The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

  Through it all, Joffre at Vitry-le-François maintained his clockwork regimen of eating regularly and well, sleeping undisturbed and long, and weeding out what he considered to be “weak” or “defensive” commanders. Minister of War Messimy tried to put the best spin on the debacle in the Vosges: “The day before yesterday, a success; today, a defeat. C’est la guerre.” Joffre dismissed the comment as “lapidary.”82

  THE VIOLENT ENGAGEMENT AROUND Sarrebourg shocked even its victor in terms of the human toll.83 Annual staff rides and field maneuvers had not prepared commanders for the true face of battle. On 21 August, Crown Prince Rupprecht inspected the previous days’ battlefields. In Serres Forest and in the region around Château-Brehain, he noted, the enemy had “left behind masses of dead and wounded.” But his own troops had also suffered grievously: At Eschen, one of the battalions of 9th Regiment, 4th ID, had been nearly annihilated and henceforward could only be deployed as a single company. Elsewhere, 18th IR had sustained 45 percent casualties; 70th IR had lost twelve hundred men. Especially the cavalry had suffered from both the heat and the steep climbs up the slopes of the Vosges. It had been forced to race back and forth on reconnaissance missions and then to deploy dismounted. One cavalry division had lost 213 riders over seventeen days of continuous patrol, and many of its mounts had no shoes; another reported that its horses were utterly worn out, and that seventy had died of exhaustion.

  As Rupprecht rode toward his new headquarters at Dieuze, he came across more scenes of carnage. At Conthil, the fields were studded with mass graves, for both men and horses. Houses were burned out, shot to pieces by the artillery. Cows not milked for days, their udders nearly bursting, roamed about “bellowing in pain.” At Morhange, artillery shells had hit the gasworks, and fires ravaged the city. On a nearby hillside, where an enemy unit had been caught in the flank, French dead, recognizable by their red pants, “lay in rows and looked like a field of poppies.” The corpses presented an eerie sight. “They lie man to man. Some still hold their rifles at the ready. Due to the intense heat, most of the men’s faces have already turned a bluish black.” Yet again, the crown prince witnessed the effects of “friendly fire”: Bavarian artillery had mistakenly fired on its own advancing infantry.

  Next, Rupprecht made his way through the Forest of Dieuze. Shirts, boots, hats, rifles, and knapsacks had been hastily abandoned. In the city itself—“a typical French town: ugly and dirty”—the scene of abandonment was even greater. Where earlier the citizenry had thrown a ball for the approaching French forces, automobiles now lay overturned in ditches, knapsacks and uniforms scattered about, and rifles with smashed butts littered the streets. The barracks attested to the “flight” of two French divisions. “An indescribable filth. Bones and pieces of meat from butchered animals lay in the courtyard and torn pieces of uniforms inside the rooms.” Rupprecht estimated recent enemy losses at thirty thousand dead and wounded.

  Ominously, reports again began to filter in to Sixth Army headquarters from company to regimental levels that the fighting had not been restricted to the battlefield or to regular forces. Countless commanders stated that armed civilians had shot at their troops with hunting pieces from windows and rooftops as they entered a town. Francs-tireurs! Word about French civilians firing on German troops spread like wildfire. Reprisals were swift. Already on the first day of the Bavarian offensive, 20 August, at Nomeny, a small town on the Meuse River between Metz and Nancy,84 men of French 277th IR at a bridge over the Seille River had held up the advancing Bavarian 2d IR and 4th IR; when the Germans finally took the bridge, French enfilading fire from a nearby field inflicted heavy casualties. Karl von Riedl’s 8th IB and Viktor Bausch’s 33d RID were convinced that the poilus of the French 277th had been assisted by civilians, who also had sheltered sharpshooters after the battle. That night 3d Battalion, 8th IR, burned much of the village; the next day, its inhabitants were expelled. Fifty-five residents of Nomeny died on 20–21 August; of those, forty-six had been shot.

  At Gerbéviller, southeast of Nancy, a similar scenario had developed.85 Soldiers of French 2d Battalion and 19th Dragoons as well as some chasseurs had stiffly defended a bridge over the Mortagne River against units of Bavarian 60th IR and 166th IR. Frustrated by this rearguard action and seeing French civilians firing on them, the Germans between 24 and 27 August pillaged and burned the city. Albert von Berrer, commanding 31st ID, ordered Gerbéviller destroyed. Sixty civilians reportedly died in the process.

  At Lunéville, southeast of Nancy, savage “reprisals” took place on 25 August.86 For three days, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein’s 5th RID and Maximilian von Höhn’s 6th ID had taken heavy losses—25,003 casualties—attempting to breach General de Castelnau’s defensive line before Nancy.87 Demoralized by failure, the men returned to Lunéville in a foul mood. They found the city clogged with columns of supply wagons and carts full of the wounded. They were sure that armed civilians on rooftops were firing at them, at supply columns, and at field hospitals. They shot wildly into homes and shops, at anything that moved. Several civilians were caught carrying cartridges to fellow shooters. “Mindless fear,” in the words of the Bavarian semiofficial history, “was the reaction. Vehicles rushed in every direction, while guards returned the fire without plan or purpose.” As darkness fell, seventy homes had been burned and nineteen civilians killed. For the soldiers, it was “a horribly beautiful, wild scene, one which deepened and reinforced their impression of this bloody and fateful day.”88 Major von Xylander of Rupprecht’s staff wrote in his war diary: “In Lunéville, murder and slaughter. Fires. Panic among our rear-guard formations. Wild rumors.” The young officer found it simply “unbelievable” how an army victorious in the Battle of the Saar* just three days earlier “in such a short time” could have degraded “to such a state.” He blamed it on the “overly excited nerves” of troops engaged in almost daily combat.89 A larger massacre was avoided by the swift action of Major Berthold Schenk von Stauffenberg of XXI Corps, who ordered his troops to stop plundering and who took sixty civilians hostage as a human shield to end the shooting. Crown Prince Rupprecht denounced the “foolish” torching of villages, which held up his train and denied the soldiers quarters.90

  Fritz Nieser, the Grand Duchy of Baden’s acting plenipotentiary at Munich, reported that the capital was decked with flags to celebrate Rupprecht’s victory in the Battle of the Saar, and that King Ludwig III had received enthusiastic public ovations. The French army “obviously had been totally defeated in the west.”91

  THE BATTLE OF THE Saar had not fulfilled Rupprecht’s dream of a great flanking movement primarily because Heeringen’s Seventh Army, although augmented by Bavarian I Corps, had not been able to make sufficient progress north of the Marne-Rhine Canal. By attacking more than six hours later than Rupprecht, Heeringen had surrendered the element of surprise. Moreover, his Landwehr brigades had become bogged down in the Vosges in countless encounters with crack French Alpine troops.92 Unlike the French, the Germans had neither specially trained Alpine troops nor high-angle-fire mountain artillery. The going was nearly impossible. Dense fog not only inhibited accurate fire but also turned the battlefields into semi darkness. Combat was close and personal, in most cases ending with bloodcurdling bayonet charges. The small creeks of the Vosges at times ran red. The din was unbearable. The woods rang with the screams of wounded soldiers rolling on the ground. Drums and bugles sounded advance and retreat, alternately. Men accidentally shot their own. And even in the mountains, there was little relief from the broiling heat.

  Adolf Hartner, a Bavarian telegraph specialist, noted that the artillery reduced the great trees of the Vosges to matchsticks and enemy soldiers to grotesque heaps of body parts. “Here a torn off foot, there an arm, a leg, then another body torn apart to the point of non-recognition; one was missing half his face & both hands; truly horrible.” At Lucy, Hartner almost became sick at the sight of a pitiful French corporal.

  A grenade had ripped open his body & he now
attempted to push back into it the intestines that had spilled out of it—until death took mercy on him. Thus he lay there with distorted eyes & a snarl on his teeth. I believe that none of us could resist a mild shudder.93

  Karl Gruber, an architect from Freiburg in charge of an infantry company, noted in his diary that the war enthusiasm of the first days of August quickly wilted in the heat and savagery of mountain warfare. More and more, his Baden soldiers badgered him with questions such as: “Lieutenant, will we be in Paris soon?” and “Lieutenant, won’t the murdering soon stop?”94

  The Bavarian semi official history of the war reproduced the travails of two battalions of 15th RIR and 30th RID in the area around Markirch in Upper Alsace on 24 August. What today is a charming resort known for its Munster cheese and Gewürztraminer wine was in 1914 a tough textile town of twelve thousand people. The countryside was still studded with open pits and slag heaps from earlier days of lead and silver mining. Bavarian infantry ran up against a natural fortress. “Everywhere, felled trees, barricades made with branches, barbed-wire entanglements, and tripwires impeded progress.” Enemy sharpshooters hid behind “bushes, boulders, rock walls,” in “holes and trenches,” as well as “in tree tops.”95 The battle raged all day across the face of the 772-meter-high Col de Sainte-Marie and the Robinot and Lièpvrette rivers. At Brifosse, the advance of 5th RIR over a bridge crossing the Robinot was halted by French machine gunners. Panic ensued.

  The troops, seized by fear, run for their lives down the southern hillside … to seek safety in Brifosse. The horses, hit by the bullets, roll on the ground and wildly flay their legs into the harnesses. The wagons, wheels inter-locked, crash into one another; are pulled to the side; then pushed over the edge. Dead and wounded men and horses lie about everywhere. There was neither any going “forward” nor any going “backward.”96

  The arrival of the 5th in Markirch later that night brought no relief. A rumor circulated that a French infantry brigade from 58th RID of Paul Pouradier-Duteil’s XIV Corps was attacking the regiment’s artillery en route to Lièpvre (Leberau). The supply wagons took off down the single, narrow road—only to run headlong into their own artillery. “A wicked chaos ensued. The wagons bump each other and collide. Shafts splinter. Horses spook and collapse. Oaths and agitated cries ring out into the darkness. One artillery piece even falls into the stream alongside the road.” Suddenly, shots rang out. “Now the disaster is complete. Whoever has a rifle or can lay their hands on one begins to shoot about wildly.”97 It took several hours to restore order. The French infantry brigade never appeared. The source of the rumor was never uncovered. In fact, the occupying units of French 71st RID from Épinal had withdrawn from Markirch during the night of 23 August. From 7 AM until 2 PM the next day, German reserves drove the remaining French up and across the strategic Sainte-Marie Pass.98

  Bloody engagements, whether in open fields or along mountain slopes, brought Seventh Army’s reserve troops greater losses in August 1914 than their forefathers had encountered in the entire Franco-Prussian War (1870–71).99 At Lagarde, 2d Jäger Battalion lost 161 men and the Kaiser-Ulanen-Regiment, 158 riders and 149 mounts. At Badonviller, the King’s Own Infantry Regiment sustained losses of 97 dead, 322 wounded, and 17 missing. At Diespach, 15th RIR lost 408 men. And the closer the troops came to the French border, the lustier became the civilian cries, “Beat the Prussian filth.”* In many instances, the reply of the “Prussian filth” was to burn down hostile villages and remove their inhabitants.

  Nor were conditions much better on the Plain of Alsace. There, the heat was abominable, the roads dry and dusty, and the still-unripe fruit fuel for intestinal disorders. In the region where, almost two millennia before, Caesar had clashed with Ariovistus, French and German troops engaged each other in ancient combat.100 By and large without artillery, they resorted to savage bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. The steep, terraced vineyards of the eastern slopes of the Vosges around Colmar, Turckheim (Türkheim), Kaysersberg, Riquewihr (Reichenweier), and Ribeauvillé (Rappoltsweiler) were easily turned into miniature fortresses by interweaving felled trees with chest-high grapevines and barbed wire. Bavarian 1st and 2nd Landwehr regiments each lost 150 to 200 men in the first few days of fighting alone—as did French 13th and 30th chasseur brigades ranged against them.

  THE BAVARIAN ARMY ALSO experienced a new logistical impediment to maneuver warfare—mail. Whereas in the Franco-Prussian War, the postal services of Prussia, Baden, and Württemberg daily had to move 500,000 letters and packets, that figure in 1914 shot up to 9.9 million pieces to the front and 6.8 million back home per day. Roughly eight thousand postal employees handled the increasing flood of mail.101 In part, the explosive expansion was due to the fact that German authorities allowed these mailings postage-free. For the government saw a potential for patriotic uplifting at home by publishing many of the letters in local newspapers and in special book editions—sixty in 1914 alone.

  Apart from sheer volume, a second problem lay in the nature of many of the packets sent to the front. Especially after the death of Pope Pius X on the day of Rupprecht’s offensive in Lorraine—20 August—these took on a macabre composition. Officers reported a host of “forbidden” items reaching their men: amulets rubbed with herbs, playing cards, engagement or wedding rings, vials of wine mixed with gunpowder, creams to ward off bullets, identification cards, chain letters, Bible verses, curses, and “hexes” of all manner and form.102 For their part, soldiers reported sighting the Madonna smiling down on them through the black powder smoke.

  Furthermore, relations between the “Old Reichsland” and German military authorities rapidly deteriorated. General Gaede, head of a special Army Detachment Gaede on the Vosges front, so distrusted the indigenous population that he literally fenced in the front in Upper Alsace with three Landsturm battalions and hundreds of kilometers of barbed wire. “A fluidum of betrayal,” he reminded his officers, “runs throughout the entire population.”103 He arrested 574 civilians for “anti-German utterances” and 913 for “anti-German sentiments.” He deported 752 Alsatians and ordered summary executions for 6. Finally, he called up 15,000 Alsatian reservists, transferred them to the right bank of the Rhine, and with the consent of the Prussian War Ministry distributed them in groups of 100 throughout the Reich. “A very severe but also very necessary and salutary measure,” he informed Grand Duke Friedrich II of Baden.104

  TO JOSEPH JOFFRE’S PLEASANT surprise, the Bavarians, equally exhausted by the Battle of the Saar, took three days to pursue Dubail and Castelnau. At times, they lagged twenty kilometers behind the beaten foe. Especially French Second Army used these precious seventy-two hours to regroup, resupply, refresh, and reinforce Nancy’s defensive belt along the line Gerbéviller-Lunéville-Amance. Joffre created a new Army of Lorraine under Michel-Joseph Maunoury and ordered it not only to hold Lorraine but to “fix” as many German units as possible in the south while he launched his great assault across the Ardennes.105 Still, Lunéville fell to the Bavarians on 23 August and Saint-Dié shortly thereafter. Given that Pau had done little to be of help at Sarrebourg and had lingered in the Alsatian vineyards for six days since 20 August, Joffre dissolved the Army of Alsace on 26 August. He left a single division to guard the Col de la Schlucht and transferred the rest of Pau’s units into Vautier’s VII Corps, which he then sent to reinforce Fortress Paris—a major reshuffle that required 110 to 120 trains and five to six days of travel. Four days later, German 55th Landwehr Brigade retook luckless Mulhouse.

  In fact, the Bavarian army had been temporarily derailed by the Army Supreme Command to deal with a nagging problem: Fort Manonviller, perhaps the strongest French fortress, which commanded the strategically important Paris-Nancy-Strasbourg rail line.106 General Karl Ritter von Brug, chief of the Bavarian Corps of Engineers, was given an enhanced brigade of I Corps to take the fort. At 10:30 AM on 25 August, the 300mm and 210mm howitzers opened fire on the giant fortress. They were joined at 2 PM by Krupp 420mm howitzers
and at 6 PM by 150mm coastal howitzers. By dusk the next day, the fort “looked like a hill spouting fire.” It surrendered at 5:30 PM on 27 August. The Germans over fifty-two hours had fired about sixteen hundred artillery rounds at Manonviller, including two hundred shells, 922kg each, from the mammoth Krupp “Big Berthas” that had been hauled to Manonviller by Daimler Benz tractors and sited at Elfringen, 14.5 kilometers from the fort.107 Deputy Officer Fritz Burger of 1st Foot Artillery Regiment was shocked at the “unbelievable devastation” caused by the Krupp howitzers. Manonviller looked like a “rooted-up molehill.”108 There had been just 2 fatalities among the 820 officers and men inside the well-protected fortress, but its defenders had been physically and psychologically shaken by the terrible pounding. A direct hit on Manonviller’s ventilation plant had greatly accelerated the decision to surrender. In an act of “chivalry,” General von Brug had requested that the French garrison be allowed to withdraw “with honor.” Rupprecht vetoed the suggestion. The French had been “less than chivalrous” at Lunéville, he countered, firing on German medics and wounded.109 It was a new, “hard” war.