The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (6 page)

Not all crowds marched for war. Antiwar demonstrations, in fact, outnumbered those demanding defense of the
Vaterland
or
la patrie
. On the day Vienna declared war on Belgrade, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin turned out a hundred thousand antiwar protesters. By 31 July, there had taken place 288 antiwar demonstrations throughout Germany, involving some 750,000 people in 183 cities and villages.
⁹¹
In Paris, Socialists and Syndicalists mounted seventy-nine demonstrations against the war. But in the end, all 110 SPD Reich stag deputies voted for war credits, as did all 98 Socialist deputies in Paris. Party solidarity and patriotism counted for more than Socialist rhetoric.

The countryside by and large remained calm. The July Crisis found the agricultural sector at a critical stage. Grain and legume fields were maturing, as were fruit orchards and vineyards. Soon, armies of farm laborers would hasten to bring in the produce before the sudden arrival of fall rains. War would mean the conscription of young male labor needed in the villages; the loss of secure urban markets; the requisitioning by the army of hundreds of thousands of horses and wagons; and the likely imposition of price controls. For France, historian Jean-Jacques Becker’s analysis of six rural departments showed that 16 percent of the population received news of mobilization favorably, 23 percent with nonchalance, and 61 percent with reserve.
⁹²

The military in France and Germany established control of the domestic agenda. In France, a decree concerning the “state of siege” was signed on 2 August. It gave the military sweeping powers to appoint judges and sub prefects, and to control the press and the telephone system. Anxious to keep politicians from interfering in military operations, the newly constituted Grand quartier général (French military headquarters) also denied the government access to the war fronts. Parliament was prorogued on 3 August. In Germany, Wilhelm II on 1 August declared from the balcony of the City Castle in Berlin, “I no longer know parties, or confessions; today we are all German brothers, and only German brothers.”
⁹³
This so-called
Burgfrieden
did not, however, prevent the resurrection of the Prussian Law of Siege of June 1851. It gave the deputy commanding generals of the Reich’s twenty-five military corps districts powers over recruitment, labor distribution, and the food supply, as well as dissemination of news and information.

It is perhaps safe to say that once mobilization was declared, most people felt a sense of pride and patriotism, exuberance and curiosity, fear and desperation. The war, so long predicted, was finally at hand. Reservists, who had some inkling of what was to come, largely were apprehensive. Wilhelm Schulin, with 29th ID in Württemberg, on 1 August recorded “incredible tension” among the people of his native Öhringen, which quickly turned to “something horribly heavy, dark, a depressing burden” as the troop transports headed for the front.
⁹⁴
Martin Nestler at Chemnitz noted that the reservists of Saxon 12th Jäger “wept” as they reported for duty.
⁹⁵
Still, adventure was in the offing. Sergeant Marc Bloch of French 272d Regiment arrived at Paris’s Gare de Lyon in the “oppressive dog-day heat” of early August full of hope and of pride. “Behold the dawn of the month of August 1914!”
⁹⁶
Within days, he would rue the “terrible and hidden meaning” of those joyous words.

Military leaders took a more philosophical stance once mobilization had been announced. General Hubert Lyautey, a future war minister, saw a brighter future for France “because the politicians have shut up.” Some of his colleagues were delighted that “the Whore,” the republic, would now have to yield to the dictates of “military secrecy.” Others crowed that “the prefects are finished, the deputies don’t matter, the generals can feed on civilian flesh.” Abel Ferry at the Foreign Office detected a sense of restoration of the Old France afoot. “Clericalism has donned uniform,” he wrote, “to make war on the Republic.”
⁹⁷

In Berlin, General von Moltke was pleased that the strain and stress of recent days were a thing of the past. “There was … an atmosphere of happiness.” Crown Prince Wilhelm, the designated commander of Fifth Army, looked forward to a “fresh and jolly”
(frisch und fröhlich)
campaign. Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Groener, the mastermind of the Reich’s railway mobilization, cheerily wrote his wife that the time had come to deal “not only with the French” but also with Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg and “the rubbish at the Foreign Office.”
⁹⁸
War Minister von Falkenhayn perhaps best summed up the feelings of many senior commanders in Berlin in his diary on 1 August: “Even if we go under as a result of this, still it was beautiful.”
⁹⁹

*
A reference to the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, hotly disputed between France and Germany.

CHAPTER TWO
“LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR”

When you mobilize the army and form strategic plans, you must be unfathomable
.

—SUN-TZU

N
O WAR PLAN BROUGHT ABOUT WHAT THE DIPLOMAT GEORGE
F. Kennan called
“the
great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century.
¹
No war plan had been formally adopted by any government, and no war plans (except for France and Russia) had been coordinated. No government in reaching its decision to “let slip the dogs of war” in 1914 referred even in passing to an inexorable timetable drafted by military leaders that demanded a
decision
for war. Instead, as argued in the previous chapter, civilian leaders weighed their options, assessed their chances, considered the alternatives, and then opted for war. Only thereafter did deployment plans take center stage. In short, no “military doomsday machine,” as Henry Kissinger once put it, drove Europe’s leaders “into the vortex” in 1914.
²

And yet, the German deployment plan of 1914—named after Alfred Count von Schlieffen, chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1905—remains the one plan most people are likely to recall when asked about military planning. For the “Schlieffen Plan” has become synonymous with militarism run amok, with operational considerations trumping statecraft, and with the rote mechanics of war replacing the art of war. Since Germany went to war in 1914 with the (revised) Schlieffen Plan, and since much of the debate about the Battle of the Marne revolves around whether the plan, if properly carried out, could have brought Germany victory as prescribed by Schlieffen, both the man and his plan deserve attention.

ALFRED VON SCHLIEFFEN WAS
born at Berlin on 28 February 1833 into the junior branch of a family that had settled at Kolberg, in Pomerania, in the fourteenth century. His father’s side had a long tradition of military service. His mother’s side was devoutly Hutterian Pietist, believing in the Godhead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; in trine baptism (hence their popular name, Dunkers); and in the infallibility of the New Testament. Thus, the boy’s upbringing was a mixture of traditional Prussian virtues such as austerity, discipline, duty, and order, and Hutterian values including dignity, modesty, respect, and a firm belief in the presence of God in history.
³
After a brief stint studying law, Alfred opted for a career with the cavalry. He attended the War Academy from 1858 to 1861, and then along with his three brothers saw action during the decisive Battle of Königgrätz in the Austro-Prussian War (1866), followed by combat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) at Toul and Soissons as well as during the winter campaign along the Loire River. After the Wars of German Unification, Schlieffen served as commander of the prestigious 1st Guard Ulan Regiment at Potsdam from 1876 until 1884, when he was appointed to the institution he would serve until retirement—the Great General Staff in Berlin.

Schlieffen arrived at the General Staff at a time of uncertainty. The Elder Helmuth von Moltke, architect of Prussia’s wars with Austria and France, increasingly became alarmed about the newfound Reich’s geographical position, wedged in between two “wing powers,” France and Russia. The prospect of a two-front war in Central Europe caused Moltke to reassess the utility of using military power to resolve great-power tensions. “Germany dare not hope to free itself in a short time from the one enemy by a quick and successful offensive in the west,” he ominously concluded, “in order thereafter to turn against another [enemy in the east].”
⁴
Put differently, Moltke came to believe that war was no longer an option for the Reich. He best expressed this view in his last speech in Parliament in May 1890: “The age of cabinet wars is behind us—now we have only peoples’ wars.” Industrial Europe, armed as never before, was capable of conducting wars “whose duration and ending cannot be gauged.” He predicted future “Seven Years’ Wars, even Thirty Years’ Wars.” He ended his farewell address with a dire warning. “Woe to him who sets Europe on fire, who throws the match into the powder box!”
⁵

Under Moltke, Schlieffen headed the crucial French Department within the Third Section of the General Staff. France remained the “hereditary enemy.” From the perspective of Berlin, French statesmen and soldiers from Cardinal Richelieu to Louis XIV, from Napoleon I to Napoleon III, had used Central Europe as venue for the sport of kings—war. Louis XIV had “raped” the Rhenish Palatinate and annexed Alsace and Lorraine. Napoleon I had defeated and then occupied the 365 German states and forced many of them to join his war with Russia in 1812. Napoleon III had been determined in the 1860s to establish the Rhine as France’s eastern border. After 1871, France repaid its reparations (imposed on a per-capita basis for what Napoleon I had extracted from Prussia after 1806) much faster than anticipated, and cries of “revenge” for 1870–71 reverberated in right-wing military, political, and public circles. From the perspective of Paris, German unification had destroyed the European “concert” established at Vienna in 1815, and had eroded France’s preeminent great-power status. The Reich’s rapidly expanding industrial output (double that of France) and its bourgeoning population base (twenty million more than France) threatened to create a continental hegemony.

Little love was lost between France and Germany. Each created what historian Michael E. Nolan has called an “inverted mirror” of the other, and in the process mythologized the “hereditary enemy.” Each saw the other side not as individuals but rather as members of the opposite and hostile nation, “imbued with an elaborate baggage of history and heredity in the form of preconceived character traits representing a strange inversion of the observer’s own perceived qualities.”
⁶
This “inverted” mirror imaging did not escape the literati. Jules Verne caught the Franco-German antagonism already in 1877 in his popular novel
The 500 Millions of the Bégum
. Therein, the fictitious French Dr. François Sarrasin and the German professor Schultze agreed to use a massive fortune bequeathed by a deceased Bégum of India, each to plan a new city. Sarrasin decided to build a model community, France-Ville, on the Oregon coast near Coos Bay. It was based on “freedom from inequality, peace with its neighbors, good administration, wisdom among its inhabitants, and bountiful prosperity”—in short, on the French ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Schultze, on the other hand, opted to establish a counterutopia: a formidable factory, Steel City (Stahlstadt), an “industrial and technological nightmare” with a Krupp-like leader directing his laborers from a “base tower.” While we have to assume that the residents of France-Ville dined on pâté, grilled meats, and fresh fish, washed down with
grand cru
wines, those of Stahlstadt had to make do with the German fare of “withered vegetables, mounds of plain cheese, quarters of smoked sausage meat, and canned foods,” all consumed amid “sacks of iron.”
⁷
Verne’s novel, while obviously grossly exaggerated, nevertheless captured the public image of the two countries and showed that popular culture was not out of step with military thinking.

More specifically, Schlieffen had carefully monitored the construction under General Raymond Séré de Rivière of a massive French belt of 166 forts in two major lines running from Verdun to Toul and from Épinal to Belfort between 1874 and 1885, and the expansion of Paris’s old ring of 14 inner forts (that had withstood the German siege of 1870–71) with an outer ring of 25 forts by 1890. When Kaiser Wilhelm II as one of his first acts after the dismissal of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1890 allowed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, wherein both parties agreed to remain neutral in a war waged by the other, to lapse, and when Paris at once leaped at the chance in August 1891 to begin negotiations of a military agreement with St. Petersburg (formalized in 1892), the time had come to reevaluate the Reich’s tenuous strategic situation in the center of the Continent.

In fact, Bismarck’s dismissal, Wilhelm II’s cancellation of the tie to Russia, and the kaiser’s desire to be his “own General Staff chief” brought about a radical shift toward a “New Course” of global expansion and fleet building as well as a reorientation of the Reich’s land strategy. In August 1888, Alfred von Waldersee succeeded Moltke as chief of the General Staff. Schlieffen briefly served as head of the Third Section (foreign armies) and in 1889 became Waldersee’s deputy chief of staff. Waldersee transformed Moltke’s cautionary military strategy into simultaneous offensive operations against France and Russia. During good weather, he would mount an offensive into Russian Poland with five to seven corps, while thirteen to fifteen corps would first hold the line of the Rhine River, then counterattack, envelop, and annihilate the French army before it could retreat to its fortress line Belfort-Verdun. In inclement weather, he would hold in the east and launch seventeen corps as well as all of his horse-drawn artillery against the French forts. An increasingly dense and sophisticated German railroad system as well as the assumed superiority of the German army, corps for corps, encouraged this offensive design. But Waldersee was too impetuous and undisciplined, much like his Supreme War Lord, and indulged in frequent political intrigues. On 7 February 1891, Wilhelm II appointed Schlieffen to head the General Staff. Sarcastic, prone to ridicule, nearly unapproachable, and an inveterate workaholic, Schlieffen for the next fourteen years put his personal stamp on the General Staff—and on German war planning. Since the Reich never developed a national coordinating body akin to the French Conseil supérieur de la défense nationale or the British Committee of Imperial Defence, it fell on Schlief fen to draft plans for national defense.

Schlieffen set about his task with several deep-rooted assumptions.
⁸
First, France remained the primary adversary. Second, given France’s military alliance with Russia, he had to prepare for a future two-front war. Third, well aware that France had by far the better railway network and that it could ill afford to trade space for time, he decided as early as August 1892 to concentrate the greater part of his forces in the west before wheeling them around to face the more slowly developing Russian steamroller in the east. After his staff convinced him that the massive French fortifications in Lorraine could not simply be stormed by infantry, Schlieffen in August 1897 considered bypassing them by way of a grand march through neutral Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. That
Westaufmarsch
was painstakingly detailed from the first day of mobilization (M+1) on, thereby ignoring the Elder Moltke’s sage counsel that no operations plan survived the initial engagement with enemy forces. Fourth, since France and Russia could bring greater initial forces as well as subsequent reserves into the field, Schlieffen argued that Germany had to avoid a protracted war. A strategy that cost “billions” in Reichsmark and “millions” in soldiers’ lives, he warned, would serve only the enemy. Thus, fifth, speed was of the essence. “The French army,” he stressed time and again, “must be annihilated.” The attack could never be allowed “to come to a standstill;” it was to be driven forward at all cost.
⁹
“Normal victories” would not do. “A series of rapidly fought brilliant victories would not suffice,” General Bernhard Rothe, Schlieffen’s deputy (1896–99), wrote: “instead we must deal the enemy such a defeat early on that it will be impossible for him to continue the war.”
¹⁰

Schlieffen used selective military history to buttress his radical concept. Napoleon I’s dramatic march through neutral Prussian Franconia en route to destroying an Austrian army at Ulm in 1805 served as a model for his planned violation of Belgian neutrality. Around 1900, he read an account of the famous Battle of Cannae (216
BC
). There Hannibal’s Carthaginian army, outnumbered almost two to one, had destroyed an entire Roman army under Consuls Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus by offering a weak infantry center while cavalry and light infantry moved around the flanks and into the Romans’ rear.
¹¹
This was the key for Schlieffen. Hannibal’s double-envelopment tactic with six thousand African cavalry at each of the flanks had guaranteed not just victory, but rather annihilation of the Roman legions. An estimated sixty thousand bloody and mutilated Roman corpses attested to the brilliance of Hannibal’s tactical feat. The idea of a gigantic battle of encirclement and annihilation
(Kesselschlacht)
against French forces now became an idée fixe with Schlieffen. Over time, it became less a historical event and more a philosophical construct. In the process, he raised tactics to the level of operations, and subordinated considerations of statecraft to purely operational concepts. As well, Schlieffen chose to ignore the fact that Rome, rather than Carthage, eventually won the Punic Wars, and that it did so largely on the basis of an element absent in Schlieffen’s grand design—sea power. General Hans von Seeckt, architect of the Reichswehr in the 1920s, in retrospect lamented Schlieffen’s obsession with it. “Cannae: no slogan became so destructive for us as this one.”
¹²