The Guns Of August

In Chapter 2, Tuchman begins laying out not only the German battle plan to attack France, but also the prevailing German ideology of the time. In the time of the Battle of Waterloo, almost 100 years before the Great War begins, German strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that the heart of France lies between Paris and Brussels. In any war that defeated France then, Germany would have to go through Belgium, whose neutrality had been assured by the five great European powers since the Treaty of London 1839.

Germany meant to have war, however, and victories over Austria and France in 1866 and 1870 had shaped German military strategy so it embraced “decisive battles.” To achieve such battles, they would need to go through Belgium. As early as 1899, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, a German military officer and strategist, planned to invade France by going through Belgium. Further, the German military, rulers, and people had been convinced by Field Marshal Wilhelm von der Goltz’s book The Nation in Arms that Germany had been chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe.

While Wilhelm attempts to bring King Leopold of Belgium to his side, German military officers draw plans for war.