The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

  Undaunted, Ludendorff pushed on into the city the next morning. He dispatched an advance guard under Colonel Burghardt von Oven to take the Citadel. Then he commandeered an automobile and with his adjutant drove up to the Citadel. There was not a German sentry to be seen, only Belgian soldiers. In a piece of audacious cheek, Ludendorff straightened himself up, dusted off his uniform, clenched the monocle into his right eye socket, strode up to the Citadel’s gates, and rapped on them with the pommel of his sword. The gates opened. The courtyard was filled with startled Belgian troops. One of the truly great “what if?” scenarios of modern history was at hand. What if a Belgian soldier had shot the general? What if he had been arrested and turned over to the French? Modern German history may well have taken a different course.* “The few hundred Belgians [inside the Citadel],” Ludendorff later triumphantly recorded, “surrendered at my summons.”16 For some reason, Colonel von Oven had opted to bypass the Citadel and to head for Fort Loncin.

  A grateful Kaiser Wilhelm II “smothered” Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, with kisses.17 Next, he awarded the war’s first prestigious Pour le Mérite medal to Ludendorff.* Then, remembering that Emmich was the field commander of X Corps, he bestowed the decoration on that officer as well.

  News of the coup de main at the Citadel hit the newspapers in Germany immediately. Joyous celebrations erupted in many cities. Bülow’s staff—without a direct connection to the troops besieging Liège, since X Corps had not been provided with a communications detachment—had intercepted Emmich’s terse private telegram to his wife: “Hurrah, at Liège.” A more formal epistle informed Second Army that Emmich had entered the city at 7:45 AM on 7 August. “The Governor in Flight. The Bishop a prisoner. Liège evacuated by Belgian troops. Citadel of Liège occupied by our troops. As yet not known which forts have been taken.”18 The last sentence raised eyebrows at Bülow’s headquarters—as did the fact that thereafter a deafening silence ensued. For almost two days, no word came out of Liège. Wild rumors circulated at once: The entire 14th IB had been taken prisoner by the Belgians; Ludendorff had been killed in action; Bülow had been shot by his sentry; losses on both sides had been horrendous; and all the forts had surrendered.

  The delay at Liège caused near panic on the morning of 8 August at Army Supreme Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL) in Berlin as well as at Bülow’s temporary headquarters at Aachen. In Berlin, Wilhelm II maliciously accused Moltke of having “brought the English down about my ears for nothing” with his invasion of neutral Belgium. For a second time since 1 August, when the kaiser had brutally rebuked Moltke for his refusal to concentrate solely against Russia after Ambassador Karl von Lichnowsky had sent word that London would keep Paris out of the war if Germany did not attack France, the chief of the General Staff collapsed psychologically. His deputy, Hermann von Stein, witnessed “a most serious nervous breakdown,” a “cascade of tears,” and eventual “utter apathy” on the part of Moltke. The latter “never forgot those words;” they “weighed heavily on him” in subsequent days. Moltke eventually recovered and put on a brave front. “Gentlemen, you have seen me weak and agitated,” he informed his staff. “The struggles before mobilization and the Kaiser’s words had made me brittle. I have now overcome that and you shall witness a different me.”19

  At Aachen, Bülow’s staff also became anxious. First and Second armies, roughly six hundred thousand soldiers and a quarter million horses, had to squeeze through the narrow corridors first of Aachen and then of Liège before they could debouch on the Hesbaye Plateau. Martial law had been declared at Aachen and the streets cleared for the troops; it would take five days to march them through its narrow medieval lanes. Their equipment had been routed through Düsseldorf to ease the congestion. Each army corps occupied thirty kilometers of road, each division fifteen, and each corps’ munitions trains twenty. If Liège held out much longer, First and Second armies would have to march through the Netherlands—and thus violate another neutral nation.

  Bülow took charge. On 8 August, with Moltke’s consent, he augmented Emmich’s original force of thirty-three thousand infantry and cavalry with a new siege army of sixty thousand (IX and VII corps) commanded by Karl von Einem-Rothmaler. A former Prussian war minister, Einem had won the Iron Cross as a lieutenant in the Franco-Prussian War and in 1914 commanded VII Corps at Münster. He took his time. He put an end to the senseless slaughter of massed infantry charges at the Liège forts and waited for the heavy siege artillery—developed in peacetime by Ludendorff for just this purpose—to arrive on the scene.

  As soon as he set foot on Belgian territory, Einem confessed to his wife that he deeply “regretted” the “brutal nature” of the conflict. “Unfortunately,” he wrote on 8 August, “the [Belgian] populace takes part in the war.” Men and women from concealed positions fired on the troops, especially under the cover of darkness. “I have ordered that the villages be burned down and everyone [seized] shot.” Two days later, he repeated his outrage at “the insidious, detestable blood thirstiness of the Belgians.” He maintained a hard stance. “Unfortunately, we had to singe and burn a lot and many inhabitants forfeited their lives.” The burned-out villages between Battice and Herve, he noted, “defy description. This is what the ruins of Pompey … must look like.” He lamented that many soldiers in their eagerness to get at the enemy had fired on their fellow warriors.20

  While he waited for the heavy artillery to arrive, Einem took stock of the situation. Not a single fort had fallen. Their garrisons had held tough. General von Emmich was in the “remarkable position” of having forced his way into the city between Forts Fléron and Evegnée—only to “find himself in a mousetrap.” Military history, Einem wryly noted, had been “enriched by a new, paradoxical example” at this “damned fortress”: “Emmich inside and we outside.”21 The men were hungry, thirsty, and tired. What remained of Marwitz’s eight thousand cavalry mounts were dangerously short on oats. The heat continued unabated. The only good news was that on 8 August, 14th IB finally managed to break out of the Belgian steel ring that encircled them and to take Fort Barchon. Fort d’Evegnée fell on the night of 11 August.

  In the afternoon of 12 August, Einem spied a welcome sight: the monstrous black heavy siege guns. First came the 305mm Austrian Škoda howitzers. Moved in three sections, they could be assembled in forty minutes. Instead of tires, they crept forward on what their crews called “iron feet”—that is, steel tracks. Next came the four 420mm Krupp monsters. Each had a crew of two hundred. Each took six hours to emplace. Each could fire a shell with 150 kilograms of explosives a distance of fourteen kilometers. Each was fired electrically from a distance of three hundred meters by a gun crew wearing protective head padding. Célestin Demblon, a deputy of Liège, marveled at the Krupp piece.

  The monster advanced in two parts, pulled by 36 horses. The pavement trembled. … Hannibal’s elephants could not have astonished the Romans more! The soldiers who accompanied it marched stiffly with an almost religious solemnity. It was the Belial* of cannons!22

  Both the škodas and the Krupp “Big Berthas”† fired armor-piercing shells with delayed fuses that allowed them to penetrate their targets before exploding.

  The issue was never in doubt. Within forty-eight hours, Leman’s forts were pulverized into submission: first Pontisse, then Chaudfontaine and Embourg, next Liers and Fléron and Evegnée east of the Meuse; thereafter, Boncelles, Lantin, and Loncin west of the river. The last two, Hollogne and Flémalle, lowered the Belgian tricolor on 16 August.23 Each fort took about thirty heavy shells. Ludendorff had arrived at Fort Loncin just in time to see a single shell from a Big Bertha rip through the concrete roof, blow up its magazine, and cause the entire structure to collapse.

  Dazed and blackened Belgian soldiers, accompanied by some Germans who had been taken prisoner on the night of August 5/6, crawled out of the ruins. Bleeding, with their hands up, they came toward us. “Ne pas tuer, ne pas tuer.”* … We were no Huns. Our men brought wate
r to refresh our enemies.24

  Loncin held a surprise for the Germans: Under its broken concrete slabs and twisted girders they found General Leman, unconscious and nearly asphyxiated by poisonous fumes. Emmich was at the scene. He had met Leman at peacetime military maneuvers and congratulated the Belgian on the tenacity of his defense. Leman’s one concern was that it be recorded that he had carried out King Albert’s orders to the letter. “Put in your dispatches that I was unconscious.” He then offered Emmich his sword. In the war’s first (and perhaps last) act of true chivalry, the German declined to take it. “No, keep your sword. To have crossed swords with you has been an honor.”25 Leman had lost twenty thousand men at Liège.26

  As soon as the debris could be cleared from the roads, German First and Second armies filed through and around the city and headed for the Liège Gap. Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Groener’s Field Railway Service of twenty-six thousand men had restored the lines between Aachen and (now) Lüttich, and only the great tunnel at Nasproué remained blocked, for the Belgians had rammed seventeen locomotives at full speed into one another inside the tunnel.27 Leman’s gallant defense of Liège had cost the Germans perhaps two days on the Schlieffen-Moltke master timetable.28

  MILITARY WISDOM NOW SUGGESTED that King Albert concentrate his remaining units at Namur, Belgium’s second great fortress on the Meuse, and there force the Germans into another bloody siege. But Albert was determined to maintain his army on Belgian soil—the only escape from Namur would have been south or west into France—and to keep open his line of retreat to Fortress Antwerp. Hence, he regrouped his formations along the line of the Gette River. At the little village of Haelen, Leon de Witte’s cavalry division, fighting as dismounted riflemen, on 12 August gallantly blunted the saber and lance charges of six regiments of Marwitz’s II Cavalry Corps as it attempted to storm the river crossings.29 Known as the Battle of the Silver Helmets in Belgian folklore, Haelen was the first cavalry battle (and the first Allied victory) of the war. Still, Namur, to the southwest of Liège, and Louvain (Leuven), to the northwest, lay squarely in the path of the German advance.

  On 17 August, Moltke issued new orders for the main German thrust into Belgium by sixteen army corps and two cavalry corps, three-quarters of them the pride of the Prussian army. The three northernmost armies were to converge on the Sambre River; First and Second armies were to cut off any Belgian attempt to withdraw to Antwerp; and Third Army was to attack the line of the Meuse between Namur and Givet. Speed was of the essence. First and Second armies had to pass through a dangerous eighty-kilometer-wide corridor between the fortresses of Namur and Antwerp, all the while securing their left flanks against suspected French forces south of the Sambre.

  Unlike the armies in the German center and south, these were commanded not by royal princes but rather by professional soldiers with the special rank of Generaloberst (literally, colonel general, or a “four-star”). At the extreme right wing, Alexander von Kluck’s First Army consisted of 120 battalions and 748 guns. Schlieffen had assigned this formation the role of “hammer” in his plan: First Army was to march some seven hundred kilometers through Belgium, across northern France, and along the English Channel before descending on Paris from the northwest and driving the French armies against the “anvil” of the German forces holding in Lorraine. Its commander in 1914 was a rarity in the highest echelons of Prussian field commanders: a self-made man, non-noble and non-Prussian. Kluck was born at Münster, in Westphalia, on 20 May 1846 and saw service with the Prussian army against both Austria (1866) and France (1870–71). Thereafter, he rose rapidly through the ranks on the basis of merit: command of a division by 1902, of V Corps in 1906, of I Corps one year later, and then of Eighth Army Inspectorate at Berlin in 1913. Kluck was rewarded for his military career with a patent of nobility in 1909. His service had been primarily commanding troops rather than staff work. He was fierce-looking and self-assured, almost to the point of arrogance.

  South of First Army ranged Karl von Bülow’s Second Army of 137 battalions and 820 guns. Its primary task, along with First Army, was to deliver the decisive blow against the French forces in and around Paris. Bülow was a striking contrast with Kluck: Born at Berlin on 24 March 1846 into an ancient Mecklenburg noble clan, he had a plethora of career paths open to him. He chose the military. His brother Bernhard opted instead for the diplomatic corps and then served as chancellor from 1900 to 1909. Like Kluck, Bülow had fought in the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian Wars. Thereafter, he had enjoyed a notable rise: commander of the prestigious 4th Foot Guards, department head at the Prussian War Ministry, and in 1902 deputy chief of the General Staff under Schlieffen. The following year, he received III Corps and in 1909 Third Army Inspectorate at Hanover. In 1914, Bülow was given Second Army and would soon be entrusted also with command over Kluck’s First Army. With white hair and mustache and a puffy face, he looked more the genial uncle than the fierce warrior. Much of the campaign in the fall of 1914 would depend on how closely these two vastly different personalities cooperated.

  South of Second Army was Max von Hausen’s Third Army—the third formation of the pivot wing, the so-called Schwenkungsflügel. At 101 battalions and 596 guns, it was the smallest of the German armies. And it was Saxon. Hausen was born in Dresden on 17 December 1846. During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Saxony sided with the Austrian Empire, and as a result Hausen had fought against Berlin.30 After German unification, he taught at the Military Academy from 1871 to 1874, and then transferred to the General Staff (1875–87). He commanded XII Corps from 1900 to 1902, and then served as Saxon war minister until 1914. During his tenure, Hausen worked diligently to uphold and even to expand the Prusso-Saxon Military Convention of 1867.* He resisted all attempts from within the army to reassert Saxon particularism. In May 1914, Hausen retired after a brilliant career that had spanned half a century. But given that King Friedrich August III had no military interest and that Crown Prince Friedrich August Georg was but twenty-one years old, Wilhelm II on 1 August reactivated Hausen’s commission and entrusted him with Third Army. Hausen’s was a difficult role: to cross the Meuse River near Dinant and, as the situation demanded, offer assistance either to Bülow’s Second Army on his right flank or to Duke Albrecht of Württemberg’s Fourth Army on his left. His relationship with the senior Bülow would be critical to the execution of his mission.

  THE ADVANCE ON PARIS by three German armies of 358 battalions of infantry and 2,164 guns required tight command and control. It received neither. Instead, Imperial Headquarters—the Großes Hauptquartier (GHQ), of which the OHL was but one, albeit major, part—consisted of what one scholar has called “a middle thing between a supreme military council and an imperial court.”31 It, in fact, was a mammoth, unwieldy conglomeration consisting of the kaiser, the chief of the General Staff and his deputy, the chief of the Admiralty Staff, the Prussian war minister, the chiefs of the Civil, Military, and Navy cabinets, the chancellor, the state secretary of the Foreign Office, the military plenipotentiaries of the German federal states, the military representative of the Austro-Hungarian ally, and the kaiser’s host of adjutants and personal staff. Master of ceremonies for this vast camp was an imperial favorite, General Hans von Plessen.

  Imperial Headquarters remained in Berlin during the period of mobilization and concentration. Then, at 7:55 AM on Sunday, 16 August, it departed for the front—or at least Koblenz, eight hundred kilometers southwest at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers—in eleven trains. Karl von Wenninger, the Bavarian military plenipotentiary, captured the enormity of the operation in his war diary.32 “Wonderful express-train cars; a separate compartment for every 2 gentlemen. I even saw a dining car.” The sign on one compartment startled him: “‘Her Excellency v. Moltke with lady’s-maid.’ So, we are even being mothered.” The chief of the General Staff had insisted that his wife accompany him into battle. There were no cheering crowds to see them off in Berlin. Just out of the station, Wenninger stood in amazement a
s the “gigantic royal train of H[is] M[ajesty] glided by.” The chefs were already at their stations, perspiring profusely as they prepared the midday meal. The trains avoided major routes and slowly rolled toward Koblenz on stretches of rail well off the beaten track. Guards had been posted at every crossing. Before noon, a major from the General Staff distributed seating lists for the dining car: “12 o’clock breakfast, 7 o’clock dinner.” Within minutes, he returned with the list of sleeping car assignments. “Now, are we truly warriors,” General von Wenninger caustically wondered, “or sybarites?” Whatever the case, the minute his train entered the Kingdom of Bavaria near Ritschenhausen, he had a hundred-liter keg of beer meet it.

  Precisely according to plan—this was, after all, the German General Staff—the trains pulled into Koblenz station at eight o’clock the next morning. “Patches of fog enveloped castles and vineyards,” Wenninger noted. Wilhelm II established his headquarters at Koblenz Castle; the General Staff, at the Hotel Union; the rest of the retinue, at the Parkhotel Koblenzer Hof. That afternoon, the kaiser took his military paladins on an automobile outing to Bad Ems, where on 13 July 1870 the fateful interview that helped launch the Franco-Prussian War had taken place,* and he planted a small oak beside the memorial stone. “I wonder,” Wenninger mused, “whether the little oak will become a mighty tree?”

  It was pure theater. The kaiser’s place was in Berlin, supervising the war effort, directing the machinery of government, and offering encouragement to the home front. His pretense of conducting military operations from Koblenz, where he ostentatiously dined on the silver field service of Frederick the Great, fooled no one. An anecdote perhaps best caught the Supreme War Lord’s true role. During a walk in one of the local parks with Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, chief of the Navy Cabinet, and General Moriz von Lyncker, chief of the Military Cabinet, Wilhelm II sat on a bench to rest. The two officers, not wishing to disturb the kaiser and concerned that the short bench might not hold three stout, middle-aged flag officers, pulled up a second bench. “Am I already such a figure of contempt,” Wilhelm II churlishly inquired, “that no one wants to sit next to me?”33