Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 305
after the triumph of 1870–71, fear of what a truly mass army might do
to the privileges of the propertied classes made it easy for the army’s
leaders to acquiesce in a system that, as population grew, called up
only a diminishing proportion of eligible young men to military ser
vice. By limiting the army to a size acceptable to penny-pinchers in
the Reichstag, it was possible to keep the officer corps more nearly
homogeneous and aristocratic in background—a safe bulwark against
potential revolution as preached by socialists.
This policy was called into question towards the end of the first
decade of the twentieth century by the accelerated pace of Russian re
armament, financed largely by France. When Germany’s protégé,
Turkey, went down in swift defeat in the first Balkan War (1912) to
states whose armies had been reequiped by the French, Germany’s
sense of beleaguerment intensified. The kaiser’s military advisers con
cluded that, despite the risk of revolution, the army would have to be
enlarged by training a larger proportion of the eligible age classes each
year. They also decided to equip the army with heavier field artillery.
Costs of such a program were significant and competed directly with
naval expenditures. Indeed, the new chancellor, Theobald von
Bethman-Hollweg, actively encouraged the army program as a way of
checking Admiral Tirpitz’ demands for funds.^79
Russia’s apparent recovery from the revolutionary disturbances that
followed the defeat of 1905–6 even called the feasibility of the fa
mous Schlieffen plan into question. If Russia could develop a dense
enough rail net to mobilize its vast manpower quickly, the Germans
might not have the time needed to defeat France before suffering un
acceptable disaster at the hands of invading Russian hordes. Yet ever
since 1893 it had been an article of faith in the Great General Staff (as
the Prussian General Staff had been rechristened after 1871) that the
only way to fight a two-front war was to strike first against France by
marching through Belgium while the Russians were still in process of
mobilization. This was what Alfred von Schlieffen, the chief of the
Great General Staff, 1891–1905, had concluded when first he faced
the problem of what to do about the French-Russian rapprochement
of 1891–94.
The Schlieffen plan was carefully revised each year to take account
of changes in German and enemy resources as reported by the latest
- Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions; German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (London, 1975),
pp. 116 ff. Cf. the interesting analysis of the German army’s dilemma in Bernd F.
Schulte, Die deutsche Armee, 1900–1914, zwischen Beharren und Werandern (University of
Hamburg dissertation, 1976).
