The German army that marched into Belgium on the 4th of August 1914 was, soldier for soldier, the best army in Europe. Its officers had trained for this war for forty years. Its general staff had refined the Schlieffen Plan for nineteen. Its troops carried better rifles, better artillery, more machine guns, and more ammunition per man than any other European army. They moved on a denser railway network. They were supported by a logistical system that had been thought through to the last horseshoe nail. The plan was a clean six weeks. Sweep through Belgium and northern France in a great arc, take Paris, force a French armistice, then turn east to deal with the slow Russian mobilisation. The technical preparation, by Prussian general-staff standards, was a masterpiece.
It did not work. The right wing was not quite strong enough; the Belgians fought longer than expected; the British Expeditionary Force, contemptuously dismissed by the Kaiser as "a contemptible little army," arrived in time to delay the right-wing advance for a critical fortnight; the French general Joffre kept his nerve and rallied the line at the Marne, in early September, when the German armies were within forty miles of Paris. By the end of October the entire western front had stabilised into the system of trenches that would not move more than ten miles in any direction for the next four years.
The fast war the Prussian general staff had planned for forty years was over. In its place was the war they had hoped never to fight: a long, attritional war on two fronts against an enemy coalition with greater combined resources.
Tannenberg, and the propaganda war
The one place the war did go well, at first, was in East Prussia. The Russians, by attacking earlier than the Germans had predicted, drew large Russian armies into the lakes and forests of the old Hohenzollern duchy. Two Russian armies advanced into East Prussia in mid-August. They were defeated, in detail, by a smaller German force commanded by the recently summoned old field marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff Erich Ludendorff. The battle that destroyed the Russian Second Army was named, for propaganda reasons, the Battle of Tannenberg — though the actual fighting happened around villages thirty miles away. The name was chosen to evoke the defeat of the Teutonic Order in 1410 and reverse it. The reversal made the rest of the war, in retrospect, bearable.
Hindenburg, with his great square stone face and his calm pronouncements, became the central figure of German wartime morale almost overnight. Ludendorff, the technical brain of the partnership, became increasingly powerful within the army. By 1916 the two men, having taken over the supreme command of the entire German war effort, were effectively the rulers of Germany. The Kaiser, increasingly marginal to actual decisions, signed what they put in front of him. The civilian Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, was dismissed in 1917 at their insistence. The Reichstag was bypassed. The country was, by the third year of the war, under what was in everything but name a military dictatorship.
The home front
Germany in 1914 was an industrial country dependent on imports. The British naval blockade, in place from August of that year, made those imports increasingly difficult to obtain. The country had stockpiled almost nothing — the general staff, expecting a six-week war, had not thought it necessary. By the winter of 1916-17, the so-called Turnip Winter, the food supply had collapsed. The potato crop had failed. The grain harvest was a third below normal. Civilians, particularly in industrial cities like Berlin and Hamburg, were eating turnips three meals a day. The official ration of bread in early 1917 was a hundred and seventy grams per day; in 1918 it would fall to a hundred and ten. Babies were not getting milk. Old people, in the third winter of the war, were dying of malnutrition at three times the pre-war rate.
The casualty lists from the front, meanwhile, were appalling and unending. The German army would lose, over the course of the war, more than two million dead. Almost every household in the country had a family member killed, wounded, or missing. The Verdun campaign of 1916, in which the German army had tried to break the French line and instead lost three hundred and thirty thousand men, had achieved nothing. The Somme, fought against them in the same year, had cost them another four hundred thousand. By the spring of 1918, the German army had been bled almost to the same degree as its enemies — but its enemies were now receiving fresh American troops, in numbers that grew by a hundred thousand a month, while the German army had no comparable replacements.
The Spring Offensive
Ludendorff knew this. He understood that 1918 would be the last year in which Germany could hope to win, and that the only chance of winning lay in attacking before the American expeditionary force became overwhelming. The Russian collapse in late 1917 had freed forty German divisions from the eastern front. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed with the new Bolshevik government in March 1918, gave Germany — on paper — almost everything it had ever wanted in the east: Ukraine, the Baltic provinces, Finland, parts of the Caucasus. It was the largest forced territorial transfer in modern European history, and it lasted, in the event, just over six months.
The Spring Offensive on the western front began on the 21st of March 1918. The German army advanced further in three weeks than it had advanced in the previous three years. It came within seventy miles of Paris. It seemed, briefly, to have won the war. And then it stopped. The troops were exhausted. The logistics were stretched. The American Expeditionary Force, by July, was deploying a quarter of a million men a month. On the 8th of August 1918, the Allies counter-attacked at Amiens; the German line broke; Ludendorff, in his subsequent memoirs, called it the black day of the German army. From that day until the armistice, the German army retreated. It retreated in good order, but it retreated.
The revolution
On the 29th of October 1918, the German High Seas Fleet at Wilhelmshaven received an order from the naval command to put to sea for a final, suicidal sortie against the British. The sailors mutinied. The mutiny spread inland. By the 4th of November the entire fleet at Kiel was in the hands of revolutionary sailors' councils. By the 7th the council movement had spread to Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, Munich, and Cologne. The King of Bavaria, on the 7th of November, was deposed by a republican government under a Jewish journalist named Kurt Eisner. By the 8th the revolution had reached Berlin.
The Kaiser was not in Berlin. He had been at the imperial military headquarters at Spa, in eastern Belgium, since the spring. He had been told, by Hindenburg and by the new Chancellor Max von Baden, that he had to abdicate. He had refused. By the morning of the 9th of November the refusal was no longer practical. The army would not march on Berlin to put down the revolution; the soldiers, the generals admitted privately to the Kaiser, would not obey such an order. The Chancellor, in Berlin, took matters into his own hands. At noon on the 9th of November he announced the Kaiser's abdication on his own authority, without waiting for the Kaiser's actual decision. Two hours later the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann, from a window of the Reichstag, proclaimed the German republic to a crowd of perhaps two hundred thousand people.
The Kaiser, in Spa, was finally persuaded to sign by his entourage at four in the afternoon. He crossed the Dutch frontier that night in a private train, was granted political asylum by Queen Wilhelmina the following day, and spent the rest of his life — he died in 1941 — at the small chateau of Doorn, in central Holland, with a pension provided partly by the Weimar Republic and partly by the German aristocracy. He was buried at Doorn under a slab inscribed only with his name and his dates. He had asked that his body not be returned to Germany unless and until the Hohenzollern monarchy was restored. It has not been.
Five centuries on the throne
The Hohenzollern dynasty had ruled Brandenburg since 1415, when Burgrave Frederick VI of Nuremberg had been granted the Electorate as a reward for services to the Emperor Sigismund. They had ruled Prussia since 1525, the duchy and then the kingdom. They had ruled, finally, the German Empire since 1871. They had reigned, in some form, for five hundred and three years. They were now over. The crown jewels of Prussia were inventoried by the new republican government and placed in the State Library. The crown itself — a small object, smaller than visitors expect, made of pearls and rubies — is in the Charlottenburg Palace today. You can see it, in a glass case, if you visit. It has not been worn since 1701.
The new republic, proclaimed in Berlin on the 9th of November 1918, would call itself the Weimar Republic. It would last fourteen years. Its constituent state of Prussia — the Free State of Prussia — would, surprisingly, be one of its most stable and democratic political units. The story of that strange last incarnation of Prussia, before its abolition, is the story of the next chapter.
End of Chapter X