Grey Tide In The East Read online

  “Your Majesty requires me?” he asked the Kaiser.

  Wilhelm turned to him waving the paper, his face flushed with triumph. His eyes flashed and his voice had the peculiarly high pitch that it took on when the Emperor was excited. “This is a telegram from our Ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowski. He has a promise from the English Foreign Secretary that they will remain neutral and will keep the French out of the war as well, if we do not attack France!” he exclaimed.

  Moltke did not respond. The telegram from London, he knew, was nonsense. The war with France had already been declared: it was too late to undeclare it, no matter what the English Foreign Secretary said. The Kaiser, who had never really accepted the necessity for the invasion of Belgium, was suffering from cold feet and was using the note from Lichnowski as an excuse to overrule his General Staff and set aside The Plan at the last moment.

  Wilhelm paced excitedly back and forth as he spoke, still clutching the telegram. “This is our opportunity to escape the trap! If we invade Belgium, we would surely bring the English in against us. It was the fondest dream of my cousin Edward to destroy Germany, and me in particular. He worked his whole reign to ruin us. Even in death he reaches from the grave to strike down the living me!” he declaimed, gesturing dramatically skyward.

  The Kaiser was obsessed with his cousin, the late King Edward VII of Great Britain. King Edward had loved France and the French, and his affection was returned: he was by all odds France’s favourite English sovereign of all time. With his many visits to France, both personal and official, he had been the face of the new British foreign policy of friendship towards France which had led to the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904 between the countries, although he had not directed or originated the policy.

  Wilhelm had believed for years that Edward was the architect of a scheme to encircle and crush Germany in a ring of enemies. In this he was mistaken, as by the end of the Nineteenth Century the British monarchy had almost no actual power over foreign policy or the governing of the country, but this did not prevent the Kaiser from referring to his deceased royal cousin as “the Great Encircler”.

  The Kaiser continued his tirade. “If we invade Belgium, the onus of the war will fall upon the German people, making us appear to be the aggressors in the eyes of the world, when in fact we are only defending our own existence. This was the Great Encircler’s plan, the trap he set at our feet, and we must not fall into it!” His voice was rising all through this speech, and by the end he was close to shrieking.

  Moltke did not respond and his face remained expressionless. In his experience, the best way to handle the Kaiser when he was in the throes of one of his inspirations was to let him run down a little before answering. The Kaiser did not seem to notice his Chief of Staff’s obvious lack of enthusiasm. He waved Moltke over to the big map table, and jabbed his finger at the mountainous French border.

  “You are expecting the French to attack here, are you not?’ the Kaiser asked, pointing his finger and sweeping his arm from Thionville in Lorraine, just south of Luxembourg, down to Mulhouse, a little north of the Swiss border. The majority of the little flag stands bearing the tri-colour of France were clustered along that serpentine line, indicating the General Staff’s estimation that the bulk of the French Army was stationed along the frontier between Germany and France.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Moltke replied wearily. “So far as we know, the French have most of their strength concentrated between Sedan and the Swiss border. It is possible that their Fourth Army will attempt to attack in the Ardennes as well, in reaction to our entry into Belgium.” The General’s finger brushed the southern corner of Belgium on the map.

  “Ha! Let them attack the neutral first,” the Kaiser exulted. “Then see if the English will come to pull their chestnuts from the fire.” He paused. “We have adequate troops in that region to handle a French invasion, I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, looking at the symbols for the units of the German Sixth and Seventh Armies in Alsace and Lorraine.

  Moltke sighed. “We have …” he calculated silently, “720,000 men available on that sector of the front, most of them in fortifications. If necessary, we could even shift a corps from the Crown Prince’s army, if there seems to be any danger of a breakthrough. Intelligence estimates that the maximum number of men the French have available for offensive operations in that region is between 650,000 and 750,000. They will not break through our positions in Alsace, or Lorraine, for that matter. But…”

  “Don’t you see what this means, General?” the Kaiser continued. The pitch of his voice began to rise again and again his eyes flashed as he grew more excited. He waved the note from the Foreign Office again. “Don’t you see the opportunity we have? This…” the blue paper crackled as the Kaiser swept it through space, “…destroys any excuse the warmongers in England have to attack us. We will stand fast in the West, and send the right wing to the East to smash the Russians! If the French want to attack us, let them bloody their noses in the mountains. Let them invade Belgium, and the world will see who the true warmongers are. Who knows, if the French are foolish enough to violate Belgium, perhaps the English will declare war on them! And if they do not, why then, we will have only the Russian enemy to defeat, as the French are impotent to injure us and, best of all, there will be no excuse for my English cousins to engage in the war!”

  Moltke decided that the time had come to deflate his sovereign. “Your Majesty, it cannot be done,” he told the Kaiser. “The deployment of millions of men cannot be improvised. If Your Majesty insists on massive changes to The Plan at this late date, you will not have an army ready for battle, but a disorganised mob of armed men with no arrangements for supply. Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate planning to complete, and once settled they cannot be altered.”

  The Kaiser, derailed by this display of military expertise, had no reply. The enthusiasm seemed to rush out of him and he slowly sank into a convenient chair, gazing across the room at nothing.

  The General gestured to Colonel Hentsch, who opened the briefcase and handed Moltke the written order for the 16th Division to resume its advance into Luxembourg. He said, “Your Majesty must sign this order.” As soon as the words left his mouth, Moltke wanted to take them back. The Kaiser, who had appeared to have run down like a clock that needed winding, now suddenly sprang back to life. He rose quickly to his feet, and fixed a glare on his presumptuous subordinate. His face was dark red, his lips drawn back in a scowl. He was as furious as Moltke had ever seen him.

  “Your… Majesty… must?” he repeated slowly, emphasising each word, his eyes flashing.

  The Chief of the General Staff stuttered, “Your Majesty, I simply meant…”

  The Kaiser began in ominously low tones. “You dare to tell me what I ‘must’ do with my army, here in the Palace of the Hohenzollerns?” His voice rose to a shout as he went on. He paused, and then continued in a tone that suggested his rage was only barely under control. “I will tell you about ‘must,’ General. You must follow the commands of your sovereign. You must produce for my signature a plan that will send my armies to East Prussia against the Russians instead of idiotically violating Belgium, a plan that will provide for all their supplies, ammunition and anything else they will need to fight. Today is Saturday. You must have this plan for my signature by Sunday night or there will be a new Chief of the General Staff on Monday morning.”

  “But Your Majesty…” Moltke began again.

  The Kaiser cut him short with a sharp chopping motion of his arm. “Can you guarantee me victory over France in two months if we follow your fabulous plan?” He paused to study Moltke’s face. .”Can you guarantee it, General?” he asked again, sharply.

  Moltke hesitated. He uneasily remembered a long discussion he had had with the Kaiser two years earlier concerning the next war. The General had spoken at length about his belief that any war between modern Great Powers would be long and difficult, and would exhaust the victors nearly
as much as it would the losers. This belief directly contravened the key premise of The Plan, that the modern, industrialised nation of France could be defeated quickly in a short, sharp war. There was nothing wrong with Wilhelm’s memory. Wilhelm knew well enough that his Chief of the General Staff was himself far from convinced that France would be knocked out in the six weeks promised by The Plan.

  “Your Majesty knows that there are no guarantees in wartime…” Moltke said, trailing off.

  The Kaiser waited long enough to see if the General had anything more to add, before he continued with growing confidence in his decision. “So then, we have a General Staff that does nothing but make plans for every possible contingency. There is a plan for a war with Russia only, with France only, with France and England, with the United States, with Austria, with invaders from the Moon, most probably. You have a Director of the Military Railways on your staff, what’s his name, von Stamm...?”

  “ Staab,” Moltke corrected.

  “Yes, that’s the one, von Staab. He does nothing but prepare alternative train schedules for all these contingencies. That is the principal function of the Director of the Military Railways, is it not? I must therefore believe that somewhere in his files and in the files of the General Staff are alternative arrangements that will do what I require of you.”

  The Sovereign was absolutely right about the contingency plans, of course. General Herman von Staab, Chief of the Military Railways, made plans for contingencies, for variations, for emergencies, as did all of the officers on the General Staff. There was no doubt that von Staab had an operational plan in his files with rail schedules and train assignments for all the men, guns and supplies that had been ticketed for France via Belgium, exactly as the Kaiser required. Just last week, a small group of officers reviewed a plan to seize the mountain passes in Northern Switzerland, in the event there was somehow a need to invade France south of Mulhouse. That was about as likely to happen as… as an invasion from the Moon, but there was a plan for it.

  The mercurial Kaiser was now buoyant and overflowing with self-assurance at having won the argument with his general. His tone now shifted from argumentative to inspirational. He struck a histrionic pose and began to orate.

  “This is the moment of supreme crisis for the German nation, General, the supreme moment of your career! Think what your uncle the great Field Marshal would have done, and act as he would have. Our gallant men at arms, all our people, our very national existence, all depend on you. Go, and do your duty to Kaiser and country!” The Kaiser pointed dramatically. “You are dismissed.”

  “It shall be as you command, Your Majesty,” Moltke gritted out through clenched teeth. He snapped to attention, saluted, spun on his heel and marched from the room, with Hentsch following.

  They walked unspeaking, the only sound the clack of their boots on the marble floor. Then Hentsch said, “For a minute, I was sure that you had convinced him it was impossible to make alternative arrangements. He may not be Frederick the Great, but he does understand the function of the General Staff.”

  Moltke, whose face had been gradually taking on the colour of a ripe tomato, suddenly exploded. “Why is it, Hentsch, that a civilian, an amateur, a man without the time, inclination or training for strategic thought, believes that he is qualified to set aside a war plan prepared by professionals? If the royal yacht ran into a storm, would he try to seize the wheel away from the ship’s captain?”

  “War is far too important to be left to kings or politicians,” Hentsch agreed. He continued in a philosophical vein, “Still, what is done is done, and we must go on from here.”

  As he strode through the halls of the Stadschloss, Moltke’s temper began to cool, and he pondered the simple truth in Hentsch’s words. The deed was done for good or ill, and there was no turning back. He reflected that the Chief of the Military Railways was going to arrange the delivery of nearly three-quarters of a million fighting men to the border of Russian Poland in about two weeks, and it would be well to have something for those soldiers to do while they were there besides picking wild strawberries. He frowned more deeply than ever, and quickened his pace.

  Chapter Two: LONDON, AUGUST 4, 1914

  It was late afternoon, and the bright sunshine bathing King Charles Street was slanting down at a shallow angle through the window of his private office at Whitehall by the time Sir Edward Grey finally completed his last correspondence of the day. It was a note to his Ambassador in Brussels, requesting whatever new information was available concerning German military movements on the border of Belgium.

  Grey shook a little sand onto the paper to absorb any excess ink, then carefully folded it and slid it into a Foreign Office envelope. He thoughtfully ran his thumb over the gold embossed lion and, wishing that he could do more to aid his beleaguered French allies to meet the European crisis than write notes to his Ambassadors, placed the envelope in the battered red leather dispatch box that would carry it to Belgium.

  Grey had been appointed to his present post in 1905, and had remained the Foreign Secretary ever since, serving in the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and then staying on under Herbert Asquith. He had continued the European policies that he had inherited from predecessors. In particular, he had broadened the agreements with France and Russia that had been negotiated in 1904 and 1907 by Lord Lansdowne and Sir Arthur Nicolson, which together constituted the Triple Entente.

  This arrangement was not quite a formal alliance between the three countries. France and Russia had a true and binding alliance with each other, which included a military convention promising that each would go to war if the other was attacked by a third power. Great Britain had no such agreement with either France or Russia, or anybody else, for that matter.

  Grey would have had it otherwise. He was a man of peace, who had no desire to involve his country in a war between Great Powers which he believed would be a disaster for European civilisation. But, he was convinced that if Great Britain was known to be firmly committed to the Franco-Russian Entente, this might be enough to cause Germany to back down, thus averting a crisis without resorting to war. On the other hand, if there was going to be a war, it was clearly not in Britain’s national interest to allow the German-dominated Triple Alliance to prevail. The consequences of that would be…

  Grey’s musings were interrupted by a knock on his office door. His private secretary said, “Please excuse the interruption, Sir Edward. The French Ambassador, his Excellency, Monsieur Cambon, has arrived for his appointment. Shall I show him in?”

  This was a meeting that Grey had been dreading all day. A feeling of guilt settled heavily over him, even though he knew he had done everything in his power to try to make the French alliance a reality, and that his failure to do so was not through any lack of effort on his part.

  Grey was one of the members of the Francophile group in the Cabinet who had for years been promoting closer ties with France. He and his group had all but promised the French that they could count on the Royal Navy to cover the French Channel ports in the event of war with Germany. They had even encouraged joint General Staff talks and the preparation of a non-binding military convention between the two countries.

  Grey, along with everyone else, had assumed that when the war came, the Germans would provide a causus belli by invading Belgium, thus bringing in Great Britain under obligations the latter had taken on as a guarantor of Belgian neutrality in the Treaty of London of 1839. Practically everyone else in European military and diplomatic circles had also expected the Germans to launch their invasion of France through Belgium. Certainly, the Kaiser and his minions had made enough suggestive and threatening remarks to Belgian officials (even including King Albert himself) over the last few years to lead Grey to believe that the Germans intended to invade Belgium at the onset of hostilities. When that happened, Grey had planned to go to the House of Commons and ask for a declaration of war based on Britain’s national interests, her treaty commitment to Belgium, and
her national honour.

  Two days earlier, on August 1, Grey had sent a Note to the German ambassador to Great Britain, Prince Karl Max Lichnowski. The statement in the Note was vague and promised little. This was for two reasons. The first was that Grey was painfully aware he had no authority from his Government to commit Great Britain to any course of action in the Continental crisis, not even if Belgium was invaded.

  The second reason was that it was Grey’s preferred diplomatic style to be vague. He believed that the less precise one’s language, the more room one had to manoeuvre as needed. It was practically his motto.

  He had told Ambassador Lichnowski that Grey could guarantee England’s neutrality if Germany would remain neutral as to both France and Russia, in other words, not go to war at all. This was not much of a commitment; in fact it was really no commitment at all. Grey had not thought that this offer would make the slightest impression on the Germans.

  Instead, this innocuous pledge had somehow induced the Germans to pull back their troop concentrations from the Belgian frontier and send their armies… elsewhere. The German Ambassador was known to be a strong advocate for peace, one of the few that had any influence on his country’s foreign policy. He wondered what Prince Lichnowski had told his Foreign Ministry.