CHAPTER
FIVE
DEADLY
DEADLOCK: THE ARDENNES
A
leader has the right to be beaten, but never the right to be surprised.
—NAPOLEON
BONAPARTE
AT
MIDMORNING ON 22 AUGUST 1914, KARL VON BÜLOW AND HIS staff motored to the
heights above Fleurus, northeast of Charleroi. It was a sun-drenched autumn
day. The countryside was equally delightful—a bountiful land with numerous
small settlements un-scarred by stone quarries, coal pits, or factories. “Large
grain, potato and beet fields covered the land and grand, majestic rows of
trees that lined both sides of the roads gave the countryside its particular
character,” the general noted. “Individual manor houses and castles with large,
often magnificent parks were scattered throughout the region.”[1] It must have reminded
him of the family’s hereditary estates in Mecklenburg. But when he reached the
crest of the ridge at Fleurus, Bülow’s thoughts returned to more mundane
matters. From where he stood, a gentle slope fell away to the deep ravines of
the Sambre Valley, while the northeastern side of the industrial town of
Charleroi consisted of a “threatening steep wall” of rock. The entire stretch
of the river was covered for several hundred meters on both banks with a
jarring jumble of slag heaps, small factories, warehouses, homes, and
cobblestone streets—the so-called borinage[2]. It
was not a good place to attack.
On the
basis of the latest reports from Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke,
which suggested that the French had marshaled seven or eight army corps south
of the Sambre and that no British formations had yet arrived on the French
left, Bülow made his operational decision. He ordered the 137 battalions and
820 guns of Second Army—from left to right, Karl von Plettenberg’s Guard Corps,
Otto von Emmich’s X Corps, Guenther von Kirchbach’s X Reserve Corps, and Karl
von Einem’s VII Corps—to advance to the Sambre against Charles Lanrezac’s
French Fifth Army of 193 battalions and 692 guns coming up from the south. With
no enemy apparently in front of First Army, Bülow ordered Alexander von Kluck
to alter his line of advance from southwest to due south so as to bring First
Army into alignment with Second Army and to secure the latter’s flank as it
turned against French Fifth Army. Both Kluck and his chief of staff, Hermann
von Kuhl, vigorously protested the order. A turn to the south would expose
First Army’s flanks to a possible attack by British forces, which they, unlike
Moltke, believed had already landed at Ostend, Calais, and Dunkirk. They wanted
to continue on a course north of Mons (Bergen) in order to turn the Allied
flank.[3] Bülow, fearing that
this would create a gap between First and Second armies, overruled them.
SECOND
ARMY’S ARRIVAL NORTH of the Sambre River finally forced French chief of
the General Staff Joseph Joffre to question his deployment plan. Until that
point, Joffre, like almost no other senior commander in modern times, had lived
in a world of denial, oblivious to all intelligence reports—French, British,
and Belgian alike. At a time like this, his dominant
characteristics—imperturbableness and stubbornness, if not downright
pigheadedness—ill served the French army. For Joffre’s fixation on carrying out
Plan XVII regardless of what the enemy did blinded him to the grave danger
developing in Belgium. As late as 5 August, he still believed that the main
German thrust into France was coming via Sedan rather than farther north by way
of Namur, Dinant, and Givet, and that the Ardennes remained the least defended
pathway into Germany. Put differently, he did not appreciate that the Ardennes
constituted the hub of the German wheel through Belgium.
For
two weeks, Joffre stubbornly insisted that his deployment plan be executed.
From 8 to 14 August, he ignored intelligence reports from his Deuxième Bureau
and from the Belgians that the Germans had at least six army corps heading for
Liège. He grudgingly moved Louis Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps to Dinant, but in
his Instruction particulière No. 6 insisted that the rest of Fifth Army be
ready to storm the Ardennes; hence, he augmented it with 37th and 38th infantry
divisions (ID) of African XIX Corps.[4] Reports from
Jean-François Sordet’s cavalry corps, in fact, suggested no major German
buildup in Belgium. Sordet had taken his horsemen on a mad three-day,
180-kilometer dash through southern Belgium, the Ardennes, and west of the
Meuse River as far as Charleroi. Nowhere had they spotted significant enemy
formations. Thus, the information Sordet sent to Joffre reinforced the
generalissimo’s preconception of German intentions.
BATTLES
OF CHARLEROI AND MONS, 21-24 AUGUST 1914
On 14
August, the day on which he launched the great offensive by First and Second
armies in Lorraine (to coincide with the Russian offensive into East Prussia),
Joffre had two distinguished visitors at the Grand quartier général (GQG) in
Vitry-le-François.[5]
The first was Charles Louis Marie Lanrezac. Born on 31 July 1852 in
the French colony of Guadeloupe, Lanrezac fought in the Franco-Prussian War and
thereafter established his reputation at the Saint-Cyr Military Academy as a
brilliant teacher and gifted theoretician. In 1906, he served under Joffre with
6th ID and became the general’s protégé. In 1911, Joffre briefly considered the
“lion of the French army” for the post of deputy chief. Instead, Lanrezac was
made divisional commander that year and corps commander in 1912. In the spring
of 1914, he reached what might well have been the pinnacle of a stellar career
when he was selected for the Supreme War Council and appointed
commander-designate for Fifth Army in the event of war. Historian Sewell Tyng
suggested that Lanrezac was “endowed with the gift of Cassandra,”[6] and that he “lacked
confidence in himself, in his superiors and … in the men under his orders.”[7] He also lacked faith
in Joffre’s operations plan. When he was handed the details of the wartime
mission for Fifth Army in May 1914, Lanrezac expressed grave concern about a
design that discounted a German drive west of the Meuse River.[8]
By
August, that concern bordered on panic. Lanrezac informed Joffre that the known
German force in Belgium was equal to his Fifth Army plus the
British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in all eight army corps and four cavalry
divisions. He strongly suggested that Fifth Army not face northeast for the
charge through the Ardennes but rather north to deploy along the line of the
Sambre River; failure to do so would allow Bülow to envelop Fifth Army’s flank
as it marched toward the east. More, Lanrezac begged GQG not to proceed with
its main offensive, and especially not to send Pierre Ruffey’s Third Army and
Fernand de Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army into “that death-trap of the Ardennes.”[9] In short, to cast
aside the French deployment plan. Joffre would have none of this. “We are of
the opinion that the Germans have not deployed there.”[10]
Joffre’s
second visitor was even more formidable. Joseph-Simon Galliéni was France’s
most distinguished soldier. Of Corsican stock, Galliéni was born at Saint-Béat,
in southwestern France, on 24 April 1849. After serving in the Franco-Prussian
War, he spent the next three decades in the colonies: Senegal, French Sudan,
Indo-China, and Madagascar, where Joffre served under him. In 1905, Galliéni
returned to France as commander of XIV Corps at Lyon; five years later, he was
considered for the post of chief of the General Staff, but he declined. He
retired in April 1914 but was reactivated in August to organize the defense of
Paris.
Galliéni’s
physical appearance alone commanded respect: Straight as an arrow and always
immaculate in full-dress uniform, he had a rugged, chiseled face with piercing
eyes, a white droopy mustache, and a pince-nez clamped on the bridge of his
nose. Already rumored to be Joffre’s successor, he was unsurprisingly kept at
arm’s length by the chief of the General Staff in a small office at Paris and
denied forces with which to defend the capital. On 14 August, Joffre granted
Galliéni a cursory few minutes of his time and then passed him off to Deputy
Chief of Staff Henri Berthelot, a corpulent man stripped down to blouse and
slippers to alleviate the torrid August heat. Joffre and Berthelot had as
little time for Galliéni’s “alarmist” warnings of a German advance west of the
Meuse as they had shown for Lanrezac’s concerns.
But
the Grand quartier général planned without the Germans. The next day, 15
August, reports poured in that ten thousand enemy riders had crossed the Meuse
at Huy and that Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps, recently detached from Lanrezac’s
Fifth Army, was engaged in a fight with strong German troop formations around
Dinant. These reports troubled Joffre: Could it be possible that Lanrezac and
Galliéni were right in their assessments? Might the Germans really be trying to
pull off a “grand Cannae,” suckering the main French advance into the Ardennes
while two southern armies were driving through the Trouée de Charmes north to
Sedan, and two (or three) armies were advancing through the Namur-Brussels gap
south across the Sambre River? If this was the case, the entire French army
might be swept up in a giant battle of encirclement west of the Ardennes.
These
were trying days at Vitry-le-François. Raymond Poincaré’s cabinet was on the
verge of dissolution. The Chamber of Deputies was demanding War Minister
Adolphe Messimy’s resignation due to his inability to exert civilian control
over Joffre and GQG. Georges Clemenceau was screaming for the president’s head.
Poincaré, in turn, was incensed that Joffre refused to allow him to visit the
front. The Belgians were accusing the French of having “abandoned” them to
their fate. Lanrezac and Galliéni were badgering the General Staff with their
“alarmist” assessments of German troop strength in Belgium. And the British
remained as diffident as ever.
The
German advances toward Huy and Dinant forced Joffre and Berthelot grudgingly to
come to grips with the fact that the enemy might already be dictating the flow
of battle. At 3:30 PM[11] on 15 August, Joffre
sprang into action and issued the first of three major “instructions.” As a
precautionary measure, Instruction particulière No. 10 ordered Lanrezac to move
Fifth Army up into the right angle of the Meuse and Sambre rivers—that is, to
face the approaching German Second Army around Charleroi and Third Army at
Dinant. This necessitated a march of 120 kilometers in five days. As well,
Joffre subordinated Sordet’s cavalry corps to Fifth Army. But still, the
preconceived notions of German intentions and the fixation on the original
concentration plan remained. While Special Instruction No. 10 acknowledged that
the enemy seemed to be making “his principal effort by his right wing north of
Givet,” it nevertheless ordered Lanrezac to spread his corps out in the
direction of Mariembourg and Philippeville “in concert with the BEF and Belgian
forces.” As stated earlier, it also forced him to surrender Joseph Eydoux’s XI
Corps to Langle de Cary’s concurrently ordered attack “in the general direction
of Neufchâteau”—that is, the heart of the Ardennes.[12] Incredibly, Joffre
informed Field Marshal Sir John French that apart from the forces around Liège,
the Germans had only cavalry in Belgium. Lanrezac was convinced that Fifth Army
alone stood between the Germans and defeat.
To be
sure, the German buildup in Belgium could no longer be ignored. Thus, on 18
August, Joffre issued his second order (Instruction particulière No. 13) to the
three armies on the French left.[13] It was based in part
on his latest assessment of the enemy’s strength and position “around
Thionville, in Luxembourg and in Belgium.” Above all, the shift to the left was
dictated by the fact that the French the day before had captured the order of
battle of Bülow’s Second Army. Still, Joffre put the best spin on the captured
document: He interpreted it to mean that the German center was weak because of
Moltke’s concentration on both flanks, in Lorraine and in Belgium. Thus, Plan
XVII was still on the table. But the Deuxième Bureau now estimated that there
were thirteen to fifteen German corps between Liège and Thionville (Diedenhofen),
divided into two “principal groups”: a northern wing of seven or eight corps
and four cavalry divisions between Liège and Bastogne, and a southern wing of
six or seven corps and two to three cavalry divisions between Bastogne and
Thionville. Joffre compromised, in his own way. He decided to strike what he
mistakenly insisted on calling the enemy’s “northern group” with his Third and
Fourth armies around Sedan and Montmédy. Third Army was to advance toward
Beuveille and Fourth Army toward Nives. Once they had defeated the German
forces between Liège and Bastogne, Ruffey and Langle de Cary were to sweep west
and roll up the flank and rear of the German northern armies. Intelligence
reports from his cavalry still insisted that the enemy had not yet crossed the
Meuse between Huy and Givet. Secrecy and surprise were the keys to Joffre’s
design. “I draw your attention,” he lectured Langle de Cary, “to the necessity
of not revealing our maneuver prior to the moment when it is unleashed.”[14] In short, Joffre’s
cherished offensive design seemed back on track.
With
regard to Fifth Army, Joffre laid out two possible scenarios. If the German
right wing marched on both banks of the Meuse in an attempt to pass the
corridor between Givet and Brussels, Lanrezac “in complete liaison with the
British and Belgian Armies” was to oppose this movement by outflanking the
Germans from the north. But if the enemy deployed “only a fraction of his right
wing” on the left bank of the Meuse, then Lanrezac was to wheel his forces east
to help the drive through the Ardennes planned for Third and Fourth armies. The
British and the Belgians would be left to deal with the German units in
Belgium. For an army consisting of three corps and seven divisions spread over
a front nearly fifty kilometers wide and on the move up to the Sambre, Special
Instruction No. 13 was impossible. Lanrezac ignored it and continued his drive
north, drums beating, bugles blowing, flags flying, and the men lustily singing
the march “Sambre-et-Meuse.”
JOFFRE’S
REACTION TO THE GERMAN ADVANCE
Mercifully
for Lanrezac, at 5 PM on 21 August, Joffre, appreciating his
commander’s “impatience,” sent out his third order (Instruction particulière
No. 15).[15] It
canceled the first option previously laid out for Fifth Army. The time had come
to mount the offensive that Joffre had planned for years: Ruffey’s Third Army,
now divided in two (Third Army and a new Army of Lorraine under Michel-Joseph
Maunoury), was to charge toward Arlon in Belgium; Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army was
to cross the Semois River and drive on Neufchâteau. From Verdun to Charleroi,
the decisive moment for the great French offensive by nine corps of 361,000 men
was at hand. At the same time, Special Order No. 15 gave Lanrezac the green
light to attack “the northern enemy group,” specifically, Bülow’s Second Army,
in concert with whatever British and Belgian forces were on his left. The
precise “line of demarcation” between British and French units was left for
Field Marshal French and General Lanrezac to decide. Berthelot cheerily
informed Lanrezac that since the French were about to drive through the
Ardennes on their way into Germany, the more enemy troops committed to Belgium,
“the easier it will be for us to break through their center.” It was one of those
typical orders from Berthelot that, in the words of historian Hew Strachan,
“did not always accord with reality or with realism.”[16] Still, Joffre was
downright optimistic. “The moment of decisive action,” he informed War Minister
Messimy, “is near.”[17]
JOFFRE’S
THROWAWAY COMMENT THAT French and Lanrezac were to decide on the manner of
cooperation between their forces was ingenuous, at best. For the first two
meetings between the two British and French field commanders had not gone well.
The arrogant, combative, and mercurial John French had left Vitry-le-François
on Sunday, 16 August, less than impressed with Joffre and his staff. “Au
fond, they are a low lot,” he informed London, “and one always has to
remember the class these French generals mostly come from.”[18] Apparently, the
noble squire from Kent had not found a suitable confrère in
the humble artisan from the Pyrenees. When Sir John incredibly asked GQG to
place Sordet’s cavalry corps as well as two French infantry divisions under his
command, Joffre was not amused. He brusquely refused.[19]
The
next day’s meeting between French and Lanrezac at Rethel had been equally
disastrous. Lanrezac’s chief of staff, Alexis Hély d’Oissel, met the British
contingent with a tart, “At last you’re here; it’s not a moment too soon. If we
are beaten we will owe it all to you!”[20] From there, the
meeting went downhill. When Lanrezac informed Sir John that the Germans were at
the Meuse near Huy, the field marshal in halting French twice inquired what
they were doing there and what they were going to do. Lanrezac, who knew no
English, allowed his acerbic bile to pour forth. “Pourqoui sont-ils
arrivés?” he snapped at French. “Mais pour pêcher dans la
rivière!”[21] Henry
Wilson, deputy chief of the British General Staff, impeccably translated that
for Sir John: “He says they’re going to cross the river, sir.”[22] Tit-for-tat, when
Lanrezac asked French for his fresh cavalry division to supplement Sordet’s
weary cavalry corps, the field marshal declined. Finally, Sir John stated that
the BEF could not be ready for action until 24 August.[23] It would then deploy
left of Lanrezac’s Fifth Army on the Sambre. The French must have wondered
about the value of British intervention on the Continent.
What
to Joffre and Lanrezac could only have seemed haughty behavior on the part of
Field Marshal French was, in fact, rooted in British tradition and in “Johnnie”
French’s orders. Horatio Herbert Lord Kitchener, Britain’s most famous colonial
soldier and in 1914 secretary of state for war, had sent Sir John off to France
with the specific instruction “that your command is an entirely independent
one, and that you will in no case come in any sense under the orders of any
Allied General.”[24]
As well, Kitchener—soon nicknamed “the Great Poster” for the famous recruiting
poster in which his blazing eyes, martial mustache, and pointing finger loomed
over the message your country needs you—had warned the field marshal to
exercise “the greatest care … towards a minimum of losses and wastage.” Knowing
the French military’s penchant for the all-out offensive (l’offensive à
outrance), Kitchener had further admonished his field commander to give
“the gravest consideration” to likely French attempts to deploy the BEF
offensively “where large bodies of French troops are not engaged, and where
your Force may be unduly exposed to attack.” Sir John meant fully to adhere to
those instructions[25].
IN THE
REAL WAR, Lanrezac’s weary soldiers moved into position on the afternoon of 20
August. In essence, Fifth Army formed a giant inverted V in the Sambre-Meuse
triangle pointing toward the northeast, with German Second Army to the north
and Third Army to the east. Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps remained on the Meuse,
guarding Lanrezac’s right flank, while Gilbert Defforges’s X Corps (with
African 37th ID) held the left flank. In the center, Henri Sauret’s III Corps
(with African 38th ID) and Eydoux’s XI Corps advanced along the Sambre River
between Namur and Charleroi. This vanguard spied the first units of Bülow’s
Second Army at 3 PM on 20 August. Later that night, as previously
noted, Joffre ordered Third and Fourth armies to storm the Ardennes, the heart
and soul of his grand design, and Lanrezac to attack the enemy on the Sambre
around Charleroi. As well, he “requested” Field Marshal French “to co-operate
in this action” on the left of French Fifth Army by advancing across the
Mons-Condé Canal “in the general direction of Soignies.”[26] Henry Wilson was
ecstatic. All the years of planning for British formations to be deployed
alongside the French on the Continent were finally coming to fruition. “To-day
we start our forward march, and the whole line from here [Le Cateau] to Verdun
set out,” he wrote home on 21 August. “It is at once a glorious and an awful
thought, and by this day [next] week the greatest action that the world has
ever heard of will have been fought.”[27]
General
Wilson’s burst of enthusiasm was ill founded. The British, Lanrezac furiously
informed Joffre, reported that they would not be ready to advance on his left
flank for another two days. Around noon on 21 August, Lanrezac demanded precise
instructions from Joffre. While he awaited a reply, Lanrezac mulled over his
options.[28] Should
he cross the Sambre and deny Bülow the heights on the northern side? Or should
he entrench his forces on the southern bank and await the arrival of the
British on his left flank—as well as the start of the advance into the Ardennes
by Third and Fourth armies? In no case was he willing to fight in the Valley of
the Sambre, the coal pits and slag heaps of le borinage. The “keen
intellect” of Saint-Cyr many times had posed similar problems to his students;
now he prevaricated and kept his corps commanders in the dark for forty-eight
hours.
Joffre
let Lanrezac stew. “I leave it entirely to you to judge the opportune moment
for you to decide when to commence offensive operations.”[29] But then GQG
instructed Fifth Army to advance without the British. Precious time had been
squandered. Already on the morning of 20 August, Bülow’s advance guard of
cavalry and bicycle units had found two bridges unguarded between Namur and
Charleroi. Numerous German cavalry formations in their field-gray uniforms had
been mistaken by the local Walloon population as being “English” and showered
with food and gifts.
At
noon on 21 August, 2d ID of Plettenberg’s Guard Corps had reached the north
shore of the Sambre. But Bülow proved to be as cautious as Lanrezac. Neither
his cavalry scouts nor his aerial reconnaissance could confirm whether an
entire French army was south of the Sambre. Moreover, he wanted at all cost to
maintain contact with his left wing (Max von Hausen’s Third Army) and his right
wing (Kluck’s First Army) during the advance. Yet his corps commanders were
chomping at the bit. After some indecision concerning Bülow’s intentions,
Arnold von Winckler decided to storm the bridges at Auvelais and
Jemeppe-sur-Sambre with his 2d Guard Division (GD). Farther to the west, Max
Hofmann’s 19th ID of Emmich’s X Corps likewise took the bridges at Tergné. With
two bridgeheads secured against repeated French counterattacks, the Germans
were ready to advance against Lanrezac’s main force the next day.
General
von Bülow hurled three corps against French Fifth Army on 22 August—only to
discover that the French had preempted him with an attack of their own. At his
headquarters at Chimay, thirty kilometers from the front, Lanrezac at first had
become incapacitated, mulling over his options. He neither approved nor
disapproved a suggestion from the commanders of III and X corps to counterattack
and retake the lost bridges. Without orders, Sauret and Defforges charged the
German positions in the early-hour mists of 22 August, flags unfurled, bugles
blaring, bayonets fixed—and without artillery support. Both attacks were
brutally beaten back around Arsimont with “staggering losses.” Tenth Corps’
desperate bayonet charges were mowed down by the machine guns of the Prussian
Guard; those of III Corps ran headlong into a fierce assault by Emmich’s X
Corps.[30] The fields were
littered with six thousand French dead and wounded; the roads soon clogged with
thousands of Belgian civilians fleeing the deadly mayhem.
In
fact, a bloody and confused melee (what military theorists call a “battle of
encounter”) quickly developed in le borinage. All along the Sambre,
a ragged, unplanned series of battles ensued. By late afternoon, Lanrezac’s
center had collapsed, with two corps retreating at great loss of life; by
nightfall, nine divisions of French III and X corps had been driven ten
kilometers back from the Sambre at Charleroi by a mere three divisions of
German X Corps and Guard Corps. The entire center and right of French Fifth
Army seemed on the point of collapse. On the French left near Fontaine, two
divisions of Einem’s VII Corps hurled Sordet’s cavalry corps back across the
Sambre, exposing the right flank of the late-arriving BEF at Mons. At
8:30 PM, Lanrezac informed Joffre of the day’s “violent” events.
“Defforges’ X Corps suffered badly. … Large numbers of officers hors de
combat. 3rd Corps and its 5th Division heavily engaged before Chatelet. …
The Cavalry Corps, extremely fatigued, no longer in contact with l’armée
W[ilson]”[31]—that
is, with the British.
That
night, Lanrezac again considered his options. He decided to resume the
offensive on 23 August. Perhaps he could strike Bülow’s Second Army in the
flank from the east. Thus, he shifted Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps on the right
north toward Namur and ordered Fourth Army to advance on the Meuse. But before
Lanrezac could mount his offensive with Fifth Army, a series of disastrous
reports from the fronts arrived at Chimay: Fortress Namur had capitulated;
French Third and Fourth armies were heavily engaged in the Ardennes and could
not come to his rescue; the BEF had been forced to retreat at Mons; and lead
elements of German Third Army had crossed the Meuse at Givet. Lanrezac at once
grasped the gravity of the situation. He now faced the dire prospect of Bülow’s
ponderous advance from the north being augmented by a flanking attack on both
his right rear (German Third Army) and his left front (German First Army).
Still, his troops fought valiantly, grudgingly yielding ground. General von
Kirchbach reported late on 23 August that his X Reserve Corps had been
shattered and would not be able to resume the attack the next day. He need not
have worried: At 9:30 PM, Lanrezac, appreciating that he had suffered a
major defeat, ordered a general retreat to the line Givet-Maubeuge, to begin at
three o’clock the next morning.[32] Joffre spied therein
a decided lack of “offensive spirit,” but Lanrezac’s action likely saved Fifth
Army from annihilation.
AS THE
FIGHTING LEFT the broken landscape of slag heaps and pitheads, it entered
a gentler, more open, agricultural countryside. At this point, there were no
physical obstacles to slow down the German advance—or the French retreat. The
situation was ripe with choice.
Charles
Lanrezac had good reason to fear for his Fifth Army. The immediate, mortal
danger lay on his right flank facing east. The Grand quartier général remained
blissfully ignorant of the danger. Joffre continued to insist that Moltke had
deployed but six corps in the “weak” center of the German line, where he had in
fact marshaled eight. Moreover, he was certain that the Germans would not fight
in the rugged terrain of the Ardennes but instead make their stand just east of
the forest. He had a point. The Ardennes was wooded, hilly, and irregular,
oftentimes shrouded in fog and rain, traversed by muddy paths and roads, and
cut by countless streams and ravines. Julius Caesar in 57 bc had taken ten days
to cross “the forest of Arden.” The woods had been “full of defiles and hidden
ways.” The enemy had been elusive and clever. “Wherever a cave, or a thicket,
or a morass offered them shelter,” he recorded, “thither they retired.” Only
what today are called “small-group tactics” had allowed Caesar eventually to
“extirpate this race of perfidious men.”[33]
On 21
August, Joffre ordered his armies to attack the enemy “wherever encountered”
throughout the Ardennes—the centerpiece of his deployment plan.[34] Once across the
forest between Liège and Bastogne, the French armies were to turn west and
deliver a fatal right hook to the left flanks of German First, Second, and
Third armies racing through Belgium. To maintain the element of surprise, no
supply columns were attached to the French armies. The campaign began at six
o’clock on a chilly morning shrouded by gray fog and rain; it ended late at
night in dense mist following a heavy rain. Surprise and chaos were the order
of the day. Few of Joffre’s commanders had bothered to study the terrain. Some
of the more optimistic had maps of the Rhineland; of the Ardennes, only a very
few had tourist maps or crude maps torn out of railway timetables.[35]
General
Ruffey commanded Third Army at Verdun. An apostle of heavy artillery—which had
earned him the sobriquet “le poète du canon”—Ruffey had made many
enemies in the French army for seemingly slighting the famous 75s and for
championing what Ferdinand Foch in 1910 had satirized as the “sport” of
airpower. On 21 August, Ruffey moved his headquarters up to Marville to lead
IV, V, and VI corps against Arlon. On his left, Fourth Army under Langle de
Cary at Stenay pointed toward Neufchâteau. Already past the mandatory
retirement age (sixty-four) in 1914, the energetic, bantam-like Langle de Cary
had been entrusted by Joffre with breaking the back of the German offensive. In
addition to his own three corps and Jules Lefèvre’s colonial corps, Fourth Army
had been augmented by Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps (Fifth Army) and Pierre
Dubois’s IX Corps (Second Army), giving it a fighting strength of about 160,000
men. To guard against a possible German thrust from Fortress Metz against the
flank and rear of Third Army, Joffre had created the Army of Lorraine, composed
entirely of reserve divisions, under General Maunoury. The three French armies
numbered 377 battalions with 1,540 guns. They were to attack along a
forty-kilometer front and to penetrate the Ardennes Forest to a depth of at
least a dozen kilometers. Unfortunately, Ruffey was never informed of the
creation or the mission of the Army of Lorraine. But it seemed to matter little
at the time. Neither Sordet’s riders nor French aviators had spied any major
German troop concentrations. “No serious opposition need be anticipated on the
day of August 22nd,” GQG cheerily informed Ruffey and Langle de Cary.[36]
Joffre
had entrusted Ruffey and Maunoury not only to carry out the centerpiece of his
famous Plan XVII, but also to secure France’s vital iron-mining and
steel-producing region, with an annual output of five million tons in 1913.
German forces advancing from Metz-Thionville had already occupied or were
threatening the great steel plants at Fraisans, Hayange, Longwy, and Briey.
Other vital steel producers needed to be secured at Saint-Étienne,
Fourchambault, Anzin, and Denain, among other places. France’s industrial war
effort hung in the balance.
On
that dismal morning of 22 August, Third and Fourth armies did not encounter the
anticipated light German screen in the Ardennes, but rather the full weight of
ten army corps. The southern Ardennes region around Metz-Thionville was held by
Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia’s Fifth Army; it was advancing against the
French fortress belt of Longwy and Montmédy—and eventually Verdun. To Wilhelm’s
immediate right in the central and northern Ardennes around Luxembourg was Duke
Albrecht of Württemberg’s Fourth Army; it was advancing against Neufchâteau. As
the hub of the German wheel, the two armies (236 battalions with 1,320 guns)[37] could afford to move
at a relatively leisurely pace—much like the inside of a line of marchers in a
band making a ninety-degree right turn—while waiting for the outer-rim armies
of the pivot wing, or Schwenkungsflügel, to quick-march across
Belgium and on to Paris.
But
Crown Prince Wilhelm and his chief of staff, Konstantin Schmidt von
Knobelsdorf, were anxious for battle honors. On 21 August, they decided on
their own initiative to mount an offensive against the French fortified cities
of Longwy and Montmédy and “ruthlessly defeat everything that stood [in]
between” at Longuyon, in the angle of the Chiers and Crusnes rivers. When
Moltke reminded them that according to the concentration plan, “defense by
Fifth Army imperative, not attack,” they simply ignored him.[38]Visions of his own Cannae
danced through the crown prince’s head.[39] Despite the fact
that Fifth Army’s offensive in the direction of Virton would create a
twenty-kilometer-wide gap between Wilhelm’s army and that of Duke Albrecht,
Moltke did not press his case. Thus, by 21 August, after Liège and Brussels had
fallen, German Fourth and Fifth armies were advancing on a southwesterly
course, while French Third and Fourth armies were moving up to the Ardennes on
a northeasterly trajectory. A head-on collision was inevitable.
French
historians refer to the events beginning on 21–22 August as the Battle of the
Ardennes; German scholars as the twin Battles of Longwy and Neufchâteau.
Neither is entirely correct. What developed, in the words of historian Sewell
Tyng, was “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.”[40] German
reconnaissance had detected the French advance and, accordingly, most of the
troops of Fourth and Fifth armies were well dug in and supported by heavy
artillery. Fog and rain helped their concealment. Moreover, the French deployed
in a peculiar echelon formation: One officer has depicted it as being akin to a
flight of stairs, descending from left to right, with each “stair” consisting
of an army corps facing north. While this theoretically would allow each corps
to attack either north or east, as the situation demanded, it also meant that the
right flank of each corps depended fully on the advance of its neighbor on the
right. Failure of one corps to do so not only imperiled the flank of the
neighbor on the left, but also threatened to collapse the entire set of
“stairs.”[41]
The
latter case set in by the second day of the battle. Between 5 and
6 AM on 22 August, Ruffey’s Third Army advanced through heavy fog.
Charles Brochin’s V Corps was in the center of the line.[42] Moving on Longwy and
its steel furnaces, V Corps immediately stumbled into the well-prepared German
defensive positions of Max von Fabeck’s XIII Corps. Brutal hand-to-hand combat
ensued, with neither side able to make out friend from foe. Ruffey had placed
his mobile soixante-quinzes up front so as to better sweep the
German “screen” from the woods. But soon after the initial contact, the fog
lifted, allowing the German 105mm and 150mm heavy howitzers’ high-angle fire to
decimate Brochin’s 75s.[43] Heroic French
bayonet attacks foundered against well-hidden machine-gun positions. Panic ensued.
One division broke and fled, leaving a huge gap in the middle of Third Army’s
line. The next day, Joffre relieved Brochin of command of V Corps and replaced
him with Frédéric Micheler.
Of
Ruffey’s other two army corps, Victor-René Boëlle’s IV Corps fared no better:
Its advance on Virton ran head-on into Hermann von Strantz’s V Corps; one of
its infantry divisions also broke and ran.[44] Maurice Sarrail’s VI
Corps, beefed up with the addition of a third infantry division, stood its
ground alone on the right side against Konrad von Goßler’s VI Reserve Corps.
The German artillery fire, a French officer recalled, was lethal. “Thousands of
dead were still standing, supported as if by a flying buttress made of bodies
lying in rows on top of each other in an ascending arc from the horizontal to
an angle of 60°.” A French sergeant likewise commented on the horror of the
slaughter. “Heaps of corpses, French and German, are lying every which way,
rifles in hand. Rain is falling, shells are screaming and bursting … we hear
the wounded crying from all over the woods.”[45] A corporal with
French 31st Infantry Regiment (IR) recalled his comrades jumping from tree
trunk to tree trunk in the dense forest, seeking shelter in ditches and
potholes, “dazed by the thunderous explosions that followed them from clearing
to clearing.”[46] In
the small villages, women and children dressed in their Sunday best were swept
up in the carnage and tried to flee, carrying whatever goods they could on
their shoulders. Eventually, the panic of the other two corps forced Sarrail’s
VI Corps also to retreat to avoid a flanking movement by two German corps.
Ruffey,
finally apprised of the existence of the Army of Lorraine at Verdun, at
1:30 PM on 22 August contacted General Maunoury and pleaded for help
for his embattled right wing. Maunoury responded at once.[47] He ordered Jules
Chailley’s 54th Reserve Infantry Division (RID) to advance to the line
Ollières-Domprix, and Henry Marabail’s 67th RID to take up positions around
Senon and Amel.[48] But
delays in relaying the general’s orders resulted in neither formation arriving
in time to turn the tide of battle.
Ruffey’s
offensive had collapsed. The “staircase” effect noted previously now set in for
Langle de Cary’s neighboring Fourth Army advancing on Neufchâteau. Augustin
Gérard’s II Corps, Fifth Army, on the extreme right was stopped dead in its
tracks around 8 AM, first by a massive artillery barrage and then by
murderous machine-gun fire from Kurt von Pritzelwitz’s VI Corps (Fourth Army).
On its left, Lefèvre’s colonial corps, veterans of France’s wars in Africa and
IndoChina, nevertheless pushed on between the Forest of Chiny and Neufchâteau.[49] The early-morning
fog and rain had turned into searing heat and enervating humidity. Georges
Goullet’s 5th Colonial Brigade and Arthur Poline’s XVII Corps were surprised in
the thick woods near Bertrix, initially by German uhlans fighting dismounted
and then by Kuno von Steuben’s XVII Reserve Corps and Dedo von Schenck’s XVIII
Corps. Desperate, violent combat ensued.[50] When Otto von
Plüskow’s XI Corps of Saxon Third Army appeared from the north, the German iron
ring around Bertrix was virtually complete. Without an escape route, Poline’s
XVII Corps panicked, abandoned its artillery, and fled, leaving a breach in the
front of Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army similar to that left by V Corps in the
front of Ruffey’s Third Army.
A
poilu, Désiré Renault of 88th IR with Poline’s XVII Corps, on 22
August wrote home of the frightful slaughter. “The fighting has ended, all my
buddies are beaten into retreat, and we, the wounded, have been left abandoned
without care, dying of thirst. What a terrible night!” The coming dawn brought
only more misery. “A new torture has added itself to the others: since the sun
rose, the flies, drawn by the smell of blood, go after me fiercely.”[51] Utterly exhausted
and seriously wounded in the bludgeoning in the Ardennes, Renault was spared
death or capture by two Red Cross nurses who carried him to a field hospital at
Longwy.
Worse
was yet to come at the small village of Rossignol, north of the Semois River
and fifteen kilometers south of Neufchâteau. There, 3d Colonial Division ran
hard up against 12th ID of Pritzelwitz’s VI Army Corps. In short order, it sent
five battalions of pantalon rouges in waves against the
Germans on a front roughly six hundred meters wide. One furious frontal bayonet
charge after another, accompanied by lusty cries of “En avant!,”[52] was
mowed down by murderous artillery and machine-gun fire. As darkness fell, 3d
Colonial Division had ceased to exist: Eleven thousand of its fifteen thousand
soldiers had been killed or wounded; its commander, General Léon Raffenel, had
been shot; and its last remnants gallantly buried the regimental colors.
Rossignol
for France constituted the deadliest campaign of the Battle of the Frontiers.
Langle de Cary in classic understatement reported to Joffre from his
headquarters at Stenay: “On the whole results hardly satisfactory.”[53] He ignored the
generalissimo’s demand that he resume the offensive the next day and instead
ordered a retreat behind the Meuse and Chiers rivers near Sedan. Ruffey,
furious that his infantry charges had not been supported by artillery, fell
back on Verdun. Lanrezac’s hard-pressed Fifth Army at the Sambre could expect
no help from either Third or Fourth armies. Maunoury’s unbloodied Army of
Lorraine limped off to the safety of Amiens.
More
than eleven thousand poilus paid the butcher’s bill. At
Virton, 8th ID lost 5,500 of its 16,000 men. At Ethe, 7th ID was so badly
mauled that it was depicted as having been “stomped.” At Ochamps, 20th IR lost
almost half (1,300) of its soldiers; the neighboring 11th IR, 2,700 out of
3,300 men. Goullet’s 5th Colonial Brigade had entered the Ardennes with 6,600
effectives; it left with only 3,400.[54] Langle de Cary
reported to Joffre that of one of his corps (40,000 men), roughly 15,000
remained combat-ready; more than 15,000 had been killed or wounded. The
survivors were evacuated to Vouziers between 23 and 31 August.[55]
But
the Germans had not escaped unscathed. Duke Albrecht’s Fourth Army suffered
7,540 men dead or missing and 11,678 wounded between 21 and 31 August, with
Schenck’s XVIII Corps and Pritzel-witz’s VI Corps each sustaining about 6,000
casualties. Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Fifth Army in the same period lost 7,488 men
dead and missing and 11,529 wounded.[56] Still, a delirious
Wilhelm II awarded his son the Iron Cross, First and Second Class—as he had
earlier to Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.
AS THE
TWO OPPOSING sides battled each other into bloody exhaustion in the
Ardennes, the final drama of the Battle of Charleroi unfolded south of the
Sambre River. Once Bülow realized that his corps commanders had attacked an
entire French army across the wide Sambre front, he quickly appreciated that he
needed help to secure both his flanks and victory. A discussion with Otto von
Lauenstein, his chief of staff, on the night of 23 August confirmed the tension
at Bülow’s headquarters at Walcourt. “There were critical hours yesterday and
during the night,” Lauenstein noted, “in which the worry whether all would go
according to plan almost gained the upper hand. Our operation had undoubtedly
been most audacious.”[57] There existed only
one option: to renew the attack on Lanrezac the next morning, 24 August, and to
call on the two flanking armies to lend support.
Bülow
had already contacted Hausen’s Third Army earlier that day to press across the
Meuse at Dinant; he repeated that plea on 24 August. At noon welcome (if
deceptive) news arrived from Third Army. “Sector seized; French gone; our right
wing [at] Florennes-Philippeville.” Bülow was ecstatic. The battle was almost
won. Around 3 PM, he triumphantly cabled Moltke. “Enemy’s right flank
decisively defeated by 2 Army. 3 Army across the Maas toward Philippeville. To
be passed on to the Kaiser. All [armies] continue the attack.”[58]
Still,
Bülow worried that he had received no news from Kluck or his chief of staff,
Kuhl. First Army seemed to be continuing its march southwest, ignoring Bülow’s
repeated requests that it turn onto a more southerly course and thereby
maintain contact with Second Army’s right flank. Lauenstein shared his
commander’s anxiety. “If my friend and my right neighbor Kuhl now deals with
the English as we have dealt with the French, then the first phase of the
campaign in the western theater will have been decided in our favor.”[59] It was time for
Bülow to issue a direct order to First Army: “IX Army Corps is to advance
immediately west of Maubeuge in order to carry out an enveloping attack against
the enemy’s left wing. III Army Corps is to join it in echelon formation.”[60]
But
whereas Bülow was able to intimidate Hausen and his chief of staff, Ernst von
Hoeppner, the same was not the case with Kluck and Kuhl. First Army’s
duumvirate appreciated that they were the hammer that was to smash the Allied
armies around Paris, and they were not about to let Bülow interfere with that
goal. “Hour after hour went by,” in the words of the German official history,
without a reply from First Army. Bülow and Lauenstein seethed with anger.
Moltke had, after all, put First Army under Bülow’s command. By late afternoon,
Bülow had lost all patience. “Where II and IV Army Corps today?” he testily
demanded to know from Kluck. “How does the battle stand today?” Finally, he issued
a barely concealed reminder of their command relationship. “Request daily to be
notified accordingly.”[61] Moltke at Koblenz
chose not to pull his field commanders into line.
FIRST
ARMY WAS ABOUT to make contact with the British Expeditionary Force. On 19
August, Wilhelm II reportedly[62] had “commanded”
Kluck to “exterminate the treacherous English” and to roll over Field Marshal
French’s “contemptible little army.”[63] First Army stood
west of Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. It had marched nearly 250 kilometers in eleven
days, much of it in excruciating heat and suffocating dust. Information
gathered from local villagers suggested to Kluck that seventy thousand British
troops were moving on Mons. But communications with Second Army remained
nonexistent, and no orders had been received from Moltke. Nor had anyone
thought of sending out liaison officers to coordinate the operations of First
and Second armies, so critical to the Moltke-Schlieffen design.[64] Kluck and Kuhl
simply planned “to cut the English off” from establishing contact with
Lanrezac’s Fifth Army.
They
did not have long to wait. Friedrich Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps, Ferdinand von
Quast’s IX Corps, and Ewald von Lochow’s III Corps blindly advanced from north
to south along the twenty-meter-wide Mons-Condé Canal against Sir Horace
Smith-Dorrien’s II Army Corps.[65] Had Kluck finally
turned toward the south as requested by Bülow? Not a word of this reached
Second Army. At the bend in the British line at Mons, where it turned southeast
toward Peissant, Manfred von Richthofen’s[66] I Cavalry Corps was
approaching Sir Douglas Haig’s I Army Corps. Field Marshal French’s role was to
protect Lanrezac’s left flank; Kluck’s was to roll up the British left flank
between Saint-Aybert and Jemappes.
The
two armies were advancing through some of the ugliest real estate in Europe.
Once a medieval textile town, Mons in 1914 was in the heart of the Belgian
coalfields. It had all the flavor of the Industrial Revolution—polluted
ditches, swamps, watercourses, and canals. Railroads and cobbled roads further
dissected the fields and farms and willow forests. Pitheads and smoking slag
heaps, some as high as thirty meters, rounded off the landscape.
This
phase of the Battle of the Frontiers began inauspiciously enough near Casteau.
Field Marshal French, wisely having rejected a plea from Lanrezac to wheel east
to strike Bülow’s Second Army in the flank and thus expose the BEF to Kluck’s
First Army, was advancing in the direction of Soignies, as Joffre had requested
in Special Order No. 15 of 21 August. Suddenly, 4th Dragoon Guards of 2d
Cavalry Brigade came upon riders of Kluck’s 9th Cavalry Division; a small
skirmish ensued. Owing to inadequate reconnaissance, neither commander
suspected the imminent clash of their entire forces. Both were thus surprised
when, between 9 and 10 AM on the misty and rainy morning of Sunday,
23 August, Quast’s IX Corps blundered into Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps near Mons.
A furious battle ensued all along the grimy Mons-Condé Canal: While Quast’s
artillery mercilessly battered the BEF’s lines with shell and shrapnel,
Smith-Dorrien’s Fourth Middlesex and Second Royal Irish riflemen endlessly
directed their accurate Lee-Enfield fire (“fifteen rounds a minute”) into wave
after wave of gray German infantry coming at them in close formation. Corporal
John Lucy later recalled the carnage:
A
great roar of musketry rent the air. … For us the battle took the form of well
ordered, rapid rifle-fire at close range as the field of grey human targets
appeared, or were struck down, to be replaced by further waves of German
infantry who shared the same fate. … Such tactics amazed us, and after the
first shock of seeing men slowly and helplessly falling down as they were hit
[it] gave us a great sense of power and pleasure.[67]
Captain
Walter Bloem of 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers also attested to the lethality of
the battlefield. The gently undulating hills and meadows around the canal were
“dotted with little grey heaps,” fallen German infantrymen. “Wherever I looked,
right or left,” he noted, “were dead and wounded, quivering in convulsions,
groaning terribly, blood oozing from fresh wounds.”[68]
It was
much the same story farther west at Jemappes, where Lochow’s III Corps
similarly fed its infantry into deadly enemy rifle fire. By day’s end, the BEF
had suffered sixteen hundred casualties; Kluck and Kuhl chose not to reveal
German losses, which have been estimated at about five thousand. Although the
British abandoned both Mons and Jemappes by nightfall and began to fall back
toward Le Cateau, the day’s battle had ended inconclusively. Kluck and Kuhl,
who had wanted to sweep around the British left flank while anchoring their own
left flank on Mons, felt cheated of victory over the BEF by Bülow’s constant
demands that First Army at all times maintain close contact with Second Army.
Moreover, they were annoyed that the enemy had once again eluded encirclement
and that their own infantry had shown such profound contempt for the enemy’s
firepower. Mons was thus best forgotten.
For
the British—both soldiers and the public at home, both then and now—Mons became
one of the great legends of the war. There were many stories of what occurred
that day, but they all had some elements in common: At one point in the battle,
when the waves of gray German infantry seemed about to sweep across the canal
and mop up the remnants of Smith-Dorrien’s “Old Contemptibles,” the skies
parted brightly to reveal a knight in shining armor mounted on a white horse
(Saint George?) while archers from above showered the German lines with arrows
and white-robed angels shielded the BEF from hostile fire. The “Angel of Mons”[69] thus became for the
British both a sign of divine intervention on their behalf and a symbol of hope
for the duration of the war.
As
Kluck resumed his attack the next day, 24 August, the entire Allied front
suddenly seemed to collapse. Lanrezac, upon receiving news that Namur had
capitulated and that Hausen’s Third Army was crossing the Meuse south of
Dinant, had decided by ten o’clock on the night of 23 August to fall back along
the line Givet-Maubeuge. He reached his decision without consulting Joffre and
without informing Sir John French, thus further eroding an already shaky
relationship with the British commander. Fifth Army’s precipitous retreat
caused a twelve-kilometer-wide gap to develop between French Fifth Army’s left
and the BEF’s right. “Johnnie” French felt “left alone” by Lanrezac and poured
out his bitterness to Joffre at GQG. At 2 AM on 24 August, he ordered
a general retreat from Mons southwest to Le Cateau. Despondency seemed to have
overtaken him. He queried Lord Kitchener about the possibility of falling back
on Le Havre—and Britain? He toyed with the idea of sheltering his forces in
Maubeuge.[70] And
he threatened to withdraw the entire BEF behind “the lower Seine”—that is,
behind Fortress Paris. For the Allies, the Great Retreat had begun.
The
agony of defeat was recorded by future historian Marc Bloch, a sergeant with
French 272d IR. The retreat for him began in the “stifling heat” of the morning
of 25 August. In village after village on the left bank of the Meuse, he
encountered fleeing French peasants. “Wrenched from their homes, disoriented,
dazed, and bullied by the gendarmes, they were troublesome but pathetic
figures.” Men, women, and children passed by in silent marches taking what
little they could in small hand-pulled wagons. On 26 August, the burning
sunshine cruelly turned to steaming rain. The retreat, “the monotony of each
day,” plodded onward toward the west, “continually retreating without
fighting.” Where and how would it end? “Oh, what bitter days of retreat, of
weariness, boredom, and anxiety!”[71]
THE
DECISION IN THE campaign in the west still lay ahead, but it would be
fought by a much-reduced German field army. For Moltke and his deputy chief of
staff, Hermann von Stein, panicked by the unexpectedly rapid Russian advance in
the east, stripped Bülow’s Second Army of Max von Gallwitz’s Guard Reserve
Corps and Hausen’s Third Army of Plüskow’s XI Corps to derail the Russian
steamroller. As the two corps marched east from Namur, Moltke, in what he
pathetically called a “counter-movement,” ordered Max von Boehn’s IX Reserve
Corps to depart Schleswig-Holstein and join Kluck’s First Army.[72] Stein had vetoed a
suggestion by Wilhelm Groener, chief of the Field Railway Section of the
General Staff, to send Bavarian I Corps and Prussian XXI Corps from Lorraine to
East Prussia instead, with the revealing comment, “One cannot expect Bavarians
to defend East Prussia.”[73] As well, Moltke and
Stein ordered Kluck to leave Hans von Beseler’s III Corps to cover Fortress
Antwerp and one brigade of Hans von Gronau’s IV Reserve Corps to garrison
Brussels. Finally, Bülow had detached Hans von Zwehl’s VII Reserve Corps as
well as one brigade of Einem’s VII Corps to lay siege to the French garrison of
fifty thousand men at Maubeuge.[74]
Heat
and exhaustion as well as almost uninterrupted combat had further weakened the
two “strike armies.” During the entire month of August, Kluck’s First Army of
217,384 soldiers had lost 7,869 men wounded as well as 2,863 killed or missing.
Slightly less than eight thousand men had reported sick—mostly from heatstroke
and dehydration, but also from foot sores due to the extended march of some
four hundred kilometers in thirty days.[75] Bülow’s Second Army
of 199,486 soldiers listed 12,151 wounded and 5,061 killed or missing for
August. Almost nine thousand soldiers had reported sick for much the same
reasons as those in First Army. There had been three suicides in each army.[76] But if one takes
into account the figures for just the last ten days of August—that is, the
period of the heaviest fighting in the Battle of the Frontiers—the totals for
First Army were 4,932 wounded, 2,145 killed or missing, and 2,567 reported
sick; and for Second Army, 8,052 wounded, 3,516 killed or missing, and 4,125
reported sick.[77]
Paris was still more than 130 kilometers away.
Joffre
was by far the principal loser. On 23 August, he flippantly notified War
Minister Messimy that he had “terminated” his strategic plan.[78] In fact, that plan
lay in tatters—at the cost of 260,000 casualties (including 75,000 killed) and
the loss of 83 percent of France’s iron ore, 62 percent of its cast iron, and
60 percent of its steel production. French First and Second armies had attacked
in Lorraine on 14 August; six days later, a German counterattack had driven
them back. Third and Fourth armies had attacked in the Ardennes on 21 August;
two days later, they had staggered back to their jump-off positions. Fifth Army
had advanced to the Sambre on 20 August; three days later, it had begun its
retreat to Givet. Joffre had been decisively beaten in the Battle of the
Frontiers and had lost the initiative to the Germans.
He
took no responsibility.[79] Both at the time and
subsequently in his memoirs, Joffre insisted that he had placed “the main body
of his army against the most sensitive point of the enemy,” and that he had
secured “numerical superiority at this point.” But the troops, despite this
“numerical superiority,” had not displayed the “offensive qualities” he had
expected of them. Worse, there had been “many individual failures” and “grave
shortcomings” among his commanders. All too many had not “understood” his Field
Regulation; all too many had failed to display the Napoleonic feu
sacré; and all too many had shown themselves to be cautious instead of
bold. Messimy for a second time in two weeks went so far as to demand that
ineffectual commanders (“old fossils”) be summarily executed.[80] A shocked President
Poincaré recalled his liaison officer to GQG for a dose of reality. “Is it
defeat?” he bluntly asked Colonel Marie-Jean Pénelon. The reply was surprisingly[81] straightforward,
“Yes, Mister President.”[82] That Sunday, 23
August 1914, childhood memories of 1870–71 could not have been far from the
mind of the statesman born in Bar-le-Duc, Lorraine, in 1860.
The
greatest losers by far, of course, were the people and the land of Belgium. The
country lay in ruins. Villages had been reduced to rubble and ashes. Hundreds
of civilians had been summarily executed for reportedly firing on German
troops, and tens of thousands had been forcefully deported to Germany. An
endless sea of refugees, pulling their few remaining possessions in ancient
small carts, flowed aimlessly away from the fighting fronts. Giant shell
craters pockmarked the landscape. Bridges, canals, railroad tracks, and
telegraph wires had been destroyed. Crops were rotting in the fields. The
bloated or blasted corpses of horses and cows were left in the sun. Will Irwin,
an American reporter for Collier’s Weekly, was struck by the
grayness of “earth and land and sky”: “gray transport wagons,” “gray motorcycles,”
“gray biplanes,” and “gray machines of men.” Ever onward the German “gray
machine of death” rolled. Irwin’s most lasting memory was a prosaic one: “And
over it all lay a smell of which I have never heard mentioned in any book on
war—the smell of a half-million un-bathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised
to the nth power. That smell lay for days over every town through
which the Germans passed.”[83]
[1] WK, 1:354.
[2] Le borinage refers
to the coal-mining district of Hainaut Province in southwest Belgium extending
to the French border. The term came from borin or borain,
pejorative French names for “buddy.”
[3]
Ibid., 366–67.
[4] Dated 13 August 1914.
AFGG, 1:165–66; and 1-1:240–41; Joffre, 1:269.
[5] Ibid., 1:266–68;
Anthony Clayton, Paths of Glory: The French Army, 1914–18 (London:
Cassell, 2003), 46–47.
[6] When Apollo, the Greek
god of sunlight and son of Zeus, granted Cassandra the gift of prophecy and she
did not return his love, Apollo placed a curse on her so that no one would ever
believe her predictions.
[7] Sewell Tyng, The
Campaign of the Marne, 1914 (New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green,
1935), 191–92.
[8] AFGG,
1:163.
[9] Cited in Gabriel
Rouquerol, La bataille de Guise (Paris: Berger-Levrault,
1921), 110.
[10] Charles
Lanrezac, Le plan de campagne français et le premier mois de la guerre
(2 août–3 sep-tembre 1914) (Paris: Payot, 1921), 77.
[11] All actions on French
soil are given in French (GMT) time.
[12] Instruction particulière
No. 10, 15 August 1914. AFGG, 1-1:307–08.
[13]
Instruction particulière No. 13, 18 August 1914. AFGG, 1-1:424–25.
[14] AFGG, 1-1:529; Joffre,
1:273–76; Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and
Operations in the Great War (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 65.
[15] AFGG, 1-1:598; Joffre, 1:289.
[16] Hew
Strachan, The First World War (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 1:225.
[17] Joffre to Messimy, 21
August 1914. AFGG, 1:205.
[18] Barbara W. Tuchman, The
Guns of August (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 258.
[19] AFGG, 1:503–04.
Joffre, 1:270–71, speaks bravely of “covering” the BEF’s movements.
[20] Charles J.
Huguet, Britain and the War: A French Indictment (London:
Cassell, 1927), 51; AFGG, 1:504–05.
[21] “Why have they come
here? But, to fish in the river!”
[22] Field-Marshal Sir
Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries, ed. C. E. Callwell (London: Cassell,
1927), 1:164. French chose to leave these discussions with Joffre and Lanrezac
out of his memoirs: 1914 (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1919), 34–36.
[23] AFGG, 1:509.
[24] HGW-MO, 1:10.
[25] The extent to which
the troops adhered to Kitchener’s instruction to keep on guard against
“excesses” and “temptations, both in wine and women,” cannot be accurately
determined.
[26]
Tyng, Campaign of the Marne, 369.
[27] Field-Marshal Sir
Henry Wilson, 1:165.
[28] AFGG, 1:474.
[29] Ibid., 1:479.
[30] Ibid., 1:484ff.
[31]
Lanrezac to Joffre, 22 August 1914. AFGG, 1-1:729. “L’armée W” refers to the
BEF guarding Lanrezac’s left flank.
[32] AFGG, 1:498.
[33] The
Commentaries of Caesar, ed. William Duncan (London: J. Cuthell, 1819),
1:422–25.
[34] Ordre particulière No.
17 to Third and Fourth armies, 21 August 1914. AFGG, 1-1:604.
[35] Tyng, Campaign
of the Marne, 82.
[36] Cited in ibid., 79.
[37]
Official German figures as of 22 August 1914. Fourth Army was listed as 117
battalions and 640 guns; Fifth Army as 119 battalions and 680 guns. WK, 1:646.
[38] Ibid., 1:306.
[39] Crown Prince
Wilhelm, Meine Erinnerungen aus Deutschlands Heldenkampf (Berlin:
E. S. Mittler, 1923), 46. He would later blame the failure to achieve his
“Cannae” on Bruno von Mudra’s XVI Corps for interpreting the royal order to
advance as one to withdraw, after having been attacked by superior French
forces.
[40] Tyng, Campaign
of the Marne, 81.
[41]
Edmond Valarché, La bataille des frontiers (Paris:
Berger-Levrault, 1932), 136.
[42] For the attack, see
Barthélemy Edmond Palat, La grande guerre sur le front occidental (Paris:
Chapelot, 1917–29), 3:173ff. AFGG, 1:369ff.
[43] WK, 1:472.
[44] AFGG, 2:255.
[45] Tuchman, Guns
of August, 284–85; AFGG 1:376ff.
[46] Jean
Galtier-Boissière, En rase campagne, 1914. Un hiver à Souchez 1915–1916 (Paris:
Berger-Levrault, 1917), 48, 54.
[47] AFGG, 1:387–88.
[48] Ibid., 2:248ff.
[49] Ibid., 1:401ff.
[50] See Bruce I.
Gudmundsson, “Unexpected Encounter at Bertrix,” in Robert Cowley, ed., The
Great War: Perspectives on the First World War (New York: Random
House, 2003), 25–36.
[51] Cited
in Jean-Pierre Guéno and Yves Laplume, eds., Paroles de poilus: lettres
et carnets du front 1914–1918 (Paris: Librio, 1998), 27–28.
[52] “Forward!”
[53] Report dated 23 August
1914. AFGG, 1-1:871.
[54] Gudmundsson,
“Unexpected Encounter,” 26, 35.
[55]
Langle de Cary to Joffre, 1 September 1914. AFGG, 2-2:315.
[56] Sanitätsbericht
über das deutsche Heer im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler,
1934), 3:36, 37–38.
[57] Letter to his wife
dated 24 August 1914. BA-MA, RH 61/948 Der Krieg im Westen 1914–1916.
[58] WK,
1:399.
[59] Letter to his wife
dated 24 August 1914. BA-MA, RH 61/948 Der Krieg im Westen 1914–1916.
[60] WK,
1:394.
[61] Ibid., 1:399.
[62] No record of this
order was ever found in the German archives, and Wilhelm II after the war
vehemently denied having issued such a command. The British press made a meal
of the quote—apparently “invented” by Frederick Maurice in the British War
Office. The soldiers of the BEF proudly adopted the moniker Old
Contemptibles.
[63] Robin Neillands, The
Old Contemptibles: The British Expeditionary Force 1914 (London: John
Murray, 2004), 2.
[64] WK, 1:420.
[65] The detailed British
account is in HGW-MO, 1:7ff.; the German, in Raimund von
Gleichen-Rußwurm, Die Schlacht bei Mons (Oldenburg: Gerhard
Stalling, 1919), 1–68.
[66] Not to be confused
with the future air ace (“Red Baron”) of the same name, then serving with
German cavalry in East Prussia.
[67] John F. Lucy, There’s
a Devil in the Drum (London: Faber, 1938), 734.
[68] Walter Bloem, The
Advance from Mons 1914 (London: Peter Davies, 1930), 60, 63.
[69] David
Clarke, The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians (Chichester:
John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 1–2.
[70] Huguet, Britain
and the War, 58–59.
[71] Marc Bloch, Memoirs
of War, 1914–15 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press,
1980), 81–85.
[72] Diary
entry dated 25 August 1914. BA-MA, RH 61/50661 Kriegserinnerungen des
Generalleunants v. [sic] Tappen, 29.
[73] BA-MA, RH 61/50739
Generalleutnant von Stein, der Generalquartiermeister der sechs ersten
Kriegswochen, 17.
[74] Tyng, Campaign
of the Marne, 136.
[75] Der Sanitätsdienst
im Gefechts-und Schlachtenverlauf im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (Berlin: E.
S. Mittler, 1938), 2:31. Some battalions reported as many as four hundred men
down with foot sores.
[76] Ibid., 2:93.
[77] Sanitätsbericht
über das Deutsche Heer im Weltkriege 1914/1918, 3:36.
[78] Joffre to Messimy, 23
August 1914. AFGG, 1:213.
[79] Joffre to Messimy, 24
August 1914. AFGG, 2:1, 124–25. Also Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 75.
[80] Messimy to Joffre, 24
August 1914. SHD, 1 K 268.
[81] The colonel had earned
the nickname April Smiles for his ability to put a positive
spin on any news, no matter how bad.
[82] Raymond
Poincaré, Au service de la France (Paris: Plon, 1928), 5:155.
[83] Cited in Mark
Sullivan, Our Times, 1900–1925 (New York and London: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 5:26.
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