The Guns of August (46 page)

Lanrezac’s retreat, leaving the BEF in the air, put them in instant peril. In anxious conference it was decided to draw back the troops at once as soon as orders could be drafted and delivered to the front. A delay that was to cost lives was due to the strange choice of location for Smith-Dorrien’s corps headquarters. They were in a modest private country house called rather grandly the Château de la Roche at Sars-la-Bruyère, a hamlet without telegraph or telephone communication on a back country road difficult enough to find in the daytime, much more so in the middle of the night. Even Marlborough and Wellington had not disdained more convenient if less gentlemanly headquarters on the main road, one in an abbey and the other in a tavern. Smith-Dorrien’s orders had to be delivered by car, and did not reach him until 3:00
A.M.
, whereas Haig’s Ist
Corps, which had not been in the battle, received its orders by telegraph an hour earlier and was able to prepare its retreat and get under way before dawn.

By that time the two German flanking corps had been brought up, the attack was renewed, and the retreat of the IInd Corps, which had been under fire all day, began under fire again. In the confusion one battalion never received its orders, and fought until it was surrounded and almost all its men were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Only two officers and two hundred men got away.

So ended the first day of combat for the first British soldiers to fight a European enemy since the Crimea and the first to fight on European soil since Waterloo. It was a bitter disappointment: both for the Ist Corps which had marched forward through the heat and dust and now had to turn and march back almost without having fired a shot; even more for the IInd Corps which felt proud of its showing against a famed and formidable enemy, knew nothing of his superior numbers or of the Fifth Army’s withdrawal, and could not understand the order to retreat.

It was a “severe” disappointment to Henry Wilson who laid it all at the door of Kitchener and the Cabinet for having sent only four divisions instead of six. Had all six been present, he said with that marvelous incapacity to admit error that was to make him ultimately a Field Marshal, “this retreat would have been an advance and defeat would have been a victory.”

Wilson’s confidence and cheer began to wane, and Sir John French, mercurial at best, plunged into despondency. Though in France barely more than a week, the tensions, anxieties, and responsibility, combined with the iniquities of Lanrezac and culminating in frustration on the opening day of battle, soured him on his command. He ended his report to Kitchener next day with the ominous suggestion, indicating that he already had begun to think in terms of departure, “I think immediate attention should be directed to the defense of Havre.” Havre at the mouth of the Seine was nearly a hundred miles south of the original British landing base at Boulogne.

That was the Battle of Mons. As the opening British engagement of what was to become the Great War, it became endowed in retrospect with every quality of greatness and
was given a place in the British pantheon equal to the battles of Hastings and Agincourt. Legends like that of the Angels of Mons settled upon it. All its men were valorous and all its dead heroes. The deeds of every named regiment were chronicled down to the last hour and bullet of the fight until Mons came to shine mistily through a haze of such gallantry and glory as to make it seem a victory. Unquestionably, at Mons the British fought bravely and well, better than some French units but no better than many others; no better than the Belgians at Haelen or the Turcos at Charleroi or General Mangin’s brigade at Onhaye or the enemy on various occasions. The battle, before the retreat began, lasted nine hours, engaged two divisions, or 35,000 British soldiers, cost a total of 1,600 British casualties, and held up the advance of von Kluck’s army by one day. During the Battle of the Frontiers, of which it was a part, 70 French divisions, or about 1,250,000 men, were in combat at different times and places over a period of four days. French casualties during those four days amounted to more than 140,000, or twice the number of the whole British Expeditionary Force in France at the time.

In the wake of Charleroi and Mons, Belgium lay coated with white dust from the shattered walls of its houses and pock-marked with the debris of battles. Muddied hay used by the soldiers as beds trailed in the streets along with abandoned packs and blood-stained bandages. “And over all lay a smell,” as Will Irwin wrote, “which I have never heard mentioned in any book on war—the smell of half a million unbathed men .… It lay for days over every town through which the Germans passed.” Mingled with it was the smell of blood and medicine and horse manure and dead bodies. The human dead were supposed to be buried by their own troops before midnight, but often there were too many and there was too little time, and even less for the dead horses whose bodies, lying unburied for a longer time, became bloated and putrid. Belgian peasants trying to clear their fields of the dead after the armies passed by could be seen bending on their spades like pictures by Millet.

Derelict among the bodies lay the fragments of Plan 17 and bright broken bits of the French Field Regulations: “… the French Army henceforth knows no law but the offensive … the offensive alone leads to positive results.”

Joffre, standing amid the tumbled debacle of all French hopes, with responsibility for the catastrophe resting finally upon him, with the frontiers of France breached, with every one of his armies in retreat or fighting desperately to hold a defensive line, remained magically unperturbed. By immediately casting the blame on the executors and absolving the planners, he was able to retain perfect and unblemished confidence in himself and in France—and in so doing, provide the essential and unique requirement in the calamitous days ahead.

On the morning of the 24th when, as he said, “There is no escaping the evidence of the facts,” he reported to Messimy that the army was “condemned to a defensive attitude” and must hold out, resting upon its fortified lines and, while trying to wear down the enemy, wait for a favorable occasion to resume the offensive. He set about at once arranging the lines of retreat and preparing a regrouping of his armies to form a mass capable of renewing the attack from a defensive line he expected to establish on the Somme. He had been encouraged by a recent telegram from Paléologue in St. Petersburg to hope that the Germans would at any moment have to withdraw forces from the Western Front to meet the Russian threat, and on the morrow of his own disaster Joffre waited anxiously for a sound of the Russian steam roller. All that came through was a sibylline telegram reporting that “grave strategic problems” were being settled in East Prussia with promise of “further offensive operations.”

Next to re-forming his lines, Joffre’s most urgent task was to find the cause for failure. Without hesitancy of any kind he found it in “grave shortcomings on the part of commanders.” A few had indeed crumbled under the awful responsibility of command. A general of artillery had to step into the place of the commander of the IIIrd Corps in front of Charleroi when that officer could nowhere be found during the most critical
phase of the battle. In the Battle of the Ardennes a divisional general of the Vth Corps committed suicide. Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers—danger, death, and live ammunition. But Joffre, who would admit no fallibility of plan, would permit none in men. Demanding the names of all generals who had shown weakness or incapacity, he enlarged the list of the
limogés
with ruthless hand.

Acknowledging, like Henry Wilson, no error of theory or strategy, he could only ascribe the failure of the offensive, “in spite of the numerical superiority which I thought I had secured for our armies,” to a “lack of offensive spirit.” He might better have said “excess” than “lack.” At Morhange in Lorraine, at Rossignol in the Ardennes, at Tamines on the Sambre it was not too little but too much
cran
that caused the French failure. In a “Note for All Armies” issued the very day after the debacle, GQG amended “lack” to “false understanding” of the offensive spirit. The Field Regulations, it said, had been “poorly understood or badly applied.” Infantry attacks were launched at too great a distance and without artillery support, thus suffering losses from machine-gun fire that might have been avoided. Henceforth when ground was occupied, “it must be immediately organized. Entrenchments must be dug.” The “capital error” had been lack of coordination between artillery and infantry which it was an “absolute necessity” to rectify. The 75s must fire at maximum range. “Finally, we must copy the enemy in using airplanes to prepare artillery attacks.” Whatever else were French military faults, unwillingness to learn from experience was not one of them—at least not in the realm of tactics.

GQG was less quick to locate failure in its own realm of strategy, even when on August 24 the Deuxième Bureau made a startling disclosure: it had discovered that the enemy’s active corps were followed by reserve corps using the same corps number. This, the first evidence of reserve units being used in the front line, revealed how the Germans had managed to be equally strong on the right and center at once. It did not convey to Joffre a suspicion that Plan 17
might have had a fallible basis. He continued to believe it a good plan which had failed through poor execution. When called to testify after the war at a parliamentary inquiry into the cause of the catastrophe that opened France to invasion, he was asked his opinion of the prewar Staff theory that the stronger the German right wing, the better for France.

“But I still think so,” Joffre replied. “The proof is that our Battle of the Frontiers was planned just for that and if it had succeeded our way would have been open .… What is more, it would have succeeded if the Fourth and Fifth Armies had fought well. If they had it would have meant annihilation of the whole German advance.”

In the dark morning of August 1914 when the retreat began it was not the Fourth so much as the Fifth Army and its commander that he chiefly blamed. Although British malice, too, clustered about the head of General Lanrezac, an anonymous spokesman for the British Army ultimately declared that Lanrezac’s decision to retreat instead of counterattacking on August 23 spared “another Sedan.” Of Lanrezac’s earlier insistence on shifting the Fifth Army west of the Meuse to Charleroi, the same spokesman added, “There is no doubt that this change of plan saved the BEF and probably the French Armies also from annihilation.”

On August 24 all that was then clear was that the French Armies were in retreat and the enemy advancing with relentless force. The extent of the debacle was unknown to the public until August 25 when the Germans announced the capture of Namur with 5,000 prisoners. The news shocked an incredulous world.
The Times
of London had said Namur would withstand a siege of six months; it had fallen in four days. In accents of stunned understatement it was said in England that the fall of Namur “is generally recognized as a distinct disadvantage … and the chances of the war being brought to a speedy conclusion are considerably reduced.”

How far reduced, how distant the end, no one yet knew. No one could realize that for numbers engaged and for rate and number of losses suffered over a comparable period of combat, the greatest battle of the war had already been fought. No
one could yet foresee its consequences: how the ultimate occupation of all Belgium and northern France would put the Germans in possession of the industrial power of both countries, of the manufactures of Liège, the coal of the Borinage, the iron ore of Lorraine, the factories of Lille, the rivers and railroads and agriculture, and how this occupation, feeding German ambition and fastening upon France the fixed resolve to fight to the last drop of recovery and reparation, would block all later attempts at compromise peace or “peace without victory” and would prolong the war for four more years.

All this is hindsight. On August 24 the Germans felt an immense surge of confidence. They saw only beaten armies ahead; the genius of Schlieffen had been proved; decisive victory seemed within German grasp. In France, President Poincaré wrote in his diary: “We must make up our minds both to retreat and to invasion. So much for the illusions of the last fortnight. Now the future of France depends on her powers of resistance.”

Elan
had not been enough.

O
N
A
UGUST
5
IN
S
T.
P
ETERSBURG
Ambassador Paléologue of France drove past a regiment of Cossacks leaving for the front. Its general, seeing the French flag on the ambassador’s car, leaned down from his horse to embrace him and begged permission to parade his regiment. While Paléologue solemnly reviewed the troops from his car, the general, between shouts of command to the ranks, addressed shouts of encouragement to the ambassador: “We’ll destroy those filthy Prussians! … No more Prussia, no more Germany! … William to St. Helena!” Concluding the review, he galloped off behind his men, waving his saber and shouting his war cry, “William to St. Helena!”