The Guns of August (16 page)

When the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, telephoned him that morning, in the interval of a Cabinet meeting, Lichnowsky, out of his own anxiety, interpreted what Grey said to him as an offer by England to stay neutral and to keep France neutral in a Russo-German war, if, in return, Germany would promise not to attack France.

Actually, Grey had not said quite that. What, in his elliptical way, he offered was a promise to keep France neutral if Germany would promise to stay neutral as against France
and
Russia, in other words, not go to war against either, pending the result of efforts to settle the Serbian affair. After eight years as Foreign Secretary in a period of chronic “Bosnias,” as Bülow called them, Grey had perfected a manner of speaking designed to convey as little meaning as possible; his avoidance of the point-blank, said a colleague, almost amounted to method. Over the telephone, Lichnowsky, himself dazed by the coming tragedy, would have had no difficulty misunderstanding him.

The Kaiser clutched at Lichnowsky’s passport to a one-front war. Minutes counted. Already mobilization was rolling inexorably toward the French frontier. The first hostile act, seizure of a railway junction in Luxembourg, whose neutrality
the five Great Powers, including Germany, had guaranteed, was scheduled within an hour. It must be stopped, stopped at once. But how? Where was Moltke? Moltke had left the palace. An aide was sent off, with siren screaming, to intercept him. He was brought back.

The Kaiser was himself again, the All-Highest, the War Lord, blazing with a new idea, planning, proposing, disposing. He read Moltke the telegram and said in triumph: “Now we can go to war against Russia only. We simply march the whole of our Army to the East!”

Aghast at the thought of his marvelous machinery of mobilization wrenched into reverse, Moltke refused point-blank. For the past ten years, first as assistant to Schlieffen, then as his successor, Moltke’s job had been planning for this day, The Day,
Der Tag,
for which all Germany’s energies were gathered, on which the march to final mastery of Europe would begin. It weighed upon him with an oppressive, almost unbearable responsibility.

Tall, heavy, bald, and sixty-six years old, Moltke habitually wore an expression of profound distress which led the Kaiser to call him
der traurige Julius
(or what might be rendered “Gloomy Gus”; in fact, his name was Helmuth). Poor health, for which he took an annual cure at Carlsbad, and the shadow of a great uncle were perhaps cause for gloom. From his window in the red brick General Staff building on the Königplatz where he lived as well as worked, he looked out every day on the equestrian statue of his namesake, the hero of 1870 and, together with Bismarck, the architect of the German Empire. The nephew was a poor horseman with a habit of falling off on staff rides and, worse, a follower of Christian Science with a side interest in anthroposophism and other cults. For this unbecoming weakness in a Prussian officer he was considered “soft”; what is more, he painted, played the cello, carried Goethe’s
Faust
in his pocket, and had begun a translation of Maeterlinck’s
Pelléas et Mélisande.

Introspective and a doubter by nature, he had said to the Kaiser upon his appointment in 1906: “I do not know how I shall get on in the event of a campaign. I am very critical of
myself.” Yet he was neither personally nor politically timid. In 1911, disgusted by Germany’s retreat in the Agadir crisis, he wrote to Conrad von Hotzendorff that if things got worse he would resign, propose to disband the army and “place ourselves under the protection of Japan; then we can make money undisturbed and turn into imbeciles.” He did not hesitate to talk back to the Kaiser, but told him “quite brutally” in 1900 that his Peking expedition was a “crazy adventure,” and when offered the appointment as Chief of Staff, asked the Kaiser if he expected “to win the big prize twice in the same lottery”—a thought that had certainly influenced William’s choice. He refused to take the post unless the Kaiser stopped his habit of winning all the war games which was making nonsense of maneuvers. Surprisingly, the Kaiser meekly obeyed.

Now, on the climactic night of August 1, Moltke was in no mood for any more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters, or with meddling of any kind with the fixed arrangements. To turn around the deployment of a million men from west to east at the very moment of departure would have taken a more iron nerve than Moltke disposed of. He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history.

“Your Majesty,” Moltke said to him now, “it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised. If Your Majesty insists on leading the whole army to the East it will not be an army ready for battle but a disorganized mob of armed men with no arrangements for supply. Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete”—and Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy—“and once settled, it cannot be altered.”

In fact it could have been altered. The German General Staff, though committed since 1905 to a plan of attack upon France first, had in their files, revised each year until 1913, an alternative plan against Russia with all the trains running eastward.

“Build no more fortresses, build railways,” ordered the elder Moltke who had laid out his strategy on a railway map and bequeathed the dogma that railways are the key to war. In Germany the railway system was under military control with a staff officer assigned to every line; no track could be laid or changed without permission of the General Staff. Annual mobilization war games kept railway officials in constant practice and tested their ability to improvise and divert traffic by telegrams reporting lines cut and bridges destroyed. The best brains produced by the War College, it was said, went into the railway section and ended up in lunatic asylums.

When Moltke’s “It cannot be done” was revealed after the war in his memoirs, General von Staab, Chief of the Railway Division, was so incensed by what he considered a reproach upon his bureau that he wrote a book to prove it could have been done. In pages of charts and graphs he demonstrated how, given notice on August 1, he could have deployed four out of the seven armies to the Eastern Front by August 15, leaving three to defend the West. Matthias Erzberger, the Reichstag deputy and leader of the Catholic Centrist Party, has left another testimony. He says that Moltke himself, within six months of the event, admitted to him that the assault on France at the beginning was a mistake and instead, “the larger part of our army ought first to have been sent East to smash the Russian steam roller, limiting operations in the West to beating off the enemy’s attack on our frontier.”

On the night of August 1, Moltke, clinging to the fixed plan, lacked the necessary nerve. “Your uncle would have given me a different answer,” the Kaiser said to him bitterly. The reproach “wounded me deeply” Moltke wrote afterward; “I never pretended to be the equal of the old Field Marshal.” Nevertheless he continued to refuse. “My protest that it would be impossible to maintain peace between France and
Germany while both countries were mobilized made no impression. Everybody got more and more excited and I was alone in my opinion.”

Finally, when Moltke convinced the Kaiser that the mobilization plan could not be changed, the group which included Bethmann and Jagow drafted a telegram to England regretting that Germany’s advance movements toward the French border “can no longer be altered,” but offering a guarantee not to cross the border before August 3 at 7:00
P.M.
, which cost them nothing as no crossing was scheduled before that time. Jagow rushed off a telegram to his ambassador in Paris, where mobilization had already been decreed at four o’clock, instructing him helpfully to “please keep France quiet for the time being.” The Kaiser added a personal telegram to King George, telling him that for “technical reasons” mobilization could not be countermanded at this late hour, but “If France offers me neutrality which must be guaranteed by the British fleet and army, I shall of course refrain from attacking France and employ my troops elsewhere. I hope France will not become nervous.”

It was now minutes before seven o’clock, the hour when the 16th Division was scheduled to move into Luxembourg. Bethmann excitedly insisted that Luxembourg must not be entered under any circumstances while waiting for the British answer. Instantly the Kaiser, without asking Moltke, ordered his aide-de-camp to telephone and telegraph 16th Division Headquarters at Trier to cancel the movement. Moltke saw ruin again. Luxembourg’s railways were essential for the offensive through Belgium against France. “At that moment,” his memoirs say, “I thought my heart would break.”

Despite all his pleading, the Kaiser refused to budge. Instead, he added a closing sentence to his telegram to King George, “The troops on my frontier are in the act of being stopped by telephone and telegraph from crossing into France,” a slight if vital twist of the truth, for the Kaiser could not acknowledge to England that what he had intended and what was being stopped was the violation of a neutral country. It would have implied his intention also to violate Belgium,
which would have been
casus belli
in England, and England’s mind was not yet made up.

“Crushed,” Moltke says of himself, on what should have been the culminating day of his career, he returned to the General Staff and “burst into bitter tears of abject despair.” When his aide brought him for his signature the written order canceling the Luxembourg movement, “I threw my pen down on the table and refused to sign.” To have signed as the first order after mobilization one that would have annulled all the careful preparations would have been taken, he knew, as evidence of “hesitancy and irresolution.” “Do what you want with this telegram,” he said to his aide; “I will not sign it.”

He was still brooding at eleven o’clock when another summons came from the palace. Moltke found the Kaiser in his bedroom, characteristically dressed for the occasion, with a military overcoat over his nightshirt. A telegram had come from Lichnowsky, who, in a further talk with Grey, had discovered his error and now wired sadly, “A positive proposal by England is, on the whole, not in prospect.”

“Now you can do what you like,” said the Kaiser, and went back to bed. Moltke, the Commander in Chief who had now to direct a campaign that would decide the fate of Germany, was left permanently shaken. “That was my first experience of the war,” he wrote afterward. “I never recovered from the shock of this incident. Something in me broke and I was never the same thereafter.”

Neither was the world, he might have added. The Kaiser’s telephone order to Trier had not arrived in time. At seven o’clock, as scheduled, the first frontier of the war was crossed, the distinction going to an infantry company of the 69th Regiment under command of a certain Lieutenant Feldmann. Just inside the Luxembourg border, on the slopes of the Ardennes about twelve miles from Bastogne in Belgium, stood a little town known to the Germans as Ulflingen. Around it cows grazed on the hillside pastures; on its steep, cobblestone streets not a stray wisp of hay, even in August harvest time, was allowed to offend the strict laws governing municipal cleanliness in the Grand Duchy. At the foot of the town was a
railroad station and telegraph office where the lines from Germany and Belgium crossed. This was the German objective which Lieutenant Feldmann’s company, arriving in automobiles, duly seized.

With their relentless talent for the tactless, the Germans chose to violate Luxembourg at a place whose native and official name was Trois Vierges. The three virgins in fact represented faith, hope, and charity, but History with her apposite touch arranged for the occasion that they should stand in the public mind for Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.

At 7:30 a second detachment in automobiles arrived (presumably in response to the Kaiser’s message) and ordered off the first group, saying “a mistake had been made.” In the interval Luxembourg’s Minister of State Eyschen had already telegraphed the news to London, Paris, and Brussels and a protest to Berlin. The three virgins had made their point. By midnight Moltke had rectified the reversal, and by the end of the next day, August 2, M–1 on the German schedule, the entire Grand Duchy was occupied.

A question has haunted the annals of history ever since: What Ifs might have followed if the Germans had gone east in 1914 while remaining on the defensive against France? General von Staab showed that to have turned against Russia was technically possible. But whether it would have been temperamentally possible for the Germans to have refrained from attacking France when
Der Tag
came is another matter.

At seven o’clock in St. Petersburg, at the same hour when the Germans entered Luxembourg, Ambassador Pourtalès, his watery blue eyes red-rimmed, his white goatee quivering, presented Germany’s declaration of war with shaking hand to Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister.

“The curses of the nations will be upon you!” Sazonov exclaimed.

“We are defending our honor,” the German ambassador replied.

“Your honor was not involved. But there is a divine justice.”

“That’s true,” and muttering, “a divine justice, a divine justice
,” Pourtalès staggered to the window, leaned against it, and burst into tears. “So this is the end of my mission,” he said when he could speak. Sazonov patted him on the shoulder, they embraced, and Pourtalès stumbled to the door, which he could hardly open with a trembling hand, and went out, murmuring, “Goodbye, goodbye.”

This affecting scene comes down to us as recorded by Sazonov with artistic additions by the French ambassador Paléologue, presumably from what Sazonov told him. Pourtalès reported only that he asked three times for a reply to the ultimatum and after Sazonov answered negatively three times, “I handed over the note as instructed.”