Hew Strachan Military Operations and National Policies, 1914–1918 “There is a certain book, ‘Vom Kriege’, which never grows old”, Paul von Hin- denburg wrote in his war memoirs, published in 1920. “Its author is Clausewitz. He knew war, and he knew men. We had to listen to him, and whenever we fol- lowed him it was to victory. To do otherwise meant disaster. He gave a warning about the encroachment of politics on the conduct of military operations.” Hindenburg was venting the frustration which he had felt in early Septem- ber 1914, after his victory at the Masurian Lakes over Rennenkampf’s 1st Army. Oberste Heeresleitung (hereafter OHL) had told him not to exploit his success by pursuing the retreating Russians, but to switch the axis of his attack to the south, so as to give “direct support” to the Austrians “on political grounds”. In the pas- sage which followed, Hindenburg reflected as much his own experiences at OHL in the second half of the war, when he himself was chief of the Prussian general staff, as his frustrations in 1914. “The political tune is a ghastly tune! I myself during the war seldom heard in that tune those harmonies which would have struck an echo in a soldier’s heart.”1 Today “Vom Kriege” is not read as it was read by German officers of Hinden- burg’s generation. Clausewitz’s nostrum that war is the continuation of policy by other means has led theorists of civil-military relations to claim that, in the words of Samuel Huntington, “the ends for which the military body is employed […] are outside its competence to judge”. Huntington concluded his consideration of Clausewitz’s “Vom Kriege” with the assertion that, “In formulating the first theo- retical rationale for the military profession, Clausewitz also contributed the first theoretical justification for civilian control.”2 Thanks not least to Huntington, military subordination to civil control is the current norm and we interpret Hin- denburg’s frustration as a classic Prussian military misreading of Clausewitz. The First World War was, after all, waged by recognisably modern states. Most had constitutions which were sufficiently progressive to mean that there was some level of parliamentary accountability, even in those countries which were not de- 1 Paul von Hindenburg: Out of My Life. London 1920, pp. 111 f. 2 Samuel P. Huntington: The Soldier and the State. The Theory and Practice of Civil-Military Re- lations. Cambridge, MA 1957, pp. 57 f. On the differences in the reading of Clausewitz, see Hew Strachan: Clausewitz and the First World War. In: Journal of Military History 75 (2011), pp. 367– 391; Hew Strachan: Clausewitz en anglais. La césure de 1976. In: Laure Bardiès/Martin Motte (eds.): De la guerre? Clausewitz et la pensée stratégique contemporaine. Paris 2008, pp. 81–122. 8 Hew Strachan mocracies. It was also a war in which armies were not on the whole commanded by their monarchs, even if some of those monarchs aspired to be autocrats. There are of course significant exceptions to both those statements. Neither of the leading democracies among the original belligerents, Britain and France, held an election during the war, and as a result their populations were never given the opportunity to pass judgement on their governments’ conduct of it. There are also important caveats to be entered in the case of the autocracies. Kaiser Wilhelm may have spent much of the war railing at his marginalisation, but he still retained the crucial power to hire and fire both Germany’s chancellors and its service chiefs.3 Tsar Nicholas II took over the supreme command of the Russian Army in September 1915 and exercised it until his abdication in March 1917. By then the new and young Kaiser Karl was increasingly involved in the command decisions of the Austro-Hungarian Army. However, neither of these observations detracts from the general point, that civil authority was more divided from the exercise of military command than it had been in Clausewitz’s day. Hindenburg’s problem in making strategy was different from, and more complex than, that which confront- ed Frederick the Great or Napoleon. Hindenburg’s was one of the first of the post-war memoirs, forming part of a flood in which the Germans led the way: his predecessor as chief of the general staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, published his in 1920, and his first quartermaster general, Erich Ludendorff, was fast off the mark in 1919. The tensions of civ- il-military relations set the tone for many of these books, whether written by sol- diers or by civilians. According to the soldiers’ line of argument, they would have won the war sooner or – in the case of the German officers – they would simply have won the war, if they had been left unfettered by the politicians to fight it. According to the politicians, the generals were stupid and bloodthirsty, and should never have been given as much head as they were. As David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, put it in a concluding chapter of his memoirs entitled “Some reflections on the functions of governments and soldiers respectively in a war”: “There is a region where the soldier claims to be paramount and where the interference of the statesman seems to him to be an impertinence. One is the ques- tion of whether a great battle which may involve enormous losses ought to be fought – if so, where and at what time. The second question is whether a pro- longed attack on fortifications (practically a siege) which is causing huge loss of life without producing any apparent result, ought to be called off. Should Gov- ernments intervene or leave the decision entirely to the soldiers?”4 3 Walter Görlitz (ed.): Regierte der Kaiser? Kriegstagebücher, Aufzeichnungen und Briefe des Chefs des Marine-Kabinetts Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, 1914–1918. Göttingen 1959, is full of examples of the Kaiser’s frustrations; Holger Afflerbach: Wilhelm II as Supreme War- lord in the First World War. In: War in History 5 (1998), pp. 427–449, shows how extensive his power remained. 4 David Lloyd George: War Memoirs. 2 vols. London 1938, here: vol. 2, p. 2035; on the War Mem- oirs, see Andrew Suttie: Rewriting the First World War. Lloyd George, Politics and Strategy. Bas- ingstoke 2005. Military Operations and National Policies 1914–1918 9 Lloyd George’s question was of course rhetorical, but its tone was also self-ex- culpating. He was anxious to defend himself from the charges that in 1917 he had not prevented the 3rd battle of Ypres and had not subsequently intervened after its commencement to forestall its continuation as Haig’s Army floundered towards Passchendaele. Most historians today have moved away from the tired and self-serving argu- ments of the memoirs. There were few, if any, pure “westerners” or “easterners” in Britain, but probably quite a number in Germany, especially in the winter of 1914–1915.5 Moreover, the person who espoused a particular line in strategy was not necessarily to be identified as either (to continue the British nomenclature for these categories) a “frock-coat” (i.e. a civilian) or a “brass-hat” (i.e. a soldier). One of the reasons for Lloyd George’s readiness both to support Robert Nivelle’s ap- pointment as the French commander-in-chief and then to back his request that the British Expeditionary Force be subordinated to French command was his own political need for a major victory on the western front. Hence too Lloyd George’s ambivalence about Haig’s plans for the second half of 1917. If Haig suc- ceeded, he would give what Lloyd George badly needed: a much more secure po- litical platform from which to pursue his own desire to defeat Germany. Real wartime ambiguities underlay the apparent post-war certainties of the memoirs. In Germany itself, Falkenhayn was a resolute “westerner” but achieved his great- est gains in the east, while Ludendorff – at least until he himself moved to OHL in 1916 – was an impassioned “easterner”. As the memoirs have been discredited by the opening of the archives, another narrative has suggested a different line of historiographical attack. In 1917–1918, the Entente powers won the war precisely because their civilian governments fought back against their generals and their accretion of political influence, so reasserting civilian authority over military. In Britain, Lloyd George, having an- gered the King, the Cabinet and Parliament by agreeing to place Haig under Nivelle without consulting any of them, a sin compounded by the failure of the Nivelle offensive in April 1917, amazingly recovered. He was helped by Haig’s dogged persistence at Ypres, which discredited the British Expeditionary Force’s commander in the eyes of his principal political supporters, the Conservative party and its press. In the winter of 1917–1918 Lloyd George managed to con- trive the removal of Haig’s principal staff officers, including his Director of Mili- tary Intelligence, John Charteris, and his Chief of Staff, Launcelot Kiggell. In February 1918 the prime minister manoeuvred Sir William Robertson out of his post as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and replaced him with Sir Henry Wil- son, whom Haig disliked. And at the end of March Haig was finally brought 5 For Britain, see the essays in Brian Bond (ed.): The First World War and British Military Histo- ry. Oxford 1991; on the debates in Germany, see Karl-Heinz Janßen: Der Kanzler und der Gene- ral. Die Führungskrise um Bethmann Hollweg und Falkenhayn 1914–1916. Göttingen 1967, which provides a lively if now somewhat dated introduction.