A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (20 page)

Helmuth von Moltke
“Too reflective, too scrupulous, and too conscientious.”

This prognosis was consistent with Moltke’s innate pessimism; he was so notorious for his gloomy outlook that the kaiser had long made a joke of it. His pessimism even extended, and always had, to his own abilities; in 1905, when it was beginning to appear that he would be promoted to head of the general staff over capable and more experienced rivals, Moltke had confided to the German chancellor of the time that he regarded himself as “too reflective, too scrupulous, and, if you like, too conscientious for such a post.” He said he did not possess “the capacity for risking all on a single throw” that marked great commanders. About that he appears to have been right; he was less a man of action than an intellectual and aesthete, more cultivated than Prussian generals were expected to be. “Art is the only thing I live for,” he once commented, revealing just how remote his values were from those of the Junkers whose sons made up Germany’s military elite. But he was also right about what lay ahead. The accuracy of his dark prophecy reflected not only his disposition but his acumen, his grasp of the realities of twentieth-century warfare.

It is not only ironic but mystifying, in light of what he foresaw, that Moltke had committed himself and his nation to a strategy focused exclusively on the achievement of a lightning-fast victory over France. This strategy was embedded in the deeply secret Schlieffen Plan, originally the work of Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Moltke’s predecessor as chief of the general staff. He had developed it before his retirement in 1905 in response to the formation of the Franco-Russian Entente and the resulting likelihood that, if war came, Germany was going to find itself fighting on two fronts. He based it on simple assumptions: that even with Austria-Hungary on its side Germany could not expect to win a protracted war against both France and Russia; that Russia would be unable to mobilize rapidly; and that the immense size of the Russian empire meant that any invader looking for a quick and decisive victory was likely to be as disappointed as Napoleon had been after capturing Moscow in 1812. Out of these assumptions rose the conclusion that Germany had to crush France before Russia became capable of mounting an offensive. It could then shift its forces to the east and crush Russia in its turn.

Moltke had adopted the plan upon succeeding Schlieffen, and in the years that followed he changed it substantially. As a result of his changes, and ultimately as a result of the failure of the altered plan to deliver Paris into German hands within the forty days that Schlieffen had set as his deadline, Moltke’s assigned place in history has generally been among the fools and weaklings. Schlieffen, by contrast, has been enshrined as a strategist of much brilliance, the creator of a key to glory that Moltke proved incapable of using. If such judgments are not flagrantly unfair, they are at a minimum arguable. It would be absurd to think that Moltke should have regarded the plan he received from Schlieffen as too sacred to be altered as circumstances changed. Schlieffen had handed his ideas over to Moltke at a point when Russia was weaker than it had been in generations. It had just lost its war with Japan and was faced with a popular uprising that had shaken the Romanov regime. Schlieffen had good reason to assume that Russia might be unable to put an effective army into the field at all, never mind speedily.

By 1914 the situation had changed. For five years the Russian government had been spending a third of its revenues on its army and navy. The so-called Grand Program, initiated in 1913, provided for the addition of 585,000 men to the tsar’s armies annually, with each recruit to remain on active duty for at least three years. By 1914, 1.4 million Russian troops were in uniform, with several million more reservists available in case of mobilization—enough to form as many as 150 divisions. Russia had also made great strides in industrializing, French capital was financing a radical improvement of the Russian rail system in ways directly threatening to Germany, and France itself was growing both in strength and in confidence. Moltke would have had to be a fool not to fear that the Russians might be capable of fighting their way to Berlin before the Germans reached Paris.

Moltke’s uncle and namesake, the architect of Germany’s victories over Austria and France almost half a century earlier, had seen things very differently from Schlieffen. In his last years he came to believe that in a two-front war Germany should stand on the defensive in the west, attack in the east just enough to drive the Russians out of Poland, and then allow its enemies to wreck their armies by hurling them against walls of fire and steel. He believed that such a war would end not in victory but in a negotiated peace with exhausted but undefeated foes—and that that was all Germany should hope for. “We should exploit in the West the great advantages which the Rhine and our powerful fortifications offer to the defensive,” he had said as early as 1879, “and should apply all the fighting forces which are not absolutely indispensable for an imposing offensive against the east.” This remained German doctrine until Schlieffen, an austere and solitary man with few interests outside military history and strategy, became head of the army and gradually set Moltke’s thinking aside.

The validity of the new strategy was, however, something less than self-evident, as Schlieffen himself acknowledged. His commentaries, which he continued to produce and share with the general staff throughout the years after his retirement, make clear that he was far from certain that it could succeed. It bet everything on an overwhelming right wing made up of seven out of every eight soldiers available for the fight with France. This massed force was to punch like a fist through three neutral countries—Holland, Belgium, and tiny Luxembourg—on its way into France. It would swing counterclockwise in a great wheeling motion, first to the west and then southward into France, overrunning whatever enemy forces confronted it, encircling and cutting off Paris, and finally swinging back to the east to take whatever remained of the French army in the rear and destroy it.

The plan was majestic in conception and breathtakingly bold but also fraught with problems not all of which were military. From a narrowly military standpoint the invasion of the three neutral countries was sensible: it would enable the Germans to move across northern Europe’s flat and open coastal plain, avoiding the powerful fortresses that the French had constructed in the rough hill country just west of their long border with Germany. In terms of grand strategy and international politics, however, it was dangerous in the extreme. It gave no weight to the possibility that a violation of the treaties guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium and Holland might provoke Britain to intervene. If Schlieffen considered the possibility of British intervention, he obviously regarded it as an acceptable risk. Britain’s army was small (Bismarck had joked that if it ever invaded Germany, he would have it arrested). If Germany could wrap up the war in the west on Schlieffen’s timetable, the British would have little opportunity to become a factor.

The French general staff was equally alert to the attractions of Belgium as a route into its enemy’s heartland. But it did not have the autonomy that allowed Schlieffen and then the younger Moltke to consult with no one; hard experience with two Bonapartist empires had made republican France wary of placing too much authority over strategy in the hands of the military. As late as 1913 the French Supreme War Council was exploring a possible invasion of Germany through Belgium, but it was obliged to keep the Paris government informed as it did so. By this time the French and British were well along in planning joint operations, and the French government was determined to bring the British in on its side in case of war. Therefore Paris checked with London about the War Council’s idea and was sternly warned off. Any such move, France’s friends on the British general staff said, would destroy even the possibility of support from Britain. And so the council stopped all work in that direction.

In Germany no such course correction was, in practical terms, even possible. No German chancellor since the young Wilhelm II’s dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 had ever attempted to question, never mind challenge, the war planning of the general staff. As Bethmann Hollweg wrote in self-defense after the war, “for the civilian side to have tried to foil a thoroughly thought-out military plan described as absolutely essential would have entailed an intolerable responsibility. In the event of a subsequent failure, such a policy would have been considered its sole cause.” Bethmann’s administration was afraid to interfere with the army’s plans even when those plans entailed terrible political risks. There is no better example of how the governmental machinery created by Bismarck proved inadequate to deal with the dangers and complexities of the twentieth century, when Bismarck’s strong hand and towering intellect no longer controlled the levers of power.

In his splendid isolation Schlieffen assumed that Germany’s enemies were intent not just on her defeat but on her destruction, and that as a result she was justified in doing things that under less harrowing circumstances would not have been thinkable. The seizure of the Dutch and Belgian roads and railways became not only desirable but imperative. Nothing less could save Germany, and anything else would increase Germany’s peril. “If we were to attack along the entire Belfort-Montmédy front [along the line of French fortresses] with blind faith in the sanctity of neutrality,” Schlieffen wrote, “we would soon be effectively enveloped on our right flank by a realistic and unscrupulous enemy advancing through southern Belgium and Luxembourg.” The “unscrupulous enemy” was, of course, France. Schlieffen’s guiding principle was that if Germany declined the benefits of violating the neutrality of its neighbors, France would happily seize them.

If Schlieffen had few concerns about the price of invading Belgium and Holland, he had many about whether his plan was militarily feasible. The outer edge of his right wing, in sweeping toward Paris, would have to advance more than two hundred miles through enemy territory in no more than forty days, defeating whatever enemies it encountered along the way. The infantry would have to do this mainly on foot, each soldier carrying seventy or more pounds of equipment every step of the way. If the horse-drawn artillery failed to keep up, if the huge amounts of food and fodder and ammunition and replacements needed by all these hundreds of thousands of men and their scores of thousands of horses were not always near at hand, if good order was not maintained, the entire venture would collapse of its own weight under the guns of the enemy.

Schlieffen calculated that the German army would need ninety divisions to execute his plan. (It had only about sixty in 1905.) He concluded that if the right wing did manage to reach Paris, the effort would likely drain it of the strength and mobility needed for a final swing to the east and the climactic battle that was the plan’s whole point. “Before the Germans reach the Somme or the Oise,” he wrote when his plan was still in gestation, “they will have realized, like other conquerors before them, that they are too weak for the whole enterprise.” Even after his retirement, Schlieffen never stopped tormenting himself with such questions. Part of his legend is that in January 1913, as he lay dying, he became conscious just long enough to say, “It must come to a fight. Only keep the right wing strong!”

The younger Moltke, like Schlieffen a bookish and introspective man, unlike Schlieffen a man with many nonmilitary interests (he was an accomplished cellist, followed his wife into occult religious practices, and raised Prussian eyebrows by taking books by Goethe on maneuvers), inherited not only the plan but his predecessor’s obsession with it. By 1911 he decided that it would be unnecessary and unwise to invade Holland; the Germans could neither take the time to defeat the Dutch army before advancing on France nor allow that army to stand undefeated and hostile on the northern edge of the route to Paris. Moltke said, too, that Germany would need neutral Holland as a “windpipe” through which to get access to supplies. In doing so he again exposed his doubts about the plausibility of the entire plan: a campaign that ended in victory after six weeks would have no need for a windpipe.

The most challenging aspect of Moltke’s change was that it would crowd the armies of the Schlieffen right wing—more than half a million men with all their artillery and support—into a twelve-mile-wide passage south of Holland and north of the Ardennes Forest. This would give them far fewer roads and rail lines to use—no small complication when hundreds of thousands of troops and their supply trains had to be moved great distances as rapidly as possible. It also meant that the Germans would be unable to go around, but would have to attack and destroy, the powerful network of fortresses that the Belgians had constructed at Liège just inside their border with Germany. For this reason German mobilization required an immediate invasion of Belgium: Moltke’s entire strategy would collapse if the Belgians were given time to ready their Liège defenses. The Schlieffen Plan itself, Moltke had said, “will hardly be possible unless Liège is in our hands. The fortress must therefore be taken at once…the possession of Liège is the
sine qua non
of our advance.”