Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (33 page)

Falkenhayn said at the beginning of August: ‘It is critical that we use the prevailing euphoria before it goes up in smoke.’ This Moltke sought to do, unleashing against Liège the first big assault of the western war. The city was defended by a garrison of 40,000 reinforced by a field division – far more men than the attackers had anticipated meeting. The local German corps commander, Gen. Otto von Emmich, issued a proclamation to
Belgians: ‘we want a clear road to attack those who wish to attack us. I give my assurance that the Belgian population will not have to suffer the horrors of war.’

But instead of ‘a clear road’, on 5 August the first waves of his Westphalian and Hanoverian soldiers met ferocious artillery and small-arms fire. These green troops, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were thrown back with heavy loss. A Belgian officer wrote: ‘As line after line of German infantry advanced, we simply mowed them down … They made no attempt at deploying but came on … 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.’ The German army started its war in a fashion the rest of Europe would emulate in the weeks that followed, and at Liège Moltke harvested a first crop of grieving widows and mothers.

The Belgian government was rash enough to issue a triumphalist communiqué: ‘We are completely victorious. All the German attacks have been repulsed.’ But Emmich had hardly started: in the days that followed, his men pressed successive attacks supported by fierce bombardments. Casualties mounted: one brigade lost over half its men, including the commander and a regimental colonel; in another attack at Vise, thirty officers and 1,150 men became casualties. On 6 August an unwelcome novelty was introduced, when a Zeppelin airship staged the first-ever bombing raid on a European city, killing nine Liègeois.

Before war came, Henry Wilson had vainly begged the Belgians to strengthen Liège and Namur. Now they discovered the vulnerability of their fortresses to sustained assault. Gen. Gérard Leman, Liège’s garrison commander, abandoned efforts to hold a continuous perimeter. He dispatched almost half his men to join the Belgian field army, thereafter relying upon interlocking fire from the bastions to check a German breakthrough. The forts at Liège, like those defending France’s eastern frontier, were constructed of concrete strengthened by vast earth banks. Ditches covered by machine-guns – though insufficient of them – held enemy infantry at bay. Each fort’s defences were dominated by guns mounted on tracks in casemates and steel cupolas which, though weighing over a hundred tons apiece, could be hand-cranked and trained.

Five German corps, 150,000 men, pressed in upon the city. A growing number of attackers exploited darkness to infiltrate between the forts. They were ordered to advance with unloaded weapons, to prevent careless soldiers shooting each other, but muddle persisted, redeemed only by
some purposeful leadership. In a notably theatrical gesture, on the morning of 7 August Ludendorff hastened forward, rallied some despondent units wilting under Belgian fire, and personally led them into Liège’s abandoned citadel. For this action he won – pretty easily – Germany’s highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite. The nation was informed that the city was taken: ‘
Lüttich ist gefallen
.’ A week earlier, few of the Kaiser’s subjects were as enthusiastic about war as had been the Prussians in 1870, but now the capture of Liège launched a wave of popular enthusiasm which persisted into September. The Germans, like most peoples, recoiled from carnage but loved victories, especially when these came quickly. Towns and cities exulted, with singing and dancing in the streets. Next day schoolchildren were assembled to share the rejoicing, then granted a holiday.

Celebration was premature. Despite the citadel’s fall, the Belgians held out stubbornly in most of the surrounding forts. On 8 August, Gen. Karl von Einem took over responsibility for the siege. He abandoned frontal attacks and deployed 60,000 troops in an encircling ‘ring of steel’ pending the arrival of heavy artillery. The Belgians kept firing: the first casualties suffered by Dr Lorenz Treplin’s regiment were three men who rashly left their posts in the captured fort of Barchon to bathe in the Meuse, where an exploding shell severely cut and bruised them. Otherwise, wrote the surgeon on 11 August, his life was boring – ‘stupor and tranquillity’; he asked his wife to send him a book to pass the time. She told their children Papa was in a place where he was obliged to speak in French. Four-year-old Ingeborg wailed, ‘But then I shan’t be able to understand him when he comes home!’

Civilians in the path of the armies wearied of war very swiftly. ‘You cannot think how miserable life is here,’ Ghent doctor’s wife Madame Jeanne van Bleyenberghe wrote to a friend. ‘Many people are ruined. Pierre had thought to send me to England … but I don’t want to be so far away and not be able to come back when I want and besides it is too late.’ Worse, much worse, now befell her country. The assault on Liège provoked the first manifestations of a month-long German frenzy about supposed
francs-tireurs
opposing their advance. This prompted the Kaiser’s army to behave with extraordinary savagery. On the night of 4 August, troops in the village of Bernau panicked amid unexplained shooting which cost the lives of eleven Germans. Next day, ten villagers were murdered in retaliation, including a family of five hiding in a cellar. The following night, a Belgian shell landed in the hamlet of Saint-Hadelin, wounding some Germans posted there. A local teacher was accused of betraying their
position by signalling to the fort of Fléron, and was promptly shot along with several of his family. The first mass executions also took place that day. A hysterical officer, Maj. Gen. von Kraewel, explained the repulse of his troops’ attacks by claiming that ‘the entire population in Liège and the suburbs participated in the fighting’. Between the 4th and 7th, Kraewel’s brigade shot 117 civilians, whom he claimed had engaged in ‘mass resistance’.

Likewise another brigade, embittered after suffering a repulse, vented frustration about its losses on the village of Soumagne, where 118 inhabitants were shot or bayoneted and a hundred houses destroyed. German soldiers told survivors: ‘It is your brothers who are firing on us from the fort of Fléron.’ On the 6th, two hundred civilians from the communities of Romsée and Olne were used as a human shield by Germans advancing on the forts of Embourg and Chaudfontaine. Other hostages were held captive and unfed on the Meuse bridges for several days, to deter Belgian artillery from destroying them. On 8 August infantrymen herded into a nearby meadow seventy-two inhabitants of Melen, including eight women and four girls under thirteen, and executed them. When the local burgomaster arrived in hopes of identifying and burying the dead, he too was shot; most of the village was burned. Sixty-four people likewise perished in Olne and Saint-Hadelin, and another forty in Riessonart. By 8 August, some 850 civilians had been killed around Liège and 1,300 buildings punitively burned by the Germans, to appease their hysteria or assert their dominance. A local tax inspector at Francorchamps, whose father had been murdered, protested to a German officer that no local citizen had raised a hand against his forces. The soldier shrugged and responded in French: ‘It doesn’t matter. At Liège you kill our men. We also have the right to kill you.’

The Belgians’ emplacements were proof against field artillery; only the heaviest metal cast by Krupp and Skoda could penetrate their casemates. Graf Harry Kessler, a forty-six-year-old reservist
Rittmeister
commanding an ammunition train outside Liège, was surprised one morning to meet Austrian artillerymen. They told him they had arrived ‘hotfoot from Trieste’, bringing four batteries of Skoda 305mm howitzers. These vast weapons opened fire on 12 August, soon accompanied by four 420mm Krupp monsters, each with a crew of two hundred men, which were fired electrically from a distance of three hundred yards, and delivered armour-piercing projectiles. The defence of Liège was terminated by violent eruptions of earth and concrete, rendings of steel and human flesh: in one
place, a single shell killed three hundred defenders. Gen. Leman was carried unconscious, choked by fumes, from the ruins of Fort de Loncin. Thirty-odd shells sufficed for each bastion: those on the right bank of the Meuse fell on the 13th, while the river’s left bank was cleared three days later.

The capture of Liège had cost the attackers 5,300 casualties. The eleven-day siege did not impose a matching delay on the German advance, because the mass of the Kaiser’s armies had anyway needed time to concentrate before they swept onwards. Some formations were already hastening down a twelve-mile-wide corridor to the French frontier, through which two vast armies must somehow squeeze. But the struggle for Liège did cause disruption: the invaders’ right flanking armies were denied the quick passage they needed to achieve their long, long crossing of Belgium and northern France before Joffre’s forces could redeploy to meet them.

Some pre-war German military pundits had argued that a swift, devastating, absolute war was preferable to a sustained and limited conflict. One such author wrote in 1913: ‘Ruthless destruction of the enemy’s forces and weapons is the most humane objective, strange as that sounds. The more generously and widely the term “humanity” is defined, the less effectual war-making becomes … [and thus] the longer a war will last, and the more heavily its consequences will weigh upon the entire existence of the belligerents. Only uninhibited commitment of every element of strength can achieve the swift and decisive overthrow of the enemy.’ This was what Moltke was attempting in August 1914.

In the first weeks of the European war, the armies of France also made their own dramatic attempt to force an outcome, before German operations had attained full momentum. Along hundreds of miles of the interface between the belligerents from Belgium to the Swiss border, Joffre’s formations began to move forward in fulfilment of Plan XVII. The exotic horsemen of Gen. Jean-François Sordet’s cavalry corps, clad in Napoleonic finery, made a dash towards Liège ahead of the French Fifth Army, to be greeted with wild enthusiasm by Belgian civilians everywhere along their road. But on 8 August, ten miles from the city, Sordet’s dragoons and lancers met German forces. They fell back, having merely exhausted their unhappy mounts; gleaming French helmets, breastplates and horsehair plumes were not matched by effective weapons. British cavalry carried infantry rifles and were trained for dismounted action, but Sordet’s men had only swords and 1890-model carbines – little more use than pistols.

A light-cavalry sergeant later described the frustrations his regiment suffered when it attempted to charge enemy horsemen in Belgium, only to meet the deadly fire of German infantry, which emptied many saddles: ‘That’s what happened over and over again – perhaps twenty or thirty times.’ At each encounter, their numbers shrank. Horse management was a critical military skill, but that of the French army was lamentable. Sordet’s cavalry rode thirty-five miles a day through the first weeks of the campaign, and some regiments covered far greater distances: the 9th Cuirassiers recorded in their war diary that they moved a hundred miles in just forty-eight hours. Soon their horses – exhausted by carrying a weight of 250 pounds apiece, poorly fed, stinking from untended saddle sores – were foundering in scores. Unlike British cavalrymen, who were trained to lead their animals as much as possible, to husband their strength for action, the French – and Germans – rode many hapless beasts to death.

As the armies brushed and skirmished in these early encounters, many men flaunted their innocence. Pte. Charles Stein of the Belgian Grenadiers saw German shells bursting, and delighted in their perceived beauty – until he saw his own compatriots fleeing in consequence. On the night of the 11th, a frightened sentry in Stein’s unit shot a cow which grazed too close to his post. A company of German reservists likewise glimpsed shadowy movements in early-morning mist, and opened a heavy fire which killed several cattle and a returning patrol before order was restored. When a dud shell landed near French Capt. Plieux de Diusse, he bent curiously to pick it up until a veteran shouted that he would burn himself – de Diusse had no inkling that projectiles were hot.

Even as Moltke’s columns tramped across Belgium, further south the first serious clashes unfolded between his formations and those of Joffre. On 3 August the French advanced into the ‘lost provinces’ annexed by Prussia after its victory in 1871. It is doubtful how many Frenchmen in 1914 nursed real emotion about Alsace-Lorraine. One young blood questioned some years earlier shrugged that their loss was ‘a historical event … I don’t think that this question interests the youth of today or the country, nor does it interest me.’ In 1908 the newspaper
La Patrie
asserted, ‘for most Frenchmen the dismemberment is an event as distant as the Seven Years War’.

But those who minded did so passionately. Gen. Louis-Napoléon Conneau, for instance, who commanded a cavalry corps in 1914, observed a pre-war ritual of bivouacking with his regiment of dragoons for one
night each year beside a frontier post marking the gateway to Alsace. More than a few such men, now at the head of France’s armies, shed tears as they set forth to liberate people whom they regarded as oppressed fellow countrymen – though 380,000 Alsace-Lorrainers eventually fought as conscripts in the German army. The province of Alsace, German-speaking but French-ruled for most of its modern history, extends about a hundred miles from north to south, but is less than forty miles deep. Its western landscape is dominated by the Vosges mountains –
Vogesen
to Germans, just as Alsace was
Elsass
and Lorraine
Lothringen
. The frontier between France and Alsace ran along a steep, densely forested ridge rising in places to 3,000 feet.

In the north, the Germans had constructed the vast fortress of Mutzig, with a network of underground bunkers, to protect the approach to Strasbourg. In the south, towards the textile town of Mulhouse, between the Vosges and the Alps lay the old floodplain of the Rhine. This constituted a corridor barely twenty miles wide, which alone offered ready access to an army. Most of the province was rustic peasant country, known for cheese, wine and lace-making. It had little strategic significance, because it was a cul-de-sac: beyond lay southern Germany’s hills and forests, major obstacles. Moreover, the Alsatian front was much more readily reinforced and supplied from Germany than from France. But Moltke correctly anticipated that, in the event of war, the French army would find irresistible the lure of recovering the eastern provinces.