Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (34 page)

The Germans who deployed to defend Alsace gazed in wonder at the first French soldiers they glimpsed before them, clad in the same long blue overcoats, red trousers and képis their fathers of the Prussian army had known and vanquished back in 1870. One of the Kaiser’s men wrote home: ‘They really look like something out of a picture-book.’ Joffre and his officers could not complain that they were unwarned about the folly of adherence to brilliant plumage. In the spring of 1914 Col. Serret, military attaché in Berlin, submitted a long report about his hosts’ latest manoeuvres. He identified the importance of their howitzers and heavy artillery, which senior officers in Paris discounted. He emphasised the benefits of German grey-green uniforms in reducing visibility, and urged that French soldiers should not merely abandon their traditional garb, but also forswear shining sword hilts, cooking utensils, even buttons. He quoted the Kaiser: ‘[For centuries] we have believed that military dress should be aesthetically pleasing … fighting at close quarters, in order to kill it was important to be able to recognise each other. Now that we
deploy some kilometres apart, we should not show ourselves.’ Wilhelm, said Serret, regretted the passing of brilliantly attired soldiers, but declared that war had now become ‘a melancholy and dirty affair’.

The colonel was infuriated by a contrarian article which appeared in
Le Temps
of 30 April. This claimed that other nations regretted adopting drab uniforms, and that France was fortunate to have rejected such folly. Serret wrote again to the War Ministry, deploring the fact that old-fashioned uniforms made its men the most conspicuous in the world: ‘This difference in visibility, where the most insignificant [French] soldier must attract immediate attention, would have a more serious [adverse] effect on morale than being asked to fight with an inferior rifle.’ He added that the gleaming French army ‘would hold the record for visibility in the face of its adversaries’. In July a new regulation belatedly introduced sensible new greyish-blue service dress – the ‘
bleu horizon
’ – but this had not yet been issued when the killing began.

Though Gen. Yvon Dubail’s 260,000 men in Alsace constituted the biggest of France’s five armies – reorganised as seven during the weeks ahead – commanders in the south were instructed by Joffre that their task was merely to engage and contain the largest possible enemy forces, while their comrades further north struck the decisive blows. The Germans at first offered no serious resistance: on the road to Mulhouse, Dubail’s men suffered only a hundred casualties. At 3 p.m. on 8 August, the French people were invited to rejoice that the tricolour flew once more over the city, which the enemy had evacuated. The liberators’ arrival was greeted with repeated renderings of the
Marseillaise
and dancing in the streets. Gen. Louis Bonneau, the local French commander, who was himself a son of the province, staged a two-hour victory parade, and issued a bombastic proclamation: ‘Children of Alsace, after forty-four years of painful waiting, French soldiers once more tread the soil of your noble land. They are the first labourers in a great work of revenge.’

Celebrations were short-lived. Twenty-four hours later, the Germans committed massive reinforcements and counter-attacked. In oppressive heat, there was confused fighting in woods and vineyards, in which not all the Kaiser’s soldiers proved themselves heroes. When Maj. Otto Teschner ordered a frontal attack, only his officers and a few men obeyed – others clung to the shelter of a gravel pit. Teschner was obliged to threaten to shoot waverers, to stem a panic-stricken rush to the rear. Another officer, sent to discover what was happening at the front, met streams of men fleeing: ‘They told me that they had been beaten and wanted to [retreat]
across the Rhine.’ But then the tide turned. The Germans prevailed, the French abandoned Mulhouse. Bonneau, much shaken, ordered a general retreat back across the frontier to Belfort.

Joffre was infuriated by both the military reverse and the moral humiliation. He castigated Bonneau for halting his advance to celebrate in Mulhouse, when he should have pushed on to destroy the Rhine bridges. The commander-in-chief had intended that a display of
panache
in Alsace should lift the spirits of the entire army. Here now, instead, was Bonneau asserting that he was pressed, and demanding reinforcements. The general and his principal subordinate were sacked, being held responsible for conducting the retreat ‘in an indescribable disorder, a chaos of horse, guns and stragglers’. Joffre nonetheless concealed news of the repulse from the French public: here was an early manifestation of the high-handed manner in which France’s C-in-C would exercise his command.

The Kaiser’s allies, however, were swiftly informed of this triumph. ‘In the evening news spread of a splendid German victory over the French at [Mulhouse],’ wrote Austrian schoolteacher Itha J. ‘These Germans! Are they really the rising new force? Is the old glory of France destined to fall, its star to wane and fade?’ But many German soldiers in Alsace were as shocked and traumatised as their French enemies by this first brief experience of battle. On 10 August, an artillery officer said to Sgt. Wilhelm Kaisen: ‘For so long, one looked forward to war, but now that we see its harsh reality one turns away with a shudder.’ Kaisen wrote to his girlfriend Helene: ‘His words burned into my consciousness, for I know others think the same. Just as he spoke, someone rushed in, reporting that France was asking for peace. You cannot imagine how enthusiastically that story was received. Oh, these madmen. They don’t know what it’s all about – that a struggle for existence has begun which will be fought to the last pfennig. This war will be Europe’s last.’

Further north, thirty-seven-year-old warrant officer Ernst Klopper – a peacetime artist from Pforzheim – succumbed to melancholy as he contemplated the battlefield. His dead comrades were laid out in rows for burial, while the French village which they had died to capture was almost burnt out. Klopper was distressed by the clamorous appeals for food, water, rescue from horses, pigs and cattle trapped in their stalls and pens. ‘I do not like to record these wicked atrocities,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I never saw anything sadder than a battlefield with so many victims dead and wounded. Despite our victory, I feel deeply depressed. It looks as though the ancient Huns had been here: everything is smashed to pieces.
Kitchens, trunks, cellars ransacked for food and drink. Even the manure heaps are burning.’

Millions of men in their first actions shared the confusion of Jacques Rivière, twenty-eight-year-old French intellectual and friend of André Gide. As he and his comrades watched houses collapse and burn under fire, they somehow fancied themselves attending a military tournament, a fantasy war, a firework display staged in a vast arena. Observing cavalry manoeuvring across the front, Rivière wondered how they would distinguish between French and German horsemen at a distance, and swiftly discovered this was impossible. His unit opened a brisk fire on their own dragoons, fortunately without effect. Hearing shellfire, like all novice warriors they were uncertain whether it was outgoing or incoming. Ever more fanciful figures of speech occurred to Rivière: three Uhlans jogging with upraised lances across a meadow on the distant horizon ‘look like vessels tossing on the distant billow’.

But some young men displayed, briefly at least, a burning enthusiasm. Lucien Laby, a twenty-two-year-old military medical student who had been mobilised as a stretcher-bearer, felt so frustrated by his non-combatant role that on 10 August he asserted that he stripped off his red cross armband to go freelancing with a few comrades in search of Germans to kill. He wrote in his diary that his passions were roused by reports of enemy atrocities, including stories of ambulances being fired on. ‘We tell no one because these little amateur expeditions would be repressed.’ Claiming to have achieved his purpose, he returned to his appointed role. ‘For a long time I have been longing to do this and now I shall do my duty as a medic with a much lighter heart.’

The first clashes in Alsace were crude affairs. The rival armies repeatedly committed men to attack in huddled masses, direct from the line of march, without attempting to deploy in open order. Commanders shrugged that such tactics were inescapable when so many unexpected encounter battles took place. Men advancing shoulder to shoulder were more likely than a scattered rabble to preserve momentum. But the consequences were devastating whenever French or German attackers met the machine-guns and artillery of their opponents.

Professional soldiers had had plenty of time to contemplate this prospect: almost a decade earlier in Manchuria, automatic weapons did immense execution, watched by many European military observers. Following that experience, the Germans adopted Maxim guns for their own army – 12,500 were in service by 1914, designated the MG08, with
many more in production. There is a popular myth that Moltke’s regiments deployed proportionately more automatic weapons than the BEF, but this was not so. The British Vickers, sighted up to 2,900 yards, was likewise a modification of the Maxim, which became the begetter of most heavy machine-guns for the next half-century, though in the first weeks of the war British newspapers used the French word for automatic weapons – ‘
mitrailleuses
’.

The Russians also used a Maxim variant, chambered for a slightly lighter bullet than the British and Germans used. All such guns were water-cooled and weighed around forty pounds, plus boxed ammunition belts which added fifteen pounds apiece. They were normally served by a crew of three, and were accurate to 1,100 yards. Their bullets scoured a ‘beaten zone’ of some square yards around the aiming point, which increased killing power. The French favoured their own clip-fed, air-cooled Hotchkiss, a good gun despite a tendency to jam, but initially had fewer automatic weapons than did the Germans and British. In Joffre’s armies the machine-gun later came to be known, with heavy irony, as the ‘
arme noble
’, and every commander complained that he did not have enough of them. In August, however, no dashing officer wished to be associated with such ungentlemanly technology. What was remarkable in 1914 was that relatively few machine-guns generated prodigious carnage.

Joseph Césaire Joffre, commander-in-chief and for a season near-dictator of France, directed its military destinies from GQG, his
Grand-Quartier-Générale
, located at a school in the Place Royer-Collard in the little Marneside town of Vitry-le-François. He commuted to work each morning at 5 o’clock from the nearby house of a certain M. Chapron, a retired engineer officer – Joffre himself was an engineer – with whom he was billeted. Each day at 11 a.m. he returned to Chapron’s for lunch, a ritual which enhanced his reputation for unshakeable calm. Only during the month of August 1914 did he abandon the additional custom of a post-prandial snooze. Dinner took place at 6.30; as in British officers’ messes, military ‘shop’ was barred from the headquarters staff’s conversation. Thereafter, a brief evening conference was held –
le petit rapport
– and at 9 p.m. the commander-in-chief retired to bed.

Most British generals took pride in their personal appearance, but Joffre’s often verged on the slovenly. His corpulence was the object of some mockery: it was claimed that the regulation requiring every French officer to be capable of riding a horse with conviction had to be waived in his
favour. He was sixty-two in 1914, and native talent had propelled his rise from humble origins as one of eleven children of a cooper. Most of his career had been spent in France’s colonies, but when the post of chief of staff of the army fell vacant in 1911 Joseph Gallieni, the obvious candidate, asserted vehemently that Joffre, and not he, must be the man. The general was famously a listener rather than a talker. He unsettled and indeed alarmed subordinate army commanders by sitting for hours in their headquarters, through conferences and crises, often without interjecting a word.

A technician devoid of intellectual pretensions, he abhorred detail, and interested himself only in big decisions. He was supported at GQG by a group of men who, while not fools, thought and acted within a tightly-laced corset of convention; displays of imagination were unwelcome. Gen. Ferdinand Foch, probably France’s ablest and most inspirational soldier of his generation, is said to have warned a General Staff officer back in 1911 that Moltke would attempt a grand envelopment: ‘Tell General Joffre … Never forget this: the Germans will put thirty-five army corps into the field against us, with their right wing on the Channel coast.’ GQG, however, declined to acknowledge the critical importance of the north. Joffre committed the cardinal error of focusing his energies almost exclusively upon his own offensive along the German border. In the first three weeks of hostilities, he showed scant interest in his enemies’ intentions.

If the commander-in-chief had been prudent, he would at least have delayed his own grand initiative until he knew that the Russians had started operations in the East. Soon after hostilities began, intelligence warned that the Germans looked unexpectedly strong in Belgium. But on 11 August, Joffre ordered his armies to start their main attacks – the advance into Alsace had been a mere
bon-bouche
. Two days later one-third of his total strength, many of the men peasants with the straw scarcely yet brushed from their hair, marched towards the Germans in Alsace-Lorraine. Cpl. Bernard Delabeye’s brigade was told with careless insouciance that its mission was to ‘lay siege to Strasbourg’. But the soldier viewed his brigadier and such braggadocio with scorn: ‘with his black coat and red trousers he seems a survivor of Solferino [in 1859]’. Delabeye thought no better of his colonel, who ordered them forward: ‘He is old and does not know about the deadly fire of an invisible enemy, which begins even before the attack. Under the deluge of shells and machine-gun fire the men run in every direction. The myth of the swift bayonet assault evaporates. The first to die fall without having glimpsed the enemy. When first [we] do see
Germans, they are greyish shapes fifty metres distant, only identifiable by the spike on their helmets. Then follows a retreat which almost becomes a rout.’