The strategy of the great war; a study of its campaigns and battles in their relation to allied and German military policy

Preface

The first six chapters of this volume appeared in the Sunday issues of the New York Tribune in January and February, 1919. Parts of four otjier chapters appeared in later Sunday issues of the same newspaper. The author's thanks are due to Mr. Ogden Reid, editor-in-chief of the Tribune, for permission to reprint them in book form.

In these studies the author has elaborated the theories outlined in his daily "MiHtary Comment" in the Tribune from April 15, 191 8, until the signing of the armistice.

This war differed from all other wars. It was fought on a scale transcending all experience. Its development could not be foreseen by the general staffs which were charged with conducting it. Many new and disturbing factors entered into it. The strategy on both sides was confused and empirical. Novel conditions in the field also revolutionized tactics. The old balance between the offensive and the defensive was vi Preface

deranged. It had to travel slowly around a circle to re-establish itself. The war, by its very immensity, overrode the strategists. It worked out its own strategy and its own tactics.

It is the purpose of this volume to interpret the influences which controlled the military policy of the two belligerent groups, and to present a clear view of the curious evolution of tactics which led from open warfare through the deadlock of rigid positional fighting around again to semi-open and then to practically open warfare. To the military student this phase is of absorbing interest.

What may be called the grand strategy of the war was largely affected by political as well as by purely military considerations. Germany's fatal blunder — that of forcing the United States into the contest— is traceable to political misjudgments of long standing. Politics, diplomacy, strategy, and the moral deficiencies of the German character all had their roles in the gigantic drama entitled "World Power or Downfall." Taking these all into account it is the writer's object to show, in a simple and non-technical way, why Germany lost a war which she might have won if she had conducted it with a keener sense of her own geographical and military limitations.

The first six chapters deal with the general principles

Preface vii

underlying German and Allied strategy. The others analyze the battles and campaigns in which the working out of these principles is illustrated.

The details of most of the main operations of the war have yet to be filled in. There are few critical works available. Perhaps the most satisfactory books of this sort produced up to date are volumes ii and iii of General Palat's La Grande Guerre sur le Front Occidental — studies of Joffre's Alsace, Lorraine, and Belgian offensives of 1914.

For the German interpretation of German strategy Lieutenant-General Baron Freytag-Loringhoven, Deputy Chief of the German General Staff, is the most useful source. He has been drawn on freely in this volume because when he wrote his two books — Deductions from the World War and A Nation Trained i?t Arms or a Militia? — ^he thought that Germany was going to win, and was willing to speak somewhat frankly and indulgently of the causes which, in his opinion, had retarded victory. The elaborate series of descriptions of battles and campaigns issued under the patronage of the German General Staff — Kriegsberichte aus dem Grossen Hauptquartier — shows only here and there a glimmer of critical frankness.

General Basil Gourko's book, War and Revolution in Russia, is an excellent first-hand authority on the

Vlll

Preface conditions on the Russian front. It is candid and discriminating. Ambassador Morgenthau's Story contains valuable first-hand information about the Dardenelles campaign. Good American books on the war are scarce. The author has depended for facts to some extent on The International Cyclopedia annuals for 1914, 1915, 1916, and 1917, and on the first two volumes of Frank H. Simonds's^ History of the World War.

Other sources used were Louis Madelin's The Victory of the Marne, George F. Schreiner's From Berlin to Bagdad, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Azan's The Warfare of Today, Professor Douglas W. Johnson's Topography and Strategy in the War, Senor E. Diaz-Retg's The Attack on Verdun, and Field Marshal Haig's admirable reports on British operations in France from 191 6 to 1918.

In a volume, to be published immediately, entitled A Short History of the Great War, I shall outline more in detail the events and campaigns which have been touched on in this book for the purpose ot illustrating the strategical problem.

William L. McPherson.

New York, May i, 1919.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface ....... v

General Outlines

Chapter I

There are two aspects to the German d6b^cle — one material and one moral. Speaking in the narrower, technical sense, Germany lost the war through certain specific errors in military policy. By November, 1918, the consequences of these blunders had brought the German armies in Belgium and France to the edge of a colossal disaster — an exaggerated Sedan or Jena. The German High Command elected to escape destruction by surrendering.

The German military failure was unquestionable. It resulted from unintelligent strategy and a misuse of military resources. But the German moral failure was even more decisive. It resulted from the inescapable limitations of the German character. Speaking in the broadest possible sense, Germany lost the war before she began it. She had the physical means to achieve victory on a limited scale — to create, for a time at least, a Middle Europe dominated from Berlin. But she lacked the sagacity to temper her megalomania. Bismarck was dead. He had left no successors. So the Germany of William II bungled along, sacrificing what might have been attainable through a prudent localization of effort to empty and grandiose dreams of Teuton world empire.

The German leaders and people were handicapped at critical stages of the war by not knowing exactly what they were fighting for. A wise statesman would have said: "Let us consolidate our power in Central and Eastern Europe. Let us throw a bridge across the Bosporus and push our railheads to Badgad. But let us stop there. That is enough for our generation, as the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine and the creation of the empire were enough for Bismarck's generation."

But there were no wise or moderate statesmen left in Germany. Whenever things looked encouraging at the front all Germans were pan-Germans. In the back of the German brain was the obsession of ethnical and moral superiority which the pan-German propaganda had so powerfully fostered. All classes of Germans were more or less conscious of a mission to go out and conquer the world and then remodel it in the image of Kultur. This spirit was unreasoning and fanatical. And since they were all deeply affected by it the German leaders gradually lost contact with political and military realities. They began to envisage the war not as a struggle for limited territorial objectives, or political priority on the continent of Europe, but as a duel between a higher form of civilization (their own, of course, which was destined to survive), and various lower forms (those of their enemies, which were destined to perish).

No illusion could have been more baseless than that the Germany of William II was elected by destiny to conquer and transform the world. Germany was too barren spiritually and intellectually to play the role of Rome or of Revolutionary France. She could not hope to establish an empire as extensive and durable as that of the Caesars. She could not even hope to establish one as unstable and transient as Napoleon's.

She had by patient labour forged a military instnmient powerful enough to subdue many of her neighbours. But she lacked utterly the moral weapons with which a conquering generation or a conquering civilization must be supplied if its sway is to become permanent

Rome possessed the indubitable moral superiority which reconciles the conquered to the rule of the conqueror. The Roman lawgiver completed the work of the Roman legionary. The Roman proconsuls brought the subject peoples peace, order, and security imder law. So the golden age of civilized Europe, Asia, and Africa was the age of Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines.

In the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, Gibbon wrote of this period:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

The Romans were true civilizers and empire builders. So were the French in the earlier years of the Revolution, when they carried through Europe the torch of liberty and the standard of democratic equality. The peoples of the Netherlands, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, whom the French freed from an outworn feudalism, welcomed the deliverance. They benefited materially by their change of status. The introduction of the French civil code, with its equalization of individual rights, was, in itself, a long step toward modern civilization.

Napoleon created the kingdoms of Bavaria and Wurttemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden. He organized the Confederation of the Rhine. He enlarged Saxony. All the South German states were vastly stimulated under the Napoleonic regime. They still owe it a debt of gratitude.

In one of the many public squares of Munich stands a monument commemorating the Bavarian soldiers who fell in Napoleon's Moscow campaign. There were thousands of them. One of the inscriptions reads: Sie sind auch fur das Vaterland gestorben ("They also died for their country"). Possibly in a larger measure than the writer of the inscription intended, Bavaria's sense of obligation to Napoleon's overlordship is thus acknowledged. France carried into these annexed countries ideas and a spirit of progress from which they profited enormously, and hundreds of thousands of their citizens fought without reluctance in the French armies. It was only when Napoleon broke entirely with the traditions of the Revolution and began to exploit these states cold-bloodedly in the effort to further his insane schemes of family aggrandizement that they turned against him and prepared to desert

him.

Under Napoleon Poland enjoyed a brief political restoration. He created out of territory allotted to

Prussia in the Polish partitions the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. He won the confidence of the Poles, although his policy toward them was plainly based on self-interest. He drew on them for a marshal, many generals, and more than one hundred thousand soldiers. Many Poles followed him to France in 1814.

Napoleon delivered Italy from the Austrian yoke and gave the Italians a forestaste of national unity when he created the Kingdom of Italy, with his stepson Eugene as viceroy. He gave the eastern Adriatic provinces autonomy. Italy's political status was greatly improved under the French regime. Spain, too, would have remained a willing ally if Napoleon had not fallen into the fatal error of trying to establish his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne.

Napoleon's own follies wrecked an empire which rested for a time (and might have continued to rest) on the good will of the peoples absorbed into it. But there is no known instance of a subject people reconciling itself to German domination.

There is something in the German character — a surviving strain of barbarism, perhaps — which stands in the way of any expression of magnanimity toward the conquered. The German is no assimilator. He has never been able to impress supposedly inferior peoples with a sense of his ethnical or moral superiority. He has, in fact, so little confidence in his own superiority that he has never been willing to admit to equality of status or opportunity the subject and supposedly inferior peoples within the German boundaries.

Inflamed by the arrogant chauvinism of the pan- German propagandists, the German people started out in 19 1 4 to impose their civilization on the rest of the world. A futile and pathetically misguided conception! When had the Germans, under the most favouring circumstances, ever Teutonized, or even placated, another race whose hard fate had brought it under German domination?

At the time of the Zabern incident, when Germany was irritated by the thought that Alsace was still unreconciled and perhaps irreconcilable, the Berliner Tagehlatt published an article comparing the feeUng of Savoy and Nice toward France with the feeling of Alsace and Lorraine toward Germany. Savoy and Nice were acquired from Italy by Napoleon III in 1859. Alsace and Lorraine were acquired from France by Bismarck in 187 1. Only twelve years' difference in time between the two transactions! Yet nobody but a historian could remember in 19 13 that Savoy and Nice had ever belonged to the present royal house of Italy, while the Zabern incident demonstrated that Alsace and Lorraine were hardly more German in affection than they were in 1871 — despite more than forty years of official proselyting and persecution.

Alsace-Lorraine went to the Prussian school of assimilation for forty-eight years in all. But she never was re-Teutonized, although her people are of an ancient German and Rhine Valley stock. The Poles of Prussia had been under German rule for a century and a 'quarter. In all that period they had been pitilessly restrained and disciplined. Everything possible was. done to eradicate their race and national spirit. They had been forbidden to speak their own language. Their lands had been taken away from them by a ruthless policy of expropriation. Yet they never yielded to German pressure. They relied on the superior tenacity of their own race instincts and culture. And they conquered at last. Parts of Poland which Prussia took nearly a century and a half ago are still more Polish than Prussian, and have properly reverted to the re-established Polish state, on whose coffin the three sovereigns of Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary sat — but sat in vain — for generations.

There is also North Schleswig. This is the Danish part of the province of Schleswig, taken away from the King of Denmark in 1864 by Austria and Prussia. These two confederates divided Holstein and Schleswig between them. But Prussia soon appropriated Austria's share. By the treaty of Prague, under which Austria legahzed the Prussian seizure, it was stipulated that the inhabitants of North Schleswig should have the right to determine by a plebiscite whether to remain Prussian or to go back to Denmark. No plebiscite was ever taken. For more than fifty years Prussia tried to assimilate this little Danish remnant. But all her efforts — including a proscription of the use of the Danish tongue — failed ignominiously.

Not a single alien element within the Prussian or German body politic has been reclaimed through the proselyting energies of German Kultur. Physical power is in itself impotent to awe the mind or conquer the imagination. Only moral virility can do that. The prophets of German destiny looking out over a world on which the stamp of German civilization was to be impressed forgot the Alsatian, Pohsh, and Danish fizzles. They clung to the primitive belief that the sword is the only civilizer. They carried the sword into Belgium, Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, Serbia, Albania, and Rumania. But everywhere the result was the same. The German conqueror might overrun and trample down peoples. He might erect military governments. But nowhere was he capable of really constructive and assimilative statesmanship. Nowhere could he conciliate or extract willing service. As an empire builder, because of Teuton tactlessness, his accomplishment was almost zero.

German policy in Belgium was the most hideous possible revelation of Germany's moral incapacity. As Bethmann-Hollweg admitted, the Germans seized Belgium in violation of treaty guarantees. It was an act of "military necessity." Germany was therefore bound in prudence to make the occupation as little oppressive as practicable to the Belgian people. And Belgium's heroic defence did not lessen the obligation of the invaders to deal generously with a country which had given Germany no shadow of offence and whose sole culpability consisted in lying across the easiest pathway of the German armies into Northern France.

Germany undoubtedly envied Belgium her great port of Antwerp and her strip of coast at the eastern entrance to the English Channel. German policy looked forward to the ultimate absorption of both Holland and Belgium. Statesmanship therefore dictated an attitude of conciliation on the part of the German invaders and a powerful emphasis of the material advantages which might accrue to the Belgians through closer association with the German Empire.

Biit in the heat of her anger over the stubborn resistance of the Belgians at Liege and over some negligible guerilla fighting in the Liege and Namur districts, Germany unloosed on Belgium those monstrous retaliations which shocked the civilized world. A deliberate programme of frightfulness was carried out against a defenceless civilian population. After Aerschot, Dinant, and Louvain it was next to impossible for any Belgian to consider contact with German civilization as anything but a defilement.

Germany gained some important military advantages by violating Belgian neutrality. She secured an entrance into France and carried the war to the gates of Paris. But she at once forced the hesitating British Government into the anti-German alliance. And her barbarities behind the fighting lines not only excited the undying enmity of the Belgians, but destroyed the last vestige of German moral prestige in the neutral world.

The German lifted his mask at Louvain. Thereafter no cunning or hypocrisy on his part could conceal what a German domination of Europe would mean.

Yet in Belgium he had had a real opportunity to imitate the tactics of Napoleon and to create local support by playing on the racial prejudices and aspirations of a large disaffected native element. If Berlin had suppressed reprisals with an iron hand and had protected the Belgian population from military terrorism, rapid progress might have been made in detaching the Flemings from the Walloons.

There had been a century-long antagonism between these two Belgian stocks, based mainly on a difference in language. The Walloons spoke French. The Flemings spoke their own ancient tongue. The former idiom gained a complete ascendancy under the French occupation from 1794 to 18 14. It became the legal language for all Belgium. After the Netherlands were united under Dutch sovereignty in 181 5 the use of Flemish was gradually restored in Belgian Flanders. This excited Walloon opposition and was one of the causes of the revolution of 1830, when Belgium achieved her independence of Holland.

After independence French became again the official tongue, although the constitution indorsed the principle of a free choice in the matter of languages. The decade from 1830 to 1840 saw the beginnings of the Flemish literary revival, which has persisted ever since. At first it was merely cultural. But from 1870 on it assumed a political aspect also. Agitations for the legalization of the use of Flemish in the criminal courts, in the secondary schools, in the public administration, and in official documents were successful. In recent years the "Flamigants," as they were called, had been working to make Flemish the exclusive tongue in all the Fleming districts, compelling its adoption in the whole school system up to the university, in local administration and in the relations of the central government with Flemish Belgium. .

The Germans knew all this. They had a lever ready made with which to segregate two sensitively antagonistic elements in the Belgian population. They had the opportunity to pose as restorers of an ancient native tongue akin to their own. Moreover, after offering the Flemings lingual freedom, they had a chance to bind them more securely to the German cause by offering them political separation and complete autonomy.

Yet German cunning could not undo the work of German savagery. The atrocities committed by the German soldiery united the Walloons and Flemings in common hatred of the invader. The breach between the two Belgian stocks closed long before the separatist intrigue could get fairly under way. It was not until December, 191 5, that Governor General Bissing converted the State University of Ghent into a Flemish University. It was not until March, 1917, that Belgium was partitioned into two military pro-consulates, Brussels becoming the Flemish capital and Namur the Walloon capital. Finally, in December, 19 17, a

Flemish legislative body, acting, under German military authority, proclaimed the complete independence of Flanders.

The few Belgians who were willing to accept racial "self-determination " from the German oppressor styled themselves Activists. They were attracted mostly by the high salaries and personal privileges offered them. But they never had a genuine following. The real leaders and forces in the former Flemish movement denounced Activism as treason. The Activists were "a staff without troops," as the Germans themselves were ultimately forced to admit. The new Flemish state, pro-Teuton in its leanings and intended to form the basis for a completely Teutonized Belgium, remained to the end a political fiction. The German despoiler, murderer, and terrorist had bungled the job of the German "liberator." The Flemings wished to speak their own language, even though it was cousin to the German. But they shrank with abhorrence from any political "liberation" which might come to them from the instigators of the Louvain massacre.

The two German political pro-consuls in Belgium were Bissing and Falkenhausen. Both were typical German bureaucrats, without vision or humane instincts. Cardinal Mercier, who defied their tyranny, said of them:

Falkenhausen was more cruel and inhuman than Bissing, and more perfidious, insidious, and dangerous. There was not much to choose between them, however.

They were true advance agents of the civiUzation which Germany intended to inflict on the rest of the world,

German policy thus failed utterly in Belgium, where conditions favoured local divisions and partial assimilation. It failed as conspicuously in the dependencies detached from Russia. The Germans also entered Poland as "liberators." They promised an end of Russian misrule. But the Poles had had some experience with Prussian methods of "liberation." They preferred Russia's tender mercies to Prussia's. They endured for more than three years the joint German and Austrian occupation and gave a passive assent to German-Austrian plans for creating a Polish buffer kingdom, under Teuton protection.

Their lot was alleviated by the inability of Germany and Austria to agree on the status of the new state. The Polish Regency Council was able to play one claimant off against the other. Both Germany and Austria tried to recruit troops in Poland. They succeeded indifferently, except in a few districts, along the West Galician border. The Poles had flocked by the tens of thousands to Napoleon's standard. But they balked at serving either Germany or Austria. The Polish Legion, created by the Regency, became in the end a national rather than a vassal organization. It was a peril rather than a help to the Teuton allies, and it turned with the Regency against them both when the German situation on the West Front became critical.

The Baltic Provinces and Lithuania were much less anti-German than Poland was. Germany at least promised and gave them a sort of political "self-determination." Economically, Courland, Livonia, and Esthonia had closer natural attachments to Germany than to Russia. They were in the German Baltic zone. But their rapprochement to Germany was half-hearted. They were willing to accept German princes and grand dukes as rulers. But they gave Germany little economic and no military aid.

Ukrainia owed her independence directly to Germany and should have been turned into a useful German ally. She had both grain and ' ' cannon fodder ' ' to contribute. But here German rapacity again overrode sound military policy. The German satraps set out to strip the Ukraine bare of food supplies the moment they were installed at Kiev. They plundered and misgoverned, quickly displacing the government which signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and sub'fetituting a dictatorship.

Governor- General Eichhorn was assassinated and Germany began to do in the Ukraine exactly what she had done in Belgium. Whatever power she retained rested on the sword. The Ukraine was quickly converted from a political asset into a political liability.

In Finland alone the Germans exhibited some gleams of political intelligence. They crushed the power of the Bolsheviki and restored a conservative government. Finland cheerfully accepted a German alliance and could have been converted into a valuable German recruiting ground, except for the fact that the alliance

*

was concluded too late. Finland was willing to fight for Germany between March and August, 191 8. After August she scented German disaster and was no longer willing to fight.

If Germany had broken down the Russian front a year earlier than she did she would have had it in her power to develop Finland, Esthonia, Livonia, Lithuania, Courland, and the Ukraine into feeders for her armies, just as Napoleon had used Poland, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and the German states. But serious mistakes of strategy in 1916 and 191 7 and the utter lack in her make-up of the empire-building instinct fortunately debarred her from exploiting with any thoroughness the populations assigned to her mercies by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

World empire is something incorporeal as well as physical. It can be attained only by nations which add to military power some spiritual ascendancy, some sterling moral quality. Germany, as the war was to prove again and again, lacked imperial stature. She had none of the upbuilding, civilizing power of Rome, none of the crusading fervour of Revolutionary France. In her political and military policy she imitated rather the futile cruelty and materialism of Spain.

It was morally impossible for Germany to conquer the world, since her cause was bad and her purposes were ignoble. One clear-minded truth-teller among the Germans saw this from the start. That was Dr. Wilhelm Miihlon. He wrote in his Diary on August 4, 1 9 14: "I cannot too often din it into the ears of the Germans that what is lacking in moral superiority cannot be replaced by force." And again: "Enthusiasm at the stare is cheap and easily excited. It can last only when one fights for a better cause and a higher ideal than his opponents, and offers even the opponent the opportunity of freedom and progress."

Germany offered no opponent, even Russia, "the opportunity of freedom and progress." She did not fight to spread civilization or to benefit humanity. She fought to stay the progress of the stars. Therefore, in the broad sense, she was doomed to defeat before she drew the sword.

But in the narrower sense there was no insuperable obstacle to her creating a limited military empire in Central Europe had she had the intelligence to make her strategy fruitful, getting the best results out of her vast initial superiority in military resources.

Chapter II

Germany fell a victim to delusions of grandeur. In his book, Germany and the Next War, published in 191 1, General Bernhardi said that the Germans would be obliged in the near future to choose between "world power and downfall."

That phrase summed up the empty im.aginings of the pan-German agitation. A rational German military policy in 191 1 or in 1914 would not have contemplated two such alternatives. If Prussia intended to engage in another war of conquest, she had only to follow the precedents set by Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century and by Moltke and Bismarck in the nineteenth. Those precedents did not compel a gamble between world power and ruin.

The Prussian state was a slow growth. First, it

embraced only the petty Mark of Brandenburg. Then

the Duch}^ of East Prussia was acquired. Pomerania

was conquered from the Swedes; West Prussia and

Posen were taken from the Poles; Silesia was grabbed from Austria, and a considerable part of Saxony from the Saxons. The Rhine province was acquired at the Congress of Vienna.

Such was Prussia's extent after the epoch of Frederick the Great. This erratic genius nearly swamped his kingdom in the Seven Years' War. His ambition led him, with only casual support from England, into a struggle with a great European coalition, comprising Austria, Saxony, France, Sweden, and Russia. The odds against him were far heavier than the odds against Germany in 19 14. He was saved by his extraordinary luck and by his own great military talents. But he never aimed at conquering Europe. His policy was one of conquest on a modest instalment plan.

Bismarck followed Frederick the Great's example, but moved with greater caution. He got Prussia into no war in which she would have to fight at a disadvantage. As a consequence he succeeded in annexing Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and Nassau, ejecting Austria from the German household, creating the modern Prussianized German Empire, and attaching Alsace-Lorraine to it as a crownland.

Victory over France in 1870-71 made Germany the first military power in Europe. The alliance with

Austria-Hungary and Italy, which Bismarck concluded, secured Germany thereafter against a counter attack. For more than forty years she nursed her resources with a view to improving her Continental position through another successful war. When the time came she was perfectly prepared to enlarge her European holdings. The chances were all heavily in her favour if she could confine the war to Europe.

If Bismarck had been in power, or if the newer generation had been able to produce a statesman of his calibre, the war of 1914 would probably have followed the course of the wars of 1866 and 1870. Germany would have emerged from it with an enlarged "place in the sun." She would have been content to digest her acquisitions and to prepare patiently for further expansion.

But Bismarck's successors, handicapped by having to cope with the instability and restless vainglory of William II, had allowed the Triple Alliance to be undermined. Italy had been estranged by a series of diplomatic blunders. By 19 14 she had become merely a nominal ally — a neutral, likely in time of trial to be converted into an enemy. Yet even with Italy hostile, Germany was still equal to fighting another prosperous European war. She was fully conscious of her strength. She was, in fact, so confident of it that in taking on a struggle with France and Russia she was willing to attack Belgium and thereby certainly force Great Britain from the outset into the circle of her enemies.