A Little WWI Background

The War That Was Never Supposed to Happen

In early August 1914, the world stumbled into the most catastrophic conflict it had ever seen — not through careful planning, but through a cascade of half-measures, fragile alliances, and stubborn pride. The great powers of Europe had spent decades constructing an elaborate web of mutual defense agreements, betting that the sheer horror of a pan-European war would prevent one from ever starting. They were catastrophically wrong.

The last time Europe’s major nations had truly fought each other was the Franco-Prussian War, which ended in 1871 with France humiliated, stripped of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and forced to pay crushing war reparations. That was 44 years in the past. France had healed, rearmed, and forged new alliances with Britain and Russia as insurance against further German ambitions. Germany, for its part, had a powerful partner in the vast Austro-Hungarian empire, whose domain stretched across much of the Balkans, including Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. In the intervening decades, the flare-ups of violence — skirmishes over Morocco, Egypt, East Africa, South Africa, and China; Russia’s humiliating defeat by Japan; America’s quick war with Spain; the periodic brush-fires of Balkan conflict — had all remained contained, local, and finite. The notion that the civilized nations of Europe would hurl themselves at one another in total industrial warfare seemed almost unthinkable. Almost.

A Shot in Sarajevo

The fuse was lit in June 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was shot dead in Sarajevo, Bosnia, by an ethnic Serb with ties to a Serbian nationalist network that had provided training and support to the conspirators. Austria-Hungary was furious and wanted satisfaction. Some historians argue that if Vienna had simply marched on Belgrade immediately, the whole affair might have burned out as another Balkan skirmish. But Austria hesitated, needing to be sure of Germany’s backing before acting.

The fatal month-long delay that followed allowed all the gears of the alliance system to begin grinding. Austria, reassured by Germany, issued a sweeping ultimatum to Serbia that included demands for Austrian officials to oversee the very investigation into the archduke’s murder — a breathtaking intrusion on Serbian sovereignty. Serbia was on the verge of capitulating to nearly every demand, until word arrived of Russia’s firm support. Russia had its own pact with France. And that meant Germany — now fully committed to Austria — suddenly faced enemies on both its eastern and western flanks simultaneously. When Serbia withheld final agreement on a handful of Austrian demands, the armies of Europe began to mobilize.

The Timetable to Catastrophe

Germany’s response to the two-front threat it now faced was to implement the Schlieffen Plan, a strategy developed over the preceding decade for exactly this nightmare scenario. The logic was blunt: attack France first and knock her out within two months before Russia’s notoriously slow mobilization could bring her armies westward. Then pivot east and deal with Russia. The war, Berlin calculated, would be over before Christmas.

Railroads Were the Key

Everything depended on the railroads. The rail networks of western Europe had been essentially complete since the late 1800s, and in Russia and eastern Europe they had expanded dramatically — from roughly 30,500 kilometers of track in 1890 to nearly 73,000 kilometers by the eve of the war. War planning had become, in large part, a problem of train scheduling. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers could be shifted from one front to another in a matter of days; supplies and artillery followed seamlessly behind. The lesson of the Franco-Prussian War — where France’s catastrophically mismanaged rolling stock left empty cars blocking the arrival of full ones — had been well absorbed. Coordinated timetables and ruthless logistical efficiency were now understood to be decisive military weapons in their own right.

The statistics are staggering. Germany’s war plans called for a meticulously choreographed 16-day mobilization requiring 11,000 trains. At the Hohenzollern Bridge alone, 2,150 trains of 54 wagons each crossed the Rhine between August 2nd and 8th — one every ten minutes. France assembled roughly 4,500 military trains for its own mobilization, moving a million soldiers and 400,000 horses to the front in the first two weeks of the war. Men remembered the troop trains for the rest of their lives. For many, that rattling, crowded, flower-festooned journey was the last moment the war felt like an adventure.

The German armies swept into France on timetables calculated years in advance, skirting the heavily fortified French border by crashing through Belgium. For a few weeks, it seemed to be working. Then the plan bogged down on the approaches to Paris, and the French, in the Battle of the Marne, threw the Germans back. In one celebrated improvisation, General Joseph Gallieni, Military Governor of Paris, commandeered roughly 600 Paris taxicabs at Les Invalides and dispatched them to carry soldiers to the front at Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, 50 kilometers away — the taxis dutifully running their meters the entire time (the French treasury later reimbursed 70,012 francs in fares). The military impact was modest — the bulk of the 150,000 soldiers in the French 6th Army had already been brought to the battle by train — but the symbolic power was enormous: the whole city had come to the army’s aid.

With the failure to overwhelm France, and Russian forces pressing from the east, Germany dug in. Both sides began throwing up trenches to mark and defend front lines that in some places sat barely a hundred meters apart. Those lines eventually stretched from the English Channel all the way to Switzerland.

Verdun and the Sacred Way

The trench lines of the Western Front stopped just short of Verdun, the ancient fortress city on the Meuse River that France refused to relinquish. But the double-track rail lines serving the city had already fallen to the Germans with the capture of the town of St. Mihiel. One remaining line — running east toward Paris through St. Menehould — was under near-constant German artillery bombardment. The only other option was a narrow-gauge track running south from Bar-le-Duc, operated by the Meusien railway (not unlike the Durango-Silverton line in Colorado). The unpaved road running alongside it became the primary lifeline of the entire Verdun garrison. The French, with characteristic flair for naming things under pressure, called it the Voie Sacrée — the Sacred Way.

It is in the hills, forests, and shattered towns around Verdun that the story of the 13th Engineers unfolds.