The persistent encounter with suspected or real francs-tireurs prompted General Hans Gaede, deputy commander of XIV Corps, to issue a special decree defining just who constituted a franc-tireur. The decree was as sweeping as it was draconian. Any citizens of “France, England, Belgium, Russia and Japan” not in uniform and who in any way disrupted German military operations, communications, or supply were to be regarded as Franktireure. If caught in the act, they were “to be killed at once, naturally in self-defense.” If not caught red-handed, they were still to be executed, but only by emergency courts-martial requiring one officer. Residents of the “Reichsland” who were caught with arms were to be summarily executed; those merely suspected of such actions, handed over to formal courts-martial.18 Without question, the war in the west had turned ugly in its first days.
The first of four engagements in the so-called Battle of the Frontiers had not gone well for France.† Joffre, who had earlier heralded Bonneau’s seizure of Mulhouse, now allowed no news of its recapture by the Germans or of the number of casualties to be released. He relieved Bonneau, the hero of yesterday, of command—the first of many so-called limogés, so named because War Minister Messimy assigned them to rear duty at the army depot of Limoges, some four hundred kilometers away from the political nerve center of Paris. Within a week, Joffre would also sack Louis Aubier, commanding 8th CD in Alsace.
The Battle of Mulhouse had been fought for the wrong reason—national prestige—and at the wrong place—the southernmost flank of both armies. Joffre’s General Instruction No. 1 had made clear that he simply wanted to tie down enemy units to the south while he delivered his main blow against the Germans around the Metz-Thionville defenses. His German counterpart, Helmuth von Moltke, likewise had instructed the commanders on his left flank merely to “attract and to tie down” as many French forces “as possible” in the area between the Upper Moselle and Meurthe rivers to prevent the French from transporting them to their left wing, where the main German attack would be delivered through Belgium. Beyond that, they were to secure Alsace and Baden against invasion.19
But as Carl von Clausewitz made abundantly clear in Vom Kriege, “war is the realm of uncertainty.” A host of “intangibles” such as interaction, friction, moral factors, and the “fog of uncertainty” at all times interacted with what he called “primordial violence” or “slaughter” and the “passions of the people” to prolong war, to escalate conflict, and to bedevil the best-laid plans of staff officers. Thus it was with regard to Alsace-Lorraine in 1914.
BAVARIAN CROWN PRINCE RUPPRECHT and the staff of German Sixth Army departed Munich-Laim by train at 9:50 PM on 7 August and arrived at their headquarters at Saint-Avold, a dreary industrial hamlet some forty kilometers east of Metz, at precisely 7:47 AM on 9 August.20 It was hot, the air sullen. Sixth Army was composed of I Corps (Oskar von Xylander), II Corps (Karl von Martini), III Corps (Ludwig von Gebsattel), and I Reserve Corps (Karl von Fasbender)—183 infantry battalions, 28 cavalry squadrons, and 81 artillery batteries; roughly 220,000 men in all. The next night, Rupprecht, at age forty-five, also assumed command of Heeringen’s Seventh Army and Rudolf von Frommel’s III Cavalry Corps. Prewar plans for his forces to be augmented by Italian Third Army—two cavalry divisions at Strasbourg and three infantry corps on the Upper Rhine, possibly to storm Belfort by the seventeenth day of mobilization (M+17)—had died when Italy declared its neutrality on 2 August. Sixth Army was thus thinly spread out: about 2,960 men per kilometer of front as opposed to 11,100 for First Army, on the right wing. According to the operational plan (“Thoughts About the Operations of Sixth and Seventh Armies”) that Moltke had submitted to Sixth Army and that Rupprecht’s chief of staff, Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen, had refined on 6 August before leaving Munich, the Bavarians were to tie down French forces in Lorraine and thereby “gain time” for the war to be decided on the right flank of the German advance.21
ARDENNES AND LORRAINE, AUGUST 1914
Rupprecht was born to King Ludwig III of Bavaria (crowned 1913) in Munich on 18 May 1869. He studied law and attended the War Academy. Most contemporaries described him as being regal, even handsome, with kind eyes and a smart mustache, but hardly martial. Once having chosen a military career, he advanced quickly: command of a regiment in 1899, of a brigade the following year, and of a division in 1903. He was given I Army Corps in 1906 and six years later, Fourth Army Inspectorate. Under the German federal system, it was natural that as head of the second most important kingdom in the empire he would command Bavarian forces in the war. Constituted as Sixth Army, Rupprecht’s men fought as a unified Bavarian force for the first (and last) time in Lorraine.
The Bavarian units, tired by the long rail journey from Munich, took advantage of their role as occupiers in what soon became a familiar pattern. At Blâmont, east of Lunéville, on 10 August, Captain Otto von Berchem, a staff officer of Xylander’s I Corps, reported that troops of 3d IB had looted local wine cellars. “The result was a most unpleasant drunken matins.” Fueled by the free red wine, the Bavarians shot off their rifles throughout the town, and in the bacchanalia also turned the guns on one another. Berchem’s observations were seconded by Sergeant Joseph Müller of 4th Chevauleger Regiment, who admitted having taken part in the “liberation” of the wine cellars.22 The Bavarians also reported countless incidents of civilians firing at them with hunting pieces. Lieutenant Colonel Eugen von Frauenholz, the future Bavarian military historian, noted some residents of Blâmont shooting at soldiers and horses from treetops and church steeples as they marched through the town.23 The 3d IB reacted to similar occurrences at Nonhigny and Montreux that same day by burning down both villages.24 It was a new and unexpected type of warfare, Frauenholz conceded.
Confusion reigned at Rupprecht’s headquarters. Bonneau’s theatrical charge into Mulhouse, in Krafft von Dellmensingen’s acid words, “had indeed drawn onto itself a good deal—the entire Seventh Army!”25 Both Sixth and Seventh armies scrambled furiously to get back on their original deployment schedules. Moreover, the overall situation remained unclear. Frommel’s cavalry had not managed to penetrate the French forward screen, and aerial reconnaissance had detected little fresh enemy movement. During a skirmish among elements of Bavarian 59th IB and 65th IB and French 15th ID and 16th ID as well as 2d CD of Joseph de Castelli’s VIII Corps at Lagarde (Gerden) along the Marne-Rhine Canal on 11 August, the Germans discovered a valuable document on the body of a fallen French general: A report from Édouard de Castelnau’s Second Army staff that six French army corps were being concentrated in the sixty-kilometer-wide Trouée de Charmes between Toul and Épinal.26 Krafft von Dellmensingen quickly calculated that this meant that the enemy had placed nine of its twenty-one active army corps (43 percent) on the southern flank.27 Sixth and Seventh armies were more than fulfilling the role of tying down as many French units as possible in the south accorded them in Moltke’s Westaufmarsch. Still, French intentions remained unclear.
Papa Joffre would soon provide clarity. From the Grand quartier général (GQG), situated in a schoolhouse at Vitry-le-François, a sleepy little town on the Marne River halfway between Paris and Nancy, Joffre on 11 August decided to launch a major offensive into Alsace-Lorraine north of the Vosges three days later in accordance with his Instruction générale No. 1.28 He anchored the extreme right wing on a new Army of Alsace, composed of Frédéric Vautier’s VII Corps, Albert Soyer’s 44th ID from the Army of the Alps, four reserve divisions, Aubier’s 8th CD, and five battalions of Chasseurs alpins from First Army—three army corps in all under Paul-Marie Pau, a veteran of 1870 brought out of retirement.29 Pau was charged with defending the vast stretch of frontier from the Swiss border north to the Col de la Schlucht, west of Munster (Münster) on the Fecht River. North of Pau, Joffre ordered Dubail’s First Army and de Castelnau’s Second Army to advance out of the Charmes Gap just south of the major German fortifications between Metz and Thionville. Dubail’s four corps would spearhead the attack. First, they would storm
several valleys in the Vosges south of Mount Donon; thereafter, they were to seize Sarre bourg (Saarburg), sixty kilometers east of Nancy, and then hurl the enemy eastward into Lower Alsace and the region around Strasbourg. Three corps of Castelnau’s Second Army were to screen Dubail’s attack by advancing toward Dieuze (Duß) and Château-Salins, with two corps on First Army’s left moving against Morhange (Mörchingen), some forty-five kilometers northeast of Nancy. Joffre placed the rest of Castelnau’s forces on the left to guard against a possible German counterattack from Fortress Metz. Most importantly, the Army of Alsace was to secure the eastern flank of the attack by marching north without delay.
Joffre was, in fact, playing straight into Moltke’s hands. He continued to believe that the main German offensive by regular army corps was being launched into Lorraine against his own center, and hence he moved to counter this threat. All the while, he ignored evidence from his own intelligence branch, the Deuxième Bureau, that significant German units were advancing into Belgium.
Simple in conception, Joffre’s attack30 was fraught with danger—quite apart from the still-unconfirmed German thrust into central Belgium. The farther French forces advanced out of the Vosges passes and the Trouée de Charmes, the broader their fronts became: eventually, eighty kilometers for First Army and seventy for Second Army. Dubail’s dual objectives of Sarrebourg and Donon necessitated splitting his forces and thus exposing his flanks to German counterattack. Finally, the terrain was rugged, studded with hills, valleys, rivers, and ravines.
Joffre’s second invasion of Alsace-Lorraine was based on the wishful thinking inherent in his deployment plan. Accordingly, the strong German defensive line between Metz and Thionville—the so-called Moselstellung—simply had to be a screen for Moltke’s major troop concentration in the Ardennes and in German Lorraine. In fact, only five regular divisions manned the Moselstellung, giving the French a three-to-one advantage in the region. But in Alsace-Lorraine, where Joffre suspected no more than six German corps facing the twenty divisions of his own First and Second armies, Crown Prince Rupprecht in fact commanded eight army corps of twenty-four divisions.
General de Castelnau, a cultured nobleman and able strategist, already before the war had feared a possible German concentration in Lorraine and advised Joffre against an offensive into the area.31 He preferred instead to stand on the defensive in well-prepared positions in front of Nancy. He repeated his concerns in August 1914. Joffre brusquely rejected this defensive mentality. No major enemy formations, he assured Castelnau, faced Second Army.32 And when news arrived from St. Petersburg on 13 August that the Russian steamroller would move into East Prussia the next day, Joffre gave the order to attack. “I count on you absolutely for the success of this operation,” he admonished Dubail and First Army. “It must succeed and you must devote all your energy to it.”33
At Saint-Avold, Rupprecht and Krafft von Dellmensingen, like Joffre, were chomping at the bit to go on the offensive. Both feared that the purely defensive role assigned to them by the Army Supreme Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL) would negatively affect the morale of their troops; any form of retreat would be disastrous. Hence, they began to toy with options. Krafft’s first plan was to advance to the line of the Upper Moselle and Meurthe rivers and thereby threaten the flank of the French center. On 11 August, he had dispatched Major Rudolf von Xylander of his staff to Seventh Army to urge greater speed on Heeringen and the two corps of Sixth Army that still had not reached Strasbourg from Mulhouse. Xylander found Heeringen’s General Headquarters to be in a state of “panic” due to the hurried shift up north, and because the former Prussian war minister had given Krafft’s plan the “cold shoulder.”34 One day later, Rupprecht received his first official instructions from the OHL: It was not “interested” in a joint advance by Sixth and Seventh armies “across” the Upper Moselle and the Meurthe; at best, it would sanction an advance “against” the two rivers under favorable conditions.35 As a sop to the Bavarians, the OHL agreed that they could reduce Fort Manonviller in French Lorraine.
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.36 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!37 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 1905.38 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.39 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.40 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.41 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* 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.”42 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.”43 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.
The Marne, 1914 Page 11
