The Guns of August (60 page)

L
IKE A SWINGING SCYTHE
the five German armies of the right wing and center cut into France from Belgium after the Battle of the Frontiers. A million Germans were in the invading force whose leading columns, shooting and burning, entered French territory on August 24. No breakthrough was made on the Lorraine front where the two armies of the left wing under Prince Rupprecht continued to struggle in prolonged battle against the furious resistance of Castelnau’s and Dubail’s armies.

Down the long white highways of northern France, cutting a swath seventy-five miles wide, the German right wing was on the march to Paris with Kluck’s Army on the extreme right seeking to envelop the Allied line. Joffre’s immediate problem was to halt the retreat of his own armies while at the same time shifting weight to the left to create a force strong enough to check the enemy’s enveloping movement and be “capable of resuming the offensive.” In the aftermath of catastrophe, “resume the offensive” was the dominant thought at GQG. Within twenty-four hours of the debacle, without taking time to assess what was officially called the “check” to the French Armies, or to rethink strategy in terms of the possible, Joffre issued on August 25 a new General Order, the second of the war. It proposed to create in the path of the German right wing a new Sixth Army formed of forces taken from the unbroken front in Lorraine. Transported by rail to Amiens, on
the left of the British, it would, together with the BEF and the Fourth and Fifth French Armies, form the mass that was to resume the offensive. While the Sixth Army was forming, the three retreating French Armies were to try to maintain a continuous front and “arrest or at least delay the advance of the enemy by short and violent counterattacks” carried out by rearguards. As stated in General Order No. 2, Joffre expected the Sixth Army to be in position and ready to join in a renewed offensive by September 2, Sedan Day.

That date glittered too before the oncoming Germans who expected by then to accomplish Schlieffen’s goal: envelopment and destruction of the French Armies in a central mass in front of Paris. Throughout the next twelve days another Sedan was in the minds of both sides. They were twelve days in which world history wavered between two courses and the Germans came so close to victory that they reached out and touched it between the Aisne and the Marne.

“Fight in retreat, fight in retreat,” was the order dinned into every French regiment during these days. The necessity to hold off pursuit and gain time to regroup and reestablish a solid line gave an urgency to the fighting that had been missing from the offensive. It required rearguard actions that were almost suicidal. The Germans’ need to allow the French no time to regroup pushed them on with equal intensity.

In retreat the French fought with competence and emergency-learned skills that had not always been present during the opening battles in Belgium. No longer engaged in a vast and only vaguely understood offensive in mysterious forests on alien soil, they were back on their own soil, defending France. The land they were passing through was familiar, the inhabitants were French, the fields and barns and village streets were their own, and they fought now as the First and Second Armies were fighting for the Moselle and the Grand Couronné. Though defeated in the offensive, they were not a routed army; their line, though dangerously pierced, was not yet broken. On the left in the path of the main German advance the Fifth Army, escaping from disaster at Charleroi and the Sambre, was trying to regather cohesion in retreat. In the center, with
their backs to the Meuse, the Third and Fourth Armies fought savage holding actions from Sedan to Verdun against the two armies of the German center, frustrating the enemy’s effort to surround them and, as the Crown Prince unhappily admitted, “recovering their freedom of movement.” Despite rearguard actions the German advance was too massive to be stopped. Still fighting, the French fell back; holding and delaying where they could but always falling back.

At one place after crossing the Meuse, a battalion of
chasseurs à pied
in General de Langle’s Fourth Army was ordered at nightfall to hold a bridge which dynamite charges had failed to blow up. They spent a night of “anguish and horror” watching the Saxons of von Hausen’s Army on the opposite bank “burning the town and shooting the inhabitants under our eyes. In the morning flames rose from the village. We could see people running in the streets, pursued by the soldiers. There were shots .… At a great distance we could see an endless movement of horsemen who seemed to be searching out our position: far away on the plain appeared dark masses marching.” The masses approached and soon along the winding road a German infantry battalion in columns of five came “marching steadily toward us. The road below was filled as far back as one could see with a swarm of troops—columns of infantry preceded by officers on horseback, artillery trains, transport, cavalry—almost a division, marching in perfect order.”

“Take aim!” The order was repeated down the line of
chasseurs
in low voices. Silently the men took their places. “Volley fire; aim at the infantry first, each man pick his target!” Company leaders gave the range. “Open fire!” Along the length of the river the fusillade crackled. Down among the Germans there was a sudden stupor. Their companies whirled and eddied; they fled. Horses struggled and reared in harness, wagons crashed. The road was covered with hundreds of corpses. At 8:45 the French ammunition was almost gone. Suddenly from behind on their left came a burst of rifle fire. The enemy had turned their flank. “To the rear,
à la baïonnette!
”
Under the thrust of their bayonet charge, the Germans gave way; the French regiment cut its way through.

Hundreds of such combats were fought by rearguards while the armies fell back, attempting to keep a continuous front with each other and reach a line from which the offensive could be renewed. Alongside the soldiers, the civil population joined in the southward-moving mass, on foot and in every kind of conveyance from families in six-horse wagons to old men pushed in wheelbarrows and babies in perambulators. Crowding the roads, they added to the confusion. Staff cars could not get through, officers cursed, messages went undelivered. Jammed between marching groups, commercial trucks and municipal buses, mobilized for army service with their familiar markings painted over with military symbols, moved slowly, carrying the wounded men who lay in blood-soaked silence with shell-torn limbs and eyes filled with pain and the fear of death.

Each mile of the retreat was an agony of yielding further French territory to the enemy. In some places French soldiers marched past their own homes knowing the Germans would enter them next day. “We left Blombay on August 27,” wrote a cavalry captain with the Fifth Army. “Ten minutes later it was occupied by the Uhlans.” Units that had been in heavy combat marched in silence, out of step, without songs. Haggard men, parched and hungry, some bitter, muttered against their officers or whispered of treason. Every French position had been betrayed to the German artillery spotters, it was said in the Xth Corps of Lanrezac’s Army which had lost 5,000 men on the Sambre. “The men drag themselves along, their faces marked by a terrible exhaustion,” wrote an infantry captain in this corps. “They have just completed a two days’ march of 62 kilometers after a sharp rearguard action.” But that night they sleep, and in the morning “it is extraordinary how a few hours’ sleep revives them. They are new men.” They ask why they are retreating, and the captain makes a sharp speech in “a cold assured voice.” He tells them they will fight again “and show the Germans we have teeth and claws.”

The cavalry, once so shiny in polished boots and bright uniforms, now stained and muddy, sway in their saddles, dazed with fatigue. “The men’s heads hang with weariness,” writes an officer of Hussars with the 9th Cavalry Division. “They only half see where they are going; they live as if in a dream. At halts the famished and broken-down horses even before unsaddling, plunge at the hay and devour it voraciously. We no longer sleep; we march by night and face the enemy by day.” They learn the Germans have crossed the Meuse behind them, are gaining ground, setting villages in flames as they pass. “Rocroi is a mass of fire and the barns burning in the neighborhood light up the trees of the nearby woods.” At dawn the voice of the enemy’s cannon begins; “the Germans salute the sun with their shells.” Through the incessant crash and thunder the French hear the brave scream of their own 75s. They grip their positions, waiting for the artillery duel to end. A mounted orderly rides up with an order from the commander: retreat. They move on. “I contemplated the green fields and the herds of grazing sheep and I thought, ‘What a fortune we are abandoning!’ My men recovered their spirits. They found a system of trenches dug by the infantry which they examined with the greatest curiosity as if they were sights offered for the admiration of the tourist.”

On August 25 Germans belonging to the Duke of Württemberg’s Army penetrated Sedan and shelled Bazeilles, scene of the famous Battle of the Last Cartridge in 1870. The French of de Langle’s Fourth Army counterattacked to keep them from crossing the Meuse. “A hot artillery duel began,” wrote a German officer of the VIIIth Reserve Corps. “It was such a terrible fracas that the earth trembled. All the old bearded Territorials were crying.” Later he fought in a “terrible combat on wooded slopes as steep as roofs. Four assaults with the bayonet. We had to jump over piles of our own dead. We fell back on Sedan with heavy casualties and the loss of three flags.”

That night the French blew up all the railroad bridges in the area. Torn between the need to delay the enemy and the thought that tomorrow they might require bridges and railroads
themselves for a return to the offensive, the French left destruction of communications to the latest possible moment, sometimes too late.

The greatest difficulty of all was the assignment of each unit, from army corps down to single regiments, each with its own supply train and auxiliaries of cavalry and artillery to its own roads and lines of communication. “Rather than yield a road to the transport wagons, the infantry mark time at the crossroads,” complained a supply officer. While falling back, the units had to reform and collect again around their flags, report their losses, receive replacements of men and officers from the depots of reserves in the rear. For one corps alone, the IVth of Ruffey’s Army, a total of 8,000 reserves, a quarter of its strength, were sent up to replace losses, company by company. Among the officers, devoted to the doctrine of
élan,
casualties from the rank of general down were severe. One of the causes of the debacle, in the opinion of Colonel Tanant, a staff officer with the Third Army, was that general officers would not direct operations from their proper place in the rear but led from the front; “they performed the function of corporals, not commanders.”

But now from bitter experience they had learned revised tactics. Now they entrenched. One regiment, shoveling all day in its shirt sleeves under the hot sun, dug trenches deep enough to shoot from standing up. Another, ordered to entrench and organize the defense of a woods, passed the night without incident and moved on again at four in the morning, “almost sorry to go without a fight … for by now we are seized with anger at this continual retreat.”

Yielding as little territory as possible, Joffre intended to make his stand as near as he could to the point of breakthrough. The line he laid down in General Order No. 2 was along the Somme, about fifty miles below the Mons Canal and the Sambre. Poincaré wondered whether there was not some self-deception lurking in Joffre’s optimism, and there were others who would have preferred a line farther back, allowing time to solidify a front. From the day after the debacle the men in Paris already saw Paris as the front, but Joffre’s
mind had not traveled back to the capital and there was no one in France to question Joffre.

The government was in a frenzy; ministers, according to Poincaré, in a “state of consternation”; deputies, according to Messimy, in a “panic that painted a livid mask of fear upon their faces.” Removed from direct contact with the front, lacking eyewitness evidence, uninformed as to strategy, dependent on the “laconic and sibylline” communiqués of GQG and on rumor, supposition, and conflicting reports, they were responsible to the country and the people while without authority over the military conduct of the war. Underneath the rubbed and polished sentences of Joffre’s report Poincaré could make out the sharp edges of the truth—“a triple avowal of invasion, defeat and the loss of Alsace.” He felt his immediate duty was to tell the country the facts and prepare the people for the “terrible trials” that lay ahead. That the need to prepare Paris for a siege was even more immediate, he did not yet realize.

Early that morning the nakedness of the capital was made known to Messimy, as Minister of War. General Hirschauer of the Engineers, in charge of the defense works and Chief of Staff to General Michel, the Military Governor of Paris, came to see him at 6:00
A.M.
This was several hours before Joffre’s telegram arrived, but Hirschauer had learned privately of the disaster at Charleroi and his mind took in the distance from the frontiers to the capital in a single stride. He told Messimy flatly that the defenses of the perimeter were not ready to be manned. Despite elaborate studies with every requirement foreseen, “the fortifications existed on paper but nothing had been done on the ground.” Originally the date given for the defense works to be usable was August 25, but such was the faith in the French offensive that it had been put off to September 15. Because of reluctance to begin the property destruction involved in felling trees and razing houses for fields of fire and in digging trenches, no definite order for these major measures had been given. Construction of gun emplacements and infantry posts, laying of barbed wire, cutting of timber for parapets, preparation of storage shelters for
ammunition were not even half finished, provisioning of the city barely begun. As Military Governor and responsible for the defenses, General Michel, perhaps permanently discouraged by the rejection of his defensive plan in 1911, had been lackluster and ineffectual. His tenure of command which came into being with the outbreak of war had quickly floundered in anarchy and hesitancy. Confirmed in the poor opinion he had had of Michel in 1911, Messimy had called in General Hirschauer on August 13 with orders to make up the delays and complete the defenses in three weeks. Hirschauer now confessed the task was impossible.