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.