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THE GERMAN ARMY 
 
 IN WAR 
 
 BY 
 
 A. HILLIARD ATTERIDGE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "FAMOUS LAND FIGHTS " 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 
. . 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION AND NOTE ON GERMAN 
 
 NUMBERS ..... v. 
 
 I. THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY . n 
 
 II. DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARMY SYSTEM . 26 
 
 III. ARMY ORGANISATION . . .40 
 
 IV. PREPARATION FOR WAR ... 56 
 V. ACTION ON DECLARATION OF WAR . 74 
 
 VI. How THE GERMANS FIGHT . .81 
 
 VII. GERMANY ON THE DEFENSIVE . . 101 
 
 VIII. THE GERMAN LAW OF WAR . . 112 
 
 IX. GERMAN IDEAS ON THE INVASION OF 
 
 ENGLAND ..... 123 
 
 330935 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 JN the following chapters I have tried to give 
 briefly and in plain untechnical language an 
 account of the origin of the German military 
 system, and the organisation and war methods 
 of the German army. I trust that the little book 
 will prove interesting and useful to readers of 
 the war news and to many of our young soldiers 
 who are now training to meet that army in the 
 field. 
 
 I have endeavoured to make the book a 
 collection of facts, with only so much discussion 
 of them as is necessary to make them clear to 
 the reader, avoiding as far as possible any attempt 
 at criticism. But the mere statement of these 
 facts is enough to show that the German army 
 is a very formidable fighting organisation. And 
 I think it is well that this should be understood. 
 It is a mistake to underrate an opponent. The 
 Germans made this mistake with regard to our own 
 gallant army. Some writers here at home appear 
 to me to have been as much at fault in their 
 estimates of the German army at the outset of 
 the war. 
 
 In our case a mistake of this kind has very 
 unfortunate results. In the first place it does an 
 injustice to our own splendid fighting men. If 
 the German army were an inefficient, out-of-date 
 war machine, if it sent to the front a crowd of 
 blundering leaders and half-hearted soldiers, 
 there would be little credit due to those who have 
 stood up so gloriously against its onset. In the 
 
vi THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 second place, unjustified depreciation of our 
 opponents is only too likely to make men think 
 that no great effort will be needed for their 
 final overthrow. Such a mistaken estimate is 
 only too likely to lead to a slackening of the 
 effort to send abundant help to those who are 
 bearing the brunt of the battle. 
 
 But from those very men there is evidence 
 enough that the German army system has been 
 quite efficient enough to produce (i) enormous 
 masses of trained soldiers, (2) and these so 
 inspired with the soldier spirit that they face 
 death unflinchingly even in attacks that seem 
 doomed to utter failure. To quote one instance 
 out of many, the official " Eye Witness ' with 
 Sir John French's headquarters has told us how, 
 in one of the attacks near Ypres, a column of 
 young soldiers struggled onward amid a deadly 
 fire from our own lines, singing as they came, 
 renewing the attack again and again, and only 
 desisting from a hopeless effort when the ground 
 was heaped with their dead and wounded. 
 Such disciplined courage wins the admiration of 
 every true man. Such soldiers and such an army 
 cannot be despised. 
 
 But here let me say that, while fully recognising 
 the good points of the German system and the 
 German army, I am not one of those whose study 
 of German war methods has led them to prefer 
 the foreign system of universal service to our own. 
 On the contrary, I hold that under our voluntary 
 system we have produced and are producing the 
 best type of soldiers in the world, and can obtain 
 as many of them as we need. But holding that 
 
INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 view I also hold that there is no reason to shut 
 one's eyes to the merits of the German system or 
 to undervalue the soldierly qualities of the men 
 it has produced. So little is this the case that, 
 to our great gain, we have, since the war of 1870, 
 been to some extent learners from Germany in 
 military matters. We have adopted many of 
 the methods of the German army, but we have 
 not been mere slavish imitators, and it may be 
 said that we have " bettered the instruction.' 1 
 France, too, has been a pupil of Germany, and 
 has adopted much more of the German system 
 than we have taken into our own. 
 
 In dealing with the German interpretation of 
 the law of war, I have stated what is the practice 
 of German commanders in the field, and I hope 
 I have made my meaning so clear that no reader 
 will mistake my explanation for a defence, or 
 even a palliation, of German misdeeds in Belgium. 
 The concluding chapter on German ideas on the 
 invasion of this country might easily have been 
 made longer, but I have purposely kept to the 
 one decisive point the absolute futility of all 
 and any project for anything more than a mere 
 local raid, so long as our navy holds the command 
 of the sea. That it will hold it to the end of 
 this war, and long after this war has become a 
 memory, I have not the shadow of a doubt. 
 Though a writer of military history, I believe in 
 the primary importance of Sea Power, and our 
 navy embodies and exercises that pow r er in the 
 highest degree to a degree, indeed, that has 
 never been surpassed, perhaps never equalled, 
 in the long annals of war. 
 
viii THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 At the outset of the war there was a tendency 
 to underestimate the forces we had to meet. 
 
 The peace strength of the German army before 
 the war was 36,300 officers and 754,600 N.C.O.'s 
 and men, a total of nearly 800,000 of all ranks. 
 
 The mobilisation of the twenty-five Army Corps 
 and the Cavalry Divisions would give a first 
 fighting line of over a million men. But this 
 force was at once doubled by forming new reserve 
 corps out of reservists of the first levy of the 
 Landwehr. Before the end of August second 
 reserve units were being formed for several of 
 the corps ; the Landsturm and the second levy 
 of the Landwehr were called out, and the recruits 
 who would normally be enrolled in September 
 were enlisted at least 600,000 men. 
 
 It is estimated that by the end of August, 
 Germany had about four millions of men under arms . 
 
 But there remained a large reserve of men fit for 
 military service but mostly untrained. Only an ap- 
 proximate estimate of their numbers can be made. 
 
 In round numbers the male population 
 of Germany amounts to thirty-tw r o millions. 
 According to data given in the November issue 
 of the Journal of the Royal United Service 
 Institution, the approximate proportions for the 
 various ages would be : 
 
 Percentage, Numbers. 
 
 Under 15 years . . . . 33 . . . . 10,560,000 
 
 From 15-40 years . . . . 42 . . . . 13,440,000 
 
 From 40-60 years . . . . 15 . . . . 4,800,000 
 
 Over 60 years 10 . . . . 3,200,000 
 
 Total loo , . . . 32,000,000 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 The classes from 15 to 60 years of age give a 
 total of over eighteen millions. Deducting one 
 third (six millions) for youths too young to serve, 
 and older men incapable of military service, or 
 debarred by necessary civil work, we have twelve 
 million possible recruits. With four millions under 
 arms at the outset the reserve would be eight 
 millions, mostly untrained. Two millions of them 
 are said to have been enrolled in various ways 
 since the first month of war. 
 
 These are, of course, only rough estimates, but 
 they show that there must still be an abundance 
 of material for the military machine of the Ger- 
 man army ; and suggest that it would be a 
 dangerous folly to relax our own efforts in 
 recruiting and training men for the war. 
 
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 THE GERMAN ARMY 
 
 IN WAR 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 
 
 THE " NATION IN ARMS ' 
 
 o 
 
 N October I4th, 1806, Napoleon defeated the 
 Prussian army at Jena. Murat's relentless 
 pursuit to the shores of the Baltic captured or 
 scattered all who had escaped the rout. Nothing 
 was left of the army, which had lived for fifty 
 years on the fame of Frederick the Great, except 
 the garrisons of a few fortresses. In the following 
 winter the defeat of Prussia's ally, the Czar, at 
 Friedland, completed the humiliation of the House 
 of Hohenzollern. By the Treaty of Tilsit Prussia 
 became a tributary of the French Empire. And 
 with a view to making this subjection permanent 
 an article of the treaty provided that the Prussian 
 standing army should be reduced to 42,000 men. 
 
 Thanks, however, to the clear-sighted action of 
 a group of patriotic men this disaster became the 
 
12 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 starting point of a new epoch of national progress 
 for Prussia. To the reorganisation of the country 
 after Jena must be traced the making of the 
 German army of to-day, and indeed the origin 
 of the military systems of all the great powers of 
 Continental Europe. 
 
 The military reorganisation of the kingdom 
 was the work of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. 
 Scharnhorst, the son of a small farmer, had 
 served in the army of Hanover, then under the 
 British Crown, in the first war of the French 
 Revolution. In 1801, he transferred his services 
 to Prussia, and became Commandant of the 
 Training School for Officers. Taken prisoner 
 after the disaster of Jena, he was exchanged in 
 time to fight in the Battle of Eylau. In 1807, 
 he was put at the head of the Commission for 
 reorganising the army. His colleague, Gneisenau, 
 came from Prussian Saxony. He saw his first 
 war service among the German troops who 
 were employed against the American Colonists, 
 under the English flag. On his return to Europe 
 he joined the Prussian army, and fought with 
 distinction in the campaign of Jena. 
 
 Scharnhorst was the author of the plan of re- 
 organisation adopted in 1807. Its central idea 
 was to make the little army of 42,000 men, which 
 Prussia was allowed to keep with the colours, 
 not a standing army in the old sense, but a 
 training school through which a large number 
 of men could be passed, who would then form 
 a reserve that could be called up for service when 
 the day came for a national uprising against the 
 French domination in Germany. Short service 
 
MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 13 
 
 was therefore introduced. The plan worked so 
 successfully that in 1813, when Prussia joined 
 the coalition against Napoleon, which ended in 
 his downfall, the army of 42,000 men was at 
 once expanded to over 120,000 by calling up 
 to the colours old soldiers and a large reserve 
 of trained men formed since 1807. 
 
 Scharnhorst died during the War of Liberation 
 (as the Germans call the war of 1813-14). But 
 Gneisenau lived to be the chief director of 
 Prussian strategy in the field during these cam- 
 paigns, and during that of Waterloo. Bliicher 
 commanded ; his reputation as an old soldier of 
 Frederick the Great, his personal influence with 
 the army, his untiring energy, made him the 
 actual leader in the field. But Bliicher was a 
 soldier of the old school. His fierce hatred of the 
 French inspired him with a kind of furious energy, 
 and made the " drunken old dragoon ' (as 
 Napoleon called him) a dangerous enemy. 
 Gneisenau was the directing mind of the Prussian 
 operations in his capacity of Chief of the Staff to 
 Bliicher. 
 
 After the downfall of Napoleon, it was 
 Gneisenau who carried on and perpetuated Scharn- 
 horst's work of reorganisation. A third great 
 soldier, Clausewitz, who had fought in the 
 Prussian and Russian armies in most of the 
 campaigns of the Revolution and the Empire 
 from Valmy to Waterloo, gave the Prussian army, 
 in his writings, a practical theory of war on 
 which it has acted ever since. Clausewitz was one 
 of the first professors of the school of war founded 
 by Scharnhorst in 1810 for the higher training 
 
14 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 of selected officers, and he was its director from 
 1818 to 1830. This school, now known as the 
 Kriegs Akademie (War Academy), is the German 
 Staff College. Its teaching staff is made up not 
 only of soldiers, but also of civilian experts. 
 Thus, for instance, Karl Ritter, one of the 
 founders of modern scientific geography, was a 
 professor of the War Academy for thirty-nine 
 years, and during this time organised the 
 remarkably efficient map department of the 
 General Staff. 
 
 The basis of the new army organisation was 
 universal obligation to military service. This 
 does not mean that every man served in the 
 army, but that on reaching the age of twenty 
 every man had to present himself at the re- 
 cruiting centre of his district, and the army 
 authorities enlisted as many men as were required 
 to make up the annual contingent. 
 
 The recruits thus enrolled served for three or 
 four years. They were then passed into the 
 reserve, and were liable to be called up on a 
 declaration of war to bring up the first line of 
 the army to war strength. After completing 
 his reserve service, the Prussian soldier belonged 
 for some years more to a second line army, 
 known as the Landwehr (the ' guards of the 
 land "). The Landwehr, though primarily in- 
 tended for home defence, could be employed for 
 active service beyond the frontier, and were 
 counted upon to form the garrisons and guard 
 the line of communication of the active army. 
 
 After being dismissed from the Landwehr, the 
 Prussian soldier passed into the Landsturm (the 
 
MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 15 
 
 ' rising of the country/' the ' levee en masse "). 
 This force was the third line. They could be 
 called to arms for the defence of Prussia in a 
 great emergency, and it was laid down that in 
 this case they would not wear uniforms, but 
 only badges. 
 
 For some sixty years, the Prussian army was 
 the only one in Europe organised on the system 
 of short service and large reserves. Every other 
 army was formed of long-service soldiers, and 
 it was the fashion to talk of the Prussian army 
 as a kind of militia, largely composed of half- 
 trained men who could not stand up against 
 professional soldiers. 
 
 A second cardinal principle of the new Prussian 
 system was the localisation of the army, and its 
 permanent organisation in territorial army corps. 
 Napoleon had organised the Grand Army in a 
 number of corps, each usually commanded by one 
 of his marshals. But these corps were formed 
 by from time to time assigning a certain number 
 of regiments to one or other of these commands, 
 and the composition of the corps varied in each 
 new war. The Prussian army corps was a little 
 army complete in infantry, cavalry and artillery, 
 recruited and permanently stationed in one or 
 other of the provinces of the kingdom. The 
 localisation was carried even further. Each 
 regiment w 7 as raised in, and permanently connected 
 with, a town or a group of villages. The result 
 was that in every battalion and company, in 
 every squadron and battery, the men were 
 neighbours and kinsfolk. It was a kind of adapta- 
 tion of the old tribal system to modern war, and 
 
16 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 it had the great advantage that it rendered 
 mobilisation a fairly simple business. The men 
 who were to fight side by side gathered in their 
 village, went into the nearest town, where they 
 found their friends and neighbours beside whom 
 they were to serve, put on once more the uniform 
 of the regiment in which they had received their 
 training, and found themselves under a colonel 
 and a general whom they had often seen at the 
 head of the troops at local reviews and route 
 marches. 
 
 The ideal of the whole organisation was that 
 the nation should be ready in the event of war 
 to bring its whole manhood into the field. But 
 during the first half of the nineteenth century 
 this ideal was far from being realised. The 
 armies of all the powers of the Continent were 
 kept at a figure far below that of the later years 
 of the century, and Prussia did not possess the 
 resources or feel the necessity to train any large 
 proportion of the men who were each year liable 
 to service. There was a partial mobilisation 
 of the Prussian army in 1859, during the war 
 between Napoleon III. and Austria. Prince 
 William of Prussia, afterwards the King and the 
 first of the new German Emperors, was then 
 acting as regent of the kingdom on account of 
 the illness of Frederic William IV. He had 
 devoted his whole life to military affairs, and as 
 a young man had fought against Napoleon in 
 the campaign of 1814. He was disappointed at 
 finding that the mobilisation took a considerable 
 time, and did not give the numbers which had 
 been anticipated. The fact was that during 
 
MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 17 
 
 long years of peace with small numbers called up 
 each year to the colours, the military system of 
 the country had fallen far below the ideals of 
 its founders. 
 
 On January 2nd, 1861, Frederic William died, 
 and the Crown Prince became King of Prussia. 
 He had already formed a scheme for reorganising 
 the army, increasing its effective strength, and 
 making the process of mobilisation more rapid 
 and workmanlike. He meant to make Prussia 
 the leading military power of Germany. In 
 carrying out this work he was assisted by three 
 remarkable men, Von Bismarck, as head of the 
 Ministry, Von Roon, as Minister of War, and Von 
 Moltke, as Chief of the General Staff. The new 
 army legislation requiring, as it did, heavy 
 financial sacrifices and a great extension of the 
 annual levy of men, excited a strong opposition 
 in the Prussian Parliament. For four years Von 
 Bismarck carried on the Government in defiance 
 of hostile votes, and levied taxes, and called out 
 men for service without Parliamentary warrant. 
 Your votes of censure are of no effect," he once 
 said to the Opposition. You imagine that you 
 are in England and that I am your minister, but 
 you are in Prussia, and I am the minister of the 
 King." 
 
 The reorganisation of the army was carried 
 out on the lines which the King had laid down 
 with the help of Von Roon and Von Moltke. 
 The latter had been Chief of the General Staff 
 since King William became regent in 1858. 
 He had made it a centre of information on which 
 he based plans for mobilisation and concentration 
 
 B 
 

 i8 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 in the event of a quarrel with any of Prussia's 
 neighbours. At the same time he directed the 
 instruction of the officers and the training of the 
 army, and he gathered around him a singu- 
 larly able group of war leaders, who were 
 thoroughly familiar with his ideas and could be 
 trusted to act on their own initiative in the spirit 
 of the military doctrine he had taught them. 
 The remarkable thing is that except for a brief 
 and disastrous campaign with the Turkish army 
 in Western Asia, he had never taken part in 
 actual operations in the field, but he had made 
 a close study of the great campaign, and under 
 his direction the Prussian army manoeuvres 
 became a real school of war at a time when in 
 other armies such manoeuvres were either non- 
 existent or were mere theatrical displays. 
 
 Prussia was at this time a member of the old 
 German Confederation formed in 1815, and made 
 up of some sixty kingdoms, principalities, grand 
 duchies, duchies and free cities whose common 
 interests were regulated in the annual meeting of 
 the Diet of the Confederation at Frankfurt-on- 
 the-Main. Austria and Prussia had long been 
 rivals for the headship of the confederation, to 
 which Austria belonged in right of its German 
 lands. 
 
 Bismarck's policy was directed to excluding the 
 Austrians from the Confederation and making 
 Prussia the dominant power in a new Germany 
 united under her headship. It was for this the 
 reorganised army was wanted. In the winter of 
 1863 the Frankfurt Diet asserted the claim of 
 the Confederation to occupy .the Danish duchies 
 
MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 19 
 
 of Schleswig-Holstein and entrusted the execution 
 of this resolution to a contingent to be drawn from 
 the armies of the minor powers. Bismarck over 
 rode the decision, and arranged with Vienna that 
 the occupation of the duchies should be carried 
 out by Austrian and Prussian contingents. On 
 the ist of February, 1864, the Austrians under 
 Gablenz, and the Prussians under Prince Frederic 
 Charles, crossed the Danish frontier. The Danes 
 were able to make only a hopeless resistance, 
 which came to an end in the early summer. It 
 was the first campaign of the new Prussian army, 
 and the Prussians did most of the fighting, such 
 as it was. But the war was a small affair. The 
 Danes had less than 46,000 men in the field, 
 the Allies 56,000, of whom more than 35,000 
 were Prussians (about the strength of a single 
 army corps), and very few people realised how 
 efficiently the little army had done its work. 
 Attention was chiefly attracted by the fact that 
 the infantry was armed with a rather clumsy 
 kind of breechloader adopted in 1855. The 
 Prussian army was then the only one in Europe 
 which possessed such a weapon, and conservative 
 military opinion in other countries set little value 
 on it. It was said that it was too complicated, 
 liable to get out of order, and certain to lead to 
 useless waste of ammunition, which might leave 
 whole battalions without a shot to fire when the 
 crisis of the fight arrived. 
 
 This Danish war of 1864 gave Prussia the port 
 of Kiel, and made the future North Sea canal 
 possible. But it was not till two years later that 
 Prussia came into assured possession of these 
 
20 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 conquests. There was a quarrel with Austria and 
 the South German States as to the division of 
 the spoil. The result was the war of 1856, when 
 for the first time Europe realised that the re- 
 organised Prussian army was a singularly for- 
 midable fighting force. 
 
 When the challenge was thrown down by 
 Berlin to Vienna the general opinion throughout 
 the neutral countries of Europe was that the war 
 would end in disaster for Prussia, despite the 
 help of Italy as an ally. Austria, after detaching 
 150,000 men to hold Venetia against the Italians, 
 would be able to put some 300,000 men in line 
 in the north, this army including the Saxon 
 forces which retired across the frontier of Bohemia 
 at the outset of the war. Hanover and the 
 South German States would be able to place 
 another army of 120,000 men in the field. Thus 
 at the outset of the war there would be 420,000 
 men mobilised by Austria and her German allies 
 against Prussia, who could count on mobilising 
 at the utmost some 350,000 men, and the idea 
 still was widely prevalent that these 350,000 
 Prussians were little better than a short service 
 militia force who would make but a poor stand 
 against the Austrian armies. 
 
 Von Moltke struck swiftly and surely ; 50,000 
 men were detached to deal with the Hanoverians 
 and South Germans. Whatever the result here 
 it would not decisively affect the issue. If the 
 main Austrian army could be beaten the minor 
 states could be subsequently disposed of ; 300,000 
 men were concentrated in three armies on the 
 frontiers of Bohemia, and entered Austrian 
 
MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 21 
 
 territory on the convergent lines of advance 
 that brought them into simultaneous action on 
 the battlefield of Sadowa. On July 4th the 
 great battle was fought that fixed the future of 
 Germany and revealed to the world the fighting 
 efficiency of the Prussian army. It was the 
 greatest battle since Leipzig. The numbers 
 engaged were fairly equal, 220,000 Prussians 
 against 215,000 Austrians and Saxons, but in 
 eight hours the Allies were hopelessly beaten. 
 The victory cost the Prussians about 9,000 killed 
 and wounded, that is 4 per cent, of the force 
 engaged, and a trifling loss. The beaten army 
 left more than 23,000 men killed and wounded 
 on the field, and the Prussians made more than 
 12,000 prisoners and took 187 guns. There was 
 no more serious fighting. In seven weeks from 
 the outbreak of hostilities the war was over. 
 Austria had agreed to withdraw from all inter- 
 ference in German affairs. The old German 
 Confederation disappeared. Prussia annexed 
 Hanover and several of the other northern 
 states that had opposed her, and bound the rest 
 to her policy by the formation of a " North German 
 Confederation/' The southern states were com- 
 pelled to enter into an offensive and defensive 
 alliance with the new Confederation, and Prussia 
 thus realised her policy of becoming the dominant 
 power of a new Germany. 
 
 ' Nothing succeeds like success.' 3 The Bis- 
 marckian policy now became popular in Prussia, 
 and in the rest of Germany there was a steady 
 growth of the new theory that the future of the 
 country depended on union under the strong 
 
22 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 headship of the Hohenzollerns linked with the 
 preservation of a certain measure of autonomy 
 for the minor states. The German army organisa- 
 tion was extended throughout the annexed 
 territories and the northern states. In virtue of 
 the alliance treaties, inspecting generals from 
 Berlin introduced reforms in the Prussian direction 
 into the armies of South Germany. 
 
 In 1867 France, then under the rule of Napoleon 
 III., was on the verge of a quarrel with Prussia 
 over the question of Luxemburg. The rupture 
 was averted by a conference and an arrangement 
 to dismantle the fortifications and neutralise the 
 little state. But on both sides of the Rhine it 
 was recognised that the conflict between France 
 and the new military power created by Prussia 
 in Germany was only deferred. The war came 
 suddenly in July, 1870. Napoleon III. and his 
 advisers had hoped that the South German States 
 which had fought against Prussia four years 
 before would now revolt against her headship, 
 and that Austria would take the opportunity 
 of avenging Sadowa. But all Germany rallied 
 to the call of the aged Prussian King. The 
 rupture with France was hailed as an occasion 
 for cementing a new German unity. Before the 
 French armies were ready to move the united 
 armies of Prussia and South Germany, 384,000 
 strong, crossed the frontier in the first week of 
 August. By the first week of September one of 
 the imperial armies of France was blockaded in 
 Metz ; the other, with the Emperor at its head, 
 had been forced to surrender at Sedan. Once 
 more Prussia had struck swiftly and surely. In 
 
MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 23 
 
 vain the war was prolonged by new levies in 
 France until far into the end of the following 
 winter. Germany poured more than a million 
 men across the Rhine. Paris was starved into 
 surrender, and the French field armies driven back 
 northwards, westwards and southwards. In the 
 first days of January the King of Prussia was 
 proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles, and 
 at the close of the war Alsace and the greater 
 part of Lorraine were annexed. Metz and 
 Strassburg became German fortresses, and the 
 Prussian system was extended to the armies of 
 all the German states. The German army came 
 definitely into existence as a single force under 
 the direction of the Emperor and the General 
 Staff at Berlin. 
 
 The three wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870 had 
 proved the value of the military tradition in- 
 augurated by vScharnhorst and Gneisenau, pro- 
 vided with a doctrine of war by Clausewitz, and 
 perfected in practical working by Von Moltke. 
 The Emperor William I. had lived through the 
 whole of this evolution and had done much to 
 guide it. The new Germany had been made by 
 the sword. To use Bismarck's phrase it had been 
 built up ' with blood and iron/' and the result 
 of the process had been the creation of an armed 
 nation that had put more than a million fighting 
 men in the field. It was recognised that the 
 position thus won could be held only by main- 
 taining and perfecting the organisation that had 
 made such results possible. 
 
 Of the further development of the German 
 army, and of the methods by which it had secured 
 
24 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 and hoped to perpetuate its success, more will 
 presently be said. Here it will be interesting to 
 note the stages of the Prussian and the German 
 army's growth as marked by the gradual increase 
 in the number of the army corps that form the 
 first battle line. 
 
 In 1866 the Prussian army was made up of the 
 Guards Corps and eight territorial corps, thus 
 localised : 
 
 ist Corps, Prussia ; 2nd Corps, Pomerania ; 3rd 
 Corps, Brandenburg ; 4th Corps, the middle Elbe 
 district, headquarters at Magdeburg ; 5th Corps, 
 the province of Posen ; 6th Corps, Silesia ; yth 
 Corps, Westphalia ; 8th Corps, the Rhineland. 
 
 Between 1866 and 1870, when Prussia extended 
 her army system to the annexed territories and 
 the other lands of the North German Confedera- 
 tion, four more army corps were formed, 
 namely : gth Corps, Schleswig Holstein and the 
 adjacent coast districts ; loth Corps, Hanover ; 
 nth Corps, Hesse, etc., headquarters, Kassel ; 
 I2th Corps, Saxony. The Bavarian army was 
 organised in two corps separately numbered. 
 
 In 1871, after the war with France, the following 
 new corps were organised : I3th Corps, Wurtem- 
 berg ; i4th Corps, Baden ; I5th Corps, Alsace ; 
 i6th Corps, Lorraine. 
 
 In more recent years by sub-dividing existing 
 districts six additional army corps were formed, 
 mostly on the eastern and western frontiers. 
 These were the I7th Corps in West Prussia, the 
 1 8th Corps in Hesse, the igth in the kingdom of 
 Saxony, and a 3rd Corps in the kingdom of 
 Bavaria, and at a later stage the 2oth Corps 
 
MAKING OF THE GERMAN ARMY 25 
 
 in East Prussia, with headquarters at Allenstein, 
 and the 2ist in the Rhin eland, with headquarters 
 at Saarbruck. 
 
 Thus, at the outbreak of the present war, the 
 first line of the German army was formed of 
 twenty-five army corps, namely, the Prussian 
 Guards Corps, the twenty-one German Corps, and 
 the three Bavarian Army Corps. Taking the 
 fighting force of a German Army Corps at 40,000 
 men, this would give a first line of a million, 
 without counting the cavalry divisions. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARMY SYSTEM 
 
 AT the close of the Napoleonic Wars the popu- 
 lation of the lands now included in the 
 German Empire was about 25,000,000. When the 
 empire was proclaimed in 1871, the population 
 was in round numbers 40,000,000. The last 
 census of the empire taken on December ist, 1910, 
 gave a grand total of 64,925,993, so that the 
 German empire has now a population of about 
 68,000,000. It is estimated that in any given 
 year the men reaching the age of twenty, and thus 
 becoming liable to military service, are about one 
 per cent, of the population. Thus, while in 1871, 
 at the close of the war with France, there would 
 be about 400,000 young men liable to service in 
 that year, the number in any year since 1910 would 
 be 650,000.* In forty years the growth of the 
 population has thus increased the available 
 number of recruits by a quarter of a million. 
 
 It has already been noted that the Wehrpflicht 
 (duty of defence), as the Germans call the universal 
 
 * In these estimates an allowance is made for men not up 
 to the physical standard or otherwise disqualified for the 
 army. See note in Introduction on the number of men 
 available for military service. 
 
 26 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF ARMY SYSTEM 27 
 
 liability to military service, does not mean that 
 every man liable to serve is actually embodied 
 in the army. Each year the Ministry of War 
 and the General Staff fix the number of recruits 
 to be called up. 
 
 In Germany, as in all countries where universal 
 liability to service exists, careful registers are 
 kept of the men in every town and district. 
 One cannot remove from one place to another, 
 or even change one's place of residence in the 
 same town without giving immediate notice 
 to the police. In the year in which his twentieth 
 birthday occurs, a young man must present 
 himself at a recruiting depot, as otherwise he is 
 at once classed as a deserter. There is a medical 
 examination, and if he passes this the recruiting 
 officers decide whether they want him or not. 
 In the earlier years of the empire a considerable 
 proportion of young men were not actually 
 enlisted, but the men who are thus dismissed 
 to their homes still belong, in a certain sense, to 
 the army. Until middle life is passed they 
 are said to belong to the Ersatz Reserve. The 
 term might be roughly translated ' supple- 
 mentary reserve." They are untrained, but their 
 obligation to serve still exists, and the Govern- 
 ment can call them up on an emergency. This 
 is not usually done, but volunteers are called 
 for from this large mass of untrained material. 
 It is said that during the present war there have 
 been a million voluntary enlistments from the 
 men of the Ersatz. 
 
 Naturally the recruiting officers select for the 
 army the best of the material supplied by the 
 
28 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 annual contingent of men liable for service, 
 and the proportion of men thus taken has steadily 
 risen ever since 1871. This has been the result 
 of the adoption of the principle of universal 
 service by all the Continental nations and the 
 continual growth of European armies. 
 
 The first stage in this race of armaments was 
 the reorganisation of the French army on the 
 German model, and the substitution of universal 
 service in France for the older system of con- 
 scription and paid substitutes. 
 
 The first great increase of the German army 
 was made by the new military law of 1880. 
 The preamble of the law set forth that the 
 military reforms introduced into neighbouring 
 states made an expansion of the army necessary. 
 ' Germany, with an immense frontier, which is 
 also that of three great and four smaller powers, 
 must be ever ready to defend her freedom and 
 security." 
 
 It would therefore be necessary to increase the 
 number of units in the army and the annual 
 contingents of trained men. 
 
 There was a further increase in 1887, and in 
 1890 new army corps were formed and the 
 peace strength of the army was raised to nearly 
 half a million. Three years later the Govern- 
 ment announced a further increase, declaring that 
 the time was come when all men really fit for 
 service would have to be employed in the army. 
 Hitherto the recruit on joining had served for 
 three years with the colours. It was now decided 
 to reduce the period of training to two years 
 for all branches of the service, except the cavalry 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF ARMY SYSTEM 29 
 
 and the batteries of horse artillery attached to it. 
 The two years' service would mean that year 
 after year a larger number of men would be 
 passed into the reserve of the army. The peace 
 strength was raised to over 500,550 men, and 
 it was estimated that after the new law had been 
 a few years in operation, the available reserves 
 would be about four millions. 
 
 Under the system thus established, a man, on 
 joining the army at the age of twenty, served for 
 two years with the colours, or for three years, 
 if he was allotted to the cavalry, or four if he 
 was allotted to the horse artillery. His years of 
 service with the colours were a time of strenuous 
 and unceasing training. He had to be made 
 into a soldier before being dismissed to the 
 Reserve. The total period of service in the first 
 line was seven years. And thus, between the 
 age of twenty and twenty-seven, the years of 
 active and reserve service were thus distributed : 
 
 With the Colours. In the Reserve. 
 
 Horse Artillery 4 years. 3 years. 
 
 Cavalry 3 4 " 
 
 All other arms 2 ,, 5 
 
 During his term of reserve service, the soldier 
 is liable to be called up for short periods of 
 training, not exceeding eight weeks, and always 
 including the period of the great manoeuvres. 
 At the age of twenty-seven, the German soldier 
 passed out of the first line army. 
 
 Then until the age of thirty-nine, he belonged 
 to the second line army, or Landwehr. Originally 
 
30 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 a territorial army of home defence force, the 
 Landwehr is liable to be called out for service 
 beyond the frontiers, either in the actual righting 
 line, or for the work of guarding the lines of 
 communication and supplying garrisons to 
 captured fortresses. In the war with France in 
 1870, some of the hardest fighting was done by 
 the Landwehr divisions. In the German army 
 of to-day, the men from twenty-seven to thirty- 
 two years of age, who form what is called the 
 first " Ban/' or levy of the Landwehr, are practi- 
 cally a second line of reserve for the field army. 
 During their five years they have twice been called 
 out for a few days' training. Their service in 
 the active army is still recent, and under modern 
 conditions they can still be classed as young men. 
 With a couple of hundred thousand men passing 
 from the first line army into the Landwehr every 
 year there are about a million of these Landwehr 
 men of the first levy. After the first five years 
 the Landwehr man is not called out to service, 
 except in time of actual war. For seven 
 years of his life, from the age of thirty-two to 
 thirty-nine, he is in the second levy of the Land- 
 wehr. His name is kept on regular lists in which 
 the men are allotted to the units into which they 
 are to be formed on mobilisation. Nothing is 
 left to be improvised at the last moment. In 
 England at the present time, we are improvising 
 second and third line armies. The German 
 military system gives the country these armies 
 already organised when war is declared. The 
 reservists join the battalions, squadrons and 
 batteries of the first line army, and these move 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF ARMY SYSTEM 31 
 
 away to the frontier. Hundreds of thousands 
 of reservists are available who are not required 
 to bring these first line units up to war strength. 
 There are more of them than need be kept in 
 the depots to make up the first losses in the field. 
 This surplus of reservists, with the men of the 
 first levy of the Landwehr, are available to form 
 at once a number of reserve corps and divisions 
 for the first fighting line. In the present war it 
 is said that during the first weeks every army 
 corps in the German army was thus duplicated 
 by a reserve corps, so that in all fifty army 
 corps, or over two millions of fighting men were 
 immediately available for the battle line. 
 
 The second levy of the Landwehr supplies 
 another army which can be used for the line of 
 communications, garrison duty and the like, 
 or which, after a brief period of training, can 
 supply complete units to the fighting line. But 
 this does not exhaust the forces that become 
 available in the second stage of mobilisation. 
 There are over 600,000 men who, in any given 
 year, are awaiting the call to the colours as 
 recruits. Instead of having to appeal to them 
 to enlist, the War Office by signing an order can 
 bring this huge army of recruits into the depots 
 and barracks. By anticipating the call to arms 
 of the following year and summoning to the 
 colours recruits at the age of nineteen, at least 
 another 600,000 are available. 
 
 These huge numbers do not exhaust the 
 resources of the German empire in men. After 
 passing out of the Landwehr at the age of thirty- 
 nine the German soldier has completed his full 
 
32 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 term of service in the first and second line of the 
 army, but for six years more, that is until he 
 reaches the age of forty-five, he belongs to a third 
 line, the Lands! urm. This is a home defence 
 force, and includes theoretically not only these 
 trained men, but all the untrained men of the 
 Ersatz Reserve up to the age of forty-five. Prac- 
 tically, however, the Landsturm, who are called 
 out for service, are the trained men. As has 
 been already noted, recruits are obtained from 
 the Ersatz by voluntary enlistment during the 
 war. The Landsturm is supposed to be only a 
 home defence force, but in the present war 
 Landsturm units have been used for garrison work 
 beyond the frontiers. 
 
 After the passing of the Army Bill of 1893, 
 General Von der Goltz wrote that under the 
 organisation it introduced, and by the establish- 
 ment of the two years' colour service for the 
 greater part of the army, " Germany had arrived 
 as nearly as the circumstances of the time would 
 permit at the desired object, namely, to bring 
 into the ranks every man capable of serving in 
 the army." But though considerable progress 
 has been made in this direction the following 
 years witnessed an increase in the number of 
 army corps and the proportion of men called up 
 each year for training. The number of army 
 corps was increased to twenty-five. Those 
 stationed on the eastern and western frontiers of 
 the empire were kept nearly on a war footing. 
 The strength of the army on a peace footing 
 rose to nearly three-quarters of a million, and in 
 every unit the number of officers was increased, 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF ARMY SYSTEM 33 
 
 so as to provide a larger reserve of leaders for 
 the new units which would be formed on a 
 declaration of war. In the first years of the 
 German army after the great war with France, 
 of more than 400,000 recruits available for train- 
 ing less than 200,000 had been actually embodied 
 in the army. With the expansion of the system, 
 in the forty years that followed, nearly double 
 this number of men could be brought under 
 training each year. 
 
 So far we have spoken only of the recruiting 
 of the rank and file of the army. If millions 
 of men are to be placed in the field for war, 
 there must be tens of thousands of officers and 
 non-commissioned officers to lead them. The 
 non-commissioned officers are provided partly 
 by promotion in the ordinary course, and partly 
 from a special class. These latter are young men 
 who, without waiting to be called up at the age 
 of twenty, join the army at the age of eighteen, 
 in order to qualify for such promotion. They 
 have thus two years of longer service, and are 
 given special facilities for qualifying, and many 
 of them are allowed to prolong their army service 
 during part of the years in which they would 
 ordinarily be in the Reserve. There is a second 
 class of special enlistment provided for from the 
 very beginning of the Prussian army system in 
 1814. The Royal Decree, which established 
 universal liability service, with a view of avoiding 
 serious interruption in the professional career 
 of men of the more educated classes, allowed 
 those who could produce certain certificates of 
 education, or a preliminary degree of a university, 
 
34 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 to volunteer for one year of service in the army 
 under special conditions. At the end of the year 
 they would have to satisfy the military authorities 
 that they had so far profited by their training 
 as to be capable of doing the work of a non- 
 commissioned officer or a company officer. They 
 then passed into the reserve, thus, under the 
 old system, saving two years of service with the 
 colours, and returned to their professional work. 
 This class supplies a reserve of non-commissioned 
 officers and officers for the first line army and 
 the Landwchr. 
 
 The officers of the army are recruited partly 
 from military schools or cadet corps, partly by 
 the promotion of educated young men who join 
 the regiments with a view to training for a 
 commission. In every regiment the officer, on 
 proposal by the War Ministry, has, in the first 
 instance, to be accepted by a vote of his future 
 comrades. Naturally, care is taken in the 
 selection of the men, so that an adverse vote is 
 a rare event. After leaving the army numbers of 
 officers keep their names on the reserve list for 
 the first line or are posted to units of the Landwehr 
 or Landsturm. Staff officers belong to a special 
 class trained for staff duties, and usually serving 
 with a regiment only for the purpose of obtaining 
 practical experience of the working of this or 
 that special arm of the service. In Prussia and 
 all the German states there are a large number 
 of families which in each generation give most 
 of their sons commission ranks for the army. 
 And in military history, from the wars of Frederick 
 the Great down to the present conflict, one finds 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF ARMY SYSTEM 35 
 
 the same name recurring in the higher command. 
 In a huge army, like that of Germany, it is of 
 course impossible that the same standard of 
 excellence should be found amongst all the 
 officers. But an effort is made to keep the 
 standard at a high level by a constant weeding 
 out of the inefficient or the failures. After each 
 year's manoeuvres, numbers of officers are quietly 
 passed from the active army into the reserve list. 
 This transfer does not necessarily imply a censure, 
 for a new military year of work begins after the 
 September manoeuvres, and this is the time 
 usually chosen by any officer who wishes to 
 retire. But in many cases the retirement is 
 not voluntary, and this weeding out process 
 sometimes places on the reserve list Generals 
 and even Princes of the royal houses, who have 
 shown that they are incapable of coming to a 
 decision in the mimic campaign, and handling 
 masses of men in the field, under the conditions 
 of a manoeuvre campaign conditions which are 
 less trying than those of war, where failure would 
 have more serious consequences. 
 
 In an army in which most of the men in the 
 ranks serve for only two years, the permanent 
 element is supplied by the officers and those non- 
 commissioned officers who prolong their term of 
 service. On them it depends to carry on the 
 military tradition. The first line of the army in 
 times of peace is a vast school of war with this 
 permanent body of teachers. Each autumn 
 half their pupils go away and are replaced by 
 the new recruits. The course of instruction is 
 a short one, so the work is carried on at high 
 pressure. 
 
36 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 It has often been said that the German army 
 is too much of a machine, that the whole system 
 is so rigid that men and officers are deprived of 
 all initiative. Every great army must be some- 
 thing of a machine, and there always is the 
 danger of routine and red tape destroying 
 initiative. The old Prussian army of Frederick 
 the Great was certainly one of the most rigid of 
 machines ever created for the purpose of making 
 each individual in its ranks a mere passive unit 
 in the hands of the higher command. It is from 
 Frederick's days the saying dates that ' the 
 Prussian soldier does not think, he only obeys." 
 In the battles of the Seven Years' War, when 
 Frederick won his great victories, everything 
 depended on the accurate execution of drill 
 movements in close order. There was a narrow 
 fighting front on which the men were brought 
 up shoulder to shoulder in three-deep lines to 
 deliver their volleys of musket balls in rapid 
 succession by word of command at short range, 
 and then charge across less than a hundred 
 yards of ground with the bayonet. The work 
 of the drill ground was everything. Unthinking 
 mechanical obedience was the cardinal virtue 
 for the soldier, only a general or a colonel need 
 trouble to do any thinking. The Prussian drill 
 book was, after Frederick's victories, supposed 
 to be the sum of military knowledge. It became 
 the drill book of both the British and the French 
 army in the years before the Great Revolution. 
 
 But the progress of war and battle methods 
 from Napoleon's days to our own, the introduction 
 of new weapons and tactics, and the wide 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF ARMY SYSTEM 37 
 
 extension of the battle front, have made mere drill 
 book and barrack yard work only the intro- 
 duction to a soldier's training. The company 
 officer, the sergeant, and even the private soldier 
 has now to think, and often decide for himself 
 what is best to be done. The important point 
 is that this thinking should be intelligent, and 
 inspired by a common tradition, so that co- 
 operation with others is possible, and officers and 
 men can understand what orders mean without 
 every detail being explained, and when and 
 where the strict letter of these orders may be 
 departed from. It was the German army that 
 first set up as a standard rule of conduct the 
 principle that no subordinate could be allowed 
 to plead as a reason for failure that he had 
 followed the strict letter of his orders ; that, on 
 the contrary, he must judge for himself when an 
 altered situation had made this strict letter no 
 longer applicable. Initiative, within certain 
 necessary limits, is therefore not only permitted 
 but enjoined. It is to the German army that 
 we also owe what is now recognised as a necessary 
 working rule in every army of the world, namely, 
 that the higher commander must tell his officers 
 not how they are to perform a certain operation, 
 but in the most general terms what is the task 
 assigned to them, leaving it to them to select 
 the proper measures for accomplishing it. Thus, 
 in the war of 1870, Von Moltke's orders to the 
 commanders of army corps took up only a few 
 lines of writing, merely conveying brief informa- 
 tion as to the position of the enemy and the 
 point on which the corps concerned was to 
 
38 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 move. The general commanding the army corps 
 similarly assigned an object to his divisional 
 commanders, leaving it to them to issue their 
 special orders to their subordinates, and in the 
 same way the battalion commander left it to his 
 captains to choose for themselves the way in 
 which their company should work once they had 
 been given a general direction as to what was to 
 be done. There was thus the widest room for 
 initiative, and in the higher commands the 
 principle was everywhere accepted that whatever 
 orders had been given, once fighting began the 
 troops engaged must be supported at all costs 
 by all those who were in reach of the scene of 
 action. In such a system of command, there is 
 nothing rigid and initiative is a necessity. 
 
 Of the working methods of the German army 
 more will be said in a later chapter. This much 
 must be granted it was the success of the 
 Prussian army in 1870 that changed the military 
 methods of all Europe, and in our own army 
 the first step towards the gradual evolution of 
 our present system was the study of German 
 methods by the brilliant group of officers who 
 were associated with Lord Wolseley in the re- 
 making of our army in the last thirty years of the 
 nineteenth century. There may have been at 
 times too much of the same kind of mere imitation 
 that made the spiked helmet copied from Prussia 
 the head-dress of our infantry. But British study 
 of German methods became more and more 
 independent and practical. Nevertheless, even 
 in recent years, we have been making new reforms 
 of lines originally struck out by the soldiers of 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF ARMY SYSTEM 39 
 
 Germany. Lord Haldane's reorganisation of the 
 army was to a great extent thus inspired. The 
 very latest change made almost on the eve of 
 the war the organisation of the battalion into 
 four companies instead of eight was a direct 
 copying of the German model. Every army in 
 Europe has, in fact, based much of its progress 
 in the last forty years on German teaching and 
 experience, and even the army of Japan was 
 reorganised by German officers on the methods 
 which had secured success for the German arms 
 in the wars of nearly half a century ago. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 ARMY ORGANISATION 
 
 THE ARMY CORPS AND THE CAVALRY DIVISION 
 
 IN describing the organisation of the German 
 army it will be simpler to begin with the 
 larger units the Army Corps and the Cavalry 
 Division. 
 
 The Army Corps is a combined force of in- 
 fantry, cavalry and artillery, with their auxiliary 
 services, but mainly an infantry and artillery 
 force. The cavalry attached to it is a relatively 
 small detachment, intended to supply escorts and 
 orderlies, and the few mounted troops to be used 
 in advanced guard and outpost work. The cavalry 
 division is a mounted force with several horse 
 artillery batteries, and these mounted divisions are 
 used for the great cavalry screen that covers the 
 movements of an army, explores the country to 
 its front, carries out reconnaissances, and on the 
 battlefield co-operates in the attack, or uses its 
 more rapid marching power to carry out the 
 great flank movements. 
 
 A German army corps is usually formed 
 of two infantry divisions. In each division 
 there are two infantry brigades, each formed 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 41 
 
 of two regiments of three battalions each. To 
 one of the divisions there is usually attached a 
 Jger, or rifle, battalion. The men of these 
 rifle battalions are specially selected among 
 recruits from forest and hill districts men who 
 are used to an open-air life. In all the army 
 corps has thus twenty-five battalions of infantry. 
 
 To each of the divisions there is attached a 
 regiment of cavalry and a brigade of field artil- 
 lery. In our army a brigade of field artillery 
 is a colonel's command, made up of three bat- 
 teries (eighteen guns). The German field 
 artillery brigade is a major-general's command, 
 and is made up of two artillery regiments, 
 each of six batteries. Thus each division has 
 seventy-two guns. In one of the divisions three 
 of these batteries have light field howitzers for 
 the shelling of entrenchments instead of field- 
 pieces. Most of the army corps have further a 
 heavy artillery battalion, which brings into the 
 field four batteries of heavy howitzers on travel- 
 ling carriages. 
 
 Each division has, besides a company of 
 pioneers (engineers), a bridge train and am- 
 munition columns. To the army corps are 
 attached from one to four engineer companies, a 
 heavy bridge train, a telegraph detachment, a 
 balloon and aeroplane detachment, ammunition 
 columns for infantry and artillery, ambulances, 
 supply columns, including field-bakery columns. 
 
 A large part of this transport is now motor 
 driven, and in the German army corps this 
 motor transport is used to enable the auxiliary 
 services to get through a large amount of work 
 
42 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 on the actual line of march. Thus there are 
 motor waggons fitted as travelling kitchens. 
 Others in which tailors and cobblers are at 
 work repairing the men's clothes and boots, and 
 a travelling printing office, which sets up and 
 prints off orders, circulars containing informa- 
 tion, and in one of the army corps of each group 
 of corps working together as an ' army," a 
 little daily paper for distribution to the men. 
 
 In war time an army corps may be strengthened 
 by the addition of a third division formed of 
 Reservists and Landwehr troops. This would 
 make the fighting strength of the corps about 
 50,000 men. The normal army corps of two 
 divisions brings about 40,000 men and officers 
 into the field. But of these some 6,000 are non- 
 combatants transport, ambulances, and other 
 auxiliary services requiring this large personnel. 
 The transport, ammunition columns, ambulances, 
 etc. used to require nearly 10,000 horses, but 
 these have been in the present war largely 
 replaced by motors. 
 
 The Cavalry Division is a mounted force of 
 about 4,500 officers and men, of whom some 
 500 are non-combatants. It is made up of three 
 brigades of cavalry, each of two regiments, two 
 batteries of horse artillery, a detachment of 
 pioneers, a telegraph detachment, ambulances, 
 transport and ammunition columns. In the 
 present war all transport attached to the 
 cavalry division is made up of motor vehicles, 
 and motor cars are also used to strengthen the 
 cavalry with detachments of riflemen conveyed 
 by motor and cars armed with machine guns and 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 43 
 
 light quick-firers. To both the infantry and 
 cavalry divisions there are also attached a number 
 of anti-aeroplane guns mounted on motor cars. 
 The gun and its mounting both come from 
 Krupp's factory. The car has a couple of spades 
 or anchors attached to it, which can be screwed 
 down into the ground, and the gun is mounted 
 on an upright pivot, so that it can be placed at 
 a high angle of elevation. It is mounted some- 
 thing like a big telescope on its tripod. It is a 
 light quick-firer throwing shells of about three 
 pounds. Some of the shells have besides their 
 bursting charge a charge in the base of a smoke- 
 producing substance, so that even in bright 
 sunlight they leave a trail behind them which 
 enables the gunner to watch their flight. The 
 gun is thus to some extent made to act as its 
 own range-finder. 
 
 On mobilisation for war a number of army 
 corps and one or two cavalry divisions are 
 grouped together to form one of the subordinate 
 armies for active operations in the field. It is 
 fairly easy to judge what the composition of 
 these armies on various parts of the frontier 
 will be, so far as the permanently organised 
 territorial army corps are concerned. The 
 position of their district in relation to the railway 
 system of the country largely determines this. 
 The puzzling problem is to find out how many 
 of these corps have been strengthened with a 
 third division and how many reserve corps have 
 been formed, and to which armies they are 
 attached. These reserve corps are, to use a 
 familiar phrase, the cards that the chief of the 
 
44 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 general staff keeps up his sleeve, and the puzzle 
 is further increased by the fact that the reserve 
 corps thus formed often receive the same numbers 
 as the permanent corps of their district. This 
 is probably why during the present war we 
 often hear of corps bearing the same number 
 being reported as in action at far distant parts 
 of the great battle line. 
 
 Infantry 
 
 A German infantry regiment has almost the 
 strength of a British brigade. It is formed of 
 three battalions, each of four companies and the 
 company is divided into three sections, or, as 
 they are called in the German army, Zugs. The 
 strength of the company on a war footing is 
 250 men. During recent years the infantry 
 battalions in all the frontier districts towards 
 France and Russia have been kept at a peace 
 strength of 180. The battalions in the other 
 corps had a company peace strength of 160. 
 Thus on mobilisation each company in the 
 frontier corps required only 70 reservists to 
 bring it up to war strength. Those of the other 
 corps would require 90. But in the whole 
 first line army on mobilisation more than two- 
 thirds of the men in the ranks would be trained 
 regulars, the reservists forming a much smaller 
 proportion than in any other European army. 
 When the German mobilised for the present 
 war none of the infantry had less than ten 
 months of training and more than half would 
 have had nearly two years' service. This small 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 45 
 
 proportion of reservists in the first fighting line 
 tends to make the army corps already formed 
 remarkably efficient, and leaves a huge surplus 
 of men for the formation of the reserve corps. 
 
 The battalion with its four companies when 
 mobilised is a little over 1,000 strong 26 
 officers and 1,031 men under the command 
 of a major. Three battalions united in the 
 regiment under the command of the colonel 
 have a war strength of 3,171 officers and men. 
 The brigade of two regiments under the com- 
 mand of a major-general is about 6,400 strong. 
 The infantry division is a lieutenant-general's 
 command. It is formed of two infantry brigades 
 and musters about 13,000 men. 
 
 The infantry weapon is the Mauser magazine 
 rifle of the 1898 pattern. The calibre is .311 
 a little more than the calibre of our British 
 army rifle. The cartridges are loaded in clips 
 carrying five each. Every regiment has a con- 
 siderable number of machine guns using the 
 rifle cartridge. In peace time the uniform of 
 infantry of the line is dark blue, but the war 
 uniform is of a greenish-grey colour, which is 
 said to melt very well into the background of a 
 European landscape. Many think in this respect 
 it is better than khaki, which was originally 
 adopted for service in sun-baked Indian districts 
 and Soudan deserts, and which shows up rather 
 too strongly against a green background. The 
 head-dress of the infantry is a leather helmet 
 with a spike at the top of it, a rather heavier and 
 clumsier form of head-gear than the spiked 
 helmets we adopted for our infantry after the 
 
46 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 Franco-German war, as a kind of imitative 
 tribute to the successful army. The German 
 helmet with its polished black surface and brass 
 or gilded badges, reflects the sun too strongly for 
 modern battle conditions, and in the present war 
 it is covered with a piece of fabric of the same 
 colour as the uniform. 
 
 The German infantryman carries rather a 
 heavy load in his knapsack. The object is to 
 lighten to a corresponding extent the weight 
 carried on the baggage waggons and make the 
 men more independent of them. The mounted 
 officers colonels, majors, adjutants and cap- 
 tains carry in the same way a good deal of 
 weight on their horses or spare chargers, and 
 the officers who are not mounted are equipped 
 with smaller and rather more elegantly made 
 knapsacks than those carried by the men, and 
 thus have all immediately necessary kit with 
 them wherever the regiment halts. 
 
 The infantry drill has been made fairly simple. 
 The company drawn up with its three Zugs, or 
 sections, in two-deep lines, one behind the other, 
 is the unit. The ordinary assembly formation is 
 that of the four company columns in lines. 
 Column formations are the ordinary or narrow 
 column formed by these company columns 
 following each other in succession, or the broad 
 column, in which the battalion is arrayed in two 
 columns, each of two companies or six sections 
 placed side by side. As with us, marching in 
 fours is the usual order for the column of route. 
 Fighting formations are made by deploying into 
 firing lines and supports from the line of company 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 47 
 
 columns. The German regulars are very hard- 
 worked during their two years' service, and the 
 precision of drill is remarkable. Every one who 
 has attended . the manoeuvres of the German 
 army is struck by the absence of shouting or 
 excitement and the few orders that are given 
 by the officers. Every one seems to understand 
 what is wanted, and a signal with the hand or 
 the sword sends the men forward, halts them, 
 or changes the direction of the advance. 
 
 Talking of drill, one point may be explained 
 about which there has been much curious mis- 
 conception during the present war. In the old 
 Prussian drill-book of Frederick the Great's time, 
 the infantry march was a slow step with the leg 
 kept stiff. This curious stiff-legged march is 
 still practised in the German army, and is used 
 at times at reviews. It is a survival just like 
 the slow march which is used by our brigade of 
 Guards every year at the trooping of the colours 
 on the King's birthday. This slow step was the 
 ordinary marching pace of all our army until 
 about eighty years ago, when the quick march 
 was introduced. At Berlin and Potsdam, on 
 great occasions, the Prussian Guards not only 
 march past with the old-fashioned stiff-legged 
 " Parade step," but also wear the quaint mitre- 
 shaped head-gear of the eighteenth century 
 Grenadiers. The " Parade step ' has been very 
 absurdly described as the " Goose-step," an 
 exercise which long survived in our own drill- 
 book, and consisted of a slow-marking time, 
 bending the knee and raising the foot high. 
 One of the correspondents who described the 
 
48 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 German entry into Brussels said, " The troops 
 marched in with the goose-step to show their 
 contempt for the Belgians." They were really 
 marching in with the ' Parade step ' of festive 
 occasions because they were celebrating a great 
 success. 
 
 Cavalry 
 
 There are ninety-three regiments of cavalry- 
 cuirassiers, lancers, dragoons and hussars. Ever 
 since the Franco-German war there has been the 
 fashion to talk of all the German cavalry men as 
 Uhlans, the name properly belongs only to the 
 lancer regiments. Lances were first introduced 
 into the modern European armies in imitation 
 of Napoleon's regiments of Polish lancers, and 
 the name ; Uhlan ' for a lancer has come into 
 use in Germany from a Polish word itself derived 
 from the Turkish*. All the heavy cavalry regi- 
 ments in the German army have the front rank 
 armed with a lance a weapon with a long shaft 
 formed of a light steel tube, and carrying in 
 peace time a small pennon of the colours of 
 whatever State the regiment may belong to. 
 The other cavalry weapons are the sword, and a 
 Mauser carbine. And a considerable amount 
 of time is given to dismounted drill and practice 
 of the carbine fighting in open order. To every 
 regiment a group of cyclists is attached for 
 orderly and messenger duties. 
 
 There are five squadrons in a cavalry regiment. 
 
 * There were no lancer regiments in our own army until 
 1816 the year after Waterloo. 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 49 
 
 In war time one of these squadrons is left behind 
 at the depot to train reservists and recruits 
 and supply drafts to make up for losses. The 
 other four squadrons take the field. In each 
 squadron there are four troops, each of one 
 officer and forty men. The war strength is about 
 670 officers and men. In peace time there are 
 generally four regiments of cavalry in each 
 army corps district. On mobilisation one of 
 these is attached to the army coips, and the 
 three others go to join one of the cavalry divisions. 
 
 Artillery 
 
 The field artillery is organised in regiments, 
 each of six batteries or thirty-six guns. In 
 each regiment there are about 700 officers 
 and men. The field gun is of the 1896 pattern, 
 with a quick-firing mounting adopted since that 
 date. It throws a 15-pound shell. An army 
 corps has twelve batteries attached to each of 
 its two divisions twenty-one of these batteries 
 are made up of field guns the other three 
 batteries are made up of what are known as light 
 field howitzers. The howitzer is a gun shorter 
 in length and wider in bore than the field piece. 
 While the former is intended for direct fire 
 against an enemy's position, the latter is intended 
 to throw a heavier shell on a high-curved flight, 
 so as to send down a shower of shrapnel balls 
 on troops sheltered by entrenchments or under 
 cover. The howitzers are also used for dropping 
 into an enemy's works shells loaded with a high 
 explosive and bursting by percussion on reaching 
 D 
 
50 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 the ground. These shells are meant to destroy 
 or demoralize hostile troops by the shock of the 
 explosion, and to shatter buildings or obstacles 
 held by the enemy. The high angle fire of the 
 howitzer is also useful for shelling an enemy 
 from guns kept completely out of sight behind 
 a swell of the ground, walls and banks, or other 
 obstacles. Artillery of all kinds now tries to 
 conceal its position, either by digging itself into 
 gun pits, using natural cover, or heaping up 
 round the guns anything that will make it diffi- 
 cult to identify them from a distance. But though 
 there is no longer the dense cloud of smoke which 
 used to mark the position of a battery in action, 
 the long bright flashes of a smokeless powder 
 generally soon show where field guns are firing. 
 It is true that these can be used from behind 
 an obstacle to fire at a target the gunners cannot 
 see, the elevation and direction being given by 
 an observer at some distance by signal or tele- 
 phone. But the range of elevation in the field 
 gun is very limited, and it is much easier to 
 employ the howitzer in this way. 
 
 The field howitzers of the German army are 
 like the field guns fitted with hydraulic 
 brakes and steel shields. The light howitzer 
 throws a 30-pound shell. To each army corps 
 there are attached four batteries of a much more 
 formidable weapon the heavy field howitzer- 
 this throws a shell weighing 94 pounds, and is 
 generally used with charges of high explosives 
 and percussion fuses that burst the shell on con- 
 tact. These are the big shells that our soldiers 
 describe as " Black Marias," " Coal-boxes," and 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 51 
 
 " Jack Johnsons." During the present war they 
 have been the most formidable and effective 
 weapons on the German side. 
 
 All these guns can be moved on field carriages, 
 even over rough ground, and brought into action 
 without platforms. Much heavier artillery is 
 used in the siege trains for the attack of fortresses. 
 It seems that some of these heavy guns have 
 been brought into action on entrenched positions 
 during the war, but this is an exceptional use 
 for them. Until the attack on the Belgian 
 fortresses revealed the fact that the Germans 
 possessed a much heavier weapon, it was supposed 
 that the heaviest guns in their siege trains were 
 the 28-centimetre (n-inch) siege howitzers. 
 These are mounted on carriages with broad 
 wheels on what is known as the " pedrail " system, 
 originally an English invention for enabling a 
 traction engine to work over soft or broken 
 ground. The wheel runs inside an endless chain 
 of wide plates which in succession bear its weight 
 and act as a kind of moving tramway. Before 
 the war, military writers in Germany had urged 
 the necessity of providing a much heavier gun 
 for the attack of modern forts defended by steel 
 armour and masses of concrete. But it was not 
 until the attack on Liege that anyone outside 
 the inner circle of the German army knew the 
 gun had been provided. It is officially known 
 as the 42-centimetre siege howitzer. The gun 
 and its mounting are so designed that they can 
 be taken to pieces and carried on separate 
 carriages. Four traction engines or thirty-two 
 horses are required for the transport of a single 
 
52 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 gun. The bore is in English measurement about 
 i6J inches, and the shell weighs approximately 
 a ton. Loaded with a powerful high explosive 
 it is practically a flying mine. Some of the forts 
 at Liege and Namur were wrecked by four or 
 five well-placed shots, and the garrisons were 
 made temporarily helpless by the gases produced 
 by the explosion and driven into the casements 
 and turrets. There are very few of these guns 
 with the German army, some say not more than 
 eight in all, and the greater part of the bombard- 
 ment of the Liege and Namur forts, and probably 
 the whole of the bombardment at Antwerp, was 
 the work of the lighter n-inch howitzers. 
 
 These guns are formidable enough, and much 
 handier than the newer i6J-inch giants. The 
 1 1 -inch howitzer has a range of nearly 11,000 
 yards (over six miles) and throws a 76o-pound 
 shell. 
 
 Another peculiar gun, described in German 
 official publications before the war, is intended 
 to throw heavy spherical bombs on a high 
 curved flight at moderate ranges. It has been 
 lately used in the trench fighting in Belgium. The 
 principle is the same as that which has been intro- 
 duced by an English inventor for throwing large 
 grenades from an ordinary rifle. The bomb, 
 which is four or five times the diameter of the 
 bore of the gun, has a kind of stem attached to 
 it which fits into the cannon and is in contact 
 with the driving charge. When the gun is 
 loaded the big round shell is just outside its 
 muzzle, looking like a bubble blown from a 
 pipe. On firing the gun the long stem drives 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 53 
 
 the bomb forward on its curved flight. But 
 the range is short and the whole device is intended 
 for bringing a heavy shell fire at close quarters 
 to bear upon troops defending themselves in 
 buildings or behind obstacles. 
 
 Another gun of peculiar construction, which 
 has been very largely employed with the German 
 army, is the Krupp anti-aeroplane quick-firer 
 already described. 
 
 Engineers and Auxiliary Services 
 
 The engineers known in the German army as 
 pioneers are organised in battalions and com- 
 panies, and there are special companies for 
 bridging work and telegraphy, now including 
 wireless. A kind of steam plough is used for 
 rapidly marking out and partly digging entrench- 
 ments, W 7 hich are afterwards completed by hand- 
 work. There are special companies for railway 
 work, and besides this the infantry regiments 
 are practised in the rapid demolition and relaying 
 of railway lines. 
 
 There are a large number of specialised auxiliary 
 services. Ambulances and transport and ammuni- 
 tion columns are attached to every division, and 
 each army corps has detachments of Field 
 Gendarmes for military police duties, and 
 despatch riders for conveying orders and in- 
 formation. Within the last few years an elaborate 
 aviation service has been organised. It is divided 
 into two branches the airship battalions and the 
 aeroplane battalions. The former are trained to 
 repair and handle airships of the various types 
 
54 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 used in the German army the rigid Zeppelins, 
 the semi-rigid Gross type, and the non-rigid 
 Parseval and at each centre there are large 
 sheds for housing the airships. According to 
 the latest scheme of organisation the five battalions 
 for dirigible work were arranged as follows : 
 
 1st Battalion (Berlin), Central training school 
 and general reserve of men and material. 
 
 2nd Battalion (Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden), 
 intended for operations against Russia on the 
 vSilesian frontier. 
 
 3rd Battalion (Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Darm- 
 stadt), intended for operations on the Belgian 
 and French frontier. 
 
 4th Battalion (Mannheim, Metz, Lahr, and 
 Friedrichshafen), intended for operations against 
 France. 
 
 5th Battalion (Konigsberg, Graudenz, Scheide- 
 miihl, and Allenstein), intended for operations 
 against Russia, on the northern part of the 
 frontier. 
 
 The aeroplanes are organised in four battalions 
 as follows : 
 
 ist Battalion (Doberitz, near Berlin, and 
 Zaltheim). 
 
 2nd Battalion (Posen, Graudenz, and Konigs- 
 berg). 
 
 3rd Battalion (Cologne, Hanover, and 
 Darmstadt). 
 
 4th Battalion (Strasburg, Metz, and Freiburg). 
 
 Like our own aviation service, the organisation 
 is at the beginning of its development, and the 
 number of battalions in its two branches has been 
 fixed rather on the scale of what is ultimately 
 
ARMY ORGANISATION 55 
 
 intended than what has been actually accom- 
 plished. Taking the number of officers and 
 men into account, they might better be described 
 as companies. There has certainly been much 
 exaggeration in current estimates of the number 
 of airships now available. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 PREPARATION FOR WAR 
 
 THE WORK OF THE GENERAL STAFF 
 
 TjNDER modern conditions it is more than ever 
 true that the issue of a war is to a great 
 extent decided by the work done during the years 
 of peace. In earlier days for instance in the 
 period before the great French Revolution this 
 was recognised only to the extent that a certain 
 number of men were drilled and equipped in 
 peace time, and a certain amount of arms and 
 ammunition kept in store. The main work of 
 preparation was done when war became imminent 
 or had actually been declared. Even during 
 the Napoleonic wars and far into the Nineteenth 
 Century most of the European nations proceeded 
 in this way. It was thought that when war 
 came there would be time enough to raise new 
 regiments, prepare plans of campaign and get 
 together the necessary material. 
 
 It was the chiefs of the Prussian army who 
 first recognised that the preparation for war 
 must be given a wider scope and carried on 
 continuously during the years of peace. By 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 37 
 
 law and tradition the king was the commander 
 of the army, not in any merely honorary sense, 
 but in actual fact. The war ministry had to do 
 with the providing of the necessary funds and 
 their expenditure and all the business routine 
 connected with recruiting, clothing, equipping 
 and lodging the men, purchasing stores, and 
 generally carrying out the administrative work 
 of the army. It acted in all these matters on 
 the advice of the group of experts who formed 
 the permanent staff of the king. The chief of 
 this staff was the executive head of the army. 
 
 Von Moltke was appointed to the General Staff 
 of the army in 1832, and after three years of 
 its work in its office in Berlin he was sent on a 
 mission to Turkey, where he assisted the Sultan, 
 Mahmoud, as military adviser, and took an 
 active part in the campaign against the Egyptian 
 army in Asia. He returned to his staff duties 
 in Berlin in 1839, and in 1857 he became chief 
 of the General Staff, a post which he held for 
 thirty years.* 
 
 He had thus reached the highest position in 
 the army just in time to co-operate with King 
 William and the War Minister, Von Roon, in 
 the great reorganisation of the Prussian army, 
 which prepared it for the victories of 1864, 1866 
 and 1870. The General Staff itself was re- 
 organised, and the scope of its activities extended 
 
 * Moltke's predecessors were Scharnhorst, the founder of 
 the system, till his death in 1813 ; Gneisenau, 1813-1821 ; 
 Von Muffling (who had been the Prussian attache with 
 Wellington's headquarters at Waterloo), 1821-1829 ; Von 
 Krauseneck, 1829-1848 ; and Von Reyher, 1848-1857. 
 
58 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 year after year. It was made up of officers 
 selected from the general list of the army, in- 
 cluding a considerable number of young men 
 who, while occupying subordinate positions in 
 the offices of Berlin, were trained for staff work 
 in the field. Under Von Moltke, the General 
 Staff became, to use an apt expression of Mr. 
 Spencer- Wilkinson, " the brain of the Prussian 
 army/' 
 
 What gave all its work a definite character 
 was that it was not merely an organisation for 
 supervising the peace training of the troops, but 
 year after year it was working out all the details 
 for their employment, not with a general view 
 to some vaguely possible war, but with the definite 
 purpose of using them in this or that probable 
 campaign. Thus, at the very outset, Moltke 
 drew up plans for operations against each and 
 all of the neighbouring states. Naturally, the 
 most probable enemies were first taken into 
 consideration. Thus in 1859, while France was 
 engaged in war with Austria, and there was a 
 prospect of Prussian intervention, Moltke com- 
 pleted a plan for a war against France on the 
 Rhine frontier. Like all his plans, extreme 
 simplicity was the basis of it. He laid down 
 more than once, in his reports from the General 
 Staff, the principle that it w r as useless to attempt 
 the full development of any future war. The 
 most that could be done would be to define the 
 general object of the operations, and to arrange to 
 place the armies on the frontier, and start them 
 on their march across it. In the plan against 
 France in 1859, he simply stated that his object 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 59 
 
 was to place as large a mass as possible on the 
 western frontier, cross it, and endeavour to 
 bring the French to action as soon as possible. 
 After the first battle further plans would be 
 arranged according to circumstances. 
 
 The plans of campaign drawn up by the 
 General Staff were, therefore, essentially plans 
 for the mobilisation and concentration of the 
 army on this or that frontier. The activity of 
 the General Staff was, accordingly, directed first 
 to working out the details of mobilisation, 
 and gradually accelerating the operations. 
 Secondly, with a view to this and to the sub- 
 sequent concentration of the army, it kept a 
 continual control of the railway system. The 
 development of the Prussian, and subsequently 
 of the German railway system, was throughout 
 directed to military necessities, instead of, as 
 in most other countries, being a kind of hap- 
 hazard growth, resulting from industrial needs 
 and commercial enterprise. Thanks to this 
 military direction, Germany possesses at the 
 present moment a series of great trunk lines 
 running east and west, and on the Russian and 
 the French frontiers a network of railways, 
 which would never have been constructed if 
 account had been taken only of the industrial 
 needs of the country. 
 
 After the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 
 1871, the General Staff drew up a complete plan 
 for the railways of the new frontier, and this 
 was later extended into Luxemburg by German 
 railway companies with state help obtaining 
 concessions for lines through the Grand Duchy, 
 
60 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 linking the German with the French and Belgian 
 systems. In the same way, on the Russian 
 frontier, the lines running from the westward 
 towards Poland and into Pomerania and East 
 Prussia were linked together by three separate 
 railway tracks following the frontier in a great 
 curve connected by frequent cross-lines, and 
 having along the frontier numerous large stations 
 with extensive sidings. This system was carried 
 through Silesia into the Austrian province of 
 Galicia. In 1900 General Kuropatkin, who 
 was then Minister of War, drew up a report on 
 the defence of Russian Poland, which was 
 subsequently published in the book he wrote 
 after the Russo-Japanese war in defence of his 
 policy. In this report Kuropatkin spoke of the 
 railway system of the Austro-German frontier 
 as " the most formidable factor on the side of 
 Russia's opponents in a war with the Triple 
 Alliance." 
 
 To us in England, a third feature of this 
 military railway system in Germany is of special 
 interest. The North Sea coast, between the 
 mouths of the Ems and the Elbe, is a region of 
 small fishing villages among the sandhills with 
 behind them a dreary expanse of marsh and 
 moorland. All the needs of the district would 
 be more than met by a single-line railway with 
 a few small stations. It has one of the finest 
 double track railways in Germany following the 
 general line of the coast, with large stations 
 equipped with long platforms and numerous 
 sidings and great sheds for stores. There is no 
 doubt that it is essentially a military railway, 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 61 
 
 not only linking all the ports of the seaboard, 
 but also supplying facilities for the detraining 
 and embarkation of troops in every creek and 
 backwater along the Frisian coast. 
 
 We have now learned from Germany the art 
 of using railways to their fullest extent during 
 the mobilisation and concentration period of a 
 great war. But it was Moltke and the General 
 Staff of Berlin that first elaborated such a 
 system. It was already perfect before the war 
 of 1870. The railway department of the General 
 Staff had worked out time-tables for the move- 
 ment of troops and the necessary train loads of 
 stores to every frontier of Germany. With its 
 mobilisation orders every unit received the 
 time-table of the trains that would convey it to 
 the point where it was to detrain on the frontier. 
 These time-tables are revised from year to year. 
 On the " declaration of the state of war/' which 
 is the immediate prelude to mobilisation, the 
 railways pass automatically under military con- 
 trol. The time-tables for the movement of 
 trains are already in the possession of the direc- 
 tors of each section of the lines, and on the 
 announcement of the mobilisation the movement 
 of the trains begins at once. We now regard 
 all this as a matter of course, but before 1870 
 the only War Office in Europe that thought it 
 worth while to prepare railway time-tables for 
 war during the years of peace was the War 
 Office at Berlin. 
 
 The plan of campaign is thus in its first stage 
 chiefly a railway plan, but the preparation of 
 all this mass of detailed orders and tables is 
 
62 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 only one part of the work of the General Staff. 
 Moltke made the annual manoeuvres not merely 
 a means of training the higher commanders in 
 handling masses of troops, but also an exercise 
 in the use of the railways for concentration and, 
 to a certain extent, an experimental test of one 
 or other of the plans of campaign he kept in his 
 portfolios. This testing of future plans was 
 carried out to a much greater extent in a series 
 of annual exercises, which had not the publicity 
 of the manoeuvres. These were what are now 
 known in our own army as Staff rides. They 
 were invented and practised by the Berlin 
 General Staff long before any other army had 
 even thought of such proceedings. In Prussia 
 the Staff rides were known as the exercises of 
 the General Staff. Each year the operations of 
 an imaginary campaign on this or that frontier 
 were studied by a group of officers under the 
 personal direction of Von Moltke. No troops 
 were brought out, but all the orders were worked 
 out as if they were actually on the ground. 
 Moltke set the general idea and the problems to 
 be solved, and gave from day to day the situation 
 and operations of the imaginary enemy. This 
 was a most valuable supplement to the work 
 done in studying possible campaigns merely on 
 the map a process which is now familiar to all 
 armies under the rather misleading name of 
 " The war game/ 1 It is better described by 
 the name used in the Italian army, " Manovre 
 sulla carta " " manoeuvres on the map." 
 
 The most valuable result of all this activity 
 was that the higher commanders of the army and 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 63 
 
 their staff officers had a common doctrine of 
 war, had the same ideas as to how troops were 
 to be handled and orders drafted, and would 
 therefore not only interpret in the same spirit 
 the directions received from the General Staff, 
 but also understand how to work together. 
 Much of the success of the German army in 1870 
 was due to this easy co-operation of the army 
 corps commanders, and the habit acquired of 
 swiftly and surely interpreting the brief orders 
 conveyed from the general headquarters and 
 practically applying them to the changing aspects 
 of the situation. 
 
 A necessary basis for any plan of campaign 
 is a knowledge of the ground and of the enemy's 
 forces, armament and war methods. A large 
 part of the work of the General Staff always has 
 been the collecting and classifying of information 
 on these matters. Of course a considerable 
 amount of this information is very easily secured, 
 provided there is a systematic organisation for 
 collecting it. And once more, this is a matter 
 in which the General Staff at Berlin were the 
 pioneers, their methods being now largely 
 adopted by all other countries. But before 1870, 
 outside Germany, this systematic collection of 
 information hardly existed. In some countries 
 there was a reckless carelessness on the subject, 
 the idea apparently being that when war came 
 an effort would be made to supply for all the 
 deficiencies in the time of peace. In France, 
 under Napoleon III., the negligence of the War 
 Office in this respect is almost incredible. A 
 very able officer, Colonel Stoffel of the French 
 
64 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 engineers, was military attache at the French 
 embassy at Berlin from 1867 up to the declaration 
 of war. He sent to Paris voluminous reports 
 on the organisation, arms and manoeuvres of 
 the Prussian army. After the fall of the empire 
 in September, 1870, most of these reports were 
 found tied up together in a portfolio at the War 
 Office, many of them absolutely unopened. 
 Colonel Stoffel had been accused of leaving his 
 government completely in the dark as to the 
 military strength of Prussia and Germany, and 
 after the war in self-defence he published a 
 volume of his Berlin reports, which form a most 
 interesting study of the Prussian army in the 
 years of preparation for the Franco-German war. 
 It need hardly be said that there was no such 
 culpable negligence in the offices of the General 
 Staff at Berlin, which had already been carrying 
 on for years the same careful collecting and 
 co-ordinating of information which is now carried 
 out by the Intelligence Department of every 
 War Office in the world. Part of this work has 
 nothing to do with espionage or any other under- 
 hand methods. As a matter of fact there are 
 not many secrets to be discovered by the agents 
 of an Intelligence Department, and there are 
 abundant sources of information open to anyone 
 who takes the trouble to watch for and make use 
 of them. 
 
 First of all, every War Office has the reports 
 of the military attaches at foreign courts and 
 of the officers invited to attend the annual 
 manoeuvres of other armies. Then there is 
 the information to be gathered from official and 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 65 
 
 non-official publications, including the newspapers 
 and the various technical magazines and reviews. 
 Finally, a good deal of information is gathered 
 by trained observers who visit foreign countries. 
 Some of these may be classed as spies, but a 
 large number hardly come under this denomi- 
 nation in the unpleasant sense of the word. 
 Thus, for instance, the officers of every army in 
 the world when travelling through a foreign 
 country have their eyes open as to its general 
 character from a military point of view, its 
 fortresses, and the rest. Sometimes an officer 
 taking a holiday in a foreign country is asked to 
 visit this or that frontier region and report upon 
 it. This can hardly be called espionage. The 
 information collected is that about which there 
 is usually very little concealed. 
 
 The average man who has had no military 
 training is very ready to believe fantastic stories 
 about the way in which the German General 
 Staff collects its information. I have more than 
 once seen in our own newspapers stories of German 
 officers in disguise travelling about the country 
 and making maps and plans of it. The Intelligence 
 Department of the General Staff at Berlin, like 
 that of every other department of the same kind 
 in the world, has no need to trust to maps im- 
 provised in this rough-and-ready way. It can 
 buy through any bookseller complete sets of 
 the official ordnance maps of every civilised 
 country, and if it wants a large supply of the 
 maps of any particular district for active opera- 
 tions it can multiply them by the various 
 photographic processes in the same printing 
 
66 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 offices that produced the official maps of its own 
 country. Take the case of France at the present 
 moment. The German armies are simply using 
 copies* or originals of the French Staff map, 
 and if it wants details as to the character of the 
 various roads for wheel traffic, it has all it wants 
 ready made for it in the admirable maps produced 
 for motorists by various French firms. As to 
 the permanent fortifications, the French Staff 
 map gives the position of every fort, battery 
 and redoubt in the country. In our ordnance 
 maps of the later issues these are omitted. On 
 the map of the Dover district there is a blank, not 
 only where the citadel stands, but also on the 
 site of Dover castle. But this omission conceals 
 nothing. Everyone knows where both these 
 places are. 
 
 As to the condition of the fortresses, the 
 German Staff doubtless knew before the war 
 that most of the French forts outside the eastern 
 barrier, and notably those of the northern 
 frontier, except at Maubeuge, had been practically 
 classed as useless. There was no need to employ 
 any spies to ascertain this fact, because the 
 matter had been discussed very fully in the 
 French military press. In the same way there 
 can be little secrecy about armaments. The 
 Germans managed to keep secret the fact that they 
 possessed an exceptionally powerful weapon in 
 
 * The German Staff Map of Central Europe, one of the 
 most beautiful maps that has ever been produced, includes 
 the ground covered by the present war in both east and west. 
 The western sheets are a reduction of the large scale French 
 and Belgian Staff maps. 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 67 
 
 the new i6J-inch howitzer. But such secrets are 
 very rare. The mere fact that most improve- 
 ments in armaments are at least alluded to in 
 the army estimates of the country, and become 
 the subjects of discussion in the technical press, 
 generally gives an early clue to any change that 
 is being made. The French tried to keep secret 
 the details of the Lebel rifle and of the new quick- 
 firing gun, but any weapon that has to be 
 multiplied by hundreds and thousands in actual 
 use is soon known to multitudes of people and 
 even casual talk about it soon gives any practical 
 mechanic an idea of what its construction must 
 be. The Germans were able to keep the secret 
 of their big howitzer because they had very few 
 of them. If the peace had been prolonged for 
 a couple of years more it probably would have 
 been fully described in half the military reviews 
 of Europe. 
 
 During the war of 1870, in some of the popular 
 narratives of the time, great surprise was 
 expressed at the intimate local knowledge 
 possessed by German officers when they occupied 
 a French town. It was generally said that a 
 German who had lived in the place had been 
 sending home detailed information as to the 
 prominent local residents and officials and the 
 factories and resources of the place. It is 
 obvious, however, that if such information had 
 been sent in for years, from about a third of 
 France, it would have formed a mass of papers 
 that would have required a whole army of clerks 
 to deal with it. What actually was done was 
 much simpler, and is certainly what is being done 
 
68 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 at present. In most cases on occupying a town 
 all the invader has to do is to take from the 
 Town Hall, or a business office, or a post office, 
 or even from a bookseller's shop some maps and 
 guides of the place, a local directory, and the tax 
 collector's list of the ratepayers. He has then 
 at his disposal more information than even the 
 most active of spies could have supplied. He 
 knows the place, its resources, the names and 
 addresses of all the officials and prominent 
 residents and the amount of their incomes. We 
 may be quite sure that with such ready means of 
 obtaining local information the German Staff 
 does not encumber its offices with whole libraries 
 of useless reports. 
 
 Of course there is also espionage on the one 
 hand, and on the other the use of reports collected 
 from men who have been resident in the country 
 amongst them the hundreds of reservists who, 
 on the declaration of war, have to give up their 
 business in a foreign country and return to their 
 regiments. As for espionage, there is one aspect 
 of it which is distinctly criminal. During the 
 last few years there have been several cases of 
 Frenchmen who accepted the pay of the German 
 War Office and in return for it handed over 
 originals or copies of confidential documents 
 which came into their hands in the execution 
 of their duty. There was more than one lament- 
 able case of this kind in the French navy, and the 
 famous Dreyfus court-martial showed that what- 
 ever were the merits of that particular case, the 
 German War Office was endeavouring to obtain 
 from men in the French army details of the new 
 artillery. 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 69 
 
 There is another kind of espionage which, 
 though for the sake of the national safety is 
 severely punished in all countries, is not in itself 
 a dishonourable proceeding. The English officers 
 who were imprisoned in Germany for having, in 
 the guise of peaceful yachtsmen, reconnoitred the 
 naval defences of the North Sea coast, took the 
 risk of being arrested and being imprisoned, but 
 w r ere doing an honourable service to their country*. 
 We must, therefore, in common fairness allow that 
 so long as no attempt was made to bribe men 
 to betray their loyalty to their own country, 
 German officers who travelled in France or 
 England with their eyes open for any useful 
 information, were doing only what our own 
 officers had done. In the days when Russia 
 was not our ally and there was a general expecta- 
 tion of a war on the north-western frontier of 
 India, English officers of the Indian army, 
 disguised as horse-dealers, travelled through the 
 Russian frontier cities of Central Asia, and 
 brought, back much useful information as to the 
 forces the Czar was gathering in Turkestan. 
 
 Before the South African war at least one of 
 our engineer officers worked as a navvy on the 
 new forts at Pretoria. We may take it, therefore, 
 that espionage in some forms is practised by 
 every army in the world. Our allies, the Japanese, 
 are past-masters of the art. For at least two 
 years before the war with Russia, a colonel 
 of a Japanese staff kept a barber's shop in Port 
 
 * General Baden-Powell has lately published in a popular 
 magazine an account of his adventures as a spy in various 
 countries. 
 
70 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 Arthur* The business of the spy is generally 
 rather to verify than to obtain information. 
 Much of his work is following up the clues supplied 
 by reports published in the newspapers or in the 
 technical press as to the contemplated changes of 
 armament, new fortification works in progress, 
 and the like. He has no need to waste his time 
 mapping huge tracts of country or compiling 
 elaborate lists of local residents. All this can 
 be found in publications accessible to everybody. 
 We have seen already that German methods 
 of preparation for war are thorough and 
 systematic, and the one point in which German 
 espionage differs from that of every other country, 
 except perhaps Japan, is that it is systematised. 
 Of course the great mass of German residents 
 in foreign countries have nothing to do with it. 
 If there were too many agents, not only would 
 a large amount of mere repetition be the result, 
 but the risk of discovery would be multiplied at 
 every step. There has been a kind of panic about 
 spies as there was in France in 1870, and the 
 wildest stories are told about their operations. 
 Even some of the narratives that have been 
 published as alleged confessions of spies are full 
 of absurd fictions. Thus one book, which has 
 attracted more attention than it deserves, pur- 
 ports to tell how the author conveyed information 
 to Berlin about the proceedings of the Balkan 
 League against Turkey some years before the 
 League came into existence. The spy is a favourite 
 figure in popular fiction, and the novelist generally 
 attributes to him more complicated methods than 
 he ever need have recourse to. He really proceeds 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 71 
 
 in two ways. Either he buys confidential docu- 
 ments and books of instruction from men who 
 are base enough to betray the trust reposed in 
 them, and in doing this he is an accomplice 
 in a criminal action, or he acts more honourably, 
 and merely keeps his eyes open for matters that, 
 to his trained intelligence, are significant, and 
 which complete the information that can be 
 obtained by anyone who regularly follows the 
 mass of details on military and naval subjects 
 that is every year and every day published in 
 the Press. 
 
 To sum up, the work of the General Staff is 
 methodical preparation for war, not only by 
 its supervision of the higher training of the 
 officers, but also by the continual perfecting of 
 the mobilisation plans, the supervision of the 
 railway system, and the collection of information, 
 and also by preparation of plans of campaign 
 against all probable enemies these plans being 
 carried forward only to the first stage of the war. 
 
 Once war has been declared the Chief of the 
 General Staff becomes Chief of the Staff to the 
 Kaiser, who acts as commander-in-chief of the 
 field armies. A substitute takes his place at 
 Berlin. The ordinary work of the Staff goes on, 
 but a large number of those who were engaged in 
 it are attached to the field armies as Staff officers, 
 or to the Headquarters Staff at the front. " At 
 the front " does not of course mean in the actual 
 region of the hard fighting. With battle fronts 
 extending over hundreds of miles the directing 
 centre must be placed at some point far in the 
 rear of the fighting line, where all information 
 
72 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 from the various points in contact with the 
 enemy can be conveyed by telegraph and the 
 necessary orders sent to the fighting front in 
 the same way. This new development really 
 began in 1866, in the campaign against Austria 
 and her allies until within a few days of the 
 great battle of Sadowa the headquarters of the 
 German armies was at Berlin. The armies were 
 concentrated on the frontier in the beginning of 
 June. War began on the i6th, but it was not 
 until the 2oth, after several battles had been 
 fought, that King William, Von Moltke, and the 
 Headquarters Staff left Berlin for Bohemia, where 
 the decisive battle was fought on July 3rd. 
 During the present war for the first month the 
 Kaiser and Headquarters Staff were at Coblenz 
 on the Rhine. The commander of an army of a 
 million or more of combatants can only occa- 
 sionally pay a flying visit to the fighting line, the 
 nearer he places his headquarters to the actual 
 front the more difficult it is to be sure of being 
 in uninterrupted communication with every part 
 of the vast line of armies he is directing. He 
 must choose for his place of command some 
 quiet city far to the rear, where he has at his 
 command the permanent telegraph system of 
 the country. It is not so romantic a position 
 as that of a commander-in-chief riding amongst 
 his troops in the battle-line. But war is ceasing 
 to be romantic. It has become a grimly organised 
 business, prepared for in the years of peace by a 
 group of quiet middle-aged men, with an army 
 of clerks in what looks like a huge business 
 office, and conducted by transferring this prosaic 
 
PREPARATION FOR WAR 73 
 
 business department to some other place nearer 
 the scene of operations, where the same busy 
 workers all day long handle telegraphic des- 
 patches and letters, dictate to typewriters, write 
 general orders to be set up by compositors, send 
 off telegrams and talk through telephones, 
 while all that the commander-in-chief sees of the 
 actual fighting is a kind of rough model of it 
 made by placing coloured blocks or sticking pins 
 in a big map laid out upon a table. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 ACTION ON DECLARATION OF WAR 
 
 MOBILISATION AND CONCENTRATION 
 
 armies have adopted so much of the 
 German system that in describing the pro- 
 cedure of the German army one is nowadays 
 giving an account of what seems to the reader to 
 be more or less familiar and obvious. But until 
 after the war of 1870, mobilisation in the correct 
 sense of the word did not exist in any army 
 outside Germany. There was nowhere else an 
 established system of expanding in a few days 
 the army on the peace footing into a war army, 
 and preparing every unit to take the field. 
 
 Even now many people use the word mobilisa- 
 tion in an incorrect sense. In recent years one 
 often read in the newspapers of this or that 
 Territorial regiment being mobilised, when all 
 that was really meant was that it had assembled 
 for a few days' manoeuvres from a permanent 
 camp, or even for a field day near London. The 
 German word for mobilisation is ' Mobilmach- 
 ung," which literally means " making ready to 
 
 74 
 
ACTION ON DECLARATION OF WAR 75 
 
 move." The steps taken when a mobilisation 
 order is published are these : 
 
 Either simultaneously with the issue of the 
 order or a few hours before it, the military 
 authorities have taken possession of the railways. 
 All ordinary traffic ceases, except perhaps where 
 on the great lines one or two civilian trains are 
 run during the day. Engines and rolling stock 
 are run from the various branch lines on to the 
 main lines leading to the frontier sidings and 
 goods depots are cleared out for the arrival of 
 the troops and their supplies. 
 
 The reservists at once begin to pour into the 
 places where the regiments they belong to are 
 stationed. The territorial system of the army 
 makes this process of rejoining a very simple 
 matter for the greater number of them. A certain 
 proportion may have to make long journeys or 
 even to come from abroad, but most of the men 
 are living in the district to which their army 
 corps belongs. In the villages in western Ger- 
 many one sees at the entrance to the main 
 street a permanent notice board bearing the 
 name of the place and that of the regiment to 
 which the villagers belong, and even the number 
 of the battalion and company. The reservists 
 are thus a party of neighbours. They travel 
 together into the nearest town, where they find 
 their battalion assembled. All over the country 
 these streams of reservists are flowing into the 
 great centres. Medical inspection and the 
 serving out of uniform, arms, equipment, a 
 first supply of ammunition, and the reserve 
 rations for the field, are the next step. Meanwhile 
 
76 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 horses and transport have been requisitioned, 
 regimental field stores and equipment are drawn 
 from the mobilisation magazines. The ranks 
 are filled and the surplus number of reservists 
 turned over to the depot formed at the barracks, 
 and the rest march off with the regiment to the 
 railway station where they are to entrain for 
 the front. 
 
 The first principle is that the regiment must 
 be complete with all its equipment, including 
 provisions for three days and the full supply of 
 ammunition before it leaves its peace station. 
 This avoids having to send after it drafts of 
 reservists and various odds and ends of equip- 
 ment and supplies. In 1870 the French acted 
 on a different system, or rather without any 
 system. They tried to carry out the mobilisa- 
 tion and the concentration simultaneously. On 
 the declaration of war regiments were moved 
 as they stood from the barracks, and hurried 
 to various places in Alsace and Lorraine. For 
 weeks after, men were arriving in handfuls to 
 complete the regiment to war strength, and in 
 the confusion at the time often found it difficult 
 to find out where their regiments were and 
 wandered for days by rail or road looking for it*. 
 
 * For instance, in the second week of the mobilisation 
 nearly 5,000 men of various regiments, and all arms of the 
 service who could not rejoin their units, were living at 
 haphazard in and about the railway station at Rheims 
 many of them half-starved, for not being attached to any 
 organised corps the distributions of rations were irregular. 
 One day there was a riot. The 5,000 attacked a provision 
 train at the station, and a regiment with fixed bayonets had 
 to be used to restore order. 
 
ACTION ON DECLARATION OF WAR 77 
 
 Commanders of regiments at the front were 
 telegraphing or writing for stores and equip- 
 ment of all kinds without which they could not 
 move, and the result was that even after the 
 first battle many of the units were incomplete, 
 and the men were without some of the most 
 necessary parts of their equipment. 
 
 It is now everywhere recognised that the 
 German rule is the sound one, namely to com- 
 plete each regiment at its peace station, and not 
 think of sending it to the front until it has been 
 brought up to full strength and completely 
 provided with all it requires, so that it has 
 become a war unit capable of marching, bivou- 
 acking, and fighting. In other words, it must be 
 made mobile before it joins the field army, and 
 this making mobile not the mere assembling of 
 officers and men is mobilisation in its true sense. 
 
 The territorial system again makes the con- 
 centration of the armies a fairly simple matter. 
 Each army corps district has its railway time- 
 table. It can be given for a certain space of 
 time exclusive use of a main line of railway on 
 which the branch lines of the district converge, 
 and thus as battalions, squadrons and batteries 
 entrain and are sent off they form a succession of 
 railway trains conveying the whole fighting 
 force of the district to the point on the frontier 
 from which the army corps is to begin its advance. 
 The same railway system sends its supplies 
 forward to this point. The front on which the 
 armies are thus concentrated is not necessarily 
 the frontier itself. It may be several days' 
 march behind it. The essential point is that a 
 
78 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 line of concentration should be secure from all 
 disturbance from the enemy. In 1870, when it 
 was expected that the French might make a 
 dash across the border, without waiting for the 
 complete concentration of their armies, the 
 German forces were assembled along the line of 
 the Rhine, and the land frontier towards France 
 was for a while held by a few weak detachments. 
 In the recent war, both on the eastern and 
 western frontier, the Germans were able to 
 concentrate on a front provided by two parallel 
 lines of railway following the general trend of the 
 frontier, provided with large military stations, 
 with long lines of sidings, and connected up with 
 the main lines of the country running east and 
 west. On the eastern frontier these military 
 lines were protected by a chain of fortresses. 
 On the western side, besides fortress protection 
 there was the security given by the concentration 
 taking place partly behind the frontier of neutral 
 Luxemburg and Belgium. In both cases, for 
 many years measures have been taken to protect 
 the concentration on this double front, by keeping 
 an extra force in the frontier districts. 
 
 The line on which the armies are concentrated 
 is decided by the plan of campaign. We have 
 seen that in Von Moltke's view this plan could not 
 go much farther than grouping the armies on 
 the frontier, and giving them their first general 
 declaration. In German military literature the 
 word ' Aufmarsch," literally ' marching up/ ex- 
 presses the last stage of the concentration for war. 
 It means more than merely that the troops have 
 been brought up to the frontier. It implies 
 
ACTION ON DECLARATION OF WAR 79 
 
 the further condition that they have been placed 
 there in a certain array, ready to advance. 
 
 The great secret carefully kept by every 
 European War Office is always what this array 
 is to be. How the great battle is to be formed 
 across the frontier ; how many of the regular 
 corps will be placed in this or that position, 
 and what reserve corps can be formed in them 
 for the first move. To know all this, would be 
 to have a very fair idea of the first movements 
 in the campaign. Something has been said in 
 the last chapter on the subject of " Espionage." 
 If the spy can ever supply useful information 
 it is during the important days of the concentra- 
 tion, when the news that this or that regiment 
 is moving by rail to such or such a point of 
 the frontier, is enough to tell that the army 
 corps to which it belongs is concentrating there. 
 And scraps of information like these from various 
 sources might easily give the whole order of the 
 Aufmarsch, and a clear key to the first operations 
 of the war. This is why in the fortnight after 
 mobilisation, the censorship is rigidly severe, 
 and the newspapers are no longer, as in former 
 days, allowed to publish even a line about the 
 departure of the troops. In the present war 
 English travellers from Germany, who left the 
 Rhineland by way of Switzerland, were able 
 to tell of a very marked movement of military 
 trains to the northward, indicating a concentra- 
 tion of the main force towards Luxemburg and 
 Belgium. Doubtless there were some among 
 them who knew enough of the German army 
 to be able to note the numbers and names of 
 
80 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 regiments as they passed to various stations. 
 And this would, under the circumstances, be very 
 valuable information in Paris and London. 
 But on the whole, the Germans were able to 
 conceal, until after the actual operations began, 
 the war array of their armies. We have proof 
 of this in the way that the information published 
 in the London Press by a military correspondent 
 known to be in touch with our War Office, and 
 the information published in St. Petersburg on 
 semi-official authority, gave a very widely different 
 account of the German arrangements. The 
 London information placed two Austrian army 
 corps in Alsace, but we now know that at the 
 outset of the war all the Austrian army corps 
 were either in Galkia or on the Servian frontier. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 
 
 WAR IDEALS AND METHODS OF THE GERMAN ARMY 
 
 '"THE German army was the first to use in war 
 on a great scale the breech-loading rifle and 
 field-gun. In the war with Austria in 1866, the 
 infantry was opposed to troops armed with the 
 old muzzle-loader. The fighting was carried 
 out much as it had been in earlier wars, namely, 
 by the advance of troops in close order, covered 
 by lines of skirmishers. The distinctive point 
 of the Prussian infantry attack in those days 
 was that behind the thin firing line of skirmishers 
 there was neither a prolonged shoulder to shoulder 
 line of infantry, nor the massive columns that 
 had been used in the later Napoleonic wars. 
 The Prussian infantry manoeuvred in company 
 columns, each company having its three sections 
 in line one behind the other. In the front line 
 of battle one of these sections was usually sent 
 out as skirmishers. It was a formation which 
 combined the advantages of line and column. 
 
 After 1866 there were many discussions as to 
 how the infantry fight would be conducted 
 
 F 81 
 
82 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 between armies both of which were armed with 
 the new weapons. It was recognised that the 
 Prussian infantry could not hope to repeat the 
 easy victories of 1866. There was even a 
 tendency towards the view that the quick fire 
 of the new rifle had given such a superiority to 
 the defence that there must be a modification 
 of the traditional view that the offensive must 
 be sought for everywhere and always as the 
 surest means of victory. 
 
 Through the whole of German military litera- 
 ture from the days of Frederick the Great down 
 to our own, the one dominant idea is that the 
 advantage in battle lies with the attack. The 
 defensive is regarded as a confession of weakness, 
 and the tactics of defence are only to be adopted 
 locally and temporarily. But all over Europe 
 the first impression made by the description the 
 war correspondents sent from the battle-fields of 
 1866 gave the impression that the rapid fire of 
 the new rifle would make a battle front all but 
 unapproachable, and more than one writer 
 insisted that the battle of the future would be 
 won by forcing an enemy to take the offensive 
 and then destroying him with rifle fire from a 
 prepared position, the full effect of the victory 
 being reaped by a counter-attack when the 
 offensive had utterly exhausted itself. French 
 writers very freely adopted this view, and it had 
 an unfortunate influence on the tactics of the 
 French army in 1870. Even in Moltke's instruc- 
 tions in the period between 1866 and 1870, there 
 are passages which at first sight suggest that he 
 was inclined to exaggerate the advantage con- 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 83 
 
 ferred by the new weapons on the defence. But 
 the old Prussian tradition prevented such ideas 
 from seriously influencing the battle methods of 
 the army. Attack might be more difficult, but 
 it was the only plan that gave promise of really 
 decisive results. 
 
 Theoretically it was recognised that the new 
 weapons would make new battle tactics necessary. 
 But it was difficult at first to realise what they 
 would be, and the conservatism that is a powerful 
 force in every army produced a tendency to 
 keep as much of the old ways as possible. Hence 
 in the battles of 1870, though it was recognised 
 from the very outset that the attack must begin 
 with an advance in dispersed order, this was at 
 first regarded as only a preliminary expedient 
 to prepare the way for an advance in close order 
 at an early stage. In earlier wars the skirmishers 
 who opened the fight had formed a loose firing 
 line behind which shoulder to shoulder lines of 
 infantry came into action. In the first battles 
 of 1870, more men were pushed into the skirmish- 
 ing line at the very beginning of the fight, but 
 this was still regarded as a mere opening of the 
 battle. But presently it was found that to 
 move close bodies into the zone of effective fire 
 meant heavy loss. The most terrible lessons 
 were those of the battles of August i6th and 
 i8th, when a Hanoverian brigade in its attack 
 on the French at Mars-la-Tour lost over 50 per 
 cent, of its strength in a few minutes and the 
 close ordered attack of the Prussian Guard at 
 St. Privat was brought to a standstill in less 
 than half an hour with the loss of nearly six 
 thousand officers and men. 
 
84 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 After these terrible days the old close order 
 was doomed. The skirmishing line became hence- 
 forth recognised as the firing line. Instead of 
 merely clearing the way for lines and masses of 
 troops to follow, it was gradually to work its 
 way forward, fed from the rear by reinforcements 
 to replace its losses. It was to be just dense 
 enough to bring as many rifles as possible into 
 action. It was to be supported by other lines 
 in the same open order from which it would be 
 fed with men and ammunition, and the decision 
 would be produced by its beating down the 
 fire of the opposing enemy, and as this return 
 fire weakened the moment would come when 
 the supports in rear could go forward with the 
 firing line to clear the hostile position. 
 
 This new kind of fighting evolved itself at first 
 without any precise orders or directions. Officers 
 and men found they could only get forward by 
 opening out, feeding the firing line, and working 
 onward from cover to cover. In the battles of 
 earlier days it was only the skirmisher who could 
 lie down behind a rock or bank under fire to take 
 cover ; for the officers and men of the main 
 fighting line such an attitude would have been 
 regarded as cowardly. But under the storm 
 of bullets from the new rifles, taking cover became 
 a necessity. For the German Army of 1870 
 battle experiences gave very plain lessons, which 
 however were only learned with much sacrifice 
 of life. In the second stage of the war the 
 Staff began to embody these lessons in provisional 
 regulations and orders. The first attempt to 
 regulate the new method of fighting in dispersed 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 85 
 
 order with successive lines of supports was made 
 at the re-capture of Le Bourget during the siege 
 of Paris. To use a phrase that came into fashion 
 at the time, ' It was an attempt to organise the 
 necessary disorder of the attack." 
 
 To old-fashioned soldiers the disorder seemed 
 hopeless, and a lamentable military decadence 
 from the accurately ordered lines in which men 
 were drilled in the barrack square and marchei 
 into battle in the days of the muzzle-loader. 
 After the war, the new methods found their way 
 into the drill books of all armies. But every- 
 where,, and notably in Germany itself, there was 
 a constant effort to invent some way of bringing 
 the dispersed attack into some fixed pattern. 
 Every army in Europe adopted and rejected 
 impracticable schemes for working out an infantry 
 attack on one or other of these set patterns. 
 
 In Germany there was at first a disposition to 
 represent the methods of the German Staff and 
 the German Army in the war of 1870 as something 
 that nearly approached perfection. Later on 
 there came a more critical period. A group of 
 military writers most of whose names are now 
 household words amongst students of \var 
 began to examine more closely the events of 
 1870, and to write very freely about them. For 
 the first time the public began to read realistic 
 descriptions of what the actual fighting had 
 been like, and to hear of the weak points of the 
 new battle methods. Fritz Hoenig and Meckel 
 were especially frank in these matters. They 
 described the long wide trail of shirkers and 
 stragglers left behind in the attack. The men 
 
86 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 who would not move forward from cover, the 
 little groups that huddled for hours in hollows 
 and amongst trees, the leaderless knots of men 
 wandering aimlessly behind the fighting line, 
 the confusion of the fight itself with men of 
 different companies and regiments mixed to- 
 gether and carried forward by whichever officers 
 had the energy to take command. Meckel, who 
 was afterwards the instructor of the Japanese 
 army, insisted in a famous pamphlet that the 
 remedy was to keep men together in something 
 approaching the old close order, and by an iron 
 discipline, bring into action every rifle for which 
 there was room on the fighting front, trusting 
 to the increased volume of fire to compensate 
 for the loss that would necessarily be incurred. 
 
 There is something to be said for the view 
 thus taken. It is quite true that, as Meckel 
 puts it, battles are won, not by taking care to 
 avoid loss, but by hitting hard. And a destruc- 
 tive fire poured into an enemy is the best pro- 
 tection against his answering fire. The German 
 drill-books and army regulations never explicitly 
 adopted the return to close order for which 
 Meckel pleaded. But at the German manoeuvres 
 for years before the war, it was quite evident 
 that the theory had considerable influence on 
 the accepted methods of battle leading. Dense 
 firing lines supported at short range by troops 
 in close order were a feature of these manoeuvre 
 battles*. 
 
 * It was easy to form a misleading impression of the 
 density of the firing lines at the German manoeuvres. 
 Towards the end of an attack the line would sometimes be 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 87 
 
 To put the matter very simply, the accepted 
 theory seems to be this. There is, say, a thousand 
 yards of front available. If a firing line is formed 
 such as we used in South Africa, there might be 
 two hundred rifles in action on this frontage. 
 It would be easy for each man to find cover and 
 they would thus form a dispersed target for 
 hostile fire. But on the same frontage one 
 might put four times the number of men in line 
 not necessarily the evenly dressed line of the 
 drill-ground, of course and though more men 
 would thus be exposed to fire, the volume of fire 
 would be four times heavier. The German 
 argued that the denser firing line would crush 
 out the fire of its dispersed opponent and inflict 
 loss not only on the men in action, but on the 
 supports reinforcing them. We have seen the 
 result of this theory of the fire fight in the battles 
 of the present war, where the Germans have 
 almost invariably pushed forward closely arrayed 
 firing lines, which gave our men the impression 
 that they were " coming on in crowds/' 
 
 There is no doubt that in the earlier battles 
 not only were dense firing lines used, but when 
 
 three or four deep in places, but this was because instead of 
 falling out men to represent casualties, it was supposed 
 that casualties had occurred and reinforcements were sent 
 into the line, but all the men, both the imaginary casualties 
 and those who were still firing, went forward together. I 
 once remarked to a German Staff Officer at manoeuvres that 
 the line was becoming a very dense one, and he replied, 
 " You must imagine that three-fourths of these men have 
 been hit and left behind. We bring them on with the firing 
 line, so that we have not to collect them at the end of the 
 attack from all kinds of places over a mile of ground behind 
 the line." 
 
88 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 the attempt was made to push home the attack, 
 the supports came on in successive waves, closed 
 upon the firing line, and formed a crowd. When 
 the war had lasted nearly three months, the losses 
 incurred led to an attempt being made to intro- 
 duce again the dispersed order of attack. In an 
 army order issued to the Fourth German Army 
 from the headquarters at Brussels by the Duke 
 of Wurtemburg on October 2ist, it was pointed 
 out that unnecessary loss had been incurred, not 
 only by insufficient reconnaissance of the enemy's 
 positions before the attack, and premature 
 attempts to assault it, but also by ; the use of 
 too dense formations/ 1 But, as has already been 
 noted, though the drill-book enjoined the dis- 
 persed order in attack, the working tradition of 
 the army had for many years encouraged the 
 other and more costly method. 
 
 In the war of 1870 and for some time after, 
 the accepted theory of the use of artillery in the 
 fight was that it began by engaging and en- 
 deavouring to silence the enemy's batteries, and 
 then shelled the hostile infantry's positions as a 
 prelude to the attack. The battle was thus 
 supposed to begin with an artillery duel. But 
 gradually this programme of the battle was 
 modified. The infantry advance was to begin 
 immediately. The batteries of the attack were 
 to take for their targets from the very outset 
 not only the enemy's guns but also his infantry 
 positions, and the fire of the artillery was to be 
 continued up to the last moment over the heads 
 of the attacking infantry. In order to facilitate 
 the attack on entrenched positions each army 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 89 
 
 corps was given several batteries of light and 
 heavy howitzers to deliver a high-angled fire of 
 big shells. Marching arrangements had always 
 included the placing of the batteries well to the 
 front, so that they could come into action as 
 early as possible. But for some time after 
 1870 there had been an accepted custom of 
 keeping back a certain number of them as an 
 artillery reserve. The modern German idea is, 
 however, that guns kept in reserve are wasted. 
 Every gun must come into action as soon as 
 a position can be found for it. 
 
 Finally, in the last ten years it has become the 
 practice to put large numbers of machine guns 
 into the firing line. The German army was 
 slow to adopt the machine gun, but once it 
 recognised its value they were provided for the 
 infantry in large numbers. On the line of 
 march they are carried in waggons. When the 
 attack begins they are brought out into the 
 firing line, singly or in groups. The mounting 
 is so low that a man can work the gun while 
 lying down, and gun and mounting can be easily 
 carried forward by two men. The German 
 attack is therefore a dense firing line of rifles, 
 studded here and there with machine guns, and 
 assisted in its advance by the fire of a huge 
 array of batteries of long-ranged quick-firers 
 and heavy field howitzers. The leading idea of 
 the attack is to push forward the infantry as 
 far as possible without revealing its position by 
 opening fire, and then when effective rifle range 
 is reached, to develop as rapidly as possible a 
 heavy fire from the largest number of men that 
 
90 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 can use their rifles along the front available. 
 The attack uses whatever cover it may find in 
 its direct line of advance, but only entrenches 
 itself if it is brought to a standstill. It is held 
 that to make it a general rule to make light 
 entrenchments at each halt of advance is only 
 to produce delay and divert a number of men 
 from the more useful occupation of firing. The 
 infantry are very carefully trained and prac- 
 tised in entrenching, but entrenchments are for 
 those parts of the line which act on the defensive, 
 and their object is to enable those sections of the 
 front to be more lightly held, thus sparing men 
 for the part of the battle line where the attack 
 is being delivered. Once begun, the attack must 
 be pushed home at all costs, and the accepted 
 doctrine is that, though heavy loss may thus 
 be incurred, it is in the end less than the sacrifices 
 that would be entailed by failure, or by a pro- 
 tracted struggle. 
 
 As to the general form of the battle, it is 
 often said that the German Staff has a kind of 
 fixed pattern for securing victory. The current 
 idea appears to be that an attempt is always 
 made to turn and envelop one or both flanks of 
 the enemy. Indeed, one popular writer on 
 German methods published not long ago a 
 description, illustrated by elaborate diagrams, of 
 the standard attack of a German army, the 
 scheme showing the centre held back and the 
 wings pushed forward on a wide front so as to 
 encircle both flanks of the opponent. This 
 would be really not the Prussian method of 
 attack, but the Zulu crescent magnified to an 
 enormous scale. 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 91 
 
 The real fact is that the German Army has no 
 " sealed pattern ' for its attack. Like every 
 other army, it of course accepts the principle- 
 old as organised warfare itself that the flank 
 attack combined with the attack in front gives 
 the most decisive result. Some of the most 
 famous battles in the Prussian and German 
 wars of 1866-1870 were won by a flank movement, 
 or a complete envelopment of the enemy. At 
 Sadowa, the decisive stroke was the flank attack 
 of the Crown Prince's army on the Austrian right, 
 combined with the frontal attack of the armies 
 of Prince Frederick Charles and the army of the 
 Elbe. At Gravelotte, in 1870, the decisive move 
 was the attack on the French right by the 
 Saxons on the flank and the Prussian Guard in 
 front. Neither of these could properly be des- 
 cribed as enveloping attacks : the object was not 
 to surround the enemy but to bring an over- 
 whelming force upon one of its flanks and roll 
 up his line. There was just one instance of a 
 real enveloping attack. It was at Sedan in 1870. 
 In this case the French army, already harassed 
 and demoralised and greatly inferior in numbers, 
 was actually surrounded in the hollow of the 
 hills about Sedan, and crushed by an over- 
 whelming force of artillery. But this was a 
 situation that even the most sanguine of generals 
 could hardly hope to reproduce. 
 
 Not in the German Army alone, but in every 
 army in the world, and not only in the operations 
 of great masses of men, but in the action of 
 small detachments, it is accepted as a principle 
 that an effort must be made to combine a flank 
 
92 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 attack with the attack in front. Since the 
 introduction of rapid-firing rifles and cannon, 
 the difficulties of the frontal attack have made 
 the flank attack more important than ever 
 before. It is quite true that on the actual 
 ground where the force attacking the flank 
 comes in contact with the enemy, the fighting 
 is frontal. But the great gain is that the flank 
 defence has to meet superior numbers and the 
 converging fire of long-range artillery, and the 
 flanking movement threatens the line of retreat 
 and, in case of great armies, the whole line of 
 communications. Outflanking movements are 
 met by bringing up new troops to prolong the 
 battle line in the new direction. Thus during 
 the fighting on the Aisne, when it was found 
 that the German front was too strong to be 
 forced by direct attack, an attempt was made 
 to strike at its right and right rear by a flank 
 movement from the direction of Amiens. This 
 was met by the Germans moving up troops to 
 prolong their right line to the northwards and, 
 as the outflanking movement extended gradually 
 in the same direction, the line of defence was 
 also prolonged, till at last in October the flanks 
 of the battle lines rested on the sea. 
 
 It would seem that with the enormous numbers 
 brought into the field in modern war, and the 
 fronts of hundreds of miles on which they are 
 engaged, the gigantic battle that results must 
 always become a conflict between two long and 
 more or less parallel lines, and that there can be 
 no question of the flank attack that secured 
 victory at Sadowa and Gravelotte. It has been 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 93 
 
 argued from these facts that the " parallel 
 battle ' is inevitable in modern war, and that 
 therefore there is a bankruptcy of German 
 methods, the enveloping movement round a 
 flank being impossible. This is, of course, a 
 conclusion not warranted by any sound view of 
 the facts. In much of the current criticism 
 on the present war, it almost seems that the 
 writers have a fixed idea that with these battle 
 lines of hundreds of miles the only point where 
 a flank movement can be attempted is at one 
 or other of these extremities. But it is equally 
 true for both sides that what is practically a 
 flank movement may be attempted and crowned 
 with success at many points in the long line. 
 In our newspaper maps, we see the German line 
 and the Allied line represented by two continuous 
 and roughly parallel black strokes, winding like 
 snakes across the maps of France and Belgium. 
 But of course in actual fact the lines are not 
 equally strong everywhere, nor is there absolute 
 continuity. On these prolonged fronts, besides 
 attempting to turn the extremities of the line, 
 the rival commanders may try to find a weak 
 spot in the opposing line and break through 
 there. If they succeeded, the victor will have 
 the choice of two flanks against which to operate 
 at the point where the line is broken, and there 
 may follow a great battle, which will repre- 
 sent a new Sadowa or Gravelotte on a gigantic 
 scale. 
 
 In following the story of the war our attention 
 here in England has naturally been riveted upon 
 that part of the long line where our own soldiers 
 
94 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 have been fighting. This is partly the result of 
 our keen interest in our own men, and partly to 
 the fact that we have heard very little of the 
 details of the operations of the French armies, 
 or of the German armies opposed to them. But 
 enough is known to show that in the first stage 
 of the war the German battle leading on a grand 
 scale was modelled precisely on this idea of 
 breaking through the long Allied line, and then 
 striking at the flanks thus created. In the last 
 days of August and the first week of September, 
 before the tide turned and victory was won on the 
 Marne, we here in England heard very little except 
 news of the movements of Sir John French's 
 force, and Von Kluck's attempts to outflank its 
 left were naturally supposed to be the main 
 effort of the enemy. But since then we have 
 learned something of the great operations on 
 other parts of the line. It is evident that the 
 general retreat of the Allies was the result of 
 not a movement against their extreme flank in 
 Belgium, but a blow delivered at their centre 
 by a huge mass of troops concentrated in the 
 third week of August in the wooded and hilly 
 country of the Ardennes. Those who believed 
 in the " sealed pattern " method of attack being 
 the only one that our German opponents would 
 adopt, thought they saw in the fighting about 
 Mons and the flank attack on the extreme Allied 
 left the repetition of what they assumed to be 
 the invariable battle plan of the German Staff. 
 But there is no such invariable plan, and in this 
 case the main stroke was at the Allied centre, 
 its success enabling the Germans in reaping its 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 95 
 
 results to have recourse to a series of flank 
 attacks once the line was broken. 
 
 The point is worth explaining in detail, as it 
 seems likely that this will be the method which 
 will give decisive results in the fighting of pro- 
 longed fronts that are characteristic of the 
 wars of armed nations. In the third week of 
 August the Allied line extended along the 
 eastern front of the fortified region in Alsace- 
 Lorraine, then bent round to the westward by 
 the north of the Argonne forest and the Ardennes 
 along the Meuse to near Namur, and thence 
 along the river Sambre and the Belgian frontier 
 by Chaleroi to Mons and Conde, where the 
 British army held the extreme left of this 
 enormous line. 
 
 All along this front of hundreds of miles the 
 German armies faced the Allies, but in the 
 right centre among the woods of the Ardennes 
 two German armies had been massed, one 
 behind the other. Nearest the French frontier 
 was the Duke of Wurtemburg's army behind 
 it, to the northward, was the army of General 
 Von Hausen (two Saxon army corps and a corps 
 from central Germany). The Duke of Wur- 
 temburg's army was attacked from the French 
 centre on the middle Meuse and this attack was 
 repulsed with heavy loss. Then came the move 
 which led to the general retirement of the Allied 
 line. The collapse of the defence of Namur 
 enabled the Saxon army to cross the Meuse 
 between Namur and Dinant, and to combine 
 a flank attack against the right rear of the 
 French on the Sambre with Von Billow's attack 
 
96 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 in front. Before this double attack the French 
 gave way. The Saxons moving down the left 
 bank of the Meuse made a flank attack upon the 
 French army holding the line of the river from 
 Mezi^res eastward by Sedan, and with this was 
 combined a front attack by the Wurtemburg 
 army. Again the French line gave way. The 
 Saxon army thus in three days delivered two 
 decisive flank attacks, left and right, from the 
 gap into which it had broken between Namur 
 and Dinant. The French centre was in full 
 retreat towards Rethel and Rheims. The retire- 
 ment of the French left from the Sambre had 
 exposed our own troops after their victorious 
 defence, on August the 23rd, to an attack by 
 overwhelming numbers, and it was then that 
 Von Kluck and Von Billow made the attempt 
 to cut off and destroy the British force. Von 
 Billow hustling the retreating French on our 
 right, and Von Kluck trying in vain to turn our 
 left and drive Sir John French's army to the 
 eastward into the hands of his colleague. The 
 splendid fighting of our men and the wonderful 
 leadership of our generals, not only saved our 
 army but at the same time covered the retire- 
 ment of the broken French line, but it will be 
 seen that the movement that led to this general 
 retreat was not a turning operation against the 
 extreme left of the long line, but Von Hausen's 
 stroke south of Namur, which cut into the line 
 at its left centre and then gave the opportunity 
 of delivering telling attacks against the flanks of 
 the broken line, first to the right towards the 
 Sambre, and then to the left along the middle 
 Meuse. 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 97 
 
 We may take it, therefore, that in the great 
 battles of to-day the existing flank will not 
 always be the dangerous point. The decision 
 will be reached by breaking through at some 
 weak point and then following up the success 
 thus obtained by a recourse to combined frontal 
 and flanking operations. To break through 
 anywhere will only be possible by accumulating 
 a superior force at this point, and if one part 
 of the long line is thus to be strengthened for 
 attack other parts of the line must be stripped 
 of a certain number of men and guns. On the 
 parts of the line thus weakened, the fighting 
 will have to be on the defensive and, to com- 
 pensate for decreased numbers, those parts of the 
 line must be heavily entrenched. 
 
 We thus arrive at the characteristic features 
 of these battles on prolonged fronts. In the great 
 battle which began upon the Aisne and gradually 
 extended to the coasts of the Channel, we have 
 seen more than one German attempt to break 
 through. Thus when the detailed story of the 
 battle can be written, it will probably be found 
 that, for at least ten days at the end of September, 
 there was a great concentration of German 
 troops about Rove and Lassigny, places which 
 were taken and retaken again and again. They 
 are near the point where the long line running 
 east and west from Verdun along the Aisne turns 
 to the northwards, and at this point the Germans 
 had not only to strengthen themselves on a 
 dangerously projecting salient, but had the 
 advantage that they could easily move consider- 
 able numbers by road and rail from- behind 
 
g8 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 their entrenched position on the Aisne. All the 
 accounts go to show that they lost very heavily 
 at this point. But the German battle methods 
 inevitably lead to heavy loss in the fight for any 
 point the capture of which would have a serious 
 result. 
 
 Through all German military literature there 
 runs the idea that loss must be freely in- 
 curred for the sake of obtaining a rapid decision. 
 In all the earlier wars of Germany in 1864, in 1866, 
 and in 1870, the price was paid and the result 
 obtained. The war of 1866 was over in seven 
 weeks. In 1870, within a month of the first 
 battle, one French army was locked up in Metz 
 and the other had been taken prisoner at Sedan. 
 It is clear that in the present war an effort was 
 made to obtain the same rapid results, and at 
 first it looked as if the plan of sacrificing men 
 freely and wearing down the enemy by reckless 
 attacks, was being crowned with success. To 
 overwhelm an enemy with an enormous develop- 
 ment of artillery fire and hurl against him attack 
 after attack of infantry, heedless of loss, is a policy 
 that may be defended as more economical of life 
 and effort in the long run, if a swift result can 
 be obtained. But it has the drawback that if 
 these costly attacks do not quickly break down 
 the opponent's resistance and the war drags on, 
 the strain on the nation is out of all proportion 
 to the results obtained. And there is the further 
 danger that, inasmuch as such methods at the 
 outset of a war mean heavy losses among the 
 best and most enterprising of the officers and 
 the trained troops of the first line, the fighting 
 
HOW THE GERMANS FIGHT 99 
 
 power of the nation will greatly deteriorate in 
 the second stage of the war. 
 
 It has already been remarked that a leading 
 feature of German battle tactics in the present 
 war has been the reliance on artillery and machine- 
 gun fire. It has even been said that in some 
 of the battles it seemed as if the infantry were 
 rather being used as an escort for these weapons 
 than as itself the main arm of attack. This is 
 probably an exaggeration. But five years ago 
 one of the best known of German military 
 writers, General Von Bernhardi, expressed the 
 opinion that, if anything, too much reliance was 
 being placed upon mechanical elements in war. 
 He is a writer who has ventured very freely 
 to criticise the methods of his own army, and 
 he went so far as to say that it might be a danger 
 for Germany in a future war if the infantry who 
 had so far been the main element in the winning 
 of battles, came to depend upon elaborately 
 improved cannon and machine guns to crush 
 the enemy's resistance, instead of relying on 
 their own rifles and bayonets as the weapons 
 that would give victory. Rightly or wrongly, it 
 has been said that in the present war the German 
 infantry firing is not as efficient as it was expected 
 to be, that brave as the men undoubtedly are, 
 their attacks have only succeeded where the 
 gunners had already all but completely shattered 
 the resistance of their opponents, and that their 
 advance has been brought to a standstill much 
 more easily than was the case in 1870, not 
 because the men themselves showed any lack 
 of courage, but because their training had not 
 
ioo THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 prepared them to use their rifles to any real 
 effect. If this be true, it would seem to confirm 
 Bernhardi's criticism, and suggest that so much 
 attention has been devoted to the development 
 of the artillery as to lead to slackness or negligence 
 in the infantry training of the German army. 
 
) > , > 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 GERMANY ON THE DEFENSIVE 
 
 THE FORTRESS-SYSTEM OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE 
 
 of Frederick the Great's sayings was, 
 that " The best place for war was in an 
 enemy's country, the next best in a neutral 
 country, and the worst of all in one's own." 
 Von Moltke put the idea in another way, when 
 he said that the best way to defend a frontier 
 was to make a vigorous attack across it. The 
 German tradition therefore is that the empire 
 is to be defended by taking the offensive. 
 
 In 1871, in accordance with this idea, by far 
 the greater number of the old fortified towns of 
 Germany were, to use the technical term, de- 
 classed. They were struck off the list of the 
 fortresses, and their walls and ramparts were 
 demolished to provide sites for new boulevards. 
 Even the fortresses that were retained, and 
 improved were regarded as not primarily defen- 
 sive, but rather as the entrenched camps that 
 would protect the mobilisation area and provide 
 room within the circle of their advanced forts 
 for great magazines of warlike stores. The 
 number of fortresses was purposely limited, as 
 it was held that there was more loss than gain 
 
 101 
 
102 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 in shutting up large garrisons behind their 
 works : the fewer men thus employed the more 
 there would be for the field armies. 
 
 When the French began to construct the 
 line of fortifications along their eastern frontier 
 the entrenched camps of Belfort, Epinal, Toul 
 and Verdun, and the lines of forts between them 
 German military critics ridiculed the project, 
 wrote of it as a " new Chinese wall," and pointed 
 to it as a confession of weakness on the part of 
 France. The events of the present war have 
 shown the wisdom of creating this fortress barrier, 
 but in 1875 the Germans pointed to it as a proof 
 that the French army was incapable of holding 
 the open field, and contrasted with it the defences 
 of their own frontier, where they had only the 
 two fortresses of Metz and Strasburg, and 
 depended for the defence of the country, not on 
 these entrenched camps, but on their power of 
 throwing a great army across the border within 
 a few days of the declaration of war. 
 
 But since those days, when a proud confidence 
 in their fighting power the result of recent 
 victories made the Germans depreciate to an 
 exaggerated extent the use of fortresses, there 
 has been a marked change in the views and 
 policy of the Berlin General Staff in this respect. 
 The reorganisation and growing efficiency of the 
 French army and the prospect of having to 
 carry on ' a war on two fronts," as the result 
 of the alliance between France and Russia, has 
 led in the last twenty years to a considerable 
 extension of the fortress system of the German 
 empire. It was realised that Germany was 
 
GERMANY ON THE DEFENSIVE 103 
 
 no longer relatively so powerful as she had been 
 in the years after the Franco-German war, and 
 that she might be compelled to fight on the 
 defensive on the eastern or western frontier, or 
 on both at the same time. 
 
 The German Empire has, broadly speaking, 
 four frontiers : the northern chiefly on the sea, 
 the western towards France, the eastern towards 
 Russia, and the southern towards Austria and 
 Switzerland. This last frontier has been left 
 almost entirely without permanent defences, as 
 Austria is the ally of Germany, and Switzerland a 
 neutral country, not likely to be involved in 
 any war. 
 
 The defences of the northern or sea frontier 
 are intended not so much for any military 
 purpose as to supply a base for the operations 
 of the German navy. All the river mouths 
 and harbours are defended by batteries and 
 mine-fields. Heligoland forms a strongly fortified 
 advanced post in the North Sea, the line of the 
 Kiel Canal is defended by forts, and at the extreme 
 eastern end of the long line of coast defences, the 
 fortresses of Konigsberg, Pillau and Dantzic form 
 at the same time a part of the coast system 
 of fortifications, and the northern wing of the 
 fortified line which defends Germany against 
 Russia. 
 
 On the western frontier there is a double line 
 of defence. The first line is provided by the 
 frontier fortresses, the second line is that of the 
 river Rhine. The two great strongholds of the 
 frontier are Metz and Strasburg. When these 
 places were annexed in 1871, Strasburg was 
 
104 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 defended only by an out-of-date system of 
 ramparts and bastions, and at Metz, in addition 
 to the older works, a few advanced forts had been 
 constructed just before the war. Some of these 
 were, in fact, unfinished when the war began, 
 and up to the last moment workmen had been 
 busy upon them, many of them Germans who 
 went back to their regiments with a very com- 
 plete knowledge of the new defences. The 
 Germans entirely reconstructed the defences of 
 both places, surrounded them with a circle of 
 strong advanced forts and providing them with 
 magazines of materials for rapidly strengthening 
 and enlarging the defences in case of war. Thion- 
 ville, a small fortress to the north of Metz, was 
 re-named Diedenhofen, and surrounded with new 
 works just sufficiently strong to prevent it from 
 being captured by a coup de mam. This was 
 done because it was an important railway junction 
 which would be of considerable use in the con- 
 centration of an army on the frontiers of Lorraine. 
 The only other old fortress which was maintained 
 on this frontier was the little hill fort of Bitche 
 in the northern Vosges. It barred an important 
 pass and a line of railway. In the war of 1870 
 it had been besieged in the beginning of August 
 and was still holding out when the armistice 
 ended the war in the following January. Its 
 obstinate resistance deprived the Germans of the 
 use of the railway line, and this suggested that it 
 was a place worth preserving, though in doing 
 this the one exception was made to the accepted 
 rule that small fortresses were not to be considered 
 as of any value. 
 
GERMANY ON THE DEFENSIVE 105 
 
 In case of invasion from the westward, the main 
 line of defence is not on the frontier, but along 
 the Rhine. In recent years a considerable 
 amount of work has been done to strengthen 
 it. The general scheme for the defence is the 
 establishment of great fortresses at the points 
 where tributary rivers join the main stream, and 
 at the chief railway crossings and junctions along 
 the river itself. Lines of railway run along 
 both banks of the river, and on its eastern bank 
 the whole railway system lends itself to the 
 movement of reinforcements rapidly to any 
 threatened point. 
 
 Beginning at the south end of the line Stras- 
 burg, though not actually on the river but on its 
 tributary the 111, is practically a Rhine fortress. 
 On its eastern front its advanced works extend 
 to the river bank, and the great railway bridge 
 across the Rhine is covered by these forts and 
 further protected by a fortified bridge head at 
 Kehl on the east bank. In Alsace itself the 
 approaches to Strasburg and the river crossing 
 are further defended by outlying works at Neu 
 Breisach, Molsheim, Mutzig, and Dangolsheim. 
 The Rhine bridges at Neu Breisach and Huningin, 
 near the Swiss frontier, are defended by four 
 armoured towers, two on each bank, mounting 
 heavy artillery. 
 
 Following the course of the river northwards, 
 the next railway bridge is at Rastatt. The place 
 was formerly an important fortress, but for 
 many years after 1870 it was an open town. 
 When the new policy of increasing the fortifica- 
 tions was adopted, three forts were erected at 
 
106 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 Rastatt to protect the road and railway crossing 
 on the river. North of Rastatt the middle 
 course of the river is protected by four fortresses 
 of the first rank Germersheim, Mainz, Coblentz, 
 and Cologne. All four have a circle of advanced 
 forts on both sides of the river. Mainz has played 
 a part in nearly every great war on the Rhine, 
 and has stood innumerable sieges. It stands 
 at the meeting point of several roads and railways, 
 and at the place where the Main valley opening 
 on the Rhine forms a natural highway into 
 central Germany. The old fortifications, de- 
 molished after 1870, have been replaced by a 
 triple line of works. 
 
 Coblentz, at the junction of the Moselle and 
 Rhine valleys, is another great railway centre. 
 Its defences include the old fortress of Ehrenbreit- 
 stein on a scarped rock on the east bank opposite 
 the city. The fortifications looking upon the 
 river, to which tourists are admitted for the 
 sake of the wide view they command, are the 
 least important part of the defences on this side. 
 The modern fortifications of Ehrenbreitstein are 
 a series of batteries and redoubts on the eastern 
 slope of the hill. South of the city a line of 
 works extends across the neck of land from the 
 Rhine to the Moselle, and on the other side of 
 the latter river there are strong forts in the plain 
 below its confluence with the Rhine. 
 
 Cologne is the most extensive of all the Rhine 
 fortresses. The country round is almost a dead 
 level, an ideal site for an entrenched camp on 
 the modern system. There is a double line of 
 defence, the outer line consists of a circle of 
 
GERMANY ON THE DEFENSIVE 107 
 
 twenty-two works (eight forts, twelve redoubts 
 an'd two batteries), spaced out about a thousand 
 yards apart on a circle of sixteen miles. Just 
 inside this circle and placed so as to connect the 
 forts with ea.ch other there is a military road and 
 tramway for the transport of ammunition and 
 supplies, and it is said intended also as the track 
 for armoured movable batteries of heavy guns. 
 The forts and the military road are hidden 
 behind screens of trees and looking across the 
 plain the aspect of this circle of fortifications is 
 that of the margin of some stretch of wooded 
 country. 
 
 The inner line is intended rather as a protection 
 against a raid between the forts than as a per- 
 manent defence against serious attacks. It is 
 a low wall with a parapet for rifle fire and prepared 
 positions for artillery at intervals. 
 
 From a few miles above Cologne to the point 
 where the Rhine runs into Dutch territory the 
 great river flows through a wide plain, and the 
 banks are everywhere low. It is, therefore, 
 adapted for defence by a river flotilla, and this 
 has been provided in the form of a fleet of gun- 
 boats under the control of the military authorities. 
 On the lower river between Cologne and Wesel the 
 railway bridges are defended by armoured towers, 
 with heavy guns mounted on turntables. Wesel 
 is the frontier fortress of the Rhine towards 
 Holland. It has batteries on the river and a 
 circle of bastioned ramparts and outlying forts 
 on both banks. 
 
 Thus the Rhine from the point where it enters 
 Germany to the Dutch frontier bristles with 
 
io8 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 fortifications. It is perhaps the strongest fortified 
 river line in the world, and it is a peculiarity 
 of all the great fortresses of the line that instead 
 of being placed on the east side of the river, so 
 that the Rhine would serve as a kind of vast 
 ditch barring the approach to them, they are 
 placed on the west side. They are aggressive 
 rather than merely defensive, and intended to 
 be the points from which armies massed under 
 the cover of their works would strike at the 
 flanks or menace the communications of an 
 enemy attempting to cross the river between 
 them. 
 
 On the eastern frontier we have again a 
 double line of defence, first the frontier fortresses, 
 and then a great river line. But in this case 
 the frontier fortresses have been made especially 
 strong and the river line has been left almost 
 entirely without permanent artificial defences. 
 
 The fortified frontier line towards Russia 
 is made up of, first, the defences of the lower 
 Vistula ; secondly, the fortresses of the provinces 
 of Posen and of Silesia. All East Prussia lies 
 entirely outside the fortified frontier. In the 
 present war it has been twice invaded by the 
 Russians. Its defence depends entirely on the 
 natural difficulties of the region of lakes, marshes 
 and forests that covers all the south and east of the 
 province. Along the sea coast and at the mouth 
 of the Vistula is the fortified region of Dantzic 
 and Konigsberg. So long as the German fleet 
 is strong enough to keep command of the neigh- 
 bouring waters of the Baltic, these places cannot 
 be starved into surrender, and besides the sea 
 
GERMANY ON THE DEFENSIVE 109 
 
 communication between them, they are linked 
 together by the great land-locked lagoon of the 
 Frisches HafL The small fortress of Pillau 
 commands its narrow entrance. Konigsberg is 
 defended by a circle of advanced forts and, except 
 in the hard winter season, by the inundations 
 along the hollow of the Pregel river. Dantzic is 
 protected towards the sea by the batteries of 
 Weichselmunde (the " Vistula mouths "). It is 
 surrounded by advanced forts, and covered to 
 the eastward by the swampy delta of the Vistula, 
 with the small fortresses of Dirschau and Marien- 
 burg protecting the railway crossings over the 
 river. Further up the Vistula are the fortresses 
 of Graudenz and Thorn, the latter a huge 
 entrenched camp covering a railway junction 
 near the point where the Vistula enters German 
 territory. The centre of the defence on the 
 western frontier of Russian Poland is the Prussian 
 fortress of Posen on the river Wartha, a place 
 like Thorn. The line of defence is prolonged 
 through Silesia by the fortresses along the upper 
 Oder, Glogau and Breslau the latter until quite 
 lately an open city but now protected by a circle 
 of earthworks and redoubts. It is believed that 
 the river crossings above Breslau are now being 
 fortified and the chain of defences is thus carried 
 on to the Austrian frontier near Cracow itself 
 a fortress of the first rank. 
 
 So much for the permanently fortified frontier. 
 The second line of defence against a Russian 
 army advancing on Berlin is the middle and 
 lower course of the river Oder. On this line 
 the harbour of Stettin at the river mouth is 
 
no THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 protected by forts and batteries, but there are no 
 other artificial defences except the small fortress 
 of Kustrin in the midst of the marshes where 
 the river Wartha runs into the Oder. 
 
 The river Oder runs through a wide hollow in 
 the plain of Eastern Germany. The banks are 
 everywhere low and easily overflowed. The 
 course of the river is a network of branches and 
 backwaters with swampy stretches of low ground 
 between them, and here and there a wilderness 
 of pools and long narrow lakes. This tangle of 
 waterways and swamps is covered in many places 
 with a low growth of willows and alders. The 
 whole forms a most formidable obstacle, and the 
 main use of the fortress at Kustrin is that it 
 provides a safe passage for an army across this 
 barrier of water courses and swamps to fall upon 
 the flank of an enemy endeavouring to force the 
 passage above or below it. No doubt in the 
 present war time the other passages of the river 
 are being strengthened by entrenchments. 
 
 Berlin has no fortifications. A few miles to 
 the westward is the fortress of Spandau, con- 
 taining within its walls a number of military 
 establishments, rifle factories, artillery workshops, 
 powder magazines and the like. One of the 
 towers of the old citadel held until lately the 
 war treasures of Germany, some millions of 
 coined gold which had been waiting there for 
 more than forty years to be used to fill the war 
 chests of the army for the first expenses of a 
 campaign. 
 
 Such is the defensive system of Germany, 
 but here also the accepted theory is that in 
 
GERMANY ON THE DEFENSIVE in 
 
 case the country is invaded passive defence must 
 end in failure, that the fortresses are only auxili- 
 aries to the field armies, and that the real hope 
 of victory must be based not on a resistance 
 behind stone walls and earthen ramparts, but on 
 hard fighting and energetic movement in the open 
 field. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE GERMAN LAW OF WAR 
 
 YV7HAT is generally known as the law or custom 
 *^ of war is a mass of written and unwritten 
 traditions as to the proper conduct to be observed 
 by belligerents towards each other and by 
 armies towards the civilian population. In the 
 course of centuries it has gradually become more 
 humane, especially where European armies are 
 acting against each other, and not against half 
 civilised or savage dark races. Thus, for in- 
 stance, no general would now dream of promising 
 his troops two or three days' pillage on the 
 capture of a town as an encouragement to them 
 to make a determined effort to storm it. It is 
 no longer the rule that quarter may be refused 
 to men who make a desperate defence of a 
 hopeless position, and prisoners of war are now 
 treated with humanity instead of being regarded 
 as slaves. 
 
 This improvement in the general conduct of 
 war is partly the effect of the influence of public 
 opinion gradually modifying the established 
 custom, and partly the result of written agree- 
 ments between the nations. The most impor- 
 tant of these is the Convention of Geneva, which 
 
 112 
 
THE GERMAN LAW OF WAR 113 
 
 gives special protection to the ambulance and 
 hospital service under the Red Cross flag. 
 How great a change has taken place in this 
 respect may be judged from the fact that, in 
 the American War of Secession, the United 
 States Government treated quinine as contra- 
 band of war, and seized supplies of it destined 
 for the Southern armies. At the time there was 
 no protest. We may contrast with this the 
 fact that during the South African war drugs 
 and medical appliances were frequently sent 
 through the British lines to the Boer com- 
 manders, and they were often supplied under a 
 flag of truce with the temporary services of our 
 own surgeons. 
 
 In one respect, however, there has been a 
 certain set-back in this progress. It dates 
 from the Napoleonic wars. The armies of the 
 seventeenth century generally plundered the 
 country in which they were operating. But in 
 the following century it was realised that, quite 
 apart from the misery inflicted on the popu- 
 lation, this was bad for the army itself. It 
 was a wasteful process and fatal to discipline and 
 order. The small armies of professional soldiers 
 in the second half of the eighteenth century 
 depended for their supplies on magazines of 
 provisions formed at an advanced base supple- 
 mented by purchases paid for in cash in the 
 district they occupied. The result of a strict 
 observance of this rule produced the state 
 of things which, however humane it was in 
 intention, seems to us nowadays hopelessly 
 unpractical, and almost incredible. Von der 
 
 H 
 
ii4 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 Goltz gives some instances of what happened at 
 a time when, as he puts it, troops sometimes 
 camped in the midst of cornfields and starved. 
 He tells how in the campaign of Jena the Prussian 
 army bivouacked " on the night of October nth 
 and i2th close by huge piles of felled wood and 
 perished with cold, and even on the following 
 day remained without firewood to cook their 
 food, and it was only decided to seize those 
 supplies for the army after the soldiers had 
 helped themselves and felled trees in the neigh- 
 bourhood.'' And he gives this further instance 
 from the same campaign 
 
 " The supply of oats for the horses ran short, 
 while plentiful abundance was stored at Jena. 
 But although the French were on the advance the 
 Generalissimo of the army considered himself 
 obliged to write to the supreme ducal adminis- 
 trator at Weimar for leave to purchase what 
 was necessary. What the answer was we do not 
 know ; but this we do know, that the oats fell into 
 the enemy's hands and French horses solved 
 the complicated question. Yet the ducal 
 administrator at Weimar was no ordinary 
 man, certainly no pedant, being none other than 
 the Privy Councillor and Minister of State, Von 
 Goethe, ' a tall, handsome man'- -as he is described 
 by a contemporary ' who in his embroidered 
 court-dress with powdered hair and a sword 
 always showed himself as a true minister and 
 well represented the dignity appertaining to 
 his rank.' 
 
 Cliusewitz tells how in the retreat after Auer- 
 stadt, when a battalion of Grenadiers arrived half 
 
THE GERMAN LAW OF WAR 115 
 
 starved in a village, and began to help themselves 
 to provisions without any arrangement being 
 made for purchase, the peasants protested and an 
 old colonel of the Guards declared they were 
 quite right, for " such a system of robbery was 
 quite unknown to the Prussian army and repug- 
 nant to its spirit." Nowadays the peasants would 
 have been told that the sooner they stopped 
 protesting the better for them. It was a French 
 Republican army that introduced or revived the 
 system of living on the country, and ' making 
 war support itself." Both the Republican generals 
 and Napoleon and his marshals, besides seizing 
 everything that might be useful, levied con- 
 tributions of money on conquered towns and 
 districts. There was always a good deal of 
 irregular pillage in the track of the Grand Army. 
 Efforts were made to repress it, chiefly because 
 it interfered with the organised requisitioning of 
 supplies and levying of contributions. Most 
 armies now recognise that while pillage must be 
 treated as a crime requisitions are a necessity and 
 contributions, if not excessive, are permissible. 
 In theory the requisition is ultimately a purchase. 
 The officer who makes the requisition gives a 
 receipt for what he takes. If he is in his own 
 country this is to be paid for sooner or later by 
 the government, if he is in an enemy's country, 
 the victims of the requisition are told they can 
 apply for compensation to their government after 
 the war. The expense thus inflicted on the hostile 
 government is regarded as part of the war 
 indemnity exacted in case of success. Such 
 proceedings are justified on the ground that the 
 army must live. 
 
n6 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 In the first stage of the Franco-Prussian war 
 the Germans generally took what they wanted 
 by way of requisition. Later on they found that 
 a simpler and more effective plan was to levy a 
 contribution on the places occupied and then 
 with its proceeds offer to buy for cash what they 
 wanted. There was then no motive to conceal 
 supplies, as there was a ready market for them. 
 It is said that there were even cases where 
 the retreating French troops could find nothing 
 in the country towns, but when the Prussian 
 supply officers, with plenty of requisition money 
 in their hands, announced an open market, the 
 place was as busy as on a fair day. 
 
 With the huge armies of the present war, an 
 attempt to live off the country would be hopeless. 
 They must depend on supplies brought up by 
 rail and motor transport. Requisitions can only 
 supplement such supplies to a very moderate 
 extent, even in the richest districts, but the right 
 of requisition has been very freely exercised by 
 the Germans. No complaint can be made of 
 this. A ground of grievance only arises when the 
 requisition is excessive. It is alleged, however, 
 that in addition to requisitioning there has been, 
 in many cases, irregular pillage and wanton 
 destruction of property. This of course is 
 unlawful, not only according to general laws of 
 war, but according to German military law itself, 
 and where it has occurred is evidence of a break- 
 down of discipline. As to the levying of con- 
 tributions, the Hague Conventions allow these, 
 but stipulate that they must not be excessive 
 or vindictive, and must be regulated by the real 
 
THE GERMAN LAW OF WAR 117 
 
 needs of the army. Some of the contributions 
 reported to have been exacted by the Germans 
 certainly seem to go beyond this definition. But 
 the practice of the commanders appears to have 
 varied very widely. In some cases impossible 
 sums were named, while in others great con- 
 sideration was shown. Thus, for instance, on 
 the wealthy city of Epernay a contribution of 
 7,000 was levied, and a few days later the whole 
 sum was handed back to the local authorities 
 ' in recognition of the care they had taken of 
 the German wounded." 
 
 So much for the practice as to requisition and 
 contributions. Another phase of German war 
 methods is open to much more serious question. 
 It is that which concerns the oppressive action 
 taken against the civil population on the plea 
 that they had been guilty of practices not recog- 
 nised by the law of war. There has been much 
 debating in recent years as to the practical 
 working of the right of civilians to take up arms 
 to oppose an invader. The theory embodied 
 in the legislation of the Hague conferences may 
 be thus summed up. As a general principle, it is 
 recognised that everyone, whether soldier or 
 civilian, has a right to take part in the defence of 
 his country against invasion. But it is also 
 recognised that there is no real gain but much 
 loss and widespread resultant misery in a state 
 of things in which the population of an occupied 
 district would be making continual attacks upon 
 isolated individuals and small parties, while 
 pretending before and after such acts to be 
 engaged only in their ordinary peaceful avocations. 
 
nS THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 The practical ruling, therefore, is that if men not 
 belonging to the regularly organised forces of the 
 country take to the warpath they must be under 
 responsible leaders, observe military discipline, 
 carry their arms openly, and if they are not 
 uniformed they must wear continually some 
 distinctive badge that can be easily seen. To 
 put it briefly, it is illegal for a man to claim the 
 privileges of a combatant one day and those of a 
 peaceful civilian on the next, he must choose his 
 part and stick to it. But there is a notable 
 exception to this general rule. It is laid down 
 that in an invaded district before it has been 
 effectually occupied by the enemy, the rule need 
 not be strictly enforced that civilians who 
 co-operate in the defence must be organised in 
 regular bodies and wear distinctive badges. In 
 our own army regulations it is laid down that in 
 dealing with armed inhabitants our officers must 
 give the largest interpretation to the right of 
 men to assist in the defence of their country. 
 This is a generous and worthy interpretation of 
 the rule. But, unfortunately, notwithstanding 
 the principles laid down at the Hague conferences, 
 the German army does not in practice give this 
 large interpretation to them, and it is very doubt- 
 ful if other continental armies accept the Hague 
 legislation as fully as we do*. 
 
 The German theory on the subject was so 
 well known that when the neutrality of Belgium 
 was violated the Belgian Government warned the 
 
 * In some of the Hague conferences the German delegates 
 refused to accept the general conclusions arrived at on this 
 point. 
 
THE GERMAN LAW OF WAR 119 
 
 people against attempting any irregular armed 
 resistance, and later on it took a still stronger 
 step, the precise reasons for which it is still 
 difficult to understand. At Liege and at Brussels 
 and elsewhere it ordered the civic guard to lay 
 down its arms and take no part in the military 
 operations on the ground that it was not a 
 regular military force. Though it would seem 
 that it more than fulfilled the requirements of 
 the Hague legislation, inasmuch as it was not 
 merely an organised force, but had been organised, 
 uniformed and armed for more than fifty years. 
 
 These incidents show how thoroughly it was 
 known that the Hague legislation would not 
 stand in the way of very severe measures by 
 the invaders against all opponents outside the 
 regular army. The position taken by the 
 Germans in this matter seems on the face of it 
 all the more unjustifiable, because their own law 
 provides that in the event of invasion the Land- 
 sturm may be called out as a levy en masse, and 
 need not wear uniforms, but only badges. The 
 argument by which German writers try to justify 
 their position is that the interference of armed 
 civilians leads only to useless loss of life, and 
 that unless sternly repressive measures are 
 exercised, it is impossible to secure the safety of 
 detachments in a hostile country. They hold 
 it is a case of self-preservation. 
 
 The sound and really defensible view would seem 
 to be this. During an invasion there are two 
 stages in any given district. In the first stage a 
 defence is being carried on by the regular troops, 
 and the district is not yet conquered. If the 
 
1,20 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 defence fails, the second stage comes, in which 
 the invader has successfully occupied the district, 
 and the regular troops are withdrawn. In the 
 first stage the government has a right to look 
 to all its subjects to assist the regular troops. 
 But those who intend to continue resistance 
 must throw in their lot with the army to which 
 they have attached themselves. They should 
 then have the full rights of combatants. If the 
 army is forced to withdraw, they should either 
 go with it, or if they wish to remain behind they 
 must surrender, or at least disarm. They cannot 
 plead the regular combatant's right to immunity 
 if they conceal their weapons and use them 
 furtively to take the life of some unfortunate 
 soldier of the force occupying the district. 
 
 But in practice, the Germans do not make this 
 distinction. Not only have civilians in Belgium 
 who took part in the fighting been refused 
 quarter, but houses from which shots were fired 
 were burned, and every man found in them shot. 
 Punishment has also been inflicted for resistance 
 by a few individuals on a whole town or district. 
 This is a direct violation of the Hague legislation, 
 which lays down that such general reprisals for 
 the acts of individuals are not permissible. 
 
 It is easy to understand how this theory that 
 the civil population has no right to take part 
 in the defence of the country and the further 
 theory that a whole town or village may be 
 punished for the armed resistance or insurrection 
 of some of its inhabitants, leads in practice to 
 atrocious acts of widespread cruelty. This has 
 nothing to do with acts of cruelty or outrage on the 
 
THE GERMAN LAW OF WAR 121 
 
 part of individuals in the invading army. Such 
 ugly incidents will happen in war when men of 
 all kinds are swept into the ranks of the army, 
 and when discipline breaks down. Men utterly 
 unfitted for such a position are put by the chapter 
 of accidents in absolute control of a conquered 
 population, and there are times when panic 
 makes men of ill-balanced character weakly cruel, 
 in the misdirected effort to appear strong. The 
 real blot upon the German method of making 
 war is that the humane legislation of the Hague 
 conferences has been disregarded. The right 
 of the citizen to defend his country, even 
 within the limit set forth in that legislation, has 
 been disregarded, and even the measures of 
 repression adopted have been carried through 
 with a cruelty which was quite needless, even if 
 we grant that the action itself was justified. 
 
 The German law of war also recognises as an 
 ordinary measure the seizure of hostages in an 
 occupied place. These hostages being responsible 
 with their lives for complete order being preserved. 
 It must in fairness be said that the system is not 
 peculiar to the German army. To us in England 
 it seems not only a hateful, but a stupid pro- 
 ceeding ; for one would think that the peace and 
 order of an occupied town might be much better 
 secured by inviting the leading inhabitants to 
 use their influence to prevent any hot-headed 
 individuals from making useless attacks on the 
 garrison, and to enable them to do this it would 
 be a more practical course to leave them at 
 liberty. But whatever may be said of the 
 practice, one finds it recommended by military 
 
122 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 writers of many continental armies. Thus for 
 instance, a standard French treatise on cavalry 
 tactics recommends an officer in command of a 
 cavalry patrol to seize some of the principal 
 inhabitants, when he enters a hostile village, and 
 let it be known that he holds them as hostages 
 for the security of his own party, The system of 
 hostages is thus not peculiar to the German army. 
 One can only regard it as one of those abuses 
 which one hopes civilised nations will abandon 
 when, after the war, an effort is made to bring the 
 whole practice of belligerents to a higher level. 
 It is strange that any people should regard it as 
 justifiable to punish men with death for the 
 acts of others when, by the mere fact of their 
 having been deprived of their libertjr, it is impos- 
 sible for them to control or influence these actions. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 GERMAN IDEAS ON THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 
 
 CONTINENTAL military writers would seem 
 to be particularly attracted by discussions 
 as to how England might be invaded. At the 
 time when there were still many open questions 
 waiting for settlement between France and Great 
 Britain, and many thought the existing tension 
 might end in war, the French military Press fully 
 discussed the subject. It was at this time, too, 
 that one of the leading military reviews of Berlin 
 published two articles on the invasion of this 
 country which, it was afterwards known, were the 
 work of a military attache at the German Embassy 
 in London. The question was treated as a purely 
 speculative problem, and much of the space was 
 devoted to an account of various projects for 
 and attempts at invasion in the past. 
 
 The basis of this essay, which may be taken 
 as typical of much other writing on the subject, 
 was an account of Napoleon's plan of invasion, 
 and a discussion as to how far modern conditions 
 had increased or diminished the chances of 
 success for a similar project. As usual it was 
 assumed that a very moderate force once landed in 
 England would be certain to fight its way to Lon- 
 don in a few days, and that with the occupation 
 
 123 
 
124 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 of London all hope of resistance would end. 
 The writer suggested that the attempt would be 
 made when most of the British regular army was 
 employed on some distant oversea expedition, 
 and he assumed that no troops would be left in 
 England, except volunteers and militia, the 
 military value of which he set at the very lowest. 
 
 It is remarkable how, not in this case only, but 
 even in more recent years, one finds in continental 
 military literature the echo of party attacks on 
 our English military system. The advocates of 
 universal military service in England in the years 
 before the war would be surprised if they read 
 the many military pamphlets and articles 
 published not only in Germany, but also in 
 France which reproduced their depreciation of 
 the regular army and the Territorials, in order 
 to show that England under the voluntary system 
 of recruiting was incapable of producing a 
 military force that would count for anything 
 serious in a great European war. The German 
 writers on the invasion of England were able by 
 such quotations to prove to their own satisfaction, 
 that once our small regular army was sent abroad 
 there would be nothing left to defend the country 
 but a mob of ' men with muskets." Our 
 experiences in the opening months of the great 
 war have sufficiently shown how wide of the 
 mark these anticipations were, but it must be 
 said that they were based almost entirely on 
 English evidence. 
 
 Those who wrote of the invasion of England 
 as a possibility always insisted on the fact that 
 the growth of the German mercantile marine, the 
 
IDEAS ON INVASION OF ENGLAND 125 
 
 possession of fleets of large steamers, and the 
 facilities afforded by the North German Ports made 
 it possible to embark a very large force within 
 twenty-four hours, only a moderate number of 
 transports being necessary, because for the short 
 voyage the men might be crowded together like 
 excursionists on a Bank Holiday. They showed 
 plainly enough that the embarkation of the 
 force would be a fairly simple matter. They 
 also proved to their own satisfaction that once a 
 hundred thousand men were upon English ground 
 they could deal with anything brought against 
 them. But the weak point of all the arguments 
 has always been a complete shirking of the real 
 difficulties of the problem. Perhaps soldiers are 
 too much inclined to under-rate the importance 
 of sea power. It was a distinguished French 
 soldier who said that the passage of the English 
 Channel by an invading army was essentially the 
 same thing as the crossing of a wide river, and 
 that a river line had seldom been successfully 
 defended against a determined effort to force it. 
 This writer left out of account the fact that it 
 is very seldom that even the widest river has 
 been defended by a fleet of warships. When the 
 Russians crossed the Danube in 1877 there were 
 Turkish monitors on the lower river, and they 
 had to be destroyed or driven off before the river 
 was bridged at Simnitza and the invasion of 
 Bulgaria begun. The narrow seas around England 
 would be no more of an obstacle than a wide 
 river, if there were no British fleet upon them. 
 But as long as that fleet holds command of the 
 sea invasion is impossible. This is the lesson of 
 
I 2 6 THE GERMAN ARMY IN WAR 
 
 all past history. Napoleon's project depended 
 upon the luring away of the fleet, and a surprise 
 concentration of his own squadrons in the Channel. 
 Wireless telegraphy has in our days made such 
 projects hopeless. And even if we suppose, for the 
 sake of argument, that the main battle fleet could 
 be thus lured away, the huge transports necessary 
 for an invasion would have to make their voyage 
 in the face of attacks from swarms of light 
 torpedo craft, from which they could not conceal 
 their movements, and whose onset would mean 
 wholesale destruction. The most an enemy 
 could accomplish would be the landing of a small 
 raiding force by surprise, even this would be 
 difficult, and it could have no serious results. 
 
 The appearance of hostile squadrons off 
 Yarmouth in October, and off Scarborough and 
 Hartlepool in December, may be taken as fair 
 samples of what a surprise visit to our shores 
 can be. Though the enemy's ships evaded our 
 cruisers, they knew that their appearance was 
 at once signalled far and wide by wireless 
 warnings, and that British ships would soon be 
 gathering around them. Within an hour 
 they steamed out to sea to make their escape. 
 But to land even a small force the trans- 
 ports and the covering flotilla would have 
 to lie off the shore for many hours. During 
 this time they must inevitably be attacked. 
 The only thing that would secure them immu- 
 nity from attack and the safe command 
 of sufficient time to land tens of thousands 
 of men with their artillery and horses would 
 be the command of the seas. So we always come 
 
IDEAS ON INVASION OF ENGLAND 127 
 
 back to the same underlying conditions of the 
 whole problem. While our fleet is in being 
 invasion is impossible. And it would be equally 
 impossible so long as we held the command of 
 the sea even if we had not a single friend 
 in the world, and all the armies of Europe were 
 encamped in millions along the coasts from 
 Hamburg to Cherbourg, waiting for a chance to 
 get across. 
 
 It may be asked, therefore, why have a home 
 defence army ? The answer is very simple. 
 Raids on a small scale are possible, the home 
 defence army exists to make such a raid futile 
 and to force an enemy who contemplates a raid to 
 recognise that to do anything it must be made on 
 a large scale. Now, the larger the force employed 
 on such an enterprise the greater the difficulty 
 of the crowd of transports conveying it being 
 able to escape observation. The smaller, there- 
 fore, is the prospect of the attempt ever being 
 seriously made. Nevertheless, German and other 
 writers who have not grasped the essential con- 
 ditions of any invasion of England will no 
 doubt continue to discuss it in serious military 
 reviews and in the lighter columns of the news- 
 paper and magazine. But there is no reason 
 why anyone in England should have a moment's 
 anxiety on the subject, or regard these literary 
 exercises as anything more than unpractical 
 theorising, which may amuse and interest its 
 German readers, but does us no harm and leads 
 nowhere. 
 
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