Allen L. Churchill

ASSEMBLING OF THE GERMAN ARMIES

"The German mobilization was the greatest movement of people that the world has ever seen. Nearly four million people had to be transported from every part of the empire to her borders. The manner in which the population is distributed made the task extremely difficult. Berlin, Rhenish Westphalia, Upper Silesia, and Saxony, especially had to send their contingents in every direction, since the eastern provinces are more thinly settled and had to have a stronger guard for the borders immediately. The result was a hurrying to and fro of thousands and hundreds of thousands of soldiers, besides a flood of civilians who had to reach their homes as soon as possible. Countries where the population is more regularly distributed have an easier task than Germany, with its predominating urban population.

"The difficulties of the gigantic undertaking were also increased by the necessity for transporting war materials of every sort. In the west are chiefly industrial undertakings, in the east mainly agricultural. Horse raising is mostly confined to the provinces on the North Sea and the Baltic, but chiefly to East Prussia, and this province, the farthest away from France, had to send its best horses to the western border, as did also Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover. Coal for our warships had to go in the other direction. From the Rhenish mines it went to the North Sea, from Upper Silesia to the Baltic. Ammunition and heavy projectiles were transported from the central part of the empire to its borders. And everywhere these operations had to be carried on with haste....

"And how was it carried on? No one could have wondered if there had been hundreds of unforeseen incidents, if military trains had arrived at their stations with great delays, if there had resulted in many places a wild hugger-mugger from the tremendous problems on hand. But there was not a trace of this. ... All moved with the regularity of clockwork. Regiments that had been ordered to mobilize in the forenoon left in the evening for the field, fully equipped....

Armies of the Contesting Nations.

"A thing that raised the national enthusiasm still higher was the appearance of the troops in brand-new uniforms, complete from head to feet. The first sight of these new uniforms of modest, field gray, faultlessly made, evoked everywhere the question: Where did they come from? On the first day of mobilization dozens of cloth manufacturers appeared at the War Ministry with offers of new material. 'We don't want any' was the astonishing reply. Equal amazement was caused by the faultless boots and shoes of the new troops, especially in view of the recent famous 'boot speech' of the French Senator Humbert.

"Small arms, cannon, and ammunition are so plentiful, that they have merely to be unpacked. In view of all this, it is no wonder that the regiments marching in were everywhere greeted with jubilation, and that those marching out took leave of their garrisons with joyful songs. No one thinks of death and destruction, every one of happy victory and joyful reunion. German discipline, once so slandered, now celebrates its triumph.

"There was still another matter in which the troops gave their countrymen cause for rejoicing. Not one drunken man was seen during these earnest days on the city streets. The General Staff had, moreover, wisely ordered that during the mobilization, when every one had money in his pockets, alcoholic drinks were not to be sold at the railroad stations....

"The army is increased to many times its ordinary strength by the mobilization. It draws from everywhere millions of soldiers, workmen, horses, wagons, and other materials. The entire railway service is at its disposal.... Not only is our great army mobilized, but the whole folk is mobilized, and the distribution of labor, the food question, and the care of the sick and wounded are all being provided for. The whole German folk has become a gigantic war camp, all are mobilized to protect kaiser, folk, and fatherland, as the closing report of the Reichstag put it."

From this German statement of German mobilization by a German committee of men of the utmost standing in the empire certain things stand out very clearly. Of this the first one is that, with a peace strength of less than a million, on the very first flush of mobilization, every possible contingency for the mobilization of four million men was at hand. German mobilization, therefore, was not the devising of plans to carry out a project, but it was rather the putting into action of a vast interacting series of preparation that had long been made and carefully conceived for an attack upon the powers to the westward. From every point of view, looking at the mobilization at the opening of the war, Germany's was the most rapid and the most complete, and, as the "Truth about Germany" states, it was perhaps the most marvelous piece of military mobilization that the world has ever seen.

As mobilization finally results in army corps, and is designed to fit into a frame, the component parts of an army corps may be set forth to show the way in which all the various units have to be drawn together to their places on a battle front. A complete army corps of the German scheme consists of 56,000 combatants and 12,000 men in the supply train. Of this, 63.81 per cent are infantry, 11.56 per cent cavalry, 10.99 field artillery, 4.21 per cent light artillery, 4.21 engineer corps, etc., hospital corps 1.04, and miscellaneous 2.02 per cent. There are 4 brigades with 24 battalions, there are 24 batteries of field artillery with 144 guns, there are 8 squadrons of cavalry, 4 howitzer batteries with 16 heavy howitzers, a machine-gun section, a battalion of rifles, a battalion of engineers, a telegraph section, a bridge train, 6 provision columns, 7 wagon-park columns, a stretcher-bearer column, a horse depot, a field bakery, 12 field hospitals, and 8 ammunition columns.

One has but to think of the various places from which these men and stores must come, of the thousands of horses and hundreds of wagons; of the millions of rounds of ammunition, speeding from different points over different railroads, and when disembarked by roads, by lanes, even by small bypaths to the appointed place on the battle front, to realize what a marvelous feat is mobilization of a modern army at the time of an outbreak of war. An insight into the manner in which this can be carried out, and incidentally, an insight into the preparedness of Germany for the war, is seen in an analysis of the extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable network of railways recently erected by Germany to tap the frontiers of Belgium and Luxemburg.

"In the southwest corner of Prussia," says Walter Littlefield, writing on this subject, "is a rectangular piece of territory, the western and eastern sides of which are formed respectively by the Belgian and Luxemburg frontiers and the River Rhine.... Five years ago, this little corner of Prussia had about 15.10 miles of railway to every hundred square miles of territory. At the opening of the war this had increased to 28.30. In five years, without any apparent industrial and commercial demand for it, this traction has been increased to nearly twice its length. Villages of less than 1,300 inhabitants have been linked up with double-track lines. For example, Pelm is 2-3/4 miles from Gerolstein, a town principally of comic-opera fame, and yet over this short distance, between the two villages, there are laid down six parallel lines of rail, besides numerous additional sidings.... Few of these lines, it is to be noted, cross the frontier. Three of them, as late as last May (this was written in the fall of 1914), led to blind terminals within a day's march of it—the double line from Cologne via Stolberg to Weiwertz, the double line from Cologne via Junkerath and Weiwertz to St. With and the double line from Remagen via Hillesheim and Pelm to Pronsfeld."

"Another point that is noticeable," says another observer, quoted in the same article, "is that provision exists everywhere at these new junctions and extensions for avoiding an upline crossing a down line on the level, the upline is carried over the down line by a bridge, involving long embankments on both sides (so new that as yet nothing has had time to grow on them) at great expense, but enormously simplifying traffic problems, when it comes to a question of full troop trains pushing through at the rate of one every quarter of an hour, and the empty cars returning eastward at the same rate.

"The detraining stations are of sufficient length to accommodate the longest troop train (ten cars) easily, and they generally have at least four sidings apart from the through up and down lines. Moreover, at almost every station there are two lines of sidings long enough for troop trains, so that they can be used to some extent as detraining stations, and so that a couple of troop trains can be held up at any time while traffic continues uninterrupted."

Such facts of railway preparedness explain, in a great measure, the means whereby Germany was able to launch upon the Belgian, Luxemburg, and French frontiers such a vast array of fully equipped troops almost at the moment of the outbreak of the war. It must be left to the reader to determine whether there is any connection between this activity of railroad building in a district industrially inactive on a frontier that was always held inviolate; and the violation of that territory by means of these very railroads. Facts remain facts, however, and the absolutely admitted facts declare that German mobilization was directed, not at the French frontier, but at the frontier of Luxemburg and Belgium, especially at the great Belgian plain, commanded and dominated by the great fortress of Liege. In the story of that siege will be shown its topographic position. As bearing upon the subject of mobilization, however, it is to be remembered that at this point, Belgium, and not at France, was directed the main first mobilization of the German army.[Back to Contents]