The Allied staffs knew, in broad outline, what the Germans had in mind.6 After many false starts, the French General Staff adopted what came to be known as Plan XVII. This provided for a defensive posture against the anticipated German thrust through Belgium accompanied by a vigorous assault on the linchpin of the German wheeling operation in the center. This attack was to penetrate German territory and, by threatening to cut off the enemy’s right wing, bring the German offensive to a halt.
The success of Plan XVII depended on Russian assistance. It posited that the Russians would threaten Berlin as soon as the German mobilization was completed—that is, by the fifteenth day of the war. The Russian assault was to compel the Germans to withdraw troops from the Western Front before the issue there had been decided and bring about Germany’s collapse.
The Franco-Russian defensive treaty of 1894 did not spell out in detail the operational plans for the eventuality of war. These were worked out in talks between the General Staffs of the two countries which began in 1911. Immediately sharp differences of opinion emerged. The Russian strategic plan, first formulated in the 1880s, called for deploying major forces in central Poland, from where, protected by fortresses, they were to launch simultaneous offensives against Vienna and Berlin. This plan was substantially revised in 1909–10. The new version called for Russia to assume a defensive stance against the Germans and to throw her main forces against the Austro-Hungarians, who were judged inferior and from whose ranks she expected massive desertions of Slavic recruits.* General M. V. Alekseev, widely regarded as Russia’s ablest strategic thinker, believed that after beating the Austrians and advancing into Silesia, the Russians would be able to threaten the very heart of Germany.
The French thought that the Russians paid too much attention to the Austrians; they could contribute more to the common Allied cause by committing the bulk of their forces against the Germans, for once the Germans had been defeated, their allies would sue for peace. The French wanted the Russians to concentrate on the Germans and to attack them even before they had fully mobilized.
A compromise plan was agreed upon at inter-Allied conferences in 1912 and 1913. The Russians promised that by the fifteenth day of the mobilization order, with only one-third of their forces under arms, they would strike at the German armies either in East Prussia or on the approaches to Berlin, depending on where they were more heavily concentrated. To this mission they would assign two armies totaling 800,000 men. The French calculated that by the thirty-fifth day of the war such a strike would penetrate so deeply into German territory that the Germans would have no alternative but to transfer east sizable troop contingents to stop the Russian “steamroller,” and thus abort the Schlieffen Plan. Once this occurred, the outcome could no longer be in doubt because the vastly superior human and material resources of the Allies were bound to bring them victory.
Although the Russians, under French pressure (sweetened with promises of assistance in modernizing Russian armies and military transport), agreed to modify their strategic plan, they did not entirely abandon it. While assigning two armies to fight the Germans, they deployed four against the Austrians. Some military historians believe that this was a fatally flawed compromise, since the Russians lacked the forces to carry out offensive operations on so broad a front. As a result, they would fail to achieve their objectives against either enemy.7 There is reason to believe that adherence to their plan of 1909–10 would have enabled them to maul the Austrians so severely that the Germans would have had to rush to their assistance with massive reinforcements drawn from the west, as they, in fact, did, albeit on a more modest scale, first in the fall of 1914 and then again in the summer of 1916. The decision to stretch the Russian forces along an overextended front, backed by inadequate reserves, and to push them into a premature, poorly planned attack on East Prussia, may well have been one of the costliest Allied blunders of the war.
In order to improve the chances of Russian success, the French agreed to finance improvements in the country’s military infrastructure. They provided money to modernize the railway lines leading to the front as well as strategic roads and bridges, which gave the German High Command cause for apprehension.
Berlin was even more alarmed by the announcement made in 1912 in St. Petersburg of the so-called Great Military Program (Bol’shaia Voennaia Programma). Scheduled for completion in 1917, it called for major improvements in artillery, transport, and mobilization procedures. Although this undertaking, initiated in 1914, remained largely on paper, it threatened to enable the Russians to complete their mobilization in 18 days, with the result that the “Russians would be in Berlin before the Germans were in Paris.”8 So disturbed were some German generals and civilian leaders by this prospect that they contemplated a preventive war.9 During the diplomatic crisis which followed the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914, they were heard to argue that this gave them as good a pretext as any to fight. Colonel Alfred Knox, the British military attaché in Russia, believed that Russian military modernization plans might have been the decisive consideration that pushed the Germans to declare war on Russia and France in August 1914.10
Given the immense literature on the subject, the diplomatic antecedents of World War I need not detain us.11 Speaking in the most general terms, the immediate cause of the war was Germany’s decision to support Austria in her struggle with Russia in the Balkans. This conflict was of long standing, but it became aggravated by the emergence in 1871 of the German Empire, which deprived Austria of northern outlets for her political ambitions, deflecting them southward, toward the Ottoman Empire. Russia, with her own designs on the Balkans, claimed the role of protector of the Orthodox Christians under Turkish rule. The two powers clashed over Serbia, which stood in Austria’s way in her drive on Turkey. In several previous confrontations in the Balkans, Russia had yielded, to the outrage of her conservative nationalists. To have done so again in the crisis that developed in July 1914 following the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, worded with deliberate insolence and backed by Germany, could have spelled the end of Russia’s influence in the Balkan Peninsula and possibly domestic difficulties. St. Petersburg, therefore, decided, with French concurrence, to support Serbia.
The critical Russian moves followed Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia on July 15/28, 1914. The exact course of events leading to the issuance of orders for general mobilization of the Russian armed forces—events which the Germans subsequently blamed for the outbreak of World War I—remains confused to this day. The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Sazonov, felt that his country had to make some kind of military gesture to give credibility to her diplomatic efforts in support of Serbia. Under his influence, and against the advice of the military, who feared that it would cause disarray in the general mobilization plans, Nicholas II initially ordered on July 15/28 a partial mobilization in four of the thirteen military districts.* The step was meant as a warning, but it inevitably led to full-scale mobilization. If one is to believe the Minister of War, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, the Tsar hesitated, being in receipt of warnings from the Kaiser urging him not to act precipitously. His decision to proceed with full mobilization, taken on July 17/30 without the concurrence or even the knowledge of the Minister of War, seems to have been taken on the advice of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (soon to be named Commander in Chief) and his protégé, the chief of staff, General N. N. Ianushkevich.12 On July 18/31, the Germans sent Russia an ultimatum demanding that she stop massing forces on their frontier. They received no answer. The same day, France and Germany began to mobilize and on July 19/August 1 Germany declared war on Russia. Russia responded in kind the day after, and the fatal chain of events was set in motion.