The Yanks Are Coming! (4 page)

While Europe's diplomats and statesmen talked peace, more than a few wanted war. All the major belligerents in the First World War, with the exception of the British Empire and the United States, entered the war thinking they had something to gain.
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All had made fatal miscalculations. Austria, in its desire to punish the Serbs, had misjudged the possibility of a greater war. The Russians, with their eyes on seizing Constantinople, failed to recognize how vulnerable
their society was to the shock of a European conflagration.
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French revanchists misjudged the price of glory.

The Russians turned what should have been a limited punitive war into
la guerre européene
. The Germans had an equally belligerent faction who thought war was inevitable—and better to defeat Germany's enemies now than wait until they were stronger. Had the Germans focused entirely on the war in the East, not only would they have been victorious, but a credible case could have been made that theirs was a just war, a war of defense against Slavic aggression, sparked by the Slavic terrorists in Sarajevo. But the German general staff, for all its superlative professionalism, proved singularly inept at larger strategic questions that went beyond military necessity.

Germany military planning was for a two-front war. The Schlieffen Plan, drawn up by Field Marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen in 1905—and implemented in 1914 by General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger,
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chief of the German general staff—was to knock out France in six weeks with one enormous blow and then turn Germany's full strength against the lumbering Russians. Schlieffen polished his plan until the end of his life in 1913. From a purely military point of view, it was a plan of genius, and had it been implemented as designed it might very well have achieved its aims. But the Achilles' heel of the plan was its amorality. It utterly disregarded the rights of neutral Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—rights that Germany was pledged to uphold. While to the German general staff these rights were insignificant, they became the direct cause of British intervention in the war.
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While in the Franco-Prussian War Bismarck had cleverly led the French to fire the first shot, at the outset of World War I the French pulled back from their borders to avoid any chance of instigating the conflict. The German general staff—wedded so completely to the
Schlieffen Plan and the need to act quickly—did not fully consider that the Gallic rooster, however devoted to
l'offensive à outrance
, might not let its
élan vital
overrule its sense of self-preservation. If Germany was culpable for the war—a burden placed on the Germans by the postwar Treaty of Versailles in Article 231, written by two Americans, Norman Davis and John Foster Dulles
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—it was not because of the war against Russia, but because Germany enlarged that war by attacking Russia's ally France. Germany did France the favor—though it hardly seemed that after its deadly toll—of launching a war France wanted but was loath to start.

On 1 August, the Germans declared war on Russia; two days later they declared war on France; and on 4 August, they invaded Belgium, which had rejected Germany's ultimatum for free passage of its troops. Britain then declared war on Germany. German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg rebuked Britain's ambassador to Berlin: “Just for a scrap of paper, Britain is going to make war on a kindred nation.”
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That amoral disregard for scraps of paper was one reason Europe's Armageddon had begun.

When Sir Edward Grey, Britain's foreign secretary, received word that Germany had declared war on France, he was watching the street lamps being lit below his office window. He remarked to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
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In the United States, the lamps would continue to burn brightly, and they would be lit again in Europe, but only after the New World came to redress the balance in the Old.

CHAPTER TWO

TWO AND A HALF YEARS HARD

B
elgium was more than overrun, it was terrorized. While propagandists exaggerated German atrocities in Belgium, the reality was striking enough. The Germans razed Belgian villages and executed villagers—men, women, and children, eventually numbering into the thousands—
en masse
. Priests, as authority figures and potential symbols of resistance, were particular targets. If that outraged some, even more were outraged by the burning and looting of the famous university town of Louvain. Over the course of five days, beginning on 25 August 1914, the Germans pillaged the city. Its celebrated library, with its collection of medieval manuscripts, was put to the torch; its townspeople were driven out as refugees. Hugh
Gibson, an American diplomat arriving at Louvain three days into its sacking, was told by a German officer, “We shall wipe it out, not one stone will stand upon another! Not one, I tell you. We will teach them to respect Germany. For generations people will come here to see what we have done!”
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The officer was unconsciously echoing earlier words of the Kaiser, who at Bremerhaven on 27 July 1900 had told German troops embarking for China to put down the Boxer Rebellion, “When you come upon the enemy, smite him. Pardon will not be given. Prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands is forfeit. Once, a thousand years ago, the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one still potent in legend and tradition. May you in this way make the name German remembered in China for a thousand years so that no Chinaman will ever again dare to
even squint at a German!
”
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Kaiser Wilhelm II, with his unerring ability to be his own worst enemy, had thus established the image of the savage German Hun—which the German army appeared to fulfill. The Allies came up with the word
schrecklichkeit
(frightfulness) to describe the Germans' use of terrorism to cow civilians.

“NECESSITY KNOWS NO LAW”

The Germans, however, believed they were fighting a war for civilization—for German
Kultur
against Latin decadence and Slavic barbarism.
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But that
Kultur
put necessity and progress beyond traditional categories of good and evil. Necessity mandated the violation of Belgian neutrality. “Necessity,” said Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, who was less of a militarist than his colleagues, “knows no law.”
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Necessity mandated lining up and executing civilians to intimidate others from resisting.

The highly educated German general staff had readily adopted social Darwinist ideas and applied them to the conduct of war—for example, in General Friedrich von Bernhardi's book
Germany and the Next War
(published in 1911).
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He called war “a biological necessity” in the struggle for existence, adding that war “is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations, but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality.” Indeed, “Struggle is . . . a universal law of nature” and “Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.”
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Bernhardi's was hardly a lone voice; he quoted many other celebrated German thinkers who agreed with him; and while Germany was, obviously, not the sole repository for these ideas—they could be found in varying degrees throughout the educated classes of the Western world—nowhere had they gained such a concentrated hold in military policy as in the German general staff.
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Beyond this, the German army had prosaic reasons for treating Belgian civilians with suspicion, if not hostility. The army had drilled into it a fear of
francs-tireurs
, irregular sharpshooters not in military uniform who had harassed German troops in the Franco-Prussian War. Such
francs-tireurs
were to be given no quarter this time round. German officers were also pressured by the relentless timetable of the Schlieffen Plan to blitzkrieg to victory in France. Impediments had to be cleared away, and that included recalcitrant or untrustworthy civilians. In the words of General Helmuth von Moltke, “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal, but we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.”
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The Germans were frustrated by unexpectedly stiff Belgian resistance—and that frustration led to civilians being sent to the wall.

It was not just the Germans. Moltke's remarks justifying the army's brutal advance through Belgium were addressed to General Conrad von Hötzendorff, chief of the Austrian general staff, whose own army was behaving in similar fashion in Serbia. In Austria's view Serbia had endorsed terrorism, so it was taken for granted that reprisals against civilians were justified. It was now, for the Austrians as much as for the Germans, a war of national survival. The idea of a limited war was utterly kaput.

Unfortunately for the Germans, so was the Schlieffen Plan, which had been fatally compromised by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. Schlieffen had warned, up to his deathbed, that everything must be done to strengthen Germany's right hook slicing through Belgium and into France. He wanted the German attack to swing all the way to the coast: “When you march into France, let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve.” He insisted (in 1913, allegedly, these were his dying words): “It must come to a fight. Only make the right wing strong.”
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Moltke was as certain as Schlieffen that it must come to a fight—and the sooner the better—but unlike Schlieffen, he preferred not to risk everything on the knockout punch into France. He diverted troops to block the French from Alsace-Lorraine and, with war under way, sent two corps on an unnecessary mission to defend East Prussia from the Russians. Moltke feared a French invasion of German territory, and guarded against it, while Schlieffen had welcomed the possibility because it would trap the French army in a crushing German envelopment. Schlieffen's audacity might have succeeded; Moltke's caution certainly did not.

The first problem was the Belgians. They refused to capitulate, blunting the initial German assault, inflicting heavy casualties, and withdrawing only when the German army's determination to stay on schedule at any price was backed by heavy guns. Despite gallant
Belgian resistance, the German juggernaut bombarded its way through the country: the Germans took Brussels on 20 August and sped to France.

The French, meanwhile, in traditional finery—blue coats, red trousers, officers in white gloves, all of which gave courage to their hearts if not concealment from the enemy—stormed into Lorraine and the forest of the Ardennes to be met by Germans in field grey manning entrenched machine guns and artillery. The results were what might be expected: a grand sacrifice
pour la patrie
. In the single month of August, 10 percent of the French officer corps fell as casualties.
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As the Germans made their great wide sweep through Belgium and into France, they stubbed their toe on the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the far left of the French line at the Belgian city of Mons. At the war's commencement, Kaiser Wilhelm had ordered the BEF destroyed, dismissing it as a “contemptibly small army.”
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Small it was, at least in the context of the Great War. About eighty thousand men of the BEF were at the Battle of Mons on 23 August. Contemptible it was not, as the British regulars stopped the German advance before being ordered to withdraw against an enemy that had twice their number of men and guns. The Battle of Mons was the sort of thing the British specialize in—heroic withdrawals, which if they do not win wars at least exemplify the bulldog spirit. The Battle of Mons inspired a legend about the Angels of Mons, where St. George and the Bowmen of Agincourt were said to have descended from the heavens to help the British.
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In the East, Austria had to divert troops from its Serbian offensive to fend off the Russians, and a worried Moltke reinforced East Prussia. Before those reinforcements arrived, the German Eighth Army, under Generals Paul von Hindenburg (called out of retirement to
meet the crisis) and Erich von Ludendorff, had knocked the wheels off the Russian steamroller, destroying its Second Army at the Battle of Tannenberg (26–30 August). Russian losses (170,000 casualties, more than 90,000 of them surrendering) were greater in size than the entire German Eighth Army, which suffered 12,000 casualties. The stolid, determined Hindenburg, the embodiment of the tough, dutiful virtues of the Prussian aristocracy, became a hero, as did the emotionally tempestuous and not quite as well-born Ludendorff. Ludendorff, brilliant and aggressive, had already made his name and been awarded the Blue Max for his conduct in Belgium, where he had taken a sword and pounded on the gates of the citadel at Liège, and accepted the surrender of hundreds of Belgian soldiers.

Though impeded in the West and outnumbered in the East, the Germans were crushing their enemies, proving themselves the best soldiers in Europe. The Austrians, however, were taking a pounding. The Austrian Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorff was as aggressive as Ludendorff but with an army incapable of carrying out his ambitious plans. By the end of 1914, the Habsburg Empire had suffered an astonishing number of casualties—more than six hundred thousand men—and was in constant need of German support. Many German officers felt that being allied to the Habsburg Empire was, in the famous phrase, like being “shackled to a corpse.”
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