4
All general staffs, war ministries and admiralties prepare for war. That is what they are there for. But the existence of plans for war does not necessarily mean that the officers who drew them up were themselves going to be responsible for ordering them to be carried out, nor does it mean that all the plans that survive in the archives were actually intended to be put into operation. Sometimes they were simply exercises to fill up the time when things were quiet, as when the German admiralty in the late 1890s drew up plans for a landing on the east coast of the United States.1 The relation between military plans and the actual decision for war is a complicated one that involves discussion of the position of the army in society, the degree of control exercised by civilian ministers, the nature and implications of armament programmes and strategic doctrines as well as of specific operational plans. These are all factors that have to be taken into account in analysing the decisions that were taken in July 1914; but behind the question of the constitutional position of the armed forces or of the contingency planning of the general staffs and admiralties lies the wider question of the degree to which a society is permeated by militarist – or anti-militarist – values, because on this depends the response that a government can expect if it decides to go to war and the kinds of arguments it will have to use to justify a declaration of war to the public. ‘Militarism’ is, in fact, a relative newcomer to the vocabulary of politics, and it was coined by those who opposed it – a derogatory epithet hurled against Bismarck and Napoleon III in the 1860s.2
Such justification was all the more necessary at a time when the armies of all the powers except Britain were composed of conscript soldiers called up from civilian life to serve two to six years in the army. The numbers in these mass armies were substantial: by 1900 Germany called up 280,000 men annually, France 250,000, Russia 335,000, Italy 100,000 and Austria-Hungary 103,000 – even though for financial reasons most governments did not in fact call up everybody who was liable for service. As the composition of the population and the balance between town and countryside changed, so the nature of the army changed too. As a result, governments began to be aware that they could no longer be sure that all the soldiers would necessarily obey orders without question or report to their depots on mobilization unless they were given some satisfactory explanation of why they were going to war. In both France and Germany, the authorities grew increasingly anxious about the possible influence of socialist and other revolutionary ideas on the soldiers and the spread of anti-militarist propaganda. When the anti-socialist law expired in Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) scored a stunning success in the 1890 elections to the Reichstag. Friedrich Engels believed that future inroads could be made in converting the agricultural labourers of Prussia to socialism, and it was their sons who made up the bulk of the rank-and-file of the army: ‘and if we get the rural districts of the six eastern provinces of Prussia… the German Army is ours!’3 In any revolutionary struggle the loyalty of the army would be a vital factor in determining the outcome, and socialists vied with the military authorities for the hearts and minds of the men.
By 1912 the German authorities were so worried when the Social Democrats won a third of the votes in the Reichstag elections and became the biggest single party in the imperial parliament that some of them had serious doubts about increasing the size of the army, desirable though they felt this to be on strategic grounds, because it would mean diluting the old officer corps with men of middle-class origin and also risking the growth in the number of soldiers susceptible to socialist ideas. In fact, the officer corps was already undergoing significant change in its social composition: in 1900, for example, 63 per cent of the Great General Staff were of noble birth; by 1914 this had fallen to 40 per cent.4 Although the officer corps was becoming more bourgeois, this did not make it any less hostile to the threat of socialism. Systematic attempts were made to propagate antisocialist ideas among the troops, and to stop soldiers attending socialist meetings in their spare time. Officers were encouraged to give lectures critical of socialism, and on the eve of the war many senior officers, especially in the entourage of the crown prince, were talking of the necessity of more drastic measures to stop the growth of socialism, such as the abolition of universal suffrage and the banning of the Social Democratic Party.5
In France, too, the growth of a militant anti-militarism, especially among the revolutionary syndicalists, was a constant source of alarm in the years immediately before the war, and the syndicalist efforts to influence conscripts in the garrison towns were the object of repeated warnings from the government to the local authorities.6 Moreover, the proposal to extend the period of military service from two years to three was one of the great political issues of 1913. The Socialist Party was bitterly opposed to any extension of military service and indeed was committed, largely under the influence of their leader Jean Jaurès, to a radical reform of the system of national defence, by which a citizen militia would be substituted for a conscripted standing army; it was argued that, if military action were subject to popular control, a war of aggression would be impossible. Even if there was little chance of such proposals being adopted and even though the government succeeded in 1913 in carrying the three-year law through parliament, the anti-militarist movement was strong enough for any government to have to take into account the mood of the conscripts before starting a war. The fears that subversive influences would endanger mobilization and the smooth execution of military plans at the beginning of a war proved groundless in 1914. However, when we examine the extent to which we can talk of a mood of militarism dominating European society in the decade before 1914, we must also consider the question in relation to the various anti-militarist movements that both challenged and intensified that militarist mood.
In the case of Germany the effectiveness of the socialist challenge was much exaggerated, but its existence, and the growing numerical strength of the social democratic movement, contributed to the feeling among the old Prussian ruling class that their values were threatened and that only vigorous action could preserve them. To the outside world, and indeed to the socialist opponents of the system inside, Germany seemed to be the country where military values influenced society more strongly than anywhere else. The Prussians formed the dominant element in the army of the new German Empire after 1870 and the Prussian war ministry was responsible for the administration and supply of the army as a whole. The Prussian tradition of a strong army and strong military values continued to affect the whole of German society. As the kaiser proclaimed in 1891: ‘The soldier and the army, not parliamentary majorities and decisions, have welded the Empire together. I put my trust in the army.’ 7 Many Germans at the turn of the century shared this view. To be a reserve officer was a mark of distinction for a member of the middle classes; it was also something that a Jew or a socialist could never hope to be. The behaviour of the army might be criticized by the Social Democrats who regularly voted against the military budget in parliament, but they were too well aware of the strength of the army in the German state to challenge it directly.
In 1906 there occurred a famous episode that seemed to demonstrate in farcical terms the position of the military in German society. An elderly ex-convict dressed up in a uniform of a captain of the 1st Foot Guards, ordered some soldiers coming out of the military swimming baths ‘auf allerhöchstem Befehl’ (by command of the All-highest) to follow him and arrested the mayor and the treasurer of the small town of Köpenick on the outskirts of Berlin, making off with the petty cash and leaving the bewildered soldiers in occupation of the town hall for several hours until the superior authorities received a telegram: ‘Town hall occupied by the military. We urgently desire information as to the reasons in order to reassure the excited citizens.’ Satirists might laugh at this episode, but it was a sign of the readiness of Germans to accept without question the orders of anyone in military uniform.8 A British equivalent was the ‘Dreadnought hoax’ in 1910 when a group of young people, including the writer Virginia Woolf with her face blackened and a false beard, succeeded in persuading the officers of HMS Dreadnought, the most up-to-date ship of the British navy and the latest product of the Anglo-German naval race, that they were the emperor of Abyssinia and his suite, and were given a suitably imperial reception. Although this was conceived just as a practical joke, Virginia Woolf ‘came out of it’, as her biographer writes, ‘with a new sense of the brutality and silliness of men’.9 If the ‘Captain of Köpenick’ demonstrated the awe in which the Prussian army was held, the hoaxers of the Dreadnought were deliberately teasing the British navy at a moment when it was the most famous symbol of Britain’s imperial greatness.
A more serious example of the extent to which the German officer corps regarded itself as being above criticism and as a privileged caste – even if it also showed that there was a growing body of people ready to express such criticism – was the ‘Zabern affair’ of 1913.10 A young officer in the garrison of this small town in Alsace insulted the civilian inhabitants and encouraged his men to beat them up; when the citizens of Zabern protested and insulted the officers in their turn, the commander of the regiment finally arrested 27 of them and locked them up in the cells of the barracks. The matter was raised in the Reichstag, but although a majority carried a vote of censure on the chancellor for his handling of the matter, nothing much came of this: the commander of the regiment in Zabern was acquitted by a court martial of a charge of illegal arrest, though some of the officers concerned were transferred elsewhere. Although there were now more voices raised in criticism of the army than might have been the case 20 years earlier, they were unable to make any impact on military procedures or to control the conduct of the army. The war minister, the crown prince and senior members of the officer corps expressed their contempt for parliament and politicians and made it quite clear that they would never allow the army to be subject to them.
Although the general acceptance of military values by large sections of the German public may have contributed to the mood that made war possible and to the enthusiasm with which the outbreak of war was greeted (see Chapter 8), the most important aspect of the role of the German army in the coming of war was its freedom from civilian political control. The stunning successes of the Prussian army in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars of 1866 and 1870–1 respectively were, in the decades that followed, attributed to the Prusso-German general staff, which was unique in Europe because it concentrated military planning, mobilization, deployment and operations in a single agency free from political and administrative interference.11 In fact, the minister of war was more accountable to it than vice versa; the general staff was able to impose a discipline and devise war scenarios without political interference and with a minimum of bureaucratic muddle. It produced an annual war plan on 1 April, which was then re-evaluated and revised on the basis of annual manoeuvres (or war games) until the plan was updated the following year. Railways played an increasingly vital part in this planning, to the point that it was the general staff that led the movement in Germany to replace the five different time zones with a single, standard, time. The chief of the general staff, Moltke the Elder, successfully argued that this was necessary for the railway timetables to be coordinated for the sake of the security of their most important traveller: the defender of the fatherland travelling to the border in time of war. So wedded was Moltke to the strategic importance of the railways, one of his generals told his fellow officers, that whenever he makes an important decision ‘he uses the Reichskursbuch – the German railway guide!12
The kaiser was the ‘supreme war lord’ and the army leaders were responsible to him alone. He had a personal military staff that operated independently of his civil and naval staffs, and the chief of the general staff had direct access to him. It was thus possible for military decisions to be taken without the knowledge of the civilian branches of the government – or, indeed, of the naval authorities. There was no collective leadership or responsibility. The only coordinating power lay with the kaiser himself, and Wilhelm II was a wayward, capricious and unstable monarch incapable of pursuing a consistent course or controlling his advisers.
There was not even any coordination between the strategic planning of the German army and that of the navy. Ever since the signature of the Franco-Russian alliance the strategy of the army had been based on the need to fight a war on two fronts, and the plans of the general staff for this contingency culminated in General Schlieffen’s famous plan of 1905, by which France was to be defeated by what would later have been called a Blitzkrieg so as to enable the German armies subsequently to concentrate against Russia. Schlieffen was encouraged by the demonstrated incapability of the Russian army to succeed in the war against Japan. At the height of the Moroccan crisis in 1905, when Bülow was about to threaten France with war if concessions were not given to Germany, he asked Schlieffen for his opinion of Russia’s military strength, to which the chief of staff replied that Russian troops were hopelessly ill-trained and underequipped: ‘they are incapable of standing up to another army, and are completely useless for an offensive. The East Asian War has shown that the Russian army was even less good than had generally been supposed.’13
The Russo-Japanese War and the Anglo-German rivalry
The Russo-Japanese War was, in fact, the most carefully studied war in history – which makes it difficult to understand the conclusions that European observers drew from it. Report after report commented on the relative superiority of defensive firepower that had been produced by machine guns and artillery; it was clearly evident that the Japanese, who were mainly on the offensive in Manchuria, lost significantly greater numbers of men than did the Russians. In the most important engagement, at Mukden, the Japanese suffered 70,000 casualties, compared with the Russian 20,000. One report concluded that it was ‘almost impossible for a front protected by really powerful weapons and field defences to be broken through even by troops of undaunted courage willing to sacrifice any number of lives’.14 Nevertheless, the success of the Japanese assaults – costly as they were – succeeded in overcoming Russian defences and received the admiration of European observers:
The whole Japanese line is now lit up with the glitter of steel flashing from the scabbard… . Once again the officers quit shelter with ringing shouts of ‘Banzai!’ wildly echoed by all the rank and file. Slowly, but not to be denied, they made headway, in spite of the barbed wire, mines and pitfalls, and the merciless hail of bullets. Whole units are destroyed – others take their places; the advancing wave pauses for a moment, but seeps ever onward.15
As Paul Mackenzie has concluded, observers were predisposed to admire the offensive strategy to the extent that they drew conclusions at variance with their own evidence. Observers repeatedly praised Japanese courage and initiative while criticizing Russian passivity and the lack of ‘leadership’ shown by their officers. Thus, most observers (and later historians) ignored the most important conclusions that might have been drawn from the conflict: that both sides were exhausted by the cost in money and manpower, and that it was this exhaustion that brought them to the bargaining table that led to the Treaty of Portsmouth. In other words, in spite of Japan’s successes in Manchuria, it was incapable of continuing or advancing any further; the war was not won ‘on the ground’ as a result of superior Japanese strategy or spirit but by the fact that Russia could no longer sustain the war effort and had been brought to the brink of revolution and perhaps the collapse of the dynasty. Russia’s loss did produce significant reforms in the realm of military intelligence however, as the Russians had significantly underestimated Japanese strength; between 1905 and 1914 Russian intelligence invested heavily in technical improvements and was among the most advanced when war broke out.16 The real lessons of the Russo-Japanese war were there to be seen, if only the military observers had not had their judgement coloured by their predisposition to applaud the strategy of the offensive.
On the other hand, naval strategists pointed to the destruction of the Russian fleets (both Pacific and Baltic) by the Japanese as evidence of the increasing importance of navies in major conflicts. The Russian navy, forced to defend an enormous seaboard and numerous potential enemies from the Baltic to the Black Sea to the far east, could not adequately prepare for all eventualities and was woefully unprepared for the war with Japan.17 The battle of the Tsushima Straits seemed to prove the validity of Mahan’s theories concerning major naval battles being the way of the future – a view of the conflict that has recently been challenged by H.P. Willmott, who argues that seapower was not the decisive factor.18 In the decade before the Russo-Japanese War, while the German army was planning a war against France and Russia, the navy was planning a war against Britain. In 1897 the construction of a German high seas fleet was begun; and Admiral von Tirpitz, the state secretary for the navy, based his plans on the use of the fleet against Britain.19 Strategic planning for a war against Russia should have been accompanied by a foreign policy aimed at securing at least the neutrality of Britain. Strategic planning for a war against Britain should have involved a foreign policy aimed at securing the friendship of Russia. General von Moltke, Schlieffen’s successor as chief of staff, realized the danger: ‘As the navy cannot wage war against Britain with any prospect of success, this war must accordingly be avoided’, he wrote in June 1909.20 But there was little even he could do about it. Because of the lack of machinery for coordinating German policy, the army and the navy pursued their policies regardless of each other, with the result that by 1914 they both saw themselves as encircled by the enemies that their respective policies had created. Anglo-German naval rivalry was a major factor leading Britain to back French policy in Morocco and aligned Britain on Russia’s side in Russia’s struggle with Austria-Hungary for control of south-east Europe.
The differing aims and needs of the German army and navy created a number of problems. At a time when the budget of the central government was constantly strained, the rival claims of the army and navy created additional financial difficulties. Popular discontent with the government’s mishandling of the Agadir crisis in 1911, combined with the electoral success of the Social Democrats in 1912, produced a popular coalition that demanded a dramatic expansion and modernization of the German army far beyond what was considered appropriate by the military leadership. The government was reluctant to embark on such a course because the increased taxation would also mean a significant increase in the fiscal powers of parliament.21 During the first years of the century the navy had been given priority, but when the government was forced to bow to public pressure and increase the size of the army in 1913, just after the passage of a supplementary navy law, it was obliged for the first time to introduce an income tax, thereby disproving Tirpitz’s assumption that it would be possible to build the navy without increasing taxation. At the same time, this had the paradoxical result that the bill for the army increases was carried with the support of the Social Democrats, who approved of the income tax but disliked increased military expenditure, against the votes of the conservatives, who approved of the army but did not want to pay for it out of their own pockets. It has indeed been argued by some historians that the cost of armaments and the strain on German public finance was so great that only a war in which the rules of orthodox finance could be suspended saved the German state from bankruptcy.
The building of a large navy had repercussions on most aspects of German policy at home and abroad. It was regarded by some German leaders as a means of integrating and reconciling the various conflicting social forces in Germany. It was the subject of a very intensive propaganda campaign supported by industry and by many in the middle class who saw the navy as a less aristocratic and exclusive organization than the army and whose national pride was aroused by the prospect of Germany becoming a Weltmacht – though the meanings they attached to the concept of ‘world power’ were ill defined and often inconsistent. After the war a radical interpretation of German foreign policy argued that the primary motives for building a battle fleet were not strategic, but political – that is to say, to mobilize the support of those elements in the ‘new’ Germany that were inclined to dislike aspects of Prussian domination: the anti-parliamentary sentiments of the Kaiserreich and the Junker-led army. If the middle classes of northern Germany and the Rhineland could be persuaded that a big navy and the policy of turning Germany into a Weltmacht were in their interests, they might side with the kaiser and his court against the radicals and socialists. Tirpitz himself sometimes played the anti-socialist card, which lent credence to this argument. A 1997 study concluded that he was primarily an opportunist who used any arguments available to support increased financing of the navy, the building of more ships, and giving greater weight to the navy in Germany’s strategic policies. At least to begin with, Tirpitz lacked ideological conviction and merely used the anti-socialist agenda as a means to an end.22
In fact, however, Tirpitz’s plans did not succeed. Although he had hoped to plan the construction of the navy in such a way that its development would be independent of recurrent parliamentary votes, the British reaction to what was regarded as a German threat to Britain’s imperial position and the world balance of power was to increase the rate of its own naval construction so that the pace of naval armament was constantly accelerating; consequently, parliamentary approval for further expenditure was required in both countries.23 Tirpitz believed that the building of the navy would, once it was through a ‘danger zone’ in which it would be vulnerable to a British pre-emptive strike, make Germany sufficiently strong at sea for Britain not to risk a confrontation. British naval building had since 1889 been explicitly governed by the ‘two-power standard’ by which the British navy had to be stronger than the combined fleets of the next two naval powers. Tirpitz’s ‘risk theory’ presupposed that the German navy would be so large that Britain would face the permanent risk of being confronted by a German navy that could inflict such damage on the British fleet that Britain, even if victorious, would be too weak to face the navies of the other leading naval powers. Britain would thus be in a position in which the very existence of the German fleet would limit its freedom of action. In fact, the British avoided this dilemma by increasing the rate of their own naval building – and, with the introduction of the Dreadnought class of battleship in 1906, constructing new types of ship – and at the same time realigning their foreign policy so as to avoid the possibility of hostilities with France and Russia and to be free to confront the German threat.24 Even before the outbreak of war, Tirpitz’s strategy had failed. When the war did break out the kind of naval building that both Germany and Britain had undertaken turned out to be inappropriate to the war at sea as it actually developed. The British and German admiralties only sent their high seas fleets into action once in what was intended to be a decisive battle off Jutland in May 1916, but the result was indecisive because neither side was prepared to risk the loss of their battleships by prolonging the fight. Both sides claimed a victory but the battleships spent most of the rest of the war at their bases; the war at sea became primarily a war of submarines and destroyers.
Britain and the continental commitment
The consequence of the German naval programme was not only the realignment of British foreign policy. It also led indirectly to a radical change in British strategic thinking. Throughout the nineteenth century the superiority of the British navy was taken for granted and the army neglected as a consequence. Although there had been moments of alarm, such as that which led to the naval programme of 1889, when it was realized that ships and equipment were growing obsolete, the German fleet was the first serious threat to Britain’s hegemony since the Napoleonic Wars. The navy was popular in Britain – though this did not prevent the pay of the ordinary seamen remaining practically unchanged at a very low rate for some 30 years. It seemed the symbol of Britain’s imperial greatness, but it could also be supported on good liberal grounds: it ensured the ‘freedom of the seas’ and thus the freedom of trade, and it had played a humanitarian role in the suppression of the slave trade. Naval budgets had not been seriously opposed in parliament – even by the Irish. Even those socialists who inclined to pacifism, such as the future Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, took the position that the British Empire, properly constituted for the common good of its subjects, was a valuable instrument in preventing the spread of militarism. If the empire were broken up, he argued,
the burden which would be shifted from our backs would be imposed upon others, and I think we are entitled to claim that an armed Britain is as unlikely to disturb the peace of the world as any other military power… . The British Empire under democratic custodianship can be a powerful element in the maintenance of peace and the promotion of the international spirit.25
Although radicals found it more difficult to support the army than the navy, its imperial role, ironically, made this easier. Historical memories inspired the suspicion that the army would be used by a powerful, centralized state against the people or the common man. The imperial role performed by the British army was different: it protected peoples who could not defend themselves against the ambitions of autocracies, or against the oppressive tendencies of their own rulers. On this issue radicals and conservatives could, as often as not, agree. ‘The British Empire is preeminently a great Naval, Indian and Colonial Power’,26 stated the committee that in 1904 recommended far-reaching changes in the administrative arrangements for imperial defence. The army since the Crimean War had been primarily a force for the defence of the colonies or for dealing with uprisings or unrest there, for fighting Zulus in South Africa or Pathans on the north-west frontier of India. The Indian army, backed by units of the British army sent to India for regular tours of duty, was an almost autonomous force, and the India Office in London or the viceroy in Delhi sometimes seemed to be pursuing a foreign policy of their own, particularly over such questions as the rivalry with Russia for the control of Afghanistan. By the beginning of the twentieth century all this was gradually changing. The war against the Boers in South Africa revealed weaknesses in the British army and led to demands for reform. A general staff was created with a chief at its head who replaced the old position of a ‘commander-in-chief’, and a modernized, mobile army began to be created that could be quickly deployed in the field – this would become, by 1914, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). The entente with France led the War Office, during the Moroccan crisis of 1905–6, to consider for the first time in decades the problems of sending such a force to fight on the continent of Europe. It is nevertheless important to note that it was the imperial problems of fighting in South Africa and the anticipated problems of fighting in the Middle East or Central Asia that led to the creation of the BEF – not the belief that Britain would one day be forced to confront Germany on the continent of Europe.27
As in Germany there was a difference of opinion between the army and the navy as to the right strategy to adopt in Europe. The War Office was from 1906 committed to planning for the dispatch of an army to the continent to take its place on the left wing of the French. The navy, and especially Admiral Sir John Fisher, the voluble and forceful first sea lord from 1904 to 1910, did not want the responsibility of protecting the army’s crossing of the Channel and thought the role of the army should be to aid a close naval blockade of Germany by seizing one or more of the Frisian Islands and possibly landing on Germany’s Baltic coast. The ‘blue-water school’ of naval strategy in Britain supported this view, arguing that the cordon that the navy could establish around the British Isles was so impregnable that ‘not even a dinghy’ could penetrate it – and therefore it was unnecessary to keep large land forces within Britain itself (critics referred to this as ‘the dinghy theory’).28 The newly formed Committee of Imperial Defence, which was presided over by the prime minister, backed the view that it was vital to create an expeditionary force that could be deployed either on the Continent or in the Empire.
The supremacy of the civilian government was never in doubt: no matter how much staff officers might complain that, for example, ‘The whole idea of governing the army by a civilian, whose whole training has been political expediency … is vicious in theory and hopeless in practice’,29 the final decision rested with the prime minister and Cabinet, and this made a degree of coordination possible. At the same time, the increase in naval construction and the growing naval arms race caused problems for Britain as for Germany. The Liberal government had to find money simultaneously for the ambitious programme of social reform to which they were committed and also for the building of the dreadnoughts for which the press and public, led by the Conservative opposition, were clamouring (‘We want eight and we won’t wait’ was the slogan launched by one Conservative MP). Nevertheless, as Jon Sumida has argued, the financial position of the British state was stronger than that of Germany, because it was able to raise revenue through substantial increases in direct taxation; Germany was unable to do so without incurring unacceptable political costs and thus remained dependent upon less productive indirect taxation. Simply put, the British state enjoyed greater access to the wealth of British society, which significantly mitigated the strategic challenges it faced as well as the erosion in its industrial preeminence.30 The British refused – and found it economically unnecessary – to give up their naval superiority. ‘If the German fleet ever becomes superior to ours’, Sir Edward Grey wrote to King Edward VII in July 1908, ‘the German army can conquer this country. There is no similar risk of this kind for Germany; for however superior our fleet was, no naval victory could bring us any nearer to Berlin.’ 31 Grey was simultaneously rejecting the views of Admiral Fisher and accepting those of the blue-water school: a strong navy permitted Britain to stand on the defensive and to resist the creation of a large army. While Fisher approved of the latter, he disagreed with the former and produced a naval version of the ‘cult of the offensive’. As early as 1899 – shortly after Germany embarked on a serious programme of naval building – he had suggested an amphibious attack on the Pomeranian coast that would enable Britain to threaten the heart of the German empire: ‘landing 90 miles from Berlin on that 14 miles of sandy beach, impossible of defence against a battle fleet sweeping with devastating shells the flat country for miles, like a mower’s sycthe’.32 Winston Churchill, who became first lord of the admiralty in 1911 as the result of changes in the Cabinet in an attempt to resolve the disputes between the War Office and the Admiralty, was adamant that Britain must maintain its naval superiority over Germany: ‘I must explicitly repudiate the suggestion that Great Britain can ever allow another naval power to approach her so nearly as to deflect or to restrict her political action by purely naval pressure.’ 33 The German government was in fact hoping for just that and wanted political concessions in exchange for reductions in naval building. When Haldane went to Berlin in February 1912 to try to negotiate a naval agreement, it was made quite clear to him that the Germans would only be satisfied with an undertaking that Britain would under all circumstances remain neutral in a European war. Tirpitz expressed his own position to a colleague as follows:
England will stand by her obligations and promises to France… [our] political demand [is that] England must take no part in a war between France and Germany, no matter who the aggressor is. If we cannot get this guarantee, then we must continue with our armament so that we are as strong as the Anglo-French entente, which has the de facto nature of an offensive alliance.34
Even when these ideas were expressed in more diplomatic language by Bethmann Hollweg and the German ambassador in London, they were quite unacceptable to the British; although there were subsequent attempts to delay the actual execution of plans for naval building – proposals for a so-called naval holiday – there was no serious diminution of the arms race and consequently no diminution of the underlying antagonism.
The British felt that the German fleet was a luxury – a phrase used by Churchill that gave much offence in Germany – but that the British fleet was a vital necessity. The Germans, on the other hand, felt aggrieved that Britain would not settle for the 3:2 ratio of capital ships in Britain’s favour proposed at the time of the Haldane mission. However, British uncertainty about Germany’s intentions had some justification: Tirpitz, as we have seen, had from the start envisaged the German navy as a means of bringing political pressure to bear on Britain. British objections to the German naval programme seemed to the Germans just a hypocritical refusal to allow any other country the privileges long enjoyed by Britain. To the British, German policy seemed an unacceptable threat to their security. In fact, Tirpitz’s gamble of building a fleet large enough to act as a deterrent that would enable Germany to influence British world policy had failed by 1914, as he himself seems to have realized, but it had had the effect of conditioning opinion in both countries and so contributing much to the climate that made war possible.
The programme of naval armament developed a momentum of its own that was hard to stop. Tirpitz was deliberately planning naval construction over a long term so as to limit the Reichstag’s opportunities for interfering. At the same time, naval building on a new scale required new facilities: wharves and docks had to be enlarged; the Kiel Canal had to be widened; private firms had to be called in to supplement the government shipyards when the pace of construction was accelerated to keep pace with the British; the works of Krupp and other heavy-industry concerns had to be extended. All this activity created vested interests in both Germany and Britain. It was, for example, the managing director of the Coventry Ordnance Works who first drew the attention of the British government to the fact that in 1906 Krupps was expanding its plant ‘for the purpose of manufacturing very large naval guns and mountings quickly’.35 No doubt he was hoping that as a result his own firm would receive orders from the admiralty for guns and mountings. But without attributing too much importance to the role of individual armament manufacturers in exacerbating the international situation, there were enough built-in forces in the armaments and shipbuilding industries to make any slowing down in the rate of construction difficult.
The British and German admiralties were agreed on this. The British admiralty was writing in 1907, when the question of disarmament was coming up for discussion at the Hague Conference:
The vested interests concerned in war-ship construction are moreover nowadays very large with ramifications in almost every branch of manufacture and trade. The immediate effect of any proposal to limit naval armaments will be to deal a heavy blow at these interests, with the result that the latter would in all probability array themselves against the movement [for disarmament] and the consequent opposition thus created would be a formidable obstacle. And, again, this country more than any other has a supreme interest in the maintenance of her shipbuilding trade in a flourishing and healthy condition. Will it be advisable for Britain to enroll herself under the banner of ‘limited naval armaments’ if as seems inevitable, such limitation will react seriously upon one of our premier national industries?36
In fact, what the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was aiming at in the discussions at the conference was not disarmament, but a reduction of expenditure on armaments through agreement with Germany to limit naval building for a period of five years. At the same time, he insisted that Britain must retain its ‘offensive’ capacity to drive other navies from the seas and that Britain would not permit any restrictions of the right of blockade.37
Again, early in 1914, when the proposal for a ‘naval holiday’ was being considered, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry told the British ambassador that the Germans were opposed to the idea because ‘the interruption for a whole year of naval construction would throw innumerable men on the pavement’,38 and Tirpitz told the Reichstag that any postponement would mean that
[T]he omissions must be made good in the following year. This would upset our finances, dislocate work in the shipbuilding yards and also our military arrangements, i.e. the regular placing of ships in commission on their completion… . We should … have to dismiss a large number of workmen and the whole organization of our shipbuilding yards would be upset.39
Thus, the naval race not only created political and psychological attitudes that contributed to the mood of 1914; it also inaugurated economic and technical processes that were increasingly hard to reverse. As early as 1893, before the naval race had begun, the German socialist thinker Eduard Bernstein had summed up the situation, using a phrase that was still commonplace nearly a century later:
This continual arming, compelling the others to keep up with Germany, is itself a kind of warfare. I do not know whether the expression has been used previously, but one could say it is a cold war. There is no shooting but there is bleeding.40
The structure of German society gave a special role to the army and produced a special respect for military values. The naval policies of Wilhelm II and Tirpitz aroused British antagonism and began a naval race that had important social and economic effects as well as producing a radical change in British foreign and strategic policy. The nature of the German political system made the coordination of policy between the various branches of the government almost impossible so that there was a lack of clear direction in Germany’s overall political and strategic planning. At the same time, the British regarded German naval building as a direct threat to their naval hegemony and their worldwide empire so that their strategy and foreign policy – although some members of the government never gave up hope of improved relations with Germany – became increasingly directed towards resisting the German challenge. Various sectors of public opinion shifted simultaneously. The leader of the Social Democratic Party in Britain, H.M. Hyndman, became increasingly alarmist after the first Moroccan crisis, warning that German naval preparations could only mean that they were preparing an attack on Britain and France and that German socialists were unable to contain the kaiser’s militarism. He advised his fellow socialists to scorn ‘sham peace twaddle’ and speak out plainly on the German threat:
The German Government I say, and I speak as a Social Democrat and a man of peace, is steadily making ready for an invasion of this country, and is building a fleet strong enough to cover that critical military operation.41
Franco-Russian preparations
French military planning was dominated by the effects of the defeat of 1871. The first objective was always the recovery of the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but it was expected that at the start of a war the French armies would have to withstand a German attack. However, the task of consolidating and expanding the French colonial empire in Africa and the Far East had, since the 1880s, given the army an opportunity of restoring its self-esteem after the debacle of 1870 and provided a chance of promotion and distinction for ambitious officers. Until the turn of the century this colonial activity meant that the French army had to plan for a possible war against the British as well as plan for a war against Germany. However, after the crisis at Fashoda in 1898, it became clear that France was not in a position to challenge the British in Africa, and this contributed to the change in French foreign policy under Delcassé. French radicals supported this change of direction, arguing that France could not afford to build a fleet to equal that of Britain while also maintaining a conscript army large enough to defend itself against a German attack, and that naval preparations should be limited to defensive measures such as the building of submarines and torpedo ships rather than offensive ones such as the building of battleships.42 Thus, both strategy and politics in France came to favour the arrangement with Britain that resulted in the Anglo-French Convention of 1904, which also gave France the hope of achieving colonial gains with British approval. Once French colonial ambitions centred on Morocco, it was Germany who now seemed France’s main colonial rival and consequently the Moroccan question was an issue that helped to consolidate the Anglo-French Entente, and to link Anglo-German naval rivalry with France’s imperial aims in North Africa and its long-term goal of recovering Alsace-Lorraine. There was no longer any conflict between the immediate aims of French imperialism and French desire for revenge so that after 1904 French military planning could concentrate on Germany.
There were, however, considerable difficulties over the position of the army in French society and the relations between the government and the high command. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of 1871, the two traditions of French nationalism, one going back to the military glories of the Ancien Régime and the other deriving from the revolutionary defence of France in 1793 and the triumphs of Napoleon, had combined, so that the army and especially the officer corps had been a highly esteemed element in French society. By the time of the Fashoda crisis, however, the army had, as a result of the Dreyfus affair and the division between those who accepted the army’s claim to be above criticism and those who saw the army’s treatment of Dreyfus and its handling of the case as a shocking infringement of the rights of man, become the object of political dispute rather than of political consensus. The Dreyfus affair had been followed by a campaign on the part of the government between 1902 and 1905 to ensure that the army leaders had reliable republican views and that officers who were known to be actively practising Catholics should be denied promotion. The social composition of the army was also changing: more than half of the officer corps had been promoted from the ranks in 1914, the middle classes dominated in engineering and artillery, and the aristocratic domination of the general staff was eroding. Nevertheless, William Serman has argued that an aristocratic ethos continued to dominate the officer corps in spite of its increasingly middle-class composition, making them hostile to republican attitudes.43
These political divisions inevitably affected the relations between the government and the high command. When the minister of war was a general, it was not always easy for him to work smoothly both with the professional politicians and with his military colleagues. When he was a civilian, he had to overcome the prejudices of the generals against a politician. Some of the politicians tried to overcome the mutual suspicions between the army and the civilians left behind by the Dreyfus case and the attempts to purge the army of anti-republican elements. In 1907 Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister, in spite of having played a leading role in the campaign in favour of Dreyfus, approved the appointment of Colonel Ferdinand Foch as head of the École de Guerre – an appointment that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, since Foch was known to be a devout Catholic whose brother was a Jesuit. Then in 1911 the post of chief of staff, who had been responsible for overall planning, was combined with that of ‘generalissimo’, who was to take over command on the outbreak of war; and Marshal Joffre was appointed to the new post in the midst, as it happened, of the crisis over Morocco. Joffre combined impeccable republican credentials and links with republican politicians with a confidence in his national mission. ‘Do you not think about war?’ he was asked in 1912 and he replied, ‘Yes, I do think about it, I think about it all the time. We shall have war, I will make it, I will win it.’44
The revival of some degree of national solidarity enabled the government in 1913 to extend the period of military service from two to three years, though in the face of vigorous opposition in and out of parliament from socialists and radicals. The Moroccan crisis of 1911 and the German army increases of 1913, as well as the need to show the Russians that France was playing its part in the alliance at a moment when the Russians had also made substantial increases in their army, gave the government the opportunity to improve the equipment of the army as well as increasing the size of the reserves through the three-year law. French hopes of a victory over Germany had become increasingly dependent on the alliance with Russia. Just as German plans aimed at knocking out the French so as to concentrate their forces against Russia, so the French hoped that Russian action in the east would make victory in the west possible. Consequently, the French were constantly impressing on their Russian allies the need for rapid mobilization and an offensive strategy so as to bring the weight of Russian manpower to bear against the German armies in the east as quickly as possible, and so relieve the pressure in the west. The French and the Russian chiefs of staff met annually (alternating between Paris and St Petersburg) to co-ordinate planning and preparation. The French assessment of Russian capabilities in 1909 was that it could not meet the goal of attacking Germany within 15 days of mobilization, that it would take perhaps 30 days – although they believed this would still provide them with the opportunity to achieve a decisive result in Lorraine because it would tie up 5–6 army corps in the east. Nevertheless, some French intelligence assessments expressed grave reservations concerning the value of the alliance – doubts that were not conveyed to the Quai d’Orsay.45
French strategists were keenly aware of the demographic challenge confronting France, with their population increasing much more slowly than that of Germany. Thus, the Russian alliance was important both for its immediate strategic effect and because it would make available Russia’s reserves of manpower. To some extent the French compensated for their demographic inferiority by calling up a higher percentage of the men liable for military service than the Germans did – but once the full weight of German manpower was mobilized, the French would inevitably be the weaker.
There were, however, difficulties in making the Franco-Russian alliance militarily effective. The Russians, at least until 1910, were reluctant to undertake an offensive against Germany. They realized that they too had to face a war on two fronts, against Germany and against Austria-Hungary. But there were other problems that complicated and weakened Russia’s military position. The most obvious of these was the defeat in the Far East in 1904–5, which had largely destroyed the Russian navy and revealed serious defects in the strategy, organization and equipment of the army. A massive reform programme was instituted following the disasters of 1904–5: large capital grants were provided to enable the upgrading and augmenting of equipment; supplies, the reserve system and logistics were all to be reformed and a new, more serious commitment was made to the training of officers. But the long-established mentalité of the officer corps impeded the effectiveness of these reforms. A typical episode indicates that the privileged position of army officers in Russia was not dissimilar to that enjoyed by those in Germany, and illustrated by the Zabern affair. In 1910 a newspaper in Kazan published – in boldfaced type – a notice to the effect that ‘citizen N’ was seeking someone to defend him from officers of the 163rd Regiment stationed in Siimbirsk. Officers then chose two of them by lot to avenge this perceived insult: the two travelled to Kazan, walked into the editorial office, asked for the editor, then murdered him in cold blood. They returned to their unit and turned themselves over to their commander for punishment, after which they received a pardon from the tsar.46 Memoirs and contemporary literature depict the lives of the tsarist officer corps as decadent, characterized by drunkenness, laziness and thieving. Few officers seem to have been particularly concerned with the performance of their military duties.
The ‘Great Programme’ of reforms was not approved by the Duma until July 1914. The war minister, General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, had instituted a series of positive changes before then, but these were only partly successful.47 It is true that by July 1914 Russia was able to maintain a peacetime army of 1,423,000 officers and men, but the army continued to be plagued by personal rivalry between cliques of officers and between those who came from the nobility and those – a large proportion – who came from humbler origins. The efforts of Sukhomlinov to change the structure and strategy of the army were made less effective by the atmosphere of corruption surrounding many members of his staff and entourage. Above all, these disagreements led to confusion about the strategy to be adopted against Germany and the types of armaments that would be required. Should Russia’s effort be concentrated on holding a number of fortresses that, in a situation in which it was expected that German mobilization would be completed first, would turn back an initial German attack? Or should the fortresses be demolished and plans made to build a mobile army and to develop the railway network to this end?48 In the event, neither policy was carried out thoroughly and both failed: the Russian invasion of East Prussia at the start of the war was defeated because of the greater mobility and more efficient railway system of the Germans, and in 1915 the fortresses were quickly captured by the German army. The Russian army, in spite of attempts to create a general staff, lacked central direction. The efforts of reformers to modernize the army through a centralized command improved communications and realistic field training had little effect.49 In the last resort all decisions ultimately rested with the tsar; and Nicholas II, as seen in his conduct during the July Crisis, was uncertain, vacillating and incapable of exercising the control over all aspects of military planning that the system demanded of him.
There were also, as in other countries, difficulties over the rival demands for expenditure by the army and the navy. The reconstruction of the Russian navy after its defeat by the Japanese seemed to be an important symbol of Russian recovery and one to which the tsar personally attached great importance, but its actual strategic use was less clear. In fact, Russia’s Asian strategy had been divided for decades: navalists looked to the French victory over China in 1884–5 as proof that fighting a land war in Asia was difficult and ineffective (it had been French naval victories that forced the Chinese to concede Tonkin and Annam in Indo-China to the French, in spite of the Chinese success against the French on the ground) and consequently opposed the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway. The failure of the army against Japan in 1904–5, when the railway made it possible to transport 370,000 troops to the far east, could be taken as further evidence of the soundness of this position.50 Army strategists, on the other hand, argued that both the failures of the Crimean War and the successes against the Afghans in Central Asia proved the growing importance of railways in Russian strategy.51 The French, who had no interest in promoting Russia’s imperial ambitions in Asia and every interest in focusing Russian attention on Europe, believed that the Russians should be concentrating on land armaments instead of, for instance, spending money on dreadnoughts (ordered from a British firm for construction in Russia) and in 1913 embarking on a substantial programme of further naval expansion. When the Russian government requested naval talks with Britain in the spring of 1914, the British admiralty was not convinced that they would serve any useful purpose. As Grey wrote subsequently, ‘To my lay mind it seemed that, in a war against Germany, the Russian Fleet could not get out of the Baltic and the British Fleet would not get into it’.52
Russian foreign policy and strategic planning in the years immediately before 1914 and during the July Crisis were not determined by a privileged officer corps or the predominant influence of the military leaders but rather by the uncertainties resulting from the weakness of an autocratic system in which the ultimate decisions rested with an inadequate autocrat. Nor were they shaped by the interests of the armaments industry: in Russia the industry was controlled largely by the state, which retained ownership of all the most important arsenals, shipyards and ironworks. There was nothing like France’s Schneider, Britain’s Vickers or Germany’s Krupp in Russia; although some private firms entered the competition for a share of the armaments market before 1914, they remained small and without significant political influence.53 The direction of Russian policy was as much the result of the need to satisfy certain presuppositions, emotional as much as strategic, about Russia’s relations with the Balkan Slavs and its historic claim to Constantinople. But because these were likely to antagonize Austria-Hungary, who was assured of the full military support of Germany, Russia needed to strengthen its alliance with France; this in turn entailed meeting French wishes for an offensive against Germany on the outbreak of war. Therefore, a two-front war, against the Germans in East Prussia and Prussian Poland and against the Austrians in Galicia, seemed inevitable, while the Russian leaders had also to be prepared for a possible campaign in the Balkans, since the position of Romania and Bulgaria was still uncertain. At the same time, the speed of Russia’s recovery after the defeat in the Far East and the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, together with the scale of its rearmament programme – even if this was not very effectively executed – impressed the other powers with Russia’s potential for war, reassuring the French but alarming the Germans.
The Habsburgs and their allies
In Austria-Hungary the army was one of the strongest unifying forces in a multinational state whose existence as a Great Power depended on maintaining sufficient internal stability for the Empire to be taken seriously by other governments as an irreplaceable element in the international system. The officers were inspired by a genuine loyalty to Emperor Franz Josef in his dual role as emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. They were recruited from a fairly broad section of society: as in Russia, only a minority came from the aristocracy, though they were often given the ennobling prefix ‘von’ as a reward for long service. Nevertheless, they formed a recognized caste; often several generations of the same family served as officers, and they developed their own social and ethical codes that could be seen as either expressions of folly and arrogance or as loyalty and self-abnegation, depending on the viewpoint. (In fiction, Arthur Schnitzler’s short story Leutnant Gustl expresses the former view and Joseph Roth’s Radetzky-Marsch the latter; Schnitzler in fact lost his position as a reserve officer because of his satire on the fatuous moral values of the junior officers in the army.) Many of the officers spoke several of the Monarchy’s 10 languages, following the example of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the inspector general of the army, who, in spite of being reputed a bad linguist, spoke seven of them.
On the other hand, the Austro-Hungarian army suffered from the principal defect of the Monarchy as a whole, an enormously cumbrous and complicated administrative system. Because of the Ausgleich (the Compromise with Hungary) of 1867 and the establishment of the Dual Constitution, which gave the Hungarian government equal powers with that of the Austrian half of the Monarchy, three different ministries were responsible for different parts of the military system. The main field army was run by the joint Austro-Hungarian minister of war, one of the three ministries (the others were foreign affairs and finance) with jurisdiction over both halves of the monarchy, but the two reserve armies, the Landwehr in Austria and the Honved in Hungary, were run separately by the Austrian and Hungarian ministries of defence. There was considerable friction between the Austrian and Hungarian governments about the number of conscripts to be raised each year from each half of the Monarchy; for this reason, as well as because of a chronic shortage of money made worse by each international crisis when precautionary military measures had been taken, as in the Bosnian crisis of 1908 and the Balkan crises of 1912–13, only a comparatively small proportion of the men available were in fact called up. Still, in June 1912 the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments passed new military laws guaranteeing their armed forces an annual contingent of 181,000 men, up from 139,000; this was to be followed by increases over each of the next five years, leading to an annual intake of 243,000 by 1917. Nevertheless, one historian has estimated that the field army in 1914 contained fewer infantry battalions than in the war against Prussia in 1866, in spite of an increase of some 20 million in the population.54 Moreover, for all the claims that were made that the army was a truly unifying force that somehow embodied the essence of Austro-Hungarian national consciousness independent of the claims of the individual nationalities, there had been, less than 10 years before the outbreak of war, a bitter dispute between Germans and Hungarians about the retention of German as the language of command in the army. (Instruction of recruits was carried on in the language of any national group that formed more than 20 per cent of any regiment, but German remained the language of command in spite of the Hungarian claim for the use of Magyar.)
Austria-Hungary also faced strategic difficulties posed by its geography: the long frontier with Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Romania totalled over 2,000 kilometres in length. Added to this geopolitical reality was the fact that their armaments programme was restricted for financial reasons, and even though the country had an efficient arms industry (the Skoda factory at Pilsen did a flourishing international trade and was a rival of the great German firm of Krupp) the equipment of the army was not always adequate and reserves of munitions were insufficient even for a very short war. The military situation was mirrored by the naval: the Marinekommandant, Admiral Rudolf Montecuccoli, believed that the sum granted by the Austrian and the Hungarian parliaments was inadequate to support the new construction required to realize the Monarchy’s strategy in the Adriatic. In 1911, therefore, he decided to borrow 13.7 million kronen from the Creditanstalt and another 18.5 million from the Länderbank, and authorized the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino to do 24.8 million worth of construction work beyond what had been approved in the budget. Altogether he ran up a bill of over 60 million kronen without securing approval of any higher authority; when this was discovered, Franz Ferdinand supported him as having had ‘only the best of intentions’.55 It was clear that the main enemy was likely to be Russia, but General Conrad, the chief of staff, was also planning for a campaign to crush Serbia, as well as talking about the possible necessity of launching a preventive attack against Austria’s nominal ally, Italy. By 1914, therefore, the Austro-Hungarian army was, like so much else in the Monarchy, in a paradoxical and contradictory situation. It had an important role as a symbol of unity that was supposed to stand above the conflict of nationalities within the Empire; however, that conflict was a potential source of weakness within the army itself. It had many able and dedicated officers, yet their effectiveness was hampered by a cumbersome bureaucratic administrative system. Above all, as events in 1914 were to show, its general staff never succeeded in clarifying their strategic priorities. They assumed that they would not have to wage war simultaneously with Russia, Serbia and Italy but, by the spring of 1915, this is just what they faced.
Italian strategists were equally perplexed by Italy’s geostrategic vulnerability. Land frontiers with France and Austria-Hungary were difficult to defend against attack, yet difficult to launch an attack from. A long coastline exposed Italy’s cities and railways to shelling from the sea, making it vulnerable to the superior naval power of Britain, France and even Austria-Hungary.56 The position of the army and popular attitudes towards it were as ambivalent in Italy as they were in France. On the one hand it was a symbol of Italy’s unity and of a unified Italy’s role in Europe; on the other, the anti-militarist Left saw it as the force that was used to break strikes or suppress popular disturbances, as in Sicily in 1894 or Milan in 1898. The army reforms of the 1870s – when the Italian army, like many other armies of Europe, was drawing the lessons of the Franco-Prussian war – envisaged the army as ‘the school of the nation’, and provision was made for each regiment to be composed of conscripts from two different regions, though the anti-militarists believed that recruitment from a single region would make units less reliable when on public security duties.
By the beginning of the twentieth century the army seemed less celebrated and less effective as a national symbol than 30 years earlier: its role in suppressing unrest seemed to be growing larger, and there was now a very vigorous anti-militarist campaign on the Left. The army had suffered a disaster in 1896 when trying to conquer Ethiopia, and this had been a bitter blow to its pride. Moreover, in addition to the complaints to be found in every army about the slowness of promotion and the gap between officers of the line and those of the general staff, the career of an officer seemed less attractive than it had been. A number of educated young men took advantage of the option of serving only one year as conscripts, but then, in contrast to Germany, did not take up the commissions in the reserve for which they were supposed to be training. There were complaints about the educational and cultural limitations of the officers, many of whom, it has been estimated, came from lower-middle-class families and from the smaller provincial towns.57 Although the minister of war was usually a general, few army officers were interested in politics, and in Italy, unlike Germany, there was no military caste to play an important political role. Except among its critics on the Left, the army was taken for granted and the supremacy of the civilian government was never actually challenged, though successive monarchs complained if the government interfered in what the king regarded as his own sphere.
From 1907, however, some changes and reforms were taking place. In December 1907 the first civilian war minister was appointed, partly it seems because Giolitti, the prime minister, hoped that this would ease the passage through parliament of an increased military budget (though actually it was the next war minister, a general, who achieved this). During these years Italy was engaged in a military and naval arms race, primarily against its ally Austria-Hungary, but also, although relations with France were improving, against the French. Italian strategic planning reflected the political ambivalence that came from above: throughout the 1890s Italian generals had planned for war with France, but the Anglo-French Entente (combined with Italian ambitions in the Balkans and the Adriatic) produced a mobilization plan for a war with Austria-Hungary in the north-east, and annual manoeuvres began to be held in the Alps.58 The effects of the proposals to reform and enlarge the army and navy were largely undone by the campaign in Libya, undertaken before the re-equipment of the army could be carried out and costing a high price in money, material and men. On the other hand, the war against Turkey did much to restore the prestige of the army, which now had vociferous supporters in the new nationalist associations, especially the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana founded in 1910. More important, perhaps, was the fact that the Libyan war won support for the army from some of its former critics: a section of the Socialist Party was in favour of the war and split off from the main body, which opposed it. The Catholic Church, which had financial interests in Tripoli and missionary interests in an Italian empire, now gave its blessing to the armed forces and authorized the official appointment of army chaplains.
The navy had a more popular image: as in Germany, it was regarded as being more liberal and more up to date than the army as well as being a symbol of Italy’s status as a Great Power. In 1888 Italy was the third naval power in the world and, although it had dropped to fifth place 10 years later, it was soon to start a large programme of building dreadnoughts, aimed primarily at Austria-Hungary. In 1908 an Italian construction plan aimed to establish a 2:1 superiority over the Austrians, although the cost of this proved beyond Italy’s means; by 1913 the plan was revised to provide for a superiority of 2:1.6.59 As with other aspects of Italian policy, there was uncertainty among allies and potential enemies concerning the meaning of naval strategy: for example, in spite of the competition with Austria-Hungary in the Adriatic, the possession of Tobruk and the Dodecanese as a result of the victory over Turkey gave bases to the Italian navy in the eastern Mediterranean and increased the anxiety of the British admiralty about the problems that the joint Austrian and Italian fleets might create for Britain. The Italians were also quick to see some of the potentialities of new technological developments: they founded a school of aviation in 1910, only three years after Gabriele D’Annunzio had, in Forse che si, forse che no, written one of the first novels in which the hero was an aviator, and in the Libyan campaign the Italians were the first people to use aircraft in a war. The weaknesses of the Italian armed forces were not the result of a lack of imagination or technical skill but rather of the bureaucratic organization of the army and navy and of their system of supply.
The chiefs of staff of the army – General Pollio from 1908 till June 1914, and then General Cadorna – had little direct political influence. They accepted, however reluctantly, that it was the government’s task to decide on policy and theirs to execute it. Thus, for example, at a time when Pollio was engaged in discussing joint plans with Italy’s allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, he did not in fact know the exact terms of the Triple Alliance treaty. Again, Giolitti and the government decided to launch the expedition to Libya without previous detailed consultation with the general staff, and Pollio was given very short notice of the decision to dispatch an expeditionary force; but then Giolitti, like most Italian politicians, was contemptuous of the military: ‘the generals are worth little; they came out of the ranks at a time when families sent their most stupid sons into the army because they did not know what to do with them’.60 The subordination of military to political considerations also limited military cooperation with the allies. Although in 1888 the Italian government had agreed with the Germans that they would send five army corps and three cavalry divisions to fight on Germany’s western front in the event of war with France, in 1912 Pollio had to tell Moltke that, because of the losses in Libya, Italy would not be able to send troops to the Rhine after all. In the following year Pollio, who was on good terms with the German and even the Austrian general staffs, promised to ask for permission to send troops to Germany in the event of war but no preparations were in fact made for this. He also proposed to Moltke at the end of 1912 that the fleets of the Triple Alliance should arrange to cooperate in the event of war; the result of this suggestion was the naval convention signed in Vienna in June 1913 providing for the Italian and Austrian fleets to rendezvous at Messina under the command of an Austrian admiral; they would aim to destroy the French fleet before the Russian Black Sea fleet could enter the Mediterranean.61 Not surprisingly, there was no mention of the British navy – and in these circumstances there was as much uncertainty about Italian military intentions in the crisis of July 1914 as there was about its foreign policy. The lack of central control was made worse by Pollio’s sudden death on 28 June 1914. The one positive military step, the calling up of an additional class of reservists on 13 July, seems to have been because of a threat of a strike by Italian railway workers rather than the threat of European war.
The government’s decision to declare Italian neutrality took the military leaders by surprise: on 31 July Pollio’s successor, Cadorna, was writing to the king about the necessity of sending troops to Germany. It was characteristic of the lack of communication between the civil and military authorities that while Cadorna was surprised and shocked at the declaration of neutrality, Salandra, the prime minister, did not know of Cadorna’s memorandum to the king until six years after the war had ended. Italy’s policy in the final crisis, unlike that of Germany, was determined not by previous military plans, nor even by Italy’s weakness after the Libyan campaign, but rather by the government’s and the king’s political decisions about Italy’s interests.
The Serbian challenge
In one other country directly involved in the outbreak of war, the role of the military was very important and of a rather different nature. In Serbia a group within the army in 1903 murdered the king and replaced him with a monarch from a rival dynasty; the new king thus owed his position to the army. The army was bitterly disappointed by the government’s acceptance of the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, but it gained enormously in prestige and influence as a result of its success in the two Balkan Wars. It claimed the right to administer the newly acquired territory in Macedonia and resented the appointment of civilian officials. In December 1913 there was a direct clash between a representative of the government and the local regimental commander at a reception at the Russian consulate in the Macedonian town of Bitola (Monastir) when the colonel claimed precedence over the civilian official in proposing the health of the tsar. The government then issued an order giving precedence to civilian officials at all public functions. As a result of these and other disagreements, early in June 1914 the chief of staff persuaded the king to dismiss the prime minister, Pašić, and it was only support for Pašić from the Russian government and Crown Prince Alexander that kept him in office. The king withdrew from politics and Alexander became prince regent, while Pašić announced the dissolution of parliament and new elections for 1 August. Thus, because of tension between the army and the civilian government, Serbia was in the midst of a major political crisis at the moment of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
The intense national feeling in Serbia at the time of the Bosnian crisis had led to the foundation in Belgrade of a nationalist association, the Narodna Odbrana (National Defence), which soon had branches in other towns as well as links with Serbs in the United States. In 1911 the slogan ‘All for Serbdom and the Fatherland’ was adopted as its official motto. This organization encouraged young people to volunteer for military training and undertook cultural activities to foster the Serb national spirit. But, in addition, a secret society, Union or Death, called by its opponents the Black Hand and with members among officers and civilians of all classes, was founded by an army officer, later to become head of Serbian military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, better known by his code name of ‘Apis’. Apis had been one of the regicides of 1903. He was a man who stopped at nothing, including murder, to attain his national and revolutionary ends. ‘This organization’, the constitution of the society ran, ‘prefers revolutionary action to cultural’62 and this marked the difference between Union or Death and the Narodna Odbrana, though a number of people were members of both organizations. The illicit activities of Apis and his group exacerbated the feud between the army and the civilian government; shortly before the murder of Franz Ferdinand, Pašić had ordered an inquiry into the illegal smuggling of arms over the frontier into Bosnia. There was a whole network of conspiracies and intrigues that have still not been unravelled and that created bitter and lasting feuds within the South Slav movement. Although there was a moment of unity in July 1914 in the face of the Austrian attack, one of the reasons that led Pašić’s government to reject part of the Austrian ultimatum may well have been the realization that the participation of Austrian officials in any inquiry in Serbia into the assassination of the archduke might have revealed the extent of the influence of Apis and his organization on the whole political and administrative life of the country. The feud between Pašić and Apis was never healed. Although three years later Apis was arrested and condemned to death on charges of plotting to murder the prince regent, his activities and motives remained obscure to the last so that his role has been the subject of wild speculation and rumour ever since. He certainly had links with the Young Bosnia group that was responsible for the assassination of the archduke; the guide who led the assassins across the Serbian border into Bosnia was one of Apis’ agents, though the same man also reported what he had done to the local representative of the Narodna Odbrana who in turn reported the fact to the government. On the other hand, Apis already knew that he was under investigation on the orders of the prime minister; and there is some evidence to suggest that he tried to stop the assassination after the conspirators had already left for Sarajevo. As with later interacting terrorist groups, the links between them are hard to disentangle.
What is more important than the details of the conspiracy and the various secret societies is the light that Apis’ career throws on the nature of Serbian society and politics. In a small, poor country where nationalist feelings were growing in intensity, the army was regarded as a symbol of national aspirations; there was, however, room for much rivalry and difference of opinion about how those aspirations might best be realized. At the same time, the interests of the army were not necessarily the same as those of the politicians who were basing their careers on the establishment of a parliamentary and democratic system. Traditions of terrorism and conspiracy going back to the years of Turkish rule contributed an element of instability in both domestic and foreign policy. Even if Apis and his organization were involved with the planning and execution of the murder of the archduke, it was without any real idea of what the long-term consequences might be. It was enough to remove someone whom they regarded as an enemy and oppressor of the Serb people; in any case, the war with Austria-Hungary was coming sooner or later. Apis believed, as his newspaper put it in 1912:
The war between Serbia and Austria … is inevitable. If Serbia wants to live in honour, she can only do this by war. This war is determined by our obligation to our traditions and the world of culture. This war derives from the duty of our race which will not permit itself to be assimilated. This war must bring about the eternal freedom of Serbia, of the South Slavs, of the Balkan peoples. Our whole race must stand together to halt the onslaught of these aliens from the north.63
War planning and the July Crisis
Yet the summer of 1914, when the Serbian army had not yet recovered from its efforts in the Balkan Wars, was hardly the moment for Serbia to provoke such a war; and the evidence does not suggest that either the Serbian government or the army command wanted to do so. However, the conspiracies and intrigues in which so many officers and politicians were involved served to give a prima facie plausibility to the Austrian accusations of Serbian complicity in the murder of Franz Ferdinand and provided the excuse needed by the Austro-Hungarian government to launch the war against Serbia, which both sides had for different reasons come to regard as inevitable. The case of Serbia in 1914 is a striking example of the way in which a fanatical nationalism will inspire actions that are not based on any rational calculation of profit and loss, actions whose consequences are unpredictable and unintended.
The nature of the social and political position of the army and navy and the role of the military leaders in deciding policy varied from country to country. Nevertheless, whatever the influence of the officer corps and the respect paid to its moral values, the actual military and naval plans of each country necessarily affected the policies of others. Each government reacted to the military and naval preparations of its neighbours: a move to increase armaments was never isolated but was followed by increased military expenditure in other states, regardless of their political system. The arms race itself contributed to the feeling that war was inevitable; although governments claimed that their preparation for a defensive war was a sign of their wish for peace and their will to deter aggression, deterrents in fact often provoke as much as they deter. Whereas some governments were readier than others to start or at least risk a war in pursuit of their policies, no government felt able to exclude the possibility of war and therefore took action that made its outbreak more likely. The pace was set by Germany trying, for a variety of reasons, to shift the world balance of power in its favour even if it involved the risk of war, but the European Great Powers were so bound up with each other that armament programmes and militarist propaganda in one necessarily led to armament programmes and militaristic propaganda in another. German naval expansion provoked British naval expansion: the Navy League in Germany was paralleled by the Navy League (and its rival the Imperial Maritime League or ‘Navier League’) in Britain and complemented by the Austrian Naval League. Russian military expenditure provided the excuse for German army increases and these in turn provoked the French three-year law. Calls for a national revival and greater preparation for the coming struggle became the common currency of political rhetoric – whether in the Ligue des Patriotes, the National Service League or the Narodna Odbrana – even if in many cases these were counterbalanced by the old liberal slogans of peace, retrenchment and reform or the socialist assertions that the working man has no country and that war between classes was destined to replace war between states. Some of these factors that contributed to the atmosphere in which the decisions of 1914 were taken will be examined in later chapters, but there is one area in which strategic decisions took precedence over all others and limited the choice of the civilian politicians. This was the actual course and immediate consequences of the July Crisis itself.
The war plans that were put into operation in the crisis of 1914 were conditioned by many things: strategic doctrine, technological capacity, the structure of command. They were revised from time to time as the diplomatic situation changed so that when war did come the nature of the opening moves had been fairly clearly foreseen and carefully worked out by the general staffs. What could not be foreseen and what made the war very different from what its instigators had envisaged were the consequences of those opening moves. Moreover, political hesitations, loss of nerve and tactical blunders often made the effect of the military plans other than that which had been intended by the planners. In general, however, the speed with which the final crisis developed in the last week of July 1914 meant that there was little chance of changing the military plans once their execution had been ordered. The case of Austria-Hungary, the first of the powers to start military action, shows clearly the difficulty of reconciling the ideal world of the staff officer with the reality of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the move.
The problem for Conrad, who was to a very great extent responsible for Austria-Hungary’s strategic planning, was, as we have seen, that he had to allow for a war on at least two fronts and perhaps more. He was passionately determined to use the first possible opportunity to inflict a crushing military defeat on Serbia, and he suggested to the politicians that Russian support for Serbia might turn out to be bluff. ‘We are not clear’, he said as late as 31 July, ‘whether Russia is only threatening so we must not let ourselves be distracted from our action against Serbia’.64 This was disingenuous: all the evidence pointed to Russian intervention in any conflict with Serbia, and Conrad gambled that a ‘lightning stroke’ against Serbia would be sufficiently quick to prevent effective Russian intervention because Austria enjoyed the advantage of a two-week interlude between attacking Serbia and effective Russian mobilization.65 On the other hand, for the Germans an essential point of the Austro-German alliance was that it would provide for an immediate Austrian offensive against Russia while Germany was concentrating on the campaign against France. To complicate the position still further, although Italy was officially allied to Austria-Hungary, it was by no means certain what its attitude in a war would be, and Conrad had indeed sometimes envisaged a preventive war against Italy as well; in any case, it would be prudent not to leave the Italian frontier unguarded. In addition, Romania, although also nominally an ally, had to be regarded as a potential enemy, and the Hungarian authorities were worried that there might be a rising among their Romanian subjects in Transylvania in the event of war. A Romania opposed to Austria-Hungary would give Russia a significant advantage in releasing troops that would be made available in an attack on Austria-Hungary: the Austro-Hungarian general staff calculated that the loss of Romania as an ally would be equivalent to losing 20 divisions or 400,000 soldiers; if Romania fought against Austria-Hungary the effect would be doubled.
By the spring of 1914 the Russians had improved their railway transport to such an extent that it was very possible that their mobilization would take less time than the 30 days on which Conrad had previously reckoned, so his hope that, by mobilizing the Austro-Hungarian forces for use against Serbia in 15 days, there would be time to deal with Serbia before Russia could open the campaign in Galicia was unlikely to be realized. In a war that started as a punitive expedition against Serbia, it would in any case be difficult for reasons of prestige and public opinion to postpone operations against Serbia so as to concentrate on the Russian front. Conrad and the Austro-Hungarian government were, as Norman Stone has convincingly shown,66 the victims both of their obsession with Serbia and of the endemic military weakness of the Monarchy. Conrad, who had doubts concerning the reliability of his troops, attempted to deal with the situation in March 1914, when he had tried to change the plan of campaign against Russia so as to evacuate some Austrian territory in the initial stages of a war and thus concentrate on a defensive battle.67 Quite apart from the fact that such a strategy was directly contrary to the interests of Austria’s ally Germany, however, he was told by the transportation division of the war ministry that the requisite revision of the railway timetables would take far too long.
Accordingly, on 25 July, when the Austrian ultimatum was running out, and three days before the actual declaration of war on Serbia, the mobilization of the army intended to defeat Serbia was begun. The Russian threat was ignored and it was planned to direct the bulk of the Austro-Hungarian army against Serbia. When it became clear that Russia was not bluffing, and under pressure from the Germans to speed up the start of the Austrian offensive in Galicia, Conrad found that to switch a large part of the army from the south to the north was impossible within any reasonable length of time. The railway timetables and the capacity of the rolling stock did not allow it. The head of transportation in the war ministry assured Conrad that to attempt the operation would only end in a ‘Tohowa-Bohu’ – a complete mess.68 Conrad was thus stuck with the war that he had unleashed against Serbia and was forced to open hostilities against both Serbia and Russia in circumstances so unfavourable that the first months of the war were a disaster from which few people expected Austria-Hungary to recover to the extent it did. The fault did not lie just with Conrad’s planning or the risks he was willing to run: the whole administrative system of the Monarchy made a more rapid or a more flexible mobilization unlikely. The Austro-Hungarian government had been determined to crush Serbia at all costs; they had realized that the cost might be a war with Russia and had chosen to proceed with their military plans against Serbia all the same. The result was that Austria was unable to overcome Serbian resistance until 1915, when Bulgaria had entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria and substantial German forces and a German commander had been sent to the Serbian front. Austria also had to face initial defeats by the Russians that led to a steadily increasing predominance of German influence over Austria-Hungary. The gesture that was to have demonstrated Austria-Hungary’s strength and to maintain its position as a Great Power in fact only led to the loss of that status and its ultimate downfall.
The Russians had slowly and rather reluctantly come round to the idea pressed on them by the French that they would have to open a war with an offensive campaign against Germany. Even then their preparations were somewhat inconsistent and confused: part of the additional expenditure authorized in 1913 was still used to add to the artillery in the dilapidated fortresses in Poland. However, they had made much progress with their strategic railway building, and in May 1912 they had modified their Plan 19 – the plan for a war against Germany and Austria-Hungary combined. The original plan made in 1910 had been for an attack on the Germans in East Prussia by the main bulk of the Russian army, while the remainder would follow a defensive strategy against the Austro-Hungarians. In 1912 it was decided that, if Germany attacked France, Russia would send nine army corps against Germany in East Prussia and 16 army corps would attack Austria-Hungary in Galicia, on the assumption that Germany would be too busy in the west to intervene effectively on the eastern front.69 In the autumn of 1912, at a moment when most of the governments of the Great Powers were thinking that war might be imminent as a result of the crisis in the Balkans, the tsar, the senior ministers and the commanders concerned considered whether it might be possible to carry out a partial mobilization for a war against Austria-Hungary alone, and so avoid provoking Germany. The idea was abandoned, largely because of the arguments of Vladimir Kokovtsov, the prime minister, who saw (rightly, as things turned out) that ‘No matter what we call the projected measures, a mobilization remained a mobilization, to be countered by our adversaries with actual war’.70
Because of the size of the Russian armies and the distances involved, the timing of the Russian mobilization was essential to the success of Russia’s initial plans on the outbreak of war. It was the decision of the Russians to mobilize in July 1914 that was seized on by Germany as providing the justification for their declaration of war, giving rise to the belief that was taken for granted in the years between the two world wars that ‘mobilization means war’. On 24 July 1914, after the Serbians had appealed to the tsar for support, the chief of staff and the foreign minister again considered a partial mobilization of the military districts of Kiev, Odessa, Moscow and Kazan with a view to action against Austria-Hungary. However, the Russians proceeded cautiously, partly from prejudice, partly from divided counsel. On 25 July they decided to recall officers on leave and to return troops on manoeuvres to their depots, and early the next day the ‘period preparatory to war’ was proclaimed. This in fact meant that the first steps towards general mobilization could be taken without the use of that fatal phrase. The decision also gave the Russians several days’ advantage over Germany, since the equivalent German measures – the proclamation of the ‘state of imminent danger of war’ (Kriegsgefahrzustand) – were not ordered till 31 July.
There has been much subsequent discussion as to whether the Russians could or should have carried out the partial mobilization discussed on 24 July; to some historians it has seemed yet another example of the way in which mobilization plans and railway timetables inexorably determined the development of the crisis. But, as L.C.F. Turner has shown,71 this possibility was not very seriously considered in 1914 and was rejected for the same reasons that it had been in 1912 – namely, that it would at once provoke Austrian general mobilization. In fact, the announcement of the ‘period preparatory to war’ and the measures already taken gave the Russians additional time for their mobilization while at the same time apparently leaving room for further diplomatic negotiations. The Austrians had always feared a situation in which the Russians would delay mobilization until the Austro-Hungarian army was tied down on the Serbian front; however, it was just this situation that Conrad had created by his rash decision to risk everything on preparing an immediate attack on Serbia.
The period between 25 July and the final decision to proclaim general mobilization was marked by the hesitations and divisions that were characteristic of the way in which Russia was governed. While suggesting to the tsar – and to the Germans – that mobilization against Austria-Hungary could be carried out without threatening Germany, Nikolai Yanushkevich, the chief of staff, was already telegraphing to his subordinates to regard 30 July as the first day of general mobilization. It was thus possible for Sazonov to assure the German ambassador that no mobilization had taken place, since the formal orders for it had not yet been issued even though the preparations had begun. How far Sazonov himself understood the implications of the military measures already taken is by no means clear: ‘Surely mobilization is not equivalent to war with you either. Is it?’ he asked the German ambassador on 26 July when the first reports of Russian military measures were reaching the German embassy. The German ambassador was apparently less innocent, at least according to his own subsequent account, and replied, ‘Perhaps not in theory. But … once the button is pressed and the machinery of mobilization set in motion there is no stopping it.’ 72
This is in effect what happened. By the afternoon of 29 July, Sazonov was sufficiently alarmed by German reactions to Russia’s preparations that he was prepared to go along with the proclamation of general mobilization. Yet, just as the orders were about to be telegraphed to the military districts, there was another hitch, when the tsar late that evening changed his mind yet again after a personal telegram from the kaiser. ‘I will not be responsible for a monstrous slaughter’, he exclaimed, and began to consider again the idea of a partial mobilization.73 The result, however, was much the same, since by now the Austrians, under pressure from the Germans, had decided to mobilize anyway and issued the order for general mobilization on 31 July. The Russian general mobilization was only postponed for 24 hours: by the evening of 30 July the orders had gone out and this gave the Germans the opportunity to start their own mobilization on the pretext that the Russians had made the first move.
Events were moving too fast for the diplomats to keep pace with the realities of military planning. Again and again during the last days of peace we have the impression that the politicians and diplomats were taking decisions about situations that had already changed without their realizing it. In this connection it is interesting to speculate how much the French government was kept up to date with the progress of Russian military preparations. In theory, the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance imposed on the Russians the obligation of consulting with the French before mobilization if the reason for mobilizing was action by Austria-Hungary, and Paléologue, the French ambassador in St Petersburg, certainly seems to have known what was going on and to have welcomed it. President Poincaré and the prime minister, Viviani, seem, however, to have gone out of their way to pretend ignorance of Russian mobilization as long as possible, presumably in order to avoid criticism that they could have done more to restrain the Russians from a step that would almost certainly lead to war.
In any case, French military planning was now based on the assumption that the Russians were prepared to attack the German armies by the 16th day after mobilization. It was an undertaking that the Russians had been somewhat reluctant to give. In 1910 they had hoped to improve their relations with Germany, and the tsar and the kaiser had had a much publicized and friendly meeting at Potsdam. Early in 1911 the French had been alarmed to discover that their allies had, without telling them, withdrawn two army corps from the Polish frontier. However, in August of that year a French military mission found the Russians more willing to commit themselves; although they said that they would not be ready for war for two years, they now agreed to open their campaign with an offensive thrust against Germany. In 1912 President Poincaré visited St Petersburg, and Grand Duke Nicholas, the tsar’s uncle and inspector general of cavalry (who became supreme commander on the outbreak of war), attended the French army manoeuvres. His Montenegrin wife, an enthusiastic supporter of the alliance and of Russia’s role as protector of the South Slavs, endeared herself to the French by insisting on taking home with her a bag containing soil from Lorraine.
Plans for collaboration were carried further and formalized when Joffre visited Russia in the summer of 1913, and reported that he was satisfied with the progress made in the construction of Russia’s strategic railways. In September 1913 a military convention was signed by which the French and Russians both undertook to open offensive operations on the outbreak of war with Germany, France on the 11th day and Russia after the 15th. The chief of the Russian general staff, Yakov Zhilinsky, agreed with Joffre that, although the alliance stipulated that France and Russia would engage only in a ‘defensive war’, this did not mean the war was to be waged defensively. On the contrary, they regarded it as absolutely vital to attack vigorously and simultaneously.74 These plans were based on the assumption that ‘Germany will direct the greatest part of her forces against France and leave only a minimum of troops against Russia’.75 At the same time the French government made the Russians a further substantial loan for railway building and armaments.
Since the Moroccan crisis of 1911, the French, in addition to strengthening their links with Russia, had been considering and revising their strategic plans as well as making changes in the high command. When Joffre became chief of staff and commander-in-chief, he began work on a new plan of campaign, Plan XVII. This not only relied on a Russian attack in the east but also allowed for the presence of a small British force on the left of the French line; in fact, the talks between the two general staffs had led to closer cooperation than the more cautious political contacts between the two foreign ministries, as well as being more frequent and more detailed than the military talks with the Russians. However, Joffre’s plans were based on faulty intelligence about German intentions: he believed that the bulk of the German forces would be concentrated on the frontier in Lorraine and that any move by the Germans through Belgium would be limited to the area to the south of the Sambre and Meuse rivers, in part because he did not realize that the Germans were prepared to use their reserve divisions for immediate action in the same way as regular divisions, and that this would provide the manpower for a major operation through Belgium. The French hope was that an all-out attack on the main German forces could achieve a quick decision – partly because Joffre calculated that Germany would commit 20 divisions to the war against Russia in the east rather than the seven that they actually did.76
The prevailing doctrine among French military leaders, in spite of a few critical voices, was that victory was as much the result of moral as material superiority and that the will to attack was bound to make the attack successful. Foch’s teaching at the École de Guerre laid down that ‘If defeat comes from moral causes, victory may come from moral causes also’,77 and his disciple, Colonel de Grandmaison, one of the younger officers who had been influential in securing the appointment of Joffre as generalissimo, put it even more strongly:
The French army, returning to its traditions, no longer knows any other law than the offensive… . All attacks are to be pushed to the extreme … to charge the enemy in order to destroy him… . This result can only be obtained at the price of bloody sacrifice.78
Grandmaison was right about the price but wrong about the result. These doctrines found expression in the formulation of Plan XVII itself: ‘Whatever the circumstances, it is the Commander-in-Chief’s intention to advance with all forces united to attack the German armies.’79
Before deciding early in 1914 that this all-out attack would be made in Lorraine, Joffre had considered an attack through Belgium, and in 1912 had pressed the idea on the Supreme War Council. However, Poincaré and the majority of the members of the government realized that any breach of Belgian neutrality by France and any move into Belgium before German forces crossed the frontier would run the risk of putting an end to any prospect of British intervention on the side of France, and Joffre was obliged to accept this decision. Here, at least, the authority of the civilian government over the military leadership was clearly asserted. When the crisis came in July 1914, this subordination of the military to the civilians continued, and the final decisions always rested with the government rather than with the high command, however much the latter might press for action. However, Joffre did, with the agreement of the war minister, take some preliminary measures before the president and prime minister had returned from their visit to Russia. As soon as Poincaré and Viviani returned on 29 July, Joffre was pressing them to authorize further measures and to allow the army to take up its positions on the German frontier. The time to be taken for mobilization was critical to French war plans: the general staff estimated that every 24 hours lost in mobilization time to the enemy would result in the loss of 15–20 kilometres of terrain.80 The Cabinet agreed on 30 July, but they insisted that the troops should remain 10 kilometres from the frontier because they were determined to impress on the British and Italians that their intentions were purely defensive.
By 31 July, Joffre was even more alarmed and he seems to have had an exaggerated view of the military measures so far taken by the Germans and of the number of reservists called up. That afternoon he told the Cabinet that any delay in French mobilization might mean having to start the war by abandoning French territory and that ‘the Commander-in-Chief must decline to accept this responsibility’.81 The Cabinet authorized further troop movements, but not the calling up of reserves, as they were still anxious to avoid any step that might be misinterpreted by the British before British intervention was assured. In fact, although each government claimed that its own mobilization was ordered as a reaction to the preparations of others, the respective military machines were set in motion largely independently of each other once the gravity of the crisis was realized. Thus Joffre finally succeeded in persuading the government to allow him to issue the mobilization orders on the afternoon of 1 August, with the next day, Sunday 2 August, as the first day of mobilization. Although the French government later implied that this decision was taken in response to the German proclamation of the Kriegsgefahrzustand, news of this was not actually received in Paris till after the French decision had been taken.
‘Mobilization is not war’, the official French statement announced,82 and it is true that most of the mobilizations ordered in the last days of July and the beginning of August did not necessarily mean that there would be immediate hostilities; in most instances there was in any case bound to be a delay of two weeks or more between ordering mobilization and being ready to start fighting. The one state whose military plans involved immediate aggressive action as soon as mobilization was proclaimed was Germany. German strategy on the outbreak of war had been determined in its general lines by the plan prepared by General von Schlieffen, the chief of staff from 1891 to 1906. Schlieffen had become convinced early in his career that an offensive strategy was the only one capable of winning a war fought by Germany. As he explained when addressing the commanders of the German Fifth Infantry Division during the war exercise of 1893:
I have the distinct impression that defensive ideas have a larger place in your minds than appears desirable. Even in the possession of the numerical superiority, in a favourable location, most gentlemen stand fast, waiting. The most daring hopes are lost, the victorious attack against the enemy is rejected. This is surprising since it is only twenty-two years since the time in which the idea of the offensive from first to last thrilled everybody… . One cannot be victorious over the enemy without attacking. I am thankful to those gentlemen who have preserved the idea that one must attack the enemy when one has the means to do so and that one must attack in such a way as to practically destroy him.83
The essence of the ‘Schlieffen plan’ was to combine the strategy of seizing the offensive with the necessity of fighting a two-front war, which appeared to be the most likely war for Germany once the Franco-Russian military agreement was signed. Schlieffen took the crucial decision to begin the war with an attack in the west rather than in the east. The plan was given its final form at the end of 1905, just before Schlieffen’s retirement and at the moment of Russia’s greatest weakness.84 Schlieffen calculated that the attack should begin in the west because Russia’s lack of railways and roads would mean that mobilization would proceed very slowly and that it would take at least 40 days before the Russians could cross the German frontier in the east. The German armies had to use this valuable time to achieve a rapid victory over France, which he believed could only be achieved by attacking through Belgium and the Netherlands. Crucial to his calculations was the use of the Dutch and Belgian railway systems, which would enable the German armies to make a rapid, massive thrust, first to the west, then to the south, enabling them to connect with the French railway system.85 The Germans would cross the French frontier where the fortifications were weakest, envelop the French armies and surround Paris. Finally, the French armies would be cut off from Paris, forced back against the fortresses on their eastern frontier and annihilated. (In fact, although the French general staff had some idea of the German intention to move through Belgium at least as early as 1905, their plans for an attack in Lorraine meant that they would do more or less what Schlieffen wanted them to do since he hoped, by an attack on Nancy, to draw them away from reinforcing their northern front.) On Schlieffen’s calculations the initial victory could be achieved in about a month, and indeed the whole plan was a gamble on the German ability to move swiftly and defeat the French before they had time to regroup their armies to meet the German advance from Belgium. When France was knocked out, substantial German forces would be sent to the east to counter the Russian offensive.
Schlieffen did not bother about possible political complications: ‘the neutrality of Luxemburg, Belgium and the Netherlands must be violated’, he wrote.86 Perhaps the Dutch might be prepared to agree to the passage of German troops; perhaps the Belgians would fight; in any case, Germany must not be deflected from pursuing its strategic goals by political and diplomatic considerations, any more than it would be by the possibility, which Schlieffen foresaw, that Britain might intervene and land an expeditionary force. He needed the room to manoeuvre so as to launch an attack on a broad front; this could only be obtained by a move through Belgium, and he needed to cross Dutch territory and use the Dutch railway system in order to capture the key Belgian railway junction of Liège and its surrounding forts. Although Schlieffen’s was not an operational war plan, the principle of sending Germany’s main armies against France via an invasion of Belgium ‘remained the bedrock of German strategic thinking down to 1914’.87
It was this last point that was to be the object of an important modification by Schlieffen’s successor, General von Moltke. He was concerned by the political objections to the violation of Dutch neutrality and decided, if possible, not to cross Dutch territory in order to launch the attack on Liège. Instead, the campaign was to open with a sudden, surprise attack on Liège and the surrounding forts; it was essential for the whole subsequent development of the German plans that this risky coup de main, involving as it did a very rapid advance on a narrow front so as to take the Belgians by surprise, should be carried out even before the declaration of war (it was in fact successfully launched on the night of 4/5 August 1914). This revision of the Schlieffen plan also enabled Moltke to reduce the estimate of the absolute number of troops needed for a successful offensive: whereas Schlieffen had believed 48.5 army corps were required in order to succeed, Moltke planned to attack with only 34 corps.88 The general necessity inherent in the Schlieffen plan for the violation of Belgian neutrality and offensive action as soon as possible after mobilization was maintained, and the attack on Liège required even more immediate action, since it was scheduled to take place on the third day of mobilization with such troops as were immediately available. It was therefore, as Moltke was to argue in a long meeting with Bethmann Hollweg on the evening of 31 July 1914, essential to launch the attack in the west the moment Russia proclaimed mobilization, so as to carry out the onslaught on France before Russian mobilization was complete and before fighting began on the eastern front. And to launch the attack in the west, it was equally essential to capture Liège within three days. The attack on Belgium had therefore to be launched almost immediately after the proclamation of mobilization and there was no margin for any delay between mobilization and the start of hostilities. The Liège operation had been kept a deep secret, and it looks as though the kaiser himself had not been told about it and that Bethmann only grasped its implications on 31 July. Whereas the other powers could order mobilization and wait to decide what to do next, in the case of Germany mobilization inevitably meant war.
Although the violation of Belgian neutrality gave the British government a convincing reason to explain to their Liberal supporters why they declared war on Germany, the decision had, as we have seen, been taken on more general political and strategic grounds. Nevertheless, the involvement of Belgium had been foreseen by the British military planners ever since the first staff talks with France started late in 1905. Indeed, at this stage there were even talks with the Belgians themselves, though these were not followed up once the immediate crisis over Morocco had abated; the Belgian authorities reverted to a dogged insistence on their neutrality, rejecting any suggestion of cooperation with the French and British. The contacts between the British and French military staffs continued, however. The British government had taken a rather ambiguous attitude to the growing collaboration between their military planners – notably General Sir Henry Wilson, the director of military operations at the War Office since 1910 – and the French. On the one hand, it was the job of the military to plan for all contingencies; on the other, it was the job of the political leadership to decide when those plans were to be put into operation. As Grey told Asquith in 1911, referring back to the staff talks of 1906: ‘The military experts then convened. What they settled I never knew – the position being that the government was quite free, but that the military people knew what to do if the word was given.’89 It was presumably this belief that military arrangements need not necessarily be implemented that enabled Asquith to tell the House of Commons after the Agadir crisis: ‘There is no secret arrangement of any sort which has not been disclosed.’90 Some of his closest advisers were less convinced. ‘I reminded him [Asquith]’, Lord Esher had written in his diary six weeks earlier, ‘that the mere fact of a War Office plan having been worked out in detail with the French General Staff … had certainly committed us to fight whether the Cabinet likes it or not’.91 This was also the view of General Wilson, who had gone ahead with detailed plans for the dispatch of an expeditionary force to France and who, in July 1911, had worked out the zone of concentration for the British forces on the left of the French armies and made precise agreements about port facilities and supply lines.
However much these agreements may have contributed to the frame of mind of the British political and military leaders that led to Britain going to war at the side of France, in the final days of the crisis it was still the civilians who had the last word: even when the Cabinet decided to intervene, the decision to order the dispatch of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) still had not been taken. General Wilson protested and fumed to the Foreign Office, to members of the government and to leaders of the opposition, and recorded scornfully in his diary that ‘Grey’s delay and hesitation in giving orders is sinful’ and that Asquith had written to the chief of the imperial general staff ‘putting on record’ the fact that the government had never promised the French an expeditionary force.92 It was only on 4 August that the order to mobilize was given, and the movement of the BEF to Europe was only ordered two days after the declaration of war; even then there were still debates about its strength and destination and suggestions that the plans prepared by Wilson and Foch should all be changed. Finally, on 12 August, the original plans were put into operation, but the existence of the plans does not seem to have determined the government’s policy or the timing of their decisions.
The British machinery of government had delayed the execution of the army’s plans for collaboration with the French rather than hastened it. The case of the navy was somewhat different. It had been decided some months earlier that, in order to save money, there should be no full-scale manoeuvres of the fleet in the summer of 1914, but that instead there should be a practice mobilization. As a result, by 17 July the whole fleet was mobilized and assembled for a grand review at Spithead. It had only started to disperse on 23 July. When the news of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia became known on 26 July, the first sea lord, Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, at once issued orders to stop the dispersal. This was approved the next day by his political boss, Winston Churchill, the first lord of the admiralty, though it was not till 29 July that the Cabinet authorized the navy’s preparations. Thus, the British navy was able to complete its preparatory measures and concentration at their wartime base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys by the time war was actually declared. This had been interpreted by some historians93 as showing that it was in fact Britain that started the process of mobilization that was to escalate the crisis and lead to war, but there seems to be no evidence to suggest that it was any more than an accidental stroke of good fortune or that Battenberg acted in any other way than any responsible officer would have done in his position and that the initiative for the decision was his alone. Churchill later said that he had hoped that this step might remind Germany and Austria-Hungary to act prudently, and Grey used it in conversation with the Austrian ambassador as a sign of the seriousness with which the government regarded the situation, but it was a decision taken by the naval authorities without consultation with the government. It also seems to have been taken before learning of the kaiser’s order on 25 July to bring back the German fleet from its summer cruise in Norway – a step regretted by the German foreign ministry – for fear it might alarm the British. Yet, although in theory the decision enabled the British navy to be in a high state of readiness when war was declared, it made very little difference to their operations at the start of the war and certainly does not seem to have influenced British political decisions in the final days of the crisis.
How far then can one attribute the outbreak of the war to the arms race or to the primacy of strategic planning over political decisions? The major powers were all increasing and re-equipping their armies and navies, and, notably in the case of the Anglo-German naval race, a step by one at once provoked a step by the other. Armaments bred armaments, and an armament programme once started was not easy to stop, for its reversal would have wide social and economic consequences. Yet at the same time governments were confronting the alternatives of cutting down their arms programme or else increasing taxation if they were not to face bankruptcy. The Germans introduced a special capital levy (Wehrbeitrag) in 1913 to meet the cost of their navy and army increases; in France the introduction of an income tax was one of the principal political issues immediately before the war; in Britain the Liberal government risked a major political and constitutional crisis by including in the 1909 budget provisions for increasing death duties and duties on increments in land values, a political tour de force that attempted to pay both for the fleet and for the government’s welfare programme but that bitterly alienated the Conservative opposition.
The influence of strategic planning depended on the role of the army in society and on the position that the general staffs occupied in the process of decision-making, and these differed widely from country to country. Such an influence could be both positive and negative. The negative influence was to restrict the freedom of action of a government in an international crisis; the decision to mobilize and the military and naval steps that mobilization involved inevitably increased the danger of war and provoked countermeasures by those governments that felt themselves threatened. The positive influence was felt in cases such as Germany and Austria, where the general staff was able to demand or persuade the government to take aggressive military action, or where the army was virtually free from civilian control. All general staffs, war ministries and admiralties existed to plan for action in an international crisis, but not in all cases did they have the last word, and not in all cases did their plans include immediate aggressive action. However, in Austria-Hungary both Conrad and most of his civilian colleagues were convinced of the importance of an early attack on Serbia, and in Germany Schlieffen’s plan (as modified by Moltke) required an immediate invasion of Belgium. Moreover, unlike every other European Great Power, the Schlieffen plan was the only mobilization plan that Germany had.
All governments envisaged the possibility of war: that was why they kept general staffs and spent vast sums on armaments. But some were more willing to contemplate starting a war than others. The Austrians had become convinced by 1914 that they must crush Serbia at whatever risk. The Germans believed that time was no longer on their side and that a war that many of their leaders said was inevitable had better be fought sooner rather than later – though there was some difference between the army and the navy as to which would be the most favourable moment.
Conrad had talked of the need for a preventive war for several years (and had been temporarily removed from office in 1911–12 for this reason) and the campaign against Serbia had been prepared since 1908, in spite of the problem of combining it with a campaign against the Russians. Serbia’s successes in the Balkan Wars gave renewed urgency to Conrad’s pleas for action. He was clearly ready to take the first chance that presented itself for an attack on Serbia, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand gave an unusually favourable opportunity.94 Some historians have placed the German decision for war in December 1912 when a Kriegsrat (‘war council’, as Bethmann Hollweg angrily described it afterwards) was called by the kaiser when he became alarmed by a report from the ambassador in London that Britain would side with France against Germany in the event of a general European war.95 Tirpitz and Moltke attended the meeting, along with Vice Admiral August von Heeringen and Admiral Georg von Müller, but politicians were noticeably absent: the chancellor, the foreign minister and even the minister of war had not been invited. The kaiser was furious with Britain, whose policy of the ‘balance of power’ was guaranteed to make it a ‘permanent enemy’ of Germany, and the Austrians had every right to counter the Serbian menace in order to forestall the challenges of the Slav minorities within the Empire. Moltke expressed his desire for ‘war – the sooner the better’, even though Tirpitz insisted that it would take at least another year and a half before the navy was ready. In fact, few new specific preparations for war were made as a result. In spite of the premise that hostilities might break out within 18 months, fortifications were not updated, casting doubt ‘on how far Germany premeditated the conflict’.96 Even the kaiser’s orders for a press campaign to prepare the nation for the coming conflict were not taken very seriously, and to at least one observer the discussion was an example of the uncertainty and vagueness of German policy-making. Volker Berghahn has renewed his earlier insistence – against the arguments of the Fischer school – that it was not at this time but later that Germany made the fateful decision to go to war: ‘it was only the setbacks to German foreign and domestic policies in 1913 and 1914 that tipped the scales in favour of a pre-emptive war in July 1914’.97 Yet the accounts that we have of this meeting are convincing proof that at least by this date Germany’s leaders were anticipating war in the near future and were quite ready to risk it when the moment seemed propitious, even if they were not planning for a particular war at a particular moment. Moltke regarded war as inevitable and, through his constant advocacy of fighting it sooner rather than later, he heightened the bellicose mood in Berlin after 1912.98
The attitude of the other belligerent powers was more complicated. They prepared for war and, in many ways, they expected it. The British hoped it would not come and within limits tried to prevent it. The French, and especially President Poincaré, believed that a war at the side of Russia might lead to the recovery of the lost provinces, but they were not prepared to start it. The army had planned its strategy based on the all-out attack, but they were not going to put it into operation until Germany moved first. The strategic initiative remained with the Germans.
The situation of Russia was more complicated still. The recovery from the defeat by Japan had been surprisingly rapid, and both the British and the Germans believed that Russia would be capable of fighting a major war by 1916 or 1917. Some of the Russian leaders had talked as if they were ready to go to war over the question of the German military mission to Constantinople in 1913, without apparently having any clear idea how they would set about it, since it soon became clear that it would be impossible to mount an expedition to seize the Straits while at the same time facing a war with Germany and Austria. However, by 1914 some at least of the Russian ministers were confident that Russia, now that it had embarked on the big army and navy increases approved in 1913, was strong enough to confront Germany and Austria-Hungary without waiting till 1917. The Germans, on the other hand, believed that they had better have the expected war with Russia as soon as possible before the Russians were militarily even stronger. But, in any case, the Russians felt bound to act in 1914 for reasons affecting their general international position and influence in the Balkans, and so believed that they must respond to Serbia’s appeal for help. They believed that they could risk a war, even though they still hoped that a firm diplomatic stand, and eventually mobilization, might avert the Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia.
The degree to which each government was prepared to risk a European war by taking the initiative in starting military action varied, but German and Austrian plans involved the highest danger of general war. What is more important than the immediate responsibility for the actual outbreak of war is the state of mind that was shared by all the belligerents, a state of mind that envisaged the probable imminence of war and its absolute necessity in certain circumstances. Still, the war they expected and the war for which the general staffs and admiralties planned was not the war they actually got. Very few people inside or outside government circles expected a long and destructive world war. None of the governments involved had made adequate economic plans for war: within weeks of its beginning they were already running out of munitions. In Germany, the banker and industrialist Walther Rathenau warned the government in September 1914 that the war would be long, and persuaded Bethmann Hollweg to put him in control of stockpiling strategic raw materials. Lord Kitchener, Britain’s most famous soldier, summoned to be Secretary for War on 4 August 1914, startled his colleagues by saying that Britain must be prepared ‘to put armies of millions into the field and maintain them for several years’, but there were no plans to do so. Grey later commented: ‘it was never disclosed how or by what powers of reasoning he made this forecast of the length of the war’,99 and it took the government a long time to act on Kitchener’s brief: conscription was not introduced till 1916.
Military strategists, civilian politicians and public pressure groups all seem to have been bewitched by what one historian has called the ‘short-war illusion’.100 Some strategists, such as the German general Colmar von der Goltz, argued that ‘nations in arms’ would fight long wars of attrition (Volkskriege), but those voicing this position were few and far between.101 The ideology of the offensive permeated practically every aspect of military planning in the decades before the war, even when the practical difficulties of such a strategy were apparent: ‘the experts who shape the prevailing wisdom about offense and defense may pay no attention to the effect of their ideas on strategic stability. Indeed, their interests and outlook may lead them to exaggerate the advantages of offense.’ 102 The consequences of this miscalculation were to make the First World War a far more significant turning point in European history than those who embarked on it – some light-heartedly, like the German crown prince, who exhorted the German people to take part in a bright and jolly war, some with regret, like Sir Edward Grey, who saw the lights going out all over Europe – ever imagined.
References
· 1 Holger H. Herwig and B.F. Trask, ‘Naval Operations Plans between Germany and the USA 1898–1913’, in P.M. Kennedy (ed.), The War Plans of the Great Powers 1880–1914 (London 1979). See also Ivo N. Lambi, The Navy and German Power Politics 1862–1914 (Boston, MA 1984), pp. 129–31. Nancy Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC 1999), is most sceptical that these plans represented real ambitions.
· 2 Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge 1994), p. 5.
· 3 Quoted in Gary Steenson, After Marx, before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914 (Pittsburgh 1991), p. 98.
· 4 Ulrich Trumpener, ‘Junkers and Others: The Rise of Commoners in the Prussian Army’, Canadian Journal of History 14 (1979), pp. 29–47.
· 5 See Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Staatsstreichpläne, Alldeutsche und Bethmann Hollweg’, in Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann and Imanuel Geiss (eds), Die Erforderlichkeit des Unmöglichen: Deutschland am Vorabend des ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main 1965). For anti-socialist measures in the army, see Martin Kitchen, The German Officer Corps 1890–1914 (Oxford 1968), Ch. VII.
· 6 See Jean-Jacques Becker, Le Carnet B: Les pouvoirs publics et l’antimilitarisme avant la guerre de 1914 (Paris 1943).
· 7 Quoted in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and his Times (London 1964), p. 158.
· 8 The Times, 18 Oct. 1906.
· 9 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, Vol. I (London 1972), p. 158.
· 10 For a detailed account of the Zabern affair and its implications, see David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London 1982).
· 11 Geoffrey Wawro, The Austro-Prussian War: Austria’s War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 (Cambridge 1996), p. 284.
· 12 Arden Bucholz, Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning (New York and Oxford 1991), p. 126.
· 13 Quoted in David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, NJ 1996), p. 41.
· 14 S.P. Mackenzie, ‘Willpower or Firepower? The Unlearned Military Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War’, in David Wells and Sandra Wilson (eds), The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective (Basingstoke 1999), p. 33.
· 15 Francois de Negrier, Lessons from the Russo-Japanese War (London 1905), p. 69; cited in Mackenzie, ‘Willpower or Firepower?’
· 16 Evgeny Sergeev, Russian Military Intelligence in the War with Japan, 1904–05: Secret Operations on Land and at Sea (Abingdon 2007).
· 17 Nicholas Papastratigakis, Russian Imperialism and Naval Power: Military Strategy and the Build-Up to the Russo-Japanese War (London 2011).
· 18 P. Willmott, The Last Century of Sea Power: 1. From Port Arthur to Chanak, 1894–1922 (Bloomington 2009).
· 19 On Tirpitz see the first scholarly biography in English: Patrick J. Kelly, Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy (Bloomington, IN 2011).
· 20 A. von Tirpitz, Politische Dokumente, Vol. I, Der Aufbau der Deutschen Weltmacht (Stuttgart and Berlin 1924), p. 160. See also Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, Vol. II (Munich 1965), p. 197.
· 21 Roger Chickering, ‘War, Peace, and Social Mobilization in Imperial Germany: Patriotic Societies, the Peace Movement, and Socialist Labor’, in Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen (eds), Peace Movements and Political Cultures (Knoxville, TN 1988), p. 10.
· 22 Lawrence Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik: German Sea Power before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis, MD 1997), p. 230.
· 23 The role of British military and naval attachés in propagating fears of the German menace is examined in Matthew Seligmann, Spies in Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the First World War (Oxford 2006).
· 24 For a historiographical review of the literature on the dreadnought revolution, see C.H. Fairbanks Jr., ‘The Origins of the Dreadnought Revolution: A Historiographical Essay’, International History Review 13 (1991), pp. 246–72, who points out that the revolution was initiated as a result of Britain’s concern with France, not Germany.
· 25 Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (Woodbridge 1998), p. 70.
· 26 Quoted in Franklyn Arthur Johnson, Defence by Committee (London 1960), p. 68.
· 27 Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia 1894–1917 (Oxford 1995), p. 142. Neilson also makes the important point that until Russia’s naval defeat at the hands of Japan it was the escalation of Russian naval power, not German, that Britain was attempting to meet with its programme.
· 28 Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America 1815–1945 (Oxford 1994), p. 100.
· 29 Henry Wilson’s diary, 31 Dec. 1901; quoted in C.E. Callwell, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Vol. I (London 1927), p. 47.
· 30 Jon Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1899–1914 (London 1989), p. 336.
· 31 G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914, Vol. VI (London 1930), Appendix III, p. 779. (Hereinafter referred to as BD.)
· 32 Quoted by Paul Hayes, ‘Britain, Germany, and the Admiralty’s Plans for Attacking German Territory, 1905–1915’, in Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes and Robert O’Neill (eds), War, Strategy, and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford 1992), p. 99.
· 33 Hansard, 5th series, Vol. 1, cols 1749–91. See E.L. Woodward, Great Britain and the German Navy (Oxford 1935), p. 408.
· 34 Tirpitz, Politische Dokumente, Vol. 1, p. 282. See also Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. 1, The Road to War 1904–14 (London 1961), p. 156.
· 35 Quoted in Marder, Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. 1, p. 156.
· 36 Marder, Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. 1, p. 158.
· 37 David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe 1904–1914 (Oxford 1996), p. 107.
· 38 BD X (2), No. 500, p. 736. See also Marder, Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. I, p. 315.
· 39 BD X (2), No. 501, p. 737.
· 40 E. Bernstein, ‘Die internationale Bedeutung des Wahlkampfes in Deutschland’, quoted in R.A. Fletcher, Revisionism and Empire (London 1984), p. 151.
· 41 Douglas J. Newton, British Labour, European Socialism and the Struggle for Peace 1889–1914 (Oxford 1985), pp. 188–9.
· 42 Judith F. Stone, Sons of the Revolution: Radical Democrats in France, 1862–1914 (Baton Rouge, LA 1996), p. 284.
· 43 William Serman, Les officiers Francais dans la nation, 1814–1914 (Paris 1982).
· 44 Quoted in Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Francais sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris 1977), p. 43, n. 174. For accounts of civil-military relations in France, see David Ralston, The Army of the Republic (Cambridge, MA 1967), and especially Douglas Porch, The March to the Marne: The French Army 1871–1914 (Cambridge 1981).
· 45 See Keith Armes, ‘French Intelligence on the Russian Army on the Eve of the First World War’, Journal of Military History 82 (2018), pp. 759–82.
· 46 J. Bushnell, ‘The Tsarist Officer Corps, 1881–1914: Customs, Duties, Inefficiency’, American Historical Review 86 (1981), p. 761.
· 47 See especially Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London 1975), Ch. 1.
· 48 Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Bloomington, IN 1992), p. 232.
· 49 See John B. Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914 (Baltimore, MD 2010).
· 50 Felix Patrikeeff and Harold Shukman, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War: Transporting War (Abingdon 2009).
· 51 Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia 1850–1917 (Ithaca, NY 1991), p. 36.
· 52 Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-five Years 1892–1916, Vol. I (London 1925), pp. 284–5. See also Marder, Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. 1, pp. 309–11.
· 53 Peter Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism (Cambridge 1994), pp. 197, 215–34.
· 54 Stone, Eastern Front, p. 71.
· 55 Lawrence Sondhaus, The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918: Navalism, Industrial Development, and the Politics of Dualism (West Lafayette, IN 1994), p. 219.
· 56 John Gooch, ‘Italy before 1915: The Quandary of the Vulnerable’, in Ernest R. May (ed.), Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars (Princeton, NJ 1984), p. 205.
· 57 See John Whittam, The Politics of the Italian Army 1861–1918 (London 1977), pp. 151 ff.
· 58 Herrmann, Arming of Europe, p. 106.
· 59 William A. Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance Into the Great War, 1914–1915 (New York 1987), p. 33.
· 60 Quoted in John Gooch, Army, State, and Society in Italy, 1870–1915 (New York 1989), p. 173.
· 61 Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword, p. 40.
· 62 Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (London 1967), p. 378.
· 63 Dedijer, Road to Sarajevo, p. 415.
· 64 Quoted in Norman Stone, ‘Die Mobilmachung der österreichischungarischen Armee 1914’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 2 (1974), pp. 67–96.
· 65 Graydon A. Tunstall Jr., Planning for War against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian and German Military Strategies, 1871–1914 (New York 1993), pp. 160–3.
· 66 Stone, Eastern Front, Ch. 4. See also Stone, ‘Moltke and Conrad: Relations between the Austro-Hungarian and German General Staffs 1909–1914’, Historical Journal 9 (1966), pp. 201–28; reprinted in Kennedy, War Plans of the Great Powers, pp. 222–51. For the details, see Günther Kronenbitter, ‘Krieg im Frieden’: Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Grossmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914 (Munich 2003), and Stone, ‘Mobilmachung’.
· 67 Tim Hadley, ‘Military Diplomacy in the Dual Alliance: German Military Attaché Reporting from Vienna, 1906–1914’, War in History 17 (2010), p 312.
· 68 Stone, ‘Mobilmachung’, p. 79.
· 69 Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War, p. 159.
· 70 L.C.F. Turner, ‘The Russian Mobilization of 1914’, in Kennedy, War Plans of the Great Powers, p. 255.
· 71 Turner, ‘Russian Mobilization’. See also L.C.F. Turner, Origins of the First World War (London 1975).
· 72 Friedrich Graf Pourtalès, Meine letzten Unterhandlungen in Sankt Petersburg (Berlin 1927), p. 27, quoted in L. Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, Vol. II (London 1953), p. 481.
· 73 Quoted in Turner, ‘Russian Mobilization’, in Kennedy, War Plans of the Great Powers, p. 266.
· 74 Documents diplomatiques francais, 3 série, Vol. VIII (Paris 1935), No. 79. See also Turner, ‘Russian Mobilization’, p. 257.
· 75 Perti Luntinen, French Information on the Russian War Plans 1880–1914 (Helsinki 1984), p. 166.
· 76 Roy A. Prete, ‘French Strategic Planning and the Deployment of the B.E.F. in France in 1914’, Canadian Journal of History 24 (1989), p. 43.
· 77 Quoted in Sir Basil Liddell Hart, ‘French Military Ideas before the First World War’, in Martin Gilbert (ed.), A Century of Conflict 1850–1950: Essays for A.J.P. Taylor (London 1966), p. 138.
· 78 Liddell Hart, ‘French Military Ideas’, p. 140.
· 79 Quoted in S.R. Williamson, ‘Joffre Reshapes French Strategy 1911–1913’, in Kennedy, War Plans of the Great Powers, p. 147.
· 80 Stephen van Evera, ‘The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War’, in Steven Miller (ed.), Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton, NJ 1985), p. 73.
· 81 J.J.C. Joffre, The Memoirs of Marshal Joffre, Vol. I (2 vols, London 1932), p. 125. See also Albertini, Origins of the War, Vol. III, p. 105.
· 82 Raymond Poincaré, Au Service de la France: Neuf années de souvenirs, Vol. IV (10 vols, Paris 1926–33), p. 484.
· 83 Quoted in Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbrück and the German Military Establishment: War Images in Conflict (Iowa City 1985), p. 61.
· 84 The various versions of the Schlieffen plan were first published in full in 1956 and are printed in Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan (Eng. tr., London 1958). The plan has recently been the subject of controversy, generated particularly by the publication of Terence Zuber’s Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871–1914 (Oxford 2002); Zuber denies that a ‘plan’ existed, that Schlieffen’s arguments for more men and materiel were primarily designed to increase the military budget, and that German war planning was more flexible than is commonly believed. For details of the debate and new documentary evidence, see Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans and Gerhard Gross (eds), Der Schlieffenplan. Analyse und Dokumente (Paderborn 2006).
· 85 Belgium had the densest railway system in Europe, and the quick capture of Liège was crucial in Schlieffen’s plans because it was the junction of four railway lines.
· 86 Ritter, Schlieffen Plan, p. 136.
· 87 David Stevenson, ‘Battlefield or Barrier? Rearmament and Military Planning in Belgium, 1902–1914’, International History Review 29 (2007), p. 482.
· 88 Terence M. Holmes, ‘Absolute Numbers: The Schlieffen Plan as a Critique of German Strategy in 1914’, War in History 21 (2014), pp. 193–213.
· 89 Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-five Years, Vol. I, p. 94. See also Samuel R. Williamson Jr., The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War 1904–1914 (Cambridge, MA 1969), p. 139.
· 90 Hansard, 5th series, Vol. XXXII, col. 107.
· 91 M.V. Brett (ed.), The Journals and Letters of Viscount Esher, Vol. II (2 vols, London 1934), pp. 61–2. Williamson, Grand Strategy, p. 197.
· 92 Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, Vol. I, pp. 154, 156.
· 93 For example by Erwin Hölzle, Die Selbstentmachtung Europas (Göttingen 1975).
· 94 On the theme of preventive war generally, see Jack S. Levy and William Mulligan, ‘Shifting Power, Preventive Logic, and the Response of the Target: Germany, Russia, and the First World War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40 (2017), pp. 731–69.
· 95 See John C.G. Röhl, ‘Admiral von Müller and the Approach of War 1911–14’, Historical Journal 12 (1964), pp. 651–73; 1914: Delusion or Design (London 1973); ‘An der Schwelle zum Weltkrieg: eine Dokumentation über der “Kriegsrat” vom 8 Dezember 1912’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1 (1977); ‘Die Generalprobe. Zur Geschichte und Bedeutung des “Kriegsrates” vom 8 Dezember 1912’, in Dirk Stegmann, Bernd-Jürgen Wendt and Peter Christian Witt (eds), Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System (Bonn 1978). See also Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen (Düsseldorf 1969), pp. 232 ff, but compare with Bernd F. Schulte, ‘Zu der Krisenkonferenz vom 8 Dezember 1912 in Berlin’, Historisches Jahrbuch 102 (1982), pp. 183–97.
· 96 David Stevenson, ‘Fortifications and the European Military Balance before 1914’, Journal of Strategic Studies 35 (2012), p, 855.
· 97 Volker R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (2nd edn, New York 1993), pp. 8–10.
· 98 Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge 2001), p. 283.
· 99 Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-five Years, Vol. II, p. 69. See also Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York 1962), pp. 195–7.
· 100 Lancelot L. Farrar Jr., The Short War Illusion (Santa Barbara, CA 1973).
· 101 See Robert T. Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916 (New York 2005).
· 102 Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, NY 1984), p. 216.