1

Der Tag
The German Decision to Go East in 1914

Peter G. Tsouras

If any man represented the genius of the German General Staff system in July 1914 as Europe stumbled toward war, it was General Hermann von Staab, Chief of the Railway Department. Upon his expertise and that of his department depended Germany’s ability to mobilise against its encircling enemies and maximise its advantage of interior lines.

That expertise was superior to that of either France or Russia, Germany’s two main enemies. The Railway Department, upon receipt of mobilisation orders, would prove the worth of the thousands of officers assigned to making sure Germany’s eight wartime armies and over two million men assembled, moved, and deployed faster than the French or Russians.

It was an incredible feat of organization. To move a single army corps – and there were fifty-six of them in the German Army – required 6,010 railway cars: 170 for officers, 965 for the infantry, 2,960 for cavalry (troopers and mounts), and 1,915 for the artillery and support troops. They would be organized into 280 trains, all moving at precisely fixed times at exact intervals. So detailed were the German Army’s mobilization plans that the number of railroad cars that could pass over any given bridge within a given time were, for safety’s sake, determined in advance.¹

The entire mobilisation required eleven thousand trains.

Staab and the rest of the German Army were now aware that Der Tag – ‘the day’ – was approaching with the speed of an out-of-control train. Der Tag was that moment when all the pent-up fears about the encirclement of Germany would be lanced, that everything the German nation had planned and prepared for would be set in motion in one tidal, emotional release. All across Germany every soldier in his garrison and every reservist in his home waited in expectation as the clouds of war gathered over Europe. They waited for the telegrams of Kriegsgefahrzustand – the announcement of imminent danger of war, the trigger for mobilisation. Kriegsgefahrzustand ‘put German railways under full military control; inaugurated martial law and military censorship; cancelled all leaves, returning troops to their garrisons, strengthened frontier defenses; and suspended postal traffic across the border’.² Kriegsgefahrzustand was the cocking of the gun. All that was left was to pull the trigger with the mobilisation order itself, which could be issued two days after the Kriegsgefahrzustand measures had been taken.

All the great powers of Europe were spinning out of control towards war. It had all come out of nowhere. Serbian fanatics had engineered the murder of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Hapsburg dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary. And now the Austrian government was determined to use that as pretext to destroy the Serbian kingdom and absorb its territory, despite Emperor Franz Joseph’s astute observation that it was a country only of goat droppings, plum trees, and murderous people. Russia, already humiliated by the Austrians in the Bosnian Crisis of 1908, had decided enough was enough and announced its support of fellow Slavs in Serbia. Unwisely then, the Kaiser had declared Germany’s full support of Austria, which in effect subordinated German national security to petty Austrian territorial aggrandisement in a region in which no one’s national interests, except the Serbs, was threatened. The late ‘Iron Chancellor’, Otto von Bismarck, had observed correctly that the entire Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

Unfortunately, the situation was about trigger an automatic sequence of events that would lead to the war that no one wanted. The problem lay in the organisation for war of the armies of the great European powers, with the exception of Britain. The Napoleonic Wars of a hundred years ago had instilled the concept of a ‘nation in arms’, armies swollen to unprecedented size because they had the entire adult male population as a military resource. Peacetime armies became training vehicles for the large number of men that would be conscripted for short periods and then sent into the reserves. This mass of reservists would then be called up to reinforce and expand the regular armies in times of war.

Germany, with a population of over seventy million, had to call up only 50 per cent of its eligible males to man a peacetime army of 840,000, while France – with only half that population – had to call up 85 per cent to reach a peacetime strength of 770,000. The Austro-Hungarian Empire with fifty million people found that it could support a peacetime army of 450,000 while Russia, with a population approaching two hundred million, put almost two million men in uniform. The mechanism of their wartime expansion, upon which all war plans were based, was a complex mobilisation plan. That in turn relied upon an increasingly dense system of railway lines to transport masses of reservists to their depots where they would be equipped, then transported as organised units to their assembly areas. At the same time formations, both reserve and regular, along with mountains of supplies, would be moved to the frontiers to be prepared to attack or defend as various war plans dictated.

For the Germans, timing would be everything. It was upon this basis that the Chief of the General Staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen (CGS from 1894 to 1905), had devised the plan for war against both France and Russia. The operative assumption was that Russia would take at least six weeks to mobilise, while the French would be much quicker off the mark and be able to amass their armies on the German border within a shorter time. Here, he thought, was the weak joint in the Franco-Russian alliance. He reasoned that if Germany mobilised faster than both France and Russia, it could knock France out of the war quickly and then turn its victorious armies to the east to meet the Russians. It would be a close-run thing, and he devoted his life to creating and honing the plan that would eventually bear his name. It called for the Germans to mass seven of their eight armies to face France. It was to maximise that window that the German Army had poured vast resources into the railway system and the precision of the mobilisation planning and execution. It needed every minute. Franco-Russian joint military planning called for simultaneous attacks on Germany on M+15 (fifteen days after mobilisation).

Yet the Franco-German border offered too little space and bad terrain for such a decisive campaign. Schlieffen then looked beyond those borders to the flat plains of Belgium, which would provide the ground for the crushing manoeuvre, the envelopment of the French left and Paris itself, thereby trapping the French armies against the other German armies along the Franco-German border. There was only one problem with the plan: violation of Belgian neutrality would bring the British immediately into the war to protect the Belgian and French Channel ports, natural points of embarkation for an invasion of England. Schlieffen dismissed the small but lethal British Army as of little account in the manoeuvres of millions and gave no thought to the wider implications of fecklessly making an enemy of the British Empire. The British had been driven from the continent before by Napoleon, only to gather new allies and wear down and finally defeat France. They had lost little of their patient tenacity.

In its final form the Schlieffen Plan was allocated seven of Germany’s eight armies, numbered one through seven; the remaining 8th Army was left to cover the Russian border. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th armies, numbering 840,000 men, would form the great wheel through Belgium. With supporting and line-of-communication troops, this force numbered over a million men. The remaining 5th, 6th, and 7th armies, numbering another 520,000 men, would defend the Franco-German border against the inevitable strong French attacks to liberate the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. The 9th Army would be maintained as a strategic reserve in central Germany to be assembled from various units around an existing army headquarters to move to either front as necessary.

It was a gamble that the long Russian mobilisation period would allow the Germans to crush the French and then turn their entire army east. It was all based on the calculation of a slow Russian mobilisation. That was a serious German intelligence failure. The Russians had worked diligently to streamline their mobilisation process and, despite a much less dense and efficient railway system, would be able to spring a major surprise on the Germans by being able to invade East Prussia with their 1st and 2nd armies, with over 400,000 men against the 170,000 men of the German 8th Army, long before the Germans expected to finish off the French. The only problem was that, unlike Germany, Russia’s mobilisation would be a phased one. The railway system could not handle the mobilisation of all the Russian reserves at the same time. Formations would be continuously fed forward in waves. That meant that the initial blow would not have the full might of the completely mobilised Russian Army. Dissipating the Russian blow further was the fact that their other four armies in Poland were all facing the Austrians.³

The single-mindedness with which Schlieffen fixed Germany’s fate to this plan was very dangerous. His predecessor, the great Feldmarshal Helmuth von Moltke (1800–91), had said, ‘Plans are nothing; planning is everything.’ The emphasis on planning imbued operations with flexibility at all levels, which fixation on a single plan simply threw away. Despite Schlieffen’s emphasis on this plan, which he was never truly satisfied with, the German General Staff did not allow itself to become brain-dead to the vagaries of fortune. Exercises were conducted that featured events that would throw the railway mobilisation off track, such as accidents and more importantly changes in strategic direction. There was even a war plan for mobilisation solely against Russia which was regularly exercised, though this plan never received the emphasis of the Schlieffen Plan.

So it was that Captain Sigurd von Ilsemann, a junior aide-de-camp to the Kaiser, was surprised to learn of this Russian variant on his advance visit in late 1913 to Staab’s headquarters in preparation for a possible inspection by the Kaiser a few months later. Staab explained that they were about to conduct a staff exercise of the mobilisation plan against Russia. The captain was evidently surprised; he had been aware of only the Schlieffen Plan against France. Staab explained that though the Schlieffen Plan had had priority, there was an equally well-organised and exercised mobilisation plan to point the German armies east.⁴ Tall and handsome, as were all of Wilhelm’s aides, the thirty-year-old Ilsemann was also shrewd and intensely devoted to His Majesty. The Kaiser’s visit would be cancelled, but Ilsemann tucked that piece of information away. His family had estates in East Prussia as well as his native Lüneburg in Lower Saxony, so war against the Russians was of more than professional interest to him.⁵

Ironically it was the Kaiser himself, Wilhelm II, who had reservations about the Schlieffen Plan and war with the British. He was a man of occasional brilliant insight, albeit well hidden by his Anglophobia, bombast, and reckless statements. He was the grandson of Victoria and well acquainted with his British cousins. His determination to match and surpass them had made him all too aware of their power.

Right now, as the war clouds gathered and darkened, his immediate problem was with his current Chief of the General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, the nephew and namesake of the great field marshal. The man upon whom the Kaiser had depended to command Germany in the life-and-death struggle against its surrounding enemies was a hollow nonentity.

The Kaiser had no one to blame but himself. Wilhelm II was obsessed with the illusion of the power of outward continuity. He had been so alarmed when Alfred Krupp, the founder of the German arms industry and the giant Krupp cannon factories, died with no male issue to carry on the name that he pushed through the Reichstag a single exception law that permitted whomever married his daughter Berta to take the Krupp name. It was not hard to find a broken-down aristocrat to throw away his name for a stake in the Krupp empire.

So it was with the Chief of the General Staff. His fate was to bear the same name as his legendary uncle, the field marshal and military genius who had organised the Prussian Army for its string of victories that created the German Empire. Von Moltke the Younger, as he came to be called, was appalled when the Kaiser announced to him in 1906 that he was to succeed Schlieffen as Chief of the German General Staff. He had worked diligently if unimaginatively as the great man’s assistant as quartermaster general, but the thought of taking all that responsibility unnerved him. He had even told the Kaiser, ‘I do not know how I shall get on in the event of a campaign. I am very critical of myself.’⁶

The Kaiser brushed that aside. He seemed to think the Moltke name alone had a magic quality. That sentiment in this case was not shared by Moltke, who had clearly taken to heart Socrates’ admonition, ‘Know thyself’. Moltke’s constant air of melancholy was so palpable that even Wilhelm dubbed him Der trauige Julius – ‘Sad Julius’.⁷

The Moltke name had been more of a curse, depriving him of the solid military background vital for someone who would direct Germany’s armies in war. He had spent the first ten years of his service as aide-decamp to his illustrious uncle, followed by the same position for the Kaiser himself for another five years, which required him to attend not only to the Kaiser personally but to accompany him on his restless travels. Despite subsequent troop commands from regiment to division (1896–1904), he still remained in close attendance on the Kaiser. His appointment as Schlieffen’s deputy in 1904 ‘was met with incredulity’ in knowledgeable circles.⁸ That impression was echoed by foreign attaché reports which rated him a lightweight, such as the Austrian comment that ‘He is a complete stranger to the activities within the General Staff.’⁹ What really alarmed his contemporaries was his obsession with spiritualism and the occult under the domineering control of his wife. More than anything else they were concerned that ‘he was a religious dreamer [who] believed in guardian angels, faith-healing and similar nonsense.’¹⁰ Instead of taking this to heart, Wilhelm was more concerned with a candidate with whom he was familiar and comfortable, so much so that the addressed him with the familiar du. He said, ‘General von der Goltz has also been recommended to me, whom I don’t want, and also General von Veseler, whom I don’t know. I know you, and I trust you.’¹¹

By 30 July the strain on Moltke’s brittle personality was beginning to tell. It was not a propitious time to lose faith in oneself. Moltke was desperate for proof of Russia’s mobilisation. Over a week ago, the tsar had ordered a partial mobilisation, but still Moltke had no tangible evidence, so well had the Russians kept their mobilisation secret. The same day the French armies were ordered to close on the border, based on misleading information that the Germans had mobilised, and yet the German Army had not even received its premobilisation order.¹² The Reichschancellor, Theobald von Bethmann- Hollweg, refused to authorise the order until there was definite proof that Russia was mobilising. That came from a telegram from Count Frederich Pourtalés, the German ambassador to St Petersburg. He emphatically stated that the Russians had already begun their mobilisation. The same day German Army intelligence had concluded that Russia’s mobilisation was ‘far advanced’. Compounding Moltke’s shock was the news that the Austrians had decided to only pursue their war plan that involved Serbia and not the one that included Russia.¹³ Only twenty Austrian divisions would be facing the four Russian armies along their mutual border. Germany would feel the full brunt of a Russian attack that would be able to divert more forces from the Austrian front. Moltke had pleaded with the Austrians to cancel their campaign against Serbia and concentrate on Russia. Unfortunately, the Austrians fecklessly had become obsessed with the petty spoils in the Balkans.

The chancellor realised that the next step was unavoidable. He then telephoned the Kaiser and read him Pourtalés’s telegram. Wilhelm arrived quickly to sign the Kriegsgefahrzustand order, which was to be operative as of 3 p.m. It would take only two days from that point for mobilisation itself to begin. That same day, with the Kaiser’s approval, Bethmann-Hollweg sent two fateful telegrams. The first was to Russia demanding that it halt its mobilisation or Germany would defend itself. The second was to France demanding that its government clarify its position on its own mobilisation. By noon the next day, when the Russian deadline had passed, the Russians had not responded, and the French reply stated tersely that: ‘France would act according to her interests.’ The French deadline passed at 2 p.m. Berlin time without any further clarification. By 4 p.m. the mobilisation placards were beginning to go up all through France.

Bethmann-Hollweg still shrank from recommending mobilisation to the Kaiser. Nevertheless, he had the day before addressed the Bundesrat and got its unanimous approval, but in a fateful remark stated, ‘If the iron dice must roll, then God help us.’ He had become a prisoner of the Schlieffen Plan, which required that mobilisation be followed immediately by war. Germany must violate the sovereignty of both Luxembourg and Belgium for the right wing of the German armies to envelop the French as well as declaring war against France. At the same time war would have to be declared against Russia.

The German naval minister, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was aghast at how poorly the plan had been thought out from the diplomatic and international law perspective. He almost shouted at the chancellor, ‘We will be seen as the aggressor in the eyes of the world but more importantly in the eyes of the British, who are the only ones in position to do something about it. And that, Herr Chancellor, is a great deal.’

Moltke came to the chancellor’s defence and said, ‘They have only a contemptible little army that we will easily throw into the Channel.’

Tirpiz glared at him. ‘I will have a little more trouble with the Royal Navy.’ His irony was lost on Moltke. He went on to say that both Italy and Romania were bound to come to Germany’s aid if it were attacked. Those obligations would not be operative if Germany declared war first and attacked.¹⁴ The defence minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn, was more concerned with the immediate realisation that Russian mobilisation was further along than anyone had expected. German reconnaissance reported parts of its order of battle as it observed the Russian 1st and 2nd armies massing on Germany’s eastern frontier. He pressed the chancellor to recommend mobilisation to the Kaiser. At 5 p.m. Wilhelm signed the order in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Falkenhayn remembered that both the Kaiser and he ‘had tears in their eyes’.

Moltke left immediately so as not give the Kaiser an opportunity for second thoughts even though it had been announced that a critical message from Germany’s ambassador to Great Britain, Baron Karl Max von Lichnowsky, was being rushed over personally by the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Gottlieb von Jagow. Moltke had barely reached the General Staff headquarters when he was recalled. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the palace. Instead of tears there was near jubilation. In the time he had been gone, Lichnowsky’s telegram had completely reversed the entire strategic situation. It stated that ‘Sir Edward Grey [British foreign secretary] had just called me upon the telephone and asked whether I thought I could give an assurance that in the event of a war between Russia and Germany whether we should not attack the French. I assured him that I could take the responsibility for such a guarantee and he will use this assurance at today’s Cabinet meeting.’¹⁵ Jagow interpreted this as Britain’s guarantee of French neutrality. Wilhelm was visibly relieved and exclaimed, ‘Now we can go to war against Russia only. We simply march the whole of our army to the east.’¹⁶

‘Your Illustrious Uncle Would Not Have Given me Such an Answer’

Moltke nearly had an aneurism as he listened to the Kaiser, supported by Tirpitz, Bethmann-Hollweg, and Jagow, state he was willing to halt any movement against France in exchange for French neutrality. According to an observer, ‘This gave rise to an extremely lively and dramatic dispute … Moltke, very excited, with trembling lips, insisted on his position. The Kaiser and the Chancellor and all the others pleaded with him in vain.’ He insisted that mobilisation once set in motion could not be altered; the Schlieffen Plan was now automatically going to happen. There was no plan to mobilise solely against Russia. At this comment, Captain von Ilsemann sucked in his breath. What had the Chief of the Imperial General Staff just said? How could he possibly be ignorant of the Russian plan Staab had briefed him on?¹⁷

He listened as Moltke went on that it would be suicidal to do anything else. Already, he said the 16th Infantry Division had crossed the Luxembourg border. Wilhelm would have none of that. He immediately sent the order to halt the division. Moltke argued that the railway route through Luxembourg was vital. The Kaiser shot back, ‘Use other routes.’ It was an amazing performance. The bombastic, highly strung Wilhelm was now the soul of common sense, refusing to be dragged along behind a plan that was clearly being overtaken by events. Moltke’s response was near to hysteria:

Your Majesty, it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised. If Your Majesty insists on leading the whole army to the East it will not be as an army ready for battle but a disorganised mob of armed men with no arrangements for supply. Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labour to compete, and once settled it cannot be altered.¹⁸

He took Falkenhayn aside to say privately that ‘he was a totally broken man, because this decision by the Kaiser demonstrated to him that the Kaiser still hoped for peace.’¹⁹

The Chief of the General Staff continued to plead, but Wilhelm remained adamant. He said, ‘Your illustrious uncle would not have given me such an answer. If I order it, it must be possible.’ He emphasised his decision by ordering champagne to be uncorked.²⁰ Bethmann-Hollweg and Jagow were busy drafting the German acceptance of the British offer. Moltke was now visibly losing control of himself. Suddenly he put his hands to his head. ‘Such pain,’ he murmured. Then he collapsed. The household physician was called, but all he could do was pronounce Moltke’s death, probably due to a stroke. To add more chaos to the moment, Lichnowsky’s follow-on telegram arrived. Apparently, Grey’s comments had not had the backing of the Cabinet. He had merely been talking through his hat, an appalling act of fecklessness for the British foreign secretary. It would not be until 11 p.m., though, that a succession of clarifications had completely removed any doubt that the British were not going to broker anything that would ensure their neutrality or that of the French.

There is a Way Out

A thoroughly resigned Wilhelm then said to Falkenhayn, whom he had appointed to succeed Moltke, ‘Now you can do what you want.’ All this time Ilsemann had been in rapt but silent attention. His junior position precluded his participation in these conversations. To do so would be a violation of strict German military decorum. Yet he remembered at this moment a story told by the elder Moltke of the Franco-Prussian War. It seems that a Prussian major had been sent on a mission but in accomplishing it he ignored an even greater opportunity. The Crown Prince had tongue-lashed him for this failure, but he replied, ‘His Majesty made me an officer to obey my orders.’ The prince shot back, ‘His Majesty made you an officer to know when to disobey your orders!’

The general bowed and was just about to turn away. Ilsemann stepped forward. ‘Your Majesty, there is a way out.’ Every eye turned to him. So desperate were the men in the room that they were willing to clutch at straws – decorum went flying out of the window.

‘The attack against France is not set in stone, Your Majesty. Last year I visited the Railway Department of the General Staff in preparation for your inspection which was subsequently cancelled. They were exercising the mobilisation plan against Russia.’ There was a moment of stupefied silence, then everyone started talking at once. The Kaiser jumped up and started pacing.

He stopped and said, ‘But the French will still attack us in the west.’

Falkhenhayn added, ‘We are just back where we were.’

A cooler head, General Baron Moritz von Lyncker, chief of the Prussian military cabinet, suggested: ‘Gentlemen, I think it would be prudent to ask General von Staab.’ He was summoned immediately to the palace from Potsdam.

No one was more surprised than Staab to receive the summons. Falkenhayn quickly filled him in on the situation. The Kaiser looked at him with all the nervousness of man whose wife had gone into labour twelve hours before. ‘Can it be done?’

Without a pause, Staab replied with great confidence, ‘Your Majesty, I can put a million men in four armies on the Russian border in ten days. We have a plan for just that and we exercised it just last November.’ He saw Ilsemann and nodded to him. ‘The good captain here visited the Railway Department just as the exercise was beginning.’

It was Tirpitz who spoke next. ‘Your Majesty realises this is a priceless gift. Germany will stand the aggrieved party in the eyes of the world. This does not require us to declare war on anyone first or to attack anyone first. Most importantly, by respecting Belgian neutrality it seriously lowers the risk that the British will enter the war, and it will oblige Italy and Romania to enter the war as allies.’ The prospect of not having to slug it out with the Royal Navy filled him with incredible relief. In comparison, Tirpitz viewed the Russian Baltic Fleet as prey.

Falkenhayn added, ‘We can depend upon a French attack, but if it can be confined to the Franco-German border, we can hold them off while the decision is achieved in the east. We have spent years preparing the region for defence. The geography is perfect for it, and we have intelligence that the French war plan, Plan XVII, will throw the bulk of the French armies there. If the French invade Belgium to outflank us, it is they and not us who will have to deal with the British, who have guaranteed its neutrality. In any case we will be able to stand up the 9th Army, our strategic reserve, in central Germany to cover Belgium if that happens.’

The Kaiser was so immensely relieved that he could even assay a joke. ‘Yes, then it will be the Belgians who request German assistance to resist the French invasion. I can always offer the Belgian king refuge in Germany.’

Again Tirpitz spoke. ‘British neutrality is crucial for Germany to fight and win this war. A neutral Britain will not interfere with our importation of vital war materials. I must remind everyone here that this country cannot feed itself without very large imports of food.’ His naval background with its emphasis on technology and material made him far more conscious of the effects of a cut-off of vital imports should the Royal Navy blockade Germany.

The Iron Dice Roll

Staab was as good as his word. Eleven thousand trains sped east, bringing the four German armies to the border of Russian Poland in the ten days he had promised. All were in place by 11 August. The 8th Army shifted north to open land north of the ninety-mile-long (145 km) Masurian Lakes. The immensely powerful 1st and 2nd armies with almost 600,000 men marshalled from Torn south of the lakes. The 3rd Army concentrated east of Posen and the 4th Army east of Breslau. Staab had indeed delivered his one million men to the east. These four armies hung back just far enough from the border so that Russian cavalry reconnaissance would not detect them. The Russians had made the mistake of sending all their reconnaissance aircraft to the Austrian border, which further blinded them to the secret massing of the German armies. The Germans now found that the configuration of the border offered them significant operational and strategic advantages. The part of Poland that Russia swallowed again after the end of the Napoleonic Wars formed a salient, with Prussia to the north and Austrian Galicia to the south. In the northern centre of the salient was the Polish capital of Warsaw, a major transportation hub for the Russians as well as Lodz in the middle, the main Russian supply and logistics base for any war with Germany. Both sides faced a limiting logistics problem. The Russian railway gauge was wider than the German. Either army penetrating the other’s territory would be reduced to the logistical capabilities of the horse-drawn Napoleonic era during initial operations. The Germans, however, had the advantage of an efficient railway service that could immediately begin to reconfigure the wider Russian gauge to take German locomotives and railway carriages.

On the diplomatic front the Germans had pledged not to violate the neutrality or attack France. Jagow had formally informed the British that Germany would do everything to avoid war in the west and that it had concentrated most of its strength against the Russians due specifically to the provocation of the Russian mobilisation, which had preceded the Germans’ own mobilisation. All of this simply let the air out of the momentum for war. British participation in the Triple Entente was provoked by fears of Germany’s designs in the west. Britain had historically been the strategic balancing wheel of Europe, frustrating attempts by any power to dominate Western Europe. The necessity for such balancing diminished the farther east events moved. It just about evaporated on the Polish border. In Berlin the strategic decision had been made to not be the first to declare war. These events left the French almost frothing at the mouth. They saw a priceless opportunity to attack Germany now that most of its armies had been sent east, egged on by the Chief of the General Staff Joffre and the War Minister Viviani. Their own mobilisation was almost now complete and the time for agreed-upon joint offensives with the Russians was almost upon them. There was the feeling in the face of growing British hesitation to go it alone. In this moment of tension the luckless Austrians were now to play a decisive part. On 12 August two Austrian armies invaded Serbia.

A flurry of last-minute negotiations went nowhere in the next two days. The French and Russians used that time to confirm that they would begin simultaneous offensive operations against Germany on 15 August. On midnight of the 14th the Russian and French ambassadors delivered their declarations of war. Hours later, French and Russian cavalry divisions invaded Germany in East Prussia and Alsace-Lorraine. To the shock of the British, two French armies invaded Belgium in the Ardennes to swing around the heavily fortified German border. King Albert of the Belgians immediately called upon the British to fulfil their treaty obligations to defend the neutrality of his country. London dithered. The British interest in Belgium’s neutrality had been only because whoever controlled its ports had a springboard to invade the British Isles. Clearly, the French in the Ardennes were not such a threat.

The French were making much of the iron law of necessity, much as the Athenians had when they invaded Sicily in 415 bc. Nevertheless, they maintained that they had no wish to take any Belgian territory and would not advance into the heavily populated Belgian heartland along the coast. Finally, the British Cabinet hit upon a solution that would demonstrate their support for Belgium without going to war. They deployed Royal Marines to Antwerp, to be followed by I Corps (two infantry divisions and one cavalry brigade), all with strict orders to stay away from the French. The French understood this ‘wink–wink–nod–nod’ situation and confined themselves to the Ardennes.²¹ Unfortunately for them, the Germans committed their strategic reserve, the new 9th Army, to the Ardennes as well. The Germans could not have wished for better defensive ground and stopped the French cold in the wooded mountains. The French found themselves throwing at great cost wave after wave of infantry against the German division holding the vital road hub of Bastogne. The valiant defence of that minor Belgian town thrilled the German people and became legend.

To the south, the three German armies held the lunging French at bay, leaving heaps of red-trousered corpses in front of their numerous machine guns. But it was in the east that the attention of the German people was fixed. The Germans had waited for the Russians to attack into East Prussia. While the 8th Army fixed the Russian 1st Army north of the Masurian Lakes, the German 1st and 2nd armies enveloped the Russian 2nd Army. It was a complete Cannae, the great battle of 216 bc in which Hannibal had utterly destroyed Rome’s finest army by envelopment. Hardly a man of the 200,000-strong Russian Army escaped. At the same time, the German 3rd and 4th armies crossed the border, aiming for the Russian logistics centre at Lodz fifty miles away. Not only a logistics centre, Lodz was ‘the ‘Manchester of the Russian Empire’s huge cotton industry’.’²² To the south, the Russians had given the Austrians a bloody nose in Galicia, stopping their bungled offensive dead and then throwing them back. Those victories drew the Russian gaze in that direction, and almost too late they tried to divert their 4th Army to the defence of Lodz. At this point the Russian railways served them well. They got enough of the army there just in time on 20 August to prevent advance German units from seizing the city. Newly mobilised Russian divisions began to arrive at the front to stabilise the defence of the city. Still, by the time the bulk of the two German armies arrived, the Russians would still be heavily outnumbered. To the north, the victorious 1st and 2nd armies were on the outskirts of Warsaw. Its fall would seriously disrupt the Russian railways.

Rennen von Kampf

The German steamroller seemed to be crushing everything in its path – except at Gumbinen in East Prussia. There another one of the Kaiser’s ‘social’ promotions led to disaster. The commander of the 8th Army, General Maximilian von Prittwitz, had been a personal favourite of the Kaiser, but the man’s incompetence was apparent even to Moltke, who repeatedly tried to get him removed. Against the imperial favour, his protestations of Prittwitz’s professional ineptitude had been fruitless. Making the situation worse was the fact that his Chief of Staff, the other half of the German command team concept, was equally inadequate. The only man at army headquarters who seemed to have his wits about him was the operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann, by accounts a young military genius. Even he, though, could not shore up the situation after Prittwitz had lost his nerve when his advance corps had unwisely attacked the Russian 1st Army, commanded by General Pavel Rennenkampf, unsupported and got whipped at Gumbinen just inside the German border. It was a remarkable Russian success considering Rennenkampf’s tactical timidity.

Prittwitz’s solution was to withdraw all the way back to Königsberg on the Baltic coast as Rennenkampf cautiously followed. With the heartland of the Hohenzollern house threatened, Wilhelm came to his senses and agreed to Falkenhayn’s demands for Prittwitz’s dismissal. In his place, the retired general Paul von Hindenburg was appointed. Hoffmann was promoted to Chief of Staff, thus creating a command team that would be considered a model of effectiveness for the remainder of the war. Nevertheless, the crisis created by the panic had resulted in the detachment of General von Kluck’s 1st Army from the drive on Warsaw to the defence of East Prussia. The irony was that it was completely unnecessary. The Hindenburg–Hoffmann team turned the retreating 8th Army on its heel and in a classic envelopment trapped half of the Russian 1st Army, inflicting 150,000 casualties. The shattered remnants fled back across the border, closely pursued by the 8th Army. In the lead was Rennenkampf himself, who fled so far that the incredulous Russian North-West Front command requested confirmation, only to discover how far Rennenkampf had outdistanced his command. By that time, even his own staff could not conceal their contempt for the man they now called ‘Rennen von Kampf’ or ‘run from the fight’.²³

Rennenkampf was only one example of the rot in the Russian Army. Despite a weeding out of incompetents after the Russo-Japanese War and 1905 Revolution, the army was just not good enough to fight the Germans, who in contrast operated with a breathtaking boldness, ability, and efficiency. Hindenburg pointed to an example of Russian ineptitude when he wrote in amazement how the Russian signals continued to send messages en clair without any attempt to use cyphers. Another fateful indicator was that one regiment of Rennenkampf’s army used 1.5 per cent of the Russian ammunition production for 1914. The strain of war would quickly reveal how inadequate the rest of Russia’s war production base was. It says something about the Austrians that the Russians were so clearly superior against them. Despite that, the Russians were paying for having concentrated so much force against a secondary enemy.

The Russian high command (Stavka) was beginning to panic. So crushing had been the German victories of mid- and late August that they cancelled out the equally impressive Russian victories over the Austrians. All reinforcements were now being sent to defend the Polish salient. Although Russian divisions were arriving in waves, it was not enough to affect the German numerical superiority on that front. Two new Russian armies were committed: the 10th to replace the shattered 1st Army facing Hindenburg and the 4th to defend Warsaw and Lodz. It was not enough. The Germans, by moving the bulk of their armies to the east, had established an immediate numerical superiority that continued to gobble up Russian reinforcements as they arrived – a result of their phased mobilisation. On top of the numerical superiority, the Germans were working at such a higher level of overall efficiency that one German soldier was the equivalent of half a dozen Russians or more. By the middle of September, both Warsaw and Lodz had fallen and the reeling Russian front was on the point of collapse despite its reinforcements from the Galacian front. The only thing that saved them was that the Germans had to pause to let their exhausted troops rest as Staab’s Railway Department expedited the conversion of the Russian-gauge railways.

In the west the French offensive had also paused in the face of sustained and bloody failure. The British remained neutral, a condition that was reinforced by the generally accepted position that Germany had had this war thrust upon it and that no British vital interests were at risk. There was also a reawakening of the old sense of British–German solidarity born of more than a hundred years of alliances against French ambitions. World opinion quickly followed that lead, the United States being the most supportive of Germany’s situation, reinforced by its large German-American population. It was President Theodore Roosevelt, nearing the end of his second full term, who offered his good offices for peace negotiations based upon a return to the status quo ante. His reputation from forging a peace between Russia and Japan in 1905 had made him a man of serious international standing. The British Cabinet unanimously supported such a move – to the outrage of the French, who had resurrected the term ‘perfidious Albion’ and injected it with a new venom.

Yet the logic of the appeal resonated. None of the belligerents had sunk so much blood into a war barely two months old that they felt they had to fight on to redeem it. American diplomacy had been quietly sounding out the belligerents before Roosevelt made his offer. The ground had been prepared. Germany, with unexpected adroitness, eagerly accepted the American mediation first, dumping the onus of refusal on the French and Russians. Grudgingly, they accepted Roosevelt’s recommendation of an immediate armistice. The peace commissioners met in The Hague and there hammered out the Roosevelt Peace, as it was commonly called. In the end, the status quo ante was generously interpreted.²⁴ The chunk of Russian Poland that the Germans had taken was made into an independent Kingdom of Poland with a Hohenzollern prince on the throne and the unspoken understanding that it would be a German client. The armies evacuated the new Polish state in stages, except certain German forces which were to train the new Polish Royal Army and dispose of masses of surrendered Russian materials. In 1916 the presence of these forces was formally recognised in a status of forces agreement.

The Russians were in no position to protest. Their defeat had been followed by an attempted Bolshevik revolution which was only staved off by the abdication of the tsar to be replaced by the young tsarevich Aleksei. His haemophilic disability tortuously placed him under the control of the most brilliant of the Russian ministers, Pytor Stolypin,²⁵ a man who had barely escaped assassination in 1911. He was considered the most dangerous of all the tsar’s ministers by the Bolsheviks because he was creating an independent peasantry as a bulwark of the throne by breaking up the village collectives. Under his guidance, Russia was finally able to develop as a constitutional monarchy and continue its rapid industrialisation. Seeing the hopelessness of their revolutionary efforts, the surviving Bolsheviks eventually dissipated into a small remnant of malicious cranks. One of their leaders, named Vladimir Lenin, died of syphilis in Switzerland, forgotten and obscure.²⁶

As a pro-German buffer state, the new Kingdom of Poland effectively insulated both the Germans and Russians from their traditional rivalry for the next twenty years. The French retreated into the reality of the situation. With their only possible ally on the continent no longer available and their temporary entente with British thoroughly discredited, they came to accept the state of affairs of German predominance in Europe. Yet that logic worked for the interests of France by breaking the alliance system that had produced the German paranoia of encirclement in the first place. Germany’s attention would be occupied not with France but with the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose performance in the short war had utterly discredited itself.

Europe gave an immense sigh of relief as the war concluded. Although there had been a million casualties in the two months of fighting, life resumed its normal course. The West’s sense of optimism and progress actually increased, oddly enough spurred on by the fact that an even longer and more devastating war had been so responsibly avoided. Among those most relieved was Wilhelm, known now to his people as the Heldkaiser – the hero emperor. It is no wonder then that at the wedding of Colonel Sigurd von Ilsemann in 1925, to a lady-in-waiting to the empress, the Kaiser himself stood as best man. When the Kaiser died in 1940, the entire nation grieved for a man that had led them through the fire to a secure and prosperous future. Germany had indeed found its place in the sun.

The Reality

The German General Staff did indeed have a war mobilisation plan directed at Russia which it regularly exercised until 1913 despite the priority given to the Schlieffen Plan. The irony was that General von Staab was never consulted during the tense showdown between the Kaiser and Moltke. The latter was aware of the Russian variant of the mobilisation plan but had neither the moral courage nor imagination to raise it as a possible alternative when the misleading report from the German ambassador in London upset the mobilisation applecart. Indeed, as the Kaiser said, his uncle would have given him a different answer. The plausible basis for Moltke suffering a fatal stroke was the belief of his wife that that confrontation with the Kaiser and his chief ministers had indeed caused a minor stroke in her husband. He was never the same man. Following his relief after the Battle of the Marne, his health rapidly declined and he died in 1916.

For his part, Staab only learned of the showdown in the Charlottenburg Palace after the war. He was so outraged at the insult to his Railway Department that he wrote a book, Aufmarsch nach zwei Fronten: auf Grund der Operationspläne von 1870–1914, to show that he could have moved four German armies with a million men to the eastern border in ten days. Given his remarkable feat of putting seven German armies with almost two million men on the French and Belgian borders in a similar period, one can only take him at his word. Ilsemann was an actual aide of the Kaiser, went with him into exile, and continued to serve him until his death in 1940. The Kaiser was his best man at his wedding in 1925 to a lady-in-waiting to the empress. His fictitious intervention at the critical moment was the catalyst for Staab to be consulted. It is conceivable that someone around the Kaiser would have known of the Russian variant. Yet no one did – or did not want to contradict Moltke – and upon that silence, history took the long and ruinous path: the war that nearly broke the back of Western civilisation and unleashed the lethal bacilli of communism and national socialism upon the world, political pandemic movements that fouled the twentieth century and caused the deaths of two hundred million human beings.

The Schlieffen Plan was based on the serious miscalculation of the Russian ability to mobilise. It was adopted as the priority plan in 1905, the very year that Russia was convulsed by defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the following abortive revolution. Serious reforms were made in the Russian Army thereafter, including its mobilisation plan, which the Germans appear to not have taken into account in the years following 1905. Yet the phased Russian mobilisation plan was vulnerable to a rapid mobilisation of the German armies in the east. Such a plan would have put an enormous mass of manoeuvres on the border, against which the Russians would have had to commit their forces piecemeal as they arrived, ensuring their defeat comprehensively. This situation had the clear potential to result in the early defeat of the Russian Army. Such a strategic turn by Germany would have allowed it to follow Tirpitz’s advice to not be the first nation to declare war but to let the enemies of Germany assume the role of aggressors, a neat juxtaposition of the onus that Germany actually incurred.