The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (54 page)

Moltke, who was born in 1800 during the Napoleonic Wars and died in 1891, lived through the transformation of European society, of European armies, and of the ways in which wars were fought. He was six when Napoleon’s armies marched or rode into Prussia and crushed its army at the Battle of Jena. In 1870, as chief of the Prussian general staff, he was responsible for the successful campaign against France. This time the armies were carried to the battlefield by trains. Twenty years later, shortly before he died, the network of railway lines covering Europe had tripled and the first vehicles powered by internal combustion engines had appeared. Armies had once been constrained in size by how many supplies they could either carry with them or forage as they moved along and limited in their reach by how far and how fast the soldiers could march. By the end of the nineteenth century, trains could take Europe’s much bigger armies over great distances and resupply them from the factories behind the lines which kept pumping out the materials, from weapons to boots, that they needed.

The industrial revolution made it possible to have bigger armies and Europe’s population growth had enlarged the pool of manpower. Prussia was the first to tap the pool successfully; it used conscription to take recruits out of civilian society and give them several years of military training. It then returned its trained soldiers to civilian life but kept their skills sharp by putting them in reserves where they did periodic training. In 1897 Germany had 545,000 soldiers in uniform but another 3.4 million who could be called back to the army.
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The other continental powers had little choice but to follow suit. Only Britain, thanks to the protection of the seas and its navy, was able to stay with a small volunteer army. On the Continent, by the end of the nineteenth century, all the powers had standing armies – in other words soldiers actually in
their units with their weapons – and much bigger potential armies dispersed throughout society, ready to come into existence as soon as the mobilisation orders were given. When Moltke was twelve years old and Napoleon started his march towards Moscow, the French army and its allies numbered some 600,000 men, the largest force Europe had ever seen. In 1870 Moltke presided over the mobilisation of 1.2 million men of Prussia and its allies. In 1914, two decades after his death, the Central Powers put over 3 million men into the field.

11. Before 1914 the European powers came to expect that a general war was likely. They engaged in an arms race and planned to fight on the offensive. Here five of the powers, Britain, France, Germany, the Ottoman Empire or Turkey and Russia confront each other, all armed to the teeth. Uncle Sam looks on from a distance in dismay saying ‘Them fellers over there want to disarm but none of ’em dast do it first!’

Moving such huge numbers was like moving whole towns and cities. The men had to be formed into their units, got to the right railway stations, and put on the right trains. Equally important, they had to have the right equipment, from food to weapons and ammunition to the
horses and mules they needed for cavalry and transportation once they left the trains. The floods of men and animals with their mounds of equipment moving towards the designated battlefields would coalesce into larger units, the division, in most armies around 20,000 men strong, and then corps of two or more divisions. Each division and corps had to have its own specialised units, from artillery to engineers, if it was to move and fight effectively. When Germany called up over 2 million men, with their tons of materials and some 118,000 horses, in the summer of 1914, it took 20,800 trains just to get them ready to be moved towards the frontiers. Trains fifty-four cars long transported troops and their equipment towards France on the crucial Hohenzollern bridge across the Rhine at Cologne every ten minutes in the first two weeks of August.
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If things went wrong – as they did with the Trans-Siberian Railway in the Russo-Japanese War – it could be catastrophic for the war effort. Supplies could go in opposite directions from the men who needed them or sit for weeks or months on railway sidings while men or whole units could wander about trying to find where they were meant to be. In 1859 Napoleon III sent a large force by train to Italy to fight Austria: the men arrived without blankets, food or ammunition. ‘We have sent an army of 120,000 men into Italy’, he said, ‘before having stocked up any supplies there.’ It was, he admitted, ‘the opposite of what we should have done’.
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Moltke was one of the first men to grasp that the new age demanded new and much more elaborate ways of organising. Armies had to draw up their plans, make maps, and collect as much information as possible beforehand because the time between mobilisation for war and combat had shrunk dramatically. Before the nineteenth century, armies had moved slowly on foot. As Frederick the Great, George Washington or the Duke of Wellington sent out cavalry scouts to get the lie of the land and try to locate the enemy, they also did their planning. By the time he had confronted the enemy on the eve of battle, Napoleon had the disposition of his own troops and those of his opponent clearly in his mind; he could draw up his battle plans and give out his orders for the morning. That was no longer possible; the army that failed to do its planning well ahead of time was an army which would be useless. When Moltke joined the Prussian army in 1819 it already possessed in embryonic form what was going to become in his hands the most important institutional innovation for armies of the modern world. The general
staff became the brains which gave ideas, organisation and ultimately leadership to the behemoths which were coming into existence. Staff officers collected information about other armies, made sure that maps were ready and up to date, and drew up and tested war plans. Austria-Hungary, for example, had plans for wars against Russia, Italy, or Serbia.

Underpinning the war plans, and one of the most important parts of the work of the general staffs, were hundreds of pages of detailed mobilisation and railway plans. These included everything from the size and speed of the trains and their timetables to stopping times to take on water and fuel.
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Germany, in this again the model for other European armies, had long since made sure that the building, running and co-ordination of railways met military needs. By 1914 the lines running west to the French and Belgian borders, for example, had a greater capacity than ordinary civilian traffic required.
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When the elder Moltke told the Reichstag that mobilisation timetables needed a single standard time to be implemented throughout Germany, it immediately agreed. Within the German general staff, the Railway Section before 1914 was staffed by some eighty officers, chosen for their brains rather than their family backgrounds. (A majority came from the middle classes and today they would probably be computer nerds. In his early days with the section General William Groener, its head in 1914, spent his weekends working out railway timetables with his wife.)
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Among the other powers, Britain was again the anomaly when it came to railways; until 1911 there was little liaison or consultation between the British army and British railway companies.
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When Moltke became head of the Prussian general staff in 1857 it had a handful of officers and was scarcely known and little heeded by the rest of the officer corps. In 1866 in the war with Austria when Moltke sent orders directly to the field commanders, one said: ‘This is all very well but who is General Moltke?’
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By 1871, with two great victories to its credit, the German general staff, as it now was called, was seen as one of Germany’s national treasures and its influence and power had grown correspondingly. By the 1880s, with the elder Moltke still in charge, it had several hundred officers and several different sections. It also became the model for the general staffs of the other continental powers, although none of the others held the same unique and privileged position as the German general staff.
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In 1883 it won the right of
direct access to the monarch and increasingly saw itself as free to concentrate on preparing for and waging war, leaving such matters as international relations and diplomacy to the civilians.
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‘The highest art of diplomacy is from my point of view’, said Moltke the Younger, ‘not to keep peace by all means but to shape the political situation of a state permanently in such a way that it is in a position to enter a war under advantageous conditions.’
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Such attitudes were dangerous because the two spheres, military and civil, and the two activities, peace and war, could not be so neatly divided; the general staff was to make decisions on military grounds – famously the decision to invade Belgium in 1914 – which were to have serious political implications.

As war planning necessarily became more detailed and complicated another danger arose. The size of the plans, the work involved in creating them, and the work necessary to change them became arguments for not altering them. In 1914 when Austria-Hungary made a last minute change in its troop movements, it meant hastily revising eighty-four boxes of instructions.
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Officers who had spent much of their working lives making the plans as foolproof as possible had, whether or not they realised it, a vested interest and pride in their handiwork. The thought of throwing out years of work and improvising was something the military in all the European powers instinctively recoiled from.
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Moreover, the military planners tended to get locked into focussing on a single scenario for war rather than a range. A staff officer in the railway planning office of Austria-Hungary’s army saw the danger that the military might concentrate on perfecting the plans for only one eventuality and not be prepared for a sudden change in foreign policy and strategic objectives. In his view the military never successfully reconciled the two demands: ‘on the one hand, to make plans as thoroughgoing as possible to obtain a maximum of speed to enable the high commands a basis for their first efforts; on the other hand, to be ready to fulfil the fundamental duty of the field railways, namely “to satisfy all demands of the leaders at any time”’. Did the systems, he asked, which had been created over so many years leave enough freedom of decision to the leaders? The great crisis of 1914 provided an answer. When the Kaiser asked Moltke the Younger in 1914 whether Germany’s war plan could be changed to allow it to fight on one front only – against Russia – rather than as planned against France and Russia at the same time,
Moltke flatly said it was not possible and, while the Kaiser was displeased, neither he nor his government questioned the assertion. Over the decades, and not just in Germany, both military and civilian leaders had come to accept that military planning was the business of the experts and that civilians had neither the knowledge nor the authority to ask searching questions or dispute their decisions.

The charge that the rigidity of the prewar plans created doomsday machines that once set in motion could not be stopped has had considerable currency as one of the causes, if not the main cause of the Great War. Yet, complex as they were, railway and mobilisation schedules could be and indeed were altered in their details every year by the military as more information came in, new lines were opened, or strategic objectives were modified. And their overall goals could have been changed or alternative plans drawn up. After the war, General Groener of the German general staff’s Railway Section claimed that he and his men could have produced new plans in July 1914 to mobilise only against Russia and not France – and done so without a delay that would have been dangerous to Germany. During the Great War itself, the military found that they could put together plans quickly to move large numbers of men by rail from one part of the battlefront to another.
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The first striking example of this capacity came in the first month of the war, when the German command on the Eastern Front switched an army corps of some 40,000 men a hundred miles to the south. The mobilisation plans were not the trigger for war themselves; rather Europe’s civilian leaders failed, first by not informing themselves as to what their war plans entailed and secondly by not insisting on a range of plans rather than a single encompassing one.

What the plans did do to bring about the Great War was put additional pressure on the decision-makers by shortening the time in which decisions had to be taken. Whereas in the eighteenth century and even the first part of the nineteenth, governments usually had months to think about whether or not they wanted or needed to go to war, they now had days. Thanks to the industrial revolution, once mobilisation started armies could be at their frontiers and be ready to fight within a week, in the case of Germany, or in the case of Russia with its greater distances, just over two weeks. The European powers had a pretty good idea of how long each of them would take to mobilise and be ready to
fight. It was critical not to get too far behind in the process. A partially completed mobilisation when the enemy was on the frontiers and already fully mobilised was the nightmare of Europe’s military and one which many civilians came to share.