The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

Kaiser Wilhelm II was “simply ecstatic” over the battlefield success of a fellow royal and on 27 August bestowed the Iron Cross, First and Second Class, on Crown Prince Rupprecht. Moltke, in the words of a Bavarian staff officer, had been “moved to tears” by the gesture. But their Prussian paladins were less charitable. Rupprecht’s failure to dispatch his “tired” cavalry to cut the defeated French Second Army to pieces after the Battle of the Saar, War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn testily recalled on the eve of the Battle of the Marne, meant that the Bavarians had missed a “golden moment” to decide the war on the southern flank, the so-called Südflügel. Prussian cavalry, unlike its Bavarian counterpart, he savagely noted, was never “too tired” to pursue a beaten foe!110

  With Fort Manonviller taken and the French driven to the line of the Meurthe River, Rupprecht and Krafft began preparations to send a major portion of their forces north to assist Fifth Army in and around Verdun. This had been “Case 3” of the modified Schlieffen Plan that Moltke had distributed on 6 August as the Bavarian part in the great Westaufmarsch. They awaited new instructions from the OHL. Eventually, Lieutenant Colonel Tappen informed them that since the German rail net in the southwest only ran as far north as Aachen—after which the troops would face a very long march to the front—they would arrive much too late to assist in the envelopment of Paris.111 The Bavarians were left alone to plot their future course of action.

  * Actions in German Alsace are given in German General Time (DGZ); in French Lorraine, in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), one hour earlier.

  * A patriotic military march arranged by Joseph François Rauski in 1879, after the Franco-Prussian War.

  * In today’s terminology, “partisans” to one side and “terrorists” to the other.

  † The others were the Ardennes, Sambre-et-Meuse (Battle of Charleroi), and Mons.

  * Weather descriptions were taken from a special compilation, Das Wetter, in the German official history, Der Weltkrieg, vol. 1, p. 893, and were cross-checked against army and corps war diaries (KTB) as well as soldiers’ letters from the front.

  * On 2 December 1805, Napoleon I with a “lion leap” charged the Austrian and Russian right flank at the Battle of Austerlitz through a thick morning fog; at 7:45 AM, the sun rose over the battlefield.

  * I follow the established practice of letting the victor name the battle. Allied historians usually refer to the Battle of the Saar as the Battle of Sarrebourg-Morhange.

  * “Il faut battre les sales Prussiens!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BLOODY ROAD WEST: LIÈGE TO LOUVAIN

  No plan of operations survives with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s major forces.

  —HELMUTH VON MOLTKE THE ELDER

  THE CITY OF LIÈGE WAS NOT ONE OF EUROPE’S DESIRED TOURIST destinations before 1914. In fact, it was a grimy industrial city of about 168,000 inhabitants that straddled the Meuse (Maas) River in northeastern Belgium—thirty kilometers from the German border to the east and fifteen from the Dutch border to the north. But it did get the occasional visitor. Among these in 1911 was a foreboding German dressed in a nondescript business suit. He was conspicuous not so much by his large round head with its receding hairline, jowled red face, piercing blue eyes, drooping bushy mustache, or barrel chest, but rather by a face that never smiled and a demeanor that never showed a hint of kindness or compassion. Humor was beyond his range.

  The German visitor parked his open-top automobile on a promontory southeast of what to him was Lüttich, above the Maas Valley.1 One hundred meters below him spread the sights of Liège: the curve of the river, the gleaming steel bands of the Belgian railway, and the spires of the Cathedral de Liège, the Église Saint-Barthélemy, and the Église Saint-Jacques. He neatly unfolded a map on the hood of the car. On his right, the river flowed through a deep ravine in the center of the city and then disappeared off to the north; on his left, wooded hills stretched to the Ardennes Plateau, off to the southeast. But mostly, the visitor took careful note of a sixteen-kilometer-wide passageway, the Liège Gap, which ran through the city and stretched between the Netherlands and the Ardennes; beyond lay the rolling plains of the Hesbaye region. As well, he studied the city’s outer belt of a dozen fortresses. For Colonel Erich Ludendorff, chief of the Mobilization and Deployment Section of the German General Staff, was in charge of drafting plans for the Handstreich (bold strike) against Liège that would kick off the Schlieffen-Moltke deployment plan in a future war.

  LIÈGE, EVENING OF 6 AUGUST 1914

  LIèGE WAS FOUNDED IN 558 when Saint Monulph, bishop of Tongres, built a chapel at the confluence of the Meuse and Legia rivers. It saw its share of Europe’s violent past. In 1467 and again in 1468, when the Liègois foolishly declared war on the Duchy of Burgundy, Charles the Bold razed the walls of the city. In 1703, the Duke of Marlborough stormed Liège’s two forts, the Citadel and La Chartreuse, preparatory to his invasion of the German states the next year. In 1794, French Revolutionary armies sacked the city and destroyed the great cathedral of Saint-Lambert. Napoleon I occupied Liège for the duration of his rule.

  But Liège survived—and prospered. The high-grade coal of the Meuse Valley between Seraing and Herstal fueled Liège’s factories, and the city quickly developed into Belgium’s chief manufacturing center—the fabled “Birmingham of Belgium.” The faubourg of Herstal became world-renowned as a producer of fine arms—to the point that Ludwig Loewe of Berlin, manufacturer of the famous Mauser small arms, in 1896 seized a controlling interest in the giant Fabrique nationale d’armes de guerre. The railway brought further wealth and prominence, and Liège became a major hub on the main rail line leading from Berlin to Brussels—and on to Paris.

  All this strategic wealth demanded protection. Beginning in 1888, Henri Alexis Brialmont, a military engineer who had built Bucharest’s belt of defenses, began work on what over time became a fifty-two-kilometer ring of twelve forts some six to seven kilometers from Liège’s center. From north to south, there were six on the right bank of the Meuse (Barchon, Evegnée, Fléron, Chaudfontaine, Embourg, and Boncelles), and another six on the river’s left bank (Pontisse, Liers, Lantin, Loncin, Hollogne, and Flémalle). The average distance between the forts was nineteen hundred meters, with the largest gap seven thousand meters. Friedrich Krupp of Essen had won the contract to modernize the forts’ four hundred guns, with the result that by 1914 a new mix of modern 120mm, 150mm, and 210mm heavy guns, mortars, and howitzers overlapped one another’s zones of fire.

  Brialmont built well. All the forts were constructed with concrete casemates. The turtle-shaped steel cupolas that housed the heavy guns could be elevated automatically to fire and then to retract. A clear field of fire was assured by sloping the cleared terrain down and away from the guns. Brialmont studded this glacis with barbed-wire entanglements. Underground tunnels connected the forts, each of which was self-contained with its own ammunition chambers, storerooms, kitchens, water cisterns, power generators, latrines, and laundry facilities. A ventilation system assured fresh air for each fort’s peacetime complement of eighty defenders.

  General Gérard Mathieu Leman, an officer of engineers and a longtime instructor at the Belgian War College, had been selected as governor of Liège only a few months before the outbreak of the war. He had under his command twenty-five thousand regular troops of 3d Infantry Division (ID) as well as 15th Infantry Brigade (IB) of the field army, forty-five hundred garrison troops, and about twelve thousand soldiers of the reserves and the Garde civique (militia). His handwritten orders from King Albert on 4 August 1914 were simple: “I charge you to hold to the end with your division the position which you have been entrusted to defend.”2

  DURING THE NIGHT OF 1–2 August, advance elements of German 29th and 69th regiments, 16th ID, crossed into the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg on bicycles, in armored cars and automobiles, and by train.3 They met no resistance and no sabotage. They secured the duchy’s bridges, railways, and roads, and occupied its capital on t
he morning of 2 August. The next day, Germany declared war on France and Belgium.

  Horsemen from 2d, 4th, and 9th cavalry divisions (CD) smartly moved westward out of Aachen and into Belgium. Their mission was to scout the thirty kilometers of terrain that lay between Aachen and Liège. They encountered no resistance. Late in the morning of 3 August, they entered the small village of Battice, about ten kilometers east of Liège. They assumed that the “neutral” Belgians would put up only token resistance. Several shots rang out from one of the houses. Three or four riders tumbled out of their saddles onto the cobbled street. Francs-tireurs! For four decades, German soldiers had been fed stories of how French “irregulars” had ambushed, mutilated, and poisoned German forces during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). In short order, the cavalrymen executed three Belgian civilians, drove the rest out of their homes, and set Battice on fire.4

  Still farther north, Georg von der Marwitz advanced with the remainder of II Cavalry Corps and 34th IB against Visé, on the Meuse River just south of the Dutch border. At Warsage, his uhlans took fire from several houses.5 Marwitz’s troopers seized and then executed six hostages. At Visé, Marwitz discovered that the Meuse bridges had been destroyed. For a third time that day, his horsemen came under fire from civilians. He ordered suspected houses burned to the ground and 627 hostages rounded up and eventually deported to Germany. Heavy fire from Liège’s northernmost fort (Pontisse) prevented the uhlans from crossing the river on 4 August. But at four o’clock* the next morning, units of Otto von Garnier’s 4th CD managed to ford the Meuse at Lixhe, hard against the Dutch frontier. They strapped together numerous steel boats, laid boards across them, and thus assisted 34th IB across the river.6 Marwitz’s riders then pushed on toward Tongeren, northwest of Liège.

  The noose around Liège was beginning to tighten. Allied fliers at dusk on 4 August had caught brief glimpses of an awe-inspiring sight: six gray-clad, reinforced infantry brigades and an entire cavalry corps—twenty-five thousand soldiers, eight thousand horsemen, and 124 guns—advancing in five mighty columns out of the east along a forty-kilometer front from Aachen to Malmédy. They were part of Otto von Emmich’s X Army Corps, Second Army. While the latter’s commander, Karl von Bülow, was leisurely making his way west from Hanover, his deputy chief of staff was already on the scene. Erich Ludendorff instantly became one of the few staff planners in history ever to draft and then take part in the execution of his own operations plan.

  The Handstreich prepared for Liège by Ludendorff in 1911 was based on a garrison force of six thousand regulars, augmented by three thousand militiamen.7 This proved to be a gross miscalculation. As noted earlier, Leman in early August 1914 had under his command about thirty thousand soldiers of 3d ID, 15th IB, the garrison force, and the Garde civique. But it was a motley collection, as if imported directly from the stage of a Franz Lehár operetta: the regular infantry in blue-and-white uniforms, the chasseurs à pied in green and yellow with flowing capes and peaked caps, and the Civic Guard in high round hats and red facings. Flemish milk-cart dogs pulled the machine guns (mitrailleuses) only recently begged from France. How would this ragtag rabble, led by a quiet academic from the Belgian War College, stand up against the approaching furor teutonicus?

  The answer was not long in coming. On the afternoon of 4 August, the defenders of Barchon bloodily repulsed an attack by units of 53d Infantry Regiment (IR) as it charged the glacis leading up to the fort’s walls. The next day, 34th IB lost 30 officers and 1,150 men at Visé. On 6 August, 14th IB, attacking the center line of Liège, sustained more than 50 percent casualties.* In the south, the Belgians warded off all attempts by 9th CD to cross the Meuse between Liège and Huy. Not even a spectacular night bombing attack on Liège by Zeppelin VI out of Cologne intimidated Leman; while its thirteen small bombs killed nine civilians and in the process launched a new form of warfare, the military effect was negligible. Moreover, the airship leaked gas on the way home and had to crash-land at Bonn.8 And when Emmich sent an emissary under a white flag to demand Leman’s surrender, the plucky professor, who had earlier barely escaped an attempt by the Germans to take him prisoner, replied, “Force your way through the gap.”9

  Leman’s valiant defenders had caused five of the six German attacking brigades to beat a hasty retreat. Headlines in Brussels papers screamed out the news: “Grande Victoire Belge!” Those in London and Paris spoke of a major “rout” of no fewer than 125,000 German troops, and of at least 20,000 enemy casualties. The French republic bestowed the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on Liège and the Military Medal on King Albert. However, Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre adamantly refused to divert French troops from his concentration plan to assist the beleaguered Belgians. Firmly convinced that the main German thrust would not come across the Meuse, he only reluctantly dispatched Louis Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps to secure the Meuse bridges between Givet and Namur and Jean-François Sordet’s I Cavalry Corps to scout southern Belgium.10 For almost ten days, Sordet managed mainly to exhaust both men and horses.

  What had happened to the German assault? Carl von Clausewitz’s proverbial “fog of uncertainty” ruled the battlefield. Already during the advance, units lost their way in the dark. Officers were separated from their horses. Maps could not be located. Field kitchens were left behind. Soldiers panicked and shot at one another. Suspected fire from civilians added to the chaos. German units stopped to shoot and burn. Moreover, war in its primordial form, as Clausewitz stated, was “slaughter” (Schlacht). German infantry assaults in close formation were a target-rich environment even for Leman’s half-trained soldiers. The mitrailleuses spat out a steady stream of death at 150 rounds every sixty seconds. A withering artillery fire swept the massed German infantry columns before the forts’ walls.

  Still, the Hanoverians and Westphalians of Emmich’s X Corps continued to advance. They made their way over a veritable wall of dead—only to be gunned down in turn. A letter by an anonymous Belgian officer told the story well:

  As line after line of German infantry advanced, we simply mowed them down. … They made no attempt at deploying, but came on, line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until, as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped one on top of the other, in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble.11

  Perhaps some of the veterans on the German General Staff remembered that in 1895, Martin Köpke had warned Alfred von Schlieffen against expecting “quick, decisive victories,” as even “the most offensive spirit” could achieve little more than “a tough, patient and stouthearted crawling forward step-by-step.” Liège in 1914 confirmed Köpke’s dire prediction. The campaign in Belgium, to use the general’s words, had degenerated into “siege-style” warfare.12 Only the means had changed, with monstrous howitzers, still to be brought up, becoming the modern trebuchet.

  Numerous German commanders lamented that there had not been sufficient prewar nighttime training, that neither war games nor staff rides had prepared the army for the lethality of the modern battlefield, and that commanders from the company level on up had sought to overcome firepower with dash and daring. The results had been staggering casualty rates, especially among infantry officers. With regard to nighttime fighting, many units adopted special white armbands as well as common passwords, and officers ordered the men to advance with unloaded rifles to cut down on the devastating occurrences of friendly fire.13

  Not surprisingly, the Germans were furious that the Belgians had refused them free passage through what they considered a neutral country. They denied the legitimacy of Belgian military resistance. The result was predictable: a veritable orgy of shooting and burning. By 8 August, almost 850 civilians had been killed and thirteen hundred buildings burned down in such nondescript places as Micheroux, Retinne, Soumagne, and Melen, among others.14 Whereas Schlieffen had believed that Liège could be invested by a single division, and Ludendorff that it could be stormed by thirty-nine thousand men, the
reality was that by 8 August, the Belgians had beaten back all attempts by X Corps to storm the forts—at the cost in blood of fifty-three hundred casualties. The corpses bloated in the broiling sun.

  Still, the German attack threatened to cut Liège off from the rest of the country. Faced with this possibility, General Leman on 6 August released 3d ID and 15th IB to withdraw to the line of the Gette (Gete) River and fight another day. But he was determined to hold the twelve forts with their skeletal complements for as long as possible in accordance with the instructions he had received from King Albert.

  The one bright note in the otherwise disastrous German assault was the plan’s architect, Ludendorff. As deputy chief of Second Army, he was not scheduled to play an active role in the campaign. But fate intervened. While waiting for Bülow to make his way to Belgium, Ludendorff found himself caught up in the maelstrom of the battle for Liège. He followed Emmich into the outskirts of the city. At Retinne, just north of Fort Fléron, he stumbled across 14th IB, whose commander, Friedrich von Wussow, had recently been killed. Ludendorff did not hesitate for even a moment. He took command of the brigade and in house-to-house fighting made his way through the Queuede-Bois, up out of the Meuse Valley, and onto the heights near the old Carthusian monastery of La Chartreuse. After overnighting there, Ludendorff at around noon on 7 August spied a white flag flying from the Citadel. Surrender? He sent an officer to investigate. No such luck. At 6 PM, the officer returned to report that General Leman had informed him that the white flag had been raised against his will.

  By then, Ludendorff and 14th IB found themselves in a precarious position—short of ammunition and food, down to a strength of only fifteen hundred men, burdened with a thousand Belgian prisoners of war, isolated within the iron ring of Leman’s forts, and cut off from the rest of their forces. The men were nervous. “I shall never forget the night of August 6/7,” Ludendorff later wrote. “It was cold. … I listened feverishly for the sound of fighting. I still hoped that at least one brigade or another had broken through the line of forts.”15 None had.