The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (56 page)

The reluctance of Europe’s military to come to terms with the new ways of war can be explained partly by bureaucratic inertia: changing such things as tactics, drills, or training methods is time-consuming and unsettling. The very cohesiveness armies demanded of their officers led to a collective mentality where originality and loyalty were prized less than being a good team player. Moreover, the military were trained and were expected, as they are today, to solve problems and achieve results. It is psychologically easier to think in terms of action; in a war that means to take the offensive and force a decision. Before 1912, when Russia was still thinking in terms of a defensive war against Germany or Austria-Hungary or both, its regional commanders complained about the difficulty of making clear plans.
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To attack was also bolder
and more glamorous; sitting in a well-defended position or fortress seemed, well, rather unimaginative, even cowardly. ‘The defensive’, said a British major general in 1914, ‘is never an acceptable role to the Briton, and he makes little or no study of it.’
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Yet we should not assume that the military planners before 1914 were unique in their dogged insistence on the offensive; history and the present are littered with examples of the striking capacity of human beings to overlook, minimise, or explain away evidence that does not fit comfortably with deeply held assumptions and theories. What some historians have christened the cult of the offensive grew stronger if anything before 1914 in the thinking of Europe’s military planners (and to be fair in that of the Americans and the Japanese as well), perhaps because the alternative – that war had evolved to a point where there would be huge losses and mutual attrition without a clear victory for either side – was so unpalatable and so difficult to comprehend.

The future Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War, Ferdinand Foch, then an instructor at the French Staff College, worked out an elaborate proof in 1903 to show that two battalions of attackers would fire 10,000 more bullets than one battalion of defenders and so gain the upper hand.
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Technology and the power of the defence would be overcome by making sure that the attackers outnumbered the defence by a large margin. Far more important than numbers, though, was the psychological factor: soldiers must be motivated through their training and by appeals to their patriotism both to attack and to die. They, and their generals, must accept large losses without losing heart. So, for example, bayonet drill was seen as important because it imbued the soldiers with the desire to attack.
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And so were dashing uniforms: ‘
Le pantalon rouge, c’est la France!
’ exclaimed a former War Minister when his successor proposed to take away the traditional red trousers and put the French soldiers into camouflage dress.
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Character, motivation, morale, these were widely seen before 1914 as the key ingredients for the success of the offensive. In stressing the importance of the psychological factor, the military drew on thinking current in the wider European society of the times. The work of Nietzsche or Bergson, for example, had awakened interest in the power of the human will. In his classic 1906 work on infantry training, Colonel Louis de Grandmaison, one of the leading French military theorists of
the prewar period, said: ‘We are rightly told that psychological factors are paramount in combat. But this is not all: properly speaking, there are no other factors, for all others – weaponry, maneuverability – influence only indirectly by provoking moral reactions … the human heart is the starting point in all questions of war.’
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The offensive was also a way of papering over the fissures in societies and their armies by inspiring them to look to the common good and fight for a common cause. For the French army, which had been badly mauled in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair and where morale among both officers and men was low, the offensive promised a way forward. When Joseph Joffre took over its command in 1911, he argued that thinking defensively had left the army with no clear sense of purpose: ‘To create a coherent doctrine, to impose it on officers and men alike, to create an instrument to apply what I considered the right doctrine – that I held to be my urgent duty.’
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In the armed forces as well as in the militaristic organisations of civilian society such as youth movements, the emphasis on inculcating such values as self-sacrifice went beyond giving fresh advantage to the offensive in war. It was also as much about overcoming the deficiencies of modern society and reversing what many, especially in the old ruling classes, felt to be the degeneration of the race and the deterioration of society. For those officers from those classes, a decreasing number but still an influential group, the attempt offered a way back to what they felt was a better society and one in which their values were paramount. That distinguished Victorian soldier Sir Garnet Wolseley, from the Anglo-Irish gentry, a class which shared many of the values of the German Junkers, advocated conscription for Britain on the grounds that it was an ‘invigorating antidote’ against the weakening effects of modern society: ‘National training keeps healthy and robust the manhood of a state, and in saving it from degeneration nobly serves the cause of civilisation.’
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When German civilians laughed at the military’s discomfiture over the fraudulent Captain of Köpenick, Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven, a leading military theorist and educator, wrote in disgust that such mockery was the product of ‘pure egoism and a dependence on comfort and easy living’. Death in battle, he said, was ‘life’s ultimate reward’; in his many writings about war he painted pictures of German soldiers of the past marching willingly into the face of enemy fire.
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When they envisaged the wars of the future, Europe’s military thought in terms of decisive battles to annihilate the enemy forces and they found comfort in past victories. ‘The officer corps had formed its ideas through the study of the wars of Napoleon and Moltke’, said Groener of his fellow staff officers in the German army, ‘a rapid flowing of the army over enemy territory; the war’s decision in a few, mighty strokes; a peace in which a defenceless enemy is forced to accept the conditions of the victor without demur.’
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In Germany, too, the memories of the great victory at Sedan in 1870 were still fresh and they came to haunt the officer corps just as memories of the victory at the Tsushima Strait cast its shadow over Japanese naval thinking before and during the Second World War. Victories should not be partial ones which led to negotiation; they should be so decisive that the enemy was finished and accepted whatever peace terms were offered. At the level of tactics, the military planners continued to see cavalry in the same critical role that it had played for Napoleon when he threw it into the attack as the enemy infantry lines were wavering. The war in South Africa had underscored another use, as mounted firepower to manoeuvre round the enemy flanks, but the cavalry in European armies themselves resisted being used, as it was said, like American roughriders. ‘It must be accepted as a principle’, said the 1907 British cavalry manual, ‘that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel.’
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There was talk too of breeding stronger and faster horses to gallop quicker across the fire zone.

Attack, battles, a war itself, all were to be fast and, crucially, short. ‘The first great battle’, an officer told the French parliament in 1912, ‘will decide the whole war, and wars will be short. The idea of offense must penetrate the spirit of our nation.’
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Talk such as this was whistling in the dark; European leaders, both civilian and military, knew that future wars could be long. It was now possible to keep their armies in the field for much longer than in the past when the impossibility of bringing up sufficient supplies indefinitely and the ravages of disease when large numbers of men were in camp had set natural limits to the length of campaigns. The European planners of the late nineteenth century feared long wars of attrition and they doubted the abilities of their own societies to endure them.

Some also suspected that war was escaping from their control and that it was increasingly difficult to bring it to a conclusion. Armies could win clear victories as Prussia and its allies had done at Sedan but the peoples might not accept the verdict. After Sedan the French people had mobilised themselves and fought on. In 1883, the great German military theorist Colmar von der Goltz published his influential work
The Nation in Arms
in which he analysed the new phenomenon of war between whole peoples and warned that it might take a long time and unacceptably high costs for one side to defeat the other. ‘Only when, after the greatest of exertions on both sides, a crisis supervenes, followed on one side by inevitable exhaustion, [do] events begin to move more rapidly.’
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A few years later, the elder Moltke gave his famous warning in the Reichstag about the age of Cabinet wars being over and the new age of the wars of peoples starting. Conservatives had particular reason to fear the results of war, whether economic bankruptcy, social unrest, or revolution. Shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, a leading Russian conservative, P. N. Durnovo, in a famous memorandum warned that war for Russia would almost certainly lead to its defeat and, inevitably, revolution.

In Austria-Hungary, two years earlier, Blasius Schemua, who was briefly chief of the general staff, had made similar arguments to his own government: people did not properly understand what war would bring.
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Yet Schemua, unlike Durnovo, did not go on to urge his government to avoid war if at all possible. Rather, like his predecessor (and successor) Conrad, he argued for a more aggressive foreign policy and accepted with a mix of resignation and hope that war might come as a result. Perhaps the people of Austria-Hungary would recognise that crass materialism did not fulfil their spiritual needs; with the right leadership a new, more heroic age could dawn.
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In Germany, many, perhaps a majority, of Germany’s military leaders before 1914 doubted that a short decisive war was possible yet they continued to plan for such a war because they could see no alternative. In a war of stalemate and attrition Germany might well lose and they, as a group, fall from their pedestal within German society.
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The striking absence of serious planning before 1914 for a long war, whether stockpiling materials or drawing up measures to manage the economy, is clear evidence that civilian and military leaders in Europe simply did not want to confront that nightmare of defeat and social
upheaval.
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At best they hoped that even a stalemated war of attrition would not last that long; on this the military across Europe agreed with Bloch, that the resources would run out and the war effort collapse. Like losing gamblers who saw no way out except to put everything on a throw of the dice or a spin of the roulette wheel, too many of Europe’s military planners, like the Germans, suppressed their own doubts and put their faith in a short decisive war which would settle things one way or the other. Victory might produce a better, more united society; if they lost, they had been doomed already.
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In 1909 a diplomat from Austria-Hungary fell into conversation with a Russian general at the St Petersburg Yacht Club. The Russian was looking forward to a good war between their two countries. ‘We need prestige’, he told the Austrian, ‘to strengthen tsarism, which deserves a great victory like every regime.’ When the two encountered each other again in the 1920s it was in the newly independent state of Hungary and the Russian was a refugee.
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If there were few such as Conrad among Europe’s leaders before 1914 who wished for war, the great majority accepted that it was a tool that could be used and hoped it was one that could be controlled. As Europe suffered a series of crises in the decade before 1914 and as the alliances grew tighter, its leaders, and their publics, got used to the idea that war might break out. The members of the Triple Entente – France, Russia, and Great Britain – and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy in the Triple Alliance, came to expect that any conflict between two powers would probably bring in their partners. Within the alliance systems, promises were made, visits were exchanged, and plans were drawn up which created expectations, hard to disappoint in a moment of crisis. A general war, fought at the heart of Europe, was becoming thinkable. The impact of crises helped as much as militarism or nationalism to prepare Europeans psychologically for the Great War.

For the most part, they believed that they were justifiably defending themselves against forces that would destroy them, whether in Germany against encirclement, Austria-Hungary against Slav nationalism, France against Germany, Russia against its neighbours Germany and Austria-Hungary, or Britain against Germany. The alliance systems and the different alliances within each pledged support only in response to an attack on the partner. And in an age when public opinion and the public’s willingness to support a war mattered, it was the concern of the
civilian and military leaders to make sure that their countries were seen as the innocent parties in any outbreak of hostilities.

Once war came, however, the European powers were prepared to attack in their own defence. Almost every military plan drawn up by European general staffs before 1914 was an offensive one, carrying the war into the enemy’s territory and seeking to achieve a quick and overwhelming victory. That in turn put pressure on the decision-makers during the increasingly frequent international crises to go to war quickly to seize the advantage. Under Germany’s war plan in 1914, it needed to get troops into Luxembourg and Belgium before any declaration of war, and that indeed is what happened.
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And the plans themselves contributed to the international tensions by bringing armed forces closer to war readiness and encouraging an arms race. What may seem like a reasonable way of protecting oneself can look very different from the other side of the border.