CHAPTER
FOUR
THE
BLOODY ROAD WEST: LIÈGE TO LOUVAIN
No
plan of operations survives with any certainty beyond the first encounter with
the enemy’s major forces.
—HELMUTH
VON MOLTKE THE ELDER
THE
CITY OF LIÈGE WAS NOT ONE OF EUROPE’S DESIRED TOURIST destinations before
1914. In fact, it was a grimy industrial city of about 168,000 inhabitants that
straddled the Meuse (Maas) River in northeastern Belgium—thirty kilometers from
the German border to the east and fifteen from the Dutch border to the north.
But it did get the occasional visitor. Among these in 1911 was a foreboding
German dressed in a nondescript business suit. He was conspicuous not so much
by his large round head with its receding hairline, jowled red face, piercing
blue eyes, drooping bushy mustache, or barrel chest, but rather by a face that
never smiled and a demeanor that never showed a hint of kindness or compassion.
Humor was beyond his range.
The
German visitor parked his open-top automobile on a promontory southeast of what
to him was Lüttich, above the Maas Valley.[1] One hundred meters
below him spread the sights of Liège: the curve of the river, the gleaming
steel bands of the Belgian railway, and the spires of the Cathedral de Liège,
the Église Saint-Barthélemy, and the Église Saint-Jacques. He neatly unfolded a
map on the hood of the car. On his right, the river flowed through a deep
ravine in the center of the city and then disappeared off to the north; on his
left, wooded hills stretched to the Ardennes Plateau, off to the southeast. But
mostly, the visitor took careful note of a sixteen-kilometer-wide passageway,
the Liège Gap, which ran through the city and stretched between the Netherlands
and the Ardennes; beyond lay the rolling plains of the Hesbaye region. As well,
he studied the city’s outer belt of a dozen fortresses. For Colonel Erich
Ludendorff, chief of the Mobilization and Deployment Section of the German
General Staff, was in charge of drafting plans for the Handstreich (bold
strike) against Liège that would kick off the Schlieffen-Moltke deployment plan
in a future war.
LIÈGE,
EVENING OF 6 AUGUST 1914
LIÉGE
WAS FOUNDED IN 558 when Saint Monulph, bishop of Tongres, built a chapel
at the confluence of the Meuse and Legia rivers. It saw its share of Europe’s violent
past. In 1467 and again in 1468, when the Liègois foolishly declared war on the
Duchy of Burgundy, Charles the Bold razed the walls of the city. In 1703, the
Duke of Marlborough stormed Liège’s two forts, the Citadel and La Chartreuse,
preparatory to his invasion of the German states the next year. In 1794, French
Revolutionary armies sacked the city and destroyed the great cathedral of
Saint-Lambert. Napoleon I occupied Liège for the duration of his rule.
But
Liège survived—and prospered. The high-grade coal of the Meuse Valley between
Seraing and Herstal fueled Liège’s factories, and the city quickly developed
into Belgium’s chief manufacturing center—the fabled “Birmingham of Belgium.”
The faubourg of Herstal became world-renowned as a producer of fine arms—to the
point that Ludwig Loewe of Berlin, manufacturer of the famous Mauser small
arms, in 1896 seized a controlling interest in the giant Fabrique nationale
d’armes de guerre. The railway brought further wealth and prominence, and Liège
became a major hub on the main rail line leading from Berlin to Brussels—and on
to Paris.
All
this strategic wealth demanded protection. Beginning in 1888, Henri Alexis
Brialmont, a military engineer who had built Bucharest’s belt of defenses,
began work on what over time became a fifty-two-kilometer ring of twelve forts
some six to seven kilometers from Liège’s center. From north to south, there
were six on the right bank of the Meuse (Barchon, Evegnée, Fléron,
Chaudfontaine, Embourg, and Boncelles), and another six on the river’s left
bank (Pontisse, Liers, Lantin, Loncin, Hollogne, and Flémalle). The average
distance between the forts was nineteen hundred meters, with the largest gap
seven thousand meters. Friedrich Krupp of Essen had won the contract to modernize
the forts’ four hundred guns, with the result that by 1914 a new mix of modern
120mm, 150mm, and 210mm heavy guns, mortars, and howitzers overlapped one
another’s zones of fire.
Brialmont
built well. All the forts were constructed with concrete casemates. The
turtle-shaped steel cupolas that housed the heavy guns could be elevated
automatically to fire and then to retract. A clear field of fire was assured by
sloping the cleared terrain down and away from the guns. Brialmont studded this
glacis with barbed-wire entanglements. Underground tunnels connected the forts,
each of which was self-contained with its own ammunition chambers, storerooms,
kitchens, water cisterns, power generators, latrines, and laundry facilities. A
ventilation system assured fresh air for each fort’s peacetime complement of
eighty defenders.
General
Gérard Mathieu Leman, an officer of engineers and a longtime instructor at the
Belgian War College, had been selected as governor of Liège only a few months
before the outbreak of the war. He had under his command twenty-five thousand
regular troops of 3d Infantry Division (ID) as well as 15th Infantry Brigade
(IB) of the field army, forty-five hundred garrison troops, and about twelve
thousand soldiers of the reserves and the Garde civique (militia). His
handwritten orders from King Albert on 4 August 1914 were simple: “I charge you
to hold to the end with your division the position which you have been
entrusted to defend.”[2]
DURING
THE NIGHT OF 1–2 August, advance elements of German 29th and 69th
regiments, 16th ID, crossed into the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg on bicycles, in
armored cars and automobiles, and by train.[3] They met no
resistance and no sabotage. They secured the duchy’s bridges, railways, and
roads, and occupied its capital on the morning of 2 August. The next day,
Germany declared war on France and Belgium.
Horsemen
from 2d, 4th, and 9th cavalry divisions (CD) smartly moved westward out of
Aachen and into Belgium. Their mission was to scout the thirty kilometers of
terrain that lay between Aachen and Liège. They encountered no resistance. Late
in the morning of 3 August, they entered the small village of Battice, about
ten kilometers east of Liège. They assumed that the “neutral” Belgians would
put up only token resistance. Several shots rang out from one of the houses.
Three or four riders tumbled out of their saddles onto the cobbled street.
Francs-tireurs! For four decades, German soldiers had been fed stories of how
French “irregulars” had ambushed, mutilated, and poisoned German forces during
the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). In short order, the cavalrymen executed
three Belgian civilians, drove the rest out of their homes, and set Battice on
fire.[4]
Still
farther north, Georg von der Marwitz advanced with the remainder of II Cavalry
Corps and 34th IB against Visé, on the Meuse River just south of the Dutch
border. At Warsage, his uhlans took fire from several houses.[5] Marwitz’s troopers
seized and then executed six hostages. At Visé, Marwitz discovered that the
Meuse bridges had been destroyed. For a third time that day, his horsemen came
under fire from civilians. He ordered suspected houses burned to the ground and
627 hostages rounded up and eventually deported to Germany. Heavy fire from
Liège’s northernmost fort (Pontisse) prevented the uhlans from crossing the
river on 4 August. But at four o’clock[6] the next morning,
units of Otto von Garnier’s 4th CD managed to ford the Meuse at Lixhe, hard
against the Dutch frontier. They strapped together numerous steel boats, laid
boards across them, and thus assisted 34th IB across the river.[7] Marwitz’s riders then
pushed on toward Tongeren, northwest of Liège.
The
noose around Liège was beginning to tighten. Allied fliers at dusk on 4 August
had caught brief glimpses of an awe-inspiring sight: six gray-clad, reinforced
infantry brigades and an entire cavalry corps—twenty-five thousand soldiers,
eight thousand horsemen, and 124 guns—advancing in five mighty columns out of
the east along a forty-kilometer front from Aachen to Malmédy. They were part
of Otto von Emmich’s X Army Corps, Second Army. While the latter’s commander,
Karl von Bülow, was leisurely making his way west from Hanover, his deputy
chief of staff was already on the scene. Erich Ludendorff instantly became one
of the few staff planners in history ever to draft and then take part in the
execution of his own operations plan.
The Handstreich prepared
for Liège by Ludendorff in 1911 was based on a garrison force of six thousand
regulars, augmented by three thousand militiamen.[8] This proved to be a
gross miscalculation. As noted earlier, Leman in early August 1914 had under
his command about thirty thousand soldiers of 3d ID, 15th IB, the garrison
force, and the Garde civique. But it was a motley collection, as if imported
directly from the stage of a Franz Lehár operetta: the regular infantry in
blue-and-white uniforms, the chasseurs à pied in green and
yellow with flowing capes and peaked caps, and the Civic Guard in high round
hats and red facings. Flemish milk-cart dogs pulled the machine guns (mitrailleuses) only
recently begged from France. How would this ragtag rabble, led by a quiet
academic from the Belgian War College, stand up against the approaching furor
teutonicus?
The
answer was not long in coming. On the afternoon of 4 August, the defenders of
Barchon bloodily repulsed an attack by units of 53d Infantry Regiment (IR) as
it charged the glacis leading up to the fort’s walls. The next day, 34th IB
lost 30 officers and 1,150 men at Visé. On 6 August, 14th IB, attacking the
center line of Liège, sustained more than 50 percent casualties[9]. In the south, the
Belgians warded off all attempts by 9th CD to cross the Meuse between Liège and
Huy. Not even a spectacular night bombing attack on Liège by Zeppelin VI out of
Cologne intimidated Leman; while its thirteen small bombs killed nine civilians
and in the process launched a new form of warfare, the military effect was
negligible. Moreover, the airship leaked gas on the way home and had to
crash-land at Bonn.[10] And when Emmich sent
an emissary under a white flag to demand Leman’s surrender, the plucky
professor, who had earlier barely escaped an attempt by the Germans to take him
prisoner, replied, “Force your way through the gap.”[11]
Leman’s
valiant defenders had caused five of the six German attacking brigades to beat
a hasty retreat. Headlines in Brussels papers screamed out the news: “Grande
Victoire Belge!” Those in London and Paris spoke of a major “rout” of
no fewer than 125,000 German troops, and of at least 20,000 enemy casualties.
The French republic bestowed the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on Liège
and the Military Medal on King Albert. However, Chief of the General Staff
Joseph Joffre adamantly refused to divert French troops from his concentration
plan to assist the beleaguered Belgians. Firmly convinced that the main German
thrust would not come across the Meuse, he only reluctantly dispatched Louis
Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps to secure the Meuse bridges between Givet and
Namur and Jean-François Sordet’s I Cavalry Corps to scout southern Belgium.[12] For almost ten days,
Sordet managed mainly to exhaust both men and horses.
What
had happened to the German assault? Carl von Clausewitz’s proverbial “fog of
uncertainty” ruled the battlefield. Already during the advance, units lost
their way in the dark. Officers were separated from their horses. Maps could
not be located. Field kitchens were left behind. Soldiers panicked and shot at
one another. Suspected fire from civilians added to the chaos. German units stopped
to shoot and burn. Moreover, war in its primordial form, as Clausewitz stated,
was “slaughter” (Schlacht). German infantry assaults in close
formation were a target-rich environment even for Leman’s half-trained
soldiers. The mitrailleuses spat out a steady stream of death
at 150 rounds every sixty seconds. A withering artillery fire swept the massed
German infantry columns before the forts’ walls.
Still,
the Hanoverians and Westphalians of Emmich’s X Corps continued to advance. They
made their way over a veritable wall of dead—only to be gunned down in turn. A
letter by an anonymous Belgian officer told the story well:
As
line after line of German infantry advanced, we simply mowed them down. … They
made no attempt at deploying, but came on, line after line, almost shoulder to
shoulder, until, as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped one on top of the
other, in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men that threatened to mask
our guns and cause us trouble.[13]
Perhaps
some of the veterans on the German General Staff remembered that in 1895,
Martin Köpke had warned Alfred von Schlieffen against expecting “quick,
decisive victories,” as even “the most offensive spirit” could achieve little
more than “a tough, patient and stouthearted crawling forward step-by-step.”
Liège in 1914 confirmed Köpke’s dire prediction. The campaign in Belgium, to
use the general’s words, had degenerated into “siege-style” warfare.[14] Only the means had
changed, with monstrous howitzers, still to be brought up, becoming the modern
trebuchet.
Numerous
German commanders lamented that there had not been sufficient prewar nighttime
training, that neither war games nor staff rides had prepared the army for the
lethality of the modern battlefield, and that commanders from the company level
on up had sought to overcome firepower with dash and daring. The results had
been staggering casualty rates, especially among infantry officers. With regard
to nighttime fighting, many units adopted special white armbands as well as
common passwords, and officers ordered the men to advance with unloaded rifles
to cut down on the devastating occurrences of friendly fire.[15]
Not
surprisingly, the Germans were furious that the Belgians had refused them free
passage through what they considered a neutral country. They denied the
legitimacy of Belgian military resistance. The result was predictable: a
veritable orgy of shooting and burning. By 8 August, almost 850 civilians had
been killed and thirteen hundred buildings burned down in such nondescript places
as Micheroux, Retinne, Soumagne, and Melen, among others.[16] Whereas Schlieffen
had believed that Liège could be invested by a single division, and Ludendorff
that it could be stormed by thirty-nine thousand men, the reality was that by 8
August, the Belgians had beaten back all attempts by X Corps to storm the
forts—at the cost in blood of fifty-three hundred casualties. The corpses
bloated in the broiling sun.
Still,
the German attack threatened to cut Liège off from the rest of the country.
Faced with this possibility, General Leman on 6 August released 3d ID and 15th
IB to withdraw to the line of the Gette (Gete) River and fight another day. But
he was determined to hold the twelve forts with their skeletal complements for
as long as possible in accordance with the instructions he had received from
King Albert.
The
one bright note in the otherwise disastrous German assault was the plan’s
architect, Ludendorff. As deputy chief of Second Army, he was not scheduled to
play an active role in the campaign. But fate intervened. While waiting for
Bülow to make his way to Belgium, Ludendorff found himself caught up in the
maelstrom of the battle for Liège. He followed Emmich into the outskirts of the
city. At Retinne, just north of Fort Fléron, he stumbled across 14th IB, whose
commander, Friedrich von Wussow, had recently been killed. Ludendorff did not
hesitate for even a moment. He took command of the brigade and in
house-to-house fighting made his way through the Queuede-Bois, up out of the
Meuse Valley, and onto the heights near the old Carthusian monastery of La
Chartreuse. After overnighting there, Ludendorff at around noon on 7 August
spied a white flag flying from the Citadel. Surrender? He sent an officer to
investigate. No such luck. At 6 PM, the officer returned to report that General
Leman had informed him that the white flag had been raised against his will.
By
then, Ludendorff and 14th IB found themselves in a precarious position—short of
ammunition and food, down to a strength of only fifteen hundred men, burdened
with a thousand Belgian prisoners of war, isolated within the iron ring of
Leman’s forts, and cut off from the rest of their forces. The men were nervous.
“I shall never forget the night of August 6/7,” Ludendorff later wrote. “It was
cold. … I listened feverishly for the sound of fighting. I still hoped that at
least one brigade or another had broken through the line of forts.”[17] None had.
Undaunted,
Ludendorff pushed on into the city the next morning. He dispatched an advance
guard under Colonel Burghardt von Oven to take the Citadel. Then he
commandeered an automobile and with his adjutant drove up to the Citadel. There
was not a German sentry to be seen, only Belgian soldiers. In a piece of
audacious cheek, Ludendorff straightened himself up, dusted off his uniform,
clenched the monocle into his right eye socket, strode up to the Citadel’s
gates, and rapped on them with the pommel of his sword. The gates opened. The
courtyard was filled with startled Belgian troops. One of the truly great “what
if?” scenarios of modern history was at hand. What if a Belgian soldier had
shot the general? What if he had been arrested and turned over to the French?
Modern German history may well have taken a different course[18] “The few hundred
Belgians [inside the Citadel],” Ludendorff later triumphantly recorded,
“surrendered at my summons.”[19] For some reason,
Colonel von Oven had opted to bypass the Citadel and to head for Fort Loncin.
A
grateful Kaiser Wilhelm II “smothered” Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the General
Staff, with kisses.[20] Next, he awarded the
war’s first prestigious Pour le Mérite medal to Ludendorff[21]. Then, remembering
that Emmich was the field commander of X Corps, he bestowed the decoration on
that officer as well.
News
of the coup de main at the Citadel hit the newspapers in Germany immediately.
Joyous celebrations erupted in many cities. Bülow’s staff—without a direct
connection to the troops besieging Liège, since X Corps had not been provided
with a communications detachment—had intercepted Emmich’s terse private
telegram to his wife: “Hurrah, at Liège.” A more formal epistle informed Second
Army that Emmich had entered the city at 7:45 AM on 7 August. “The
Governor in Flight. The Bishop a prisoner. Liège evacuated by Belgian troops.
Citadel of Liège occupied by our troops. As yet not known which forts have been
taken.”[22] The last sentence
raised eyebrows at Bülow’s headquarters—as did the fact that thereafter a
deafening silence ensued. For almost two days, no word came out of Liège. Wild
rumors circulated at once: The entire 14th IB had been taken prisoner by the
Belgians; Ludendorff had been killed in action; Bülow had been shot by his
sentry; losses on both sides had been horrendous; and all the forts had
surrendered.
The
delay at Liège caused near panic on the morning of 8 August at Army Supreme
Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL) in Berlin as well as at Bülow’s
temporary headquarters at Aachen. In Berlin, Wilhelm II maliciously accused
Moltke of having “brought the English down about my ears for nothing” with his
invasion of neutral Belgium. For a second time since 1 August, when the kaiser
had brutally rebuked Moltke for his refusal to concentrate solely against
Russia after Ambassador Karl von Lichnowsky had sent word that London would keep
Paris out of the war if Germany did not attack France, the chief of the General
Staff collapsed psychologically. His deputy, Hermann von Stein, witnessed “a
most serious nervous breakdown,” a “cascade of tears,” and eventual “utter
apathy” on the part of Moltke. The latter “never forgot those words;” they
“weighed heavily on him” in subsequent days. Moltke eventually recovered and
put on a brave front. “Gentlemen, you have seen me weak and agitated,” he
informed his staff. “The struggles before mobilization and the Kaiser’s words
had made me brittle. I have now overcome that and you shall witness a different
me.”[23]
At
Aachen, Bülow’s staff also became anxious. First and Second armies, roughly six
hundred thousand soldiers and a quarter million horses, had to squeeze through
the narrow corridors first of Aachen and then of Liège before they could
debouch on the Hesbaye Plateau. Martial law had been declared at Aachen and the
streets cleared for the troops; it would take five days to march them through
its narrow medieval lanes. Their equipment had been routed through Düsseldorf
to ease the congestion. Each army corps occupied thirty kilometers of road,
each division fifteen, and each corps’ munitions trains twenty. If Liège held
out much longer, First and Second armies would have to march through the
Netherlands—and thus violate another neutral nation.
Bülow
took charge. On 8 August, with Moltke’s consent, he augmented Emmich’s original
force of thirty-three thousand infantry and cavalry with a new siege army of
sixty thousand (IX and VII corps) commanded by Karl von Einem-Rothmaler. A
former Prussian war minister, Einem had won the Iron Cross as a lieutenant in
the Franco-Prussian War and in 1914 commanded VII Corps at Münster. He took his
time. He put an end to the senseless slaughter of massed infantry charges at
the Liège forts and waited for the heavy siege artillery—developed in peacetime
by Ludendorff for just this purpose—to arrive on the scene.
As
soon as he set foot on Belgian territory, Einem confessed to his wife that he
deeply “regretted” the “brutal nature” of the conflict. “Unfortunately,” he
wrote on 8 August, “the [Belgian] populace takes part in the war.” Men and
women from concealed positions fired on the troops, especially under the cover
of darkness. “I have ordered that the villages be burned down and everyone
[seized] shot.” Two days later, he repeated his outrage at “the insidious,
detestable blood thirstiness of the Belgians.” He maintained a hard stance.
“Unfortunately, we had to singe and burn a lot and many inhabitants forfeited
their lives.” The burned-out villages between Battice and Herve, he noted,
“defy description. This is what the ruins of Pompey … must look like.” He
lamented that many soldiers in their eagerness to get at the enemy had fired on
their fellow warriors.[24]
While
he waited for the heavy artillery to arrive, Einem took stock of the situation.
Not a single fort had fallen. Their garrisons had held tough. General von
Emmich was in the “remarkable position” of having forced his way into the city
between Forts Fléron and Evegnée—only to “find himself in a mousetrap.”
Military history, Einem wryly noted, had been “enriched by a new, paradoxical
example” at this “damned fortress”: “Emmich inside and we outside.”[25] The men were hungry,
thirsty, and tired. What remained of Marwitz’s eight thousand cavalry mounts
were dangerously short on oats. The heat continued unabated. The only good news
was that on 8 August, 14th IB finally managed to break out of the Belgian steel
ring that encircled them and to take Fort Barchon. Fort d’Evegnée fell on the
night of 11 August.
In the
afternoon of 12 August, Einem spied a welcome sight: the monstrous black heavy
siege guns. First came the 305mm Austrian Škoda howitzers. Moved in three
sections, they could be assembled in forty minutes. Instead of tires, they
crept forward on what their crews called “iron feet”—that is, steel tracks.
Next came the four 420mm Krupp monsters. Each had a crew of two hundred. Each
took six hours to emplace. Each could fire a shell with 150 kilograms of
explosives a distance of fourteen kilometers. Each was fired electrically from
a distance of three hundred meters by a gun crew wearing protective head
padding. Célestin Demblon, a deputy of Liège, marveled at the Krupp piece.
The
monster advanced in two parts, pulled by 36 horses. The pavement trembled. …
Hannibal’s elephants could not have astonished the Romans more! The soldiers
who accompanied it marched stiffly with an almost religious solemnity. It was
the Belial[26] of
cannons![27]
Both
the škodas and the Krupp “Big Berthas”[28] fired armor-piercing
shells with delayed fuses that allowed them to penetrate their targets before
exploding.
The
issue was never in doubt. Within forty-eight hours, Leman’s forts were
pulverized into submission: first Pontisse, then Chaudfontaine and Embourg,
next Liers and Fléron and Evegnée east of the Meuse; thereafter, Boncelles,
Lantin, and Loncin west of the river. The last two, Hollogne and Flémalle,
lowered the Belgian tricolor on 16 August.[29] Each fort took about
thirty heavy shells. Ludendorff had arrived at Fort Loncin just in time to see
a single shell from a Big Bertha rip through the concrete roof, blow up its
magazine, and cause the entire structure to collapse.
Dazed
and blackened Belgian soldiers, accompanied by some Germans who had been taken
prisoner on the night of August 5/6, crawled out of the ruins. Bleeding, with
their hands up, they came toward us. “Ne pas tuer, ne pas tuer.”[30] … We
were no Huns. Our men brought water to refresh our enemies.[31]
Loncin
held a surprise for the Germans: Under its broken concrete slabs and twisted
girders they found General Leman, unconscious and nearly asphyxiated by
poisonous fumes. Emmich was at the scene. He had met Leman at peacetime
military maneuvers and congratulated the Belgian on the tenacity of his
defense. Leman’s one concern was that it be recorded that he had carried out
King Albert’s orders to the letter. “Put in your dispatches that I was
unconscious.” He then offered Emmich his sword. In the war’s first (and perhaps
last) act of true chivalry, the German declined to take it. “No, keep your
sword. To have crossed swords with you has been an honor.”[32] Leman had lost
twenty thousand men at Liège.[33]
As
soon as the debris could be cleared from the roads, German First and Second
armies filed through and around the city and headed for the Liège Gap.
Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Groener’s Field Railway Service of twenty-six
thousand men had restored the lines between Aachen and (now) Lüttich, and only
the great tunnel at Nasproué remained blocked, for the Belgians had rammed
seventeen locomotives at full speed into one another inside the tunnel.[34] Leman’s gallant
defense of Liège had cost the Germans perhaps two days on the Schlieffen-Moltke
master timetable.[35]
MILITARY
WISDOM NOW SUGGESTED that King Albert concentrate his remaining units at
Namur, Belgium’s second great fortress on the Meuse, and there force the
Germans into another bloody siege. But Albert was determined to maintain his
army on Belgian soil—the only escape from Namur would have been south or west
into France—and to keep open his line of retreat to Fortress Antwerp. Hence, he
regrouped his formations along the line of the Gette River. At the little
village of Haelen, Leon de Witte’s cavalry division, fighting as dismounted
riflemen, on 12 August gallantly blunted the saber and lance charges of six
regiments of Marwitz’s II Cavalry Corps as it attempted to storm the river
crossings.[36] Known
as the Battle of the Silver Helmets in Belgian folklore, Haelen was the first
cavalry battle (and the first Allied victory) of the war. Still, Namur, to the
southwest of Liège, and Louvain (Leuven), to the northwest, lay squarely in the
path of the German advance.
On 17
August, Moltke issued new orders for the main German thrust into Belgium by
sixteen army corps and two cavalry corps, three-quarters of them the pride of
the Prussian army. The three northernmost armies were to converge on the Sambre
River; First and Second armies were to cut off any Belgian attempt to withdraw
to Antwerp; and Third Army was to attack the line of the Meuse between Namur
and Givet. Speed was of the essence. First and Second armies had to pass
through a dangerous eighty-kilometer-wide corridor between the fortresses of Namur
and Antwerp, all the while securing their left flanks against suspected French
forces south of the Sambre.
Unlike
the armies in the German center and south, these were commanded not by royal
princes but rather by professional soldiers with the special rank of Generaloberst (literally,
colonel general, or a “four-star”). At the extreme right wing, Alexander von
Kluck’s First Army consisted of 120 battalions and 748 guns. Schlieffen had
assigned this formation the role of “hammer” in his plan: First Army was to
march some seven hundred kilometers through Belgium, across northern France,
and along the English Channel before descending on Paris from the northwest and
driving the French armies against the “anvil” of the German forces holding in
Lorraine. Its commander in 1914 was a rarity in the highest echelons of
Prussian field commanders: a self-made man, non-noble and non-Prussian. Kluck
was born at Münster, in Westphalia, on 20 May 1846 and saw service with the
Prussian army against both Austria (1866) and France (1870–71). Thereafter, he
rose rapidly through the ranks on the basis of merit: command of a division by
1902, of V Corps in 1906, of I Corps one year later, and then of Eighth Army
Inspectorate at Berlin in 1913. Kluck was rewarded for his military career with
a patent of nobility in 1909. His service had been primarily commanding troops
rather than staff work. He was fierce-looking and self-assured, almost to the
point of arrogance.
South
of First Army ranged Karl von Bülow’s Second Army of 137 battalions and 820
guns. Its primary task, along with First Army, was to deliver the decisive blow
against the French forces in and around Paris. Bülow was a striking contrast
with Kluck: Born at Berlin on 24 March 1846 into an ancient Mecklenburg noble
clan, he had a plethora of career paths open to him. He chose the military. His
brother Bernhard opted instead for the diplomatic corps and then served as
chancellor from 1900 to 1909. Like Kluck, Bülow had fought in the
Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian Wars. Thereafter, he had enjoyed a
notable rise: commander of the prestigious 4th Foot Guards, department head at
the Prussian War Ministry, and in 1902 deputy chief of the General Staff under
Schlieffen. The following year, he received III Corps and in 1909 Third Army
Inspectorate at Hanover. In 1914, Bülow was given Second Army and would soon be
entrusted also with command over Kluck’s First Army. With white hair and
mustache and a puffy face, he looked more the genial uncle than the fierce
warrior. Much of the campaign in the fall of 1914 would depend on how closely
these two vastly different personalities cooperated.
South
of Second Army was Max von Hausen’s Third Army—the third formation of the pivot
wing, the so-called Schwenkungsflügel. At 101 battalions and 596
guns, it was the smallest of the German armies. And it was Saxon. Hausen was
born in Dresden on 17 December 1846. During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866,
Saxony sided with the Austrian Empire, and as a result Hausen had fought
against Berlin.[37] After
German unification, he taught at the Military Academy from 1871 to 1874, and
then transferred to the General Staff (1875–87). He commanded XII Corps from
1900 to 1902, and then served as Saxon war minister until 1914. During his
tenure, Hausen worked diligently to uphold and even to expand the Prusso-Saxon
Military Convention of 1867[38]. He resisted all
attempts from within the army to reassert Saxon particularism. In May 1914,
Hausen retired after a brilliant career that had spanned half a century. But
given that King Friedrich August III had no military interest and that Crown
Prince Friedrich August Georg was but twenty-one years old, Wilhelm II on 1
August reactivated Hausen’s commission and entrusted him with Third Army.
Hausen’s was a difficult role: to cross the Meuse River near Dinant and, as the
situation demanded, offer assistance either to Bülow’s Second Army on his right
flank or to Duke Albrecht of Württemberg’s Fourth Army on his left. His
relationship with the senior Bülow would be critical to the execution of his
mission.
THE
ADVANCE ON PARIS by three German armies of 358 battalions of infantry and
2,164 guns required tight command and control. It received neither. Instead,
Imperial Headquarters—the Großes Hauptquartier (GHQ), of which the OHL was but
one, albeit major, part—consisted of what one scholar has called “a middle
thing between a supreme military council and an imperial court.”[39] It, in fact, was a
mammoth, unwieldy conglomeration consisting of the kaiser, the chief of the
General Staff and his deputy, the chief of the Admiralty Staff, the Prussian
war minister, the chiefs of the Civil, Military, and Navy cabinets, the
chancellor, the state secretary of the Foreign Office, the military
plenipotentiaries of the German federal states, the military representative of
the Austro-Hungarian ally, and the kaiser’s host of adjutants and personal
staff. Master of ceremonies for this vast camp was an imperial favorite,
General Hans von Plessen.
Imperial
Headquarters remained in Berlin during the period of mobilization and
concentration. Then, at 7:55 AM on Sunday, 16 August, it departed for
the front—or at least Koblenz, eight hundred kilometers southwest at the
confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers—in eleven trains. Karl von Wenninger,
the Bavarian military plenipotentiary, captured the enormity of the operation
in his war diary.[40] “Wonderful
express-train cars; a separate compartment for every 2 gentlemen. I even saw a
dining car.” The sign on one compartment startled him: “‘Her Excellency v.
Moltke with lady’s-maid.’ So, we are even being mothered.” The chief of the
General Staff had insisted that his wife accompany him into battle. There were
no cheering crowds to see them off in Berlin. Just out of the station,
Wenninger stood in amazement as the “gigantic royal train of H[is] M[ajesty]
glided by.” The chefs were already at their stations, perspiring profusely as
they prepared the midday meal. The trains avoided major routes and slowly
rolled toward Koblenz on stretches of rail well off the beaten track. Guards
had been posted at every crossing. Before noon, a major from the General Staff
distributed seating lists for the dining car: “12 o’clock breakfast, 7 o’clock
dinner.” Within minutes, he returned with the list of sleeping car assignments.
“Now, are we truly warriors,” General von Wenninger caustically wondered, “or
sybarites?” Whatever the case, the minute his train entered the Kingdom of
Bavaria near Ritschenhausen, he had a hundred-liter keg of beer meet it.
Precisely
according to plan—this was, after all, the German General Staff—the trains
pulled into Koblenz station at eight o’clock the next morning. “Patches of fog
enveloped castles and vineyards,” Wenninger noted. Wilhelm II established his
headquarters at Koblenz Castle; the General Staff, at the Hotel Union; the rest
of the retinue, at the Parkhotel Koblenzer Hof. That afternoon, the kaiser took
his military paladins on an automobile outing to Bad Ems, where on 13 July 1870
the fateful interview that helped launch the Franco-Prussian War had taken
place[41], and he planted a
small oak beside the memorial stone. “I wonder,” Wenninger mused, “whether the
little oak will become a mighty tree?”
It was
pure theater. The kaiser’s place was in Berlin, supervising the war effort,
directing the machinery of government, and offering encouragement to the home
front. His pretense of conducting military operations from Koblenz, where he
ostentatiously dined on the silver field service of Frederick the Great, fooled
no one. An anecdote perhaps best caught the Supreme War Lord’s true role.
During a walk in one of the local parks with Admiral Georg Alexander von
Müller, chief of the Navy Cabinet, and General Moriz von Lyncker, chief of the
Military Cabinet, Wilhelm II sat on a bench to rest. The two officers, not
wishing to disturb the kaiser and concerned that the short bench might not hold
three stout, middle-aged flag officers, pulled up a second bench. “Am I already
such a figure of contempt,” Wilhelm II churlishly inquired, “that no one wants
to sit next to me?”[42]
Moltke
insisted on remaining at Koblenz partly to keep a close eye on the volatile
kaiser, and partly to be equidistant from the Eastern Front. He resisted
several pleas from Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Tappen, his chief of operations,
to move at least the OHL closer to the front in Belgium, perhaps somewhere
north of Namur, with the argument that this “insurrectionist” land had not yet
been pacified.[43] Incredibly,
Moltke directed General William Balcke, his chief of field telegraphy, to take
up headquarters at Bad Ems, well hidden in a small valley east of the General
Staff nerve center at Koblenz. And in sharp contrast with his French
counterpart, Joffre—who used his private chauffeur, Georges Bouillot, winner of
the French Grand Prix in 1912 and 1913, to rush him to the various army
commands—Moltke left execution of his war plans to the individual army
commanders. He remained firm in the belief that peacetime staff rides and war
games had sufficiently honed their skills at interaction and cooperation, and
that the “intentions” of the General Staff could best be relayed “orally
through the sending of an officer of the High Command.” Most especially, he
placed his trust in the sixty-eight-year-old Bülow, whom he considered to be
Germany’s “most competent” army commander.[44]
BY 18
AUGUST, the second Battle of the Frontiers (also known as Sambre-et-Meuse, or
Charleroi) was about to begin. The northern German armies were driving west
across the undulating plains of Brabant into Hainaut Province—Kluck just south
of Brussels, and Bülow along the Wavre-Namur axis. The right wing of Hausen’s
Third Army as well as elements of the left wing of Bülow’s Second Army were
closing on Namur, at the junction of the Sambre and Meuse rivers. At Andenne
and Seilles, where Bülow’s men crossed the Meuse, and at Aarschot, where
Kluck’s troops drove the Belgian army behind the Gette, the pattern established
at Battice and Visé repeated itself. German soldiers were convinced that
civilians had fired on them and, worse, mutilated the bodies of their fallen
comrades. “Man hat geschossen!” (“We have been shot at!”)
became the battle cry. Reprisals were swift and harsh: Suspected shooters were
rounded up and executed, homes of suspected armed civilians burned to the
ground, priests as well as burgomasters taken hostage, and hundreds of Belgians
deported to Germany in cattle cars.[45]
General
Ludwig von Sieger, chief of field munitions and recently returned from Liège,
regaled Imperial Headquarters with gruesome stories of the “bestiality” of
Belgian civilians in the path of war. Many had “clawed out the eyes and cut the
throats” of wounded German soldiers. Despite the constant prewar reminders of
francs-tireurs in 1870–71, Moltke’s warriors simply had been unprepared for
this form of irregular warfare. “But now we are finally moving against
[Belgian] residents with utmost severity,” Sieger was happy to report. “They
have been executed en masse, their villages razed.” He concluded that such
“ruthless severity” had not been “without effect.”[46]
At
other places in Belgium, the German advance was more orderly and less brutal.
After Liège, General von Einem’s VII Corps, part of Bülow’s Second Army,
pointed west toward Wavre. The plains of Brabant were a welcome relief from the
concrete forts of Liège. “The land has been cultivated just like it is at
home,” Einem noted in his diary. “It is very pretty, stretching well off to the
distance; a great region to do battle.” By 20–21 August, VII Corps had passed
Wavre and approached Waterloo. “99 years ago all those people who today are our
enemies defeated Napoleon and his Frenchmen there,” he ruefully noted. “We are
now on historic ground and today will advance along the same roads that took
[Field Marshal Gebhard von] Blücher and his victorious formations to Waterloo
or Belle Alliance.”[47] Einem, the graduate
of the Prussian Military Academy, had fulfilled one of his youthful dreams. He
could not repress his feelings. “On the basis of [my] studies, I knew the
configurations of the land so well that nothing surprised me”—except the
British Lion Mound of 1826, a conical heap with 226 steps leading up to a great
stone lion. A century ago the battle had been fought in rain; in 1914, a
blazing sun scorched the fields.
The
Belgian army, its brief heroics at Haelen notwithstanding, was in danger of
being cut off from Antwerp by German First and Second armies along the line of
the Gette. King Albert appealed to Joffre for French forces to come north
across the Sambre to strike the enemy armies driving toward Antwerp in the
flank. Joffre coldly replied that German formations west of the Meuse were but
a “screen” for the main German drive around Sedan.[48] The truth of the
matter is that Joffre continued to ignore warnings from both his intelligence
staff and his field commanders that as many as eight German army corps and four
cavalry divisions were already in Belgium, and instead clung to his firm belief
that the Germans would not cross the Meuse in force but concentrate their
efforts in the center, through the Ardennes. Obstinacy and stolidity, two of
his main character traits, hampered early reassessment.
On 18
August, Moltke repeated his earlier placement of German Sixth and Seventh
armies in Alsace-Lorraine under a single command—that of Crown Prince Rupprecht
of Bavaria—and “subordinated” Kluck to Bülow in Belgium.[49] It was an
ill-advised move. Bülow at once used his new authority to order Kluck to
release Alexander von Linsingen’s II Corps to execute a flank attack left from
north of Diest against the retreating Belgian forces in hopes of encircling
them before they reached Antwerp, while First and Second armies, each with
three corps, advanced on the Gette from the east. Kluck was furious. He
believed that his command authority had been infringed upon, that the new
orders to II Corps only meant needless further marching and fatigue, and that
Bülow’s action would force him to cover the advance of II Corps, thereby
slowing his advance toward the west. His anger was at full tide when he
discovered the same day that King Albert had refused to make a stand on the
Gette and instead had ordered a withdrawal behind the Dijle River to Fortress
Antwerp. He found little consolation in the fact that Ferdinand von Quast’s IX
Corps had inflicted severe losses (1,639 officers and men) on the Belgians’
left at Tirlemont.[50]
King
Albert reached Antwerp on 20 August, only to be met by a sharp protest
concerning the “retreat before a mere cavalry screen” from Colonel Jacques
Aldebert of the French Military Mission. Aldebert, obviously briefed by Joffre,
still insisted that the Germans would not advance beyond the Meuse in force.
Had King Albert done the right thing? Or should he have withdrawn to the
southwest to link forces with the British?[51] As King of the
Belgians, he refused to abandon his country. By falling back on Antwerp—which
Moltke had hoped to prevent—he forced Kluck to detach Hans von Beseler’s III
Reserve Corps (and later also IX Reserve Corps) to cover Antwerp and its
garrison of sixty thousand men, thereby substantially weakening First Army.
Albert’s
decision to abandon his capital was militarily unimportant. Brussels was not a
fortress. It had no strategic arteries. It had not figured in prewar military
planning. When foreign diplomats discovered that the Garde civique was digging
trenches and mustering companies in the city’s parks, they pleaded
(successfully) with Burgomaster Adolphe Max to end the foolishness, to declare
Brussels an “open city” and thus spare it the fate of Liège. At
3:30 PM on 20 August, Friedrich Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps entered the
city with divisional bands playing the patriotic march “Die
Wacht AM Rhein;” the troops paraded for hours before their commander.
American ambassador Brand Whitlock likened the German entry by a “mighty grey,
grim horde” to a “thing of steel that came thundering on with shrill fifes and
throbbing drums.”[52] The Germans imposed
an indemnity of 50 million francs on Brussels and 450 million on Brabant
Province, to be paid within ten days. News of the fall of the Belgian capital
evoked “fierce joy in Berlin.” Church bells rang well into the night and people
embraced one another, “frantic with delight.”[53] Brussels had been
spared destruction.
Not so
Louvain (Leuven). When troops of First Army approached the city on 19 August,
its forty-two thousand inhabitants—mainly educated, genteel people such as
priests, nuns, professors, and wealthy retirees—sensibly declared it to be an
“open city.” Kluck thought it sufficiently secure to establish his headquarters
there for the next four days. An uneasy truce held for almost a week under the
cover of martial law in what the Germans called Löwen. Then, as First Army
moved out toward the French border, fears mounted at the OHL that King Albert’s
forces might see this as the moment to sally out from Antwerp and hit Kluck’s
overextended supplies and communications network. Elements of Belgian 2d ID and
its cavalry detachment in fact did so on 25–26 August, driving some German
units back as far as Malines (Mechelen) and Louvain. By the afternoon of 25
August, about ten thousand German troops—many just arrived from the siege of
Liège—bivouacked in Louvain.
Suddenly,
an alarm sounded.[54] Eyewitnesses could
not agree whether it was at 5:30, or 6:30 PM. Both sides did agree that
sporadic shooting broke out by 8 PM. It soon spread through the city’s
main streets and squares. The tac-tac of machine guns then
joined in. The whistles of emergency workers pierced the dusk that by now had
enveloped Louvain. The cry of “We have been shot at!” was taken up by countless
German soldiers—fueled by fear, panic, hunger, exhaustion, and drink.
THE
ADVANCE TO LOUVAIN AND ANTWERP
The
few Belgian civilians who dared venture out saw a heavy red glow and gray smoke
swirl down the Boulevard de Tirlemont and across the Place de la Station and
the Place du Peuple. The flames spread to the Palais de Justice, the Church of
Saint-Pierre, the university, and the Clothworkers’ Hall with its library of
230,000 volumes, including more than 1,000 incunabula[55] and 750 medieval
manuscripts. Dead horses littered the streets. Corpses were collected and piled
up at the Place de la Station. Priests and members of the Garde civique were
singled out for abuse.
For
three days, Louvain lived in terror. On 27 August, the Germans announced that
they were about to bombard the city and expelled 10,000 civilians. The
bombardment was never carried out. When the fires finally died down, 248
citizens had been killed, perhaps as many as 40,000 deported to Germany, and
twenty-one hundred buildings destroyed. Hugh Gibson, secretary of the American
legation in Brussels, visited Louvain on 28 August.[56] “The road was black
with frightened civilians carrying away small bundles from the ruins of their
homes. Ahead was a great column of dull gray smoke which completely hid the
city. We could hear the muffled sound of firing ahead.” A small boy joyously
cried out, “Les Américains sont arrivés! Les Américains sont arrivés!” After
assuring the lad that the Americans had not arrived in Belgium, Gibson
penetrated deeper into Louvain. He was confronted by burning houses and cinders
so thick that he had to put on his motoring goggles. Many of the city’s former
stately homes were little more than “blackened walls with smouldering timbers
inside.” The streets were littered with wreckage: “hats and wooden shoes,
German helmets, swords and saddles, bottles and all sorts of bundles which had
been dropped and abandoned when the trouble began.” Telegraph and trolley wires
were down. Dead men and horses littered every square. Countless houses were
still burning. The Boulevard de Tirlemont “looked as though it had been swept
by a cyclone.” Everywhere, the looting and shooting continued unabated. “It was
all most businesslike.”
The
story of what occurred at Louvain during those terrible three days in August
quickly made its way around the world and has remained a topic of debate ever
since. For the Germans, the looting, burning, and shooting were “justified
reprisals” for armed civilians inserting themselves into a military battle. There
is a great deal of comment in German unit histories about the soldiers being
tired, hungry, thirsty, and drunk from “liberated” wine stocks. But there is
equal insistence on having witnessed Belgian civilians firing from windows and
rooftops. General von Kluck in his memoirs conceded that “tough and inexorable
reprisals” including “summary shooting of individuals” and “punitive burning of
houses” had been applied by “local commanders on the spot.”[57] The
German official history of the war merely acknowledged that 27th Landwehr
Brigade stood in and around Louvain on 27–28 August and that Belgian soldiers
and Civic Guardsmen had discarded their uniforms and shot at German regulars
“from behind bushes and houses.”[58] Not a word more.
For
the Allies, Louvain became synonymous with German “barbarism.”
Hundreds of lurid posters showing the Germans as modern-day “Huns” and Wilhelm
II as “the modern Attila” or as “King of the Vandals” circulated almost
immediately. Undoubtedly, the most famous was produced in the United States. It
showed a giant gorilla, wearing a German spiked helmet with the word militarism
inscribed on it and sporting a Kaiser Wilhelm–like upturned mustache, emerging
from the sea against the background of a burned-out European city. In his right
hand he held a bloody club labeled KULTUR; in the other, a bare-bosomed
damsel obviously in distress.[59] American journalists
from Collier’s Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Chicago
Tribune, among others, fed their readers a steady diet of despondent
Belgian refugees, burned-out cities, rotting animal and human corpses, and
taunting “Huns.” In their exhaustive study, German Atrocities 1914,
historians John Horne and Alan Kramer conclude that while there “is no serious
evidence that the German actions in Louvain were premeditated,”[60] the “reprisals” of
arson, executions, expulsions, and deportations were part of a systematic
policy of intimidation and terror. They record a total of 4,421 Belgian
civilians killed.[61]
THERE
REMAINED NAMUR, the last of the great eastern Belgian for tresses not yet
taken. It not only was an important commercial center at the confluence of the
Meuse and Sambre rivers, but also a potential rallying and sallying point for
Franco-Belgian formations.[62] By 18 August, the three
infantry divisions of Max von Gallwitz’s Guard Reserve Corps were advancing on
Namur. The next morning, Moltke’s staff sent Gallwitz a detailed siege plan
prepared already in peacetime.[63] It contained data on
the size of the fortress, the number of defenders, the caliber and placement of
guns, and even a step-by-step plan of attack. Gallwitz ignored it. The front
was fluid, and he was not about to halt the advance to conduct a leisurely,
medieval siege. Instead, he persuaded Bülow to send him XI Corps—of Hausen’s
Saxon Third Army—as reinforcement. It was the first of many such encroachments
to come. Hausen raised no objection, although he would have preferred to detach
XII Reserve Corps instead in order to keep his regulars in the line of advance.[64]
The
Romans had built a fortified outlook post on a rocky ledge overlooking Namur
and the Meuse Valley in the third and fourth centuries; Emperor Charles V had
constructed a citadel, La Médiane, on the very spot between 1542 and 1555; and
Sebastien de Vauban had greatly expanded the citadel into a stone fortress for
Louis XIV of France. Napoleon I had demolished large parts of the citadel since
he saw no need for it as he had expanded his empire far to the east. But the
new Kingdom of Belgium saw merit in the old ruins as part of its planned
east-west line of defense, and thus hired Brialmont to fortify Namur between
1888 and 1892. He sited a ring of nine forts some eight kilometers from the
center of the city and linked them (as at Liège) with an elaborate system of
trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. In August 1914, la position
fortifiée de Namurwas defended by thirty-five thousand soldiers, mostly of
Augustin Michel’s Belgian 4th ID as well as four regiments of fortress
infantry. At the last moment, the garrison had been augmented by Belgian 8th
Infantry Brigade—which, finding itself isolated at Huy, had blown up the
bridges over the Meuse there and fallen back on Namur. King Albert’s orders
again were straightforward: “Resist to the last.”[65] Carrier pigeons
maintained contact between Namur and the Belgian field army.
On 20
August, Gallwitz, an artillery specialist, began to test Namur’s defenses by
randomly shelling one of its forts, Marchovellette. But he was not about to
repeat the senseless massed infantry assaults with which Emmich had shattered a
good part of his X Corps at Liège. Instead, he methodically concentrated his
forces—Guard Reserve Corps to the north and Saxon XI Corps to the southeast of
Namur. Then he brought up the heavy siege guns released by the surrender of
Liège: four batteries of Austrian Škoda howitzers and one battery of the Krupp
Big Berthas. Finally, he convinced Bülow to attack the French at Charleroi to
tie down Charles Lanrezac’s French Fifth Army and so prevent it from lifting
the siege at Namur.
Gallwitz
got serious on 21 August, pulverizing Namur’s forts relentlessly with his heavy
siege guns.[66] Two
forts were reduced within forty-eight hours. Two counterattacks by Michel’s men
were easily beaten back. By 23 August, the entire northern and eastern fronts
of la position fortifiée de Namur had been reduced and five of
its nine forts put out of commission. In all, the Germans fired 126 Krupp 420mm
shells, 573 škoda 305mm shells, and 6,763 coastal artillery 210mm shells at
Namur.[67] Only 45th and 148th
regiments, 45th IB, from Augustin Gérard’s II Corps of French Fifth Army
managed to approach Namur. They arrived just in time for the vanguard to be
swept up in the German assault. On the evening of 23 August, the Prussians and
Saxons stormed Namur. Gallwitz took sixty-seven hundred Belgian and French
prisoners of war, captured twelve field guns as well as the forts’ defensive
artillery, and added vast stores of ammunition, food, and wagons to his corps.
German losses were but nine hundred, of which one-third were fatal. Overall
Belgian losses were set at fifteen thousand men, two-thirds of whom had
belonged to 4th ID.[68]
The
capture of Namur yet again was accompanied by acts of terror on the part of the
occupiers. As before, the cry “We have been shot at!” sufficed to stampede
German commanders into severe “retaliation.” Upon receiving reports that
nineteen armed civilians had fired on his men, Hans von Kirchbach, commanding
XII Reserve Corps, reacted swiftly. “We burned down the houses from which the
shots had come.”[69] Saxon
soldiers sent countless letters home confirming the “reprisals.” Arthur
Prausch, with 139th IR advancing on Namur, wrote his brother that civilians had
fired on his unit and that he had seen comrades “with their throats slit” lying
in the streets.[70] Villages
where such “despicable acts” purportedly occurred were immediately burned to
the ground. “In one village we shot 35 men as well as several women, including
two priests. … They all lie heaped in a pile.” Max Basta, 65th IR, Württemberg
16th Reserve Infantry Division (RID), likewise wrote home his impressions of
the brutal nature of the war south of Namur. “All Belgian villages have been
leveled to the ground; we marched through smoldering ruins.” He most remembered
the smell of destruction. “The swirling smoke caused by burning human and
animal corpses forced our eyes to tear.” It had become a harsh war. “Whoever
fired on our troops or in any way appeared suspicious was gunned down.”[71] Namur’s inhabitants
were gathered up to witness the public executions, and then released.
Inside
Namur, isolated shots fired by civilians during the night of 24 August also
brought instant “reprisals”—thirty civilians were executed and 110 buildings
(including the City Hall and much of the Grand’Place) torched. “Our soldiers
have been fired on,” one German officer barked at a group of four hundred
hostages. “We are going to act as we did at Andenne[72].… More than 500 shot.”
Charges that Belgian civilians “have also cut off our soldiers’ noses, ears,
eyes and fingers” threatened to escalate the reprisals into an orgy of murder
and burning.[73] This
was prevented at the last moment—and the hostages released—by the joint efforts
of Bishop Thomas-Louis Heylen and the new city commandant, General Fritz von
Below of XXI Corps.
General
Michel had managed to march roughly fifty-six hundred soldiers of Belgian 4th
ID out of the ruins just before Gallwitz’s forces stormed Namur in hopes of
eventually joining King Albert at Antwerp. It was not to be. Near Bioul, 4th Infantry
Division was intercepted by Saxon 23d RID and virtually its entire complement
taken prisoner without a struggle.[74] With the capture of
Namur, the Germans had removed a vital corner post of the Allied front on the
Meuse and the Sambre. Bülow’s Second Army was now free to march westward along
the Sambre River.
[1] D. J. Goodspeed, Ludendorff:
Soldier: Dictator: Revolutionary (London: Hart-Davis, 1966), 1.
[2] Cited in Sewell
Tyng, The Campaign of the Marne, 1914 (New York and Toronto:
Longmans, Green, 1935), 53.
[3] WK,
1:105–06.
[4] Jeff Lipkes, Rehearsals:
The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 (Leuven: Leuven University
Press, 2007), 42.
[5]
Ibid., 90–103; Maximilian v. Poseck, Die Deutsche Kavallerie 1914 in
Belgien und Frankreich (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1921), 10–11.
[6] Belgian/French time
(Greenwich Mean Time). German army records give German General Time (DGZ), one
hour ahead.
[7] WK,
1:109–10.
[8] Ibid., 108.
[9] Casualty figures are
notoriously inexact. Armies tend to understate their own and to overstate those
of the enemy. Moreover, the records are incomplete: Many were not kept in the
heat of battle and others were lost in subsequent actions. And there is little
consistency in counting: The Germans only tallied wounded who were evacuated to
field hospitals; the British included even those returned to duty after
immediate, cursory treatment. I have used the term casualties to
apply to men killed, wounded, captured, or missing in battle, but not to those
affected by disease, mental trauma, psychiatric shock, neuralgia, or battle
fatigue. See the entry “casualties” in Richard Holmes, ed., The Oxford
Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
182–85.
[10]
Ibid., 111–13, 115.
[11] Ibid., 111;
Lipkes, Rehearsals, 61.
[12] Joffre, 1:286–87.
[13] Cited
in Source Records of the Great War, ed. Charles F. Horne (USA:
National Alumni, 1923), 2:49.
[14] BA-MA, RH 61/50220,
Wilhelm Dieckmann, “Der Schlieffenplan,” 53–57.
[15] WK,
1:112.
[16] John Horne and Alan
Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 13; Lipkes, Rehearsals,
110ff.
[17] Erich
Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S.
Mittler, 1919), 29.
[18] Ludendorff was assigned chief of staff of Eighth Army in East Prussia and, together with Paul von Hindenburg, defeated two Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. From 1916 to 1918, the two men exercised a “silent dictatorship” over Germany. In 1918, they helped invent the infamous “stab-in-the-back” lie, according to which Germany had never been defeated militarily but rather “stabbed in the back” by its domestic enemies—Jews, Socialists, and Communists. In November 1923, Ludendorff took part in Adolf Hitler’s so-called Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, hoping to use Bavaria as a springboard to topple the democratic and republican government in Berlin.
[19]
Ibid., 29.
[20] Moltke, 24.
[21] Ludendorff never
received a patent of nobility for his services, mainly because Kaiser Wilhelm
II disliked his gruff nature
[22] Cited in Tyng, Campaign
of the Marne, 56.
[23] Research report dated
11 April 1938. BA-MA, RH 61/50739, Generalleutnant von Stein, der
Generalquartiermeister der sechs ersten Kriegswochen, 7, 9.
[24] Ein
Armeeführer erlebt den Weltkrieg. Persönliche Aufzeichnungen des
Generalobersten v. Einem, ed. Junius Alter (Leipzig: Hase u. Koehler,
1938), 35–37; Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch … Erlebnis und
Wirkung des Weltkriegs, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Gerd Krumeich (Essen:
Klartext, 1993), 88–89.
[25] Diary entries dated 8
and 11 August 1914. Ein Armeeführer erlebt den Weltkrieg, 35–37.
[26] Biblical name for the
devil or one of his associates.
[27] Barbara Tuchman, The
Guns of August (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 226.
[28] The nickname referred
to the somewhat corpulent F. A. Krupp heiress, Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und
Halbach; she was not amused.
[29] WK, 1:120.
[30] “Don’t kill, don’t
kill!”
[31]
Ludendorff, Kriegserinnerungen, 31.
[32]
“German Letter from an Officer in the Assault,” undated. Cited in Source
Records of the Great War, 2:48.
[33] Émile Galet, Albert,
King of the Belgians in the Great War: His Military Activities and Experiences
Set Down with his Approval (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1931), 126.
[34] WK,
1:120.
[35] There is much debate
on the matter. German commanders after the war argued that Liège caused them no
delay. French and Belgian military histories insist on a delay of ten days. The
British official history suggests a halt of “four or five days.” HGW-MO, 1:35,
n. 1.
[36] AFGG, 1:158–59; Harald
van Nes, “Die ‘Kavalleriedebatte’ vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg und das Gefecht von
Halen am 12. August 1914,” Militärgeschichte 3 (1993): 25–30.
[37] The only biography
remains Artur Brabant, Generaloberst Max Freiherr von Hausen: Ein
deutscher Soldat (Dresden: v. Baensch, 1926).
[38] In 1866 the Saxon army
had not invaded Prussia, but had stood alongside the Austrians in Bohemia;
thus, it was spared the fate of the Kingdom of Hanover, annexation. Under the
Military Convention of 7 February 1867, Saxony was allowed to maintain its own
War Ministry, army corps (XII), and cadet corps, but it had to undergo
“Prussianization” in terms of organization and weaponry.
[39] Peter Graf
Kielmansegg, Deutschland und der Erste Weltkrieg (Frankfurt:
Athenaion, 1968), 34.
[40] Diary entries dated 16
and 17 August 1914. Tagebücher General von Wenninger, BHStA-KA, HS 2543–46.
Published in Bernd F. Schulte, “Neue Dokumente zu Kriegsausbruch und
Kriegsverlauf 1914,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 25
(1979): 146–49.
[41] French foreign
minister Antoine de Gramont had instructed his ambassador to Prussia, Vincent
de Benedetti, to seek out King Wilhelm I, then taking the cure at Bad Ems, to
gain assurances that no member of the Hohenzollern family would ever seek the
throne of Spain. Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck fueled the flames of
war by editing out all conciliatory phrases from Wilhelm’s report of this
discussion and then publishing it in the newspapers.
[42] The Kaiser and His
Court: The Diaries, Note Books and Letters of Admiral Georg Alexander von
Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, 1914–1918, ed. Walter Görlitz (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 22–23.
[43] WK, 1:258.
[44] Ibid., 187, 259;
Robert T. Foley, “Preparing the German Army for the First World War: The
Operational Ideas of Alfred von Schlieffen and Helmuth von Moltke the
Younger,” War & Society 22 (October 2004): 19.
[45] Detailed in Lipkes, Rehearsals, 125–70, 171–206.
[46] Military
Plenipotentiary Traugott Leuckart von Weißdort to War Minister Adolph von
Carlowitz, 17 August 1914. SHStA, 11250 Sächsischer Militäbevollmächtigter in
Berlin 71. Geheimakten A: Verschiedenes.
[47] Diary entries dated 20
and 21 August 1914. BA-MA, N 324/11 and N 324/26, Nachlaß v. Einem.
[48] Entry
dated 19 August 1914. Joffre, 1:277–78.
[49] WK, 1:186.
[50]
Tyng, Campaign of the Marne, 96.
[51] See Antonin Selliers
de Moranville, Pourquoi l’armée belge s’est-elle retirée vers la
position fortifiée d’Anvers le 18 août 1914 (Brussels: Dewit, 1921).
[52] Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under the German Occupation: A Personal Narrative (London: W. Heinemann, 1919), 1:81.
[53] Entry dated 21 August 1914. Evelyn Princess Blücher, An English Wife in Berlin: A Private Memoir of Events, Politics, and Daily Life in Germany Throughout the War and the Social Revolution of 1918 (London: Constable, 1920), 21.
[54] From Horne and
Kramer, German Atrocities, 39–42; Lipkes, Rehearsals,
401ff.
[55] Books printed before
1501.
[56] Hugh Gibson, A
Journal from Our Legation in Belgium (Toronto: William Briggs, 1917),
155–59.
[57]
Alexander von Kluck, Der Marsch auf Paris und die Marneschlacht 1914 (Berlin:
E. S. Mittler, 1920), 24.
[58] BA-MA, RH 61/208,
Franktireurkrieg in Belgien 1914; WK, 3:328–29.
[59] Peter
Paret et al., eds., Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution
from the Hoover Institution Archives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 25.
[60] Horne and
Kramer, German Atrocities, 41.
[61] Ibid., 74.
[62]
See La guerre de 1914. L’action de l’armée belge pour la defense du
pays et le respect de sa neu-tralité: rapport/du commandement de l’armée
(periode du 21 juillet au 31 decembre) (Paris: Chapelot, 1915).
[63] WK, 1:408.
[64] Ibid., 223; Max von
Hausen, Erinnerungen an den Marnefeldzug 1914 (Leipzig: K. F.
Koehler, 1920), 112–13.
[65] Cited in Tyng, Campaign
of the Marne, 100.
[66] WK, 1:401, 406, 416.
[67] GLA,
59, Nr. 365, Denkschrift der Beschiessungen der Forts 1914, General v. Bailer,
12. Bailer was with the Engineer Corps.
[68] Galet, Albert,
King of the Belgians in the Great War, 146. The German official history
gives slightly different totals: six thousand soldiers, forty heavy guns, and
one hundred trucks captured. WK, 1:512.
[69] Letter dated 20 August
1914. SHStA, 11356 Generalkommando des XII. Reservekorps 139.
[70] Keiner fühlt sich
hier mehr als Mensch, 101–02.
[71] Letter dated 23 August
1914. SHStA, 11372 Militärgeschichtliche Sammlung Nr. 105.
[72] On 20–21 August, units of the Guard Reserve Corps, believing that they had been fired upon by francstireurs at Andenne, Belgium, killed 130 civilians in the town and an equal number in the outlying areas.
[73] The following from
Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 35–36.
[74] Report dated 24 August
1914. SHStA, 11356 Generaldommando des XII. Reservekorps 139.
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