The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (55 page)

What is striking about the decision-making in 1914 is how it was accepted that even the briefest of delays meant danger. Conrad argued in Austria-Hungary that every day mattered in getting the Austrian troops assembled in Galicia facing the frontier with Russia; any delay might leave them half-ready in the face of a massive Russian attack. General Joseph Joffre and Moltke, the chiefs of staff in France and Germany respectively, warned their governments that even a day, perhaps even a few hours, would exact a terrible cost in blood spilt and territory lost to the enemy. And the civilians, overwhelmed by their responsibility and trusting the professionals, did not question them, asking for example whether it might not be better to prepare defensive positions and wait for the enemy to attack.
¹⁵
So once a neighbouring power started mobilising or even showing signs of preparations it was hard for its neighbours to resist mobilising as well. Not to do anything could be suicide but mobilising too late was seen as not much better. In 1914 those were the arguments that the military made to their civilian leaders to urge them to give the orders. Similar arguments were made, and with a much shorter time scale of minutes rather than days, to President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis: that if he waited to launch his missiles at the Soviet Union it would be too late because Soviet ones might already be in the air. He chose to ignore the military advice; in 1914 not all civilian leaders would show such independence.

It is also easy to see in retrospect that the military planners worked in too much of a vacuum. While it varied from power to power, the general staff planners saw themselves as technicians, working out the best ways to defend the nation, and leaving diplomatic and political considerations to the civilians. The difficulty, and it is always present in the relations between the civil and the military leadership, is that matters and issues cannot always be divided neatly into military and non-military. The German general staff decided that it needed to move into Belgium for sound strategic reasons if it were to attack France successfully, yet that invasion in 1914 was going to cause severe damage to
Germany’s reputation among neutral powers, tellingly so in the United States, and bring Britain into a war it might otherwise not have entered. Too often, the civilians did not know, or did not care to inform themselves, about what the military were planning; the extent of the discussions over a number of years between the British and the French general staffs came as a surprise to most in the British Cabinet in 1914. It also worked the other way round. The French military stationed two divisions, which it could well have used elsewhere, along the common border between France and Italy only to find out, seven years after the fact, that the French and Italian governments had signed a secret agreement to remove tensions there.
¹⁶

Even different branches of the military in a single country did not always share information or co-ordinate their efforts. Under Jacky Fisher, the British navy refused to give the army its war plans for fear of leaks. In 1911 at a long and stormy meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Fisher’s successor, Sir Arthur Wilson, made it clear that the navy had no plans and little interest in transporting British troops to the Continent even though the army had been considering the possibility for some time. Although German military circles feared amphibious attacks on Germany’s Baltic coast, the German army and navy made just one attempt, in 1904, to carry out joint manoeuvres there.
¹⁷
It was apparently only in 1912, two years before the Great War, that the German Chancellor was informed of what was in the German war plan.
¹⁸
In 1914, so Admiral Tirpitz claimed in his memoirs, he and the navy still had no idea what the German army was planning.
¹⁹

The new stress in Europe’s military on technical expertise did not always sit easily with the values of the classes from which so many officers came. When an officer from one of the particularly fashionable British cavalry regiments thought of applying to the Staff College which the British army had, with some reluctance, set up, a fellow officer was firm: ‘Well, I will give one piece of advice, and that is to say nothing about it to your brother officers, or you will get yourself jolly well disliked.’
²⁰
In the army of Austria-Hungary, cavalry officers called those in the artillery the ‘powder Jews’ and even among artillery officers themselves riding was considered to be more important than technical expertise.
²¹
While the increasing size of the continental armies obliged them to draw more officers from the urban middle classes, this shift did
not lead to a greater enthusiasm and respect for technical or academic prowess; indeed the middle-class officers seem to have absorbed aristocratic values, in taking up duelling for example, not the other way round.

While this had disadvantages and served to deepen the gulf between armies and their own societies, it also reinforced cohesiveness in the officer corps and certain character traits that were valued among the aristocracy – a sense of duty, physical bravery, facing death without flinching – which were what the military required as well. The sort of war which they mostly envisaged, though, was one that was increasingly anachronistic as the nineteenth century wore on. The European military looked back to the great soldiers of the past for inspiration: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and, closer in time, such figures as Frederick the Great or Napoleon. And the modern-day soldiers longed to emulate the great attacks of the past with their infantry assaults, their hand-to-hand fighting and their cavalry charges.
²²
Military histories, even of more recent wars, reinforced the romantic, heroic view of war and held up for admiration individual acts of prowess. European commentators on the Russo-Japanese War were full of admiration for the Japanese soldiers who fought and died like true warriors – and worried that Europeans were no longer capable of behaving in the same way.
²³
But the war that Europeans were being asked to face by 1900
was
different in significant ways from those of the past. The industrial revolution had produced weapons that were more powerful, more reliable and more accurate and their much greater range meant that soldiers often did not see the enemies they were killing. It was much easier to defend positions than to attack: as yet the technologies to overcome a strong defence, such as aircraft and armoured vehicles, did not exist. As a French general reportedly said after the long-drawn-out Battle of Verdun in the Great War, ‘Three men and a machine gun can stop a battalion of heroes.’

With advances in metallurgy, guns, from the standard weapons of soldiers to artillery, were stronger and more durable; with new explosives, including those invented by Alfred Nobel, they fired much further; and with rifling they were much more accurate. Soldiers in Napoleon’s time had muskets which, with good training, they could reload – standing up – and fire three times a minute, and which were only accurate up to forty-five metres. (That is why it had been both necessary and
possible for soldiers to hold their fire until they could see the whites of the enemy’s eyes.) By 1870 the soldiers had rifles which were accurate up to almost half a kilometre; what is more they could load and fire six times a minute, and from the breech as they lay down, which meant that they were not exposed to enemy fire. By 1900 rifles were accurate – and lethal – over a greater distance, sometimes even up to a kilometre, and the new machine guns could fire hundreds of rounds a minute. The numbers had climbed and were continuing to climb all round: field artillery, which had an average range of just over half a kilometre in 1800, had almost seven kilometres in 1900; heavier guns, often mounted on railway undercarriages, had a range of ten kilometres. So attackers had to survive several kilometres of shell fire then several hundred metres of intense rifle and machine-gun fire on their way towards the enemy.
²⁴

Bloch warned about this last, the zone of fire, and the growing advantage of the defence, and about the likelihood of stalemates on the battlefield that would last for months or years. Yet Europe’s military planners dismissed his work. After all, as a Jew by birth, a banker, and a pacifist he was everything they tended to dislike. When he gave three lectures at the United Services Institute in the summer of 1900, the audience of largely military men listened politely but showed no signs of being persuaded by what he said. ‘So-called non-jingoism, or non-militarism’, was the view of one major-general; ‘namby-pamby so-called humanitarianism’.
²⁵
In Germany one of the leading military historians of the day, Hans Delbrück, said: ‘From a scientific standpoint the work does not have much to recommend it. It is a rather uncritical and poorly arranged collection of material; and although it is embellished with illustrations, the treatment is amateurish with vast amounts of detail that have nothing to do with the actual problem.’
²⁶
As Bloch himself complained, the military were like a priestly caste who did not like outsiders meddling: ‘Military science has from time immemorial been a book with seven seals, which none but the duly initiated were deemed worthy to open.’
²⁷

Nevertheless the European military did have a sense of what the problem was and had devoted attention to it. How could they not? They tried out the new weapons themselves and studied the evidence from recent wars. European military observers had gone to the American
Civil War of 1861–5 or to that between Turkey and Russia in 1877 and seen for themselves how a combination of well-prepared defensive positions including trenches in combination with rapid firing had devastated the attackers and caused much larger losses among them than the defenders. At the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, to take only one of many examples, the Union threw waves of soldiers against well-defended Confederate positions. All the attacks failed and the Union lost over twice as many soldiers as the Confederacy. It is said that the Union wounded scattered across the battlefield begged their comrades not to continue their fruitless attacks. Closer to hand the European military had the evidence of the Franco-Prussian War, where, for example, 48,000 Germans had held a line of some thirty-five kilometres against 131,000 French.
²⁸
The Boer and Russo-Japanese wars more recently still had added fresh evidence: Boer farmers well hidden in the ground had inflicted devastating losses on British frontal attacks and the same pattern had been true in the Far East.

While pacifists hoped that progress was making war obsolete and used wars such as the Russo-Japanese and the Boer as evidence of its folly, the military and indeed many of the civilian leaders in Europe could not envisage a world without war, a bias reinforced by Social Darwinist ideas that societies had natural, hereditary enemies and that conflict among them was inevitable. The French military in the years before the Great War developed, for example, a theory of an ‘eternal’ Germany which was a deadly and determined enemy to France. In dispatch after dispatch French military attachés in Berlin warned their superiors that Germany was a dark and malignant force which would stop at nothing to destroy France.
²⁹
The German military had a corresponding view of a France motivated by centuries of hostility and envy as well, of course, as by a desire for revenge after its recent defeat. Europe’s leaders also saw war in less apocalyptic ways, as a necessary tool of statecraft. Recent history, the unifications of Italy and Germany in particular, seemed to show that war produced results at relatively low cost. Before 1914 too there were those in positions of power in Europe who saw merit in preventive war, to cut an enemy down to size before it was too late. In each of the major crises between 1905 and 1914 preventive war was considered seriously as an option by men in positions of power and in more than one country. It was not only the publics in
Europe who were being prepared psychologically for the Great War; it was their leaders as well.

Europe’s military planners did their best to explain away the problems of the offence and the growing cost in terms of life. Recent wars had not, for example, been fought properly as the most advanced, European armies would fight them. ‘Those savage encounters do not deserve the name of war,’ a European general said of the American Civil War to Bloch, ‘and I have dissuaded my officers from reading the published accounts of them.’
³⁰
The British military argued that their losses in South Africa were an aberration due to the terrain and space of South Africa so there were no useful lessons for Europe. And the Japanese had after all won in their war with Russia, in the generally accepted view, precisely because they were prepared to attack and take much bigger casualties than the Russians. So the lessons were not that the attack no longer worked but that it had to be pressed harder, with more men.
³¹
Military history, which was treated with reverence in the European military as the source of wisdom about war, was called in to support the arguments.
³²
The battles with clear outcomes, Leipzig in 1813 or Sedan in 1870 for example, tended, however, to get more attention than inconclusive or defensive ones. Cannae in the Punic Wars, when Hannibal defeated a much larger Roman force by bringing his wings to encircle the Romans, was a particular favourite of military colleges and it inspired General Alfred von Schlieffen of the German general staff when he drew up his plans to defeat France with a giant pincer movement around its armies.
³³