Echoes of the Great War in Ukraine

War in the 21st century shouldn’t be like this. Assembled ranks of military pundits (including this one) insisted that Russian mass, firepower and doctrinal sophistication above and below the threshold of formal conflict would deliver a quick outcome, at least in the conventional phase of any conflict with Ukraine.

Instead, we have had a thoroughly revisionist fight, conducted largely within the range of traditional weapon systems, from heavy artillery to the infantry bayonet. Drones and smart anti-armour kit have given glimpses of a future battlefield, but the essential nature of war looks as grisly and proximate as it ever has — to the extent that limited comparisons with the First World War now seem appropriate.

This is not to make the claim that, taken as a whole, the conflicts are in any way comparable. The Great War was a global conflict that destroyed four empires and, no matter what the challenges that face the Ukrainian government today, any direct comparison would be grotesque. However, in terms of specific operational cameos and some of the larger strategic themes, improbable parallels are beginning to emerge.

First up is the sprint for the enemy capital. When the Chief of the Great German General Staff, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, finalised his eponymous plan in 1905, he believed he had found a way to sequentially neutralise the political leadership and then annihilate the military capacity of France. By attacking in overwhelming force through neutral Belgium, he intended to envelop Paris from the west, which would then permit Germany to decapitate French political leadership in the capital, before pinning the bulk of the French army to its system of border fortifications, centred on Verdun, where it would be destroyed by German forces attacking from east and west simultaneously.

Schlieffen had previously written a definitive treatise on Hannibal’s conduct of the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, where the Carthaginian general destroyed one of the largest Roman armies ever to take the field. In doing so he created the military concept of double envelopment – where his army held the Roman centre while simultaneously wrapping around its flanks to completely trap it – a manoeuvre that generals from Napoleon Bonaparte to Norman Schwarzkopf (in the first Gulf War) have been trying to emulate ever since.

Schlieffen freely plagiarised Cannae and his plan was given form by the officers of the first – and pound for pound, perhaps the best — professional general staff to plan a campaign at this scale. In the event, the plan was fatally modified by Schlieffen’s successor, the flaccid and indecisive Moltke the Younger, and the operation failed.

So how did the Russians go about planning the attack on Kyiv? Any sense of Vladimir Putin poring over classical texts is probably wide of the mark. Indeed, even the extent to which his Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, was involved in the planning is open to question, as it seems a lash-up plan was devised between the Russian intelligence services and Kremlin insiders, which Gerasimov was invited to execute. The hideous confusion that followed is now a matter of record.

Any comparison in the genesis of the two plans seems purely coincidental and could lead to Schlieffen’s ghost suing for libel. But the aims and consequences look remarkably similar. Just as Schlieffen planned the two-step political and military defeat of France, so Putin intended the political neutralisation of Ukraine, followed by the double envelopment of the bulk of the Ukrainian army, fixed and isolated in position defending the Donbas by Russian forces simultaneously attacking from west and east.

Not only that, but, just as in 1914, the defeat of the initial attack led to a rapid reappraisal of the overall plan and settlement upon a set of much more limited objectives. In 1914 this led to trench systems being dug from the North Sea to the Swiss border; in 2022 it is leading to the attempted consolidation of Russian held territory in the east and south of Ukraine. In both cases, ambitious manoeuvre has been replaced by positional warfare; quick victory abandoned in favour of the long war; and, crucially, the attacker moving to gain the most advantageous position available in war by being simultaneously on the strategic offensive (by the occupation of enemy territory) and the tactical defensive (by inviting the enemy to win his territory back).

The disastrous Nivelle Offensive in 1917 broke the French army’s heart and the task of winning the tactical battle fell increasingly to the British. As early as the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the British had worked out how to take German-held defensive positions. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was holding them against the inevitable German counter-attack and without the support of observed artillery fire. The solution to this core tactical dilemma became the doctrine of “bite and hold”.

Rather than attempt large scale offensive operations designed to take ground across the full frontage of any attack, the “bite and hold” school advocated limited objectives that could be “softened up” by an intense artillery barrage followed by a rapid infantry assault. There would be no exploitation beyond the range of the supporting artillery which would effectively seal the ground taken against counter-attack. The process was deliberate and economical, but agonisingly slow. The next bite could not take place until the guns had been moved forward and – the constant limiting factor – resupplied with ammunition. Unless the process could gain tempo and momentum through the automation of some of the sub-processes, it was going to take a long time to win the war. Until, that is, the Battle of Amiens.

The British, Australian, Canadian and French forces that attacked on the 8th of August 1918 were supported by 500 tanks and embryonic offensive air support. They ruptured the German line to an unprecedented depth. The battle was characterised by the German commander Ludendorff as “the black day of the German army”. Its true significance lay in the fact that it was the beginning of the 100-day campaign that ended on November 11th and the defeat of Germany.

At the heart of this achievement was the leap of “bite and hold” from a limited, formulaic and rather laborious tactical evolution to large scale, automated and utterly relentless operational level manoeuvre. For the only time in its history, the British army became the leading exponent of handling mass on the land battlefield.

What is the Russian army doing now in the Donbas other than trying to perfect “bite and hold”? Having abandoned manoeuvre across large frontages, it is concentrating on the bite-sized attrition of Ukrainian forces. Russia has yet to achieve its Amiens moment — there has been no “black day of the Ukrainian army” – but the finely balanced battle in the Donbas not only holds the key to this phase of the war, but may also be replaying the drama of 1918.

So much for a passing military resemblance to 1914 – 18, but there are wider strategic parallels too. Revolution at home, mutiny in the fleet and the utter exhaustion of the field army led to German capitulation in 1918. But the German border was never crossed, Berlin never occupied nor the army stripped of its weapons. Versailles may have been a victor’s peace but for the authors of the “stab in the back” political mythology (which claimed Germany’s politicians may have been defeated but the army never was), the historical record was ambivalent. Ambivalent enough to support a political culture with Spartacists on the Left and Freikorps on the Right, leading to governments ranging from liberal Weimar in 1918 to the totalitarian Nazis in 1933.

An exactly parallel ambivalence may be about the assert itself in Ukraine. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the Russians will continue the war until they are able to claim ostensible victory, based on a defensible line enclosing the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Under these circumstances the Ukrainians will have lost a campaign but not a war of national survival and will endure as a sovereign entity, animated by irredentism. For the Russians, it will be a job no more than partially complete. For both sides an interim peace soon may do no more than establish the start lines of the next conflict. Just as what started in 1914 ended not in 1918 but in 1945, what has kicked off in 2022 is most unlikely to end on completion of the first phase of conflict.

Finally, there is the curious case of Emmanuel Macron’s historical amnesia. President Macron has made clear his support for the Kissinger school of realist international diplomacy. He judges it appropriate and right for Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia. No doubt he is acting from the highest motives in pursuit of peace on the European continent. There is, though, the possibility that he sees a role for himself in international arbitration; that economic business as usual would better suit France and the EU than the distraction of war; and, that anything that exaggerates the role of NATO is inimical to his idea of European strategic autonomy. But leaving all that to one side, is there no institutional memory within the French state of the burning resentment and humiliation that the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871 represented and the final requited joy its restoration meant to France in 1918?

Why would Macron inflict the same on Ukraine, Europe and the world?

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