The Great War

Part One: The Roots of Catastrophe

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Prefatory Note

To mark the centenary of the Great War and its catastrophic consequences, I began publishing online a series of articles about the war’s causes, character, and course. Some of this material was written long ago, when I was a graduate student in history at the University of Notre Dame. Some is of more recent date, set down as an intellectual exercise in the years of my retirement. The academic portions originally included footnotes and sources; these I’ve deleted, though at some point I plan to provide a bibliographical essay for the benefit of those who wish to learn more about the subject. The main series of articles is a chronological account of the military course of the war, alternating among the various fronts. These will be supplemented by articles on specific topics, such as the armies of the belligerents, the evolution of weapons and tactics, the literature of the war, and so forth.

As published here on Substack, this and forthcoming articles in the series have been revised and updated.

This project is dedicated to my lifelong friend, Michael F. Felong, M.D., Ph.D., who died most tragically in 2018, the victim of a traffic accident. Intellectual curiosity was prominent among Mike's virtues, and our discussions about the war were of great help to me in clarifying my views and conclusions.

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Part One: The Roots of Catastrophe

When the guns finally opened fire in the summer of 1914 no one in Europe, not even the generals, really knew what to expect. The last general European war had been fought in 1815, a year in which the military state of the art was represented by the Brown Bess musket. With that weapon, a well-trained soldier could load and fire two or three rounds a minute. The effective range of the Brown Bess and similar smoothbore muzzle-loading flintlock muskets was about eighty yards. As for the artillery, in 1815 it consisted mostly of cast bronze muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon, such as the French 12-pounder field gun. This weapon had an effective range of about 1,000 yards with solid shot and five hundred yards with grapeshot or canister. Its rate of fire was one or two rounds a minute. Though pistols and carbines were also carried, the cavalry arm relied mainly on 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 often bloodier 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 in 1815, military technology had scarcely advanced. Such improvements as occurred were incremental, for instance the replacement of wooden musket ramrods by more durable iron ones.

Most of the states that fought the wars of the Napoleonic era still had roots in the feudal past. Bu revolutionary France was different: it was the prototype of the modern nation-state, with profound implications for the art of war.

The French Revolution had given birth to a concept of national citizenship embodying both rights and duties, and foremost among the latter was the duty of bearing arms in defense of the nation. Thus the citizen-soldiers of the French revolutionary armies were not mercenaries or press-ganged peasants, as in the Russian, Prussian and Austrian armies. The rigid discipline and draconian punishments that kept the soldiers of those states under control were not necessary to make French soldiers fight. Patriotic ardor powerfully reinforced traditional military discipline, and this was reflected in new, flexible battlefield tactics that Napoleon was to exploit to the fullest. And wherever the French armies marched, they brought with them the ideas of the French Revolution—nationalism prominent among them.

And the French Revolution cast a long shadow. Between 1815 and 1914, Europe was transformed by the growing national consciousness of its peoples. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814 “legitimacy” was temporarily restored, but it could not last. The Greek War of Independence, the Polish revolts, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, Italian and German unification—year by year, these upsets undermined the foundations of the old order. Particularly hard hit were the multinational Austrian and Ottoman empires. The latter’s gradual decline was a major source of European tension in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the Habsburg Monarchy's fear of South-Slav nationalism was a major contributor to the crisis that led to war in 1914.

War in the age of the nation-state meant the nation in arms and the Industrial Revolution, advancing pari passu with nationalism, made this possible. The growth, development, and diversification of industry—coal and oil, steam, steel, electricity and chemistry—supplied the material means to arm, equip, transport, and sustain the new mass armies. The railroad and the telegraph facilitated the mobilization and movement of those armies. The administrative apparatus of the modern state facilitated national mobilization. And the great increase in the population of Europe between 1815 and 1914 supplied vastly more manpower for the armed forces.

Thus by 1914 the muskets of Waterloo had been replaced by bolt-action magazine rifles (rate of fire 6-8 rounds per minute, effective range 800-1,000 yards) and the machine gun. Smoothbore muzzle-loading cannons had been replaced by breech-loading, recoil-stabilized field guns and howitzers firing high-explosive and shrapnel shells to ranges up to 10,000 yards. In the cavalry arm, the sword and lance were supplemented by rifles and machine guns. And, of course, the armies were far larger. In 1914 France mobilized nearly three million men to bring its peacetime army of about 800,000 up to war strength. The mobilized German Army contained four and a half million men. What would happen when such gigantic armies clashed, no one could say.

However, 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 of several months. 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 modern war and, perhaps, the social unrest accompanying it would soon bring any fighting to a halt. So, with the teachings of Clausewitz in mind, the general staffs of the major continental powers thought and planned in terms of decisive battle.

But not one decisive battle. Military leaders perceived that no single battle would determine the outcome of the next war. Rather, the war would be decided by a series of engagements over a period of weeks and months. Their planning therefore focused on the mobilization and initial deployment of their forces.

All the major European powers, Britain excepted, employed similar military systems. Their peacetime armies were relatively small, consisting of long-service officers, NCOs and soldiers whose main mission was to train the annual intake of conscripts. These 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 to form additional units. The second-line reservists would 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 and made ready for action in three weeks to a month.

Prewar military planning thus focused on two problems: (1) mobilization and organization of the army and (2) its deployment to the zone of active operations. After reporting to their regimental depots, mobilized reservists would have to be uniformed, equipped, armed, and organized into units. Then they would have to be transported by rail to the zone of operations. The complications involved in this process were formidable. All general staffs included railway sections whose specialists concerned themselves exclusively with the rail 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 not be rectified. Millions of soldiers with all their horses, guns, ammunition, supplies and impedimenta could not summarily be 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 exemplified that focus. The Chief of the Großgeneralstab (Great General Staff), General von Schlieffen, poring over his maps at the turn of the century, sought sufficient space for the western deployment in full strength of the German Army. His eye fell inevitably on Belgium, “the cockpit of Europe.” There a powerful attacking force would find ample ground on which to array itself, pressing down the Channel coast into France, turning the left wing of the French army in a series of engagements whose cumulative effect would bring decisive victory south and west of Paris.

Similar planning had been going on in the general staff offices of all the continental European powers. Now war had come, and the military plans thus developed, the military instruments thus forged, were about to be tested in battle.