A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (31 page)

The Junkers were not, as a group, rich, and their estates were not large. Life was often almost hardscrabble, requiring much labor and generating barely enough income to sustain a marginally aristocratic way of life. The people who grew up on those estates were, as a rule, neither particularly well educated nor particularly sophisticated. They were pious and provincial Lutherans, upright and sober, hardworking and hardheaded and often hard-hearted, with a deeply ingrained reverence for the law, for property rights, and for the class structure atop which they sat. What came to distinguish them above all was their almost mystic bond not to Prussia as a nation but to the Hohenzollern dynasty. This bond developed slowly, and what made it develop was the advantage it offered the Junkers. In return for their loyalty, they were assured nearly exclusive access to the more coveted positions in the Prussian army and civil service—opportunities for their sons to win a measure of power, snatches of glory, and sometimes, though not commonly, real wealth. The Junkers evolved into Prussia’s hereditary military elite. A culture emerged that was unlike any other in Europe, an army, it was said, that happened to have a country attached to it. This arrangement was threatened by the Napoleonic wars at the start of the nineteenth century and by the revolution that shook Europe in 1848. (Prussian king Frederick William IV horrified the Junkers by granting the revolutionaries a constitution, though this was rescinded at the first opportunity.) Having barely survived these upheavals, the Junkers emerged more conservative than ever, their hatred of change in any form deeply ingrained.

Kaiser Wilhelm I was not a man of great intellect, but it was perceptive of him to find little to celebrate in the creation of his empire. In the most visible ways, the empire was a glorious achievement, one that put him at the pinnacle not only of Germany but of Europe and appeared to multiply the opportunities available to the Junker elite. But on a deeper level the new situation was fraught with difficulties, especially for the Junkers. First among the problems was the question of legitimacy. The Junkers were determined to maintain their special connection to the crown and the prerogatives that came with it. The Hohenzollern dynasty wanted much the same thing. But if the Junkers had been a small slice of the population of Prussia, they were an even smaller part of the empire. In the new world of giant industries and great cities, they remained a tribe of provincial farmers without real economic power.

Inevitably, the Junkers came to seem an anachronism to the increasing numbers of Germans who knew how different things were in America, Britain, and France. As agriculture became a less important element in the economy, what little prosperity the Junkers traditionally had came under threat. The richer and more educated the German nation grew, the more prominent among the peoples of the world, the odder it seemed that East Prussia should dominate as it did.

What is most odd is how little resistance to Junker privilege other Germans displayed during the half century that the empire existed. Bismarck, again, made this possible. Though he had deep roots in Junkerdom and for much of his early adulthood had worked a family farm, Bismarck was never entirely trusted or accepted by his own class. (His mother, an outsider from the professional classes, had given young Otto an education that made him more cosmopolitan than was considered quite proper.) He was permitted to create the empire only on the basis of certain understandings. He made it not a centralized country but a federation in which Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, and other states were allowed semiautonomy under their ruling families while Prussia stood supreme. He fashioned a constitution that concentrated nearly all political power in the hands of the monarch (who remained King of Prussia in addition to being kaiser) and the officials he appointed. He did so with the tacit understanding that the Junkers would continue to be specially favored. And so they were. Though it would have been politically awkward to fill every important chair with Junker bottoms, the Junkers could always be confident of getting more than their statistically fair share. Bismarck’s system made ample room for economic liberalism—that was good for revenues and so for the army—but made political liberalism, and above all democracy, impossible.

This was not a system well equipped to deal with the tensions of a modern capitalist and industrial society, and even Bismarck had trouble making it work. After he passed from the scene, his successors were sometimes barely able to keep its wheels turning. In a free market for agricultural products, the Junker estates would have sunk into bankruptcy; to save them, the government enacted so many tariffs on food imports that Germany became what has been described as “a welfare agency for needy landowners.” There was a legislature, the Reichstag, but it had little power. As men infected with democratic and even socialist notions became increasingly common within the Reichstag, the Junkers kept them in check by joining forces with industrial interests in what came to be called the alliance of iron and rye. They were greatly helped by an electoral system that gave more votes to people with land and money.

In consequence, thousands of Germans of professional attainment, people with education and talent, had no real voice in public affairs. The political life of the nation remained in an atrophied state. The Reichstag, though it did have a role in budget-making, was otherwise little more than a debating society. In England and France the members of the legislature—the House of Commons and the Chamber of Deputies—chose the prime minister. Thus they, and the people who elected them, had a real connection to the levers of power and could regard themselves as a kind of ultimate authority. Their counterparts in Germany were essentially impotent. Their parties, instead of being contenders for control of the government, were held at arm’s length by a government that remained very nearly what it had been in feudal times: a collection of Junkers chosen by their king. The result, in the short term, was widespread public indifference to politics. In tougher times it was a recipe for alienation.

The problem of how the Junkers were going to keep intact what remained of the old Prussia extended into the army. With all their limitations and faults, the Junkers were never expansionist imperialists. They were not even German nationalists; many of them cared little about Germany except as an extension of Prussian power. What they wanted was the little world of their forebears, and every new stage of growth, of expansion, made that world less sustainable. Even the expansion of the army, unavoidable in the arms race that gripped the great powers of Europe at the start of the twentieth century, deeply troubled many traditionalists. Just as for a good Junker the only thoroughly acceptable army officer was an East Prussian of acceptable family background, so too the only dependable recruit was an ignorant and docile East Prussian farm boy. The increasing numbers of alternatives—growing hordes of city dwellers and factory workers, many of them infected with modern notions—were aliens and not to be trusted.

Tensions associated with such questions cost Erich Ludendorff, himself an upstart whose father had sold insurance, his place on Moltke’s planning staff just a year before the start of the Great War. He had become convinced that a larger army was essential if the Schlieffen Plan was to remain practicable in the face of increasing French and Russian strength, and he began pressing for the creation of six new army corps. When only half this total was approved, he continued to demand more. After being told to keep silent but refusing, he was banished from the staff. This was a blow; it meant that, in case of war, Ludendorff would not become Moltke’s chief of operations. He had brought this punishment down on himself by touching two sets of raw nerves. The government and the army did not want to stir up resistance in the Reichstag by asking for too big an increase in military spending too quickly. And many influential Junkers knew that it would not be possible to find nearly enough young aristocrats to fill the officer billets in six new corps. Outsiders in large numbers would have to be given commissions. The biggest army that Germany was capable of mustering was not likely to be the kind of army that the Junkers could continue to control.

Erich von Falkenhayn A model Junker
Described the German army as “a broken instrument” at the end of 1914.

While Ludendorff departed Berlin for Düsseldorf and command of a nonelite regiment (his not being given a unit of the Prussian Guard was seen as another rebuke), the man who would become his archenemy was rising almost effortlessly. Four years older than Ludendorff, Erich von Falkenhayn had been a favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm’s since 1911, the year he had become a regimental commander in the guard. Just a year after that he was made a major general, and in 1913 he was promoted again and made minister of war. Though surprising even to his fellow generals, this rapid ascent (and the still greater promotion that would soon follow) is explicable in terms of Falkenhayn’s background. He was very nearly the ideal Junker. Tall and slender, haughtily elegant in bearing, he had been raised on a modest farm in easternmost East Prussia to a family that traced itself back to the twelfth century and the Teutonic Knights and had produced one of Frederick the Great’s generals.

He was a pure product of the old Prussia, and Ludendorff’s opposite in far too many ways.

Chapter 10

To the Marne

“We must not deceive ourselves.
We have had successes, but we have not had victory.”

—C
HIEF OF
S
TAFF
H
ELMUTH VON
M
OLTKE

A
s big and confused and drawn out as it was, the Battle of Tannenberg was a model of clarity and simplicity compared with the more famous Battle of the Marne, which has come down to us in history as the fight that saved Paris but in fact was settled by one side’s decision not to fight.

Far more than Tannenberg, “First Marne” (there would be another huge and crucial encounter in almost exactly the same place four long years later) was not a single great encounter but a weeks-long series of maneuvers punctuated with bursts of ferocious combat. It involved millions rather than mere hundreds of thousands of troops, and they were stretched out over vast expanses of territory. Its starting date is hard to pinpoint; traditionally it has been placed on or about September 5, but events began flowing toward it during the closing days of August, at the time when the Germans were destroying the Russian Second Army in East Prussia.

All the French and German forces, as August ended, were still arranged in the order in which they had begun the war. Kluck’s First Army was still the outer edge of the Schlieffen right wing, but now it was well south of Belgium, setting the pace for the rest of the German line as it swung down toward Paris like a great hour hand in counterclockwise motion.

South of Verdun, the German left was also pushing toward Paris but making much slower progress. In place after place there, in woods and fields and on stony hilltops, men were dying by the thousands in savage, obscure fights the names of which are almost completely forgotten today.

Movement had always been most pronounced at the other end of the line, where Lanrezac and the British Expeditionary Force were no longer even attempting to turn and fight. The situation north of Paris had become almost surreal: hundreds of thousands of weary French and British doggedly trudging southward, hundreds of thousands of equally weary Germans following in their tracks, and almost none of them doing any actual fighting. Looming over all was the idea of Paris, the supreme symbolic prize but also a great if dubiously prepared fortress with a sixty-mile perimeter of defensive walls and artillery emplacements. Bülow, when he got there, was supposed to besiege it while Kluck went around. One question was whether Bülow could get there. Another was whether, having arrived, he could take the city. The Germans had encircled Paris in the Franco-Prussian War but failed to get inside.

Schlieffen had predicted that a decisive battle would take place on or about the fortieth day after mobilization. As the twenty-fifth day arrived, then the thirtieth, mounting tension and the increasing exhaustion of the troops as they drew closer to Paris made it seem that a climax of some kind had to be imminent.