1st Blood


The war began on August 2nd, when an advance force of German cavalry moved into Luxembourg to seize its network of railways. That same day Germany delivered an ultimatum to Belgium, demanding unobstructed passage for its armies.

Young King Albert

refused. His little army of only 7 divisions totaling 117,000 troops, began blowing up bridges and rail lines leading into Belgium from Germany. Now suddenly the little city of Liege, always locally important as a center of road, rail, and water transportation, became the most important place on the continent. There defenses, on high bluffs looming over the River Muse, dominated the narrow passage through which the Schlieffen right wing had to pass on its way westward. Unless these defenses were overcome, and quickly, the German advance would be blocked almost at its starting point and the entire offensive reduced to shambles.

Liege was not your ordinary city, it was a ring of 12 massive forts that together made it one of the most formidable military strong points in the world. Each of the forts contained 8 or 9 big guns under armored turrets, and each was built of reinforced concrete and designed to withstand direct hits from the heaviest  artillery then in existence.

General Gerard Leman

The Belgian commander at Liege, had some 8,000 troops inside the fort, plus as a mobile force, a division of 24,000 troops infantry, 500 cavalry, and 72 field guns.

The Germans, as part of their mobilization plan, had formed, trained, and stationed near the border a special strike force of 30,000 men plus mobile field artillery whose sole mission was to attack and neutralize the forts. When the lead elements of this force moved on Liege from the south on August 4th, they were greatly outnumbered by the defenders, but immediately launched a night assault. They met ferocious fire, and where thrown back. They quickly attacked again and again were repulsed. This put the Germans in a desperate situation. Leman, ordered by King Albert to hold his position at all costs(meaning death before surrender or retreat), learned of the appearance of German cavalry to his north and concluded that he would soon be surrounded. To keep his mobile force from capture, he sent it off to join the main Belgian army.

This helped remove a quarter of Belgium's total fighting forces from danger of encirclement and capture, but at a price; it ended any possibility that Leman would have enough troops to keep the Germans at a distance from which their guns would be unable to do their worst.

There now arrived on the scene, and on the world stage, an obscure German officer who quickly established himself as the hero of the siege and with startling speed would become one of the most important men in the German army. This was

Erich Ludendorff

(Note the absent of the von in the name-he wasn't a member of Prussia's Junker Aristocracy). Recently promoted to Major General, a tall portly, double-chinned 49 year old, Ludendorff was on temporary assignment as liaison between the Liege assault force and the German 2nd army, which was still assembling on the German side of the border. There had been good reason for giving Ludendorff this assignment; a few years earlier, as a key member of Moltke's staff he had developed the plans for the reduction of the Liege fortifications. (He had once spent vacation in Belgian in order to examine the defenses at 1st hand).

Now in the German army, unlike the French, it was customary to send staff officers into the field, into combat, where they could observe their plans in action, assist in making adjustments when reality began to intrude, and learn from the experience. But Lundendorff was constitutionally incapable of remaining a mere observer or adviser. He was the one who had sent the cavalry that, by by showing itself north of Liege, had caused Leman to send most of his troops away. Then, coming upon a brigade whose commander had been killed in one of the early attacks, he put himself in charge.

Bringing howitzers forward and directing their fire on the Belgian defenses, he led an assault that gave him possession of an expanse of high ground from which the city and its central citadel were clearly visible. When he could see no sign of activity around the citadel(because Leman had moved to one of the outlying forts),

Ludendorff drove to it. He shouted a demand for surrender while pounding on the gate with the pommel of his sword. Astoundingly, he was obeyed in spite of being greatly outnumbered. Thus the centerpiece of the Liege defenses fell into German hands almost without effort. Even though the circle of forts was still intact, all were now isolated and without any support except what they could give another. Ludendorff then hurried back into Germany to see to it that more and bigger guns were brought forward without delay.

Moltke's 7 western armies, meanwhile, were forming up on a north-south line just inside the German border south of Holland. Picture a clock with Pairs at its center. The line of armies was in the upper-right portion of the clock's face, extending, roughly, from one to 3 o'clock. The biggest and norther most of these armies, positioned to the north and east of Liege, was commanded by

General Alexander von Kluck

a tough, aggressive, irascible, 68 year old hardened infantryman who had begun life as a commoner and had been elevated to the nobility in reward for decades of distinguished service. Remarkably for a high ranking German officer, Kluck had never had a tour of duty on the high commander's headquarters staff. His 1st army, almost a 1/3 of a 1,000,000 men strong, was assigned to be the outer edge of the right wing.

It would have the longest distance to travel as it moved westward across Belgium and then looped toward the southwest. If things went perfectly it would, on its way to Paris, move around and past the westernmost end of the French defensive line. It would then continue southward, circle all the way around Paris, and move back to the east. Then finally it would hit the French line from the rear, pushing it into other German armies positioned at 2 and 3 o'clock and crushing it in a great vice. 

The Germans did students of the war a lasting favor by arranging their armies in numerical order. Next to Kluck, immediately to his south during the mobilization(later to his east, as the Schlieffen wheel made its great turn), was the 2nd army under

General Karl von Bulow

a member of the High Prussian Aristocracy who was also in his late 60's. Then came the 3rd and 4th and so on down to the 7th, which was almost as far south as Paris and had the Swiss border on its left. The 1st three of these armies made up the right wing, and through that wing no longer included as big a part of the German army as Schlieffen had intended, it was still an awesome force of 75,000 troops. This was war on a truly new scale; the army with which Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo had totaled 60,000 men.

The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd armies would be side by side as they drove forward. Their left would be protected by the rest of the German line. Though their right would be exposed, this would be no problem if Kluck could get around the equally exposed French left. His primary assignment, until he had circled Paris, was not to engage the enemy but to keep moving. If circumstances developed in such a way as to permit him to strike at the flank of the French left as he advanced, perhaps crippling it, so much the better. That would be secondary, however. The goal was Paris.

The 2nd armies on the German left, the 6th and the 7th, were not intended to be an attack force. Their role was to absorb an expected advance by the French into Alsace and Lorraine, stopping the invaders from breaking through while keeping them too fully engaged to spare troops for the defense of Paris. Between the 3 armies of the right wing and the 2nd on the left were the 4th and 5th armies, the latter commanded by 

Imperial Crown Prince Wilhelm

the Kaiser's eldest son.

They were to provide a connecting link between the defensive force in the south and the right wing, keeping the line continuous and free of gaps. The would be the hub of the wheel on which the right wing was moving, and they wouldn't have to move either far or fast. They would be an anchor, a pivot point, for the entire campaign. They were to become the killing machine into which Kluck was to drive the French after his swing around Paris.

French General Joffre, 

for his part, had his 1,000,000-plus frontline troops organized into 5 armies. They too were forming up in a line and were in numerical order, with the 1st on the right just above Switzerland. The French 2nd army was immediately to its north, the 3rd above it, and so on northward and westward in a great arc that ended approximately midway between Paris and the starting point of Kluck's army. Joffre's 1st, 2nd and 3rd armies, as they took up their backs to the chain of superfortresses(Verdun,Toul,Epinal, and Belfort) that France had constructed between Switzerland and Belgium. The 4th and 5th, being to the north and west of these forts, had no such strong points to fall back on.

The 5th commanded by Joffre's friend and protege

Charles Lanrezac

was problematic. It was the end of the French line in exactly the same way that Kluck's army was the end of the German, with no significant French forces to its north or west. Its left flank ended, as tacticians say, "up in the air"-out on a limb. This position carried withing it the danger that the Germans might get around Lanrezac's left, exposing him to attack in the flank or from the rear. In the opening days of the war, however, this danger seemed so hypothetical to Joffre as to be unworthy of concern.

Neither Lanrezac nor Joffre had any real way of knowing what the Germans were going to do. Until mobilization was completed, it wouldn't be possible to make much use of the cavalry that was supposed to function as the eyes of the army. The commanders on both sides could do little more than make educated guesses, using whatever information came in from spies or could be gained from the questions of captured soldiers. The sheer size of their armies and the theater of operations, and the unavoidable remoteness of hundreds of thousands of men, compounded the intelligence problem.

The individual armies, too, would be half-blind as they went into action. And they would be far more vulnerable then their size would suggest. A mass of infantry on the move is like nothing else in the world, but it may usefully be thought of as an immensely long and cumbersome caterpillar with the head of a nearsighted tiger. It's structured to make its head as lethal as possible, ready at all times to come to grips with whatever enemy comes into its path. A big part of an army commander's job is to make certain that it is in fact the head that meets the enemy, so that the tiger's teeth-men armed with guns and blades and whatever other implements of destruction-are available to them-can either attack the enemy or fend off the enemy's attack as circumstances require. An advancing army's worst vulnerability lies in the long caterpillar body behind the head.

Great battles can be won when a tiger's head eludes or even accidentally misses the head of its enemy and makes contact with its body instead. When this happens the enemy is "taken in the flank", and if an attacking head has sufficient weight it can quickly tear the enemy's body apart, finally reducing even the head to an isolated, enfeebled remnant. Much the same can happen when an army on the move is taken in the rear, or surrounded and cut off from its lines of supply. Hence the importance that Moltke and Joffre attacked to arranging their armies in an unbroken line, so that each could protect the flanks of its neighbors. Even though in doing so, both generals would start the war with one end of their lines unprotected. Now Joffre, like Moltke, was intent upon taking the offensive. His master plan reflected the French government's refusal to permit any move into neutral territory.

It assumed that the Germans too would stay out of Belgium and Luxembourg, and so its assumed further that the 1st great clash of the war would take place on the French-German border, somewhere between Verdun to the north and the fortress of Belfort to the south. Joffre's 5 armies were more than sufficient to maintain a solid line while attacking from one end of that border to the other, so he saw no reason to be concerned about Lanrezac's left, which would be anchored on Luxembourg. 

Joffre's advantage was that he wasn't irrevocably committed to attacking at any specific place or time or even to attacking at all. Unlike Moltke he had options-he could change his plans and the disposition of his armies according to how the situation developed. This ability quickly proved important; when the Germans moved into Luxembourg and then on to Liege, Joffre was able to order the 4th and 5th armies to shift around and face northward. He expected the Germans to come from the northeast, through Begium's 

Ardennes Forest 

toward the French city of

Sedan.

The left wing would move north to meet them.

Lanrezac wasn't so sure. As word reached him of the intensifying assualt on Liege, he could think of no reason for it unless the Germans needed to clear a path to the west. Even before war was declared-he sent word to Joffre expressing concern about what would happen if the Germans advance westward while his army stayed south of the Belgium border or moved east to join in the French offensive "In such case," he warned, "the 5th army... could do nothing to prevent a possible encircling movement against our left wing." Joffre of course didn't respond; he was certain that no such thing would happen. A week later, with the Germans continuing to concentrate troops opposite Liege, Lanrezac sent another appeal. "This time there can be no doubt," he said, "They are planning a wide encircling movement through Belgium. I ask permission to change the direction of the 5th army toward the north." He had it exactly right, but Joffre remained unpersuaded, confident that whatever was happening around Liege must be a German feint intended to lure his forces out of position. His full attention was focused on launching an capture of France's lost provinces would be a tremendous symbolic triumph.

But as a precaution, though, he did send cavalry on a scouting expedition into Belgium. When they found no evidence of German activity-inevitably, the German not yet having moved beyond Liege-Joffre felt free to proceed with his own plans. His 1st army began crossing into Alsace as early as August 7th, the day Ludendorff captured the Liege citadel, and it made good progress. Another week passed, and the direction of the German right wing became undeniable, before Joffre at last responded to Lanrezac's warnings, telling hi almost laconically that "I see no objection-(to the contrary) to your considering the movement that you propose." Even then he added, with thinly veiled annoyance that, "the threat is as yet only a long term possibility and we are not absolutely certain that it actually exists." Lanrezac started northward, not knowing that it was already too late for him to escape being outflanked in exactly the way he had feared from the start.

The Germans, by this time, had hauled into Belgium the weapons that would decide the fate of Liege, two new kinds of monster artillery;

The 305 mm Skoda siege Mortars 

borrowed from Austria, plus an almost unimaginably huge

420 mm Howitzer

secretly developed and produced by Germany's 

Krupp Steelworks.

Neither of these guns had ever been used in combat. The bigger of the 2 weighing 75 tons and had to be transported by rail in 5 sections and set in concrete before going into action. It could fire up to 10 2,200 lb projectiles per hour, each shell carrying a hardened head and a delayed-action fuse so that it penetrated its target before exploding. It had a range of 9 miles, its projectiles following such a high trajectory that they came down almost vertically. It had to be fired electrically so that the 200 men crew operating it, their heads covered with protective padding, could move 300 yards away and lie down on the ground before detonation. Once "registered"- its elevation and direction set so that every round landed on target-it was a hellishly destructive weapon, capable of breaking apart even the strongest of the Liege forts and vaporizing the men inside. It was a fitting act for a hellish destructive war.

The big guns arrived at Liege on August 10th, but 2 days more were needed to get them in place. By this time, off to the south, Joffre's Alsace offensive had captured several towns, but on August 11th the Germans counterattacked and brought the advance to a stop. The day after that Austria's Field Marshall Conrad, launching the punitive campaign that he had so long craved, sent 3 armies totaling 400,000 men into Serbia, where they soon were moving rapidly across easy terrain toward the mountains to the east.

On August 13th, after taking several shattering hits, 

Fort de Chaudfontaine

At the southeastern corner of the Liege circle surrendered, with only 76 of the 408 members of its garrison still alive. Later that day 2 more of the forts, with similar devastation, also surrendered. On August 15th 

Fort Loncin

ceased to exist when the 23rd 420mm shell fired at it penetrating its ammunition stores and set them off. After taking possession, the Germans found Belgium General Leman lying in the wreckage. As they carried away, he opened his eyes and said, "I ask you to bear witness that you found me unconscious," and even though a few of the forts had not yet surrendered or been destroyed, their ability to interfere with the German advance was at an end.

Moltke and his armies were ready, the road to the west was open and the right wing went into motion almost exactly on Shclieffen's schedule. The German engineers hurried to repair the rail lines that was destroyed by the Belgians, and trains started to roll one right after another, carrying the mountains of supplies needed to support the offensive. Over 500 trains were crossing the Rhine every 24 hours; 16 days after the troops had began to move, 1,250 trains had already crossed a single bridge at Cologne- 1 every 10 minutes. And with good reason: Kluck's 1st army alone by itself required 550 tons of food every day. Its 84,000 horses consumed 840 tons of fodder alone daily.

Now things started happening at an accelerating pace and on an expanding scale, and it became uncommon for anything to happen as anyone had expected or intended. By August 16th, in a heroically speedy if tragically premature response to the French government's call for the opening of a 2nd front, Russia inserted its 1st army into east Prussia. This move was far in advance of what the Germans had thought possible; obviously other Russian armies would be arriving soon, and so Moltke was faced with a possible disaster in the east long before the fight in the west could be decided. On this same day a Serbian counterattack stopped the Austrians and threw them back in disorder. Suddenly major developments were occurring daily.

Now on August 17th; a collision of German and Russian troops at Stalluponen in East Prussia ends inconclusively; the Germans are forced into a retreat that disrupts their plans, but they take 3,000 prisoners with them.

On August 18th; Joffre broadens his eastward offensive by sending the French 2nd army into Lorraine. The invasion makes good progress, only because Moltke has ordered the German 6th army to fall back. He also had a plan for Lorraine; to allow the French to advance until they are between his 5th army to the north and 7th army to the south. Then they can be hit on both flanks and destroyed. If this is successful, it could produce a victory on the German left so decisive that the success of the Schlieffen right wing might become unnecessary. 

August 19th; The French continue to advance in Lorraine.

On August 20th;

Crown Prince Rupprecht

of Bavaria, Commander of the 6th German army in Lorraine and temporarily in command of the 7th army as well, watches as the French offensive over extends itself and runs out of momentum. Unable to resist so tempering a target, "We can't ask our Bavarian soldiers to retreat again," he complains, "Just when they feel absolute superiority over the enemy facing them," he then orders a counterattack that proves to be brilliantly successful, inflicting tremendous casualties on the French and driving them back across the border to the city of  Nancy, which is nearly abandoned. It's saved by a defense and counterattack organized by corps 

Commander Ferdinand Foch.

Rupprechts counterattack for all its success, is a serious mistake. It neither destroys the French 6th army nor captures anything of strategic importance. Instead it pushes the French backwards out of Moltke's trap, returning them to their line of fortresses. And with the latest developments in technology made these fortresses capable of standing up even under the kinds of guns that broke Liege, and in the weeks ahead their strength will permit Joffre to shift troops from his right wing to his imperiled left. The Germans' chances of achieving a breakthrough are vanishingly small, but Rupprecht thinks otherwise. Wanting to press his advantage, he all but demands-that Moltke send him more troops. Moltke, in one of his departures from a Schlieffen Plan in which all possible manpower was suppose to be concentrated in the right wing agrees.

On this very same day the Austrian invasion of Serbia is transformed from a failure into a humiliating vout; the Austrian forces take 50,000 casualties, including 6,000 men killed and flee back across the border. The Russians and Germans collide again in East Prussia, this time at a place called Gumbinnen, and again the fighting is bloody but inconclusive.

The Germans pull back, but the Russians don't pursue. The commander of the 8th army,

Max von Prittwitz

Telephones Moltke and reports that he is in terrible trouble and needs to withdraw from East Prussia. This news is disastrous tactically and strategically. East Prussia is the homeland of the Junkers, Prussia's hereditary elite, and as such it's the cradle of Germany's General Staff. The mere thought of the Junker farms being left to the mercies of rampaging Cossack horsemen is horrifying. But, as with Rupprecht, Moltke decides that he is to far from the action and too lacking in reliable information to disagree. He doesn't challenge Prittwitz's decision.

In Belgium things continued to go well for the Germans. Having done their work at Liege, the big guns were quickly moved westward to Namur

a cluster of 9 forts nearly as strong as Liege and junction of 6 rail lines. Namur surrendered after 5 days of shelling. But the Germans had something to regret; their failure to cut off and destroy the Belgian army before it slipped off to Antwerp, near the coast. Kluck had to reduce his army by 2 corps in order to keep the Belgians from coming back south and threatening his lines of communications.

The French and Belgians had made an equally serious mistake in failing to send troops to Namur while it still might have provided them with a fortified base from which to block the German advance. Such a move with enough troops involved, would have had a good chance of succeeding. Now, with that opportunity gone, Lanrezac was going to have to find a way to stop the Germans in open country.

The Germans took possession of 

Brussels.

Now, while continuing westward, they began to bend their route toward the south, toward Paris. In their wake they were leaving a trail of killings that, even after the truth was separated from the exaggerations of propaganda, would totally disgrace them in the eyes of the world, and give their enemies reason to argue that this was a war for civilization, and began the long process that would end with the United States entering the war against them. They destroyed towns, took civilian hostages, including women and children, and killing them- in some cases machine-gunning them by the score. They were killing priests simply because they where priests(trying to claim that they were leaders of a guerrilla resistance). They also destroyed the storybook city of 

Louvain, with its exquisite medieval university and irreplaceable library. Now, the extent of these acts can be explained-never excused, but explained-they had tangled origins.

The Germans suffered significant casualties in the Franco-Prussia War at the hands of franc-tiraurs, civilian snipers and guerrillas. The Germans were determined not to have a repeat. When they encountered guerrillas in Belgium, they lashed out viciously. The German newspapers carried sensational accounts of German soldiers being mutilated and killed by Belgian townsfolk. The German troops read the stories and they became angered and frightened, causing them to respond with further violence. The senior officers were fixated on the same idea that had made the violation of Belgian neutrally possible in the 1st place-the idea that Germany was in a life or death struggle, so they had no choice but to take extreme measures.

"Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal," Moltke observed. "But we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences".

It was so bad, whenever enemy armies were believed to be approaching, in Belgium, France, Southwestern Germany, East Prussia, Serbia, and Poland, the civilian populations fled by the 100"s of 1'000's in whatever way they could. Roads became clogged with refugees and their livestock and whatever possessions they could load onto wagons and carts. When the armies used the same roads, the civilians had to make for the fields and woods. 

Belgian civilians who had been displaced by the war, had started crowding the docks of Antwerp waiting for passage to Britain. 

But Europe was more focused on the fortunes of the armies, not the savaging and suffering that the war was already visiting on the innocent, as the middle of August passed. By August 21st things seemed to be moving rapidly to a climax, and on this same day, 

a 2nd Russian army entered East Prussia and began taking town after town. The Russian's plan was obvious; their 2 armies would converge on Germany's one eastern army, which they vastly outnumbered, and obliterate it. The road to Berlin would be wide open, and the Germans would have no way of saving themselves except by pulling apart their long wall of armies in the west.

Kaiser Wilhelm was almost unhinged by the news from East Prussia. He seated himself on a bench and told his companions-the heads of his military and naval cabinets-to sit down as well. The 2 men, no doubt trying to be properly deferential to their emperor, pulled up a 2nd bench and sat on it. "Do you already hold me in such contempt that none will sit beside me?" the Kaiser cried. This was the 1st sign that the Kaiser was not going to stand up well under the strain of war.

It was on August 21st, too, that Joffre launched a new offensive, sending the 3rd and 4th armies. That formed the center of his line northward into the Ardennes. By now it had become obvious that the Germans' main attack wouldn't be coming from that direction, and Joffre guessed that their center couldn't possibly be very strong. His intelligence bureau had estimated that the Germans would begin the war with 68 combat-ready divisions in the west-not 78 infantry and 10 cavalry divisions plus 14 brigades of territorial militia, as was actually the case. It assumed incorrectly that the Germans would like the French, regard their newly mobilized reserved troops as too green for action. Joffre therefore reasoned that if the Germans had enough strength on their left to push back his offensive in Alsace-Lorraine and enough on their right for a drive across Belgium, the center had to be vulnerable. By thrusting upward into southwestern Belgium, he thought, he could penetrate far enough to strike the German right wing in its flank and separate it from its sources of supply and reinforcements.

The 14 French divisions sent into the Ardennes ran head-on into exactly 14 German divisions that found strong defensive positions in the region's rough wooded hills and were well equipped with machine guns and artillery. The French attacked and attacked again under increasingly hopeless conditions until finally, weakened by appalling casualties, they had no choice but to stop. The fight at the town of Rossignol was sadly typical; of the 14,000 crack colonial troops thrown at the Germans there, nearly a 1/3 were shot dead.

Lanrezac's 5th army might have been mangled in this offensive as well, if not for his warnings and appeals and Joffre's grudging decision to allow him to stay farther west. Now the 5th was the only French army not fully engaged. By now it was clear that Lanrezac had been right all along; the main German invasion force was to his north, moving through Belgium virtually unopposed. A 75 mile shift had taken Lanrezac's left to a point across the River Sambre from the town of Charleroi. Lanrezac didn't know where the Germans were and had little in the way of instructions from Joffre, and so he did something that was extremely unfashionable in the French army of 1914; he had his troops take up defensive positions.

It was fortunate that he did. The next day his army was hit by advance units of Bulow's 2nd army coming out of the east. The striking fact here is that Lanrezac, at the far left end of the French line, had met not the end of the German right wing under Kluck but the army on Kluck's left. Important as Lanrezac's move to the north was, it had not reached far enough to intercept the outer of the German right. All 5 French armies were now locked in combat, but this was true of only 6 of Germany's. Kluck's army was out somewhere to the north and west, beyond Lanrezac's reach and meeting no serious resistance at it plowed its way forward.

By this point all of Joffre's offensives had been beaten back, several of them ending in severe disorder. French casualties for the war's 1st month are believed to have totaled 260,000, of whom 75,000 were killed (27,000 on August 22nd alone). Among the dead were more then 10% of France's regular and reserve officers. The cult of the offensive wasn't delivering its promised results.

As a young French Captain named Charles De Gaulle would say of the fight in which he was wounded and had his eyes opened, "In a moment it's clear that all the courage in the world can't prevail against gunfire."

The Germans, except on their right where continued movement was essential, tended to rely on their artillery and let the French attack 1st. In this way they held their own at worst and took significantly fewer casualties overall; 18,000 of their troops were killed on the Western Front in August, a fraction of the French and British total.

And Kluck, with Bulow keeping pace on his left and the German line unbroken all the way to Switzerland, was pounding to the southwest on schedule. The Schlieffen Plan was being achieved. The stage was set for Kluck to swing around Lanrezac and continue on to Paris.

Or so it seemed until Sunday, August 23rd. Then suddenly, Kluck crashed into a mass of dug in riflemen freshly arrived from England. It must have been a shock. Kluck hadn't known that British troops were in the neighborhood. He hadn't even known, until the day before, that they were in France in sufficient numbers to take the field.

                                                              Paris in 1914

The start of the war comes as a far greater shock to Paris than to Berlin, Budapest, St. Petersburg, or Vienna. Until almost the end of the July crisis, the French paid little attention. They and the newspapers they read, were focused instead on a lady named

Henriette Caillaux

Not like the lady and the war are entirely unrelated. Among the what if's of 1914 is the intriguing possibility-remote to be sure, but real nonetheless-that the war might have been averted if not for 6 pistol shots fired by Madame Caillaux 101 days before the assassination of 

Franz Ferdinand

Madame Caillaux was the wife-2nd wife, importantly just as he was her 2nd husband- of

Joseph Caillaux

a former French Premier who in early 1914 was making a serious bid to become once again the head of the government. In a arm's-length partnership with a brilliant and charismatic socialist leader named Jean Jaures, Caillaux was campaigning  to displace the man who, a year earlier, had enacted a controversial measure aimed at improving France's readiness for war. This measure was a requirement, demanded by 

President Poincare

and the leadership of the army, that every military conscript(and France was drafting 80% of its men by that time, as opposed to 56% in Germany) must spend 3 years on active service, rather than 2 as in the recent past. The change had been one expression of a surge of patriotic fever that arose in the wake of a French-German showdown over control of Morocco in 1911 and swept Poincare into the presidency 2 years later. (When the Germans ended that showdown by backing down, in large part because Britain was siding with France, it seemed proof that France's long period of weakness on the international stage had ended at last) Supporters of the extension were convinced that unless France maintained its credibility as a military power, it would lose the confidence of its Russian all and be left to face Germany alone. Jaure's was instant that the European arms race was madness, that a general war would be ruinous for everyone involved no matter who won, that it was ridiculous for the only republic in Europe to tie itself to a regime as antediluvian as tsarist Russia, and that it was not impossible for France and Germany to come to an understanding. Though Caillaux had not pledged himself to repeal the extension, the conservatives convinced themselves that he would do so if given the opportunity. They did everything in their power to turn him into what the writer-politician Maurice Barres said he already was "the most hated man in France."

Now a national election was scheduled for early summer. It would decide the membership of the Chamber of Deputies, which in turn would choose the next Premier.(Now the Premiership, a position analogous to that of British Prime Minister, changed hands more or less annually as shifting coalitions of France's many factions caused governments to rise and fall.( It is not to be confused with the presidency, an elective office with a fixed 6 year term and roughly comparable to Britain's monarch.) The election became a referendum on the 3 year service question and, by implication, on France's place in the European balance of power.

Now Joseph Caillaux, the leading opponent of the Poincare camp, was an interesting figure. Trained in accounting and as an auditor, meticulous as only a dedicated accountant can be, he had followed his father into politics and had risen to cabinet rank on the basis of hard work and his knowledge of the intricacies of budgeting, taxation, and finance, an office to which his unrivaled competency would cause him to be returned repeatedly over the years. And being able to survive the numberless accusations hurled at him over the years, he remained throughout his career the very picture of stuffy, almost comic haut bourgeois respectability.

Paradoxically, by 1914 Caillaux had moved about as far to the left as it was possible for a French politician to move in those days and still be a contender for the highest offices of government. This had happened gradually, as a result of his mastery of finance. He had conducted a study of the tax system and, offended by its inadequacy to the needs of a modern state, had proposed an income tax. The idea horrified the conservatives who predictably had no interest in surrendering their exemption from being taxed. But it won Caillaux so many new friends in the so-called Radical Faction(which in fact was not radical at all but barely left of center)that he became for a time Premier.

Caillaux's tenure as Premier included in the 1911 Moroccan crisis, and he had been firm and effective in negotiating a settlement with the Germans. Even though his enemies accused him, inevitably, of being under German pressure, he had won for France the colony of Morocco at the lowest price Berlin was prepared to accept short of war. It was also during Caillaux's Premiership that 

General Joseph Joffre

was made head of the French General Staff, which meant that in the years just before the war, the army had a commander who insisted on better training, better equipment, and promotion on the basis of ability and performance. Even in his skepticism about the military service extension, Caillaux never challenged the idea that France should be military strong. His questions were about how strength could best be achieved. Keeping many 1,000's of men on active duty for an additional year required heavy spending for barracks and other facilities, but it did little to increase the size of the army upon mobilization. Caillaux wanted to invest in artillery(in which France was seriously deficient)and innovations such as aircraft.

One other thing was paradoxical about Joseph Caillaux, behind his invincible facade of fashionable propriety, behind his cold and eccentric public persona, he was an adventurous womanizer. He never married until he was into middle age. When he finally did marry, his choice was a divorcee older than himself who had been his mistress for some years. Not long after marrying her, he entered into an affair with a married woman, Madame Henriette Claretre. Their liaison wasn't frivolous. With some difficulty the 2 divorced their spouses and married.

All these currents-hatred for Caillaux's taxation proposals, conservative belief that the future of the nation hinged on the service extension, questions about the alliance with Russia, and the support given to Caillaux by

Jean Jaures

and the socialist-came together in the 1914 election. In the words of 

Maurice Barres

Caillaux was a menace because he was the one man who could "bring Jaure's pacifist dream down from the clouds, to make the theories of working-class internationalism and the fraternity of all people both practical and realizable."

The campaign was more than spirited. As a Caillaux's victory boomed, his enemies cast aside what little restraint was customary in the politics of France. The conservative press attacked him relentlessly. Characteristically, Caillaux disdained to reply; he would coolly assert his innocence of whatever the latest charge happened to be but go no further. He was coasting towards a victory that would lead to a reappraisal of national policy and possibly to the resignation of Poincare(who threatened just such a step), but then Caillaux's private life was brought into the political arena, and everything changed.

Caillaux's 1st wife, a woman spurned and vengeful, made available to

Gaston Calmette

The editor of the Conservative Publication Le Figaro, letters that Caillaux had sent her in 1901 when she was still his mistress and married to another man. Calmette, who had been attacking Caillaux viciously, now promised his readers a "comic interlude" that he opened by printing one of the letters. Its content was not scandalous in any sexual sense; Caillaux had boasted of appearing to fight for his income tax proposal while actually assuring that it could not pass. This raised questions about possible duplicity on his part(unless of course he was simply trying to impress his paramour,) but it was hardly a smoking gun. Much was made of the fact that Caillaux signed himself Ton Jo, "Your Joe". The tone was inappropriately intimate when used by a gentlemen in addressing a married lady, but even by the standards of its day it was something less than outrageous.

The 2nd Madame Caillaux, however, was not amused. Despite her affair and divorce and remarriage. Henriette cared greatly about her reputation and place in society. She hated the world of politics and the abuse to which it exposed her husband. Lately, when in public she had found herself hissed and laughed at when people learned that she was the spouse of the traitor to his class, the man who wanted to tax incomes. But she was terrified that the publication of the letter from Caillux's 1st wife, would be followed by love letters that she and Caillaux had exchanged while still married to other people. And there was gossip to the effect that these letters too had been given to Le Figaro.

So on the afternoon of March 16th, Henriette went to the shop of a Paris gun dealer, and purchased a small Browning automatic pistol. After the dealer showed her how to use it, she went to the office of Le Figaro, after announcing who she was, she asked to see Calmette. Unfortunately he was out at the time so she had to sit and wait for hours for him to return. When at last Calmette arrived through a rear entrance, he was told of his visitor and urged not to see her. He gallantly replied that he wouldn't deny a lady. Upon being admitted to his office, Henriette asked Calmette if he knew why she wanted to see him. When he replied that he didn't and offered her a chair, she took out her pistol and squeezed the trigger until its 6 bullets had been discharged. Calmette was hit 4x and killed. Later Henriette testified that, intending only to frighten him, she had closed her eyes before firing and pointed the pistol at the floor. Calmette, unfortunately for both of them, had fallen to the floor as soon as he saw the gun and so put himself in the line of fire. When members of the Figaro staff came running into the office, Henriette surrender her weapon but imperiously maintained her dignity. "Do not touch me," she declared, "I am a lady." When the police were preparing to take her to jail, she refused to enter their wagon. She had her own car that would take her to the station and the police agreed.

This was the most sensational story in years, one that combined murder and sex with wild speculation about what had motivated Henriette and what further scandals might be revealed. It monopolized the attention of the Paris newspapers all that spring and summer. Its 1st effect was to sideline Caillaux politically; he immediately resigned from the cabinet and announced(he would later changed his mind) that his political career was over.

In spite of the scandal, the election turned out to be a disaster for Poincare and the conservatives and a triumph for Caillaux's Radicals and their Socialists allies. Under ordinary circumstances, Caillaux would have become Premier, but now someone else had to be found for the job, and with Caillaux out of the running, no one was holding Poincare to his threat to resign.

For 2 weeks, as the formidable Poincare used his constitutional authority to block a succession of candidates who were opposed to the service extension, France remained without a government. Finally, grudgingly, Poincare agreed to the appointment of 

Rene Viviani

a one time socialist and a rising but inexperienced political star who in 1913 had voted against the extension but now promised to withdraw his opposition. In the weeks ahead Viviani would show himself to be emotionally fragile(his career would end in insanity) and willing to follow Poincare guidance in dealing with the July crisis.

Henriette's trial, from its start early in July, was an early specimen of full-bore media circus, obsessing press and public alike, making the news about yet another crisis in the distant Balkans seem dreary and pointless by comparison, and constantly giving rise to new sensations.(One of the trial judges challenged another to a duel.) Then came the state visit that Poincare paid to St. Petersburg, taking Viviani with him and using the long days at sea to instruct the new Premier in the importance of military readiness and the alliance with Russia.

Even if there had been no trial and no voyage to Russia, French passivity throughout the crisis undoubtedly would have been to Poincare's liking. The president was the closet thing to a true master of French politics to have emerged in decades. He began his career as the youngest lawyer in the country, then became the youngest member of the Chamber of Deputies at 26, was elected Premier in his 40's and in 1913, at age 52 became both the youngest president in the nation's history and the 1st to be elected while serving as premier. In 1914 he was mindful of what General Joffre had told him' that France was now strong enough to win a war with Germany if Serbia tied up a substantial part of the Austro-Hungarian army, Russia took the field against the Germans, and Britain too came in on France's side. The British factor made it essential that France stand aside during the diplomatic crisis. Paris could have changed the outcome of the crisis only by discouraging the Russians from being so quick to mobilize. Caillaux, as Premier, almost certainly would have done this. With the Tsar's reluctance to mobilize makes it at least possible that Caillaux could have succeed.

The magnitude of the international crisis finally came crashing in on Paris on Wednesday, July 29th, when a jury found Madame Caillaux not guilty, and France's newspapers awoke from a trance over this trial to discover that Europe was on the brink of war. Poincare and Viviani returned to Paris, finding the capital burning with war fever. July 29th was also the day on which Tsar Nicholas 1st ordered and canceled mobilization. And thanks to the scheming 

Ambassador Paleologue, 

Paris had limited knowledge of what was happening in St. Petersburg, and the Russians had no reason to think that the French government was not enthusiastic about their mobilization. By Friday full mobilization was under way in Russia, but not a word was printed about it in the Paris newspapers. But they were however carrying excited and unfounded reports that Germany was mobilizing secretly. Joffre was demanding French mobilization.

Now with Caillaux out of the picture and the final slide into war underway, there was in all of France one man of importance who not only thought that war might be prevented but was committed to preventing it if he could. This was

Jean Jaures

who's gifts were so prodigious that it seemed briefly possible that even now, far into the 11th hour, he might make a difference. As a leader, thinker, and human being, Jaures stood out like a giant in the summer of 1914. Like Caillaux he was widely hated, but only for the most honorable of reasons; he had dedicated his life to the achievement of democracy and genuine piece not only in France but across the continent. But he was respected too-respected and loved to an extent remarkable for a man whose socialist convictions had put him permanently outside the boundaries of political respectability. Everyone who knew him and left a record of the experience tells of a sunny, selfless, brilliant personality, bearded and bearlike and utterly careless of his appearance, indifferent to personal success or failure but passionately dedicated to his vision of a better, saner world.

Born in provincial obscurity, he had been sent to Paris on scholarship and excelled at the most elite schools to be found there. He had gone 1st into an academic career and then into politics, earning a doctorate along the way. Drawn by his sense of the injustices of industrial society into the Socialists Party, he soon became its dominant figure and a practical, non dogmatic adapter of Marxist thought. He was opposed to imperialism, colonialism, and militarism, all of which he saw as a waster of resources that could be used for better purposes. But he wasn't opposed to nationalism, envisioning a Europe of autonomous democracies working together for a prosperity in which the poor and the powerless could share. He believed that political liberty was meaningless without economic liberty, that the power of the industrialists, banks, big landowners, and Churches must be curtailed, and that small family businesses and farms must be preserved. An anticlerical he nevertheless opposed the efforts of his associates to bar Catholics from teaching in the universities. Above all he was opposed to the secret alliances of the Great Powers, France included. He foresaw how disastrous a general war would be with clarity that can still astonish anyone who reads the things he wrote and said. He was widely regarded as the greatest orator of his time, and by consistently demonstrating his integrity and indifference to personal advantage, he had unified France's leftist functions and made the Socialist Party a force in national politics. By late July, France appeared to be divided into 2 camps; one that regarded Jaures as a public danger, another that was ready to follow him. In the midst of mounting hysteria he was the one prominent figure calling for restraint, deliberation, and a search for a way out of war-for sangfroid. "The danger is great but not insuperable if we keep our clearness of mind and strength of will," he wrote in his last newspaper column, which appeared on Friday July 31st, "If we show the heroism of action."

France's conservative voices, meanwhile, were anything but calm. "We have no wish to incite anyone to political assassination," the newspaper Action Francaise had declared on July 23rd in what was becoming the characteristic tone of Jaures enemies, "but M.Jean Jaures may well shake in his shoes!" " His words may perhaps give some fanatic desire to settle by the experimental method the question of whether anything would be changed in the invincible order of things if M. Jean Jaures were to suffer the fate of M. Calmette."

Another paper told its readers that "if on the eve of war a General were to detail 1/2 a dozen men and a Corporal to put citizen Jaures against a wall and to pump the lead he needs into his brain at point-blank range-do you think that General would be doing anything but his elementary duty?"

On the evening of July 31st, just back from a hurried trip to Brussels where he had addressed an emergency meeting of Socialist from several countries, including Germany, Jaures and a small group of his associates went to the foreign ministry, where they met with 

Vice Minister Abel Ferry

and demanded every possible effort to keep Russia from mobilizing. By this time the government not only knew of the Russia mobilization but had received, via the German Ambassador, Berlin's warning that it too would mobilize if the Russians didn't reverse course. Viviani, after consultation with Poincare, had given the Germans his promise of an answer by 1 p.m. tomorrow, Saturday.

Now Ferry simply told Jaures that it was too late that "everything is finished, there is nothing left to do."

"To the very end," Jaures answered angrily, "we will continue to struggle against war."

"No," Terry replied. "You won't be able to continue. You will be assassinated on the nearest street corner."

2 Hours later a 29 year old man named

Raoul Villain

well educated but aimless, confused and unemployed was walking along the Rue Montmartre when he saw several men enter the Cafe du Croissant. Among them was Jaures, and Villain recognized him. As he watched, Jaures took a seat with his back to an open window. For 1/2 an hour while Jaures ate his dinner and conferred with editors of his newspaper, L' Humanite, about what should be said in the Saturday edition, Villain paced outside. He was armed; inflamed by the hysteria all around him, he had been planning to travel to Germany and shoot the Kaiser. Here, suddenly, was an opportunity to demonstrate his patriotism and strike a blow for France right at home.

Now inside the restaurant a man rose from another table and approached the Jaures group. He was a friend of one of Jaures companions, and he wanted to show off a photo of his baby daughter.

"May I see?" Jaures asked. He examined the picture, smiled, asked the child's age, and offered congratulations. At that instant Villain, standing just outside the window, fired 2 shots into the back of his head. Jaures was dead before the police arrived and the next day France and Germany mobilized. The Socialist in both countries, now without anyone capable of bringing them together, supported the move to war.

                                                                   

                                                   Roll of the Iron Dice



 Before every commander of the armies that went to war in August 1914, there lay the possibility's of becoming a hero, a giant, a deliver of his people. Likewise there lay before everyone of them the very real possibility of everlasting disgrace.

This was nowhere more true than the case of Helmuth von Moltke, who as the war began was 66 years old, in questionable health, and approaching the 9th anniversary of his appointment as head of the German High Command. His long service as Chief meant that he was responsible not only for winning the war but for the plans-the inconceivably intricate plans, including among much else the timetables of the 11,000 trains that would have to be moved to complete German mobilization-according to which the war was to be prosecuted. All of this was on his shoulders, and Moltke went to war without a trace of Napoleoni zest. Throughout most of the July crisis he had been a voice for restraint. Though Russia's mobilization turned him into a strident advocate of military action, even then he was motivated not by any hunger for conquest or expectation of victory but by fear of a kind that was far from uncommon in the upper reaches of the German Civil and military administration. This fear rose out of the belief, the conviction, that Germany was encircled by enemies who were growing stringer at an alarming rate, and that if the showdown were delayed just a few years more there might be no possibility of victory, even of survival. Far from looking forward to a quick and easy victory, Moltke said that if war came it would be "a long weary struggle with a country that will not acknowledge defeat until the whole strength of its people is broken, a war that even if we should be the victors will push our own people too the limits of exhaustion.

Of course this prognosis was consistent with Moltke inmate pessimism; he was so notorious for his gloomy outlook that the Kaiser had long made jokes of it. Even when Moltke was gonna be promoted to General Staff, he confided to the German Chancellor of the time that he regarded himself as "too reflective, too scrupulous, and, if you like, to conscientious for such a post." He said he did not posses "the capacity for risking all on a single throw," that marked great commanders. About that he appears to have been right; he was less a man of action than an intellectual and aesthete, more cultivated than Prussian Generals were expected to be. Art was the only things Moltke lived for.

But he was also right about what lay ahead. The accuracy of his dark prophecy reflected not only his disposition but his acumen, his grasp of the realities of 20th century warfare. And because of this Moltke committed himself and his nation to a strategy focused exclusively on the achievement of a lightning-fast victory over France. This strategy was embedded in the deeply secret Schlieffen Plan, originally the work of Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Moltke's predecessor as Chief of the General Staff. He had developed it before his retirement in 1905 in response to the formation of the Franco-Russian Entente and the resulting likelihood that, if war came, Germany was going to find itself fighting on 2 fronts.

He based it on that even with Austria-Hungary on its side Germany couldn't expect to win a protracted war against both France and Russia; that Russia would be unable to mobilize rapidly; and that the immense size of the Russian empire meant that any invader looking for a quick and decisive victory was likely to be as disappointed as Napoleon had been after capturing Moscow in 1812. Out of these assumptions rose the conclusion that Germany had to crush France before Russia became capable of mounting an offensive. It would then be able to shift its forces to the east and crush Russia in its turn.

Now Moltke had adopted the plan upon succeeding Schlieffen and in the years that followed, Moltke would change it substantially. As a result of the changes, and ultimately the failure of the altered plan to deliver Paris into German hands within 40 days that Schlieffen had set as a deadline, Moltke's assigned place in history has generally been among the fools and weaklings. While Shclieffen has been enshrined as a strategist of much brilliance, the creator of a key to glory that Moltke proved incapable of using.

If such judgements are not flagrantly unfair, they are at a minimum arguable. It was absurd to think that Moltke should have regarded the plan he received from Schlieffen  as too sacred to be altered as circumstances changed. Schlieffen  had handed his ideas over to Moltke at a point when Russia was weaker than it had been in generations. It had just lost its war with Japan and was faced with a popular uprisings that had shaken the Romanov regime. Shclieffen had good reason to assume that Russia might be unable to put an effective army into the field at all , never mind speedily.

But by 1914 the situation had changed. For 5 years the Russian government had been spending a 1/3 of its revenues on its army and navy, this was the so called Grand Program, initiated in 1913, provided for the addition of 585,000 men to Tsar's army annually, with every recruit to remain on active duty for at least 3 years. By 1914, 1.4 million Russian troops were in uniform, with several million more reservists available in case of mobilization-enough to form as many as 150 divisions. Russia had also made great strides in industrializing, the French Capital was also financing a radical improvement of the Russian rail system in ways growing both in strength and in confidence. Moltke would have had to be a fool not to fear that the Russians might be capable of fighting their way to Berlin before the Germans reached Paris.

Now Motlke's uncle and namesake, the architect of Germany's victories over Austria and France almost half a century earlier, had seen things very differently from Schlieffen. In his last years he came to believe that in a 2 front war Germany should stand on the defensive in the west, attack in the east just enough to drive the Russians out of Poland, and then allow its enemies to wreck their armies by hurling them against walls of fire and steel. he believed that such a war would end not in victory but in a negotiated peace with exhausted but undefeated foes-and that was all Germany should hope for.

"We should exploit in the West the great advantages which the Rhine and our powerful fortifications offers to the defensive," he had said as early as 1879, " and should apply all the fighting forces which are not absolutely indispensable for an imposing offensive against the east." This remained German doctrine until Schlieffen, became head of the army and gradually set Moltke's thinking aside.

The validly of the new strategy was, however, something less than self-evident, as Shclieffen himself acknowledged. His commentaries, which he continued to produce and share with the General Staff throughout the years after his retirement, make clear that he was far from certain that it could succeed. It bet everything on an overwhelming right wing made up of 7 out of every 8 soldiers available for the fight with France. This massed force was to punch like a fist through 3 neutral countries-Holland, Belgium, and tiny Luxembourg-on its way to France. It would swing counterclockwise in a great wheeling motion, 1st to the west and then southward into France, over running whatever enemy forces confronted it, encircling and cutting off Pairs, and finally swinging back to the east to take whatever remained of the French army in the rear and destroy it.

The plan was majestic in conception and breathtakingly bold but also fraught with problems not all of which were military. From a narrowly military stand point the invasion of the 3 neutral countries was sensible; It would enable the Germans to move across northern Europe's flat and open coastal plain, avoiding the powerful fortresses that the French had constructed in the rough hill county just west of their long border with Germany. But in terms of grand strategy and international politics, however, it was dangerous in the extreme. It gave no weight to the possibility that a violation of the treaties guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium and Holland might provoke Britain to intervene. If Schlieffen had considered the possibility  of British intervention, he obviously regarded it as an acceptable risk. Britain's army was small(Bismarck had joked that if it ever invaded Germany, he would have it arrested) If Germany could wrap up the war in the west on Shclieffen's timetable, the British would have little opportunity to become a factor.

Even the French General Staff was equally alert to the attractions of Belgium as a route into its enemy's heartland. But it didn't have the autonomy that allowed Schlieffen and then younger Moltke to consult with no one; hard experience with 2 Bonapartist empires had made republican France wary of placing to much over str1905) in the hands of the military. As late as 1913 the French Supreme War Council was exploring a possible invasion of Germany through Belgium, but it was obliged to keep the Paris government informed as it do so. By this time the French and British were well along in planning joint operations, and the French government was determined to bring the British in on its side in case of war. There fore Paris checked with London about the War Council's idea and was sternly warned off. Any such move, France's friends on the British General Staff said would destroy even the possibility of support from Britain. So the council stopped all work in that direction.

Now over in Germany no such course correction was, in practical terms, even possible. No German Chancellor since the young Wilhelm's II dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 had ever attempted to question, never mind challenge, the war planning of the General Staff. Bethmann's administration was afraid to interfere with the army's plans even when those plans entailed terrible political risks.
In his splendid isolation Schlieffen assumed that Germany's enemies were intent not just on her defeat but on her destruction, and because of this she was justified in doing things that under less knowing circumstances would not have been thinkable. So the seizure of the Dutch and Belgium roads and railways became not only desirable but imperative. Nothing less could save Germany, and anything else would increase Germany's peril. "If we were to attack along the entire Belfort-Montmeely front(along the line of French fortresses) with blind faith in the sanctity of neutrality," Schlieffen wrote, "we would soon be effectively enveloped on our right flank by a realistic and unscrupulous enemy advancing through southern Belgium and Luxembourg." The "unscrupulous enemy" was, of course France. Schlieffen's guiding principle was that if Germany declined the benefits of violating the neutrality of its neighbors, France would happily seize them.

If Schlieffen had any concerns about the price of invading Belgium and Holland, he had many about whether his plan was militarily feasible. The outer edge of his right wing, in sweeping toward Paris, would have to advance more than 40 days, defeating whatever enemies it encountered along the way. The infantry would have to do this mainly on foot, each soldier carrying 70 or more pounds of equipment every step of the way. If the horse-drawn artillery failed to keep up, if the huge amounts of food and fodder and ammunition and replacements needed by all these 100's of 1000's of men and their scores of 1'000's of horses were not always near at hand, if good order was not maintained, the entire venture would collapse of its own weight under the guns of the enemy.

Schlieffen had it calculated that the German army would need 90 divisions to execute his plan.(It only had 60 in 1905). He concluded that if the right wing did manage to reach Paris, the effort would likely drain it of the strength and mobility needed for a final swing to the east and the climactic battle that was the plan's whole point.

"Before the Germans reach the Somme or the Oise," he wrote when his plan was still in gestation, "they will have realized, like other conquerors before them, that they are too weak for the whole enterprise." Even after Schlieffen's retirement he never stopped tormenting himself with such questions. Part of his legend is that in January 1913, as he lay dying, he became conscious just long enough to say "It must come to a fight. Only keep the right wing strong!"

The younger Moltke, like Schlieffen a bookish and introspective man, inherited not only the plan but his predecessor's obsession with it. By 1911 he decided that it would be unnecessary and unwise to invade Holland; the Germans couldn't take the time to defeat the Dutch army before advancing on France no allow that army to stand undefeated and hostile on the northern edge of the route to Paris. Moltke said, too, that Germany would need neutral Holland as a "windpipe" through which to get access to supplies. In doing so he again exposed his doubts about the plausibility of the entire plan: a campaign that ended in victory after 6 weeks would have no need for a windpipe.

The most challenging aspect of Moltke's change was that it would crowd the armies of the Schlieffen right wing-more than 1/2 a million men with all their artillery and support-into a 12-mile-wide passage south of Holland and north of the Ardennes Forest. This would give them far fewer roads and rail lines to use-no small complication when 100's of 1000's of troops and their supply trains had to be moved great distances as rapidly as possible. It also meant that the Germans would be unable to go around, but would have to attack and destroy, the powerful network of fortresses that the Belgium's had constructed at Liege just inside their border with Germany.

So this meant German mobilization required an immediate invasion of Belgium; Moltke's entire strategy would collapse if the Belgium's were given time to ready their Liege defenses. Moltke also said that Schlieffen's plan "will hardly be possible unless Liege is in our hands. The fortress must therefore be taken at once, the possession of Liege is the sine qua non of our advance."

Moltke came to believe that Germany couldn't afford to concentrate such an overwhelming large part of its forces in the attacking right wing. As the years passed, he altered the distribution of his troops so that the right wing would be only 3x the size of the left, not 7 as Schlieffen had presecribed. In its 1914 iteration the plan entailed positioning 55 divisions north of the fortified city of Metz, which lay directly to the east of Paris, with 23 divisions in a defensive posture farther south. Shclieffen, with fewer divisions to deploy, had assigned 59 to the north and only 9 to the left. This change, though controversial ever since, was certainly rational; after 1910 the French army, like the Russian, had become much more formidable than it had been in Schlieffen's day.

It was bigger, better trained, better equipped, better led, and more professional overall. It was sure to be ready with an offensive of its own, and Moltke and his staff guessed rightly that its attack force would be concentrated somewhere south of Belgium and therefore opposite the relatively weak German left wing. If the French broke threw the German lines, they would be able to swing north, cut the German right wing off from its home base, and achieve their own quick victory.

But in broad terms, and without any apparent enthusiasm or even anything approaching real confidence, Moltke embraced Shclieffen's approach. There is no evidence that he ever seriously considered not keeping it-that he ever thought through, for example, the potentially immense advantages of reverting to his uncle's idea and standing on the defensive in the West at least for a while, forcing the French to attack him if they wanted a war. In 1913 he abandoned an alternative plan that his staff had until then been updating regularly and keeping ready for use-one for directing Germany's offensive capabilities towards Russia. When the crisis came, therefore, he had no alternative.

Perhaps it was because he was unable to think through the ramifications of the strategic situation in Europe(one such being the certain fact that Britain would never have gone to war if France had attacked Germany rather than vice verse). More likely he was in the grip of a fever that infected all the military planners of Europe in the years leading up to 1914, the French especially, but the Germans and others to a more limited extent. This was "the cult of the offensive"-the belief that the only way to succeed in war was to attack your enemy as quickly as possible and then stay on the attack regardless of the consequences. This belief was rooted in what everyone too to be the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War, in which many of the most senior generals of 1914 had taken part at the beginning of their careers. In that war the forces of Napoleon III had allowed the Prussians to seize and keep the initiative, and the results had been disastrous. This probably played some part in Moltke's strategic decisions. It is also possibly true, for all that even Moltke's severest critics really know, that no alternative produced better results.

In the 30 days following the start of the war, mobilization increased the German army from its peace time strength of 761,000 men to slightly more than 2,000,000. This ocean of humanity was organized into 87 infantry divisions averaging some 18,000 men each, plus 11 Calvary divisions. These divisions formed 8 field armies, each commanded by a full general. 7 took up positions along Germany's western border, and the last stood alone in faraway east Prussia with responsibility for holding off whatever Russia threw at it. To the south of east Prussia, separated from it by Russian and Poland, was Austria-Hungary, with an initial mobilized force of 1.3 million men-49 infantry and 11 Calvary divisions under Conrad von Holzendorf. Farther south still was Serbia, with a tough, experienced and almost fanatically dedicated army of some 250,000 troops making up 12 1/2 divisions. Also opposing Germany and Austria was a Russian army whose 3 1/2 million troops were organized into 114 infantry and 36 cavalry divisions and had the potential, given Russia's immense population to grow much larger. This was "the Russian steamroller," the shear size of which made it a chilling threat for the German and Austrian planners. Now to the west, 30 days after mobilization, France had 1.8 million men under arms(all the #'s given here would soon be dwarfed by floods of new volunteers and conscripts) and organized into 90 divisions-80 infantry and 10 Calvary.

And even without possible British and Belgian involvement, therefore, the Germans and Austrians began at an overwhelming manpower disadvantage in the east. In the west the German armies were at best equal in size to those of the French. In their advance on Paris they would be facing the only military organization in the world that was comparable to theirs not only on manpower but in fighting capability as well-a huge modern army whose generals had a secret plan of their own for swift and conclusive victory.