Gordon A. Craig

The World War I Alliance of the Central Powers in Retrospect: The Military Cohesion of the Alliance

SOMEWHERE in the labyrinthine ways of Karl Krauss interminable moon drama, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, a character called the Grumbler comments upon the military alliance of the Central Powers and says that it reminds him of a partnership between Eskimos and natives of the Congo. How, he asks, could one expect military success from an association between a people that had made lack of system a way of life and another that seemed to deify order and live for it alone?1 That there was a certain temperamental incompatibility between the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies is doubtless true. Long before 1914 the well-trained, scientifically minded Prussian staff officers who had any contact with Austrians in similar positions were puzzled or shocked by the levity with which their southern colleagues went about the business of soldiering. In 1854 Prussias first military attach to Vienna, Prince Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, tried to explain to his Austrian colleagues how one used the Kriegsspiel, that time-tested method of training staff officers, and was asked by one of his auditors how you won money at it;2 and there must have been many other instances of this sort of thing. During World War I German officers were in-