The Battle of the Rivers

by Edmund Dane

Such was the plan on its political side. What were its military features?

A political plan of that character plainly called for a swift and, if possible, crushing military offensive. Rapidity was one of the first essentials. That affected materially the whole military side of the scheme. It meant that to facilitate mobility and transport, the equipment of the troops must be made as light as possible. Hence all the usual apparatus of field hospitals and impedimenta for encampment must be dispensed with. It meant that the force to be dispatched must be powerful enough to bear down the maximum of estimated opposition, and ensure the seizure of Paris, without delay. It meant again that the force must move by the shortest and most direct route.

If we bear in mind these three features—equipment cut down to give mobility, strength to ensure an uninterrupted sweep, shortest route—we shall find it the easier to grasp the nature of the operations which have since taken place. The point to be kept in mind is that what the military expedition contemplated was not only on an unusual scale, but was of an altogether unusual, and in many respects novel, character.

The most serious military problem in front of the German Government was the problem of route. The forces supposed to be strong enough Germany had at her disposal. Within her power, too, was it to make them, so far as meticulous preparation could do it, mobile. But command of the shortest and most direct route she did not possess.

That route we know passes in part through the plain of northern Belgium, and in part through the parallel valley of the Meuse to the points where, on the Belgium frontier, there begin the great international roads converging on Paris. All the way from Liége to Paris there are not only these great paved highways, but lines of main trans-continental railroads. The route, in short, presented every natural and artificial facility needed to keep a vast army fully supplied.

Here it should be recalled that two things govern the movements of armies. Hostile opposition is one; supplies are the other. In this instance, the possible hostile opposition was estimated for. It remained to ensure that neither the march of the great host, as a whole, nor the advance of any part of it should at any time be held up by waiting for the arrival of either foodstuffs, munitions, or reinforcements, but that the thousand and one necessaries for such an army, still a complex list even when everything omissible had been weeded out, should arrive, as, when, and where wanted.

Little imagination need be exercised to perceive that to work out a scheme like that on such a scale involves enormous labour. On the one side were the arrangements for gathering these necessaries and placing them in depots; on the other were the arrangements for issuing them, sending them forward, and distributing them. Nothing short of years of effort could connect such a mass of detail. If hopeless confusion was not almost from the outset to ensue, the greatest care was called for to make it certain that the mighty machination would move successfully.

A scheme of that kind suited the methodical genius of Germany, and there can be no doubt that the years spent upon it had brought it to perfection. It had been worked out to time table. Concurrently, arrangements for the mobilisation of reserve troops had become almost automatic. Every reservist in the German Army held instructions setting out minutely what to do and where and when to report himself as soon as the call came.

Now this elaborate plan had been drawn up on the assumption of an invasion of France by the route through Belgium. That assumption formed its basis. Not only so, but the extent to which the resources of Belgium and North-east France might, by requisitioning, be drawn upon to relieve transport and so promote rapidity, had been exactly estimated.