The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (7 page)

On 28 December 1905, after fourteen years of tinkering on his strategic blueprint, Schlieffen committed his final thoughts on a future war with France and Russia to the famous memorandum that bears his name.
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The keys to victory lay in rapid mobilization and numerical superiority at the decisive point. In its final form, the Schlieffen Plan ordered roughly 15 percent of German forces (two weak armies of five corps) along with Italian Third Army (three corps), transported to the Rhine through Austria-Hungary, to anchor the front on the Upper Rhine. The bulk of the German armies would quick-march west through the Low Countries; drive around the French left (or northern) flank; and, sweeping the English Channel with their “sleeves,” wheel into the Seine basin southwest of Fortress Paris, where they would destroy the main French armies. This “hammer” would then pound any remaining enemy units against the German “anvil” in Lorraine, or against the Swiss border. Depending on the pace of the fighting in the south, Schlieffen was even prepared to detach two army corps from Lorraine and rush them north to reinforce the right wing (which would then constitute 91 percent of his forces). Six Ersatz divisions (surplus trained reserves) would follow up the initial assault and mop up or besiege Belgian and French forces and fortresses. In the meantime, a single army, using the lake-and swamp-studded terrain of East Prussia to advantage, would hold off the Russians.

Schlieffen meticulously crafted his grand design. The first twenty days of mobilization were laid out down to the minute for 20,800 trains of fifty cars each that were to transport 2.07 million men, 118,000 horses, and 400,000 tons of war materials to the fronts.
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Each active army corps was assigned 140 trains, each reserve corps 85, and each cavalry division 31. Thirteen major rail lines were secured for the
Westaufmarsch
alone, and 660 trains per day were to run along each line. Major operations, Schlieffen lectured the General Staff, needed to be calculated down to the last detail. “It must be the same as it is at battalion-level exercises.”
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The campaign against France was to be over in forty days, after which the armies would race across Germany to deal with the slowly mobilizing Russian armies. Schlieffen had decided on a high-risk offensive between Thionville (Diedenhofen) and the Dutch border with all available forces (five armies of seventeen active corps) for political reasons: Russia’s poor performance in its war against Japan that year convinced him that the French would stand on the defensive for years to come.
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In his last “General Staff Tour West 1905,” Schlieffen twice had his operations staff game three scenarios (Steuben, Kuhl, Freytag) for a campaign against France. In each case, he led the German (blue) side, which defeated his adversary (red). The most interesting for our purposes is Case Freytag II, in which Schlieffen pursued the retreating French armies across the Marne, cut them off from Paris by turning south before he reached the capital, “pursued the French east of Paris,” drove southeast, and finally broke them against the Swiss border by the fifty-sixth day of mobilization.
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It was an all-or-nothing throw of the dice, a high-risk operation born of hubris and bordering on recklessness. It was coordinated with neither the Chancellery, the Navy Office, the Foreign Office, the Finance Ministry, the War Ministry, nor the Austro-Hungarian ally. It disregarded Carl von Clausewitz’s concepts of interaction, friction, escalation, reassessment, the “genius of war,” and the “fog of uncertainty.” It violated the neutrality of Belgium and the Netherlands, thus making Britain’s entry into the war more probable. It was crafted without regard for existing German troop strengths. The final memorandum failed to mention that Germany was eight corps shy of Schlief -fen’s original prescription. And while it envisaged first the siege and then the battering of Fortress Paris by seven or eight corps, none of these as yet existed even on paper.
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Moreover, the Schlieffen Plan was based on a number of fragile assumptions: that the Russians would take at least forty days to mobilize; that the Dutch and Belgian railroad systems would assure his speed of advance; that the element of surprise would throw the French (and British) off their guard; and that the German railroad system would be able expeditiously to transfer the bulk of the armies from west to east in time to stall the Russian steamroller. And Schlieffen’s 1905 blueprint was riddled with hedge words such as
if, when, perhaps
, and
hopefully
. It was a classic best-case scenario, an “audacious, yes, overly audacious gamble, whose success depended on many strokes of luck.”
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Schlieffen was not without his critics.
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Senior commanders questioned his “miraculous” strategy. Karl von Einem-Rothmaler pointed out that whereas the Elder Moltke in 1870–71 had led a Prussian army of 462,000 soldiers, Schlieffen proposed directing one of 2 million. Colmar von der Goltz questioned the concept of a forty-day
Blitz
through Belgium and France. Gottlieb von Haeseler argued that one could not expect to capture a great power such as France “like a cat in a sack.” Martin Köpke, Rothe’s predecessor as deputy chief of staff, as early as August 1895 had warned his chief against such an all-or-nothing strategy. France’s numerical superiority in troop strength and its vast network of fortresses along its eastern border with Germany precluded another quick victory such as that scored by the Prussians against Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870. “We cannot expect quick, decisive victories,” he cautioned, as even “the most offensive spirit” could achieve little more than “a tough, patient and stout-hearted crawling forward step-by-step.” Foreshadowing what was to come twenty years later, Köpke argued that Schlieffen’s plan, if enacted, would degenerate into “siege-style” warfare.
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The “storm of steel” that dominated the modern battlefield by 1905 was lethal: Prussian troops suffered 68 percent casualties at Mars-la-Tour in 1870, whereas the Japanese Nambu Brigade incurred 90 percent losses during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. What nation would accept that loss rate for an army of two million young men?

SCHLIEFFEN PLAN 1905 AND FRENCH PLAN XVII

Schlieffen apparently accepted Köpke’s critique—and continued with his operational planning. For his critics offered no viable alternative. Germany could not fight a protracted war against a superior hostile coalition either in terms of men and money, or without endangering domestic stability (the “red specter,” as Schlieffen put it). It could not divide its armies equally between the west and the east and hope to stay on the defensive indefinitely. Above all, the General Staff could not simply admit that war was no longer a viable option for Germany without calling into question its very existence. It was a Hobbesian choice.

ALTHOUGH SOME REVISIONISTS HAVE
argued, “There never was a ‘Schlieffen plan,’”
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Germany’s senior military leaders had no doubt as to its existence well before 1914. As early as 1907, Moltke had Karl von Fasbender, chief of the Bavarian General Staff, game various aspects of it. In 1912, Wilhelm II asked his senior military planners whether they were prepared to execute the Schlieffen Plan. Two years later, Moltke confirmed that he had inherited a copy of Germany’s “one” operations plan from Schlieffen. Throughout the march to the Marne (“the basic idea of the Schlieffen operation”), Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Groener of the Prussian army’s railroad section wrote his wife praising “the late Schlieffen” as “the man who thought up all the ideas we are carrying out.”
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Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of Sixth Army, throughout August and September 1914 compared every operation mounted by Moltke to “the Old Schlieffen” or to “the Schlieffen Plan.”
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Moltke’s successor, Erich von Falkenhayn, cryptically noted on taking command of the General Staff in mid-September 1914: “Schlieffen’s notes are at an end and therewith also Moltke’s wits.”
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Colonel Wilhelm Müller-Loebnitz of the General Staff (and later official army historian) knew of the existence of the plan well before 1914 and participated in many of the maneuvers designed to test it. Moreover, Schlieffen had frequently and “thoroughly discussed” the plan with Müller-Loebnitz as far back as 1905.
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And the editors who produced the fourteen-volume official history of the war
(Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918)
had no problem identifying that operations plan to have been Schlieffen’s.

In fact, there existed no formal German war plan. Only Wilhelm II in his function as Supreme War Lord could exercise “the power to command.”
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As is well known, the kaiser was utterly unable to carry out such a demanding role. Thus, war planning fell by default to the chief of the General Staff, Moltke, even though he commanded not a single soldier, battalion, regiment, division, or corps. He could issue no formal orders, purchase no equipment, and authorize no war plan. His position was not embedded in the Constitution of 1871. And until a state of war was decreed by the kaiser and his chancellor (with the approval of the Bundesrath, or Upper House) and the various federal armies united into one German army in August 1914, the chief of the General Staff remained a purely
Prussian
official, one without formal command over the other federal armies.

THE YOUNGER MOLTKE LITERALLY
inherited the Schlieffen Plan in January 1906, for Schlieffen upon retirement had “purposefully” left the memorandum of 28 December 1905 in the General Staff’s iron safe.
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Who was this man, who later would march 2.147 million men into battle?
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Helmuth Johannes Ludwig von Moltke was all things to all people. To his friends, he was decent, honest, earnest, and cultured. To his detractors, he was dour, pessimistic, insecure, and an “occultist.” For he had learned what one German prince called “wretched faith-healing”
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from his wife, Eliza, and her spiritual mentor, the Austrian theosophist Rudolf Steiner.
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Friends and foes alike agreed that Moltke was a complex figure, and one without the sharp Napoleonic eye for the main prize
(coup d’oeil)
or the necessary ambition and drive
(feu sacré)
.

Born on 25 May 1848, Moltke saw action during the Franco-Prussian War in the Vosges, at Sedan, and during the siege of Paris. He rose quickly in rank to become Wilhelm II’s personal adjutant. He dabbled in music and painting. He was a tall, corpulent man. He aspired to command an army corps, but his famous name eventually placed him at the head of the General Staff. He neither sought nor desired the position, fearing not only the kaiser’s well-known penchant for meddling in military affairs but also the “difficult inheritance” of becoming Schlieffen’s successor.
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He was appointed to the post on 1 January 1906, just before turning fifty-eight. While senior army commanders were shocked by the appointment, Wilhelm II crowed that Moltke was just the right man because he, the kaiser, did “not require a General Staff.”
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Moltke quickly adopted Schlieffen’s blueprint. He shared it with only a few members of his planning staff and cut off all communications with Schlieffen, obviously intent on establishing his own credentials independent of the “master.” He maintained most of Schlieffen’s blueprint, but eventually changed some of its bolder force concentration. As a result, Germany went to war on 4 August with a “modified Schlieffen Plan with similar goals.”
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The basic similarities are glaring.
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Both men believed that Germany was “encircled” by hostile powers, and that only military action could “break” the iron ring. Both accepted that Germany would be numerically inferior in a future war; hence, it had to dictate the timing and pace of that conflict. This led to a third common constant, namely, that the main thrust of the offensive had to fall on France. In 1909, as the annexation crisis over Bosnia-Herzegovina evoked a possible Austro-Russian war, Wilhelm II revealed that he knew the Schlieffen Plan. “In order to be able to march against Moscow,” he noted, “Paris must be taken first.”
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That same year, Moltke reminded his Austro-Hungarian counterpart, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, that in case of a two-front war, he would advise the kaiser “to deploy the main mass of German forces initially against France,” leaving only a minimum number of troops “to guard our eastern provinces” against Russia. He gamely promised Conrad that the German army would redeploy in the east “3–4 weeks + 9–10 days transport” after the start of hostilities in the west.
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