Europe's Last Summer (5 page)

What Europe was building up toward was not a better world, but a giant smashup, as, in the first twentieth-century war among modern industrial societies, the accumulated explosive power that advanced science had developed was concentrated on the goal of mass destruction.

Why did contemporaries believe that they were headed for a more peaceful world? How could they dismiss the possibility of a war among European powers from their fears and their minds? Why were they taken by surprise by the outbreak of war? Did they never look to see what their leading industry was manufacturing?

Looking back, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the prewar international landscape was the accelerating
arms race. The German armaments firm Krupp was the largest single business in Europe. Its giant rivals—Skoda, Creusot, Schneider, and Vickers-Maxim—also were enormous. In large part, in the new industrial age, Europe's business had become the business of preparing to fight a
war. In retrospect the intense
arms race was the most visible feature of Europe's political landscape in those antebellum years. It is odd that the man in the street did not see this with equal clarity at the time.

The European war economy had become immense in scale, but it did not bring security. A technological breakthrough such as Britain's development of the
Dreadnought,
rendering all existing battleships obsolete, not merely forced a country to write off its previous efforts and investments, but risked leaving it naked before its enemies during the years required to catch up.

Each adjusted its military manpower requirements—its blend of regular army, conscripts, and reserves of one sort or another—to at least match the levels of its potential adversaries. The unrelenting competitiveness achieved the opposite of what was intended. The buildup in the armed forces was intended to achieve national security, but instead undermined it: the arms race, driven by mutual fears, ended by making all the Great Powers of Europe radically insecure.

All the Great Powers—even Russia, after the 1905 revolution— were relatively open societies in which the appropriation of funds by parliaments for military purposes could be scrutinized by rival states, whose analyses were not infrequently colored by alarmism. As military programs mandated by legislation embodied schedules, countries were aware of one another's production timetables for armaments and therefore could be tempted to launch a preemptive strike.

An innovation dating from the nineteenth century was that the armed forces of the respective countries now routinely prepared contingency plans for making war on their rivals should hostilities break out. These, of course, were secret, although governments usually had at least an idea of what each other's overall strategy would be.

There was no great mystery as to who potential enemies were likely to be. France and Russia, despite major ideological differences, were known to be allies, driven together by Germany's threat to both of them. Germany was closely bound up with Austria-Hungary, and also was allied with the unreliable Italians, even though the Italians still harbored territorial claims against Austria. Great Britain, though preferring to remain neutral, was being impelled by the growth of German ambitions to draw closer to France and—for France's sake— to Russia.

The various war crises of the early twentieth century jolted the Great Powers into initiating joint staff talks with the armed forces of their allies. Secret army and navy discussions between Britain and France in 1905–06 and 1911 dealt with how to meet an attack by Germany. In 1908–09 similar talks were begun by the chiefs of the German and Austro-Hungarian general staffs and were focused on a possible war with Russia. Secret
naval talks between Britain and Russia were authorized by the British cabinet in May 1914 and, when Berlin learned of them, terrified Germany. Such joint talks did not commit the European governments in a formal sense, yet in transforming theory into practice Europe's governments somehow took a further giant step on the road that led to 1914. And as it happened, they did define the war to come. They produced a script that in fact was to be followed. They provided a good indication of who would stay with which coalition: Germany and Austria would stick together, while Britain would decide to back France and Russia.

Whether or not their accelerating arms race made conflict inevitable, as British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey claimed, the Great Powers of Europe somehow brought the event closer by engaging in what were essentially dress rehearsals for war—and not just for any war, but for the opening stages of the very war they were indeed about to wage.

Was it fear of one another, driven by the arms race, and feeding on itself, that was pushing Europe to the brink? Or was it inborn aggression, pent up during the unnaturally long four decades of peace among the Great Powers, that now threatened to explode? Or were governments, as many were to say, deliberately maneuvering their countries toward war in order to distract attention from domestic problems that looked to be insoluble? Or were some governments pursuing aggressive or dangerous policies they should have known that other countries would be obliged to resist by force of arms? Whatever the reasons, as Helmuth von Moltke, chief of Germany's general staff, told the civilian Chancellor in a memorandum dated December 2, 1912: "All sides are preparing for European War, which all sides expect sooner or later."

War plans were criticized and changed in the light of experience gained in war games. They were updated in response to changing circumstances and to new information about enemy plans gleaned from espionage by the intelligence services. France was exceptional in that, on the eve of war, it modified its war plans in the light of a fashionable philosophy. The new French doctrine was that morale was the key to victory. It was a view derived from the teachings of military officers
Ardant du Picq (1821–70)* and
Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929). That it was the moral rather than the material that ought to be emphasized seemed to be confirmed by the philosophy of
Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who saw in the
élan vital
—the life force—the energy that propelled evolution. These views lent themselves to the glorification of the attack—at the expense, perhaps, of prudence—and that manifested themselves in the bias toward the offensive that many were to criticize later in Plan XVII, the organizational and strategic plan adopted by France in May 1913.

*Some sources give his date of birth as 1831.

Of all the strategies explored in advance by the military chiefs of the European powers, the one that was to figure most largely in later thinking about the war was the scheme named after Count
Alfred von Schlieffen, the German general to whom the design was attributed. Schlieffen (1833–1913) served as chief of Germany's Great General Staff from 1891 to 1906. The general staff of the Prussian army had been called "Great" since 1871, to distinguish it from the general staffs of other states in the German confederation: Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg. An elite body of about 650 officers, the Great General Staff served as the brains and nerve center of the army.

In its first hypothetical war plan after German unification in 1871, the Great General Staff imagined a conflict in which the enemy consisted of a coalition of France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. This, the most dangerous of possibilities, corresponded to the German nightmare of being surrounded: the "Slav East and the Latin West against the center of Europe," in the words of
Helmuth von Moltke—known as Moltke "the elder"—then chief of the general staff. From 1879 on, following the alliance agreement with Austria-Hungary, Germany's
planning always made provision for a war against France and Russia: an unlikely combination on ideological grounds, for France was an advanced democracy and Russia was a backward tyranny. Driven together—against the odds—by the German threat, in 1894 France and Russia did indeed enter into an alliance, and Germany's war plans stopped being hypothetical. Successive chiefs of the Great General Staff asked not whether such a war would occur, but when. The difficult challenge that they faced— how to fight a two-front war successfully—had arisen because of the ineptness of their country's leaders in foreign policy.

Moltke the Elder and his successor,
Count Alfred von Waldersee, planned to fight Russia in a limited war that would compel the Czar to make peace quickly, while at about the same time battling France with the objective of negotiating peace on favorable terms. It was a moderate strategy, defensive in spirit, aimed at coming out ahead. But it did mean splitting forces in order to fight both enemies at the same time.

Count von Schlieffen took over as chief of the general staff on February 7, 1891. He was appointed despite his lack of combat experience. Lonely since the death of his wife, he was a solitary figure with narrow professional interests. He was a sarcastic officer whose twisted monocle made him look like the caricature of a Prussian.

Schlieffen conducted what was almost a university for the officers under his command. He put them to work testing and reworking deployment plans annually in the light of what was learned in frequent war games and in horseback rides to study the terrain. Under his supervision staff officers prepared forty-nine different overall strategic plans for the European war they believed was coming: sixteen against France alone, fourteen against Russia alone, and nineteen against them together.

In the event of a two-front war, Germany essentially had three choices. One of them—fighting France and Russia at the same time—seemed a risky strategy for an outnumbered Germany. Dealing with Russia first seemed impractical; the Russians, even if defeated, could retreat into the almost endless interior of their vast country: they could not be dealt a quick knockout blow. Moreover, the Russians were arming and building armies and railroads at a rapid pace; they were becoming more formidable opponents all the time. On the other hand, Schlieffen, as of 1905, held a low opinion of Russian military capabilities.

A number of factors pointed to a strategy of engaging France first, and to the military mind, the only practical way for Germany to attack France was through neutral Belgium. Some officers in the French high command understood this. In Britain, Winston Churchill knew it; he had learned it at a confidential briefing of Britain's Committee of Imperial Defence in 1911. The reasons for it had been explained to the committee by
Major General Sir Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office.

At the end of Schlieffen's tenure as chief of staff, he composed an informal memorandum outlining for his successor how such an invasion of France through Belgium might be done. The memorandum assumed that Germany had at its disposal for the hypothetical attack ninety divisions—at a time when only seventy were available. Does this mean that the memo was not really a proposal? Does it mean that it really was only a demonstration on paper that Germany needed a larger army than the war ministry was willing to raise? Was it a document meant to persuade the war ministry to change its mind? Whatever else it may have been, it served as a scenario and probably is best viewed as such.

The Schlieffen memoranda of 1905–06 remain subjects of intense controversy. After the First World War came to an end, German generals who survived the war claimed that it had been lost only because dead colleagues had failed to follow to the letter an alleged secret
Schlieffen plan that would have proved a guide to victory.

Their claim was in large part accepted. The plan supposedly called for almost the entire German army to constitute a right arm—a right flank—that would drive to the Dutch and Belgian coasts, and then sweep down to envelop western France, then turn and scoop up Paris on the way to a decisive victory east of Paris: a victory over a French army that at that point would be completely surrounded. France would be destroyed forever as a Great Power. It all would have taken a matter of weeks, and the German army would then have been transferred east to deal with Russia.

Throughout the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first, historians have debated the consequences of the so-called Schlieffen plan. Its rigid timetable supposedly forced Germany to initiate the war when and as it did. The course of events in the summer of 1914 often is pictured as an example of automation, as though the government of Berlin were caught up in the grip of its own unchangeable secret plan. We now can see that any such account is a distorted one.

We have scholarly resources not available generations ago. Schlieffen's papers, carried off by Americans, were discovered in Washington, D.C., in 1953 in the National Archives. After the pioneering research of
Gerhard Ritter in the 1950s, lucidly seconded in 2001 by
John Keegan, it became clear that, whatever else it might have been, the Schlieffen memorandum of 1905, with its 1906 supplement, was not a plan. It was not operational. It did not go into details or issue orders. It can be viewed in context by reading a selection of Schlieffen's military writings, which has just appeared in English translation by
Robert T. Foley.

A further challenge—mounted as this is being written—is the publication of
Inventing the Schlieffen Plan
by Terence Zuber. Based on archival material that he tells us has not been used before, Zuber argues that even the memoranda we speak of as embodying the Schlieffen strategy proposal do not express his actually proposed strategies and his war plans and ideas.

Of course Germany did invade France through Belgium, as Schlieffen's memorandum imagined it would do. But that was pursuant to what with more accuracy should be called the
Moltke plan, for it was during Moltke's tenure of office that the operational document—the actual plan for invading France—was promulgated.