The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Visiting the Balkan front in 1912, Messimy saw the advantages gained by the dull-colored Bulgarians and came home determined to make the French soldier less visible. His project to clothe him in gray-blue or gray-green raised a howl of protest.

Army prestige was once again felt to be at stake. To clothe the French soldier in some muddy, inglorious color, declared the army’s champions, would be to realize the fondest hopes of Dreyfusards and Freemasons. To banish “all that is colorful, all that gives the soldier his vivid aspect,” wrote the Echo de Paris, “is to go contrary both to French taste and military function.” Messimy pointed out that the two might no longer be synonymous, but his opponents proved immovable.

Messimy’s first choice was the austere and brilliant general in pince-nez, Gallieni, who refused it because, he explained, having been instrumental in Michel’s dismissal he felt scruples about replacing him. Furthermore he had only two years to go before retirement at sixty-four, and he believed the appointment of a “colonial” would be resented by the Metropolitan Army—“une question de bouton,” he said, tapping his insignia.

Joffre looked like Santa Claus and gave an impression of benevolence and naïveté—two qualities not noticeably part of his character.

He had no known clerical, monarchist, or other disturbing connections; he had been out of the country during the Dreyfus Affair; his reputation as a good republican was as smooth as his well-manicured hands; he was solid and utterly phlegmatic. His outstanding characteristic was a habitual silence that in other men would have seemed self-deprecatory but, worn like an aura over Joffre’s great, calm bulk, inspired confidence.

Castelnau, who was a graduate both of St. Cyr and of the War College, came, like D’Artagnan, from Gascony, which is said to produce men of hot blood and cold brain.

He had also left behind a strategic plan which became the framework of Plan 17. Completed in April 1913, it was adopted without discussion or consultation, together with the new Field Regulations by the Supreme War Council in May. The next eight months were spent reorganizing the army on the basis of the plan and preparing all the instructions and orders for mobilization, transport, services of supply, areas and schedules of deployment and concentration.

Unlike the Schlieffen plan, Plan 17 contained no stated over-all objective and no explicit schedule of operations. It was not a plan of operations but a plan of deployment with directives for several possible lines of attack for each army, depending on circumstances, but without a given goal.

Its intention was inflexible: Attack! Otherwise its arrangements were flexible.

To this end Plan 17 deployed the five French armies along the frontier from Belfort in Alsace as far as Hirson, about a third of the way along the Franco-Belgian border. The remaining two-thirds of the Belgian frontier, from Hirson to the sea, was left undefended.

The French General Staff, though receiving many indications collected by the Deuxième Bureau, or Military Intelligence, pointing to a powerful German right-wing envelopment, believed the arguments against such a maneuver more telling than the evidence for it.

In a series of three rendezvous with a French intelligence officer at Brussels, Paris, and Nice, the German appeared with his head swathed in bandages, revealing only a gray mustache and a pair of piercing eyes. The documents he handed over for a considerable sum revealed that the Germans planned to come through Belgium by way of Liège, Namur, Charleroi, and invade France along the valley of the Oise, by way of Guise, Noyon and Compiègne.

They did not believe the Germans could mobilize enough men to maneuver on such a scale, and they suspected the information might be a feint designed to draw the French away from the area of the real attack. French planning was hampered by a variety of uncertainties, and the greatest of these was Belgium.

Attempting to fit Plan 17 to one of several hypotheses of German strategy, Joffre and Castelnau believed that the most likely one was a major enemy offensive across the plateau of Lorraine.

Jean Jaurès, the great socialist leader, thought differently. Leading the fight against the Three-Year Law, he insisted in his speeches and in his book L’Armée nouvelle that the war of the future would be one of mass armies using every citizen, that this was what the Germans were preparing, that reservists of twenty-five to thirty-three were at their peak of stamina and more committed than younger men without responsibilities, that unless France used all her reservists in the front line she would be subjected to a terrible “submersion.”

In 1913 the Deuxième Bureau collected enough information on the German use of reserves as active troops as to make it impossible for the French General Staff to be ignorant of this crucial factor. A critique by Moltke on German maneuvers of 1913 indicating that the reserves would be so used came into French possession.

the authors of Plan 17 did not want to be convinced. They rejected evidence that argued in favor of their staying on the defensive because their hearts and hopes, as well as their training and strategy, were fixed on the offensive.

They enabled themselves to reject defense of the Belgian frontier by insisting that if the Germans extended their right wing as far as Flanders, they would leave their center so thinned that the French, as Castelnau said, could “cut them in half.”

BRITAIN’S JOINT MILITARY PLANS with France were begotten in 1905 when Russia’s far-off defeats at the hands of the Japanese, revealing her military impotence, unhinged the equilibrium of Europe.

Suddenly and simultaneously the government of every nation became aware that if any one of them chose that moment to precipitate a war, France would have to fight without an ally. The German government put the moment to an immediate test. Within three weeks of the Russian defeat at Mukden in 1905, a challenge was flung at France in the form of the Kaiser’s sensational appearance at Tangier on March 31.

Of his own life Péguy was not speaking vainly. In August 1914 he was to volunteer at forty-one for military service and be killed in action at the Marne on September 7.

Just at the time when the Kaiser was nervously riding a too spirited white horse through the streets of Tangier, the Staff was engaged in a theoretical war game based on the assumption that the Germans would come through Belgium in a wide flanking movement north and west of the Meuse.

With Britain in the throes of a general election and ministers scattered about the country campaigning, the French were forced to make an unofficial approach. Their military attaché in London, Major Huguet, made contact with an active and eager intermediary, Colonel Repington, military correspondent of The Times, who, with a nod from Esher and Clarke, opened negotiations.

No British government in history ever committed itself to take action “automatically” upon an event, but the Colonel, with the bit in his teeth, was galloping far ahead of the field.

Grey, warily approached by the French, indicated he had no intention of “receding” from any assurances his predecessor had given to France.

Thereupon he, Grey, and the Prime Minister, without informing the rest of the Cabinet, left further developments in the hands of the military as a “departmental affair.”

The “Esher triumvirate,” however, fundamentally disapproved of employing the British Army as a mere adjunct of the French and, after the tension of the Moroccan crisis relaxed, the joint planning begun in 1905 was not pushed further.

He doubted the military capacity of the French, expected the Germans to beat them on land, and saw no purpose in ferrying the British Army over to be included in that defeat.

Early in 1910 Fisher, at sixty-nine, was simultaneously raised to the peerage and relieved of the Admiralty, but that was to be far from the end of his usefulness.

In January 1909 Schlieffen published an anonymous article in the Deutsche Revue to protest certain changes made in his plan by his successor, Moltke. The basic outline, if not the details, of the “colossal Cannae” prepared for the envelopment of the French and British armies was revealed and the identity of the author surmised.

In London when Foch came over, Wilson introduced him to Haldane and others at the War Office. Bursting into the room of one of his colleagues, he said: “I’ve got a French general outside—General Foch. Mark my words, this fellow is going to command the Allied armies when the big war comes on.” Here Wilson had already accepted the principle of unity of command and picked the man for it, although it was to take four years of war and the brink of defeat before events would bear him out.

“What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Wilson asked. Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”

When Major Huguet at once came to see the new Director to bewail the lack of progress since 1906 on the important question of Anglo-French military cooperation, Wilson replied, “Important question! But it is vital! There is no other.”

Covering the whole wall of Wilson’s room in the War Office was a huge map of Belgium with every road by which he thought the Germans could march marked in heavy black.

Yet by March 1911 out of all this lack of arrangements—and of horses—he had brought a schedule of mobilization by which “the whole of the infantry of six divisions would embark on the 4th day, cavalry 7th day, artillery 9th day.”

On July 1, 1911, the Panther came to Agadir. Through all the chancelleries of Europe ran the whispered monosyllable, “War.” Wilson hurried over to Paris in the same month that the French War Council, ousting General Michel, turned its back forever on the defensive.

In effect, the Dubail-Wilson agreement attached the British Army, in the event that war came and Britain entered it, to the French, placing it where it would prolong the French line and guard the French flank against envelopment.

In fact the British Navy was as much responsible as the French because its refusal to guarantee disembarkation ports above the line Dover-Calais precluded landings closer to, or within, Belgium.

Wilson, facing this group of “ignorant men,” as he called them, and accompanied by his fellow officer and future chief, Sir John French, “who knows nothing at all about the subject,” pinned up his great map of Belgium on the wall and lectured for two hours. He swept away many illusions when he explained how Germany, counting on Russia’s slow mobilization, would send the bulk of her forces against the French, achieving superiority of numbers over them. He correctly predicated the German plan of attack upon a right-wing envelopment but, schooled in the French theories, estimated the force that would come down west of the Meuse at no more than four divisions. He stated that, if all six British divisions were sent immediately upon the outbreak of war to the extreme left of the French line, the chances of stopping the Germans would be favorable.

A certain inescapable logic in the Antwerp idea was to keep tugging at British military plans up to the last minute in 1914 and even afterward.

Echoes of the secret meeting of the CID angered the Cabinet members who had been left out and who belonged to the sternly pacifist wing of the party. Henry Wilson learned that he was regarded as the villain of the proceedings and that they were “calling for my head.”

The government maintained the disingenuous position that the military “conversations” were, in Haldane’s words, “just the natural and informal outcome of our close friendship with France.” Natural outcome they might be; informal they were not.

There is no record what Asquith replied or what, in his inmost mind, a region difficult to penetrate under the best of circumstances, he thought on this crucial question.

In an effort to dissuade the Germans from passing a new Naval Law providing for increases in the fleet, Haldane was sent to talk with the Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg, Admiral Tirpitz, and other German leaders. It was the last Anglo-German attempt to find a common ground of understanding, and it failed. As a quid pro quo for keeping their fleet second to Britain’s, the Germans demanded a promise of British neutrality in the event of war between Germany and France.

Haldane returned convinced that Germany’s drive for hegemony in Europe would have to be resisted sooner or later: “I thought, from my study of the German General Staff, that once the German war party had got into the saddle, it would be war not merely for the overthrow of France or Russia but for the domination of the world.” Coming from Haldane this conclusion had a profound effect upon Liberal thinking and planning.

Although the terms of the agreement were not known to the Cabinet as a whole, an uneasy sense prevailed that matters had gone too far. Not satisfied with the “no commitment” formula, the antiwar group insisted that it be put in writing. Sir Edward Grey obliged in the form of a letter to M. Cambon, the French ambassador. Drafted and approved by the Cabinet, it was a masterpiece of ellipsis.

After Agadir, as each year brought its summer crisis and the air grew heavier with approaching storm, the joint work of the General Staff grew more intense.

In 1912 he examined the new German railway constructions, all converging on Aachen and the Belgian frontier.

While Wilson was tightening and perfecting his arrangements with the French, Britain’s new Chief of Imperial General Staff, Sir John French, made an attempt in 1912 to revert to the idea of independent action in Belgium. Discreet inquiries made by the British military attaché in Brussels put an end to this effort.

The British minister, making his own inquiries, was told that if British troops landed before a German invasion or without a formal Belgian request, the Belgians would open fire.