In many ways this was a second-best solution. In World War I a combat division was seldom able to operate without the support of arms and services pooled at corps level. As much to the point, morale and efficiency were fostered when divisions were familiar with their neighbors, and with the higher headquarters under which they operated. Until 1918 most French divisions were permanently assigned to a specific army corps. In the British Expeditionary Force, the vaunted efficiency of the Australian and Canadian divisions owed much to their concentration in the separate army corps of the respective dominions. The commander of a German active corps in 1914 was supposed to fight his formation as a single entity, not two divisions side by side. He controlled a major source of intelligence: a squadron of six aircraft. He had at his disposal one of the single strongest element of fire support in any of Europe’s armies: a battalion of sixteen 150-millimeter howitzers, the best medium guns in the world. And he had his personality. His eccentricities, real or calculated, were familiar to his subordinates. Unlike his modern counterparts, shadowy figures to the divisions shuttling in and out of their control, a German corps commander expected to be known and recognized throughout his formation.
A German division commander’s task was in some ways more complex than his superior’s. Like most continental armies, Germany organized its higher formations by twos: two divisions to a corps, two brigades to a division, two regiments to a brigade. The four regiments were not a problem. A division with four regiments could simultaneously perform a principal and a secondary mission while retaining a reserve. This capacity was desirable during maneuvers, where seldom more than a corps or two were involved on either side and where formations did not have to worry so much about getting in each others’ way. The brigade, however, seemed by 1914 an increasingly unnecessary link. The telephone and the automobile enabled a division commander to control his four regiments directly. On the other hand, abolishing the brigade would mean eliminating a large number of command positions for general officers in an army already concerned about the limitations of promotion to senior ranks. It was not quite an accident that such a widely respected military theorist as Friedrich von Bernhardi, when proposing an internal reorganization of the army corps, left the brigade structure intact. The high command’s desire to create a strategic reserve quickly, rather than any obvious tactical considerations, motivated Germany’s move to a three-regiment division in 1915. Even then, one brigade headquarters remained in each division, usually performing the role of a combat command.23
The two infantry brigades were supported by a regiment of cavalry—four squadrons, each around 170 “sabers” in official parlance. Since 1916 it has been militarily and academically fashionable to deride the cult of the horse. Critics overlook the fact that before World War I, cavalry was the only operationally mobile arm in existence. The internal-combustion engine was unreliable under operational conditions. The spectacular success of individual reconnaissance and combat operations by improvised mechanized units in 1914 should not obscure the fact that the early armored cars were essentially roadbound. Properly used in the kind of open warfare made possible by the geography of Eastern Europe, cavalry was seen as vital for successful offensive operations. The German army, however, was relatively weak in this arm, particularly when compared to the Russians. The military budget, despite its size, could not be stretched to accommodate larger mounted forces without sacrificing even more important elements.
This tended to foster caution among both the formers of German cavalry doctrine and the officers who implemented it. Cavalry could not be improvised. As both the Union’s experience in the American Civil War and Great Britain’s in South Africa indicated, it took upwards of three years to turn a man on a horse into a fighting trooper. Given the general expectations of a short war, it is hardly surprising that the cavalry regarded itself as a one-shot instrument, to be used and expended only at the decisive moment of a campaign. This attitude had at least as much to do with the arm’s continued acceptance of shock tactics as did any nostalgic longings for the glory days of the arme blanche. For all their swagger, few German troopers really believed their arm could operate effectively against infantry or artillery under modern conditions. Instead they perceived their combat role as fighting other cavalry: the military equivalent of an exchange of knights in a chess game.
This mind-set had an unfortunate effect on those regiments unlucky enough—from their perspective—to be assigned as divisional cavalry instead of being massed in the mounted divisions and corps. Their principal mission of close-range reconnaissance, tended to be at best indifferently performed by horsemen seeking opportunities for mounted action even on a troop or squadron level. Nor did the divisional cavalry seek to develop its potential as a mobile reserve of firepower.24
Far more important to a German divisional commander was his artillery brigade. It had two regiments, each with two eighteen-gun battalions: a total of seventy-two pieces. Fifty-four of them, three battalions, were flat-trajectory 77-millimeter cannon. Their design represented one of the major examples of premature rearmament in the modern era. The German field artillery of the early 1890s was equipped with a gun whose basic design dated back to 1873, so clearly obsolete that the war ministry ignored the protests of technicians and introduced the C/96 field gun just a year before France revolutionized field artillery with the famous French 75. Its steel shield, long range, and hydropneumatic recoil rendered all existing guns obsolescent. Russia in 1902 and Great Britain in 1904 introduced their own version of the quick-firing cannon. Germany was unable to afford the cost of two complete rearmaments in less than a decade. While pundits found fault with the 75, technicians fussed over the C/96, giving it a shield, an improved recoil mechanism, better sights, and redesigned ammunition. The resulting FK 96 nA (Modified Field Gun 96), introduced after 1905, had neither the range, the accuracy, nor the rate of fire of its entente counterparts. Its high wheels gave it a vaguely antique appearance compared to the sleek, deadly soixante-quinze or the businesslike 18-pounder. The German gun had one advantage that would prove useful in the eastern theater: it was mobile. Its light weight and large wheels made it less likely than any of its rivals to bog down in mud or sand, or to exhaust horses pulling it on short rations. But when it came to fighting, professionalism would have to compensate for material in three-fourths of Germany’s field artillery.
The division’s fourth artillery battalion was far better off. Since the Franco-Prussian War, German gunners had been committed to support a doctrine of the offensive. This involved developing a capacity to shoot over the hill, to search out trenches and covered positions with high explosive. Around the turn of the century the German army had adopted a 105-millimeter field howitzer, a state-of-the-art design unsurpassed by anything in Europe. By 1914 each division had a full battalion of them. So while one artillery regiment had two battalions of conventional 77-millimeter field guns, the other had one gun and one howitzer battalion. The problems this posed for both decentralized and direct fire support are obvious. Assigning a howitzer battery to each gun battalion was rejected as diminishing the effect of their high-angle fire. Kept in the chain of command, the howitzer battalion had a deplorable tendency never to be where it was needed. Placing it under the direct control of the division commander, on the other hand, left one artillery colonel with nothing to do except supervise his remaining battalion—a waste of a senior officer and his staff. But shortcomings in the artillery’s command structure were more than balanced by the multiple uses of howitzers in a war that even in the east tended almost immediately to become a war of entrenchments.25