Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Military History, 1914-1918

For the general student of history, the military history of the First World War is not merely the narration of advancing armies, the struggles of men, their deaths, triumphs, or defeats. Rather, it presents an extraordinary discrepancy between the facts of modern warfare and the ideas on military tactics which dominated the minds of men, especially the minds of military men. This discrepancy existed for many years before the war and began to disappear only in the course of 1918. As a result of its existence, the first three years of the war witnessed the largest military casualties in human history. These occurred as a result of the efforts of military men to do things which were quite impossible to do.

The German victories of 1866 and 1870 were the result of theoretical study, chiefly by the General Staff, and exhaustive detailed training resulting from that study. They were emphatically not based on experience, for the army of 1866 had had no actual fighting experience for two generations, and was commanded by a leader, Helmuth von Moltke, who had never commanded a unit so large as a company previously. Moltke’s great contribution was to be found in the fact that, by using the railroad and the telegraph, he was able to merge mobilization and attack into a single operation so that the final concentration of his forces took place in the enemy country, practically on the battlefield itself, just before contact with the main enemy forces took place.

This contribution of Moltke’s was accepted and expanded by Count von Schlieffen, chief of the Great General Staff from 1891 to 1905. Schlieffen considered it essential to overwhelm the enemy in one great initial onslaught. He assumed that Germany would be outnumbered and economically smothered in any fighting of extended duration, and sought to prevent this by a lightning war of an exclusively offensive character. He assumed that the next war would be a two-front war against France and Russia simultaneously and that the former would have to be annihilated before the latter was completely mobilized. Above all, he was determined to preserve the existing social structure of Germany, especially the superiority of the Junker class; accordingly, he rejected either an enormous mass army, in which the Junker control of the Officers’ Corps would be lost by simple lack of numbers, or a long-drawn war of resources and attrition which would require a reorganized German economy.

The German emphasis on attack was shared by the French Army command, but in a much more extreme and even mystical fashion. Under the influence of Ardant Du Picq and Ferdinand Foch, the French General Staff came to believe that victory depended only on attack and that the success of any attack depended on morale and not on any physical factors. Du Picq went so far as to insist that victory did not depend at all on physical assault or on casualties, because the former never occurs and the latter occurs only during flight after the defeat. According to him, victory was a matter of morale, and went automatically to the side with the higher morale. The sides charge at each other; there is never any shock of attack, because one side breaks and flees before impact; this break is not the result of casualties, because the flight occurs before casualties are suffered and always begins in the rear ranks where no casualties could be suffered; the casualties are suffered in the flight and pursuit after the break. Thus the whole problem of war resolved itself into the problem of how to screw up the morale of one’s army to the point where it is willing to fling itself headlong on the enemy. Technical problems of equipment or maneuvers are of little importance.

These ideas of Du Picq were accepted by an influential group in the French Army as the only possible explanation of the French defeat in 1870. This group, led by Foch, propagated throughout the army the doctrine of morale and the offensive à outrance. Foch became professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in 1894, and his teaching could be summed up in the four words, “Attaquez! Attaquez! Toujours, attaquez!”

This emphasis on the offensive à outrance by both sides led to a concentration of attention on three factors which were obsolete by 1914. These three were (a) cavalry, (b) the bayonet, and (c) the headlong infantry assault. These were obsolete in 1914 as the result of three technical innovations: (a) rapid-fire guns, especially machine guns; (b) barbed-wire entanglements, and (c) trench warfare. The orthodox military leaders generally paid no attention to the three innovations while concentrating all their attention on the three obsolete factors. Foch, from his studies of the Russo-Japanese War, decided that machine guns and barbed wire were of no importance, and ignored completely the role of trenches. Although cavalry was obsolete for assault by the time of the Crimean War (a fact indicated in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”), and although this was clearly demonstrated to be so in the American Civil War (a fact explicitly recognized in The Army and Navy Journal for October 31, 1868), cavalry and cavalry officers continued to dominate armies and military preparations. During the War of 1914-1918 many commanding officers, like John French, Douglas Haig, and John J. Pershing, were cavalry officers and retained the mentality of such officers. Haig, in his testimony before the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa (1903), testified, “Cavalry will have a larger sphere of action in future wars.” Pershing insisted on the necessity to keep large numbers of horses behind the lines, waiting for the “breakthrough” which was to be obtained by bayonet charge. In every army, transportation was one of the weakest points, yet feed for the horses was the largest item transported, being greater than ammunition or other supplies. Although transport across the Atlantic was critically short throughout the war, one-third of all shipping space was in feed for horses. Time for training recruits was also a critical bottleneck, but most armies spent more time on bayonet practice than on anything else. Yet casualties inflicted on the enemy by bayonet were so few that they hardly appear in the statistics dealing with the subject.

The belief of military men that an assault made with high morale could roll through wire, machine guns, and trenches was made even more unrealistic by their insistence that such an offensive unit maintain a straight front. This meant that it was not to be permitted to move further in a soft spot, but was to hold back where advance was easy in order to break down the defensive strong points so that the whole front could precede at approximately the same rate. This was done, they explained, in order to avoid exposed flanks and enemy crossfire on advanced salients.

There was some opposition to these unrealistic theories, especially in the German Army, and there were important civilians in all countries who fought with their own military leaders on these issues. Clemenceau in France, and, above all, Lord Esher and the members of the Committee on Imperial Defence in England should be mentioned here.

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, both sides began to put into effect their complicated strategic plans made much earlier. On the German side this plan, known as the Schlieffen Plan, was drawn up in 1905 and modified by the younger Helmuth von Moltke (nephew of the Moltke of 1870) after 1906. On the French side the plan was known as Plan XVII, and was drawn up by Joffre in 1912.

The original Schlieffen Plan proposed to hold the Russians, as best as could be done, with ten divisions, and to face France with a stationary left wing of eight divisions and a great wheeling right and center of fifty-three divisions going through Holland and Belgium and coming down on the flank and rear of the French armies by passing west of Paris. Moltke modified this by adding two divisions to the right wing (one from the Russian front and one new) and eight new divisions to the left. He also cut out the passage through Holland, making it necessary for his right wing to pass through the Liege gap, between the Maastricht appendix of Holland and the forested terrain of the Ardennes.