A uniformed man was ushered into the room. It was an exclusive gathering of turn-of-the-century, Berlin high society. The feathered ladies, wives of top officials from the Foreign Ministry and Reich Chancellery, were dressed as if they expected the kaiser to appear. The men were attired formally and stiffly, as befitted their station in life and the state. As civilians, however, they lacked the status, the rank, and the eye-opening excitement of the elder man who walked in. It was not the emperor, but everyone knew that when Europe exploded, when mounting tensions forced a new martial resettling of European relations, when war brought the reordering of the continent that would finally give Germany its due, Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the Great General Staff, would again guide Germany’s men to victory. It was unquestioned.
Schlieffen’s receding hair, elongated ears, and chiseled features marked him as an old and serious man. His subordinates would later talk about his legendary intensity. When one pointed out the beauty of a valley during a staff ride, he would say coldly that it was only a minor obstacle for his army. When juniors received an operational problem on Christmas Eve, answers were due on Christmas Day. Schlieffen was a dogmatist, a doctrinaire, and a theorist. His dogma was the offensive; his doctrine was envelopment; and his operational theories, tested by loyal professionals, were developed to reproduce glories as great as Waterloo, Königgrätz, and Sedan.
The eyes of the former cavalryman narrowed as he entered, seeking out the German ambassador to England, Hermann von Eckardstein, on a brief leave from London. There would be time for the general’s questions after dinner when the men repaired to smoke and discuss serious matters alone. When that time came, Schlieffen queried Eckardstein about unsettling news he had received of England’s growing estrangement from Germany. “If you are correct in terms of our relationship with England, I will have to change my entire campaign plan.” Surely Eckardstein was too pessimistic? But when the ambassador persisted in his belief, remarking further that if Germany marched through Belgium “we would have England on our necks immediately,” Schlieffen fell silent. Soon the conversation ended and the general, his aging brow furrowed, slipped away to process this new information.
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The observations of Colmar von der Goltz, Germany’s most popular military writer before the war, are a good example of the persistence of traditional military thinking. In The Nation in Arms (1883), which became a kind of Bible for officers and the educated public, Goltz investigated the problem caused by mass conscript armies. 8 He was convinced that no single decisive battle would decide the course of a war. Rather, future wars would consist of numerous battles and might last a long time. Goltz was also one of the first to draw attention to the logistical difficulties of supplying both weapons and food to such massive armies but he was convinced that a well-managed military, such as that of Germany, could overcome such problems and systematically exhaust its enemy during a long war.
The views of the Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1905, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, however, were premised on a short war, and revealed even more clearly than Goltz’s writings the ambivalent and limited understanding of the real nature of a future war. Schlieffen’s famous war plan (known by his name even after subsequent modifications) was completed in 1904-5. It dealt with the diplomatic situation faced by Germany since the Franco-Russian military agreement of 1893, which exposed Germany to the risk of a war on two fronts. Schlieffen dealt with this by planning to concentrate German forces initially against France, which would mobilize more rapidly than Russia. After a swift invasion, resulting in the encirclement and annihilation of the French armies, the Germans would turn with their Austro-Hungarian ally to eliminate Russia, which it was assumed would mobilize much more slowly. The thinking behind the plan showed a very limited understanding of the dynamics of a war between entire peoples fought with industrialized weaponry. For to reach Paris in six weeks and crush the French assumed that the Belgians would offer no resistance and that the French would behave in the same paralyzed and panic-stricken manner as the armies of Napoleon III had done in the summer and autumn of 1870. How the German armies were meant to handle real resistance when they would be marching over 20 km a day and requiring vast amounts of fodder and munitions from dwindling supply-lines was simply not addressed.
Such intellectual arrogance arose from the belief that Republican France and its army were morally inferior to Germany. It was this that enabled German military and political leaders to discount the “friction” of unforeseeable events that Clausewitz had warned would slow down any military operation. Schlieffen’s writings after his retirement betrayed the same fundamental illusions as his Plan. In “War Today,” an essay published in the popular Deutsche Revue in 1909, he argued that high levels of armaments and general conscription would not make wars longer, as suggested by Moltke the Elder, but would shorten them:
All the doubts about the horrible cost, the possible high casualties – have emerged from the background. Universal conscription – has dampened the lust for battle. The supposedly impregnable fortresses, behind which one feels warm and safe, appear to have reduced the incentive – to bare one’s breasts to combat. The arms factories, the cannon foundries, the steam hammers that harden the steel used in fortresses have produced more friendly faces and more amiable obligingness than all the peace congresses could.
Schlieffen’s argument became a commonplace of military thought in the years before the war. As the German army’s service regulations of 1 January 1910 stated:
Today the character of war is defined by the longing for a quick and major decision. The call up of all those capable of military service, the strength of the armies, the difficulty of feeding the army, the cost of the state of war, the disruption of trade and transport, industry and agriculture, as well as the responsiveness of military organization and the ease with which the army can be assembled on a war footing – all mean that war would finish quickly.
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It required intervention by the General Staff to begin to restore the German field artillery’s competitive position. After tests in 1896 confirmed the ineffectiveness of flat-trajectory cannons against field entrenchments, Alfred von Schlieffen, Waldersee’s successor as chief of the General Staff, prodded artillery experts in the War Ministry and the General Inspection of the Field Artillery to reinvestigate the potential of field howitzers. The forced result was the 105-mm, rapid-firing l. FH-98, a lightweight, mobile, versatile weapon capable of shooting seven types of shells, including grenades and shrapnel. The opponents of the stubby-barreled howitzers offered some co gent criticisms, pointing out, for instance, that the cumbersome ammunition train would impede rapid engagement. The advocates of l. FH-98 added unnecessary controversy by raising the old specter of completely replacing C-96s with howitzers as the field artillery’s standard cannon. This fear elicited responses from the other side that reflected a deeper and more basic reason for resisting the new device. The howitzer’s “mortar-mouth existence was only to be explained by the fact that [it] was constructed under the banner of those who argue that shovels will play a much greater role in future wars.”
To those who believed that victory belonged to the audacious, the mere discussion of defensive strategies-or, in this extreme case, even the offensive weapons to counter them-was intolerable because this smacked somehow of weakness and unmanliness. Schlieffen’s most influential opponent in this struggle was Ernst Hoffbauer, general inspector of the field artillery from 1891 to 1899 and, not coincidentally, an outspoken advocate since the 1870s of field artillery mobility and close-range support of the troops. “Given this general resistance,” said Schlieffen in 1897, “I don’t know if we’re on the right path.” He resisted the temptation to yield, however, and in 1900 the l. FH-98 finally exited the factories to join the C-96 in the field artillery’s arsenal.
