Dennis Showalter - Tannenberg - Clash of Empires

Neither the Baits nor the émigrés had anything like a general constituency in Germany. Liberals distrusted one, conservatives and anti-Semites the other. Both communities, however, contributed to a general sense that it was increasingly necessary to re-evaluate Germany’s position, in particular her military position, relative to Russia. 74

Historically, military intelligence work had been neglected in Germany, with officers avoiding it as a professional dead end. What intelligence efforts existed were primarily directed against France. For information about Russia the German army relied primarily on its attachés and military plenipotentiaries in St. Petersburg, and on Austrian sources. Efforts to build a modern intelligence network in the east encountered hostility from local civil authorities. The Prussian ministry of the interior disliked using royal officials for any kind of intelligence work. Corps commanders resented any interference with their authority. Schlieffen was relatively uninterested in the subject. As late as 1906, Prussian War Minister Karl von Einem insisted that no one could maintain relationships with spies, traitors, and similar disreputable characters without damaging his own character. Not until Moltke became chief did the intelligence branch of the general staff receive consistent support from the highest quarters.

Intelligence work in Russia was a challenge. The country’s size and backwardness meant foreigners were relatively conspicuous. The archetypical nineteenth-century gentleman agent posing as a tourist or commercial traveller was correspondingly handicapped, particularly given the relatively rigid enforcement of passport and residence regulations in the tsar’s empire. This meant developing and cultivating Russian sources. In 1906, Captain Walter Nicolai was assigned to Königsberg as senior intelligence officer of I Corps. He was thirty-three, bright, assertive, and a tireless worker. It was Nicolai’s contention that good intelligence officers avoided isolated coups and bravura pieces, working instead to establish a total picture of their target’s capabilities. After his routine reassignment in 1910, intelligence officers of the army corps on the eastern frontier followed the pattern he established, concentrating on collecting and processing large quantities of low-level information. But what did the data mean? Some reports described carelessness, incompetence, drunkenness. Others presented changes in doctrine, training, and command that suggested enhanced vitality in the Russian military system. Were the changes mere ephemera in a Russia ultimately unable to modernize? Could Germany risk that assumption? French behavior suggested that the scope of the Franco-Russian alliance had expanded significantly since 1908. The developing armed strength of the Balkan states, the shattering of Turkey’s forces, and the continued weakness of Austria—all combined to enhance the danger of underestimating Russia. 75

The Imperial German army was confident in its particular blend of human and material elements. It expected to defeat its enemies quickly and decisively. But in the first years of the new century military technology had not yet progressed so far that combat strength could not legitimately be reckoned in the traditional material form of sabers, bayonets, and guns. Nor had recent wars demonstrated beyond doubt just which intangible military virtues were most useful. Russian stolidity and endurance, German dash and initiative, might well cancel each other. Nor could German planners afford to forget a major lesson of the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese, foreign observers generally agreed, were far superior man for man to their adversaries in enthusiasm, dash, tactical skill—all the qualities on which the German army prided itself. Yet the Japanese army bled itself white against the Russian colossus at Port Arthur, LiaoYang, and Mukden. By war’s end it was virtually crippled by its positive qualities.

The failure of Russia’s military reforms are clearer by far from a half-century’s hindsight than they appeared in 1912. Internal criticisms of the army’s shortcomings can be taken as positive: the Russian military establishment was anything but complacent in the years between 1905 and 1914. British observers, with less of an axe to grind than their French counterparts, continued to be impressed with Russia’s recovery after 1905. 76Germany’s generals, moreover, were not academic structuralists. Everything in their experience since the Wars of Liberation suggested that social organization, military efficiency, and victory in battle did not follow one another in anything resembling logical progression. On the contrary, armies had the potential to introduce significant reforms within existing institutional frameworks. Armies had the ability to make good the failings of the systems that committed them to battle. German soldiers were aware that the French and Austrians had come closer to altering the destiny of Nineteenth-century Europe on the battlefield than was generally realized. And even marginal improvements in Russia’s military performance meant an exponential increase in the threat she posed. A skillful middleweight boxer’s chances against a clumsy, untutored heavyweight diminish significantly once his opponent assimilates a few pointers on footwork and timing.

As for Russia’s economic position, its weaknesses were hardly unfamiliar in a Germany whose businessmen and financiers were so heavily involved in her development. But no one of consequence anywhere in Europe expected any future war to last long enough for anything but the resources on hand to influence the outcome. The exponentially greater output of German farms and factories meant nothing if the tsar’s armies delivered a knockout punch in the first round. Positive discrepancies between a state’s armed force and the economic infrastructure sustaining it should generate anxiety among that state’s neighbors. Fighting men can seize wealth easier than wealth can buy fighting men. The notion that economically limited states would spend themselves into bankruptcy competing with their neighbors proved an expensive delusion in the 1930s as Germany, Italy, and Japan demonstrated the military potential of unbalanced economies.

The crisis of 1912 wound down, like so many of its predecessors, in a flurry of relieved correspondence. On December 17, the first session of the great powers’ conference on the Balkans opened in London—a conference characterized by increasing cooperation between Britain and Germany. The mood in Moscow, according to the German consul, was by no means warlike. Everyone had expected things to go wrong with the mobilization, and they did. The Warsaw military district began discharging its time-expired men in March, 1913. The only overt sign of hostilities came from the frontier district of Taurowitz, where local officials reported suspicious lights and noises that could only come from a Russian airship. The Landrat responded by ordering the gendarmerie to try and force down the alien flying machine when next it appeared. 77

As for the mobilization that triggered the anxiety, Sukhomlinov was at pains to tell the German military attaché that everything was Sazonov’s fault. The war ministry, he declared, had informed the foreign office as early as May, 1912, of its plans to hold a practice mobilization and assumed the German government had been appropriately notified. His surprise at discovering the contrary appeared genuine enough to convince the attaché. The Russian ambassador to Berlin took meticulous pains to report to the German foreign office the dates of projected call-ups of reservists in the Kiev and Warsaw districts during 1913. By October of that year, the Warsaw consulate quoted General Alexei Brusilov, the military district’s deputy commander, to the familiar effect that many senior Russian officers would welcome better relations with Germany. Only decrepit Austria would not be welcome in a new alliance. 78