What civilian employers could do, the German army saw itself able to do even better. Far from being stagnant or retrograde, the German army recognized more clearly than most of its critics the single most difficult problem of modern warfare: getting soldiers not only to advance under fire, but to accomplish something by advancing. In war, as in so many other human endeavors, the necessary tends to become the possible. But in fact nothing in the small wars of the twentieth century indicated that infantrymen could no longer attack successfully against modern firepower. No one in Germany argued that the process of advancing was easy—only that it was still feasible under the right conditions. The revised drill regulations of 1906 recommended in paragraph after paragraph the need to develop “inner assertiveness,” a compulsion to reach the objective before one’s neighbors, to charge to the music of bugles and to shouts of “Hurrah!” But German tactics also reflected growing appreciation of the lessons of the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the two Balkan Wars. Inadequate preparation, clumsy formations, and one-sided reliance on enthusiasm brought defeat to British and Japanese, to Bulgars, Serbs, and Greeks indiscriminately.31
The craft of war in the twentieth century, at least as practiced in the Western world, has increasingly focussed on substituting the internal-combustion engine for men’s muscles and will power. In the absence of such technology it was not romanticism but hard, practical considerations that led the kaiser’s army to concentrate as heavily as it did on human factors.
These were particularly important in an army of mobilized civilians. Almost half the men in every active infantry regiment at war strength were reservists; the proportion in the artillery was only slightly lower. Entire regiments, divisions, and army corps were composed of these hostilities-only soldiers. The German army is frequently credited with being far ahead of its continental contemporaries in recognizing the martial virtues of the citizen in uniform. Unlike the French and Russians, who treated their reserve formations as second-line troops suited only for garrison duty or subsidiary missions, the Germans used their reserve units alongside the active ones, giving them the same tasks and assuming the same levels of proficiency.
A military system increasingly committed to the concept of a short war, sandwiched between two powerful and determined enemies, saw little advantage in maintaining a large pool of individual replacements. Keeping combat units up to strength was not seen as a significant problem by German planners in the years before 1914. What was important was putting the largest possible organized force in the field in the shortest possible time. From the 1890s, the German army earmarked an increasing number of reservists for separate formations. These, unlike the Honvéd and Landwehr of Austria, or the Russian reserve units before the Russo-Japanese War, existed entirely on paper, with no peacetime cadre. A small number of active officers would be transferred to them on mobilization, primarily as staff officers or company and battalion commanders. The rest of the command positions would be filled by men from civilian life: NCOs who had completed their twelve years of service, officers retired into the reserve, or commissioned and promoted as reservists. For them, and even more for the men they led, faith in the system as a whole and confidence in its component parts were all-important, particularly in the first days of war.32
The German army’s morale was more than a temporary creation of blaring bands and cheering civilians. It was more as well than the belligerence of ignorance. Most accounts of World War I stress the naïvete with which Europe’s youth rushed to arms—a mixture of generational awareness, belligerent rhetoric, and a commitment to abstract ideals of heroism at best obsolescent in an age of industrial war. Germany is a particularly fruitful source of supporting images. Trainloads of young men gaily sing “Die Wacht am Rhein” on their way to be slaughtered; others even younger scream the “Deutschandlied” as they charge into British rifles at Langemarck. Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, even the fire-eaters like Werner Beumelberg or Ernst Jünger, fill their pages with tales of innocence sacrificed at Verdun or on the Somme, with the resulting emotional discord contributing to a postwar generation at once terribly lost and tragically vulnerable.33
This process of disillusionment must not be exaggerated. Unlike their counterparts in the English-speaking countries, German men were part of a society with a long tradition of compulsory military service. Those who took the field in August were not the schoolboys whose dying lent such poignance to the Langemarck-Mythos on one hand and Im Westen nichts Neues on the other. They were overwhelmingly either serving soldiers or men who had worn uniforms earlier in their lives. This generated a high level of cultural familiarity with the army. The men who marched to the sound of the guns of August had a broad spectrum of concrete expectations—but these concerned what might be called their working conditions, rather than the nature of the war itself. The German soldier, whether serving conscript or long-discharged reservist, saw himself as part of an institution incorporating both the rectitude of certitude and a significant technical competence. Much of the content of British or American military reminiscences in the twentieth century involves the superiority of the individual soldier, particularly the narrator, to an insensitive, indifferent, essentially inefficient system. German soldiers, on the other hand, not only went to war in an atmosphere of patriotic enthusiasm, but had their enthusiasm reinforced by the army’s capacity to give at least the appearance of knowing what it was doing.
The German army of 1914 was by no means as good as its press releases. It had, however, kept steady pace with developments in material and doctrine. It had paid close attention to the lessons of the world’s recent battlefields. The kaiser’s army had not gone down to the operational dead end of the French in 1940, or the United States in Vietnam. It clearly recognized an uncomfortable ultimate: victory in war depends on advancing. Unlike the British, with their suspicion of any kind of theory, unlike republican France, whose soldiers were expected to replace skill at arms with patriotic zeal, the Germans attempted to respond to the problem by producing men with both the psychological and the professional equipment to survive on the modern battlefield. Emphasis in principle on dispersion and articulation put the German army on the right tactical track, even if that emphasis was not sufficiently developed to antedate directly the infiltration and stormtroop methods of the world war.
While questions of initiative and flexibility are more difficult to resolve, the evidence suggests that discipline did not drive independence out of German heads, nor did the German rank and file have to be led everywhere. German snipers and German patrols were respected by their western front adversaries, including the Canadians and the Australians. As in any mass army, some formations were excellent and others were a liability. In the course of four years, the same company might on one occasion collapse without its officers and sergeants, and another time carry on to the last man under the senior surviving private.
Yet if Germany’s direct preparation for war was not necessarily impractical, it was theoretical. Relevant battle experience was virtually nonexistent at all levels. Some of the senior generals had been subalterns in 1870. A few adventurous company officers had served against the Herero in Southwest Africa—too few to be a major source of wisdom and advice on what to do when the ammunition was live. The German army of 1914, in short, was a brittle instrument. The first shocks of war might temper it, but they might just as possibly break it. No one could in his heart really be sure what was going to happen—particularly in the context of the eastern front.