The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (30 page)

Lanrezac caught Bülow’s Second Army off guard. As the sun slowly began to burn through the morning mist, it became readily evident that once more, what was intended to be a single, bold, decisive French counterattack had degenerated into a series of distinct localized battles. Hache’s III Corps and de Mas-Latrie’s XVIII Corps advanced about four kilometers west and northwest, respectively, before each was met by a withering storm of artillery, followed by massed infantry charges. By noon, their drive had stalled. French X Corps in the center of the line attacking north fared even worse. By 11
AM
, General Defforges was pleading with Lanrezac to send him reinforcements. “I am very violently attacked on my whole front. They are getting around my right flank. I will hold at all costs. Get me support as soon as possible on my right and on my left.”
⁸⁵
Lanrezac countered that it was too early in the day to commit Franchet d’Espèrey’s precious I Corps.

North of the Oise, Bülow was about to enter Saint-Quentin with his staff when the thunder of heavy guns erupted to the southeast. He drove toward the sound of the guns. Not only had Kirchbach’s X Reserve Corps been heavily attacked east of Guise, but Emmich’s X Corps and Plettenberg’s Guard Corps were in a serious firefight around Audigny, south of Guise. Bülow and his chief of staff, Otto von Lauenstein, quickly appreciated that Second Army was conducting two major but separate battles: one at Guise in a southeasterly direction against the line of the Oise between Bernot and La Fère, and the other across the Oise from Guise to Vervins. By noon, a fifteen-kilometer-wide gap had formed between the two groups.
⁸⁶

A lieutenant (Dr. Trierenberg) with 2d Guard Regiment wrote home about the horror of battle around Le Sourd. Approaching the village through ripe orchards, the Guard was met by a withering hail of fire from houses and hedges and pinned down for two hours. When it finally resumed the advance, “the streets of Le Sourd offered a horrible picture. The dead and the wounded lay about in heaps. Pleading cries for help were directed toward us.” Beyond Le Sourd, the fields had been set on fire by the artillery and were littered with abandoned machine guns and their dead crews. Not even a small wood offered protection, as it was repeatedly raked by French 75mm fire. “Bloody corpses rolled around on the ground.” The heat was unbearable. Whenever the men spied even a dirty puddle of water in the clay soil, “they fell over it like a pack of wild animals.” The wounded ran about in delirium, “wild eyed and foaming at the mouth.” At the end of the day, 2d Guard Regiment was down to eight hundred men.
⁸⁷

The situation was critical. The French were tenaciously attacking Bülow’s entire front. On the left flank, the Guard Corps was battling Defforges’s X Corps east of Audigny. Unsurprisingly, Bülow hurriedly contacted Hausen’s Third Army and requested that it attack the French “in the direction of Vervins” to relieve the pressure on Plettenberg’s Guard Corps. Uncharacteristically, there was no ready reply from Hausen. In fact, Third Army was being hard-pressed by Dubois’s IX Corps near Rethel. Moreover, the distance to Vervins was too great for Third Army to cover in a day. As well, Hausen allowed, his men were “extraordinarily impaired by the great heat on the waterless plateau of Château-Porcien.”
⁸⁸
There was nothing for Bülow and Lauenstein to do but call in the last reserves: Kurt von dem Borne’s 13th ID and Paul Fleck’s 14th ID. Piecemeal, they fed their reserves into wherever the French threatened to break Second Army’s front—at Audigny, at Le Mesnil, at Mont-d’Origny, at Sains-Richaumont.

By midafternoon, the crisis on Second Army’s left flank had further intensified. Just after 1
PM
Joffre, who had spent the morning with Lanrezac at Marle, released Fifth Army’s iron reserve to be “engaged as circumstances best require in liaison with the 3rd and 10th Army Corps.”
⁸⁹
Finally unleashed, Franchet d’Espèrey did not disappoint. Believing both Hache and Defforges to have been beaten morally rather than physically, he pushed his forces in between III and X corps. What followed was grand theater. Mounted on a chestnut charger in the light of the setting sun, Franchet d’Espèrey ordered Alexandre Gallet’s 1st ID, its bayonets fixed, colors unfurled, and bands playing “La Marseillaise,” to sweep down the slope from Le Hérie against the German line. Obviously stirred by the sight, the men of III and X corps joined the attack. Only the onset of darkness prevented a systematic attempt to exploit the charge. Joffre had found a potential new army commander: “a man of energy and willpower.”
⁹⁰

The western French front facing Saint-Quentin was dramatically less successful. Neither Hache nor de Mas-Latrie was cut from the same cloth as Franchet d’Espèrey. The more Hache clamored for reinforcements, the less inclined de Mas-Latrie was to press the attack against Saint-Quentin on the left flank of III Corps. And when German X Reserve Corps, commanded by Richard von Süsskind after Kirchbach had been wounded in a firefight, drove down the Oise against Justinien Lefèvre’s 18th ID, de Mas-Latrie ordered a retreat. On his left flank, Einem’s VII Corps at the same time crossed the Oise and chased Pierre Abonneau’s 4th Reserve Division Group out of its positions between Choigny and Moy. Jules Champin, a soldier with French 36th IR, recalled the horror of the attack:

German bullets whiz around my ears without stopping and shells fall on all sides, a bullet hits the ground just in front of me but doesn’t touch me. … I noticed that I didn’t have any more cartridges. When I asked my comrades who were 4–5 meters away, they didn’t answer my calls. They were all dead.
⁹¹

The assault on Saint-Quentin, the cornerstone of Joffre’s grand design, had ended in failure.

As bloody 29 August came to a close, a depressed Bülow took stock of the situation. His center had held—but just barely. His right flank had chased Lanrezac’s XVIII Corps and 4th Reserve Division Group from the field. But his left flank southeast of Guise gave cause for concern. A liaison officer from General von Plettenberg’s headquarters reported around 8
PM
that the Guard Corps had been stopped dead in its tracks by Defforges’s X Corps and Franchet d’Espèrey’s dramatic sunset charge; that its front was overextended to a width of eighteen kilometers; that it most likely would not be able to resume the attack the next day; and that in case of another French attack, it would have to fall back behind the river. Not prepared to have the kaiser’s Guard Corps “totally bled to death” on the banks of the Oise, Bülow gave Plettenberg freedom of action, including the option of a full withdrawal.
⁹²

Bülow then turned his attention to a gift from the gods: That night at Mont-d’Origny, several precious documents had been taken from Colonel Gédéon Geismar, the captured chief of staff of III Corps—among them, Lanrezac’s attack orders to his corps commanders. Bülow and Lauenstein were now fully informed. Whereas they had suspected that “at most 5 corps” had attacked Second Army that day, in truth the French had thrown thirteen divisions into the battle—against just six and one-half German divisions. More, the captured papers showed that Saint-Quentin was the main object of the French drive, and thus Plettenberg and the Guard Corps were not in danger of a renewed attack the next morning.
⁹³

In fact, the next day, 30 August, was anticlimactic. Bülow renewed the offensive into the triangle of the Oise. From Second Army headquarters at Homblières, he drove X Corps, Guard Corps, and X Reserve Corps forward with exhortations to “advance soon and energetically.” By noon, Chief of Staff von Lauenstein was sure of victory. The Battle of Saint-Quentin, he wrote his wife, had taken a sudden and surprising turn in the last twelve hours. “I was certain of the issue around 12 o’clock noon.” Bülow concurred. “Now the matter has been decided.” He hailed his advancing troops, “Great victory! French totally defeated!” The “moral capacity to resist” of the French army, Lauenstein crowed, “apparently” had been “broken.” German fliers reported large columns of French soldiers falling back on Crécy-sur-Serre and Laon. Lauenstein rose to giddy heights. “Our offensive surpasses even Napoleonic dimensions. If only Schlieffen could have witnessed this.”
⁹⁴
At 3:45
PM
, Bülow issued his Order of the Day: “The enemy has been defeated along the entire front in the three-day
[sic]
Battle of Saint-Quentin.”
⁹⁵

Lanrezac, fearing that German Third and First armies might join the battle in a pincer move against Fifth Army’s flanks, at 5
PM
on 31 August ordered his “fatigued” corps commanders to retreat south behind the Aisne River.
⁹⁶
Three hours later, Joffre approved Lanrezac’s request to break contact (lest his army be “captured,” as Lanrezac put it to GQG) and to withdraw forty kilometers to a new line running from Compiègne to Soissons to Reims.
⁹⁷

Guise/Saint-Quentin had turned into another German tactical victory, albeit another bloody one. Lanrezac had failed to take advantage of Fifth Army’s numerical superiority over German Second Army. He had held back Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps for much of the day and had engaged it only after Hache’s III and Defforges’s X corps had been driven to the point of defeat. He had left Abonneau’s cavalry and Boutegourd’s 51st RID (up from Dinant) virtually idle on his right wing. Above all, he had failed to detect and then to exploit the fifty-kilometer gap that had developed between Bülow’s left and Hausen’s right—that is, to press home a devastating attack on the left wing of Plettenberg’s battered Guard Corps on the morning of 30 August.
⁹⁸
Historians who speak of Lanrezac’s “unwilling victory” are off the mark.
⁹⁹

As great as Lanrezac’s failings were, they paled compared with those of Bülow. For a second time (since Charleroi), he had blunted an attack by French Fifth Army. For a second time, he had driven that force back with heavy losses. And for a second time, he had an opportunity to pursue and perhaps finish off Fifth Army. As commander of both First and Second armies and with Third Army at his beck and call, he was well positioned to close the vise on Lanrezac: Kluck to drive against Fifth Army’s left flank from the west, Hausen against its right flank from the east, and his Second Army against its rear from the north.

Bülow did nothing of the kind. Instead, he spent the afternoon of 30 August spreading the news of his victory. Kluck was first on the list. “Today 2 Army has decisively defeated the enemy. Large formations fell back on La Fère.” Moltke was next: “Today, the second day of the Battle of St. Quentin, complete victory. French [forces] comprising four army corps and three divisions in full retreat.” Hausen was last: “Major French forces decisively defeated in two-day Battle of St. Quentin and hurled back on La Fère and east [of there].”
¹⁰⁰
More, instead of immediately ordering a potentially fatal pursuit of the “decisively defeated” French Fifth Army, Bülow let his troops rest the next day, 31 August, as well. Field kitchens arrived to serve the half-starved troops from steaming vats of soup with meat, potatoes, cabbage or beans, and roots or rice. Nearly six thousand soldiers needed medical attention or burial. Almost as an afterthought, Bülow nonchalantly suggested that First Army change direction and advance along the line La Fère–Laon and “fully exploit” Second Army’s tactical victory. The Germans’ second potential “climacteric” of the war had been squandered.

*
A term famously coined by Muhammad Ali for the “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in October 1974 at Kinshasa, Zaire.

*
Interestingly, in 1934 King Albert of Belgium died near Dinant while rock climbing.

†
French (GMT) time. German records are in German General Time (one hour later).

CHAPTER SEVEN
TO THE MARNE

It is essential for a general to be tranquil and obscure, upright and self-disciplined. … He alters his management of affairs and changes his strategies. … He shifts his position and traverses indirect routes to keep other people from being able to anticipate him
.

—SUN-TZU

D
ESPITE KARL VON BüLOW’S FAILURE TO EXPLOIT HIS “TOTAL
victory” at Saint-Quentin, Army Supreme Command (OHL) had every reason to believe that the campaign in the west had been won by late August. For nearly three weeks, its armies had steadily advanced, had blunted every enemy offensive, and had driven Joseph Joffre’s armies ever deeper into France. From Nancy to Verdun, Namur to Charleroi, Guise to Saint-Quentin, and Mons to Le Cateau, the enemy seemed on the verge of collapse. Only “occupation measures,” the OHL informed Fritz Nieser, Baden’s military plenipotentiary to Imperial Headquarters, remained. On the morning of 4 September, advance guards of Second Army happily passed a road sign, paris 121
KM
; by afternoon, another sign read, paris 95
KM
.
¹

The opposing headquarters took time to reassess the flow of the campaign after Guise/Saint-Quentin. For Helmuth von Moltke, this meant setting in place a series of orders instructing his armies how to pursue the enemy and how to bring about the final, decisive victory. For Joseph Joffre, this meant a further falling-back toward Paris and frantic efforts to form up Michel-Joseph Maunoury’s Sixth Army. And, of course, more dealings with the always difficult British.

SHORTLY AFTER NOON ON
28 August, having satisfied himself that Charles Lanrezac had the attack at Guise well under way, Joffre left Fifth Army headquarters at Marle. His driver, Georges Bouillot, sped him to Compiègne to confer with Field Marshal Sir John French.
²
As always, Joffre was concerned about his “fragile” left wing. If, Godspeed, Lanrezac advanced across the Oise against German Second Army, or if, God forbid, Bülow’s infantry drove Fifth Army back on Laon, a serious gap would be created between Fifth Army and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). More, if the latter continued to retreat, a second gap—between Fifth Army and Maunoury’s nascent Sixth Army—would also open up. In short, it was imperative that Sir John halt his precipitous retreat and return to the line.

French had no desire to do either. Despite Joffre’s most flowery pleading and cajoling—something totally out of character for the usually phlegmatic generalissimo—the field marshal would buy into neither General Instruction No. 2 nor the new plan to stand along the line Compiègne-Soissons-Reims. “No, no, my troops need forty-eight hours of absolute rest,” French insisted.
³
All the while, Chief of Staff Archibald Murray, having recovered from his “dead faint” at Le Cateau, urged his chief to remain firm about withdrawing and not to endorse Joffre’s design.

Joffre left Compiègne disappointed and bitter, but not defeated. He decided to appeal to President Raymond Poincaré to exert political pressure on John French. The latter made his feelings clear in a letter to Secretary of State for War Horatio Herbert Lord Kitchener on 30 August. “My confidence in the ability of the leaders of the French Army to carry this campaign to a successful conclusion is fast waning, and this is my real reason for the decision I have taken to move the British forces so far back.” His three “shattered” corps required time to rest and refit.
⁴
Privately, he allowed that they needed “ten days of quiet.”
⁵
For the next two days, the BEF made it its business to be always one day’s retreat farther back than French Fifth Army on its right and Sixth Army slowly being assembled near Paris on its left.

In fact, “Johnnie” French was fast retreating into the eye of a political storm. Joffre’s appeal to Poincaré resulted in the president contacting Sir Francis Bertie, and asking St. James’s envoy at Paris to forward Poincaré’s “imperative” plea for action by the BEF to the field marshal. “I refused,” was French’s lapidary comment.
⁶
Poincaré was livid. “Eight days, eight days! Before eight days [are up] will the Germans not be in Paris?”
⁷
At the War Office in London, Kitchener became alarmed that Sir John’s refusal to fall into line with Joffre’s new strategy and the continuing rapid retreat of the BEF could lead to defeat of the French left flank and therewith collapse of the entire front, if not also of the Entente. Before daybreak on 1 September, Kitchener, with the approval of the cabinet, was aboard a Royal Navy destroyer bound for France; he summoned French to meet him and Bertie at the British embassy in Paris. The field marshal took along “old Archie” Murray and Charles Huguet, the French representative at British headquarters (GHQ). Poincaré sent Premier René Viviani and the new minister of war, Alexandre Millerand, to what was fast shaping up as the first Anglo-French “summit.”

Secretary Kitchener’s arrival at the British embassy in his blue field marshal’s uniform was as dramatic as it was unfortunate. The “super-sensitive” Sir John French “immediately took it as an insult. Was Kitchener, who did not outrank him, trying to pull rank?”
⁸
Not unexpectedly, the meeting quickly became “heated.” Kitchener, according to Huguet, remained “calm, balanced, reflective, master of himself;” French, on the other hand, was “sour, impetuous, with congested face, sullen and ill-tempered in expression.”
⁹
As the exchange between the two British field marshals grew in volume and intensity, Kitchener asked Sir John to join him in an adjoining room. There is no record of the conversation. None is needed. Kitchener later that night recapitulated their discussion in a letter to Field Marshal French, of which he sent Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith a copy for good measure. It was blunt.

French’s troops are now engaged in the fighting line, where he will remain conforming to the movements of the French Army. … By being in the fighting line you of course understand I mean dispositions of your troops in contact with, though possibly behind, the French as they were to-day. …
¹⁰

There was no more talk by Sir John of a withdrawal south of Paris. He resumed his place in the Allied line. Kitchener returned to London.

At Vitry-le-François, Joffre, resplendent as ever in baggy red breeches and crumpled black tunic, put the finishing touches on General Instruction No. 4 that same day.
¹¹
Lanrezac’s Fifth Army and Fernand de Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army were to withdraw another hundred kilometers to the Seine and Aube rivers, and Maunoury’s Sixth Army was to be stood up northeast of Paris. Joffre politely rejected Sir John French’s suggestion that the Allies hold along the Marne River, fearing that this would inhibit his freedom of maneuver. He furiously drove his Directorate of Railways to rush four infantry divisions from Alsace-Lorraine to face the German assault on Paris. For he well knew the state of fatigue of his soldiers along the Marne. During a tour of the front of Third and Fourth armies on 30 August, he had noted red trousers faded to the color of “pale brick,” coats “ragged and torn,” shoes “caked with mud,” the soldiers’ eyes “cavernous in faces dulled by exhaustion,” and their faces dark with “many days’ growth of beard.” Twenty days of campaigning had aged them “as many years.”
¹²

As well, Joffre instructed the War Ministry to comb the depots and barracks of France for replacements for the 260,000 men killed, wounded, or ill at the front. It estimated the numbers to be large—a “minimum” of 300,000 infantry, 30,000 artillery, and 20,000 cavalry recruits—but it would be weeks before they could be sufficiently formed into units, equipped, trained, and deployed. The same was true for the draftees of the Class of 1914, which by the end of August amounted to 180,000 deemed fit for combat training. Already in late August, War Minister Adolphe Messimy had concluded that while “human resources” were “considerable,” the difficulties in clothing and equipping new recruits were “considerable, but not insurmountable.” However, the acute shortage of officers, especially for the infantry, remained
“le point délicat.”
¹³

The frantic pace of Joffre’s activities after the Battle of the Frontiers has been well documented.
¹⁴
Ably chauffeured by Bouillot, Joffre crisscrossed the French countryside. On 26 August, he met with French, Lanrezac, and Albert d’Amade at Saint-Quentin; on the twenty-eighth, he saw Lanrezac at Marle; on the twenty-ninth, he met with French at Compiègne and Henry Wilson at Reims; on the thirtieth, he was at Pierre Ruffey’s Third Army headquarters at Varennes; on 3 September, he visited Lanrezac again, this time at Sézanne; and on the fifth he met yet again with Sir John French, at Melun, on the Seine River. Everywhere Joffre went, he inspected, he ordered, and he disposed, much like an eighteenth-century enlightened despot. And he fired—among the infantry, the commanders of two armies, nine corps, and thirty-three divisions; among the cavalry, one corps and five divisional commanders.
¹⁵
On 30 August, he fired Ruffey of Third Army and replaced him with Maurice Sarrail, until then VI Corps commander. Four days later, he parted company with Lanrezac, dismissing the “lion of the French army” with two curt sentences and placing him under the military governor of Paris. Not surprisingly, Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, the tough-minded commander of I Corps, took over Fifth Army. For the upcoming counterpunch against the three German armies approaching Paris, Joffre needed leaders “who have faith in their success” and who thereby knew “how to impose their will on their subordinates and dominate events.”
¹⁶
The “short and square” Franchet d’Espèrey, with a head like a “howitzer,” straight jaw, high cheekbones, and “dark piercing eyes,”
¹⁷
fit the bill.

THERE WERE NO SIGNS
of such frenetic activity at German headquarters in Luxembourg. Once in possession of Bülow’s pronouncement of “total victory” over Lanrezac’s Fifth Army, Moltke and his staff by the evening of 30 August believed that they had a clear picture of the situation. Despite small gaps among First, Second, and Third armies, the entire right pivot wing, or
Schwenkungsflügel
, was on the march again. Everywhere, Moltke assured nervous leaders in the German state capitals, the enemy was “in full flight.”
¹⁸
And when First Army the following day reported that it had swept all opposing forces from the field, Moltke’s concerns about a flanking movement out of Fortress Paris vanished. As did a sudden panic attack when the British landed four battalions (three thousand men) of marine light infantry and artillery under Sir George Aston at Ostend on 27–28 August to secure the BEF’s supply base there and possibly to harass Kluck’s lines of communication. For they were reembarked within seventy-two hours when Sir John French moved his main supply base to Saint-Nazaire in the Bay of Biscay.
¹⁹
All the Germans found at Ostend was a trainload of dead horses, shot because there had been no ships on which to evacuate them.
²⁰
Most critically, during the night of 30–31 August, Moltke received the welcome news that Eighth Army had shattered General A. V. Samsonov’s Russian Second Army at Tannenberg. Tales of Russian terror accompanied the news.
^*
It was time to set all the major pieces in play for the final act in the great drama in the west.