Plan for the grand envelopment of the French armies was executed. It failed because of
its logistical frailty and the weariness of the marching troops; because of the lack of real-
time communications between the armies of the right wing and Moltke’s headquarters in
Luxembourg, and therefore because of the absence of command grip from the centre;
because the French and British threatened to outflank and envelop exposed and isolated
armies; because French lateral railways enabled a rapid shift of weight from the right to
the left of the theatre; and because it was executed with too few troops.
Schlieffen’s original grand design was nothing if not daring. Of Germany’s seventy-
eight divisions, he allocated only ten to hold the Russians in East Prussia, with the
remaining sixty-eight to invade France. Fully fifty-nine of those sixty-eight were assigned
to the armies of the right wing, the enveloping arm, leaving only nine to face the French
on the left. Between 1906 and 1914 Moltke changed the ratio of forces between the
left and the right wings, adding eight of nine new divisions to the left and only one to
the right. On 25 August 1914 he compounded the damage to the basic concept of a
huge disparity between the left and right wings when he acted ill-advisedly in response
to panicky reports from East Prussia. He withdrew three army corps from the right wing
and dispatched them to the Eastern Front. As a result, those divisions were in transit while
major battles with far-reaching consequences were waged in both the East and the West.
These modifications to Schlieffen’s plan certainly lessened its prospects of success.
But, given the dire logistical straits in which the armies of the right wing found them-
selves as they approached Paris, it is not obvious that larger forces could have been
sustained on the right anyway. In recent years a radical revisionist argument that there
never was a Schlieffen Plan intended to defeat France in six weeks gained some credence
for a while (Zuber, 2002). However, scholarly battle has since been fully joined, and the
traditional understanding of a German bid to knock France out of the war in a single
campaign has regained its authority (Mombauer, 2005).
The Germans were halted on the Marne, deep in France, and were compelled to retreat,
albeit in good order, to the River Aisne, where they remained for the next four years. Alas,
the Germans had neglected to develop a ‘Plan B’, as insurance against the possibility of
failure of the Schlieffen gamble. For the remainder of 1914, September–December,
the severely battered armies in the West extended their fronts competitively all the way
to the sea. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was moved to the vicinity of Ypres in
Belgium, where it fought itself almost to oblivion in a protracted struggle in October and
November. With a great deal of French assistance, it prevented a German breakthrough
which might have outflanked the still rudimentary Allied line. In the East, the Russians
behaved as an exceedingly loyal ally. They attacked prematurely in East Prussia in
order to relieve pressure on the French in the West, only to meet with twin disasters at
Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes at the hands of what was to become the much
respected command team of Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg. That celebrated
pair received the glory, but the true architect of the German triumph of cunning manoeu-
vre, effective deception and exploitation of Russian incompetence was one Lieutenant
Colonel Max Hoffmann.
86 War, peace and international relations