From Prophecy to Prediction 335

From Prophecy
A serialised survey of the movement
to Prediction
of ideas, developments in predictive
fiction, and first attempts to forecast
the future scientifically.
8. The war that never was
Correlli Barnett
BETWEEN the conclusion of the Franco-
Prussian War in 1871 and the coming
of the Great War in 1914, the military
leaderships of Europe faced one of
the most momentous problems of pre-
diction in history, for on the accuracy
of their calculations depended the
fate of their countries, of Europe as
a whole, and the lives of hundreds
of thousands (millions, in the event) of
men. It was at the same time one
of the most perplexing riddles ever to
confront professional predictors, be-
cause of three new factors which
together totally altered the terms of
reference of warfare.
The first of these factors was the
technological and military revolution
represented by the magazine rifle, the
water-cooled and belt-fed machine
gun, smokeless propellants, and quick-
firing artillery. The second factor was
the novel problem of supplying, de-
ploying, and directing unprecedented
numbers of troops; and this was linked
with the related problems of making
the right military use of the latest
inventions-the telephone, wireless, the
internal combustion engine, the flying
machine. Practical progress in these
fields was astonishingly rapid. In 1896
motor vehicles figured for the first
time in French manoeuvres; by 1914
it was &ear that motor transport,
while still not replacing the railway,
Mr Corelli Bamett has a worldwide reputation
as a military historian. His publications include
7% Deseri Genmals, The Sword6earers, Britain and
Her Army, The Coliapst of British Power, and
Marlborough.
boots, and hooves as the primary
means of moving armies, would be a
significant factor. By 1914 too the
most progressive armies were equipped
with mobile field radio sets. Count
Schlieffen, Chief of the German General
Staff until 1906, had a science-fiction
vision of the future commander, con-
trolling his distant armies from a desk
loaded with telephones. All armies had
their air force by 1914, whether air-
craft or airships. Although still without
striking power, these were clearly
of immense potential importance for
reconnaissance and fire-direction.
There was also the question of the
impact of mass technological warfare
on the highly geared and, so it seemed,
therefore fragile economies of the new
industrial states. What would be the
direct expense of keeping massive
armies in the field, of equipping them
and resupplying them, of feeding their
men and guns? And what would be
the economic effects of such a vast
diversion of manpower and resources
out of production into war making?
How, in a word, would a future war
be paid for ? Co&d it be paid for ?
The military leaderships had to
solve all these riddles not only in
general terms, but also in regard to
the political and strategic situation of
their countries, the plans of their
allies, and the likely plans of their
enemies. Diligently, and according to
their intellectual lights and national
traditions, they pondered and re-
pondered.
The French, who came late to the
FUTURES August 1875
Y
336 From Prophecy to Prediction
systematic study of war, only founding
their Ecole de Guerre in 1878, adopted
something of the approach of medieval
thinkers-an arbitrary vision, based on
faith, that disdained inconvenient fact.
Moreover, they limited themselves to
war in terms of armies and battlefield
tactics, rather than war in all its
technological, economic, and social
implications. By the 1880s the memory
faded of attacks stopped in slaughter
by modern firepower in the Franco-
Prussian War. Thereafter, under the
inspirational teachings of such heads
of the &ole de Guerre as Cardot and
Foch, the French army came to
believe that, in the words of the
Reglement dlnfanterie of 1887, Brave
and energetically commanded infantry
can march under the most violent fire
even against well-defended trenches,
and take them. This mystical faith
in moral elan survived the develop-
ment of quick-firing artillery and
machine-guns, and the proof supplied
by the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 of
the immense strength lent to the
defence by such weapons in the hands
of well-entrenched troops.
In the sphere of strategy the French
-great idealopes as a nation-fell
victims to Napoleonic myth, to emotion
and faith rather than to observation
and analysis of fact. They came to
believe fervently in the oflensive-
violent, immediate, and pushed to
extremes. When in 1910 General
Michel, then Chief of the General
Staff, realistically proposed a defensive
strategy in the fact of what he-
rightly-believed would be a vast
German wheeling movement through
Belgium, it cost him his post. Under
his successor, Joffre, French strateg)
obeyed the precepts of such advocates
of the Napoleonic offensive as Colonel
de Grandmaison, and this found its
ultimate expression in the afterwards
notorious Plan Seventeen of 1913.
So, according to French predictions,
August and September 1914 should
have gone like this: two closely c on-
centrated groups of French armies
attack in Lorraine on both sides of
the German fortress area of Metz.
To loud cheering and the blare of
bugles the French infantry, supported
by the fire of 75 mm field-guns, sweep
over the defenders by sheer force of
impetus and moral ascendancy and
win a decisive victory. The pursuit
is carried forward in a north-easterly
and easterly direction to the Rhine,
so isolating any German formations
that have advanced into Belgium.
Germany, faced simultaneously with
a Russian conquest of East Prussia and
advance on Berlin, sues for peace.
The German General Staff, for their
part, though by no means free of the
distortion of the judgement caused by
worship of glorious military tradition,
on the whole set about finding the
answers to the riddle of future war by
thorough analysis of technical factors
and such regional conflicts as the
Boer War and the Russo-Japanese
War. After 1871 the elder Moltke
saw little hope of repeating his decisive
victories over France. In the case of
a two-front war he planned for a
defensive in great depth in the West
and a strictly limited victory against
Russia in the open ground of the
Polish plain. He feared the possibility
of a peoples war, like the closing
phase of the France -Prussian war,
which he saw could prove intensely
difficult to bring to an end. Count
Schlieffen, who became Chief of the
General Staff in 1905, was no less
haunted by the consequences of a
prolonged struggle between modern
industrial states, which he-like some
civilian commentators-believed must
prove economically ruinous.
The German reading of the broad
evidence was therefore much more
sombre and cautious than the French.
German planners also had to recognise
that Germany would have to fight on
two fronts, against France and her
ally Russia, and with only the dubious
assistance of the Austrians. To Ger-
FUTURES Aueust 1875
Forecasts of future wars were frequent before 1914. This issue of Le Mode lllustr.6 from March 1900
described a French victory and the occupation of London
Y
By 1915 Americans had begun to read stories
of the coming German invasion of the United
States
Conan Doyles famous prediction of submarine
warfare, in the July issue of the Strand Magazine
for 1914
From Prophecy to Prediction 339
many,
therefore, a prolonged war
would be doubly ruinous. It followed
that a quick decisive victory was
doubly vital. But how to achieve it
against the firepower of the modern
defence ? Schlieffen ruled out a frontal
offensive as bound to fail. The answer
could only lie in outflanking the
enemy defences. In adopting this solu-
tion Schlieffen and his successor the
younger Moltke recognised that Ger-
manys bid for a quick victory could
only be a colossal gamble; and, in
contrast to the romantic rhetoric of
the French, they evinced a caution
verging on pessimism about the chances
of their gamble succeeding.
Germanys Lwar that never was
unrolled as follows: the conflict opens
with a colossal offensive against France
by seven-eighths of the German field
army,
while the remainder defend
East Prussia against the ponderous
Russians. In Lorraine and Alsace weak
German forces give ground in the
face of a French offensive, so drawing
the bulk of the French army east-
wards. Meanwhile the mass of the
German forces in the West (36 corps
out of 41) carry out a vast wheel
through Belgium and Luxembourg
(Schlieffen had included Holland, but
Moltke deleted it), pivoting on Metz,
and completely outflanking the power-
ful French frontier defences and the
principal strength of the French army.
The edge of the German wheel passes
through Brussels and Lille, down
across the Oise and the Seine. Every
time the French seek to build up a
defence line, to entrench, they are
freshly outflanked and forced to retreat
again, so that the campaign remains
mobile. The German wheel passes to
the westward of the fortress of Paris
and then swings east, crowding the
French armies away from the capital,
the centre of their rail net, and back
against the rear of their own frontier
defences. Here, caught in a gigantic
corral, a super Sedan, the French
army is forced to capitulate. Leaving
behind occupation forces to supervise
the armistice, Germany rails her army
across Europe to launch, in conjunction
with the Austrians, an encirclement
battle in Poland against the Russians,
who, defeated and bereft of their ally,
also sue for peace.
The Russians and Austrians followed
their senior partners in hoping and
planning for a quick war of manoeuvre
and a decisive victory: Russia for an
advance on Berlin while their French
ally was advancing to the Rhine;
Austria hoped for the conquest of
Serbia, an early success in Galicia,
and a decisive victory with her German
ally over Russia. The British General
Staff, whose planning was necessarily
circumscribed by the limitations of a
small all-professional army, could not
look beyond a supporting role in
French strategy; a minor part in the
colossal battles which British generals,
as much as their European counter-
parts, hoped and expected would
swiftly decide the war.
As we know, none of these predic-
tions came true. Instead the early
battles were indecisive; stalemate super-
vened. For the first time in European
history the quantity of military man-
power enabled a continuous front to
be held from Switzerland to the
sea, and (though more sketchily) in
the East from the Baltic to the Black
Sea; for the first time in history there
were no flanks to be turned, no possi-
bility of manoeuvre until first a break-
through had been achieved. And for
three years every attempt at break-
through-except on the more thinly
held Eastern Front-broke down in
the face of barbed wire, trenches,
machine-guns, and massed gunfire. The
defensive became supreme. The war
became a prolonged exercise in the
attrition of demographical, moral, in-
dustrial, and economic resources-
ruinous to victors and vanquished
alike.
It is therefore easy to see why the
pre-1914 general staffs of Europe have
FUTURES Augur t 1975
340 From Prophecy to Prediction
been universally condemned ever since
for getting it all so wrong. By way
of contrast their critics point in parti-
cular to the predictions of one I. S.
Bloch, a Polish banker, and his vast
work of analysis published in 1897
(The Wur of the Future in its Technical,
Economic and Political Relations, of which
part was published in English transla-
tion in 1900 under the title Is War
Impossible?). Bloch predicted a stale-
mated war in which entrenched armies
faced each other impotently across an
impassable zone of fire. The outcome
would eventually be decided through
attrition of the entire resources of the
combatant nations; economic exhaus-
tion and disruption would bring in
their train social uprisings and cvcn
revolution.
Nevertheless Bloc11 was not always
right. He wrongly thought that the
magazine-rifle would be the decisive
weapon, not, as it proved, the machine-
gun and artillery. He thought the range
of modern rifles would put an end to
close-range fighting, whereas trench
warfare was to prove a matter of
extremely close ranges. He believed
that, because of the scale of casualties,
care of the wounded would be beyond
the medical services. In fact, never
before had been casualtics better looked
after. He considered Russia to be the
nation best able to sustain a long war
without social collapse. In fact, she was
the first to undergo revolution and the
first to make peace. He also believed-
writing only a few years before Japan
humiliatingly defeated Russia in the
Far East-that Japan posed no danger
to Russia.
On the other hand not all Europes
soldiers were as lost in illusion as
their critics seem to think. The French
certainly were fantasists; they were
terribly awakened to reality by the
bloody repulse of their offensives in
1914. But the younger Moltke, for
example, told the Kaiser in 1905 that
the next conflict will become a war
of peoples which is not to be concluded
with a single battle but which will
be a long weary struggle with a country
which will not acknowledge defeat
until the whole strength of its people
is broken. Von Bernhardi, author
of the best-selling prewar book Ott the
War of Today, foresaw that frontal
attacks on a well-entrenched defence
would almost always fail. He also
grasped that industrial states had
immense adaptive capacity and would
be able to sustain a struggle much
longer than Bloch expected.
Nevertheless this kind of sober wis-
dom was alloyed in Germany too
with a traditional military faith in
the offensive as the virile and
victory-bringing form of war, and in
the sovereign virtues of the decisive
battle as practised by Frederick the
Great and Napoleon, and preached
by Clausewitz. This faith dovetailed
all too neatly into the practical necessity
of avoiding a long war.
Perhaps the real charge against the
pre-1914 military leaderships is not
that they failed to foresee and prepare
for a long war, but that, unlike their
successors in 1936-1939, they failed
to warn their governments that
Europes problems could not be solved
by military means, and that to resort
to such means must inevitably result in
catastrophe.
It would not, however, be fair for
us today to sneer at the pre- 1914
soldiers for planning exclusively for a
single, short campaign on the grounds
that a long war would be either
impossible or ruinous. For this is
exactly what NATO is doing today-
with the full approval of its member
governments-and despite the prece-
dent of two world wars; a precedent
which the military analysts before 1914
did not enjoy.
FUTURES August 1975