The general staff exercise of 1891 featured a simultaneous Russian invasion of Posen and East Prussia, with Schlieffen’s summary highlighting the probable moral impact if even one invading column was destroyed. The problem for 1898 saw the East Prussian garrison threatened on three sides, with Schlieffen insisting the optimal response was to engage the nearest enemy force as quickly as possible, decisively defeat it, then turn against the other two adversaries. In 1899 the Germans again countered numerical inferiority by crushing one of the Russian flanks, then moving against their lines of communication.
By the turn of the century it had become a textbook solution: throw the entire German strength at whichever enemy first came within range, then concentrate against the other. Time and again the concept succeeded in war games. On one memorable occasion a general staff lieutenant-colonel charged with leading one of the “Russian” armies found himself so completely surrounded that the rules demanded a surrender. The officer insisted that no force he led would ever lay down its arms. Schlieffen, who was not without a sense of humor, amended the final report to read that the “Russian” commander, recognizing his hopeless situation, sought and found death in the front line!
Such an outcome was, however, considered an optimal result. Schlieffen had a healthy respect for the size of the Russian army, and a high regard for the uncertainties of battle. After 1901 the mobilization plan reduced Germany’s eastern force to an average of three corps, four reserve divisions, and two to four cavalry divisions. Schlieffen did not expect miracles from such a weak instrument. He recognized the possibility that a well-coordinated Russian advance, or a German defeat in the opening rounds, might require drawing troops from the west. But he also warned that once the reinforcements were on the scene, nothing would prevent the Russians from withdrawing until French pressure constrained the Germans to send troops westward, then resuming the advance. This sort of counterpunching, Schlieffen roundly declared, would lead in the long run to the complete annihilation of the German army. Instead, Ostheer should expect to fight with what it had, do as much damage as possible, and wait for the decisive victory over France. If necessary, Schlieffen was prepared to return to the concept of the 1880s, abandoning most of East Prussia and making a stand on the Vistula River. By 1903 the railway section of the general staff felt able to guarantee the transportation of eleven corps eastward as soon as France should be overthrown. And this would be only the vanguard of a German army strong enough not merely to drive Russian invaders out of East Prussia, but to pin them there and destroy them.67
Schlieffen’s strategic conceptions incorporated his reflections on the changing nature of war. Often derided for their shortsightedness in failing to predict a war of attrition, Europe’s generals were if anything even less correct in evaluating the pace of destruction in modern war. Far from being technological illiterates, soldiers were well aware of what modern weapons, the rapid-firing field gun, the machine gun, and the magazine rifle, could do in theory. What they were expecting was not a gentlemen’s war, not a repetition of 1866 or 1870, but an Armageddon in quick time, with events proceeding at the outer limits of comprehension and control. I. S. Bloch’s La guerre future was not only discounted because of its pessimistic predictions of indecisive mass war. More and more experts agreed that the rates of loss under modern conditions made a war of attrition on the Bloch model impossible.
Military planners prior to 1914 are often described as underestimating the resilience of their war machines and the societies sustaining them. What they actually did was to overestimate the rates at which men would be killed and machines destroyed. They saw vulnerabilities more clearly than durabilities—and it was the latter that gave Europe time to adjust to the initial casualty rates of 1914–15. Given the nature of prewar anticipations, it by no means indicated lack of faith in one’s people to assume that countries facing such a catastrophe were likely to collapse from psychic shock and physical stress. Schlieffen was hardly isolated in his growing belief that the armed forces available to modern nations could be maintained for any length of time only at the expense of the economic, social, and political institutions they were supposed to sustain. And in this context Russia, combining tremendous reserves of human and material resources with a relatively primitive social structure, emerged as the most likely survivor of a protracted war.68
The essence of strategy is the calculating of relationships among ends, means, and will. Let the process of calculation obscure the values of the relationships, and the result is not bad strategy but no strategy.69 Neither the German Empire’s power nor the German Empire’s finesse was sufficient to establish her as the focal point of European diplomacy during the Bülow years. Instead, Germany remained one power of several—at the very time when increasing concern for her military position generated a corresponding policy of Flucht nach vorne. The German army in the years before 1914 became increasingly concerned with processes, methods, and techniques. Arguably, Schlieffen’s essential flaw as a strategist was his acceptance of Germany’s international position as defined by civilian political authority. He responded with a desperation move: a staff college tour de force, but a military myth requiring everything to go impossibly right to have a real chance of succeeding.
“Everything” included political and diplomatic factors, which between 1905 and 1914 became increasingly subordinated to this gambler’s gambit. The Schlieffen Plan, however, had one supreme psychological virtue. It offered hope through diligence. If everyone did his bit and played his part, the Empire might have a chance. The plan’s rapid evolution into dogma owed much to the increasingly narrow perspective of German military thinking. But that development in turn represented in large part a response to a paradox. The Imperial army was given—and accepted—the task of planning for a war which its own calculations suggested might well be so destructive as to be unpredictable, uncontrollable, and ultimately unwinnable. In this context, a withdrawal into procedures, a concentration on mobilization schedules and corps-level tactics, was natural if not exactly inevitable. The Schlieffen Plan was a sophisticated security blanket. Had it not existed its equivalent would almost certainly have been designed.
The climate of anxiety in Germany was reinforced by a new set of public slanging matches with Russia. In the agonizing reappraisals that followed the Peace of Portsmouth, Germany bore the brunt of the blame in St. Petersburg for encouraging Russia’s disastrous Far Eastern policies. Even Witte criticized Berlin for “forcing” Russia to pursue her arms in Manchuria rather than closer to home. Holstein was not being blindly Russophobic when he acidly described “Russia of the Russians, where the ‘inevitable’ war with Germany is discussed in every Zemstvo… even if a treaty actually existed between Russia and Germany, the popular prejudices of the Russian people would today probably override it.”70
Russia’s increasing and unexpected postwar rapprochement with Britain generated corresponding despondency in the German foreign office. Both powers had significant reasons for settling their imperial rivalries. Britain was unwilling to maintain the land forces necessary to project her power into the Middle East and central Asia in the face of Russian opposition. Russia for her part needed above all a period of stability in international affairs. These positive factors drew Britain and Russia together independent of anything Germany was able to do. With France as an enthusiastic go-between, the Anglo-Russian entente of 1907 quickly emerged as something more than just another paper agreement.71