A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (21 page)

Moltke came to believe that Germany could not afford to concentrate such an overwhelmingly large part of its forces in the attacking right wing. As the years passed, he altered the distribution of his troops so that the right wing would be only three times the size of the left, not seven as Schlieffen had prescribed. In its 1914 iteration the plan entailed positioning fifty-five divisions north of the fortified city of Metz, which lay directly to the east of Paris, with twenty-three divisions in a defensive posture farther south. Schlieffen, with fewer divisions to deploy, had assigned fifty-nine to the north and only nine to the left. This change, though controversial ever since, was certainly rational; after 1910 the French army, like the Russian, had become much more formidable than it had been in Schlieffen’s day. It was bigger, better trained, better equipped, better led, and more professional overall. It was sure to be ready with an offensive of its own, and Moltke and his staff guessed rightly that its attack force would be concentrated somewhere south of Belgium and therefore opposite the relatively weak German left wing. If the French broke through into Germany, they might then be able to swing to the north, cut the German right wing off from its home base, and achieve their own quick victory.

But in broad terms, and without any apparent enthusiasm or even anything approaching real confidence, Moltke embraced Schlieffen’s approach. There is no evidence that he ever seriously considered
not
keeping it—that he ever thought through, for example, the potentially immense advantages of reverting to his uncle’s idea and standing on the defensive in the west at least for a while, forcing the French to attack him if they wanted a war. In 1913 he abandoned an alternative plan that his staff had until then been updating regularly and keeping ready for use—one for directing Germany’s offensive capabilities toward Russia. When the crisis came, therefore, he
had
no alternative.

Perhaps he was unable to think through the ramifications of the strategic situation in Europe (one such ramification being the certain fact that Britain would never have gone to war if France had attacked Germany rather than vice versa). More likely he was in the grip of a fever that infected all the military planners of Europe in the years leading up to 1914, the French especially but the Germans and others to a more limited extent. This was “the cult of the offensive”—the belief that the only way to succeed in war was to attack your enemy as quickly as possible and then stay on the attack regardless of the consequences. This belief was rooted in what everyone took to be the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War, in which many of the most senior generals of 1914 had taken part at the beginning of their careers. In that war the forces of Napoleon III had allowed the Prussians to seize and keep the initiative, and the results had been disastrous. Probably this idea played some part in Molke’s strategic decisions. It is also possibly true, for all that even Moltke’s severest critics really know, that no alternative to his final version of the Schlieffen Plan could have produced better results.

In the thirty days following the start of the war, mobilization increased the German army from its peacetime strength of seven hundred and sixty-one thousand men to slightly more than two million. This ocean of humanity was organized into eighty-seven infantry divisions averaging some eighteen thousand men each, plus another eleven cavalry divisions. These divisions formed eight field armies, each commanded by a full general. Seven took up positions along Germany’s western border, and the last stood alone in faraway East Prussia with responsibility for holding off whatever Russia threw at it. To the south of East Prussia, separated from it by Russian Poland, was Austria-Hungary, with an initial mobilized force of 1.3 million men—forty-nine infantry and eleven cavalry divisions under Conrad von Hötzendorf. Farther south still was Serbia, with a tough, experienced, and almost fanatically dedicated army of some two hundred and fifty thousand troops making up twelve and a half divisions. Also opposing Germany and Austria was a Russian army whose three and a half million troops were organized into 114 infantry and thirty-six cavalry divisions and had the potential, given Russia’s immense population, to grow much larger. This was “the Russian steamroller,” the sheer size of which made it a chilling threat for the German and Austrian planners. To the west, thirty days after mobilization, France had 1.8 million men under arms (all the numbers given here would soon be dwarfed by floods of new volunteers and conscripts) and organized into ninety divisions—eighty infantry and ten cavalry.

Even without possible British and Belgian involvement, therefore, the Germans and Austrians began at an overwhelming manpower disadvantage in the east. In the west the German armies were at best equal in size to those of the French. In their advance on Paris they would be facing the only military organization in the world that was comparable to theirs not only in manpower but in fighting capability as well—a huge modern army whose generals had a secret plan of their own for swift and conclusive victory.

Background

PARIS IN 1914

THE START OF THE WAR CAME AS A FAR GREATER SHOCK
to Paris than to Berlin, Budapest, St. Petersburg, or Vienna. Until almost the end of the July crisis, the French paid it little attention. They, and the newspapers they read, were focused instead on a lady named Henriette Caillaux.

Not that the lady and the war are entirely unrelated. Among the what-ifs of 1914 is the intriguing possibility—remote to be sure, but real nonetheless—that the war might have been averted if not for six pistol shots fired by Madame Caillaux 101 days before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

Madame Caillaux was the wife—the second wife, importantly, just as he was her second husband—of Joseph Caillaux, a former French premier who in early 1914 was making a serious bid to become once again the head of the government. In arm’s-length partnership with a brilliant and charismatic Socialist leader named Jean Jaurès, Caillaux was campaigning to displace the men who, a year earlier, had enacted a controversial measure aimed at improving France’s readiness for war. This measure was a requirement, demanded by President Poincaré and the leadership of the army, that every military conscript (and France was drafting 80 percent of its eligible men by that time, as opposed to 56 percent in Germany) must spend three years on active service, rather than two as in the recent past. The change had been one expression of a surge of patriotic fervor that arose in the wake of a French-German showdown over control of Morocco in 1911 and swept Poincaré into the presidency two years later. (When the Germans ended that showdown by backing down, in large part because Britain was siding with France, it seemed proof that France’s long period of weakness on the international stage had ended at last.) Supporters of the extension were convinced that unless France maintained its credibility as a military power, it would lose the confidence of its Russian ally and be left to face Germany alone. Jaurès was insistent that the European arms race was madness, that a general war would be ruinous for everyone involved no matter who won, that it was ridiculous for the only republic in Europe to tie itself to a regime as antediluvian as tsarist Russia, and that it was not impossible for France and Germany to come to an understanding. Though Caillaux had not pledged himself to repeal the extension, the conservatives convinced themselves that he would do so if given the opportunity. They did everything in their power to turn him into what the writer-politician Maurice Barrès said he already was: “the most hated man in France.”

A national election was scheduled for early summer. It would decide the membership of the Chamber of Deputies, which in turn would choose the next premier. (The premiership, a position analogous to that of British prime minister, changed hands more or less annually as shifting coalitions of France’s many factions caused governments to rise and fall. It is not to be confused with the presidency, an elective office with a fixed six-year term and roughly comparable to Britain’s monarch.) The election became a referendum on the three-year-service question and, by implication, on France’s place in the European balance of power.

Joseph Caillaux, the leading opponent of the Poincaré camp, was an interesting figure if not an altogether appealing human being. Trained in accounting and as an auditor, meticulous as only a dedicated accountant can be, he had followed his father into politics and had risen to cabinet rank on the basis of hard work and his knowledge (unusual in the Chamber of Deputies) of the intricacies of budgeting, taxation, and finance. At an early age he became minister of finance, an office to which his unrivaled competency would cause him to be returned repeatedly over the years. Haughty to the point of insufferable arrogance, rich, impeccably honest and therefore able to survive the numberless accusations hurled at him over the years, he remained throughout his career the very picture of stuffy, almost comic haut
bourgeois
respectability.

Paradoxically, by 1914 Caillaux had moved about as far to the left as it was possible for a French politician to move in those days and still be a contender for the highest offices of government. This had happened gradually, as a result of his mastery of finance. He had conducted a study of the tax system and, offended by its inadequacy to the needs of a modern state, had proposed an income tax. The idea horrified the conservatives, who predictably had no interest in surrendering their exemption from being taxed. But it won Caillaux so many new friends in the so-called Radical faction (which in fact was not radical at all but barely left of center) that he became for a time premier.

Caillaux’s tenure as premier included the 1911 Moroccan crisis, and he had been firm and effective in negotiating a settlement with the Germans. Though his enemies accused him, inevitably, of bending under German pressure, he had won for France the colony of Morocco at the lowest price Berlin was prepared to accept short of war. It was also during Caillaux’s premiership that General Joseph Joffre was made head of the French general staff, which meant that, in the years just before the war, the army had a commander who insisted on better training, better equipment, and promotion on the basis of ability and performance. Even in his skepticism about the military service extension, Caillaux never challenged the idea that France should be militarily strong. His questions were about how strength could best be achieved. Keeping many thousands of men on active duty for an additional year required heavy spending for barracks and other facilities, but it did little to increase the size of the army upon mobilization. Caillaux wanted to invest in artillery (in which France was seriously deficient) and innovations such as aircraft.

One other thing was paradoxical about Joseph Caillaux. Behind his invincible facade of fashionable propriety, behind his cold and eccentric public persona, he was an adventurous womanizer. He did not marry until he was into middle age. When he did, his choice was a divorcée older than himself who had been his mistress for some years. Not long afterward he entered into an affair with a married woman, Madame Henriette Claretie. Their liaison was not frivolous. With some difficulty the two divorced their spouses and were married.

All these currents—hatred for Caillaux’s taxation proposals, conservative belief that the future of the nation hinged on the service extension, questions about the alliance with Russia, and the support given to Caillaux by Jaurès and the Socialists—came together in the 1914 election. In the words of Barrès, Caillaux was a menace because he was the one man who could “bring Jaurès’s pacifist dream down from the clouds, to make the theories of working-class internationalism and the fraternity of all people both practical and realizable.”

The campaign was more than spirited. As a Caillaux victory loomed, his enemies cast aside what little restraint was customary in the politics of France. The conservative press attacked him relentlessly. Characteristically, Caillaux disdained to reply; he would coolly assert his innocence of whatever the latest charge happened to be but go no further. He was coasting toward a victory that would lead to a reappraisal of national policy and possibly to the resignation of Poincaré (who threatened just such a step). But then his private life was brought into the political arena, and everything changed.

Caillaux’s first wife, a woman spurned and vengeful, made available to Gaston Calmette, the editor of the conservative publication Le Figaro, letters that Caillaux had sent to her in 1901 when she was still his mistress and married to another man. Calmette, who had been attacking Caillaux viciously, now promised his readers a “comic interlude” that he opened by printing one of the letters. Its content was not scandalous in any sexual sense; Caillaux had boasted of appearing to fight for his income tax proposal while actually assuring that it could not pass. This raised questions about possible duplicity on his part (unless of course he was simply trying to impress his paramour), but it was hardly a smoking gun. Much was made of the fact that Caillaux signed himself Ton Jo, “Your Joe.” The ton was inappropriately intimate when used by a gentleman in addressing a married lady, but even by the standards of its day it was something less than outrageous.

The second Madame Caillaux, however, was not amused. Despite her affair and divorce and remarriage, Henriette cared greatly about her reputation and place in society. She hated the world of politics and the abuse to which it exposed her husband. Lately, when in public, she had found herself hissed and laughed at when people learned that she was the spouse of that traitor to his class, the man who wanted to tax incomes. She complained of being unable to eat or sleep, and when she tried to talk with her husband about what was happening, he (as he ruefully acknowledged later) did not take her seriously.

What terrified Henriette about the publication of the letter, apparently, was the possibility that it would be followed by love letters that she and Caillaux had exchanged while still married to other people. There was gossip to the effect that these letters too had been given to Le Figaro.