The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World

O
N 2 AUGUST 1914, JUST A FEW HOURS BEFORE GERMAN TROOPS OCCUPIED
Luxembourg and thirty hours before war was declared between France and Germany, Lieutenant Albert Mayer of 5th Baden Mounted Jäger Regiment led a patrol of seven riders across a small ridge along the Allaine River near Joncherey, southeast of Belfort.
¹Suddenly, French guards of the 44th Infantry Regiment appeared. Mayer charged. He struck the first Frenchman over the head with his broadsword, causing him to roll into a roadside ditch. Another Jäger drove his lance into the chest of a second French soldier. A third Jäger shot Corporal Jules-André Peugeot, making him the first French casualty of the war. The remaining group of twenty French soldiers took cover in the ditch and opened fire on the German sharpshooters. Mayer tumbled out of the saddle, dead. In this unexpected manner, the twenty-two-year-old Jäger became the first German soldier killed in the war. And in this bizarre way, the first victim in what would collectively be called the Battle of the Marne.

THE MARNE WAS THE
most significant land battle of the twentieth century. I made that claim nearly a decade ago in a special issue of
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History
dedicated to “Greatest Military Events of the Twentieth Century.”
²The research for this book has only reinforced that belief. In fact, I would argue that the Marne was the most decisive land battle since Waterloo (1815). First, the scale of the struggle was unheard of before 1914: France and Germany mobilized roughly two million men each, Britain some 130,000. During the momentous days between 5 and 11 September 1914, the two sides committed nearly two million men with six thousand guns to a desperate campaign along the Marne River on a front of just two hundred kilometers between the “horns of Verdun and Paris.” Second, the technology of killing was unprecedented. Rapid small-arms fire, machine guns, hand grenades, 75mm and 77mm flat-trajectory guns, 150mm and 60-pounder heavy artillery, mammoth 305mm and 420mm howitzers, and even aircraft made the killing ground lethal. Third, the casualties (“wastage”) suffered by both sides were unimaginable to prewar planners and civilian leaders alike: two hundred thousand men per side in the Battle of the Frontiers around the hills of Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes in August, followed by three hundred thousand along the chalky banks of the Marne in early September. No other year of the war compared to its first five months in terms of death. Fourth, the immediate impact of the draw on the Marne was spectacular: The great German assault on Paris had been halted, and the enemy driven behind the Aisne River. France was spared defeat and occupation. Germany was denied victory and hegemony over the Continent. Britain maintained its foothold on the Continent. Finally, the long-term repercussions of the Marne were tragic: It ushered in four more years of what the future German military historian Gerhard Ritter, a veteran of World War I, called the “monotonous mutual mass murder” of the trenches.
³During that time, Britain and the empire sustained 3.5 million casualties, France 6 million, and Germany 7 million.
^*Without the Battle of the Marne, places such as Passchendaele, the Somme, Verdun, and Ypres would not resonate with us as they do. Without the Battle of the Marne, most likely no Hitler; no Horthy; no Lenin; no Stalin.

The Marne was high drama. The Germans gambled all on a brilliant operational concept devised by Chief of the General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905 and carried out (in revised form) by his successor, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, in 1914: a lightning forty-day wheel through Belgium and northern France ending in a victorious entry march into Paris, followed by a redeployment of German armies to the east to halt the Russian steamroller. It was a single roll of the dice. There was no fallback, no Plan B. Speed was critical; delay was death. Every available soldier, active or reserve, was deployed from the first day of mobilization. The sounds and sights of two million men trudging across Belgium and northeastern France with their kit, guns, and horses in sweltering thirty-degree-Celsius heat, stifling humidity, and suffocating dust was stunning, and frightening. Tens of thousands of soldiers fell by the wayside due to exhaustion, heatstroke, blisters, thirst, hunger, and typhus. Others collapsed with gastroenteritis after devouring the half-ripe fruits in the orchards they passed. Will Irwin, an American journalist observing the German “gray machine of death” marching across Belgium, reported on something he had never heard mentioned in any book on war—“the smell of a half-million un-bathed men. … That smell lay for days over every town.”
⁴

Still, hundreds of thousands pushed on, a ragged and emaciated gray mass buoyed by the “short-war illusion” that the decisive battle was just around the next bend in the road. The home front waited anxiously for victory bulletins. Newspapers vied with one another for any scrap of news or rumor from the front. The atmosphere was electric—in Berlin, in Paris, and in London. Winston S. Churchill, looking back on 1914, opined: “No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening.” The “measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces,” the uncertainty of their deployment and engagement, and the fickle role of chance “made the first collision a drama never surpassed.” Never again would battle be waged “on so grand a scale.” Never again would the slaughter “be so swift or the stakes so high.”
⁵It is hard to argue with Churchill.

The Marne has lost none of its fascination. The famous “taxis of the Marne,” the six hundred Renault cabs that rushed some three thousand men of French 7th Infantry Division to the Ourcq River in time to “save” Paris from Alexander von Kluck’s First Army, remain dear to every tourist who has bravely ventured forth in a Parisian taxi-cab. Joseph Galliéni, the military governor of the Paris Entrenched Camp, whose idea it was to use the taxis, remains in the popular mind the brilliant strategist who appreciated the significance of Kluck’s turn southeast before Paris, and who rallied the capital’s forces as well as French Sixth Army to deprive the Germans of victory.

Books on the Marne abound. A keyword search of the catalog of the Library of Congress shows ten thousand titles. A similar perusal of the Google website brings up 174,000 hits. Most of these works are from the British and French perspective. They deal with virtually every aspect of the Battle of the Marne, from the company to the corps level, from the human to the material dimension. Bitter disputes still rage over “reputations”
⁶—from those of French chief of staff Joseph Joffre to his British counterpart, Sir John French, and from General Charles Lanrezac of French Fifth Army to Sir Douglas Haig of British I Corps. No stone is left unturned in this never-ending war of ink.

This book is different. For the first time, the Battle of the Marne is analyzed from the perspective of those who initiated it: the seven German armies that invaded Belgium and France. There was no “German army” before August 1914. Thus, the story is told on the basis of what was a massive research effort in the archives of the various German federal contingents: Baden XIV Army Corps fighting in Alsace, Bavarian Sixth Army and Württemberg XIII Corps deployed in Lorraine, Saxon Third Army struggling in the Ardennes, and Prussian First, Second, and Fifth armies advancing in an arc from Antwerp to Verdun. The collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989–90 proved to be a boon for researchers: It gave me access to the records of Saxon Third Army at Dresden, and to roughly three thousand Prussian army files long thought destroyed by Allied air raids in 1945, but returned to Potsdam by the Soviet Union in 1988 and now housed at Freiburg. These allow a fresh and revealing look at the Marne.

This book raises a fundamental question: Was it truly the “Battle of the Marne”? The campaign in the west in 1914, as illustrated by Lieutenant Albert Mayer’s death in the Vosges, was an extended series of battles that raged from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast. During its initial phase, commonly referred to as the Battle of the Frontiers, major operations took place in Alsace, Lorraine, Belgium, the Ardennes, and the Argonne. Each is an integral part of the larger Battle of the Marne. In many ways, what is generally called the First Battle of the Marne
^*—the bloody campaigns of German First, Second, and Third armies against French Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) between Paris and Verdun from 5 to 11 September—was but the final act in this great drama. Even then, the critical, desperate battles of German First Army and French Sixth Army took place along the Ourcq River and not the Marne. Still, when it came time for the victor to name the battle, French chief of staff Joffre chose
Marne
mainly because most of the rivers in the region of decisive struggle—Ourcq, Grand Morin, Petit Morin, Saulz, and Ornain—all flowed into the Marne.
⁷

The titanic clash of vast armies over an extended 480-kilometer front, then, was not one battle at all. Rather, in the words of Sewell Tyng, a distinguished historian of the Marne, it consisted of “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.”
⁸Hence, the story is told from the perspective of individual units in separate theaters. These range from the cadets of France’s Saint-Cyr Military Academy advancing on Altkirch, in Alsace, in full-dress uniform to the desperate struggle of German First Army’s hundred thousand grimy and grisly warriors marching to the very outskirts of Paris.

The face of battle in each of these theaters is reconstructed on the basis of the diaries and letters of “common soldiers” on both sides, French
poilus
and German
Landser
. The much-neglected story of German atrocities committed in Belgium and Lorraine from fear of attack by enemy irregulars (francs-tireurs) likewise is rendered on the basis of the official reports, diaries, and letters of German unit commanders and soldiers in the field. The Bavarian archives reveal the horror of the atrocities at Nomeny, Gerbéviller, and Lunéville, while the Saxon archives help sort out the terrible days when Third Army stormed Dinant. In the process, many of the victims’ reports as well as much of the Allied wartime propaganda are reevaluated.

Obviously, the Battle of the Marne did not end the war. Nor did it suddenly and irrevocably halt the war of maneuver envisioned by all sides before 1914. To be sure, many historians have argued that the Marne brought a formal end to maneuver warfare and that the military commanders thereafter callously accepted an inevitable and indeterminate war of attrition. This simply is a
post facto
construction. On the Allied side, General Joffre and Field Marshal French saw the Battle of the Marne first as a radical reversal of the Allies’ “Great Retreat,” and then as an opportunity to drive the Germans out of France and Belgium and to take the war into the heartland of the Second Reich. On the German side, Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, First Army’s Alexander von Kluck, Second Army’s Karl von Bülow, and Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch saw the withdrawal from the Marne as a temporary course correction, after which the drive on Paris would be renewed by refreshed and replenished armies. Only Wilhelm II, always prone to sudden mood swings, recognized the Marne as a defeat, as
“the
great turning point” in his life.
⁹

Given its undisputed centrality in the history of World War I, the Battle of the Marne not surprisingly has raised many “what if?” questions and created myths and legends that have withstood almost a century of investigation. The greatest of these is the most obvious: What if the German operations plan had succeeded and Paris had fallen? The French government already had fled to Bordeaux. Civilians were rushing to train stations to evacuate the capital. And Kaiser Wilhelm II was not in a charitable mood. On the eve of the Battle of the Marne, when he learned that German Eighth Army had taken ninety-two thousand Russian prisoners of war during the Battle of Tannenberg, he suggested they be driven on to a barren peninsula at Courland along the Baltic shore and “starved to death.”
¹⁰The Marne, in fact, already was seen as a clash of civilizations, one pitting the German “ideas of 1914”—duty, order, justice—against the French “ideas of 1789”—liberty, fraternity, equality. Or, in Wilhelm II’s simpler analogy, as a clash between “monarchy and democracy.”
¹¹

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