A Patriot's History of the Modern World (15 page)

Even then, the Kaiser and his advisers were cautious. Desperate to avoid being the odd man out of a European alliance system, Germany had blustered and bullied, foolishly allowing nonaggression pacts with Russia to expire. Even worse, the infamous Schlieffen Plan to sweep through the flat plains of Belgium into France ensured that two more enemies—Belgium and Britain (because of her traditional concern about access to northern European ports)—would be aligned against her. Whereas Germany's national inferiority complex propelled her in one direction, France, having solidified the Russian alliance, drifted in another, overconfident of her military abilities.

French bellicosity swelled in the years before the war as the nations quietly prepared for conflict. Subscribing to concepts of the
offensive à outrance
and
élan
(“offense to excess,” or “hit 'em with everything you got,” and “fighting spirit”), the French developed a mirror strategy to the one they knew Germany would most likely employ in the event of war, namely a sweep from the north through Belgium, even if the Belgians denied them free passage. Thus the French response would be to blast through the Ardennes on the German left flank—just as Germany was swinging around the French left flank—meaning that in both cases, strategy would to a great degree determine policy rather than vice versa. All in all, the respective war plans had put all Europe on a hair trigger of mobilization, made worse by the German plans to disregard Belgium's neutral rights if and when war came. In previous wars, nonbelligerent nations had frequently allowed foreign armies passage through their territory, provided they pay for damages. German planners still clung to their hope that Belgium would relent and not resist.

The wood and tinder were firmly in place and all that was needed was the proverbial spark. That came on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, when Gavrilo Princip, part of a group of six high-school-aged South Slav nationalists, nervously waited for the car carrying Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, guns and grenades in hand.

Assassination by Accident

History is rife with seemingly minor incidents that turn the course of the world. Soldiers from General George McClellan's army found General Robert E. Lee's battle orders with a package of cigars before the battle of Antietam. Abraham Lincoln's assassin succeeded only because a guard was away from his post at Ford's Theatre. Theodore Roosevelt, running for president in 1912, was in point-blank range of John Schrank's gun when a bystander deflected the bullet's path just enough so that Roosevelt's folded, fifty-page speech absorbed the shot and stopped the bullet short of his heart. The impact of any of those turns of fate is debatable, though one would be hard pressed to argue that any were more earth-shattering than the chain of events that followed the death of the archduke and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo in 1914.

While on his way to make a routine diplomatic speech, Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir apparent, rode with his wife Sophie Chotek, a low-ranking Bohemian aristocrat whom he had married out of love, down the avenue bordering the Miljacka embankment of Sarajevo, unaware that it was lined with assassins. While the couple was en route, four of the would-be killers got cold feet. One who did not hurled a grenade at the party: it blew out a front tire on the following car, slightly wounding the military governor's aide-de-camp. After stopping to look after the wounded officer, Franz Ferdinand doggedly continued to city hall. The military governor prevailed on him to forgo the remaining events, and the archduke decided to alter his course and drive to the hospital to inquire about the aide-de-camp on his way back to his train. As the procession started toward the hospital, the lead chauffeur turned in error to follow the scheduled route, and the military governor told the cars to stop. They did, leaving the archduke less than ten feet away from Princip, who was standing on the sidewalk. The assassin fired two shots at point-blank range, killing both the archduke and Sophie.

Immediate reaction was restrained—after all, political assassinations were common at the time, and at least a dozen Austrian leaders had been shot at in the previous few years. Not only had President William McKinley been assassinated in 1901, but between 1898 and 1913 no fewer than forty political figures had been killed, including six prime ministers and four kings, among them King George I of Greece. Almost all of the assassinations had been carried out by leftists or anarchists. The Balkans alone
had seen eight successful assassinations, but this one in particular was directly tied to the expanded influence of a Serbian state working for the independence of southern Slavic states from Austria-Hungary, which the Austro-Hungarians felt could not be permitted out of fear that a Slavic-Serbian state might ally with Russia. And there were larger forces at work than the Austro-Serbian conflict: the Balkan states had fought several successful mini-wars against the Ottoman Empire to greatly diminish its power in Europe, while both Russia and Austria suddenly faced restless nationalities inflamed by the success of the Bulgarians and Serbs in evicting the Turks. Russia, having failed in 1908 to support Serbia against Austria, could not abandon a Slavic ally a second time, while the Austrians wanted to institutionalize their informal protectorate over Serbia. The subsequent ultimatum issued to Serbia was so strong as to constitute a virtual declaration of war. Backed by its allies the Germans, Austria delivered its message to Belgrade on July 23 (hence its name the “July ultimatum”) and began mobilizing. Serbia had forty-eight hours to comply with Austrian demands. Immediately, however, the Serbs received another secret telegram—of support from Russia. Wheels of war rapidly spun, with no one any longer in control of the throttle. European military leaders, politicians, and monarchs suddenly realized what had been set in motion. French premier René Viviani, a Socialist, called for his country to pull back from the borders by ten kilometers, terrified that “war might burst from a clump of trees, from a meeting of two patrols, from a threatening gesture…a black look, a brutal word, a shot!”
²³
Another powerful antiwar voice, Socialist Jean Jaurès, had opposed France's Three-Year Law, which required young Frenchmen to serve three years in the military. Modern romantic notions that Jaurès alone could have halted the acceleration to war are unrealistic, but forever unanswered, as on July 31, 1914, a nationalist assassin killed Jaurès in a Paris café. The president of the Chamber of Deputies eulogized Jaurès, saying, “There are no more adversaries here, there are only Frenchmen.”
²⁴
Indeed, the entire French Socialist movement had joined the “establishment” over the previous twenty years; now, to prove their loyalty, Socialists had to support the war—a position most regretted within the year, and one which permanently reversed the movement's willingness to engage in a compromise of convenience.

Miscalculations abounded on both sides. France and Russia assumed that the obvious weight of populations aligned against Germany would forestall hostilities—especially if England and Belgium were thrust into
the Allied camp. Britain dallied to embarrass the Germans, all the while appearing resolute in her support for France and Belgium. The war speech by the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, when it finally came, began with such conciliation to Germany that a Tory minister whispered to another, “By God, they are going to desert Belgium!”
²⁵

Confidence in both German and French militaries led the main belligerents to conclude that each could defeat the other, and indeed, do so quite rapidly. Had most of the leaders truly believed they were in for a war of four years and deaths in the millions, they might well have redoubled their efforts for peace. But this wasn't the only monumental miscalculation: a string of incomprehensible smaller errors compounded juvenile attachments to cavalry on both sides and, in the case of the French, outrageously silly uniforms with red pants. When some wiser heads attempted to replace the garish French colors with camouflage gray or khaki, they were shouted down with thunderous derision. Bright uniforms, claimed the
Echo de Paris
, were mainstays of French “taste and military function,” and a former war minister during a hearing on adopting different uniforms exclaimed “Eliminate the red trousers? Never!
Le pantalon rouge c'est la France
!”
²⁶

Major General Sir Henry Wilson, commander of Britain's IV Corps in France, confidently wrote in his diary that his forces would be in Germany in three weeks—an astonishing statement in retrospect, but no less detached from military reality than Santa Anna's rash prediction that he would lead Mexican armies into Washington, D.C., during the Mexican War. Horrific initial losses hardly changed opinions: as late as January 1915, General Douglas Haig said the Allies could “walk through the German line at several places” as soon as they got sufficient artillery ammunition.
²⁷

To be sure, there were voices of caution, men who knew combat up close and had tasted the murderous fire of modern guns. Germany's corpselike Field Marshal Helmut von Moltke (the elder) had predicted in 1890 that a future war could last for years. His thinking wore off on his nephew, von Moltke the younger—cited for bravery as a grenadier, but by 1906 the German chief of staff—who instructed the Kaiser that the next war “will be a national war which will not be settled by a decisive battle but by a long wearisome struggle…which will utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious.”
²⁸
Britain's Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, appointed as secretary of state for war in August 1914, also knew the lethality of modern weapons all too well. He had seen rapid-fire guns up close in the Franco-Prussian War where, at age twenty, he fought with the French army as a
volunteer, then witnessed his own Maxim guns and artillery shred the Mahdi army at Omdurman, and experienced heavy losses at the Battle of Paardeberg at the hands of the Boers. Suddenly placed in charge of the British military effort, Kitchener stunned the Imperial Staff when he told them to “be prepared to put armies of millions into the field and maintain them for several years.”
²⁹
Britain originally had planned to send six infantry and one cavalry division, scarcely 150,000 men, to support the French but cut that almost immediately to an anemic four infantry divisions out of concern that Britain herself might be invaded. Now Kitchener was instructing the government that victory would require a British army of
seventy divisions
, and mobilization could not attain those levels for three years, “implying,” as historian Barbara Tuchman noted, “the staggering corollary that the war would last that long.”
³⁰
Kitchener's views were often ridiculed in the high command, most notably by Sir Henry Wilson, who labeled Lord Kitchener “mad” and “as much an enemy of England as Moltke.”
³¹

Even when confronted with intelligence about the size of German forces, both British and French generals dismissed the information. On August 11, when Sir John French met with the chief of British intelligence, French's deputy director of operations was dumbstruck at the German numbers being suggested. “He kept on producing fresh batches of Reserve Divisions and Extra-Reserve Divisions,” French sputtered, “like a conjurer producing glassfuls of goldfish out of his pocket.”
³²
France's intelligence officers were relating similar information, yet General Joseph Joffre refused to believe it. Only Kitchener had no trouble envisioning a million Germans sweeping through Belgium and into northern France. When Germany, having declared war on Russia on August 1, and unsuccessfully cajoled and threatened the Belgians to allow their troops free passage through Belgian territory, sent military columns to plow through Belgium two days later, the twentieth century greeted its first mass war.

The German High Command believed Belgium would permit millions of German soldiers to march across their territory without resistance, and were therefore shocked at the tenacity and hatred they encountered once the invasion started. After all, God was on the side of Germany (the German belt buckles said so with
Gott mit uns
or “God is with us”), and Germany needed transit through Belgium to eliminate the threat to its national existence. The natural invasion route in Europe was across the North German Plain, a flat expanse broken only by man-made obstacles and rivers from Flanders to Russia. In German eyes, the Flemish were essentially
German, and German soldiers had come to the aid of Belgium many times in history against the French. A small nation of seven million did not have the right to deny passage to a major power, which would, after all, recompense the Belgians for any and all damage. Going the extra mile, the German High Command considered a neutral's defense of its own territory against German troops passing through illegal. The German military manual,
The Usages of War on Land,
issued in 1902, stated that “if a neutral did not stop one belligerent from marching through, that belligerent's opponent was free to do battle on neutral territory, and a neutral that disregarded its duties had to give satisfaction or compensation.”
³³

Since the German General Staff assumed the French would or already had moved into Belgium with the declaration of war by France on Germany, the German Army was free, indeed obligated, to defend itself against the Belgians. In the German view, Belgium had constructed forts on its eastern border facing Germany, but none facing France (at least no major ones), so rather than being neutral, Belgium was actually a belligerent allied with France and England. In the event, it seemed the whole world except for Belgium knew the Germans would attack across Belgium—the French assumed it and the British planned on it.

“Belgium's Misery”

After briefly assaulting the fortresses around Liège in costly frontal attacks, the Germans hauled up monster cannons, including the Austrian-built Skoda 305s, which, transported in three pieces, could move only twenty miles a day. German iron and steel giant Friedrich Krupp AG had fabricated an even more imposing weapon, the 420, of which only five were in existence when the shooting started. Even slower and more cumbersome than the Skoda guns, the 420s reached the front a week after Germans first entered Belgium; the “overfed slugs” stupefied everyone when they fired their first rounds on August 12. The shells took a full minute to travel to their targets, and the compression and shock of firing was so severe that the guns were triggered from three hundred yards away. Loaders and other members of the 285-man crew remaining close to the gun had ear padding, plugs, eye protection, and lay prone during firing for further safety. Suddenly, Belgian forts that had resisted wave after wave of crack German infantry now surrendered after forty massive explosions.