TWO

WAR PLANS

ARMIES MAKE PLANS. Alexander the Great had a plan for the invasion of the Persian empire, which was to bring the army of the emperor Darius to battle and to kill or make him prisoner.¹ Hannibal had a plan for the second Punic War: to evade Rome’s naval control of the Mediterranean by transferring the Carthaginian army via the short sea route to Spain, crossing the Alps – everyone remembers the story of his elephants – and confronting the legions in their homeland. Philip II had a plan to win a war against England in 1588: sail the Armada up the Channel, load the army which was fighting his rebellious Dutch subjects and land it in Kent. Marlborough’s plan to save Holland in 1704 was to draw the French army down the Rhine and fight it when distance from its bases made its defeat probable. Napoleon made a plan almost every year of his strategic life: in 1798 to open a second front against his European enemies in Egypt, in 1800 to defeat Austria in Italy, in 1806 to blitzkrieg Prussia, in 1808 to conquer Spain, in 1812 to knock Russia out of the continuing war. The United States had a plan in 1861, the Anaconda Plan, designed to strangle the rebellious South by blockade of the coasts and seizure of the Mississippi river. Napoleon III even had a plan of sorts for his catastrophic war against Prussia in 1870: to advance into southern Germany and turn the non-Prussian kingdoms against Berlin.²

All these, however, were plans made on the hoof, when war threatened or had actually begun. By 1870, though Napoleon III did not appreciate it, a new era in military planning had begun; that of the making of war plans in the abstract, plans conceived at leisure, pigeonholed and pulled out when eventuality became actuality. The development had two separate, though connected, origins. The first was the building of the European rail network, begun in the 1830s. Soldiers rapidly grasped that railways would revolutionise war, by making the movement and supply of troops perhaps ten times as swift as by foot and horse, but almost equally rapidly grasped that such movement would have to be meticulously planned. Long-distance campaigners had made their arrangements in the past; the idea that the armies of antiquity or the Middle Ages spurred off into the blue is a romantic illusion. Alexander the Great either marched coastwise within seventy-five miles of the ships that carried his supplies or sent agents ahead to bribe Persian officials into selling provender. Charlemagne required the counts of his kingdom to set aside as much as two-thirds of their grazing for his army if it needed to campaign in their territories.³ The re-supply of the Third Crusade, after a disastrous start, was assured by Richard the Lionheart choosing a route that kept him in constant touch with his supporting fleet.⁴ Nevertheless, pre-railway logistics had always been hit-and-miss; equally, they allowed flexibility, for livestock and draught animals could always be parked off the road when not needed, and live animals might be bought or looted to replace those eaten or killed by overwork. None of that was true of railways. Locomotives could not be picked up in farmyards, while the mismanagement of rolling stock during the Franco-Prussian War, when a tangle of empty wagons in the unloading yards blocked the arrival of full ones for miles up the line, taught the French army a lesson never to be forgotten.⁵ Railways need to be timetabled quite as strictly in war as in peace; indeed more strictly, nineteenth-century soldiers learnt, for mobilisation required lines designed to carry thousands of passengers monthly to move millions in days. The writing of railway movement tables therefore became a vital peacetime task.

It was a task in which officers had to be trained; fortunately, suitable places of training already existed, in the armies’ staff colleges. There lay the other root of abstract war planning. Staff colleges, like industrial and commercial schools, were a creation of the nineteenth century. Napoleon’s subordinates had learnt their business from their elders and as they went along. Their practical mastery persuaded their competitors that expertise must be systematised. In 1810 Prussia established, on the same day as a University of Berlin was founded, a War Academy to train officers in staff duties.⁶ There had been earlier equivalents, in Prussia itself and in other countries, but the staff work taught was narrowly interpreted: clerking, map-making, tabulation of data. The products of such colleges were destined to be minions; as late as 1854, fifty-five years after Britain had founded a staff college, the commanders of the British army going to the Crimea chose their executives by the immemorial method of nominating friends and favourites.⁷ By then Prussia, under the influence of the highly intellectual Helmuth von Moltke, was about to transform its staff college into a real school of war. Its future graduates would be encouraged to think like generals, play realistic war games, study concrete military probabilities on the ground during ‘staff rides’ and write ‘solutions’ to national strategic problems. After the spectacular Prussian victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, existing institutions in those countries and others were hastily modernised or new, ‘higher’ ones founded, the French Ecole de Guerre in 1880, a Centre for Higher Military Studies in Paris, ‘the School for Marshals’, in 1908.⁸ Methods of training, through war games and staff rides, were made to imitate the Prussian; German texts were translated, recent military history was analysed; the best graduates, when appointed to the general staffs of their armies after competitive selection, were set to arranging mobilisation schedules, writing railway deployment timetables and designing plans for every eventuality in national security, often highly offensive in character. In the diplomatic world there was ironically no equivalence; the professorship of Modern History at Oxford had been established in the eighteenth century to educate future diplomats, but the British Foreign Office in 1914 was still choosing many of its entrants from the ranks of honorary attachés, young men whose fathers were friends of ambassadors, the equivalent of the favourites who had gone with Lord Raglan to the Crimea.

Diplomacy, therefore, remained an art taught in embassies. It was a benevolent education. Europe’s diplomats were, before 1914, the continent’s one truly international class, knowing each other as social intimates and speaking French as a common language. Though dedicated to the national interest, they shared a belief that their role was to avoid war.

The Ambassadors, for instance, of France, Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy, who under Sir Edward Grey’s chairmanship, managed to settle the Balkan crisis of 1913, each represented national rivalries that were dangerous and acute. Yet they possessed complete confidence in each other’s probity and discretion, had a common standard of professional conduct, and desired above all else to prevent a general conflagration. It was not the fault of the old diplomacy . . . that . . . Europe was shattered by the First World War . . . other non-diplomatic influences and interests assumed control of affairs.⁹

Thus Harold Nicolson, himself a diplomat of the old school and the son of another. Among the non-diplomatic interest he cites was, of course, that of the professional soldiers. Though no more professional warmongers than their diplomatic colleagues, they had been trained in an entirely contrary ethos to theirs: how to assure military advantage in an international crisis, not how to resolve it. What determined their outlook was the syllabus of the Staff College and what in turn determined that were the imperatives of mobilisation, concentration and deployment of troops dictated by the capacities of railways. Though A.J.P. Taylor was flippantly wrong to characterise the outbreak of 1914 as ‘war by timetable’, since statesmen might have averted it at any time, given goodwill, by ignoring professional military advice, the characterisation is accurate in a deeper sense. Timetabling having so demonstrably contributed to Prussia’s victory of 1870 over France, timetables inevitably came to dominate thereafter the European military mind. M-Tag (mobilisation day), as the Germans called it, became a neurotic fixed point. From it, inflexible calculation prescribed how many troops could be carried at what speed to any chosen border zone, what quantity of supplies could follow and how broad would be the front on which armies could be deployed on a subsequent date against the enemy. Simultaneous equations revealed the enemy’s reciprocal capability. Initial war plans thus took on mathematical rigidities, with which staff officers confronted statesmen. Joffre, chief of the French General Staff in July 1914, felt he discharged his duty in warning the government’s Superior War Council that every day’s delay in proclaiming general mobilisation entailed, as if by a law of nature, the surrender of twenty-five kilometres’ depth of national territory to the enemy; indeed, the assumption by meteorologists of the use of the word ‘front’ to describe moving belts of high and low pressure derives from the strategy of the First World War and provides, reflexively, one of the more useful insights we have into the working of military mentalities in the years before its outbreak.¹⁰

All European armies in 1904 had long-laid military plans, notable in most cases for their inflexibility. None was integrated with what today would be called a ‘national security policy’, made in conclave between politicians, diplomats, intelligence directors and service chiefs, and designed to serve a country’s vital interests, for such a concept of national leadership did not then exist. Military plans were held to be military secrets in the strictest sense, secret to the planners alone, scarcely communicable in peacetime to civilian heads of government, often not from one service to another.¹¹ The commander of the Italian navy in 1915, for example, was not told by the army of the decision to make war on Austria until the day itself; conversely, the Austrian Chief of Staff so intimidated the Foreign Minister that in July 1914 he was left uninformed of military judgements about the likelihood of Russia declaring war.¹² Only in Britain, where a Committee of Imperial Defence formed of politicians, civil servants and diplomats as well as commanders and intelligence officers had been instituted in 1902, were military plans discussed in open forum; even the CID, however, was dominated by the army, for the Royal Navy, Britain’s senior service and heir of Nelson, had its own plan to win any war by fighting a second Trafalgar, and so held magnificently aloof from the committee’s deliberations.¹³ In Germany, where the army and the Kaiser had succeeded by 1889 in excluding both the War Ministry and parliament from military policy-making, war planning belonged exclusively to the Great General Staff; the navy’s admirals were fed crumbs and even the Prime Minister, Bethmann Hollweg, was not told of the central war plan until December 1912, though it had been in preparation since 1905.

Yet that plan, the ‘Schlieffen Plan’, so-called after its architect, was the most important government document written in any country in the first decade of the twentieth century; it might be argued that it was to prove the most important official document of the last hundred years, for what it caused to ensue on the field of battle, the hopes it inspired, the hopes it dashed, were to have consequences that persist to this day. The effect exerted by paper plans on the unfolding of events must never be exaggerated. Plans do not determine outcomes. The happenings set in motion by a particular scheme of action will rarely be those narrowly intended, are intrinsically unpredictable and will ramify far beyond the anticipation of the instigator. So it was to prove with the Schlieffen Plan. In no sense did it precipitate the First World War; the war was the result of decisions taken, or not taken, by many men in June and July 1914, not by those of a group of officers of the German Great General Staff, or any single one of them, years beforehand. Neither did its failure, for fail it did, determine what followed; it was a plan for quick victory in a short war. The long war which followed might have been averted by a resolution of the combatants to desist after the initial, abortive clash of arms. Nevertheless, Schlieffen’s plan, by his selection of place for a war’s opening and proposal of action in that theatre by the German army, dictated, once it was adopted in the heat of crisis, where the war’s focus would lie and, through its innate flaws, the possibility of the war’s political widening and therefore the probability of its protraction. It was a plan pregnant with dangerous uncertainty: the uncertainty of the quick victory it was designed to achieve, the greater uncertainty of what would follow if it did not attain its intended object.

Schlieffen’s was a pigeonholed plan par excellence. He was appointed Chief of the German Great General Staff in 1891 and began at once to consider in the abstract how best to secure his country’s security in the political circumstances prevailing. The plans inherited from his predecessors, the great Moltke the Elder and Waldersee, took the predicament of Germany’s interposition between France, implacably hostile since the defeat of 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and Russia, long France’s friend, as their starting point. That presaged, in worst case, a two-front war. Both discounted the likelihood of a success against France, which was protected by a chain of fortresses, undergoing expensive modernisation, and therefore concluded that the German army should fight defensively in the west, using the Rhine as a barrier against a French offensive, and deploy its main strength in the east; even there, however, its aims should be limited to gaining a defensible line just inside the Russian frontier; to follow up a victory in the (Russian) kingdom of Poland by ‘pursuit into the Russian interior’, Moltke wrote in 1879, ‘would be of no interest to us’. Moltke remembered the catastrophe of Napoleon’s march on Moscow.¹⁴

So, it must be said, did Schlieffen; but he, a pupil of Moltke’s system of staff education, understood only its disciplines, not its inspiration. Moltke, while insisting on rigour in military analysis, had always taken trouble to adjust his strategic ideas to the spirit of his country’s diplomacy. He and Bismarck, whatever their differences over policy, opened their minds to each other. Schlieffen was uninterested in foreign affairs. He believed in the primacy of force. Because of the young German Kaiser’s ill-judged repudiation of Bismarck’s ‘reinsurance’ treaty with Russia in 1890, a treaty holding Russia to neutrality with Germany unless Germany attacked France, and Germany to neutrality with Russia unless it attacked Austria-Hungary, Germany’s ally, he was allowed, on succeeding as Chief of Staff, to give his preoccupation with force full rein.¹⁵ Chess-board thinking came to possess him. The pieces he identified were few: a France weaker than Germany but protected by forts, a Russia weaker than Germany but protected by great space; a weak Austrian ally, but hostile to Russia and therefore useful as a distraction and perhaps even as a counterweight; a very weak Italy, allied to Germany and Austria, which therefore did not count; a Britain which could be ignored, for Schlieffen was so uninterested in seapower that he even despised the German navy, darling of the Kaiser though it increasingly became during his reign.¹⁶

Given the relativities of force, and they alone influenced his thinking, he arrived in progressive stages at a plan to commit seven-eighths of Germany’s strength, in the contingency of war, to an overwhelming offensive against France, an all-or-nothing endgame that risked his own king in the event of failure. Schlieffen, however, discounted failure. Already by August 1892 he had decided that the west, not the east as in Moltke’s and Waldersee’s thinking, must be the centre of effort. By 1894 he was proposing a scheme for destroying the French fortresses along the Franco-German frontier. In 1897, having accepted that Germany’s heavy artillery could not do sufficient damage to the forts, he began to argue to himself that the ‘offensive must not shrink from violating the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg’, in other words, neutralising the French fortresses by outflanking them. Plans written between 1899 and 1904, tested in war games and staff rides, envisaged an advance through Luxembourg and the southern tip of Belgium with more than two-thirds of the army. Finally, in the so-called ‘Great Memorandum’ of December 1905, completed just before his retirement after fourteen years in the highest military post, he cast moderation aside. Belgian neutrality – guaranteed jointly by Britain, France and Prussia, since 1839 – was not tepidly to be infringed but violated on the largest scale. Almost the whole of the German army, drawn up on a line hinged on the Swiss frontier and reaching nearly to the North Sea, was to march forward in a huge wheeling movement, first through Belgium, the outer wing to pass north of Brussels, then across the plains of Flanders to reach, on the twenty-second day after mobilisation, the French frontier. On the thirty-first day, the German line was to run along the Somme and Meuse rivers and from that position the right wing was to turn southwards, envelop Paris from the west and begin to drive the French army towards the left wing advancing from Alsace-Lorraine. A great semicircular pincer, 400 miles in circumference, the jaws separated by 200 miles, would close on the French army. Under inexorable pressure the French would be pinned to the ground of a decisive battlefield, fought to a standstill and crushed. By the forty-second day from mobilisation, the war in the west would have been won and the victorious German army freed to take the railway back across Germany to the east and there inflict another crushing defeat on the Russians.¹⁷

Schlieffen continued to tinker with his plan, even in retirement, until his death in 1912. He had no other occupation. He was a man without hobbies. As Chief of Staff he had often worked until midnight, then relaxing by reading military history to his daughters. Military history was a subordinate passion to writing war plans. He had been the Great General Staff’s military historian before becoming its chief, but studied history in a wholly technical way. It was the dispositions of armies on a map that interested him, not the spirit of their soldiers, nor the reasoning of governments that had brought them to the clash of arms.¹⁸ He had an obsession with Cannae, the battle in which Hannibal had encircled the Roman legions in 216 BC. Hannibal’s crushing victory was a major inspiration of his Great Memorandum of 1905. In Cannae he perceived the pure essence of generalship, untainted by politics, logistics, technology or the psychology of combat. His practical service as a young officer with the Lancers of the Guard seems to have left no mark; in the wars of 1866 and 1870 he was already on the staff: by 1884 he was a professional military historian; after 1891 the routines of the map table appear to have possessed him completely. Aloof, sarcastic, intellectually arrogant, ever more olympian as his tenure of office extended to its unprecedented duration, he had by the end of his career succeeded in reducing war, at least for himself, to a pure abstraction, so many corps here, so many there. An extract from the Great Memorandum gives the flavour:

The Schlieffen Plan

If possible, the German Army will win its battle by an envelopment with the right wing. This will therefore be made as strong as possible. For this purpose eight army corps and five cavalry divisions will cross the Meuse by five routes below Liège and advance in the direction of Brussels-Namur; a ninth army corps (XVIIIth) will join them after crossing the Meuse above Liège. The last must also neutralise the citadel of Huy within whose range it is obliged to cross the Meuse.

Odder still, given his obsession with troop movements, Schlieffen had no interest in enlarging the size of the German army so as to ensure its capacity to overwhelm the enemy. As Holger Herwig has recently argued, he shared a prevailing fear of the PrussianGeneralität that expansion would corrupt an army of apolitical country lads with socialists from the big cities.¹⁹ Though in 1905 he demanded the raising of thirty-three new infantry battalions, that was because he had calculated such a number to be the shortfall threatening his plan with failure. He wanted at that stage no more, though Germany’s large and expanding population of young men could easily have supplied it. The intellectual problem he had set himself, and believed he could solve, was how to win a short war with the resources available. His ambition was to repeat the triumphs of the great von Moltke in 1866, against Austria, and 1870, against France, wars of six and seven weeks respectively. Above all he wanted to avoid a ‘wearing-out’ war. ‘A strategy of attrition’, he wrote, ‘will not do if the maintenance of millions costs billions.’²⁰

He did not live to discover, as Hitler would, that brilliant schemes of aggression, if flawed, entail attrition as if by an inexorable reactive law. Yet Schlieffen was, within the circumstances his own time imposed, right to limit numerically the scope of the offensive he devised. Hitler’s scheme was to fail because, after a whirlwind victory in the west, he persuaded himself that he could repeat victory in the vast spaces of the east. Schlieffen shrank from those spaces. He recognised that a marching army of foot and horse would exhaust its impetus in the limitless room of the steppe. Hence his midnight vigils over the maps of Flanders and the Ile-de-France, a corps here, a flank march there, a river bridged, a fortress masked. His midnight pettifoggery had as its object an exact adjustment not of German numbers to those that the French could deploy, but to what the Belgian and French road network could carry. Such calculations were the groundwork of staff-college training: students, transferring from prepared tables the length of a marching column – twenty-nine kilometres for a corps, for example – to a road map, could determine how many troops could be pushed through a given sector at what speed. Since thirty-two kilometres was the limit of a forced march, that would be the advance of a corps on a single road; but the tail of a column twenty-nine kilometres long would remain near or at the marching-off point at the day’s end. If there were twin parallel roads, the tails would advance half the distance, if four three-quarters and so on. Ideally, the units of a corps would advance not in column but in line abreast, allowing all of it to arrive at the day’s end thirty-two kilometres further on; in practice, as Schlieffen admitted in one of his amendments, parallel roads were at best to be found one to two kilometres apart. As his great wheeling movement was to sweep forward on a front of three hundred kilometres with about thirty corps, however, each would have only ten kilometres of front on which to make its advance, in which there might at best be seven parallel roads. That was not enough to allow the tails of the columns to catch up with the heads by the day’s end. The drawback was serious in itself; more seriously, it absolutely forbade any attempt to crowd more troops into the radius of the wheeling movement. They would not fit; there simply was not room.²¹

Schlieffen’s determination to work with the numbers he had was therefore correct; the plan derived from mathematical realities. As he recognised in his final amendment, any attempt to increase numbers on the roads, perhaps even to work with the numbers in hand, would result in a useless traffic jam: ‘an unnecessary mass will be formed behind the firing-line’.²² The plan, unfortunately for the Germans was not, however, derived purely from mathematical realities. Its ultimate wellspring was wishful thinking. Schlieffen had a dream of repeating the great victories of 1870, not as then on the Franco-German frontier, for he realised that the French were unlikely to do Germany the ‘willing favour’ of plunging a second time headfirst into its territory, but deep inside France itself. Yet France, as he emphasised time again and again, was a ‘great fortress’, fortified on its frontiers and in its interior, fortified above all at Paris, a city surrounded by modern fortifications. Belgium, though fortified also, offered a way round the French frontier forts, for its army was too small to resist German strength for any period; but to pass through Belgium towards Paris both lengthened and narrowed the front of advance. Hence the obsession with the road network, the search for a corridor through Flanders to the Ile-de-France and Paris down which the corps of the right wing could crowd fast enough to reach the field of decisive battle within the time limit of six weeks from mobilisation day; longer than that and the Russians would have emerged from their great spaces to overwhelm the exiguous forces left in the east to defend the approaches to Berlin.

The dream was of a whirlwind; the calculations warned of a dying thunderstorm. Even in the Great Memorandum of 1905 Schlieffen took counsel of his fears. ‘It is therefore essential’, he wrote, ‘to accelerate the advance of the German right wing as much as possible’ and ‘the army commanders must be constantly on the alert and distribute the marching routes appropriately’; this when, by his own admission, the median marching speed of trained troops was twenty kilometres a day.²³ Orders to speed up or to switch roads could scarcely alter that. Then there was the well-known ‘diminishing power of the offensive’; ‘the active [peacetime] corps must be kept intact for the battle and not used for duties in the lines of communication area, siege-works, or the investing of fortresses’, though, at the same time, ‘the railways necessary to supply the army must also be guarded;²⁴ the great cities and the populous provinces of Belgium and north-western France must be occupied’;²⁵ such duties were a sponge soaking up fighting troops. Then there were contingencies: ‘should the English land and advance, the Germans will halt . . . defeat the English and continue the operations against the French’; no allowance of time made for that delay. Then, in a later amendment, there was the danger that the French, so despised after their collapse in 1870, might have found a new fighting will: ‘now that they are imbued with the offensive spirit, we must assume that the part [of their army] not attacked will advance offensively’.²⁶ That raised the dark spectre of attrition, the long battle, to be fought out with blood and iron. The danger was there in any case: ‘If the enemy stands his ground in the face of the great wheeling movement, all along the line the corps will try, as in siege-warfare, to come to grips with the enemy from position to position, day and night, advancing, digging-in, advancing’; even if such advances were possible, if the Germans averted ‘a standstill as happened in the war in the Far East’ (the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5), the French might fall back further into the ‘great fortress’ as which ‘France must be regarded’;²⁷ ‘if the French give up the Oise and the Aisne and retreat behind the Marne, Seine etc . . . the war will be endless’.²⁸

This is not the only note of desperation in the Great Memorandum. There are others. Schlieffen yearns for more troops at the decisive point, the right wing of the great wheel through Belgium and northern France: ‘Still greater forces must be raised . . . Eight army corps must be raised . . . We continue to boast of the density of our population, of the great manpower at our disposal; but these masses are now trained or armed to the full number of men they could yield . . . the eight army corps are most needed on or behind the right wing.’ Schlieffen urges the creation of these eight corps, an addition of a full quarter to the strength of the army, from the reserves, the Ersatz (untrained contingents) and the Landwehr (over-age reservists), even though he apparently shared his brother generals’ fear of enlarging the army through the enlistment of unreliable elements. The note of desperation grows stronger: ‘How many [of the eight corps] can be transported [to the right wing] depends on the capacity of the railways . . . [they] are needed for theenvelopment of Paris . . . How they advance and the attack on the position are shown on Map 3.’²⁹

It is at this point that a careful reader of the Great Memorandum recognises a plan falling apart: Map 3 in no way shows how the new corps are to advance or to invest Paris, the central strongpoint of the ‘great fortress’ that was Schlieffen’s France. The corps simply appear, with no indication of how they have reached Paris and its outskirts. The ‘capacity of the railways’ is irrelevant; railways, in Schlieffen’s plan, were to carry the attackers no further than the German frontier with Belgium and France. Thereafter it was the road network that led forward, and the plodding boots of the infantry that would measure out the speed of advance. Schlieffen himself reckoned that to be only twelve miles a day. In the crisis of August and September 1914, Germans, French and British units would all exceed that, sometimes day after day – the 1st Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment averaged sixteen and a half miles during the great retreat from Mons to the Marne, 24 August – 5 September, and covered twenty-three and twenty-one miles on 27 and 28 August respectively – but Schlieffen’s mean was not far short of the mark.³⁰ Von Kluck’s army on the outer wing of the great wheel achieved a little over thirteen miles a day between 18 August and 5 September, 1914, over a distance of 260 miles.³¹ For the ‘eight new corps’, needed by Schlieffen as his plan’s clinching device, to arrive at the decisive place of action, they would have actually needed to march not only further and faster, which defied probabilities, but to do so along the same roads as those occupied by the corps already existing, a simple impossibility.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find buried in the text of the Great Memorandum its author’s admission that ‘we are too weak’ to bring the plan to a conclusion and, in a later amendment, ‘on such an extended line we shall still need greater forces than we have so far estimated’.³² He had run into a logical impasse. Railways would position the troops for his great wheel; the Belgian and French roads would allow them to reach the outskirts of Paris in the sixth week from mobilisation day; but they would not arrive in the strength necessary to win a decisive battle unless they were accompanied by eight corps – 200,000 men – for which there was no room. His plan for a lightning victory was flawed at its heart.

It was pigeonholed for use nonetheless. Moltke the Younger, nephew of the victor of 1866 and 1870, tinkered with it when he succeeded as Chief of the Great General Staff in 1906. Schlieffen did so himself, literally up to the eve of his death on 4 January 1913. Neither solved the inherent difficulties. Moltke is conventionally accused of compounding them, by strengthening the left wing of the planned German deployment at the expense proportionately of Schlieffen’s massive right; that is scarcely the point. Moltke’s staff certainly abbreviated the time needed to entrain and offload the troops at the frontier deployment points, by at least two days in some sectors and four in others.³³ That was scarcely the point either; beyond the railways, where movement could be accelerated by planning, lay the roads, where it could not. There the inflexible average of the twelve marched miles a day cramped the calculations of the finest minds. Moltke and the Great General Staff responded to the difficulty by ignoring it. The Schlieffen Plan was left to lie in its pigeonhole, to be extracted and instituted in August 1914 with calamitous results.

Yet the French war plan that lay in its pigeonhole in 1914, Plan XVII, proposed exactly that ‘favour’ to Germany Schlieffen had discounted France making. It was a plan for a headlong attack across the common Franco-German frontier, into Lorraine and towards the Rhine, judged by Schlieffen the least well to serve French interests. For just as France had spent time and vast quantities of money since the 1880s in improving and extending the fortifications that protected its territory, so had Germany. The provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, annexed to the new German Empire in 1871, had been heavily fortified by France in the two preceding centuries. Under German imperial government – Alsace-Lorraine was ‘Reich’ territory, coming directly under the administration of Berlin – the fortifications of Metz and Thionville on the River Moselle and of Strassburg on the Rhine had been expensively modernised. Those cities were the gateways from France to Germany. Schlieffen presumed that the French high command would shrink from planning to attack them.

In the period while the Great Memorandum was in preparation, Schlieffen’s presumption was correct. The French Plan XIV, completed in 1898, predicated defence of the common frontier in the event of war with Germany. A French attack was thought impossible by reason of disparity of numbers. A static French population of forty million could not challenge an expanding German population already fifty million strong, and rising fast. Moreover, the French high command was intimidated by Germany’s proven ability to enlarge its army rapidly in time of crisis by incorporation of reservists. The French reserve system had failed in 1870. The French generals of 1898 did not trust that the system would work any better in the future. Plan XIV allotted no role to separate reserve formations, Plan XV of 1903 a subordinate one.

The problem of reserves was to afflict the French military mind throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. While the German generals wrestled with the difficulty of how numbers were to be transported at the greatest possible speed to the chosen field of action, the French agonised on how adequate numbers were to be found at all. The Conscription Law of 1905, imposing two years of military service on all young Frenchmen, without exemption, eased that difficulty by increasing the size of the ‘active’ or peacetime army; the Law actually made the French peacetime army larger than that which Germany intended to deploy into Belgium, which brought the problem of reserves back again. A peacetime army large enough to outnumber the German on the common frontier would still need to incorporate reserves rapidly if the front widened. In 1907 Plan XV bisallowed for a concentration of French troops against southern Belgium; two years later Plan XVI enlarged that concentration, even though the new arrangements depended on incorporating reservists whom the high command still doubted it knew how to employ carefully. By 1911 fears of a large German offensive through Belgium, reinforced by massive reserves, were becoming acute and a new French Chief of Staff, Victor Michel, proposed a radical departure from the strategies of Plans XIV–XVI: all available reserves were to be amalgamated with the active units, and the army was to be deployed on mobilisation along the whole French frontier from Switzerland to the North Sea.³⁴

Michel’s plan mirrored, though he could not know it, Schlieffen’s; it even proposed an offensive into northern Belgium which would have met Schlieffen’s ‘strong right wing’ head on; with what results cannot be guessed, though surely not worse than those produced by the totally different French war plan of 1914. Michel, unfortunately, was a military odd-man-out, a ‘Republican’ general whose politics were disliked by his fellows. He was soon ousted from office by a new right-wing government. Plan XVII, which came into force in April 1913, reversed his scheme. The amalgamation of reserve with active units was set aside. The deployment northwards to the sea was curtailed, leaving only the left-hand Fifth Army to deal with the danger of a German advance through northern Belgium from a position opposite southern Belgium. Most important, the operations on the common frontier were designed to be offensive. ‘Whatever the circumstances’, Plan XVII laid down, ‘the intention of the commander-in-chief is to advance with all forces united to the attack on the German armies’; that meant an attack into Lorraine, the ‘favour’ Schlieffen doubted France would grant.³⁵

There were several reasons for the adoption of Plan XVII, the brainchild of Michel’s successor, Joseph Joffre. One was an absence of any firm assurance by the intelligence services that the Germans would indeed risk anything as strategically problematic and diplomatically reprehensible as a drive through northern Belgium; given the intense secrecy which surrounded all contemporary war planning – but also the blinkered refusal of the French Second (Intelligence) Bureau to recognise the clues – such intelligence was not easily to be had.³⁶ Another was the anxiety induced by Germany’s response to the French Two-Year Law of 1905; in 1911–13 it passed conscription laws of its own which sharply increased the size of its peacetime army.³⁷ Those measures, and Germany’s known ability to deploy reserve formations at mobilisation, put a premium on using the strength of the French peacetime army as forcefully as possible, before the reserves of either side could come into play. That meant attacking, and attacking at a point which the Germans must defend and where they could be found quickly, which was across the common frontier. Moreover, France had responded to the German conscription laws of 1911–13 by another of her own, extending service to three years; this Three-Year Law of 1913, though it could not compensate for the growing preponderance of German armies over French, did increase the size of the French peacetime army, while automatically reducing that of the reserves, thus reinforcing the argument for immediate offensive action in war. A final reason for the adoption of Plan XVII was supplied by the developing relationship between France and her associates. Since 1905 the British and French general staffs had been in active conclave. By 1911 there was between them a firm understanding that in the event of Germany’s violation of the Anglo-French-Prussian treaty of 1839 guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality, a British Expeditionary Force would take its place on the French left, an understanding which palliated, if it did not solve, ‘the Belgian problem’. The two countries had hoped for more: that Belgium would allow one or other or both to advance troops on to its territory if Germany threatened. Both had been rebuffed by the Belgian General Staff – the rebuff to France was an additional reason for its adoption of Plan XVII – but France could draw comfort from the British commitment of support. Though the two countries were bound by no formal treaty, the French generals had learnt that ‘when [their] staffs agreed upon something, action followed’.³⁸

It was precisely because ‘such was not often the case when the French and Russian experts’ – whose governments were indeed allied – ‘settled upon a plan’ that the French generals believed the Plan XVII offensive to be a necessity if Russia were to lend the help France would need at the outset of a German war.³⁹ Russia’s strategic difficulties both resembled and differed from those of France. Like France, it would be slower than Germany to utilise its reserves in a crisis. Its initial operations would therefore also have to be mounted with the active army. Unlike France, which had simply failed to fix upon a satisfactory scheme for integrating its reserves with the peacetime army, its difficulties of reinforcement were more geographical than organisational. It was the vast distance between population centres within Russia and their remoteness from the border with Germany, which would delay deployment to the front. Yet those distances were also an advantage to Russia, since the dimension of space is also one of time amid the urgencies of war. Russia would not be pressed, in the crisis of mobilisation. It would accept an initial loss of territory while it rallied its army, something France could not afford. Of that France was acutely aware. Plan XVII was therefore justified in one sense because the great battle it was designed to provoke would buy time in the east; it was motivated, in another sense, by the need the French felt to convince the Russians at the outset that the struggle was one of life and death. The bigger and quicker the crisis, the greater the danger to France, the sooner the subsequent threat to Russia and therefore the more imperative the need for it to march rapidly to the help of France also.

Yet Russia had a reputation for dilatoriness. It rightly exasperated the French generals. Bad enough that their Russian equivalents were secretive and often unbusinesslike, in contrast to the British, who inspired confidence even though they were not formal allies; worse was Russia’s evasion of fixed commitments. ‘Before 1911 the Russians had, despite continual French pressure, refused to promise more than unspecified offensive action by the twentieth day of mobilisation. In late 1910 even this minimum expectation was shaken when St Petersburg withdrew several units from Russian Poland and the Tsar met with the Kaiser at Potsdam.’ It took new staff talks, convoked by a thoroughly alarmed Joffre in August 1910, to win from General Sukhomlinov, the Russian War Minister, an assurance that the Russian army would ‘undertake some offensive action on the sixteenth day in the hope of tying down at least five or six German corps otherwise employable on the western front’. The assurance was still only verbal. The French had no written guarantee that the Russians would do what they said, indeed no clear impression even of what action the Russians contemplated.⁴⁰

The Russians were not wholly to be blamed. The first decade of the century was for them a time of troubles, revolution at home, defeat in war with the Japanese in the Far East. The war left the state in poverty, defeat the army in disarray. The years 1906–9 were those in which the Schlieffen Plan would have worked, for the Russians hoped at best, in the event of conflict, to stand on the strategic defensive, a posture that would have given France no help at all. By 1909 they had recovered enough to write a Mobilisation Schedule, Number 18, which at least included provision for an offensive, though only after a pause to cover the concentration of reserves and to identify whether the main threat was poised by Germany or Austria. In June 1910 the Russian staff had become more positive. Mobilisation Schedule 19 accepted that Germany would be the chief enemy; still, the plan would also have abandoned most of Russian Poland to the enemy. That prospect outraged the commanders of the western districts, whose role had long been that of engaging the Austrians. Further debate within the general staff ensued, over the relative weights of what was operationally possible, what was owed to Russia’s traditional commitments in south-eastern Europe and what was due to the French alliance. The outcome was a compromise, known as Variants A and G to Schedule 19, A for a main effort against Austria, G against Germany.⁴¹

Variant A, had the French known of it, would have confirmed their worst fears. Fortunately for them, in the same month, August 1912, that the Russian General Staff completed the drafting of the two variants to Schedule 19, they were able to extract from General Zhilinsky, the Russian Chief of Staff, a promise that his army would attack Germany with at least 800,000 men – half its peacetime strength – ‘after M + 15’, fifteen days from mobilisation.⁴² The promise was made specific – ‘on’ rather than ‘after’ M + 15 – in Article III of the Russo-French Military Convention of September 1913. This sudden show by the Russians of wholehearted commitment to their ally has been explained in a variety of ways. One is that by 1913 the Russian army had largely recovered from the chaos into which it had been thrown by defeat at the hands of the Japanese; a new scheme of spending, Sukhomlinov’s ‘Great Programme’, promised positive improvement and actual expansion within four years. A second reason, it has been suggested, was misleading intelligence. In 1913 Russia had an ‘agent in place’, the Austrian Colonel Alfred Redl, who had sold them the plans for his army’s mobilisation, plans which appeared to minimise the dangers foreseen in Variant A. ‘A third explanation for Russian conduct was the weight of the [French] alliance . . . If France readily fell to the Germans, the Russians had little confidence they could hold against the combined hordes of Germany and Austria-Hungary . . . Russia and France either rose or fell together and . . . Russia should strain to the utmost in meeting its obligations, even to the point of conducting offensive operations at M + 15.’ Finally, there is the suggestion that the Russian generals abruptly closed their minds to the dangers into which an offensive, rather than a self-interested but safe defensive war would lead them. In that, however, they differed from the French and the Germans only in the lateness of their decision to gamble.⁴³

If Russia alarmed France by prevarication and procrastination in the years 1906–14, so did Austria her German ally. The two countries, enemies in the war of 1866 which had given Germany the leadership of central Europe, had made up their differences by 1882. The alliance then signed, however, contained no military provisions. Bismarck, Germany’s Chancellor, sagely shrank from the danger of involvement in Austria’s manifold internal and external difficulties, among which the antagonism with Ottoman Turkey was age-old, the quarrel with Italy over lost Venice but recently papered over, the designs of Serbia and Romania on Habsburg lands inhabited by their minorities strong and growing. There were informal explorations of respective strategies between the two general staffs, nonetheless; Austria learnt that, in the event of a two-front war, Germany intended to defend against France, attack Russia; Germany learnt with satisfaction that Austria would attack Russian Poland. There things rested. The Austrian staff found Schlieffen, when he came into office, ‘taciturn’ and ‘hardly forthcoming’.⁴⁴ It was not until after his retirement that productive negotiations commenced, in January 1909.

Moltke the Younger, German Chief of Staff, knew what he wanted. The Schlieffen Plan lay in its pigeonhole. It required of the Austrians the largest and speediest deployment possible against Russian Poland. The initiative for the talks, however, had come from his Austrian opposite number, Conrad von Hötzendorf, then alarmed at a threat of war not with Russia only, but her protégé, Serbia, also. There were other fears. Italy was not a reliable ally, nor was Romania. He saw a web of combinations and eventualities, none favourable to Austria. The worst eventuality was that Serbia might provoke a war with Austria-Hungary, in which Russia would intervene after the Habsburg army had deployed the weight of its forces in what would then be the wrong direction, south to the Danube instead of north to Poland. The solution he suggested was the division of his army into three at mobilisation: a Minimalgruppe Balkan of ten divisions, to deploy against Serbia, a Staffel-A of thirty divisions for the Polish theatre and a Staffel-B of twelve divisions, to act as a ‘swing’ force reinforcing either, as need be.

The scheme offered little to Moltke and on 21 January he wrote to better Conrad’s terms. Dismissing Austrian fears of Italian or Romanian falseness, he assured Conrad that the war in the west would be over before Russia could fully mobilise and that Germany would by then have sent strong forces to the east; but he gave no timetable, an omission to cause Conrad anxiety, since he had a two-front war of his own to plan. On 26 January he warned Moltke that Germany could not count on the transfer of Minimalgruppe Balkan to Poland before fifty days from mobilisation. Could Germany guarantee to send support within forty days? If not, he had better stand on the defensive in Poland and destroy Serbia in an all-out offensive. The destruction of Serbia was Conrad’s real desire; like many German-Austrians, he detested the small Slav kingdom, not merely because it failed to show due deference to Austria’s unofficial imperium over the Balkans but also because it was a magnet of attraction to dissident Serbs within the Habsburg empire. A victory over Serbia looked to be the surest solution of Austria’s general difficulties with its other Slav minorities.

Moltke replied with a mixture of assurances and dismissals. The French could not delay German reinforcements more than four weeks – the Schlieffen Plan, to the details of which Austria was not privy, reckoned six weeks – so that it was perfectly safe, as well as essential, for Austria to attack Russia in Poland; and, even if Austria found itself committed to a Serbian war, it would not be let down by Germany; as to Serbia, the problem ‘will solve itself for Austria as a matter of course’. Conrad noted: ‘Certainly: but what am I to do if already tied down in Serbia?’⁴⁵ Since the Austrians outnumbered the Serbs by sixty divisions to ten, twice the proportion conventionally reckoned necessary for victory, Conrad might be reckoned timorous. His army could not be beaten by the Serbs, even if he committed only Minimalgruppe Balkan against them. Moltke, above all concerned to arrange that Russia should also have to fight on two fronts – a Polish western front where the Germans would be temporarily weak, a Polish southern front where he hoped the Austrians would be strong – stifled any irritation Conrad’s prevarication provoked and he promised almost by return of post to join with Austria in an offensive: ‘I will not hesitate to make the attack to support the simultaneous Austrian offensive.’⁴⁶ That was a promise he should not have given and could not certainly make good. The Schlieffen Plan, indeed, stipulated that the fraction of the German army left in East Prussia while the great western battle was fought should stand on the defensive. He apparently gave the promise in good faith, nonetheless, and the letter of 19 March 1909 in which it was offered remained the understanding between the two allies in the years that followed. Conrad, whose bellicosity brought about his removal from office in November 1910, found that it still lay on file on his reappointment a year later. When he and Moltke had their final pre-war meeting at the holiday resort of Carlsbad in May 1914, the German Chief of Staff responded to the Austrian’s request for the commitment of additional troops in the east, with the vague assurance, ‘I will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.’⁴⁷ Schlieffen’s pigeonholed plan, drawing the trace of a ‘strong right wing’ on the map of northern France, had insisted otherwise; but he had counted on a firmer Austrian will and feebler Russian power.

What he had not counted upon was the intervention of the British. Schlieffen’s Great Memorandum alludes to the possibility; an appendix of February 1906 discusses its import, but with the presumption that they would do no more than land at Antwerp, or perhaps on Germany’s North Sea coast. There was no apprehension that they would place themselves in the French line of battle at a point to impede the German advance through Belgium. Since military conversations between France and Britain, an outcome of the agreement of entente cordiale in April 1904, did not begin until December 1905, the month in which the Great Memorandum was finished, he had no indication that they might. Moreover, the British, even while they opened their discussions with the French, themselves remained in two minds over what they should do with their army if it were committed to the continent. There was indeed the possibility of an amphibious operation, one the Royal Navy favoured as a means of forcing out the German High Seas Fleet to give battle.⁴⁸ That, on the other hand, was a ‘strategy of diversion’. The universal military mood called for a ‘strategy of concentration’ at the decisive point. The decisive point, in a war in which Germany was the attacker, would lie in France and it was there, in progressive stages, that the British General Staff agreed with the French an expeditionary force should be committed. In April 1906 the Committee of Imperial Defence drew up plans to send troops directly to the Low Countries. There was then a lapse of five years, brought about by Belgian unwillingness to admit a British army and by French inability to design a convincing war plan. All changed in 1911, with the appointment of Joffre as French Chief of Staff, Henry Wilson as British Director of Military Operations. Joffre was formidable, Wilson dynamic. When they met for the first time in Paris in November, Joffre unveiled the outlines of Plan XVII.⁴⁹ Wilson, in August, had already outlined to the Committee of Imperial Defence how best a British Expeditionary Force might be employed, small though it would be, for spending on the navy and the country’s continued resistance to conscription allowed it to keep an army of only six divisions at home. Those six divisions, by operating against the German right wing, might tip the balance by forcing the Germans to divert strength to deal with it. ‘The larger the force detached by the Germans from the decisive point’, Wilson argued, ‘the better it would be for France and ourselves.’ He proceeded to the detailed planning of how most quickly and efficiently the expeditionary force could be transported across the Channel, with the active co-operation of the navy, which supported a speedy operation that would then leave it free to concentrate on tempting the German fleet to decisive action. The British were nevertheless cautious. Ardently Francophile though he was, Wilson succeeded in denying to the French any specific indication as to where the expeditionary force would take the field, right up to August 1914, while it was only in November 1912 that the French extracted from the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, something like a commitment to common action.⁵⁰ ‘If either government’, the letter read, ‘had grave reason to expect an unprovoked attack by a third Power, or something that threatened the general peace, it should immediately discuss with the other, whether both Governments should act to prevent aggression and to preserve peace, and if so what measures they should take in common. If these measures involved common action, the plans of the General Staffs would at once be taken into consideration, and the Governments should then decide what effect should be given to them.’ The principle of splendid isolation, for all the dangers offered by diminishing economic power and growing German naval strength, could still cause Britain to hesitate at binding herself to an ally.

Britain, of course, enjoyed a luxury of choice the continental powers did not, the choice between ‘taking as much or as little of a war’ as it wanted; Bacon’s summary of the advantages of sea power remained as true in the twentieth as it had been in the sixteenth century. France and Germany, Russia and Austria, did not benefit from the protection of salt-water frontiers. Separated from each other at best by river or mountain, at worst by nothing more substantial than a line on the map, their security resided in their armies. That threw them into a harsh and mutual predicament. It resembled that which would bind the nuclear superpowers sixty years later. ‘Use them or lose them’ became the imperative of missile strategy; for missiles not used in a crisis might become the debris of an opponent’s first strike: an army which did not strike as soon as time permitted might be destroyed in mid-mobilisation; even if it completed its mobilisation but then failed to attack, it would have shown its hand and lost the advantage the war plan had been so painstakingly devised to deliver. That danger most acutely threatened Germany: if it failed to move to the offensive as soon as the troop trains disgorged their passengers at the unloading points, the unequal division of force between west and east would be pointlessly revealed and so, worse, would be the concentration against Belgium. The Schlieffen Plan would have been betrayed, France given the time to recoil from the peril of Plan XVII, Russia the incentive to invade East Prussia in overwhelming force, andAustria the unsought and probably undischargeable burden of guaranteeing the security of Central Europe.

The existence of a permanent medium of negotiation between the European powers might have robbed the war plans that lay in their pigeonholes of their menacing instantaneity; sixty years later the suicidal risks of nuclear war planning prompted the superpowers, divided though they were by ideological differences that had no counterpart in the Europe of kings and emperors, to find such a medium, through the convocation of regular summit conferences and the installation of a ‘hot line’ between Moscow and Washington. Before 1914 technology could not offer the opportunity of frequent and immediate communication but more important than that lack was the absence of a mood to seek an expedient. The mood was absent not only from diplomacy, which clung to the stately rhythms of past times, but also within governments. Britain’s Committee of Imperial Defence, bringing together service chiefs, diplomats and statesmen, was unique but also imperfect; the Royal Navy, insistent on its seniority, kept its own counsel. The French army behaved likewise in the much more makeshift Superior War Council. In Germany, Russia and Austria, countries of court government, where the sovereign was commander-in-chief both in name and fact, and each organ of the military system answered directly to him, communication between them was beset by secretiveness and jealousy. The system, disastrously, took its most extreme form in Germany, where

there was no governmental process that corrected . . . the concentration of the assessment [of plans and policy] in a single person, the Kaiser. Almost fifty people had direct access to him but there were no routines to discuss or co-ordinate among or between them or to share the important and discrete information each possessed. No established or regular councils existed for that purpose. Even information about the war plan was top secret and restricted to those who had a need to know; it was not shared between the Great General Staff, the War Ministry, the Military Cabinet, the Admiralty, the Naval General Staff and the Foreign Office.⁵¹

It was as if, sixty years later, the United States Strategic Air Command had enjoyed the freedom to write plans for nuclear war against Russia without reference to the State Department, Navy or Army and to leave the President to circulate within government such details of it as he saw fit. An elected president, chosen by competition between veteran politicians, might nevertheless have brought order to the system; a hereditary monarch, who took increasingly less interest in military detail after 1904, was unlikely to do so.⁵²The Kaiser in practice did not; in the crisis of 1914, when he alone might have put brakes to the inexorable progression of the Schlieffen Plan, he found he did not understand the machinery he was supposed to control, panicked and let a piece of paper determine events.