The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (19 page)

Still, the Hanoverians and Westphalians of Emmich’s X Corps continued to advance. They made their way over a veritable wall of dead—only to be gunned down in turn. A letter by an anonymous Belgian officer told the story well:

As line after line of German infantry advanced, we simply mowed them down. … They made no attempt at deploying, but came on, line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until, as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped one on top of the other, in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble.
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Perhaps some of the veterans on the German General Staff remembered that in 1895, Martin Köpke had warned Alfred von Schlieffen against expecting “quick, decisive victories,” as even “the most offensive spirit” could achieve little more than “a tough, patient and stouthearted crawling forward step-by-step.” Liège in 1914 confirmed Köpke’s dire prediction. The campaign in Belgium, to use the general’s words, had degenerated into “siege-style” warfare.
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Only the means had changed, with monstrous howitzers, still to be brought up, becoming the modern trebuchet.

Numerous German commanders lamented that there had not been sufficient prewar nighttime training, that neither war games nor staff rides had prepared the army for the lethality of the modern battlefield, and that commanders from the company level on up had sought to overcome firepower with dash and daring. The results had been staggering casualty rates, especially among infantry officers. With regard to nighttime fighting, many units adopted special white armbands as well as common passwords, and officers ordered the men to advance with unloaded rifles to cut down on the devastating occurrences of friendly fire.
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Not surprisingly, the Germans were furious that the Belgians had refused them free passage through what they considered a neutral country. They denied the legitimacy of Belgian military resistance. The result was predictable: a veritable orgy of shooting and burning. By 8 August, almost 850 civilians had been killed and thirteen hundred buildings burned down in such nondescript places as Micheroux, Retinne, Soumagne, and Melen, among others.
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Whereas Schlieffen had believed that Liège could be invested by a single division, and Ludendorff that it could be stormed by thirty-nine thousand men, the reality was that by 8 August, the Belgians had beaten back all attempts by X Corps to storm the forts—at the cost in blood of fifty-three hundred casualties. The corpses bloated in the broiling sun.

Still, the German attack threatened to cut Liège off from the rest of the country. Faced with this possibility, General Leman on 6 August released 3d ID and 15th IB to withdraw to the line of the Gette (Gete) River and fight another day. But he was determined to hold the twelve forts with their skeletal complements for as long as possible in accordance with the instructions he had received from King Albert.

The one bright note in the otherwise disastrous German assault was the plan’s architect, Ludendorff. As deputy chief of Second Army, he was not scheduled to play an active role in the campaign. But fate intervened. While waiting for Bülow to make his way to Belgium, Ludendorff found himself caught up in the maelstrom of the battle for Liège. He followed Emmich into the outskirts of the city. At Retinne, just north of Fort Fléron, he stumbled across 14th IB, whose commander, Friedrich von Wussow, had recently been killed. Ludendorff did not hesitate for even a moment. He took command of the brigade and in house-to-house fighting made his way through the Queuede-Bois, up out of the Meuse Valley, and onto the heights near the old Carthusian monastery of La Chartreuse. After overnighting there, Ludendorff at around noon on 7 August spied a white flag flying from the Citadel. Surrender? He sent an officer to investigate. No such luck. At 6 PM, the officer returned to report that General Leman had informed him that the white flag had been raised against his will.

By then, Ludendorff and 14th IB found themselves in a precarious position—short of ammunition and food, down to a strength of only fifteen hundred men, burdened with a thousand Belgian prisoners of war, isolated within the iron ring of Leman’s forts, and cut off from the rest of their forces. The men were nervous. “I shall never forget the night of August 6/7,” Ludendorff later wrote. “It was cold. … I listened feverishly for the sound of fighting. I still hoped that at least one brigade or another had broken through the line of forts.”
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None had.

Undaunted, Ludendorff pushed on into the city the next morning. He dispatched an advance guard under Colonel Burghardt von Oven to take the Citadel. Then he commandeered an automobile and with his adjutant drove up to the Citadel. There was not a German sentry to be seen, only Belgian soldiers. In a piece of audacious cheek, Ludendorff straightened himself up, dusted off his uniform, clenched the monocle into his right eye socket, strode up to the Citadel’s gates, and rapped on them with the pommel of his sword. The gates opened. The courtyard was filled with startled Belgian troops. One of the truly great “what if?” scenarios of modern history was at hand. What if a Belgian soldier had shot the general? What if he had been arrested and turned over to the French? Modern German history may well have taken a different course.
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“The few hundred Belgians [inside the Citadel],” Ludendorff later triumphantly recorded, “surrendered at my summons.”
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For some reason, Colonel von Oven had opted to bypass the Citadel and to head for Fort Loncin.

A grateful Kaiser Wilhelm II “smothered” Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, with kisses.
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Next, he awarded the war’s first prestigious Pour le Mérite medal to Ludendorff.
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Then, remembering that Emmich was the field commander of X Corps, he bestowed the decoration on that officer as well.

News of the coup de main at the Citadel hit the newspapers in Germany immediately. Joyous celebrations erupted in many cities. Bülow’s staff—without a direct connection to the troops besieging Liège, since X Corps had not been provided with a communications detachment—had intercepted Emmich’s terse private telegram to his wife: “Hurrah, at Liège.” A more formal epistle informed Second Army that Emmich had entered the city at 7:45
AM
on 7 August. “The Governor in Flight. The Bishop a prisoner. Liège evacuated by Belgian troops. Citadel of Liège occupied by our troops. As yet not known which forts have been taken.”
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The last sentence raised eyebrows at Bülow’s headquarters—as did the fact that thereafter a deafening silence ensued. For almost two days, no word came out of Liège. Wild rumors circulated at once: The entire 14th IB had been taken prisoner by the Belgians; Ludendorff had been killed in action; Bülow had been shot by his sentry; losses on both sides had been horrendous; and all the forts had surrendered.

The delay at Liège caused near panic on the morning of 8 August at Army Supreme Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL) in Berlin as well as at Bülow’s temporary headquarters at Aachen. In Berlin, Wilhelm II maliciously accused Moltke of having “brought the English down about my ears for nothing” with his invasion of neutral Belgium. For a second time since 1 August, when the kaiser had brutally rebuked Moltke for his refusal to concentrate solely against Russia after Ambassador Karl von Lichnowsky had sent word that London would keep Paris out of the war if Germany did not attack France, the chief of the General Staff collapsed psychologically. His deputy, Hermann von Stein, witnessed “a most serious nervous breakdown,” a “cascade of tears,” and eventual “utter apathy” on the part of Moltke. The latter “never forgot those words;” they “weighed heavily on him” in subsequent days. Moltke eventually recovered and put on a brave front. “Gentlemen, you have seen me weak and agitated,” he informed his staff. “The struggles before mobilization and the Kaiser’s words had made me brittle. I have now overcome that and you shall witness a different me.”
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At Aachen, Bülow’s staff also became anxious. First and Second armies, roughly six hundred thousand soldiers and a quarter million horses, had to squeeze through the narrow corridors first of Aachen and then of Liège before they could debouch on the Hesbaye Plateau. Martial law had been declared at Aachen and the streets cleared for the troops; it would take five days to march them through its narrow medieval lanes. Their equipment had been routed through Düsseldorf to ease the congestion. Each army corps occupied thirty kilometers of road, each division fifteen, and each corps’ munitions trains twenty. If Liège held out much longer, First and Second armies would have to march through the Netherlands—and thus violate another neutral nation.

Bülow took charge. On 8 August, with Moltke’s consent, he augmented Emmich’s original force of thirty-three thousand infantry and cavalry with a new siege army of sixty thousand (IX and VII corps) commanded by Karl von Einem-Rothmaler. A former Prussian war minister, Einem had won the Iron Cross as a lieutenant in the Franco-Prussian War and in 1914 commanded VII Corps at Münster. He took his time. He put an end to the senseless slaughter of massed infantry charges at the Liège forts and waited for the heavy siege artillery—developed in peacetime by Ludendorff for just this purpose—to arrive on the scene.

As soon as he set foot on Belgian territory, Einem confessed to his wife that he deeply “regretted” the “brutal nature” of the conflict. “Unfortunately,” he wrote on 8 August, “the [Belgian] populace takes part in the war.” Men and women from concealed positions fired on the troops, especially under the cover of darkness. “I have ordered that the villages be burned down and everyone [seized] shot.” Two days later, he repeated his outrage at “the insidious, detestable blood thirstiness of the Belgians.” He maintained a hard stance. “Unfortunately, we had to singe and burn a lot and many inhabitants forfeited their lives.” The burned-out villages between Battice and Herve, he noted, “defy description. This is what the ruins of Pompey … must look like.” He lamented that many soldiers in their eagerness to get at the enemy had fired on their fellow warriors.
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While he waited for the heavy artillery to arrive, Einem took stock of the situation. Not a single fort had fallen. Their garrisons had held tough. General von Emmich was in the “remarkable position” of having forced his way into the city between Forts Fléron and Evegnée—only to “find himself in a mousetrap.” Military history, Einem wryly noted, had been “enriched by a new, paradoxical example” at this “damned fortress”: “Emmich inside and we outside.”
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The men were hungry, thirsty, and tired. What remained of Marwitz’s eight thousand cavalry mounts were dangerously short on oats. The heat continued unabated. The only good news was that on 8 August, 14th IB finally managed to break out of the Belgian steel ring that encircled them and to take Fort Barchon. Fort d’Evegnée fell on the night of 11 August.

In the afternoon of 12 August, Einem spied a welcome sight: the monstrous black heavy siege guns. First came the 305mm Austrian Škoda howitzers. Moved in three sections, they could be assembled in forty minutes. Instead of tires, they crept forward on what their crews called “iron feet”—that is, steel tracks. Next came the four 420mm Krupp monsters. Each had a crew of two hundred. Each took six hours to emplace. Each could fire a shell with 150 kilograms of explosives a distance of fourteen kilometers. Each was fired electrically from a distance of three hundred meters by a gun crew wearing protective head padding. Célestin Demblon, a deputy of Liège, marveled at the Krupp piece.

The monster advanced in two parts, pulled by 36 horses. The pavement trembled. … Hannibal’s elephants could not have astonished the Romans more! The soldiers who accompanied it marched stiffly with an almost religious solemnity. It was the Belial
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of cannons!
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Both the škodas and the Krupp “Big Berthas”
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fired armor-piercing shells with delayed fuses that allowed them to penetrate their targets before exploding.

The issue was never in doubt. Within forty-eight hours, Leman’s forts were pulverized into submission: first Pontisse, then Chaudfontaine and Embourg, next Liers and Fléron and Evegnée east of the Meuse; thereafter, Boncelles, Lantin, and Loncin west of the river. The last two, Hollogne and Flémalle, lowered the Belgian tricolor on 16 August.
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Each fort took about thirty heavy shells. Ludendorff had arrived at Fort Loncin just in time to see a single shell from a Big Bertha rip through the concrete roof, blow up its magazine, and cause the entire structure to collapse.

Dazed and blackened Belgian soldiers, accompanied by some Germans who had been taken prisoner on the night of August 5/6, crawled out of the ruins. Bleeding, with their hands up, they came toward us.
“Ne pas tuer, ne pas tuer.”
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…
We were no Huns. Our men brought water to refresh our enemies.
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Loncin held a surprise for the Germans: Under its broken concrete slabs and twisted girders they found General Leman, unconscious and nearly asphyxiated by poisonous fumes. Emmich was at the scene. He had met Leman at peacetime military maneuvers and congratulated the Belgian on the tenacity of his defense. Leman’s one concern was that it be recorded that he had carried out King Albert’s orders to the letter. “Put in your dispatches that I was unconscious.” He then offered Emmich his sword. In the war’s first (and perhaps last) act of true chivalry, the German declined to take it. “No, keep your sword. To have crossed swords with you has been an honor.”
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Leman had lost twenty thousand men at Liège.
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