To give the new kingdom a chance to defend itself (at least initially) in case of hostile incursion by any of its neighbors, the great powers had insisted that Belgium “uphold” its territorial integrity. Thus, between 1878 and 1906 Brussels set about creating a system of ten fortresses—the major ones being at Antwerp, Namur, and Liège. By 1914, la position fortifée de Liège had received an additional eleven forts and twelve field works, equally divided along both banks of the Maas, making it one of Europe’s most formidable fortresses. The regular army consisted of 117,000 men, divided into six light infantry divisions and one cavalry division.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Charles de Brocqueville, Brussels in May 1913 introduced universal male conscription and increased the annual intake of recruits from 13,300 to 33,000.129 The grand design was to stand up an army of roughly 340,000 soldiers by 1918. The regular field army was to consist of 180,000 men, organized into six army corps, each of three or four light infantry divisions. The new king, Albert, the last of the European warrior-kings, was prepared to use these assets against any and all potential invaders; he regarded no power as a potential ally. Thus, in historian Strachan’s words, Brussels boxed itself into a policy of “international political purity” but “strategic and military absurdity.”130
Belgium’s precarious position of “perpetual” neutrality suffered a rude shock in 1913. In his last peacetime “Deployment Plan 1913/14,” Moltke demanded that on the first day of mobilization, the Belgian government be handed an “ultimatum of short duration” in which it openly declared itself “to be Germany’s ally or adversary,” and that it “open” the fortresses of Liège, Namur, and Huy to a German advance across its territory.131 During a state visit to Berlin in November, Wilhelm II and Moltke warned Albert that “small countries, such as Belgium, would be well advised to rally to the side of the strong if they wished to retain their independence.”132 It was at best an insensitive comment; at worst a direct threat to a king who stemmed from an ancient and noble German house, whose mother was a Hohenzollern princess, and who had married a Bavarian duchess, Elisabeth of Wittelsbach. Above all, both Wilhelm II and Moltke badly misjudged Albert’s temperament.
How to deploy Belgium’s army? King Albert and his military reached general agreement that, depending on the nature of an external threat, the army would concentrate along a west-east axis running from Aat to Namur to Liège, ready to face either France or Germany. But in May 1913, Chief of the General Staff Antonin Selliers de Moranville ordered a refinement of these plans as it became evident that Germany would be the likely adversary. Since Germany could mobilize and deploy its forces faster than Belgium, Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel Louis de Rijckel (Ryckel), with King Albert’s approval, decided to deploy his entire force along the line of the Maas. The plan made sense. The army could thus be anchored on Fortress Liège and its four hundred guns, with its front protected by the “formidable wet ditch” of the Maas; its left wing rested against the Dutch border, and its right wing sheltered behind the Maas and Fortress Namur.133 Of course, such a massive overhaul of the Belgian war plan required the one thing that Brussels did not have in 1913—time.
How well prepared was Liège for war? When General Gérard Leman took command of 3d Infantry Division at Liège at the beginning of 1913, he was shocked by its “deplorable state.”134 The “lamentable slackness” of the troops “greatly distressed” him: By and large, they were “dirty and untidy,” avoided officers so as not to have to salute, carried no arms, and in public “slouched, hand across stomachs or behind backs, humped up, chins on chests and feet dragging.” A forced refresher course at Beverloo in May did little to address the sad state of the forces. Fully one-third of the division’s officers, Leman lamented, “knew nothing of fire control or maneuver.” The infantry “were very poor marksmen.” The artillery “had not the equipment to communicate with its own infantry.” The only bright spot was that by the end of their training, at least the young recruits “showed willingness and endurance in marching” and generally “gave the impression of having personal courage.”
On 3 August, King Albert rejected Berlin’s ultimatum of the previous evening calling on Brussels to grant German armies free passage with the terse comment, “It is war.”135 The theoretical planning of the last years was now hard reality. Under Article 68 of the Constitution, King Albert became commander in chief of the Belgian army. And since no plans existed as yet for Rijckel’s redeployment of the bulk of his forces on the line of the Maas, Albert had no alternative but to marshal 3d Infantry Division at Liège, 4th Infantry Division at Namur, and the remainder of his troops at Tirlemont, Perwez, and Leuven (Louvain), between the Gette (Gete) and Dyle (Dijle) rivers. Leuven was to serve as army headquarters.
The Belgian army called up 200,000 men, followed by 18,500 volunteers and 18,000 conscripts. In fact, the field army, excluding fortress troops, amounted to but 117,000 regulars and 37,600 horses. Each of the six corps comprised between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand men; the cavalry division, forty-five hundred sabers. Each infantry division was subdivided into three or four brigades of two regiments each, with one artillery regiment of a dozen 75mm guns and a second with a plethora of 36mm, 75mm, and 150mm guns. There existed no heavy artillery and a mere 102 machine guns, with the result that Brussels in August hastily purchased twelve heavy howitzers and one hundred machine guns from France.136 About two hundred thousand soldiers manned the country’s ten major fortresses. Behind them stood a last reserve, the Garde civique, weekend warriors garbed in semimilitary uniforms. Still caught up in the midst of Brocqueville’s expansion plans, much of Belgium’s army in 1914 consisted of what Émile Galet of its École militaire called “phantom battalions and skeleton companies.”137 The full force of the German assault would soon fall on this army at Liège.
* Theosophy (the name comes from a Greek word meaning “wisdom of the divine”) professed to achieve knowledge of God by “spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual revelation.” Steiner is best known for the pedagogic theories taught in his worldwide Waldorf (or Steiner) schools.
* Sites in Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine are given their more customary French names, with their 1914 German names in parentheses. Spelling of French city names was taken from www.viamichelin.com.
* I have used this familiar Anglo-Saxon term rather than the German quartermaster-general.
* Neither the French government nor Joffre had a formal name for the Plan de renseignements, popularly referred to as Plan XVII.
† In 1998, the city reverted to its prerevolutionary name, Châlons-en-Champagne.
* “Plant bayonets! Forward!”
* Boche is a disparaging term for a German, likely from the French dialectical caboche (cabbage, blockhead).
CHAPTER THREE
DEATH IN THE VOSGES
A single error in the original assembly of the armies can hardly ever be rectified during the entire course of the campaign.
—HELMUTH VON MOLTKE THE ELDER
TWO ARMIES CLOSED ON EACH OTHER ON THE PLAIN OF ALSACE in the heat of early September. One had advanced out of the west through the Belfort Gap, a broad swath of land where the Vosges Mountains of France fail to meet the Jura Mountains of Switzerland; the other, out of the northeast and across the Rhine. They met somewhere between Cernay (Sennheim) and Mulhouse (Mülhausen) along the edge of the southern Vosges Mountains. One took up an attacking position on “a large plain” west of the Rhine; the other debouched on “a rising ground of considerable height” in the Vosges. Both “fell to work with their spades” and built strong entrenchments. Both were about fifty thousand men strong.1 One was commanded by Julius Caesar, the other by the German chieftain Ariovistus.
Precisely 1,972 years later, such a battle was repeated. The troops pouring out of the Belfort Gap in 1914 were French and those out of the northeast, German. French forces consisted of VII Army Corps and 8th Cavalry Division (CD) of Yvon Dubail’s First Army; German fo
rces, of Baden XIV and XV army corps as well as XIV Army Reserve Corps of Josias von Heeringen’s Seventh Army. Both were rushing headlong toward the villages of Altkirch and Thann as well as Mulhouse, a textile town known as “the city of a hundred flues,” some of which belonged to the family of Alfred Dreyfus. Upper Alsace was devoid of major fortifications, for it had no pride of place in either side’s concentration plan.
WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION of the Rhenish Palatinate—the left bank of the river Rhine bordered by France to the west and Baden to the south—no area of the historic wars between France and Germany so agitated the public as the two ancient lands of Alsace and Lorraine. They had been part of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nation since the Treaty of Meersen in 870, but eight hundred years later, in the words of the Elder Helmuth von Moltke, Louis XIV “severed” them “like a sound limb from the living body of Germany.”2 That same Moltke brought the “Old Reichsland” back into Germany in 1871. He was moved in doing so not only by national passion but also by military necessity: The two provinces formed a triangle with the apex, formed by the confluence of the Ill and Rhine rivers, a veritable dagger pointing at the heart of Germany; and the Vosges Mountains and the Plain of Alsace accorded France a perfect sallying point for a future revenge attack on the new Reich.
Annexation brought with it a return to old Germanic names. Alsace reverted to Elsaß, Lorraine to Lothringen, Sarrebourg to Saarburg, Strasbourg to Straßburg, and Thionville to Diedenhofen. The Vosges were once more the Vogesen. Many villages exchanged the French endings of -vihr and -viler for the ancient German -weier and -weiler, respectively. Lorraine remained French culturally and linguistically, while Alsace retained its Aleman roots. Many French Alsatians migrated to France. Villages were torn apart by the new border. Roads were studded with sentry gates; the ridge of the Vosges, with border posts. The German administration—Prussian military—impressed the local population with neither its charm nor its grace. In the petty bickering leading up to the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1871, two decisions were made that were to impact the course of events in 1914: Fortress and Territoire de Belfort remained with France (in exchange for a German victory parade through Paris), and the new Franco-German border was drawn along the crest of the Vosges rather than farther west at the eastern edge of the Plateau of Lorraine. Belfort in 1914 would anchor the French extreme right flank; the Vosges heights would provide France access to the major passes through the mountains.
ON 7 AUGUST, the French landed the first blow in the south. Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre’s General Instruction No. 1 of 8 August, as detailed in the previous chapter, had made clear that he primarily wanted to “jab” in Alsace with his First Army, to “fix” the German left wing, and, if possible, to draw enemy units to the south while he delivered the main blow against the German center via a two-pronged offensive on each side of the Metz-Thionville defenses.3 But Joffre could not resist the temptation to arouse the nation’s passion for war by an early coup de théâtre in Alsace. He selected Louis Bonneau, Alsatian-born, to lead French forces against Mulhouse, destroy the Rhine bridges, and then march north against Colmar and Strasbourg. A cautious man, Bonneau’s one claim to fame was that at a general maneuver, he had delivered a blistering public attack on a divisional commander—Ferdinand Foch.4 At 5 AM* on 7 August, Bonneau led VII Corps out of the Belfort Gap on what he termed a “delicate and hazardous” undertaking.5 He directed Louis Curé’s 14th Infantry Division (ID) to attack Altkirch and Paul Superbie’s 41st ID, Thann—two villages close to the Swiss border. The infantrymen were conspicuous in their bright blue jackets, shining red trousers, and képi, led by officers in white gloves clutching drawn swords. Louis Aubier’s flanking 8th CD was resplendent in dark bluejackets, red breeches with blue seams, and brass helmets streaming long back plumes.6 Cadets from the Saint-Cyr Military Academy deployed in full-dress uniforms with white plumed casoar. Bonneau’s troops advanced haltingly against virtually no opposition. Then in a spirited bayonet charge, they drove the small German garrison out of Altkirch. Bonneau sent news of the victory to Paris, where it evoked wild celebrations.
Joffre, while pleased with the public fervor over the seizure of Altkirch, was infuriated by Bonneau’s failure to quickly follow up the initial victory. He ordered VII Corps to move at once against Mulhouse.7 It did so slowly. The city fell to Bonneau without opposition at 3 PM on 8 August, the covering German 58th Infantry Brigade (IB) having withdrawn. Bonneau paraded his troops through Mulhouse’s main square for two hours, displaying the German border posts they had ripped out of the ground the previous morning. Joffre now hailed the soldiers of VII Corps as “pioneers in the great work of revenge.”8 French Alsatians welcomed the troops with cheers of “Vive la France!” and hearty renditions of “La Marseillaise” as well as the “Sambre et Meuse.”* They also took advantage of the opportunity to turn against their German brothers. The latter responded by passing on French troop formations and strengths to General von Heeringen at Strasbourg.
Within twenty-four hours of Bonneau’s strike on Mulhouse, Heeringen overthrew his entire deployment plan and moved to dislodge the French from Mulhouse. He ordered Bertold von Deimling’s XV Corps at Strasbourg and Ernst von Hoiningen-Huene’s XIV Corps at Breisach to retake the city; Richard von Schubert’s XIV Reserve Corps was to continue to mobilize along the Rhine bridges. To assure success, Heeringen secured the temporary addition of Oskar von Xylander’s Bavarian I Army Corps for the operation. His plan was to turn the French left flank and to throw Bonneau’s VII Army Corps against the Swiss border. XIV Corps, fifty-eight battalions strong, straddled the Rhine River. Due to their close proximity to Mulhouse, Hoiningen-Huene’s corps forwent rail transport and instead headed on foot across the Rhine Valley.9 For forty hours, the troops marched over fields of clover and grain, past vineyards and orchards, through hawthorn hedges and forests under a blazing forty-degree-Celsius sun.10 En route, they sharpened bayonets. Most adhered to Hoiningen-Huene’s orders to restrict their beer intake and not to purchase hard liquor.
Debouching from the mosquito-infested bogs of the Forest of Harth at 3 PM on 9 August, Hoiningen-Huene’s units attacked French positions around Mulhouse. The orderly advance quickly disintegrated into a series of bloody frontal assaults. The fighting in heavily wooded and vineyard-studded terrain was bitter and at close quarters. Heat, exhaustion, and lack of water took their toll. Men dropped off to rest in roadside ditches. Others had to be carried forward on trucks and carts. Infantry companies straggled. Field kitchens (“goulash cannons”) fell behind. By nightfall, vicious street fighting ensued at the small village of Rixheim, just east of Mulhouse. In their baptism of fire, many companies blindly fired off ten to sixteen thousand rounds. In the darkness, soldiers mistakenly fired on one another. A semblance of order was finally restored by having the men sing the patriotic song “Die Wacht AM Rhein,” as a means of identification. In the melee, 112th Infantry Regiment (IR) suffered 41 dead, 163 wounded, and 223 missing.11
The fighting at Mulhouse was even more disorderly and just as deadly. At Napoleon Island on the Rhône-Rhine Canal, the French fired at the Baden Landwehr (reserves) from raised platforms across ripe grain fields, inflicting “severe losses.” Confusion reigned at battalion and regimental levels. Orders were either not received or ignored. To avoid the withering French machine-gun fire, the men of 2d Battalion, 169th IR, took refuge in a gravel pit. When the battalion commander, Major Otto Teschner, ordered a frontal attack, only his officers and “a few men” obeyed; the rest beat a hasty retreat to the shelter of the pit—and beyond. Teschner stemmed the flood back to the canal only by threatening to shoot shirkers and by striking at least one on the head with his dagger.12
There were similar scenes of disorderly retreat elsewhere. When Major Maas, commanding 1st Battalion, 169th IR, dispatched Lother Hauger to reconnoiter Banzenheim, the officer encountered several companies streaming back from the front. “They told me that they had been beaten and wanted to [go ba
ck] across the Rhine.” The nineteen-year-old Hauger rose to the occasion. “I took the next available horse, had the Rhine bridge closed and gave the order not to let anyone across.”13 He received a regimental citation for valor and later the Iron Cross, Second Class.14
The German losses may have been severe, but Bonneau was shaken by the massive enemy response to his invasion and ordered a general retreat later that night. He did not stop until VII Corps was safely under the shelter of Belfort’s guns. War Minister Adolphe Messimy threatened to court-martial and execute any commander found to be lacking the requisite offensive spirit.15 By 13 August, Mulhouse and the surrounding area were back in German hands. It was now the turn of the returning German Alsatians to take revenge on their French brothers. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!” was sung well into the night. Martial law was proclaimed, and residents suspected of having aided the French were evicted. But worse was to come. Numerous commanders—at the company, battalion, and regimental levels—reported that their men had been fired on by civilians. The nightmarish specter of 1870, when French irregulars had taken up arms against the invading German troops, had raised its ugly head: francs-tireurs!* Although all Baden formations had been read the “rules of war” on 4 August, a General Corps Order of 11 August stated: “Soldiers or civilians offering even the least resistance are to be shot at once.” At Baldersheim, armed civilians operating out of houses flying the Red Cross flag were hanged.16 At Didenheim and Niedermorschweier, Hoiningen-Huene’s units took mayors and priests hostage and threatened to execute armed civilians and burn down the homes of those who sheltered them.17
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