The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

How receptive were the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to whom he gave, or caused to be given, copies of The Great Illusion is not reported. There is no evidence that he gave one to General von Bernhardi, who was engaged in 1910 in writing a book called Germany and the Next War, published in the following year, which was to be as influential as Angell’s but from the opposite point of view.

Three of its chapter titles, “The Right to Make War,” “The Duty to Make War,” and “World Power or Downfall,” sum up its thesis.

This asshole would have a Punisher sticker on his pickup

War, he stated, “is a biological necessity”; it is the carrying out among humankind of “the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence.” Nations, he said, must progress or decay; “there can be no standing still,” and Germany must choose “world power or downfall.”

To be successful a state must begin war at the “most favorable moment” of its own choosing; it has “the acknowledged right … to secure the proud privilege of such initiative.” Offensive war thus becomes another “necessity” and a second conclusion inescapable: “It is incumbent on us … to act on the offensive and strike the first blow.” Bernhardi did not share the Kaiser’s concern about the “odium” that attached to an aggressor. Nor was he reluctant to tell where the blow would fall.

Publicly his performance was perfect; privately he could not resist the opportunity for fresh scheming. At a dinner given by the King that night at Buckingham Palace for the seventy royal mourners and special ambassadors, he buttonholed M. Pichon of France and proposed to him that in the event Germany should find herself opposed to England in a conflict, France should side with Germany.

this latest imperial brainstorm caused the same fuss, that had once moved Sir Edward Grey, England’s harassed Foreign Secretary, to remark wistfully, “The other sovereigns are so much quieter.”

William scampered nimbly around still ahead of the servants, reached the door first, handed out the widow, and kissed her with the affection of a bereaved nephew. Fortunately, King George came up at this moment to rescue his mother and escort her himself, for she loathed the Kaiser, both personally and for the sake of Schleswig-Holstein.

His horse with empty saddle and boots reversed in the stirrups led by two grooms and trotting along behind his wire-haired terrier, Caesar, added a pang of personal sentiment.

COUNT ALFRED VON SCHLIEFFEN, Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, was, like all German officers, schooled in Clausewitz’s precept “The heart of France lies between Brussels and Paris.”

Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bullnecked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second.

he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, “An unimportant obstacle.”

A neutral and independent Belgium was the creation of England or rather of England’s ablest Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston. Belgium’s coast was England’s frontier; on the plains of Belgium, Wellington had defeated the greatest threat to England since the Armada. Thereafter England was determined to make that patch of open, easily traversible territory a neutral zone and, under the post-Napoleon settleme...

The Dutch fought to retain their province; the French, eager to reabsorb what they had once ruled, moved in; the autocratic states—Russia, Prussia, and Austria—bent on keeping Europe clamped under the vise of Vienna, were ready to shoot at the first sign of revolt anywhere. Lord Palmerston outmaneuvered them all.

He knew that a subject province would be an eternal temptation to one neighbor or another and that only an independent nation, resolved to maintain its own integrity, could survive as a safety zone. Through nine years of nerve, of suppleness, of never swerving from his aim, of calling out the British fleet when necessary, he played off all contenders and secured an international treaty guaranteeing Belgium as an “independent and perpetually neutral state.”

Ever since 1892, when France and Russia had joined in military alliance, it was clear that four of the five signatories of the Belgian treaty would be automatically engaged—two against two—in the war for which Schlieffen had to plan.

Under the terms of the Austro-German alliance, Germany was obliged to support Austria in any conflict with Russia. Under the terms of the alliance between France and Russia, both parties were obliged to move against Germany if either became involved in a “defensive war” with Germany. These arrangements made it inevitable that in any war in which she engaged, Germany would have to fight on two fronts against both Russia and France.

In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when Germany was still a climbing power, Bismarck had been happy enough, upon a hint from England, to reaffirm the inviolability of Belgium. Gladstone had secured a treaty from both belligerents providing that if either violated Belgian neutrality, England would cooperate with the other to the extent of defending Belgium, though without engaging in the general operations of the war.

Nevertheless, Schlieffen decided, in the event of war, to attack France by way of Belgium. His reason was “military necessity.” In a two-front war, he wrote, “the whole of Germany must throw itself upon one enemy, the strongest, most powerful, most dangerous enemy, and that can only be France.”

He chose France first because Russia could frustrate a quick victory by simply withdrawing within her infinite room, leaving Germany to be sucked into an endless campaign as Napoleon had been. France was both closer at hand and quicker to mobilize.

The German and French armies each required two weeks to complete mobilization before a major attack could begin on the fifteenth day. Russia, according to German arithmetic, because of her vast distances, huge numbers, and meager railroads, would take six weeks before she could launch a major offensive, by which time France would be beaten.

Frederick the Great had said, “It is better to lose a province than split the forces with which one seeks victory,” and nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Only by a strategy of envelopment, using Belgium as a pathway, could the German armies, in Schlieffen’s opinion, attack France successfully. His reasoning, from the purely military point of view, appeared faultless.

There was not enough room for the huge German Army to get around the French armies and still stay inside France. The Germans had done it in 1870 when both armies were small, but now it was a matter of moving an army of millions to outflank an army of millions. Space, roads, and railroads were essential. The flat plains of Flanders had them.

Clausewitz, oracle of German military thought, had ordained a quick victory by “decisive battle” as the first object in offensive war. Occupation of the enemy’s territory and gaining control of his resources was secondary. To speed an early decision was essential.

Under Schlieffen, envelopment became the fetish and frontal attack the anathema of the German General Staff.

Schlieffen’s first plan to include the violation of Belgium was formulated in 1899. It called for cutting across the corner of Belgium east of the Meuse. Enlarged with each successive year, by 1905 it had expanded into a huge enveloping right-wing sweep in which the German armies would cross Belgium from Liège to Brussels before turning southward, where they could take advantage of the open country of Flanders, to march against France.

Schlieffen did not have enough divisions for a double envelopment of France à la Cannae. For this he substituted a heavily one-sided right wing that would spread across the whole of Belgium on both sides of the Meuse, sweep down through the country like a monstrous hayrake, cross the Franco-Belgian frontier along its entire width, and descend upon Paris along the Valley of the Oise.

Essential to the plan was a deliberately weak German left wing on the Alsace-Lorraine front which would tempt the French in that area forward into a “sack” between Metz and the Vosges.

In the back of Schlieffen’s mind always glimmered the hope that, as battle unfolded, a counterattack by his left wing could be mounted in order to bring about a true double envelopment—the “colossal Cannae” of his dreams. Sternly saving his greatest strength for the right wing, he did not yield to that vaulting ambition in his plan. But the lure of the left wing remained to tempt his successors.

Decisive battle dictated envelopment, and envelopment dictated the use of Belgian territory. The German General Staff pronounced it a military necessity; Kaiser and Chancellor accepted it with more or less equanimity. Whether it was advisable, whether it was even expedient in view of the probable effect on world opinion, especially on neutral opinion, was irrelevant.

Germans had imbibed from 1870 the lesson that arms and war were the sole source of German greatness. They had been taught by Field Marshal von der Goltz, in his book The Nation in Arms, that “We have won our position through the sharpness of our sword, not through the sharpness...

A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the incre...

The goal, decisive battle, was a product of the victories over Austria and France in 1866 and 1870. Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

even the ghost of Hannibal might have reminded Schlieffen that though Carthage won at Cannae, Rome won the war.

Old Field Marshal Moltke in 1890 foretold that the next war might last seven years—or thirty—because the resources of a modern state were so great it would not know itself to be beaten af...

In a moment of heresy to Clausewitz, he said to the Kaiser in 1906, “It will be a national war which will not be settled by a decisive battle but by a long wearisome struggle with a country that will not be overcome until its whole national force is broken, and a war which will utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious.”

The younger Moltke was already Chief of Staff when he made his prophecy, but neither he nor his Staff, nor the Staff of any other country, ever made any effort to plan for a long war. Besides the two Moltkes, one dead and the other infirm of purpose, some military strategists in other countries glimpsed the possibility of prolonged war, but all preferred to believe, along with the bankers and industrialists, that because of the dislocation of economic life a general European war could not last longer than three or four months.

Schlieffen, having embraced the strategy of “decisive battle,” pinned Germany’s fate to it. He expected France to violate Belgium as soon as Germany’s deployment at the Belgian frontier revealed her strategy, and he therefore planned that Germany should do it first and faster.

Indemnity, which enables a state to conduct war at the enemy’s expense instead of its own, was a secondary object laid down by Clausewitz. His third was the winning of public opinion, which is accomplished by “gaining great victories and possession of the enemy’s capital” and which helps to bring an end to resistance.

he forgot how moral failure could lose it, which too can be a hazard of war. It was a hazard the French never lost sight of, and it led them to the opposite conclusion from the one Schlieffen expected. Belgium was their pathway of attack too, through the Ardennes if not through Flanders, but their plan of campaign prohibited their armies from using it until after the Germans had violated Belgium first.

When Chancellor Bülow, discussing the problem with Schlieffen in 1904, reminded him of Bismarck’s warning that it would be against “plain common sense” to add another enemy to the forces against Germany, Schlieffen twisted his monocle several times in his eye, as was his habit, and said: “Of course. We haven’t grown stupider since then.” But Belgium would not resist by force of arms; she would be satisfied to protest, he said.

German confidence on this score was due to placing rather too high a value on the well-known avarice of Leopold II, who was King of the Belgians in Schlieffen’s time.

Leopold was, in the opinion of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, “a thoroughly bad man.” There were few men who could be so described, the Emperor said, but the King of the Belgians was one.

Whenever the Kaiser was seized with a project he attempted instantly to execute it, usually to his astonishment and chagrin when it did not work. In 1904 he invited Leopold to visit him in Berlin, spoke to him in “the kindest way in the world” about his proud forefathers, the Dukes of Burgundy, and offered to re-create the old Duchy of Burgundy for him out of Artois, French Flanders, and the French Ardennes. Leopold gazed at him “open-mouthed,” then, attempting to pass it off with a laugh, reminded the Kaiser that much had changed since the fifteenth century.

That was the wrong thing to say, for the Kaiser flew into one of his rages and scolded the King for putting respect for Parliament and Ministers above respect for the finger of God (with which William sometimes confused himself).

This declared intent, the first explicit threat to tear up the treaty, dumfounded King Leopold. He drove off to the station with his helmet on back to front, looking to the aide who accompanied him “as if he had had a shock of some kind.”

Although the Kaiser’s scheme failed, Leopold was still expected to barter Belgium’s neutrality for a purse of two million pounds sterling. When a French intelligence officer, who was told this figure by a German officer after the war, expressed surprise at its generosity, he was reminded that “the French would have had to pay for it.”

Schlieffen designated thirty-four divisions to take the roads through Belgium, disposing on their way of Belgium’s six divisions if, as seemed to the Germans unlikely, they chose to resist. The Germans were intensely anxious that they should not, because resistance would mean destruction of railways and bridges and consequent dislocation of the schedule to which the German Staff was passionately attached.

Furthermore, counting on British belligerency, he wanted a wide sweep in order to rake in a British Expeditionary Force along with the French. He placed a higher value on the blockade potential of British sea power than on the British Army, and therefore was determined to achieve a quick victory over French and British land forces and an early decision of the war before the economic consequences of British hostility could make themselves felt.

Sounds familiar

Employing the active army alone, he would not have enough divisions both to hold his eastern frontier against a Russian breakthrough and to achieve the superiority in numbers over France which he needed for a quick victory. His solution was simple if revolutionary. He decided to use reserve units in the front line.