For all of the emphasis on World War I as a war of machines, the dirty work was still done by the foot soldier. A German infantry regiment included just over three thousand of them, distributed among three four-company battalions. The regiment was likely to be the highest formation of which the soldier was directly aware. It was the regimental flag before which he swore his oaths of loyalty. It was the regiment’s number painted on the canvas cover of his helmet. It was the regiment’s history he heard in the rainy-day lectures. But as a cult object the regiment was more likely to engage the identities of the officers. For the rank and file, loyalty was more likely to be developed at the levels British sociologist Anthony Sampson describes as the “pack” and the “tribe.” The German soldier’s “pack” in 1914 was his squad or Gruppe: eight men and a lance-corporal. Still more of an administrative unit and an affinity group than the tactical formation of later years, the squad was correspondingly less significant than the individual’s “tribe,” his company. The company was the private soldier’s primary source of promotions and punishments, reprimands and soft jobs. It was also something more. In theory the battalion had long been considered the basic tactical unit, the largest formation a single officer can control in combat. In practice, modern firepower meant prior to 1914 that role devolved on the company, with its 250 rifles commanded by a captain. Within weeks in the field even platoons of eighty men proved far too large for one man to command as a unit; the German infantry began that articulation into squads and sections under NCOs with independent responsibilities that contributed so much to its combat efficiency in both world wars.26
The German infantryman went to war carrying a rifle that was just a cut below the best available. The Gewehr 98 was a Mauser design. Sturdy and reliable enough, it was bulkier and clumsier than the British Lee-Enfield and the U.S. M1903 Springfield, neither as rapid firing as the British weapon nor as accurate as the American. These points were, however, less significant in an army much less interested in individual aimed shots than in producing concentrated, controlled bursts at the right time. This was not merely a manifestation of skepticism at the prospect of turning the average German conscript into a Daniel Boone. Field tests, even under artificial peacetime conditions, demonstrated time after time that an exaggerated emphasis on individual marksmanship, the approach fostered by imperial awards to the army’s best shots, was less important than volume of fire, with the first round placed somewhere near the target and the rest more or less in the same place.27
Another clear indication of the German army’s appreciation of the potential of massed small-caliber fire was the new organization most German regiments were taking into the field: a thirteenth company, manning six water-cooled Maxim automatic machine guns. The German army had introduced this weapon not for its defensive potential, but for its perceived uses in preparing and supporting the offensive. After the turn of the century an increasing number of voices suggested that this “concentrated essence of infantry” be massed as a reserve of firepower at the disposal of higher commanders, either to enable riflemen to be massed for an attack or to support that attack by concentrated fire on selected positions. They particularly stressed the value of the extremely accurate Maxim-model guns once the artillery had to cease fire for fear of destroying its own men. Given suitable enfilade positions, machine guns could play on an objective until the very moment an assault was pushed home. Other military futurologists foreshadowed the use of machine guns for offensive barrages in the way best developed in the British army of 1917/ 18: firing indirectly on ranged lines, borrowing techniques of observation and control from the artillery.28
Emphasis on the tactical offensive was in no sense an unconsidered decision. The difficulties accompanying attack under modern conditions were recognized and accepted in Germany long before the first rounds were fired from the guns of August. But no army, however confident in its generals’ abilities, could afford to base its doctrines on the assumption that enemies would be obliging enough to dash themselves to pieces on one’s own rifles, artillery, and machine guns. Some time, somehow, it would be necessary to go forward—to go through.
The generals of Imperial Germany were not particularly blood-thirsty. They perceived that the best way for them to maintain and enhance their class position was to win any future war decisively, while sacrificing as few German lives as possible. The best way to do this was to produce infantrymen able and willing to advance on the modern battlefield. Since the seventeenth century a concept of battle had been developing in Europe and in Germany—a concept too often submerged under vitalist rhetoric about battles of annihilation and the mystique of cold steel. The deficiencies of drawing up masses of men to mow each other down had been plain since the days of Gustavus Adolphus. Even at its most effective the process resembled a duel at ten paces with submachine guns. Victory was meaningless if its price became too high; even Napoleon’s conscripts were not an infinitely self-renewing force.
Instead of killing an enemy in place, the essential craft of war involved convincing him to run and then killing him. To achieve this, it was necessary to concentrate superior force at one point. “Force” in this context meant to the German army a combination of firepower, numbers, and moral superiority. Experience indicated that all three were required. Fire action by itself was not decisive. Infantry skirmishes could wear down an enemy but were as a rule unable to do more for a very human reason. Once an advance stopped and men spread out to fire their weapons, it was difficult if not impossible to get them moving again. Yet move they would have to. A line of skirmishers doing no more than blazing away at defenders increasingly likely to be concealed behind improvised fieldworks, was an open invitation to attrition on the wrong side of the balance sheet—and to the drawn-out, murderous, indecisive battles characteristic of the Napoleonic Era or the American Civil War. The problem was exacerbated as improved weapons made traditional maneuvers like the cavalry charge, or the concentration of masses of guns to blow apart an enemy’s front at close range, less and less feasible alternatives to the forward movement of the infantryman.29
That movement posed a comprehensive challenge to all levels, from commanding general to rear-rank private. It required preparation: precisely coordinating infantry movements and artillery support, timing attacks to the minute, providing adequate reserves to exploit success. But the attack demanded above all striking an exact balance between dispersion and control in order to maintain momentum.
The industrial revolution, with its unique challenges to human flexibility, offered grounds for optimism in all of these areas. If the sons of men conditioned for generations to the peasant’s plow or the artisan’s bench could be socialized by the hundreds of thousands into mills and factories, then surely civilians could be taught in two or three years of peacetime active service how to use terrain, act independently, and respond to orders even on the empty modern battlefield. Images of the nineteenth-century industrial worker frequently suggest or imply that factory routine itself dulled the mind. The reverse was far more likely to be the case. Participation in a modern industrial plant demanded degrees of alertness and cooperation that were mentally and physically exhausting. The miner, the mill hand, the iron worker, could rarely afford the luxury of detaching his mind from what his hands did, or from what his workmates were doing.30