Also by Allan Mallinson

LIGHT DRAGOONS: THE MAKING OF A REGIMENT

THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH ARMY

1914: FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT – BRITAIN, THE ARMY AND THE COMING OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The Matthew Hervey series

A CLOSE RUN THING

THE NIZAM’S DAUGHTERS

A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR

A CALL TO ARMS

THE SABRE’S EDGE

RUMOURS OF WAR

AN ACT OF COURAGE

COMPANY OF SPEARS

MAN OF WAR

WARRIOR

ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE

WORDS OF COMMAND

Too Important for the Generals

How Britain nearly lost the First World War

Allan Mallinson

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Allan Mallinson 2016
Cover photograph: © Chronicle/ Alamy Stock Photo
Cover design: Stephen Mulcahey/TW

Allan Mallinson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409011002

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9780593058190 (tpb)

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Preface

In July 2013, following the lead set by the government, the British army issued instructions laying out its approach to the First World War centenary commemorations – ‘Operation Reflect’. Its aim was (and remains, until 11 November 2018) to ‘mark the centenary of the First World War in an appropriate manner in order to commemorate the sacrifice of our forebears, learn enduring lessons, and educate ourselves and others’.

This was something of a departure for the army. Hitherto it had steered clear of the First World War, perhaps because four years of stalemate seemed irrelevant to modern conflict. On the face of it, the campaigns of Marlborough and Wellington and the battles of the Second World War looked more likely to yield lessons in strategy and ‘the operational art’, while counter-insurgency campaigns such as those in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus were the obvious places to seek inspiration in the ‘war on terror’.

The army launched Operation Reflect with a conference in London in July 2014, followed in September by a week’s ‘staff ride’fn1 in France and Belgium in which 150 hand-picked British and French captains and majors, led by the general officer commanding the 3rd (UK) Division and attended by the chief of the general staff, his French opposite number and several German officers, studied the course of the war on the Western Front on the ground over which it had been fought. It was all very high-powered, with just about every ‘name’ in the book of British military historians taking part in one event or the other.

The captains and majors, fresh from Afghanistan, and in many cases with previous service in Iraq, were soon in awe of the sheer size of the problem that the British army had faced in the Great War, expanding as it had from a relatively small expeditionary force in August 1914 to some two million by 1918, 90 per cent of whom had never been in uniform before.

The London conference, the staff ride and the ‘exploitation’ conference at Sandhurst which followed two months later were not designed to answer the questions about British generalship posed by entertainments such as Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder Goes Forth. Even so, it seemed to me that professional sympathy for the magnitude of the generals’ task, with much talk about ‘the learning curve’ (in truth, a flat line for far too long), made for a sort of fatalism among the officers taking part which was not unlike that prevailing in the army of 1916–18 – something along the lines of: ‘Although things should never have got to this pass, the war is where it is and can only be won by destroying the German army on the Western Front, and in the process, come what may, huge numbers of men are going to be killed.’

Indeed, this seems to be the growing consensus among historians. In one of the most recent and purportedly authoritative studies of modern warfare, Professor David Woodward of Marshall University, West Virginia, writes baldly of ‘a cruel truth’ that costly frontal offensives were the only way to win the war.fn2

I profoundly disagree.

As I have recently explained,fn3 personal and institutional failures – both political and military – marked Britain’s preparations for the war, and its early conduct. There were two literally vital elements missing: strategy and generalship. In fact, personal and institutional failures marked the next four years just as much, the want of strategy and generalship exacting a terrible tactical price – not least in casualties – that still taints the ultimate allied victory of November 1918.

Whether and when Clemenceau actually said that war is too important to be left to the generals is unimportant; it is what he thought, and the words have force. While aphorisms can be trite, at the time of their coining they have not of course been dulled by use. One of the problems in writing about the First World War, a conflict unsurpassed in the variety and volume of its literature, is language. Of some words and phrases there is now no common understanding: used often and indiscriminately, they no longer have meaning. Yet this is not to deny their original aptness. Clarify the language – ‘strategy’, ‘attrition’, ‘knocking away the props’ and so on – as well as the context, and the truth is once again revealed. In March 1915, Henry James, ‘sick beyond cure’ that he had lived to see the war, gave an interview to the New York Times. ‘One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts,’ James told the young journalist sent to interview him in London, Preston Lockwood, a Rhodes Scholar who would later serve with the French and then the US armies on the Western Front: ‘The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires . . . and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness.’

When Clemenceau became president of the council of ministers in November 1917, one of France’s darkest hours, he said simply: ‘Je fais la guerre’ – ‘I [intend to] make war.’ If he had then added by way of explanation: ‘En raison de c’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires,’ it would have been a criticism not only of the generals, whose stratagems to date had been both costly and unsuccessful, but also of the statesmen who had allowed the generals to dictate military policy – had surrendered to them, indeed, the whole gamut of strategy.fn4

In the fifth century BC the family of Greek words deriving from strategos (general) had a clear and basic military connection, strategia being the art of leading an army. But it was the practice of Athenian statesmen (politikoi) to take command of armies – Pericles being the signal example – and so the line between the civil and the military was not as clear as modern practice would suggest. Indeed, European kings and princes led their armies in the field until the eighteenth century (George II was the last British monarch to command in battle, in 1743 at Dettingen); it was the best way to be sure of the ultimate loyalty of subordinates. It was only with the writings of Clausewitz in the early nineteenth century that the distinction between the military and the civil in war became sharply defined.fn5 The word ‘strategy’ in the sense of disposing military force had only recently come into use in Europe (the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use in English to 1810fn6), and Clausewitz’s definition was still relatively narrow: ‘Strategy is the use of engagements [battles] for the object of war’ (‘Die Strategie ist der Gebrauch des Gefechts zum Zweck des Krieges’). By the twentieth century, ‘strategy’ was understood more broadly as the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfil the ends of policy. Both understandings, however, gave pre-eminence to political over military goals. Indeed, Clausewitz was adamant: ‘It is an inadmissible and even harmful distinction to leave a great military enterprise or its planning to a “purely military” judgment; more, it is absurd to consult professional soldiers on a plan for a war in order that they may judge from a “purely military” stand-point what cabinets are to do.’

Here, then, is the substance of what Clemenceau was talking about. The business of war is more than simply arranging and conducting battles. Political purpose must dominate all strategy, otherwise military ‘necessity’ may distort that purpose. The government states its policy – the desired outcome, or ‘ends’ – to the militaires, with appropriate guidance, sometimes called ‘grand strategy’ or ‘war policy’. The militaires then determine the ways and means to secure the ends.

This sounds straightforward enough; but, as Clausewitz observed, war is a mix of instinct, art and reason (the so-called Clausewitzian trinity). It is first an affair of ‘primordial violence, hatred and enmity . . . a blind, natural force’. The ‘play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam’, is an art not a science; while it is only as an instrument of policy that, theoretically, it is ‘subject to pure reason’.

War, he wrote, is ‘not merely a political act but also a real political instrument’ – ‘a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same enterprise with other means’ (‘Der Krieg ist eine blosse Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln’). Unfortunately for the proper relationship of the political and the military in the First World War, the notion had gained purchase in some quarters that once war begins it becomes solely the business of soldiers. In Britain this was perhaps because the first full English text of Vom Kriege to be published renders mit anderen Mitteln not as ‘with’ but as ‘by’ other means, allowing the inference that the primary, non-military, means are at an end.fn7 With his characteristic pithiness – ‘La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires’ – Clemenceau was in fact reclaiming Clausewitz’s true original proposition.

Whereas ‘tactics’ is about knowing what to do to achieve a specific practical objective, strategy is about the overall objective(s) – beginning with recognizing the need to do anything at all. It is then about balancing overall objectives (or ends) with the ways and means of achieving them. And balancing is a business of give and take. The leaders of the state – politicians – set the policy, but before any attempt at implementation military officers must first apprise policy-makers of the extent to which those objectives are achievable with the ways and means available. If the necessary ways and means cannot be found, the objectives must be modified. This is a dynamic process – not least once battle begins – needing continual dialogue to ensure that ends, ways and means remain in balance. Without strategy, tactics fumble blindly, bloodily and with no assurance of success.

This dialogue, this understanding, was fundamentally lacking in most capitals before and during the First World War; and that lack was at the root of the strategic stalemate that occurred between 1915 and the middle of 1918, and of the consequential and unnecessary loss of life. Nowhere was it more evident than in London. Matters were very different in the Second World War after Winston Churchill became prime minister, for Churchill, uniquely, had seen the want of strategic dialogue in 1914–18 from the perspectives of both statesman and militaire. On taking office as prime minister in 1940 he at once made himself ‘minister of defence’ and thereby director of grand strategy, the art of which lay, he said, ‘in foreseeing the outlines of the future and being prepared to deal with it’ – a typically (and usefully) reductionist definition, cutting through the purism of Clausewitz and his posthumous disciple Moltke.fn8 Indeed, it is probably the most realistic definition.

Yet before 1914 the British had thought themselves eminently superior in the constitutional arrangements for war-making. In The English Constitution (1867), Walter Bagehot, the foremost political essayist of the Victorian age, wrote of the great advantages of the British parliamentary system:

He cited as his principal evidence the toppling of the government of Lord Aberdeen in the 1850s because of the early débâcles of the Crimean War, and Aberdeen’s replacement by Lord Palmerston (he of the famous ‘gunboat diplomacy’), saying: ‘We turned out the Quaker, and put in the pugilist.’

And then he compared this with the US constitution:

But theory is one thing, events another. Bagehot was writing just after President Lincoln had been helmsman in the Civil War, and yet, curiously, he made no comment on this, though Lincoln had surely been the very model of a modern war leader in a democracy (as President Franklin D. Roosevelt would be in the Second World War, and, some would argue, Woodrow Wilson in 1917–18) – except that in the early years of the war Lincoln and his generals could come up with no strategy to defeat the Confederacy, leaving the Union army fighting battle after battle which led nowhere but to the grave for huge numbers of its men (Lincoln’s ultimate triumph was to pick the right generals). Indeed, Bagehot, had he lived, would have had to add a substantial coda to extend his analysis to cover Britain up to December 1916. For the six years of the preceding peace, the prime minister, H. H. Asquith, had been not so much the ‘pilot of the calm’ as rather a helmsman capable only of letting the ship of state drift with the current. And then for two and a half critical years of war he stayed on as the ‘pilot of the storm’. Yet not even Asquith’s greatest supporter (probably his wife, Margot) could have claimed for him ‘the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis’. Indeed, in November 1916, as the Battle of the Somme – the nadir of generalship (until 1917) – gasped to a halt, one of his ministers would minute him on the inherent illogicality of a war for civilization in which civilization was itself being destroyed, a war of survival in fighting which the nation’s strength does not survive: ‘No one for a moment believes we are going to lose this war, but what is our chance of winning it in such a manner, and within such limits of time, as will enable us to beat our enemy to the ground and impose upon him the kind of terms which we so freely discuss?’fn9

For the military-strategic (as well as the tactical) record had not been a good one. In August 1914 the army’s brightest and best had gone to France with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), emptying the War Office of just about every trained, experienced and useful staff officer. Even the director of military operations (DMO), the man responsible for intelligence and operational planning, put on khaki and crossed the Channel.fn10 Nor was the problem merely one of empty corridors. The few who remained proved frighteningly ineffective in the new scheme of things. The chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) himself, Sir Charles Douglas, hastily appointed in April when Sir John French had resigned in the wake of the ‘Curragh mutiny’,fn11 had never held a general staff appointment. Yet he was now to be the war cabinet’s principal adviser on military strategy, besides being in large measure its executive arm, as well as having the job of reconstituting the War Office staff. Poor man: he would die of the strain inside three months.

In any case, the War Office had been without an effective secretary of state since April, when Jack Seely, a man whose greatest admirer (probably his horse, the famous Warrior) could never have placed him in the first division, had felt obliged to resign alongside French.fn12 Asquith had decided not to replace him, instead taking the portfolio himself. Yet industry was not Asquith’s most notable attribute, and this addition to his workload made sense only in ensuring that he would not be troubled by an insistent voice at the War Office. In the latter days of the July crisis, as Europe stumbled into war, he asked the Lord Chancellor, Haldane,fn13 the great reforming war minister of the Edwardian period, to keep an eye on his old department as well as his current one. And then the day after the declaration of war, 5 August, he appointed Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum as secretary of state: a ‘perilous experiment’, as Asquith himself called it – a man in uniform in the cabinet, and one whose monocratic methods would be exacerbated by the weakness of his own War Office staff.

This was no way for a nation to wage any sort of war, let alone one as convulsive as that already raging from the North Sea coast to the Carpathian mountains, and soon to spread to the Near and Middle East, to the jungles, lakes and savannah the length of Africa – indeed to every ocean and continent. When something of its like, if not its intensity, had befallen the world in Napoleon’s day, the British government had responded resolutely but subtly. Victory was long in coming – the Whigs complained of ‘the never-ending war’ – but when it did come it was decisive and in no sense pyrrhic. The duke of Wellington’s name is indelibly inscribed on that victory, but it had certainly not been a war left to the generals. Pitt and Castlereagh, whose astute economic strategy and international coalition-building did so much to defeat the ‘Great Disturber’, deserve equal if not greater laurels. The same can be said of the Second World War. To the former western allies, Eisenhower and Montgomery are names on a par with Wellington’s; but the true architects of victory were Roosevelt and Churchill – superbly supported by their de facto military-strategic advisers, respectively Generals George Marshall and Alan Brooke (both graduates of the Western Front). Yet to whom should the laurels go for 1918; and why? Who indeed would wish to claim them when, as Clemenceau put it in another doleful remark, the war amounted to nothing but ‘a series of catastrophes that results in a victory’?

The want of strategy and generalship, and its terrible price, that marked the war set the scene for the conference at Versailles in 1919, and the flawed peace treaties that followed. Too Important for the Generals is not, I think, without contemporary resonance in this respect – and in another. For strategy cannot flower without capable statesmen and skilled generals; but it positively wilts if there isn’t trust between the two, and therefore continuous, productive discourse. That is perhaps the greatest lesson of the Great War – and it is the theme of this book. It was a lesson taken to heart in the Second World War in Britain and the United States, but one that in more recent times seems to have been quite forgotten.

Prologue

In the Beginning was the Plan

In 1905 General der Kavallerie Alfred Graf (Count) von Schlieffen was kicked by a horse. For fifteen years he had been chief of the German Grosser Generalstab (literally, ‘great general staff’), and now, he wrote, ‘nearly 75 years old, almost blind, half deaf . . . [I] have a broken leg’.

The general’s misfortune became world news when his incapacity led to enforced retirement the following January, though not all the newspapers treated it with solemnity. Under the headline ‘No fat men may apply for this job’, the Daily Sun of St John, New Brunswick, Canada, explained that Schlieffen had been unable to attend the army manoeuvres that autumn: ‘A rule of the general staff is that no one not physically sound may remain on the staff. Even fat men are excluded from the most honored department of the army.’

The Sun went on to report that the appointment of Generalleutnant Helmuth Graf von Moltke was expected shortly, and that he was a nephew of ‘the great commander’.

The ‘great commander’ was Helmuth Karl Graf von Moltke (‘the Elder Moltke’), born in 1800 and appointed chief of the Prussian Generalstab in 1857 – a post he retained for thirty years, until just three years before his death.fn1 Prussia and then the Deutsches Kaiserreich prized continuity at the head of that ‘most honored department of the army’, the department which in an influential work of 1891 the British military commentator and subsequently the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford, Spencer Wilkinson, dubbed the army’s brain.fn2 Without natural borders other than the Baltic and a little of the North Sea, Prussia – indeed the whole Deutscher Bund (the German Confederation created in the mid-nineteenth century) – relied absolutely on its army to guarantee its territorial integrity. The map of Prussia over the centuries, variously expanding and contracting, was a veritable atlas of the army’s campaigns. Prussia, in the words of Voltaire, was ‘an army with a country attached to it’.fn3

The job of the Grosser Generalstab was to prepare for war. This indeed was the principal function of any nation’s general staff – to make plans to deter attack, and then plans to fight should deterrence fail: ‘Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.’fn4 But the Grosser Generalstab prepared also to wage war for the consolidation, even expansion, of the Reich, as well as in what today would be called pre-emptive war. In other words, ‘that most honored department of the army’ was offensive-minded.

Preparation for war took many forms: calculations and arrangements for the annual draft; training of conscripts; allocating men to the various reserves at the end of their conscription; devising and promulgating military doctrine, including ‘war games’ (map exercises to test command and staff procedures) and the annual manoeuvres – and drawing up campaign plans for every contingency. In this last task, the ‘honored department’ – Schlieffen especially – kept its cards close to its chest. The Elder Moltke had been the military enabler of Bismarck’s policy of unification, presiding over three short and highly successful wars,fn5 and had a fine practical as well as theoretical grasp of campaign planning. Schlieffen, who took over indirectly from Moltke (the appointment was held briefly by Alfred von Waldersee, who fell out with the new, young Kaiser Wilhelm), did not have the same base of practical experience. This soon began to show in an increasingly theoretical consideration of the strategic problems Germany believed she faced. The Generalstab’s practice under Schlieffen of wargaming every idea and then deriving requirements, in particular troop numbers (which ultimately determined the size of the annual draft), from the exercise was admirably scientific but could have a perverse effect. For wargaming, even allowing for the element of ‘friction’, as Clausewitz called it, can by degrees, imperceptibly even, rationalize practical problems and downplay risks to such an extent that what in reality is an unrealistic course of action actually seems reasonable.fn6

This, in essence, was the problem with the celebrated ‘Schlieffen Plan’. In the later years of the nineteenth century the Kaiser and his ministers began seeing war with Russia as somehow inevitable. The reasons were territorial in the sense that Voltaire (or Mirabeau) had described, fuelled by convictions of racial superiority and supercharged by paranoia. For centuries the Russian bear had been a rather lumbering presence in the various continental upheavals. Its ability to mobilize the vast manpower at the Tsar’s command was notoriously poor, but in the 1890s the country began rapidly to modernize, with railways and telegraphy changing the game. Berlin would not be able to rely indefinitely on the greater agility of the German army if it came to war with Russia. And then when in 1893 St Petersburg completed a treaty of alliance with Paris, the Grosser Generalstab had to address the further problem of war on two fronts – for although the Franco-Russian Entente was purely defensive, at some point it might become aggressive.fn7 Contingency planning was, after all, the meat and drink of a general staff.fn8

The first instincts of the Grosser Generalstab in the later years of the Elder Moltke’s tenure had been realistic: war with both Russia and France would be unwinnable in the sense of the rapid and complete victories of the deutschen Einigung, German unification. The only way would be to stand on the defensive in the west, France being the stronger of the two powers in the short term, inflict crushing defeat on Russia, the lumbering bear, and then negotiate a favourable peace with the Franco-Russian Entente from a position of strength. This was also the military strategy advocated by Moltke’s successor, Waldersee. However, it did not entirely fulfil the ends of policy: the Kaiser wanted the option of complete victory. When Waldersee proved not to be amenable in this, he was replaced by Schlieffen. What mattered now therefore was that the Grosser Generalstab should produce a plan that promised absolute victory; otherwise the Kaiser might be obliged to change its chief again. Schlieffen probably reckoned that as it was a plan unlikely to see action for some time (or indeed at all), the theoretical possibility of success would be enough to keep the Kaiser amused – for the time being at least. He certainly worked along those lines.

The premise of Moltke’s and Waldersee’s strategy had been that the French fortifications built along the new border after the humiliating defeat of 1870 and loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany were too strong to overcome rapidly, and that it would therefore be better to wait on the defensive for the attack which the French would be obliged to make under the terms of the alliance with Russia, and take the fight at once to the Russians. Schlieffen now challenged this logic by questioning the feasibility of an offensive against Russia alongside the Austrian army (Germany and Austria had signed a formal alliance in 1879, joined by Italy three years later – the ‘Triple Alliance’). It would, he argued, be impossible to gain any conclusive victory over the Russian army – which would be only partially mobilized anyway, such was the incapacity even of the improved Russian railways – or prevent it from retiring out of reach. Besides, why should the undoubtedly formidable French fortifications on the border rule out an offensive in the west when there was the simple expedient of bypassing them by marching through Belgium?

The pre-eminent British military theorist of the mid-twentieth century, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, explained this change of thinking: ‘[Schlieffen’s] conception of war was dominated by the theoretical absolutes of Clausewitzian doctrine. So when he came to the conclusion that such absolute victory was unattainable in the East, he came back to the idea of seeking it in the West.’fn9 If it were necessary to invade Belgium, whose neutrality was guaranteed by a treaty of 1839 (signed by Britain, Prussia, Austria, France and Russia) then Clausewitzian absolutes not only justified but required it (‘War is an act of force . . . [which knows] no logical limit’).

The Kaiser agreed. The following year Schlieffen formally threw out Moltke’s ‘Russia first’ plan and began working on a scheme to ignore Belgian neutrality. It was the German chancellor, Theodore von Bethmann Hollweg, who in August 1914 would call the 1839 treaty a ‘scrap of paper’, but in the secrecy of his office in the Königsplatz, hard by the new Reichstag building, Schlieffen had already in effect done so. His strategy would be ‘France first (through Belgium)’; and it was again to be a business of weeks rather than months, just as in 1870, whereupon his victorious troops would be speeded east by the admirable Reichs-Eisenbahnen to deal with the lumbering bear.fn10

The plan he eventually came up with derived from his reading of classical history, in particular the battle of Cannae, of which he would write extensively in retirement. Cannae was a perfect battle – a simple concept, a complete victory, and an economical one. In 216 BC, near the present-day town of Barletta in southern Italy, the Carthaginian army of Hannibal defeated a Roman army twice its size by the bold gamble of presenting only a weak centre while sending cavalry and light infantry in a double envelopment deep into the Roman legions’ rear. Sixty thousand legionary corpses attested to not just defeat but annihilation. Of Cannae and its modern relevance, Schlieffen wrote:

Schlieffen accordingly sought, on a much vaster scale, to replicate the shock of Cannae, although by a bold, deep, single envelopment rather than a double movement. While holding along the Franco-German border with relatively weak forces, he would put the greatest weight of troops progressively on the right, where the Schwenkungsflügel – the ‘swinging’ wing (the strongest and furthest right) – would wheel through Belgium to come upon the rear of the French armies trying to defend their borders (including those with Belgium and Luxembourg).

Schlieffen developed his plan annually by degrees. By 1905, to be sure of casting the net broadly enough, he intended the tip of his right wing to cross the Franco-Belgian border near Lille. But this in turn presented him with another problem: to avoid being delayed by the strong Belgian fortresses of Namur and Liège, he would have to outflank them by a march through the Maastricht corridor – violating Dutch territory. And in extending his right wing so, when it swung south he risked running into the strong defences of Paris, or, in turning south-east to avoid them, exposing his flank to a counter-stroke by its garrison (which is what, in the event, would happen in August 1914). So he decided to extend his wheeling movement wider still – west of Paris.

The Schlieffen Plan, even as modified by the Younger Moltke, who significantly weakened the Schwenkungsflügel, had elegance and daring; but, as Liddell Hart said despairingly: ‘A swift victory over the main armies in the main theatre of war was the German General Staff’s solution for all outside difficulties, and absolved them from thinking of war in its wider aspects.’fn12 These wider aspects were, not least, Belgian neutrality and Britain’s reaction to its infringement. As the German-born Professor Holger Herwig writes in a much-admired recent work, Schlieffen ‘raised tactics [i.e. Cannae] to the level of operations, and subordinated statecraft to purely operational concepts.’fn13 Hans von Seeckt, chief of staff of one of the corps on Schlieffen’s right wing, and head of the army in the post-war Reichswehr, was even more categorical: ‘Cannae: no slogan became so destructive for us as this one.’fn14

But Schlieffen also ignored a good few military as well as political realities, not least among them the number of troops available, as well as ‘time and space’ and logistics. One of Hitler’s best field marshals, Albert Kesselring, would make a telling remark about the Grosser Generalstab’s rarefied military intellectualism: of the instruction at the pre-1914 staff college he wrote that it was inadequate in too many practical fields, such as intelligence, logistics, air and naval warfare, applied science and ‘anything to do with oil which soiled the fingers and hampered the tactician and strategist in the free flight of his ideas’.fn15 It is this otherwise apparently inexplicable gap between theorizing and military logic – inexplicable, given the professionalism of the Prussian general staff – that has led some to the conclusion that the plan never existed in any form beyond a sort of military doodle. Yet events speak otherwise.

In fact the Elder Moltke, just before his death, spelled out the challenge of strategy. Replying to Spencer Wilkinson after receiving an advance copy of The Brain of an Army, he wrote:

He made the point very clearly that strategy, like politics, isn’t over when war begins. It is not ‘the plan’ alone, but includes managing the repercussions of the plan’s implementation.

The French had their plans too, of course, notably ‘Plan XVII’, finally adopted in 1913. It was based on three primary considerations. First, the relative strengths of the armies: although Germany’s population was two-thirds as much again that of France, only some 54 per cent of available imperial manpower was ever actually called up, compared with France’s 80 per cent.fn17 Budgetary constraints, an increasingly left-wing Reichstag, and reluctance within the army itself to recruit in the growing urban centres of population, which were perceived as politically unreliable, kept it at a peacetime strength in 1911 of 612,000, compared with France’s 593,000. The law of unintended consequences also gave an advantage in reservists to France, where an intense mistrust of militarism kept compulsory military service at two years, compared with the Germans’ three. So although French reservists were not as well trained as the German, the system produced a third more of them each year. As far as theoretical strengths went, then, there was not a great deal in it. And while in a ‘France first’ plan the Germans would have to keep troops in East Prussia to guard against a Russian spoiling attack (the État-Major, the French general staff, calculated twenty-two divisions, perhaps even twenty-seven), the French would also have to keep troops on the Italian border – at least nine divisions – to guard against a similar attack by the third member of the Triple Alliance.fn18 However, the Germans would be able to choose the place at which they would concentrate their strength, while the French, uncertain where this would be, were obliged to spread their forces.

The second consideration of the architects of Plan XVII was really an assumption, namely that despite the heavy fortifications on the Franco-German border – and even if Berlin ignored Belgian neutrality – the main weight of any German offensive would fall in Alsace-Lorraine. For the Germans could not afford to leave this area weakly defended, thereby tempting a French offensive; in which case, reasoned the État-Major, if the bulk of the German army was to be in Alsace-Lorraine anyway, surely it would not simply sit on the defensive? So, they concluded, the German army would mount a strong offensive across the border, and in conjunction with that main effort would seek to turn the fortifications by a march through Luxembourg and the south-eastern corner of Belgium (the Ardennes). The État-Major saw no purpose in any greater German effort through Belgium – certainly not west of the River Meuse – because it would be too radically disconnected from the main offensive in Alsace-Lorraine; and in any case, they calculated, the Germans would not have enough troops, given the need to keep over twenty divisions in East Prussia.

The third consideration was what is today known as the ‘moral component of fighting power’, i.e. the element beyond military hardware and numbers of troops – in particular, doctrine. The commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, appointed in 1911, though an engineer officer with a reputation for plodding staffwork, had nevertheless embraced with a will the new doctrine of offensive à outrance – taking the offensive with the utmost hostility, to the limit, even to excess. This represented a semi-mystical belief in the superiority of the man advancing with the bayonet to the one waiting to meet the enemy with fire, and was more an atonement for the humiliation of 1870 than military doctrine as Clausewitz would have recognized it. For while Napoleon himself had pronounced that ‘in war the moral to the material is as three is to one’, it failed to recognize that in this ratio the material – even at ‘one’ – still had force, and that the ratio might well be variable depending on time and circumstance. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 had shown how barbed wire and the machine gun could upset the calculation. Kipling, indeed, had made the case thirty years earlier in the opening lines of ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’:

Joffre had torn up the earlier Plan XVI, the epitome, it seemed to him, of defensive-mindedness, and with the help of the commandant of the staff college, Ferdinand Foch, the greatest apostle of offensive à outrance, had begun work instead on a scheme more suited to the resurgent esprit militaire – the scheme that would become Plan XVII. And he would proclaim grandiloquently in the new field regulations: ‘The French army, returning to its traditions, henceforth admits no law but the offensive.’

But an offensive where? Foch said into Alsace-Lorraine. That was where the enemy would be in the greatest number, and the effect on the German campaign plan would therefore be decisive. The French army would be recovering lost ground too, redeeming the humiliating defeats of 1870. And any Germans coming through Luxembourg and the Ardennes would be met with a counter-offensive into their flank: French troops would under no circumstances wait to receive an attack. Plan XVII therefore required four of the five French armies that formed on mobilization to assemble for offensive action, the main effort being into Lorraine towards Nancy and Saarbrücken, while the fifth army formed the reserve to deal with any hook through the Ardennes. This considerably reduced the overall length of the French line envisaged in Plan XVI: there would be no need to cover even half the Franco-Belgian border, for the Germans would not be crossing the Meuse in any appreciable strength. The État-Major were quite convinced of it.

They were wrong, of course. Schlieffen’s dying words to the Younger Moltke are supposed to have been ‘Only make the right wing strong!’ The German main effort would come not in Alsace-Lorraine but through Belgium. Schlieffen’s plan saw the 1st and 2nd German Armies, in all some 450,000 men, crossing the Meuse and pushing well to the west before turning south, enveloping Paris and eventually destroying the French armies – hammer and anvil – up against the Franco-German border.

‘If ever a plan deserved victory it was the Schlieffen Plan,’ wrote that singular soldier–scholar Field Marshal Lord Wavell three decades later; ‘if ever one deserved defeat it was Plan XVII.’fn20 Why? Because Schlieffen’s was bold, following Moltke’s advice to ‘first reckon, then risk’, while the État-Major’s was stubbornly doctrinaire.

But how, if the État-Major’s calculations were correct (which mathematically – in terms of the absolute numbers of men available – they were), did the Germans have enough troops in 1914 to risk all on Schlieffen’s plan? The answer is that the Germans did something the French had not considered. First, they took a gamble in Alsace-Lorraine, as Hannibal had at Cannae in presenting only a weak centre, leaving just two armies, the 5th and 6th (Crown Prince Wilhelm’s and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s) to hold the fortified border. Secondly, instead of using the bulk of their older reservists as ersatz Truppen – replacements – they used them from the outset for subsidiary tasks that would otherwise have fallen to first-line troops, thereby almost doubling the fighting strength of each army. And thirdly, they took a further gamble: instead of leaving twenty and more divisions in East Prussia to guard against a Russian spoiling offensive, they left just nine.

If the Schlieffen Plan took too little notice of ‘friction’, Plan XVII broke a cardinal rule by taking even less notice of the enemy.

How to make the gods of war smile: tell them your plans. Schlieffen’s and Plan XVII positively dovetailed with each other. Indeed, wrote Liddell Hart in The Real War, success in Plan XVII would actually increase the chance of success in Schlieffen’s:

In the event, this is indeed what would happen in August 1914. While the French pushed in Alsace-Lorraine, the Germans swung through Belgium and northern France practically unhindered, Joffre focusing on the apparent success of the French counter-offensive across the Franco-German border. And even when the door was abruptly arrested in its swing by a force cobbled together at the last minute (including the BEF), the damage had been done: upwards of a million Germans had been let into Flanders, Picardy and Champagne.

They had not achieved the rapid victory prescribed by Schlieffen, however: conquering German troops would not now be sent by train to the Eastern Front to complete the destruction of the Franco-Russian alliance. The short war that everyone had predicted might have been over, but no one had won.

Time and again, however, during the next three years, the French would come close to handing victory to the Germans in their increasingly frantic attempts to eject them from French soil. And the tragedy is that some saw it coming – as they had seen, indeed, the débâcle of the ‘battle of the frontiers’. Towards the end of 1914, the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, wrote to the prime minister: ‘I think it is quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s line in the Western theatre [of war] . . . My impression is that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change – although no doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on the point.’

Several hundred thousand: if only it had been so few.

Chapter One

THE CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY

After the war, reflecting on the army’s rapid expansion during its course, the chief of the imperial general staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, declared: ‘There are a great many advantages in a voluntary army; there are a great many disadvantages. But whatever the advantages, and whatever the disadvantages, there is this constant factor in a voluntary army: it solves no military problem alone – none . . . in 1914, if we take that year, there was not one single campaign that the wit of man could imagine where the right answer was: “Six Regular divisions and fourteen Territorials.” ’fn1

Yet in 1914 the then Major-General Wilson, as director of military operations (DMO), had been content to send just four of the BEF’s divisions plus the cavalry division to fight along the Belgian border on the left wing of the French, whose army consisted of some ninety divisions – had argued, indeed, that it was not just the best but the only strategic option, one on whose details he had been working since 1910.fn2 Either his own eyes had been opened by four years of needless losses, or he was attempting to pull the wool over those of any in his audience who might question his earlier judgement. Unfortunately there is no record of the subsequent discussion.

There had been no treaty binding the BEF to action alongside the French. Indeed, on the morning of Sunday, 2 August, when the first shots were exchanged prematurely after German troops had roamed across the French border near Belfort the day before Germany declared war on France, Paris was looking to London increasingly anxiously: would ‘John Bull’ stand by ‘Marianne’, his partner in the Entente Cordiale, or would he stand her up?fn3 The cabinet had met at eleven o’clock and come to no decision – or rather, in the words of one minister of an earlier meeting, ‘It had decided not to decide.’ Asquith, as prime minister, summarized the discussion thus: