Topic: Military History
When the guns opened fire in the summer of 1914 no one, the generals included, knew just what to expect. No general European war had been fought since 1815, a year in which the military state of the art was represented by the Brown Bess musket. With this weapon, generally considered to have been the finest of its type, a well-trained soldier could load and fire two or three rounds a minute. The effective range of the Brown Bess and other flintlock muskets was about 80 yards. As for the artillery, in 1815 it consisted mostly of cast bronze muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon of various types, such as the French 12-pounder field gun. This weapon had an effective range of about 1,000 yards with solid shot and 500 yards with canister. Its rate of fire was one or two rounds a minute. The main weapons of the cavalry arm were the sword, the saber and the lance.
The armies that employed these weapons were of modest size. At Waterloo about 75,000 French troops fought some 120,000 allied troops. The battles of the Napoleonic era were, indeed, larger and more sanguinary than those of the preceding Seven Years War. But a soldier of the army of Frederick the Great would not have felt entirely out of place at Austerlitz or Borodino. Between the general adoption of the flintlock musket around 1700 and the defeat of Napoleon military technology had remained relatively stable. Such improvements as occurred were incremental, for instance the replacement of wooden musket ramrods by more durable iron ones.
By 1914, however, armies and the weapons they employed had been altered out of all recognition. The musket had been replaced by the magazine rifle (rate of fire 10-12 rounds per minute, effective range 800-1,000 yards) and the machine gun. The smoothbore muzzle-loading cannon had been replaced by breech-loading field guns and howitzers firing high-explosive and shrapnel shells to ranges up to 10,000 yards. In the cavalry arm, though the sword and lance still held sway they were now supplemented by rifles and machine guns. And the armies themselves were much larger. In 1914 France mobilized nearly 3 million men to bring its peacetime army of about 800,000 up to full strength. The mobilized German Army contained 4.5 million men. What would happen when such gigantic armies clashed, no one could say.
But it was the business of the generals and general staffs who controlled these forces to plan for war. In Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and Russia this planning proceeded on the assumption that the impending war would be decided in a single campaign. There were reasons to think that modern Europe could not sustain a long war. Many people felt that Europe’s economic interdependence, the vast cost of war and, perhaps, the social unrest accompanying it would soon bring any fighting to a halt. So, having read their Clausewitz, the general staffs of the major continental powers thought and planned in terms of decisive battle.
Or rather, they planned in terms of a series of battles leading to a decisive result. Military leaders perceived that no single battle would determine the outcome of the next war. Their planning thus focused on the mobilization and initial deployment of their forces. All the major European powers, Britain excepted, employed a similar military system. Their peacetime armies were relatively small, consisting of long-service officers, NCOs and soldiers whose main business was to train the annual intake of conscripts. These latter served for two or three years, afterwards passing into the first-line reserve where they remained for six or eight years. Thereafter they passed into the second-line reserve, called the Territorial Reserve in France and the Landwehr in Germany. Upon mobilization the first-line reservists would be used to fill out the units of the active army and form additional units. The second-line reservists would also be formed into units for employment on subsidiary duties: rear-area security, guarding prisoners of war, garrisoning fortresses, manning quiet sectors of the front, etc. By this means an army of millions could be raised in three weeks to a month.
Prewar military planning concerned itself with two problems: (1) mobilization and organization of the army; (2) its deployment for battle. It was the second problem that most exercised the minds of the general staffs. After reporting to their regimental depots recalled reservists would have to be uniformed, equipped, armed and organized into units. Then they would have to be transported by rail to the area of operations. The complications involved in this process were formidable. All general staffs included railway sections whose specialists concerned themselves exclusively with the scheduling necessary to bring off a smooth deployment. In 1914 the German Army’s western deployment required 11,000 troop trains. At the height of the effort, trains were crossing the Rhine River bridges at two- or three-minute intervals.
Men realized that a mistake made in the initial deployment of the army could never be rectified. Millions of soldiers with all their horses, guns, ammunition, supplies and impedimenta could not be summarily moved from place to place like counters on a game board. Getting the initial deployment right thus became the focus of prewar planning. The German Schlieffen Plan, that famous right hook, was really a deployment scheme, not a battle plan. General von Schlieffen, poring over his maps at the turn of the century, sought sufficient ground for the deployment of the German Army in full strength. His eye fell inevitably on Belgium, “the cockpit of Europe.” There the main strength of the Army would array itself, pressing down the Channel coast into France, turning the left wing of the French army in a series of engagements whose cumulative effects would bring decisive victory south and west of Paris.
It was the Industrial Revolution—not just its productive capacity but the social changes that it wrought—that had called into being this new military world. The growth, development and diversification of industry had been accompanied by that of the administrative state. The former made it possible to arm, supply, transport and sustain the new mass armies; the latter operated the machinery of conscription and mobilization. Now war had come and the military instrument thus forged was about to be tested in action.
