The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (15 page)

Frustrated in his offensive design, Krafft von Dellmensingen turned to a second option: If the Bavarians had to remain on the defensive and if Joffre truly had ranged substantial forces against them, then why not entice the French into advancing into an artificially created “sack” somewhere between Metz and Strasbourg? In other words, show the French that the Bavarians were withdrawing in the face of superior forces, lure them into the sack, and then cut them to pieces from three sides—Fifth Army and Fortress Metz from the west, Sixth Army from the east, and Seventh Army from the south.
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A “small Cannae” (the German obsession) might thus be achieved at an unexpected sector of the front.

As if on cue, the German military attaché at Bern, Switzerland, reported that Joffre had indeed amassed “12–15” or even “15–18 army corps” against Rupprecht’s two armies—that is, perhaps as much as two-thirds of the French army!
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Option two was now on the table. Moltke’s deputy chief of staff, Hermann von Stein, was enthusiastic and ordered Sixth Army to withdraw behind the Saar River north of Saarbrücken. To Rupprecht, the plan seemed too “artificial,” an obvious pandering to what he called the southern defensive posture of the “Old Schlieffen” Plan of 1905.
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Still, it was now up to Joffre to take the bait, charge into the sack, and place his head into its noose.

On 13 August, French ambassador to Russia Maurice Paléologue informed Paris that the Russians would launch their much-anticipated offensive against the Germans in East Prussia at dawn the next morning. It was the news Joffre had been waiting for. On the morning of the fourteenth, he sent the armies on the right wing—roughly four hundred battalions and sixteen hundred guns, almost one-third of the chief of staff’s effective strength—into Germany. Bands struck up “La Marseillaise.” Soldiers in the lead formations tore down the striped posts that marked the Reichsland’s boundary with France.
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Ahead of them lay lush green fields of alfalfa and golden strips of cereal crops—and beyond that the industrial Saar region and eventually the Rhine Valley. On the left flank of First Army, César Alix’s XIII Corps headed for Cirey and Castelli’s VIII Corps, for Blâmont. On Dubail’s left, Castelnau directed Louis Taverna’s XVI Corps to advance from Lunéville to Elfringen, Louis Espinasse’s XV Corps from Serres to Monhofen, and Ferdinand Foch’s XX Corps from Lunéville to Kambrich. Overall, the French force formed a gigantic wedge aimed straight at Sarrebourg and the left wing of Rupprecht’s Sixth Army.

Progress was good. For four days, Joffre’s troops advanced methodically.
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German Sixth Army relied mainly on long-range artillery fire from its 1,068 guns and on brief but violent rear guard actions to slow the French advance. Frédéric Bourdériat’s 13th ID of Émile-Edmond Legrand-Girarde’s XXI Corps seized Mount Donon while Alix’s XIII Corps and Castelli’s VIII Corps drove Xylander’s Bavarian I Corps behind the Marne-Rhine Canal, advancing to within twelve kilometers of Sarrebourg. The Germans everywhere were withdrawing, burning villages as they abandoned them. Only an ill-conceived attack on Cirey by Gustave Silhol’s 26th ID just before 7
PM
sounded a sour note. As the 26th swept across a flat field, German artillery and machine guns cut it to ribbons.
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Joffre formed a new cavalry corps under General Louis Conneau by combining Dubail’s 6th CD with Castelnau’s 10th CD in hopes of breaking through the German positions the next day.

The attack resumed on 15 August. It quickly turned into a bloody slogging match as the first rain
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of the campaign soaked the fields and turned the Lorraine clay into beige-gray ooze. By 9
AM
, Castelnau’s Second Army reported a thousand casualties. Classic infantry charges with flags unfurled, bugles blaring, and drums beating, the caustic commander of Second Army lectured Joffre, had to be supported by “heavy firing by artillery” prior to the attack. Thereafter, the troops needed to establish step-by-step field defenses such as “extensive trenches, shelter against shrapnel, helmets for riflemen, etc.” Both infantry and artillery, Castelnau tartly noted, “have been sorely tested.”
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German heavy artillery kept the lighter French 75s out of range, and the infantry dug in. At General von Stein’s urging, Moltke rushed six Ersatz divisions originally assigned to the right wing in Belgium to Alsace-Lorraine. Superstitious Alsatian peasants noted that thirty storks had prematurely headed south out of the Rhine Valley—a bad omen.

Still, the French advance continued over the next two days in dreary cloud and rain. The Germans poured lethal artillery fire into the advancing French forces in the Seille lowland from their commanding positions on the Côte de Delme and from their double fortresses of Morhange-Dieuze. They used forest cover to conceal the whereabouts of their machine-gun nests. The result was slaughter for the French. Charles de Gaulle, a lieutenant in 1914, later acknowledged that “on a tactical plane,” German firepower had “made nonsense” of Joffre’s theories of the
offensive à outrance
. “Morally, the illusions behind which the soldiers had taken refuge were swept away in a trice.”
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Yet at this early stage in the war, Joffre was unwilling to concede that French tactical doctrine and the inadequacy of its artillery had become apparent.
⁴⁴

But Joffre was no fool. He kept a tight rein on the advance, limiting it to roughly five kilometers per day. He refused to take the German bait—that is, to stick his head into the sack prepared for the French between Metz and Strasbourg. He constantly admonished Dubail and Castelnau to maintain contact on their flanks.
⁴⁵
He urged Pau’s Army of Alsace, fronted by only German reserve and Landwehr units around Colmar, to march north at greater speed. On 17 August, Foch’s XX Corps, strengthened by long-service white Troupes Coloniales, advanced from the Donnelay-Juvelize ridge and took Château-Salins; the next day, Espinasse’s XV Corps occupied Dieuze. That same day, Louis de Maud’huy’s 16th ID of Castelli’s VIII Corps, having beaten back Ludwig von Hetzel’s Bavarian 2d Division, moved into an abandoned Sarrebourg, while Foch’s XX Corps advanced against Martini’s Bavarian II Corps on the fortified heights of Morhange. But Conneau’s cavalry corps could not get across the Saar River due to heavy enemy artillery fire. Rupprecht’s Sixth Army continued to retreat in an easterly direction, leaving behind guns, wagons, field kitchens, knapsacks, and rifles as well as its dead and wounded. It also left behind a burning Sarrebourg, having doused its stores of ammunition and supplies with gasoline and set them on fire.

As an interesting footnote in history, the war diary of 2d Battalion, Baden 112th IR, recorded on 18 August: “Lt. Goering 8C brings in 3 prisoners of [French] IR 85.”
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The twenty-one-year-old Hermann Goering of 8th Company, future head of the German Luftwaffe and successor-designate to Adolf Hitler, received the Iron Cross, Second Class, for his frontline service in Lorraine.
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Joffre, no doubt buoyed by his successes, but also fearing that the enemy was preparing a trap for his armies east of Sarrebourg, ordered Second Army to shift the direction of its attack to the north, up the valley of the Saar River.
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As a result, the two French armies lost contact with each other. Pau’s Army of Alsace continued to cling to the security of the Vosges Mountains between Mulhouse and Colmar. Unknown to the Germans, on 16 August, Joffre withheld African XIX Corps from Dubail’s First Army and transferred Arthur Poline’s XVII Corps to Charles Lanrezac’s Fifth Army north at Rethel-Mézières. Two days later, he sent Pierre Dubois’s IX Corps to Fernand de Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army at Sainte-Menehould. Obviously, a French withdrawal of forces to the north had begun. Moltke, for his part, made no move to shift forces from his left to his right wing. On 20 August, Joffre informed War Minister Messimy, “Overall, the situation appears to me to be favorable.”
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German hopes of trapping the French in a sack east of the Metz-Nancy line died just as quickly as they had been raised. Already on 16 August, Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Tappen, chief of operations of the OHL, informed Rupprecht that the Bern reports concerning French heavy concentrations in the Charmes Gap had been grossly overstated and that the German withdrawal accordingly was advancing at far too fast a pace.
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Moreover, the stiff resistance mounted against Dubail and Castelnau by Sixth Army undoubtedly had frustrated the overall sack design. While the Bavarian crown prince had been more than willing to let the French storm across the Rhine into the Black Forest in order to surround and annihilate them elsewhere,
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Moltke’s headquarters refused to concede German soil for a theoretical small Cannae.

In the south, Vautier’s VII Corps had advanced on Mulhouse almost as slowly as it had earlier under Bonneau. Once again, the fighting was vicious and the losses severe. Once again, there had been little or no reconnaissance, with the result that the two opposing armies unexpectedly ran head-on into each other. The so-called Second Battle of Mulhouse was in full swing by 10
AM
on 19 August. It was at its most ferocious in the suburb of Dornach. The French commanded the heights and mercilessly poured machine-gun fire into the massed German infantry columns, cutting the
Landser
down “like a scythe does stalks of grain.” Panic quickly set in. Poorly trained Baden Landwehr units yet again fired wildly—thirty-five thousand rounds by one company alone—and occasionally at Württemberg troops, whose blue pants they mistook for French blue capes in the smoke and confusion of battle. Colonel Koch, commanding the hard-hit 40th IR, spent much of his time trying to stanch the flow of Landwehr companies streaming back to the Rhône-Rhine Canal.
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Three times he rallied his men; three times their charge was bloodily repelled.

Communications from the company to the regimental level totally broke down. Major Leist, commanding 1st Battalion, 40th IR, recorded: “There can be no talk of a connection with the Regiment; not a single regimental order was passed down during the entire battle.”
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Thus, the general order to retire to the Eichenwald at 4
PM
did not reach all units, and more than five hundred German soldiers had no choice but to surrender to the French. Sergeant Otto Breinlinger, 11th Reserve Infantry Regiment (RIR), sadly wrote home that after Mulhouse and Dornach, his 10th Company had shrunk from 250 to 16 men.
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Dominik Richert, a German-Alsatian farmer, was appalled at the sight of the battlefields. “Some of the dead looked horrible. Some lay on their faces, others on their backs. Blood, claw-like hands, glazed over eyes, distorted faces. Many grotesquely clutched rifles in their hands, others had their hands full of dirt and grass which they had torn out in their death pangs.”
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For most men of Hoiningen-Huene’s Baden XIV Corps, there was but one thought: back to the Rhine.

Paul Gläser, a noncommissioned officer with 2d Company, 40th IR, informed his parents that his vocabulary simply was inadequate to describe the brutal street fighting at Dornach. The regiment was fired on from countless windows as it withdrew. “Certainly, more than 100 bullets whistled about my head, from behind, from left and from right of me.” Storming one house in search of francs-tireurs, Gläser found four French soldiers in civilian clothes and a “young wench” who loaded rifles for them. “We finished them off with a triple salvo.”
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At a higher level in the chain of command, General Gaede informed Grand Duke Friedrich II of Baden that civilians had yet again fired on his men “in vile and despicable fashion.” Revenge would be swift. “If we get Dornach back, not a single house must be allowed to stand.”
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At their new headquarters in a “miserable school house” at Hellimer, Rupprecht and Krafft turned their thoughts to mounting a powerful counterattack.
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The latest intelligence reports suggested that Joffre had marshaled seven and one-half corps as well as three cavalry divisions against Sixth Army and XV and XIV corps of Seventh Army, which had finally marched up from their ill-conceived detour to Mulhouse and linked up with Rupprecht’s left flank. Krafft suggested launching the counterattack on 18 August, the anniversary of the Battle of Gravelotte in 1870.
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He dispatched Major von Xylander on a “diplomatic mission” to Heeringen’s Seventh Army to garner support for the plan. Once again, the Prussian turned a “cold shoulder” to the Bavarian initiative. Krafft was livid. “The great Heeringen, the former
Prussian
War Minister, will accommodate the
Bavarian
Crown Prince only grudgingly.”
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And when the crown prince and his chief of staff relayed their decision to the OHL, Moltke and his staff reacted with what the Bavarians sarcastically called “a most oracle-like”
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directive: Stick to the original
Aufmarschplan
. To mollify Bavarian royal feelings, Moltke dispatched Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm von Dommes, chief of the Political Section of the General Staff, to Hellimer.

Dommes’s mission was the first of several such confusing encounters over the ensuing days. He had come, Dommes informed the Bavarians, not with specific directives but only with general talking points. Moltke and Tappen by now had dropped the idea of luring the French into the vaunted sack between the Saar and Nied rivers. They also had ruled out any major offensive against the Trouée de Charmes. On the basis of this apparent return to the original deployment plan, Dommes suggested that Sixth and Seventh armies fall back to defensive positions between Metz and the Lower Nied River to prevent Joffre’s First and Second armies from attacking the flank of German Fifth Army near Verdun. “6. and 7. Armies should not engage in adventures. Stand firm! Task: secure the army’s left flank.”
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But neither Rupprecht nor Krafft von Dellmensingen was willing to accept a prolonged passive stance by the Bavarian army on the Nied, as this would seriously impair its “offensive spirit” and cause the men to lose faith in their leaders.
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Krafft pressed his case for the offensive, “the first great battle of the war.” It would be risky,
“but it must be attempted.”
He closed the meeting on a harsh note. “One either lets me do as I want or one gives me concrete orders.”
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Dommes possessed no such orders from Moltke. Rupprecht noted that Dommes was so “nervous” during the talks that he left “helmet and sword” behind upon departing Hellimer.
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