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.”46 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.47
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.48 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.”49
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.50 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,51 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.52 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.”53 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.54 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.”55 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.”56 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.”57
At their new headquarters in a “miserable school house” at Hellimer, Rupprecht and Krafft turned their thoughts to mounting a powerful counterattack.58 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 1870.59 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.”60 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”61 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.”62 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.63 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.”64 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.65
Just to be on the safe side, Krafft on 18 August telephoned the OHL to make known his intentions to attack. Deputy Chief of Staff von Stein cagily replied: “No, I will not prevent you from doing this by ordering a stop to it. You will have to bear the responsibility. Make your decision as your conscience dictates.” Krafft did not hesitate for a moment. “It has been made.”66 Both he and Rupprecht would later be accused of having placed Bavarian dynastic interests above German national strategy.
The charge does not sit well. For, while refusing to issue Rupprecht direct orders, the OHL continued to second-guess his intentions. “One assumes here,” Bavarian military plenipotentiary Karl von Wenninger reported from the OHL, “that th
e Crown Pr[ince] will solve his task offensively, but at the same time one hopes—albeit in silence—that [his] commander’s nerves will allow him to draw the enemy onto Saarburg in order then to crush him between two fronts.”67 The Younger Moltke’s copying of his great-uncle’s loose command style was beginning to show cracks. While it had been relatively easy for the Elder Moltke to decentralize command and to have divisions and even corps “march to the sound of the guns” (Auftragstaktik) over relatively narrow fronts in 1870, the Younger Moltke was beginning to realize that this was not the case with what amounted to small army groups of four to five hundred thousand men extended over more than a hundred kilometers of front.
Dawn on 20 August broke gray and foggy, prohibiting aerial reconnaissance by either side. At 4:30 AM, a blood-red sun—“the sun of Austerlitz,”* Rupprecht and Krafft giddily noted—broke through the mist. For a sixth day, Joffre’s armies in Lorraine renewed the attack. Conneau’s cavalry corps debouched into the rear of German Sixth Army to roll up its flank. On this day, however, the French were met by a withering hail of artillery fire—and by a spirited counterattack.68 In fact, like the classical charges of Athenians and Spartans, Romans and Carthaginians, the two forces, quite unaware of the fact, had each mounted separate attacks that morning and crashed head-on along a hundred-kilometer-wide front.
The men of Bavarian Sixth Army had leaped out of their defensive positions at 3:30 AM “with flags unfurled” and pressed their concentrated attack all along the line. The battle almost immediately disintegrated into a series of isolated and uncoordinated engagements. Clumps of soldiers rushed wildly across the hills and valleys of the Vosges, and through the fences and hedges of its quaint villages. Foch’s XX Corps alone made progress at Morhange. At one point, his forces stormed two lines of German trenches—only to discover that they were being “held” by field-gray straw figures.69 Foch had undertaken this deep penetration of the enemy lines against Castelnau’s express orders, and in the process had exposed the left flank of Second Army’s two center corps. Bavarian Sixth Army counterattacked that exposed flank of Castelli’s VIII Corps with wave after wave of infantry supported by heavy artillery. Enfilading machine-gun fire from Gebsattel’s III Corps caused what Foch called “gruesome” losses for his XX Corps. In the heated melee, it was often difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Near Bisping, for example, Bavarian 1st IB was nearly annihilated by a withering barrage of artillery shells from its own 9th Field Artillery Regiment.70 “Unfortunately,” Krafft noted in his diary, he had not been able “to move” Heeringen’s Seventh Army “to attack before 11 AM.”71 In Paris, President Raymond Poincaré quietly marked his fifty-fourth birthday.
In fact, Carl von Clausewitz’s “fog of uncertainty” had bedeviled the French at Morhange. On the evening of 19 August, two contradictory orders were issued: While Castelnau instructed Foch to hold the line where he stood, Foch ordered his troops to renew the attack the next morning. Foch informed Castelnau of his decision forty-five minutes before that attack, set for 6 AM on 20 August, and the commander of Second Army replied by repeating his earlier order to stand pat and to guard against a possible German counteroffensive—by telephone as well as by sending a staff officer to XX Corps. Foch in his memoirs claimed that he received no instruction on the night of the nineteenth and that Castelnau’s order to halt on the morning of the twentieth reached him too late, for the Germans had preempted his own attack by launching their offensive around 5 AM (French time). Joffre was content to note in his report to Paris only that XX Corps had “advanced perhaps a little too quickly.”72 He was not about to cashier one of his most energetic corps commanders.
A disaster ensued for the French—despite the fact that they had captured the war diary of a fallen German officer detailing Rupprecht’s plan of attack. German heavy artillery arrayed on the Morhange Ridge and ranged by means of pre selected aiming points decimated first French artillery and then the enemy infantry marching through the valleys below it. By late afternoon, as the broiling heat of the first two weeks of the campaign returned, Castelnau had lost not only his son in battle but much of his field artillery as well. Espinasse’s XV Corps and Taverna’s XVI Corps were in full retreat. French 68th ID and 70th ID had been severely mauled. Foch’s XX Corps had taken a bad knock. In the words of one officer, “a sublime chaos, infantrymen, gunners with their clumsy wagons, combat supplies, regimental stores, brilliant motor cars of our brilliant staffs all meeting, criss-crossing, not knowing what to do or where to go.”73 Still seething over Foch’s unauthorized advance, Castelnau had no choice but to order a retreat to the original starting line of the offensive on 14 August—the Meurthe River and the Grand Couronné de Nancy, the long chain of fortified ridges that shielded the city against attack. Believing the situation to be “very grave” and his army desperately in need of at least forty-eight hours’ rest, he entertained thoughts of further withdrawals behind the Upper Moselle and perhaps as far as Toul and Épinal. Joffre refused even to consider the suggestion. “Speak no more of retiring beyond the Moselle.”74 Instead, he rushed 64th RID and 74th RID to buttress Second Army and halted the shunting of Dubois’s IX Corps to the north, already in progress. And he sent a number of “defensive-minded” brigade and division commanders into “retirement” at Limoges.
Castelnau’s retreat also sealed the fate of Dubail’s advance. Initially, and without contacting Castelnau, the fiery Dubail was determined to continue the attack. General de Maud’huy’s 16th ID was engaged in bitter house-to-house fighting in Sarrebourg. A relief attempt by Léon Bajolle’s 15th ID was repulsed with heavy losses by Xylander’s Bavarian I Corps. Maud’huy had no choice but to abandon Sarrebourg. He did so with a defiant last gesture: Amid a storm of shrapnel, he and his staff stood at attention at the southern end of the city while 16th Division’s massed bands played the “Marche Lorraine” as the troops marched out of Sarrebourg.75
It was heroic, but it was not war. Late in the day, a telephone call from Joffre apprised Dubail that Second Army’s retreat threatened to turn into a rout. Foch’s XX Corps alone remained combat-effective and was doing its best to cover the hasty withdrawal of Espinasse’s XV Corps and Taverna’s XVI Corps. Still, its 39th ID and 11th ID took a terrible pounding and were driven back from one defensive position to another. Dubail was left no option but to withdraw VIII and XIII corps to cover Castelnau’s exposed flanks. Pau’s Army of Alsace still was nowhere in sight.
French losses on 20 August were appalling: Bavarian III Corps registered thirteen hundred enemy prisoners of war; Bavarian II Corps, eight hundred; and Bavarian I Corps, nineteen hundred. Special burial details took care of twelve hundred dead poilus.76 The Great Retreat in the south was in full swing by the evening of 20 August. The French army admitted five thousand casualties; historians have put that figure at ten thousand. Friedrich von Graevenitz, Württemberg’s plenipotentiary to the OHL, reported “total victory” against “at least nine active corps,” and the capture of fourteen thousand prisoners of war and thirteen artillery batteries.77 Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been roused from bed by his senior military entourage to receive the news, celebrated “the greatest victory in the history of warfare.”78
At daybreak on 21 August, the gunners of Sixth Army showered Castelnau’s battered formations with another withering artillery barrage. As the early-morning mists evaporated, Foch’s 39th ID was hurled back north of Château-Salins, and his 11th ID likewise was forced to retreat. As Rupprecht’s Bavarians began a sweep around Castelnau’s Second Army, the previously shattered XV Corps and XVI Corps disintegrated. By 10 AM, the little “monk in boots” ordered the first general retreat of the day. As his officers in vain tried to rally the troops to defend scattered hills and ridges, the German pursuit continued. Some four thousand shells pulverized the small town of Sainte-Geneviève over seventy-five hours. Castelnau’s men, morally and physically shaken, abandoned carts and wagons, guns and horses. At 6 PM, the commander ordered another general retreat—un
der cover of darkness. Dubail’s First Army, with its western flank left in the air by Castelnau’s precipitous retreat, was forced to fall back to the line of the Meurthe River. He never forgave Castelnau.
Despite Joffre’s attempts to isolate the zone des armées from the home front, word of the disaster that had befallen Espinasse’s XV Corps at Morhange spread fast. The endless wagons filled with the wounded bore witness to what had taken place. On 24 August, Le Matin at Paris reported:
Companies, battalions passed in indescribable disorder. Mixed in with the soldiers were women carrying children on their arms … girls in their Sunday best, old people, carrying or dragging a bizarre mixture of objects. Entire regiments were falling back in disorder. One had the impression that discipline had completely collapsed.79
At the front near Rambervillers, northeast of Épinal, Lieutenant Henri Desagneaux was amazed by the seemingly endless columns of French refugees: “the peasant carrying his little bundle; the worker with a few old clothes; small farmers, shopkeepers and their cases, finally the bourgeois, dragging along a dog or a trunk.” He was shocked by what came next: “whole trains” bringing back the two thousand wounded at Rambervillers. “Their limbs shot off, their heads a pulpy mess; all these bandages, spattered with blood mingle with the civilian population.”80 Marcel Papillon with 356th RIR wrote home of the “awful weather—cold with a fine rain” that plagued the men for four days as they fell back to the Grand Couronné de Nancy. “War is sad,” he allowed, especially on the local population living amid the mounds of gray corpses (des grises). “I saw villages burned up by bombardments. It is cruel. The infantry of French XX Corps has suffered very heavy losses.”81 Not even the canteens offering vin ordinaire at the exorbitant rate of three francs per bottle offered relief.
The Marne, 1914 Page 12
