Their part in the victory of Tannenberg, which checked the Russian invasion of East Prussia, reinforced as it was by three years of uninterrupted victories on the Eastern Front, gave this formidable pair a prestige that was unmatched by any of their colleagues in the West, which was as much a graveyard of military reputations for German generals as it was for those of the Allies. Nor was there any civilian competition: Bethmann Hollweg was no Bismarck, and the Kaiser had squandered the reputation bequeathed to him by his grandfather long before the war began. So when in 1916 it became clear that Germany was fighting a total war involving the active participation of the entire nation, HL took over, almost by right, not only the supreme command of the German army but the leadership of the nation; a position to be assumed in Britain and France by the civilians Lloyd George and Clemenceau.
All might yet have been well for Germany and the world if these great soldiers had been politically neutral, but few great soldiers are, and these two certainly were not. Von Hindenburg, an old- fashioned conservative Junker, disliked the Reichstag and all it represented. Luden- dorff had long been a fully paid-up member of the extreme radical Right, whose annexationist foreign policy he strongly endorsed. He was not prepared even to consider the minimal Allied demand for the evacuation of Belgium, let alone abandon the huge new empire his armies were carving out in the East. When he took over power the Russians were defeated, the French exhausted, the British could be starved out, and the United States were a long way away. So long as the German people held firm for another year, he reckoned, Weltmacht lay within their grasp. Seldom has there been a more disastrous miscalculation.
This is the story that John Lee tells in this unpretentious new biography. He does not claim to contribute any new insights. He has used only the most easily available sources in English, and those not the most up-to-date. (In particular he seems unaware of the current controversy set on foot by Terence Zuber’s denial of the existence of a serious Schlieffen Plan.) But his narrative is clear and reliable, his maps are excellent, and if, understandably, his book is weighted on the side of operational military history, he has a firm enough grasp of German domestic politics to provide a reasonable balance. This is, in short, a good introduction to a huge and tragic subject by a very accomplished writer.
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