The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Introspective and a doubter by nature, he had said to the Kaiser upon his appointment in 1906: “I do not know how I shall get on in the event of a campaign. I am very critical of myself.” Yet he was neither personally nor politically timid.

He refused to take the post unless the Kaiser stopped his habit of winning all the war games, which was making nonsense of maneuvers. Surprisingly, the Kaiser meekly obeyed.

OK that makes sense

He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history.

Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete”—and Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy—“and once settled it cannot be altered.” In fact it could have been altered.

The German General Staff, though committed since 1905 to a plan of attack upon France first, had in their files, revised each year until 1913, an alternative plan against Russia with all the trains running eastward.

In Germany the railway system was under military control with a staff officer assigned to every line; no track could be laid or changed without permission of the General Staff.

The best brains produced by the War College, it was said, went into the Railway Section and ended up in lunatic asylums.

When Moltke’s “It cannot be done” was revealed after the war in his memoirs, General von Staab, Chief of the Railway Division, was so incensed by what he considered a reproach upon his bureau that he wrote a book to prove it could have been done. In pages of charts and graphs he demonstrated how, given notice on August 1, he could have deployed four out of the seven armies to the Eastern Front by August 15, leaving three to defend the West.

On the night of August 1, Moltke, clinging to the fixed plan, lacked the necessary nerve. “Your uncle would have given me a different answer,” the Kaiser said to him bitterly.

Bethmann excitedly insisted that Luxembourg must not be entered under any circumstances while waiting for the British answer. Instantly the Kaiser, without asking Moltke, ordered his aide-de-camp to telephone and telegraph 16th Division Headquarters at Trier to cancel the movement. Moltke saw ruin again. Luxembourg’s railways were essential for the offensive through Belgium against France. “At that moment,” his memoirs say, “I thought my heart would break.”

“Crushed,” Moltke says of himself, on what should have been the culminating day of his career, he returned to the General Staff and “burst into bitter tears of abject despair.”

Shithead

A telegram had come from Lichnowsky, who, in a further talk with Grey, had discovered his error and now wired sadly, “A positive proposal by England is, on the whole, not in prospect.”

The Kaiser’s telephone order to Trier had not arrived in time. At seven o’clock, as scheduled, the first frontier of the war was crossed, the distinction going to an infantry company of the 69th Regiment under command of a certain Lieutenant Feldmann.

With their relentless talent for the tactless, the Germans chose to violate Luxembourg at a place whose native and official name was Trois Vierges.

The three virgins in fact represented faith, hope, and charity, but History with her apposite touch arranged for the occasion that they should stand in the public mind for Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.

A question has haunted the annals of history ever since: What Ifs might have followed if the Germans had gone east in 1914 while remaining on the defensive against France? General von Staab showed that to have turned against Russia was technically possible. But whether it would have been temperamentally possible for the Germans to have refrained from attacking France when Der Tag came is another matter.

At seven o’clock in St. Petersburg, at the same hour when the Germans entered Luxembourg, Ambassador Pourtalès, his watery blue eyes red-rimmed, his white goatee quivering, presented Germany’s declaration of war with shaking hand to Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister.

Why did it have to be handed over at all? Admiral von Tirpitz, the Naval Minister, had plaintively asked the night before when the declaration of war was being drafted. Speaking, he says, “more from instinct than from reason,” he wanted to know why, if Germany did not plan to invade Russia, was it necessary to declare war and assume the odium of the attacking party?

Italy was obliged to join her allies only in a defensive war and, already shaky in her allegiance, was widely expected to sidle out through any loophole that opened up.

German protocol required that war be properly declared. Jurists of the Foreign Office, according to Tirpitz, insisted it was legally the correct thing to do. “Outside Germany,” he says pathetically, “there is no appreciation of such ideas.” In France appreciation was keener than he knew.

ONE PRIME OBJECTIVE GOVERNED French policy: to enter the war with England as an ally. To ensure that event and enable her friends in England to overcome the inertia and reluctance within their own Cabinet and country, France had to leave it clear beyond question who was the attacked and who the attacker.

On July 30 it ordered a ten-kilometer withdrawal along the entire frontier with Germany from Switzerland to Luxembourg.

Austria had waited until Viviani and Poincaré were at sea to issue her ultimatum to Serbia. On receiving this news the French President and Premier had eliminated a scheduled visit to Copenhagen and hurried home.

The order, telegraphed to corps commanders, was designed, they were told, “to assure the collaboration of our English neighbors.” A telegram informing England of the measure went out simultaneously. The act of withdrawal, done at the very portals of invasion, was a calculated military risk deliberately taken for its political effect.

Withdrawal was a bitter gesture to ask of a French Commander in Chief schooled in the doctrine of offensive and nothing but the offensive. It could have shattered General Joffre as Moltke’s first experience of the war shattered him, but General Joffre’s heart did not break.

He loomed large in authority before a new-born Cabinet, the tenth in five years, whose predecessor had lasted three days. The present one was remarkable chiefly for having most of France’s strong men outside it.

The Minister of Marine, Dr. Gauthier, a doctor of medicine shoved into the naval post when a political scandal removed his predecessor, was so overwhelmed by events that he “forgot” to order fleet units into the Channel and had to be replaced by the Minister of Public Instruction on the spot.

the untried Cabinet leaned willingly on the abilities and strong will of the man who was constitutionally a cipher. Born in Lorraine, Poincaré could remember as a boy of ten the long line of spiked German helmets marching through Barle-Duc, his home town. He was credited by the Germans with the most bellicose intent, partly because, as Premier at the time of Agadir, he had held firm, partly because as President he had used his influence to push through the Three-Year Military Service Law in 1913 against violent Socialist opposition.

One day the French woke up to find Mme. Caillaux on page two—and the sudden, awful knowledge that France faced war.

Joffre told the government that if he was not given the order to assemble and transport the covering troops of five army corps and cavalry toward the frontier, the Germans would “enter France without firing a shot.” He accepted the ten-kilometer withdrawal of troops already in position less from subservience to the civil arm—Joffre was about as subservient by nature as Julius Caesar—as from a desire to bend all the force of his argument upon the one issue of the covering troops.

At 4:30 next day, July 31, a banking friend in Amsterdam telephoned Messimy the news of the German Kriegesgefahr, officially confirmed an hour later from Berlin. It was “une forme hypocrite de la mobilisation” Messimy angrily told the Cabinet.

Following hard upon this news came a telegram from Paul Cambon, French ambassador in London, reporting that England was “tepid.” Cambon had devoted every day of the past sixteen years at his post to the single end of ensuring England’s active support when the time came, but he had now to wire that the British government seemed to be awaiting some new development. The dispute so far was of “no interest to Great Britain.”

Still the Cabinet sat and argued over financial measures, recall of Parliament, declaration of a state of siege, while all Paris waited in suspense. One crazed young man cracked under the agony, held a pistol against a café window, and shot dead Jean Jaurès, whose leadership in international socialism and in the fight against the Three-Year Law had made him, in the eyes of superpatriots, a symbol of pacifism.

Of the 2,501 persons listed in Carnet B, 80 per cent were ultimately to volunteer for military service.

Isvolsky had no doubts of Poincaré’s attitude, but he and other Russian statesmen were always haunted by the fear that when the time came the French Parliament, which had never been told the terms of the military alliance with Russia, would fail to ratify it.

Pressed by the Russians to declare themselves, and by Joffre to mobilize, yet held to a standstill by the need to prove to England that France would act only in self-defense, the French government found calm not easy.

“Evidemment,” replied Viviani, and gave the answer prearranged between him and Poincaré. “France will act in accordance with her interests.” As Schoen left, Isvolsky rushed in with news of the German ultimatum to Russia. Viviani returned to the Cabinet, which at last agreed upon mobilization.

At four o’clock the first poster appeared on the walls of Paris (at the corner of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Royale, one still remains, preserved under glass). At Armenonville, rendezvous of the haut-monde in the Bois de Boulogne, tea dancing suddenly stopped when the manager stepped forward, silenced the orchestra, and announced: “Mobilization has been ordered. It begins at midnight. Play the ‘Marseillaise.’

Orchestras in restaurants played the French, Russian, and British anthems. “To think these are all being played by Hungarians,” someone remarked. The playing of their anthem, as if to express a hope, made Englishmen in the crowd uncomfortable and none more so than Sir Francis Bertie, the pink and plump British ambassador who in a gray frock coat and gray top hat, holding a green parasol against the sun, was seen entering the Quai d’Orsay.

Grey, behind his tight mouth and Roman nose, was in equal anguish. He believed fervently that England’s interests required her to support France; he was prepared, in fact, to resign if she did not; he believed events to come would force her hand but as yet he could say nothing officially to Cambon.

He managed only to express edgily the thought that was in everyone’s mind, that “Belgian neutrality might become a factor.” That was the development Grey—and not he alone—was waiting for.

Britain’s predicament resulted from a split personality evident both within the Cabinet and between the parties. The Cabinet was divided in a split that derived from the Boer War, between Liberal Imperialists represented by Asquith, Grey, Haldane, and Churchill, and “Little Englanders” represented by all the rest.

They tended to regard France as the decadent and frivolous grasshopper, and would have liked to regard Germany as the industrious, respectable ant, had not the posturings and roarings of the Kaiser and the Pan-German militarists somehow discouraged this view.

Grey’s group in the Cabinet, on the other hand, shared with the Tories a fundamental premise that Britain’s national interest was bound up with the preservation of France. The reasoning was best expressed in the marvelously flat words of Grey himself: “If Germany dominated the Continent it would be disagreeable to us as well as to others, for we should be isolated.”

Alone in Europe Britain had no conscription. In war she would be dependent on voluntary enlistment. A secession from the government over the war issue would mean the formation of an antiwar party led by the dissidents with disastrous effect on recruiting.

it was clear to Morley that the neutrality of Belgium was “secondary to the question of our neutrality in the struggle between Germany and France.” It was equally clear to Grey that only violation of Belgium’s neutrality would convince the peace party of the German menace and the need to go to war in the national interest.

That afternoon in the lobby of the House of Commons a caucus of Liberal M.P.s voted 19 to 4 (though with many abstentions) for a motion that England should remain neutral “whatever happened in Belgium or elsewhere.”

Why should I follow your fighting line For a matter that’s no concern of mine?… I shall be asked to a general scrap All over the European map, Dragged into somebody else’s war For that’s what a double entente is for.

The “Curragh Mutiny” was England’s Mme. Caillaux. As a result of the Home Rule Bill, Ulster was threatening armed rebellion against autonomy for Ireland and English troops stationed at the Curragh had refused to take up arms against Ulster loyalists. General Gough, the Curragh commander, had resigned with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, Chief of General Staff, resigned, whereupon Colonel John Seely, Haldane’s successor as Secretary of War, resigned. The army seethed, uproar and schism ruled the country, and a Palace Conference of party leaders with the King met in vain.

Asquith had, however, a particularly active First Lord of the Admiralty. When he smelled battle afar off, Winston Churchill resembled the war horse in Job who turned not back from the sword but “paweth in the valley and saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.” He was the only British minister to have a perfectly clear conviction of what Britain should do and to act upon it without hesitation.