machine-gun company, and a small motor-transport column whose ten trucks
could be used to shuttle infantry forward much like the truck companies attached
to US infantry divisions in the Second World War.
One need not assume that German cavalry utilized asanearly version of the Soviet
operational manoeuvre group would have somehow averted stagnation. The high
force-to-space ratios of the Western Front, combined with the historically unique
imbalance among firepower, mobility, and protection, would, in all probability, have
ended in something approximating the race to the sea and the development of
trench warfare no matter what the Kaiser’s horsemen did or did not do. What is
significant is that rethinking the prospects for cavalry’s employment proved beyond
the collective imagination of the cavalry as well as the high command.
Mechanization was an even more remote concept. As early as 1905, car engineer
Paul Daimler demonstrated a surprisingly advanced prototype armoured car at
the autumn manoeuvres. It was dismissed as lacking practical utility. In 1914, a
couple of improvised armoured trucks were attached to each cavalry division.
Equally improvised detachments of machine-gun crews and riflemen in comman-
deered civilian cars did useful service occupying bridges and road junctions in
advance of the horsemen. Only in 1915, however, did the general staff develop
specifications for a purpose-built armoured car. The resulting models carried two
or three machine guns and were well armoured for the time. One even had a radio.
But their bulky shapes and heavy weights rendered them visible on roads and
limited their cross-country mobility to virtually zero. 44
The strategic and tactical circumstances of the developed Western Front
reduced German opportunities for employing operational art to another near-
zero. Nor did the Russian Front ever quite repay the efforts put into it by the
Second Reich. From Tannenberg in 1914 to Riga in 1917, the Russian army
acquired an image of being easy to defeat, but hard to finish. The 1915 Battle of
Gorlice–Tarnow was archetypical. Pitting comprehensive planning and high-tech
heavy artillery and chlorine gas against numbers and inertia, a handful of German
divisions tore open the front on a thirty-kilometre sector, captured a third of a
million prisoners, and absorbed Russia’s available resources in everything from
anaesthetics to ammunition. Yet the Russians somehow managed to retreat faster
than the Germans could chase them. 45
Gorlice–Tarnow and its aftermath effectively confirmed pre-war general staff
conclusions that the possibilities of decisive military action against Russia were
too limited to be worth pursuing in any context. The operational-level successes
achieved at Riga were processed as the outcome of tactical victory against an
enemy too eroded by defeat, privation, and revolution to serve as a benchmark. 46
Romania in 1916 was similarly written down as a sideshow against a third-rate
opponent. 47
German operational art received a technical window of opportunity when its
gunners developed ways of using artillery as a precision instrument of neutrali-
zation instead of a blunt tool for blasting ground in the hope of hitting something
important. 48 Combined with the storm-troop tactics based on fire and movement
by small groups that the infantry had been developing since 1915, they offered the
46 The Evolution of Operational Art