PROLOGUE
“A
DRAMA NEVER SURPASSED”
Woe to
him who sets Europe on fire, who throws the match into
the powder box!
—HELMUTH
VON MOLTKE THE ELDER, MAY 1890
ON 2
AUGUST 1914, JUST A FEW HOURS BEFORE GERMAN TROOPS OCCUPIED Luxembourg and
thirty hours before war was declared between France and Germany, Lieutenant
Albert Mayer of 5th Baden Mounted Jäger Regiment led a patrol of seven riders
across a small ridge along the Allaine River near Joncherey, southeast of
Belfort.[1] Suddenly, French
guards of the 44th Infantry Regiment appeared. Mayer charged. He struck the
first Frenchman over the head with his broadsword, causing him to roll into a
roadside ditch. Another Jäger drove his lance into the chest of a second French
soldier. A third Jäger shot Corporal Jules-André Peugeot, making him the first
French casualty of the war. The remaining group of twenty French soldiers took
cover in the ditch and opened fire on the German sharpshooters. Mayer tumbled
out of the saddle, dead. In this unexpected manner, the twenty-two-year-old
Jäger became the first German soldier killed in the war. And in this bizarre
way, the first victim in what would collectively be called the Battle of the
Marne.
THE
MARNE WAS THE most significant land battle of the twentieth century. I
made that claim nearly a decade ago in a special issue of MHQ: The
Quarterly Journal of Military History dedicated to “Greatest Military
Events of the Twentieth Century.”[2] The research for this
book has only reinforced that belief. In fact, I would argue that the Marne was
the most decisive land battle since Waterloo (1815). First, the scale of the
struggle was unheard of before 1914: France and Germany mobilized roughly two
million men each, Britain some 130,000. During the momentous days between 5 and
11 September 1914, the two sides committed nearly two million men with six
thousand guns to a desperate campaign along the Marne River on a front of just two
hundred kilometers between the “horns of Verdun and Paris.” Second, the
technology of killing was unprecedented. Rapid small-arms fire, machine guns,
hand grenades, 75mm and 77mm flat-trajectory guns, 150mm and 60-pounder heavy
artillery, mammoth 305mm and 420mm howitzers, and even aircraft made the
killing ground lethal. Third, the casualties (“wastage”) suffered by both sides
were unimaginable to prewar planners and civilian leaders alike: two hundred
thousand men per side in the Battle of the Frontiers around the hills of
Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes in August, followed by three hundred thousand
along the chalky banks of the Marne in early September. No other year of the
war compared to its first five months in terms of death. Fourth, the immediate impact
of the draw on the Marne was spectacular: The great German assault on Paris had
been halted, and the enemy driven behind the Aisne River. France was spared
defeat and occupation. Germany was denied victory and hegemony over the
Continent. Britain maintained its foothold on the Continent. Finally, the
long-term repercussions of the Marne were tragic: It ushered in four more years
of what the future German military historian Gerhard Ritter, a veteran of World
War I, called the “monotonous mutual mass murder” of the trenches.[3]During that time, Britain
and the empire sustained 3.5 million casualties, France 6 million, and Germany
7 million[4]. Without the Battle
of the Marne, places such as Passchendaele, the Somme, Verdun, and Ypres would
not resonate with us as they do. Without the Battle of the Marne, most likely
no Hitler; no Horthy; no Lenin; no Stalin.
The
Marne was high drama. The Germans gambled all on a brilliant operational
concept devised by Chief of the General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905 and
carried out (in revised form) by his successor, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger,
in 1914: a lightning forty-day wheel through Belgium and northern France ending
in a victorious entry march into Paris, followed by a redeployment of German
armies to the east to halt the Russian steamroller. It was a single roll of the
dice. There was no fallback, no Plan B. Speed was critical; delay was death.
Every available soldier, active or reserve, was deployed from the first day of
mobilization. The sounds and sights of two million men trudging across Belgium
and northeastern France with their kit, guns, and horses in sweltering
thirty-degree-Celsius heat, stifling humidity, and suffocating dust was
stunning, and frightening. Tens of thousands of soldiers fell by the wayside
due to exhaustion, heatstroke, blisters, thirst, hunger, and typhus. Others
collapsed with gastroenteritis after devouring the half-ripe fruits in the
orchards they passed. Will Irwin, an American journalist observing the German
“gray machine of death” marching across Belgium, reported on something he had
never heard mentioned in any book on war—“the smell of a half-million un-bathed
men. … That smell lay for days over every town.”[5]
Still,
hundreds of thousands pushed on, a ragged and emaciated gray mass buoyed by the
“short-war illusion” that the decisive battle was just around the next bend in
the road. The home front waited anxiously for victory bulletins. Newspapers
vied with one another for any scrap of news or rumor from the front. The atmosphere
was electric—in Berlin, in Paris, and in London. Winston S. Churchill, looking
back on 1914, opined: “No part of the Great War compares in interest with its
opening.” The “measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces,” the
uncertainty of their deployment and engagement, and the fickle role of chance
“made the first collision a drama never surpassed.” Never again would battle be
waged “on so grand a scale.” Never again would the slaughter “be so swift or
the stakes so high.”[6] It is hard to argue with
Churchill.
The
Marne has lost none of its fascination. The famous “taxis of the Marne,” the
six hundred Renault cabs that rushed some three thousand men of French 7th
Infantry Division to the Ourcq River in time to “save” Paris from Alexander von
Kluck’s First Army, remain dear to every tourist who has bravely ventured forth
in a Parisian taxi-cab. Joseph Galliéni, the military governor of the Paris
Entrenched Camp, whose idea it was to use the taxis, remains in the popular
mind the brilliant strategist who appreciated the significance of Kluck’s turn
southeast before Paris, and who rallied the capital’s forces as well as French
Sixth Army to deprive the Germans of victory.
Books
on the Marne abound. A keyword search of the catalog of the Library of Congress
shows ten thousand titles. A similar perusal of the Google website brings up
174,000 hits. Most of these works are from the British and French perspective.
They deal with virtually every aspect of the Battle of the Marne, from the
company to the corps level, from the human to the material dimension. Bitter
disputes still rage over “reputations”[7]—from those of French chief
of staff Joseph Joffre to his British counterpart, Sir John French, and from
General Charles Lanrezac of French Fifth Army to Sir Douglas Haig of British I
Corps. No stone is left unturned in this never-ending war of ink.
This
book is different. For the first time, the Battle of the Marne is analyzed from
the perspective of those who initiated it: the seven German armies that invaded
Belgium and France. There was no “German army” before August 1914. Thus, the
story is told on the basis of what was a massive research effort in the
archives of the various German federal contingents: Baden XIV Army Corps
fighting in Alsace, Bavarian Sixth Army and Württemberg XIII Corps deployed in
Lorraine, Saxon Third Army struggling in the Ardennes, and Prussian First,
Second, and Fifth armies advancing in an arc from Antwerp to Verdun. The
collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989–90 proved to be a boon for
researchers: It gave me access to the records of Saxon Third Army at Dresden,
and to roughly three thousand Prussian army files long thought destroyed by
Allied air raids in 1945, but returned to Potsdam by the Soviet Union in 1988
and now housed at Freiburg. These allow a fresh and revealing look at the
Marne.
This
book raises a fundamental question: Was it truly the “Battle of the Marne”? The
campaign in the west in 1914, as illustrated by Lieutenant Albert Mayer’s death
in the Vosges, was an extended series of battles that raged from the Swiss
border to the Belgian coast. During its initial phase, commonly referred to as
the Battle of the Frontiers, major operations took place in Alsace, Lorraine,
Belgium, the Ardennes, and the Argonne. Each is an integral part of the larger
Battle of the Marne. In many ways, what is generally called the First Battle of
the Marne[8]—the bloody campaigns of
German First, Second, and Third armies against French Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth
armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) between Paris and Verdun from
5 to 11 September—was but the final act in this great drama. Even then, the
critical, desperate battles of German First Army and French Sixth Army took
place along the Ourcq River and not the Marne. Still, when it came time for the
victor to name the battle, French chief of staff Joffre chose Marne mainly
because most of the rivers in the region of decisive struggle—Ourcq, Grand
Morin, Petit Morin, Saulz, and Ornain—all flowed into the Marne.[9]
The
titanic clash of vast armies over an extended 480-kilometer front, then, was
not one battle at all. Rather, in the words of Sewell Tyng, a distinguished
historian of the Marne, it consisted of “a series of engagements fought
simultaneously by army corps, divisions, brigades, and even battalions, for the
most part independently of any central control and independently of the conduct
of adjacent units.”[10] Hence, the story is
told from the perspective of individual units in separate theaters. These range
from the cadets of France’s Saint-Cyr Military Academy advancing on Altkirch,
in Alsace, in full-dress uniform to the desperate struggle of German First
Army’s hundred thousand grimy and grisly warriors marching to the very
outskirts of Paris.
The
face of battle in each of these theaters is reconstructed on the basis of the
diaries and letters of “common soldiers” on both sides, French poilus and
German Landser. The much-neglected story of German atrocities
committed in Belgium and Lorraine from fear of attack by enemy irregulars
(francs-tireurs) likewise is rendered on the basis of the official reports,
diaries, and letters of German unit commanders and soldiers in the field. The
Bavarian archives reveal the horror of the atrocities at Nomeny, Gerbéviller,
and Lunéville, while the Saxon archives help sort out the terrible days when
Third Army stormed Dinant. In the process, many of the victims’ reports as well
as much of the Allied wartime propaganda are reevaluated.
Obviously,
the Battle of the Marne did not end the war. Nor did it suddenly and
irrevocably halt the war of maneuver envisioned by all sides before 1914. To be
sure, many historians have argued that the Marne brought a formal end to
maneuver warfare and that the military commanders thereafter callously accepted
an inevitable and indeterminate war of attrition. This simply is a post
facto construction. On the Allied side, General Joffre and Field
Marshal French saw the Battle of the Marne first as a radical reversal of the
Allies’ “Great Retreat,” and then as an opportunity to drive the Germans out of
France and Belgium and to take the war into the heartland of the Second Reich.
On the German side, Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, First Army’s
Alexander von Kluck, Second Army’s Karl von Bülow, and Lieutenant Colonel
Richard Hentsch saw the withdrawal from the Marne as a temporary course
correction, after which the drive on Paris would be renewed by refreshed and
replenished armies. Only Wilhelm II, always prone to sudden mood swings,
recognized the Marne as a defeat, as “the great turning point”
in his life.[11]
Given
its undisputed centrality in the history of World War I, the Battle of the
Marne not surprisingly has raised many “what if?” questions and created myths
and legends that have withstood almost a century of investigation. The greatest
of these is the most obvious: What if the German operations plan had succeeded
and Paris had fallen? The French government already had fled to Bordeaux.
Civilians were rushing to train stations to evacuate the capital. And Kaiser
Wilhelm II was not in a charitable mood. On the eve of the Battle of the Marne,
when he learned that German Eighth Army had taken ninety-two thousand Russian
prisoners of war during the Battle of Tannenberg, he suggested they be driven on
to a barren peninsula at Courland along the Baltic shore and “starved to
death.”[12] The Marne, in fact,
already was seen as a clash of civilizations, one pitting the German “ideas of
1914”—duty, order, justice—against the French “ideas of 1789”—liberty, fraternity,
equality. Or, in Wilhelm II’s simpler analogy, as a clash between “monarchy and
democracy.”[13]
On the
basis of three decades of research on imperial Germany and World War I, I can
state that the record on the implications of a German victory in 1914 is clear:
The result would have been a German “condominium” over the Continent “for all
imaginable time.” The Low Countries would have become German vassal states,
parts of northeastern France and its Channel coast would have come under
Berlin’s control, the countries between Scandinavia and Turkey would have been
forced to join a German “economic union,” and Russia would have been reduced to
its borders under Peter the Great.[14] The British policy
of the balance of power—that is, of not allowing any European hegemony to
emerge—would have lain in tatters. The Battle of the Marne was consequential in
blocking these developments. In the succinct words of General Jean-Jacques
Senant, military commander of the French Army Archives at the Château de
Vincennes, to an international gathering of scholars in 2004, “The Battle of
the Marne saved France and the rest of Europe from German domination. …
Indisputably, it is the first turning point of the war.”[15]
As
well, a host of lesser myths and legends enshrouded the Marne in Carl von
Clausewitz’s famous “fog of uncertainty” and refuse to disappear from the pages
of contemporary accounts of the battle.[16] Some were simply propaganda designed for
public consumption: the Kaiser’s planned entry into Nancy sitting astride a
white charger in the white dress uniform of the Guard Cuirassiers; the
twenty-meter-long German flag specially made to fly from the top of the Eiffel
Tower; the ten railroad cars loaded with commemorative medals for the fall of
Paris that accompanied Kluck’s First Army; and the twenty thousand Saxon
soldiers who opted to be taken prisoner at the climax of the Battle of the
Marne rather than to fight on. Others were the products of ambitious writers
and mythmakers: General Édouard de Castelnau’s alleged disobeying of Joffre’s
orders to abandon Nancy early in September (when the reverse was the case);
General Ferdinand Foch’s putative communiqué that while his position at the
Saint-Gond Marshes was “impossible … I attack;” Joffre’s reported command to
his staff on the eve of the battle, accentuated by pounding his fist on the
operations table, “Gentlemen, we shall fight it out on the Marne;” and General
Maurice Sarrail’s outrageous claim that he had refused Joffre’s “order to
abandon Verdun” and in the process assumed the title “Savior of Verdun.”
Indeed,
the Allies were not short on creating myths and legends of their own. On the
British side of the ledger, there remains the legend that the BEF “discovered”
the gap at the Marne between German First and Second armies; that it thereafter
brilliantly “exploited” the gap; and that, in the process, it “saved” France.
On the French side, there persists the myth of the putative miracle de
la Marne.[17] For too
long, this has served to obscure the fact that Joffre and his staff had not
been the benefactors of a divine “miracle,” but rather had brought about what
Louis Muller, the chief of staff’s orderly, called “une victoire
stratégique” and “un miracle mérite.”[18] This
book will set the record straight.
Other
myths were much more harmful, and again attest to the centrality of the Marne
in the history of what was later called the Great War. Certainly, that of Richard
Hentsch, a mere lieutenant colonel on the German General Staff, snatching
victory from the hands of Generals von Kluck and von Bülow at the moment of
certain triumph by ordering them to retreat behind the Marne was among the most
damaging. It obscured for decades the truth behind the German retreat: a flawed
command structure, an inadequate logistical system, an antiquated
communications arm, and inept field commanders. In the verdict of the Germany
official history of the war, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, General
von Bülow of Second Army had been hesitant and insecure; General von Kluck of
First Army, overly aggressive and unwilling to adhere to commands; and Chief of
Staff von Moltke, not up to the strains of command. “In the hour of decision
over the future of the German people,” the official historians concluded, “its
leader on the field of battle completely broke down psychologically and
physically.”[19]
Perhaps
most damaging, after the war numerous former commanders brought to the public
the myth that the German armies had not been defeated in the field but rather
denied victory by a “sinister conspiracy” on the part of Freemasons and Jews.
Erich Ludendorff, the “victor” of the Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian
Lakes in 1914 and Germany’s “silent dictator” from 1916 to 1918, championed
this school. In postwar writings, such as The Marne Drama, he
assured a defeated nation that the “secret forces of Freemasonry,” the
machinations of world Jewry, and the baleful influence of Rudolf Steiner’s
“occult” theosophy on General von Moltke’s wife, Eliza, had combined forces
against Germany.[20] Ludendorff’s
absurd claims, of course, helped to launch the infamous “stab-in-the-back”
postwar legend. This book judges the performance of the German armies and their
commanders at the Marne on the basis of official operational records rather
than on mischievous mythmaking.
Fritz
Fischer, arguably Germany’s most famous historian of the latter half of the
twentieth century, placed the Battle of the Marne squarely in the pantheon of
that mythmaking. In 1974, he stated that in addition to the two best-known and
most “highly explosive” German “moral-psychological complexes” arising from
World War I—the “war-guilt question” of 1914 and the “stab-in-the-back legend”
of 1918—there needed to be added a third: the Battle of the Marne. Or, better
put, “the secret of the Marne,” that is, the “defeat at the Marne 1914.” From
the moment that German troops stumbled back from the fateful river on 9
September, Fischer argues, first the government of Chancellor Theobald von
Bethmann Hollweg and then the Army Supreme Command conspired “systematically to
conceal” the enormity of the defeat from the public.[21] At the end of that
twenty-year journey of deception and deceit lay another bid at redemption:
World War II.
[1] Die Badener im
Weltkrieg 1914/1918, ed. Wilhelm Müller-Loebnitz (Karlsruhe: G. Braun,
1935), 20–21. The Peugeot Memorial at Joncherey today memorializes the spot.
[2] Holger H. Herwig, “The
Marne,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (Winter
2000): 10–11.
[3] Ritter to Hermann
Witte, 15 May 1917. Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in
seinen Briefen, eds. Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt (Boppard: H. Boldt,
1984), 202–03.
[4] Estimates by the U.S.
War Department.
[5] Report for Collier’s
Weekly; cited in Mark Sullivan, Our Times, 1900–1925 (New
York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 5:26.
[6] “Foreword” to Edmund
Spears, Liaison 1914: A Narrative of the Great Retreat (London:
Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1930), vii.
[7] A first effort was
undertaken by Basil Liddell Hart, Reputations, Ten Years After (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1928).
[8] There was to be a
second in the early summer of 1918.
[9]
Joffre, 1:420.
[10] Sewell Tyng, The
Campaign of the Marne 1914 (New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green,
1935), 81.
[11] Die
graue Exzellenz: Zwischen Staatsräson und Vasallentreue. Aus den Papieren des
kaiserlichen Gesandten Karl Georg von Treutler, ed. Karl-Heinz Janßen
(Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna: Ullstein, 1971), 167.
[12]
BA-MA, Nachlass Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, N 159, 4:292. Diary entry
for 4 September 1914.
[13] Cited in Holger H.
Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (London:
Arnold, 1997), 406.
[14] This is the
“minimalist” war-aims program that Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg
drafted on 9 September, the day of climax for the Battle of the Marne. See
Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegszielpolitik des
kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961), 113ff
[15] Les
batailles de la Marne de l’Ourcq à Verdun (1914 et 1918) (Soteca:
Éditions, 2004), 11.
[16] Tyng, Campaign
of the Marne, 342ff
[17] To the best of my
knowledge, the concept was first popularized by Gustave Babin in L’Illustration on
11 October 1915.
[18] Louis E. Muller, Joffre
et la Marne (Paris: G. Crès, 1931), 113ff.
[19] WK,
4:541.
[20] Erich
Ludendorff, Das Marne-Drama. Der Fall Moltke-Hentsch (Munich:
Ludendorffs Verlag, 1934).
[21] Fritz Fischer’s
“Introduction” to Karl Lange, Marneschlacht und deutsche Öffentlichkeit
1914–1939. Eine verdrängte Niederlage und ihre Folgen (Düsseldorf:
Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, 1974), 7.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario