"The Guns of August"

[fiefoe]

Barbara Tuchman sets the stage superbly, starting with the famous opening paragraph with nine kings:

• SO GORGEOUS WAS THE SPECTACLE on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and of its kind the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
• He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany’s encirclement; Edward his mother’s brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun.
• The Kaiser, possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe,
• ninth king, the only one among them who was to achieve greatness as a man. Despite his great height and perfect horsemanship, Albert, King of the Belgians, who disliked the pomp of royal ceremony, contrived in that company to look both embarrassed and absentminded. He was then thirty-five and had been on the throne barely a year. In later years when his face became known to the world as a symbol of heroism and tragedy, it still always wore that abstracted look, as if his mind were on something else.
• Bülow had no principles; he was so slippery, lamented his colleague Admiral Tirpitz, that compared to him an eel was a leech. The flashing, inconstant, always freshly inspired Kaiser had a different goal every hour, and practiced diplomacy as an exercise in perpetual motion.
• but it is perhaps the saddest story of the fate of kings that the Kaiser lived to be eighty-two and died without seeing Paris.
• The Tiger shared Napoleon’s opinion that Prussia “was hatched from a cannon ball,” and saw the cannon ball coming in his direction.
• Nicholas II once combined two favorite prejudices in the simple statement, “An Englishman is a zhid (Jew).”
• and he was sure Grandpapa (William I, who had died muttering about a war on two fronts)
• War, he stated, “is a biological necessity”; it is the carrying out among humankind of “the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence.” Nations, he said, must progress or decay; “there can be no standing still,” and Germany must choose “world power or downfall.”
• Offensive war thus becomes another “necessity” and a second conclusion inescapable: “It is incumbent on us … to act on the offensive and strike the first blow.” Bernhardi
• At a signal of four sharp whistles the sailors hoisted the coffin onto the gun carriage draped in purple, red and white. The cortege moved on between motionless lines of grenadiers like red walls that hemmed in the packed black masses of perfectly silent people. London was never so crowded, never so still.

• COUNT ALFRED VON SCHLIEFFEN, Chief： Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bullnecked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, “An unimportant obstacle.”
• A neutral and independent Belgium was the creation of England or rather of England’s ablest Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston. Belgium’s coast was England’s frontier;
• Lord Palmerston outmaneuvered them all. He knew that a subject province would be an eternal temptation to one neighbor or another and that only an independent nation, resolved to maintain its own integrity, could survive as a safety zone. Through nine years of nerve, of suppleness, of never swerving from his aim, of calling out the British fleet when necessary, he played off all contenders and secured an international treaty guaranteeing Belgium as an “independent and perpetually neutral state.” The treaty was signed in 1839 by England, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
• Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others. Under the terms of the Austro-German alliance, Germany was obliged to support Austria in any conflict with Russia. Under the terms of the alliance between France and Russia, both parties were obliged to move against Germany if either became involved in a “defensive war” with Germany. These arrangements made it inevitable that in any war in which she engaged, Germany would have to fight on two fronts against both Russia and France.
• The flat plains of Flanders had them. In Belgium there was both room for the outflanking maneuver which was Schlieffen’s formula for success as well as a way to avoid the frontal attack which was his formula for disaster.
• Clausewitz, oracle of German military thought, had ordained a quick victory by “decisive battle” as the first object in offensive war.
• Under Schlieffen, envelopment became the fetish and frontal attack the anathema of the German General Staff.... Thus the Germans came to Belgium. Decisive battle dictated envelopment, and envelopment dictated the use of Belgian territory.
• Germans had imbibed from 1870 the lesson that arms and war were the sole source of German greatness.
• What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”
• One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
• He knew how material success could gain public opinion; he forgot how moral failure could lose it, which too can be a hazard of war.
• Tall and imposing with his black spade beard and his aura of wickedness composed of mistresses, money, Congo cruelties, and other scandals, Leopold was, in the opinion of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, “a thoroughly bad man.”
• The schedule called for the roads through Liège to be open by the twelfth day of mobilization, Brussels to be taken by M-19, the French frontier crossed on M-22, a line Thionville–St. Quentin reached by M-31, Paris and decisive victory by M-39. The plan of campaign was as rigid and complete as the blueprint for a battleship.


• Against that elusive, that mocking and perilous quantity, every precaution had been taken except one—flexibility.

• French strategy did not ignore the threat of envelopment by a German right wing. On the contrary, the French General Staff believed that the stronger the Germans made their right wing, the correspondingly weaker they would leave their center and left where the French Army planned to break through.
• Through returning prosperity and growing empire, through the perennial civil quarrels—royalism, Boulangism, clericalism, strikes, and the culminating, devastating Dreyfus Affair—the sacred anger still glowed especially in the army. The one thing that held together all elements of the army, whether old guard or republican, Jesuit or Freemason, was the mystique d’Alsace.
• Translated into military terms Bergson’s élan vital became the doctrine of the offensive. In proportion as a defensive gave way to an offensive strategy, the attention paid to the Belgian frontier gradually gave way in favor of a progressive shift of gravity eastward toward the point where a French offensive could be launched to break through to the Rhine.
• Foch’s mind, like a heart, contained two valves: one pumped spirit into strategy; the other circulated common sense. On the one hand Foch preached a mystique of will expressed in his famous aphorisms “The will to conquer is the first condition of victory,”
• Colonel Grandmaison grasped only the head and not the feet of Foch’s principles. Expounding their élan without their sureté, he expressed a military philosophy that electrified his audience. He waved before their dazzled eyes an “idea with a sword” which showed them how France could win. Its essence was the offensive à outrance, offensive to the limit.
• The defensive is forgotten, abandoned, discarded; its only possible justification is an occasional “economizing of forces at certain points with a view to adding them to the attack.”
• While French history and development after the turn of the century fixed her mind upon the offensive, her geography still required a strategy of the defensive.
• A trick of fate arranged that Messimy should be a forceful character and Michel should not. To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions, and Michel duly paid for his clairvoyance.
• “Eliminate the red trousers?” he cried. “Never! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!” “That blind and imbecile attachment to the most visible of all colors,” wrote Messimy afterward, “was to have cruel consequences.”
• They did not credit the sweep through Flanders, although, in fact, they had been told about it in a dramatic manner by an officer of the German General Staff who in 1904 betrayed to them an early version of the Schlieffen plan.
• In the interim two men formed a trans-Channel friendship which was to serve as the first cable for the building of a bridge. Britain’s Staff College was then commanded by Brigadier General Henry Wilson, a tall, bony, ebullient Anglo-Irishman with a face which he thought rather resembled that of a horse. Quick and impatient, Wilson was in a constant boil of ideas, humor, passion, imagination and, above all, energy.
• the Home Secretary, a young man of thirty-seven, impossible to ignore, who, from his inappropriate post, had pelted the Prime Minister during the crisis with ideas on naval and military strategy, all of them quite sound, had produced an astonishingly accurate prediction of the future course of the fighting, and who had no doubts whatever about what needed to be done. The Home Secretary was Winston Churchill.
• Sir Edward Grey obliged in the form of a letter to M. Cambon, the French ambassador. Drafted and approved by the Cabinet, it was a masterpiece of ellipsis. The military conversations, it said, left both parties free to decide at any future time “whether or not to assist each other by armed force.”
• This curious document managed to satisfy everybody: the French because the whole British Cabinet Government had now officially acknowledged the existence of the joint plans, the antiwar group because it said England was not “committed,” and Grey because he had evolved a formula that both saved the plans and quieted their opponents.
• During mobilization the average Russian soldier had to be transported 700 miles, four times as far as the average German soldier, and Russia had available one-tenth as many railroads per square kilometer as Germany. As a defense against invasion these had been deliberately built on a wider gauge than those of Germany.
• To send an army into modern battle on enemy territory, especially under the disadvantage of different railway gauges, is a hazardous and complicated undertaking requiring prodigies of careful organization. Systematic attention to detail was not a notable characteristic of the Russian Army.
• The regime was ruled from the top by a sovereign who had but one idea of government—to preserve intact the absolute monarchy bequeathed to him by his father—and who, lacking the intellect, energy, or training for his job, fell back on personal favorites, whim, simple mulishness, and other devices of the empty-headed autocrat. His father, Alexander III, who deliberately intended to keep his son uneducated in statecraft until the age of thirty, unfortunately miscalculated his own life expectancy, and died when Nicholas was twenty-six. The new Czar, now forty-six, had learned nothing in the interval, and the impression of imperturbability he conveyed was in reality apathy—the indifference of a mind so shallow as to be all surface.
• its particular quality that caused a British diplomat to conclude that “everyone in Russia was a little mad”—a quality called le charme slave, half nonchalance, half inefficiency, a kind of fin de siècle fecklessness that hung like a faint mist over the city on the Neva which the world knew as St. Petersburg and did not know was the Cherry Orchard.
• No less ardent a friend of France was the Grand Duke’s wife, Anastasia, and her sister Militza, who was married to the Grand Duke’s brother Peter. As daughters of King Nikita of Montenegro, their fondness for France was in direct proportion to their natural hatred of Austria.