It encouraged the introduction of heavy guns into field warfare, to facilitate
breaking through the kinds of fixed defences the French were constructing. By
the mid-1890s, however, fortress technology had moved well ahead of the destruc-
tive power of mobile heavy artillery. Pessimists—or realists, depending on one’s
perspective—advised forgetting about anything but a slow, costly, episodic ad-
vance. 39
The implications for a short, victorious war were obvious. Schlieffen’s response
was to turn from breakthrough to envelopment: the sweep through Belgium that
became the focal point of German war planning. This revised operational concept
has been shown as less a doomsday machine in the literal sense than Schlieffen
himself might have preferred. Instead, his memoranda reveal an almost Moltkean
acceptance of contingency at the sharp end, with specific courses of events
depending on French behaviour and German success. He had the uncomfortable
habit of assuming divisions and army corps would emerge as needed, like
warriors from the dragon’s teeth sowed by Cadmus. Schlieffen’s own scenarios
frequently involved a series of rapid victories on the frontier that would cripple
the French army and set the stage for further operations in the interior over six to
nine months. 40 By 1914, that period was being extended to as long as two years in
some general staff circles. 41
Germany’s defeat in the West in the autumn of 1914 has been explained in terms
of policy, strategy, operations, tactics, and a near-infinite number of combinations.
Its principal operational weakness was not its neglect of contingency, but the fact
that it had no room for friction. Everything at all levels had to go preternaturally
right for the whole to work. Even a little grit gridlocked the system beyond its ability
to repair itself or the high command’s capacity to retune it. 42
Considered in retrospect, however, the 1914 campaign also illustrated a gap in
the German concept of operations: a neglect of mobility. From ancient times to
the present day, pursuit and exploitation at the operational level turn a victorious
battle into a victorious campaign. Eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry was es-
sentially a tactical instrument. In the Wars of Liberation, it was deployed by
regiments and brigades. In the Wars of Unification, larger formations were only
organized on mobilization. Moltke the Elder focused on reconnaissance and
screening. 43 Schlieffen insisted on strong cavalry forces on the flanks of the
German advance. Instead, however, in 1914 half the cavalry of Germany’s active
army was directly assigned to infantry divisions. Of the ten cavalry divisions
deployed on the Western Front, five were deployed to cover the advance in such
unlikely cavalry country as the Vosges and the Ardennes.
The German cavalry division of 1914 was a potentially effective combined-
arms team. Its six regiments, 4,500 troopers, had twelve field pieces and half-
a-dozen mobile machine guns as organic fire support. They depended on horses,
but were by no means helpless on foot. Regiments were extensively trained in
marksmanship and skirmishing. Officers did not ignore the potential of dis-
mounted fire action. The division had its own bridging train, and even a radio
detachment. Most divisions either had attached or could call on a battalion or
two ofJa ̈ger. These elite light infantry formations included a cyclist company, a
Prussian–German Operational Art, 1740–1943 45