The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

French historians refer to the events beginning on 21–22 August as the Battle of the Ardennes; German scholars as the twin Battles of Longwy and Neufchâteau. Neither is entirely correct. What developed, in the words of historian Sewell Tyng, was “a series of engagements, fought simultaneously by army corps, divisions, brigades and even battalions, for the most part independently of any central control and independently of the conduct of adjacent units.”35 German reconnaissance had detected the French advance and, accordingly, most of the troops of Fourth and Fifth armies were well dug in and supported by heavy artillery. Fog and rain helped their concealment. Moreover, the French deployed in a peculiar echelon formation: One officer has depicted it as being akin to a flight of stairs, descending from left to right, with each “stair” consisting of an army corps facing north. While this theoretically would allow each corps to attack either north or east, as the situation demanded, it also meant that the right flank of each corps depended fully on the advance of its neighbor on the right. Failure of one corps to do so not only imperiled the flank of the neighbor on the left, but also threatened to collapse the entire set of “stairs.”36

  The latter case set in by the second day of the battle. Between 5 and 6 AM on 22 August, Ruffey’s Third Army advanced through heavy fog. Charles Brochin’s V Corps was in the center of the line.37 Moving on Longwy and its steel furnaces, V Corps immediately stumbled into the well-prepared German defensive positions of Max von Fabeck’s XIII Corps. Brutal hand-to-hand combat ensued, with neither side able to make out friend from foe. Ruffey had placed his mobile soixante-quinzes up front so as to better sweep the German “screen” from the woods. But soon after the initial contact, the fog lifted, allowing the German 105mm and 150mm heavy howitzers’ high-angle fire to decimate Brochin’s 75s.38 Heroic French bayonet attacks foundered against well-hidden machine-gun positions. Panic ensued. One division broke and fled, leaving a huge gap in the middle of Third Army’s line. The next day, Joffre relieved Brochin of command of V Corps and replaced him with Frédéric Micheler.

  Of Ruffey’s other two army corps, Victor-René Boëlle’s IV Corps fared no better: Its advance on Virton ran head-on into Hermann von Strantz’s V Corps; one of its infantry divisions also broke and ran.39 Maurice Sarrail’s VI Corps, beefed up with the addition of a third infantry division, stood its ground alone on the right side against Konrad von Goßler’s VI Reserve Corps. The German artillery fire, a French officer recalled, was lethal. “Thousands of dead were still standing, supported as if by a flying buttress made of bodies lying in rows on top of each other in an ascending arc from the horizontal to an angle of 60°.” A French sergeant likewise commented on the horror of the slaughter. “Heaps of corpses, French and German, are lying every which way, rifles in hand. Rain is falling, shells are screaming and bursting … we hear the wounded crying from all over the woods.”40 A corporal with French 31st Infantry Regiment (IR) recalled his comrades jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk in the dense forest, seeking shelter in ditches and potholes, “dazed by the thunderous explosions that followed them from clearing to clearing.”41 In the small villages, women and children dressed in their Sunday best were swept up in the carnage and tried to flee, carrying whatever goods they could on their shoulders. Eventually, the panic of the other two corps forced Sarrail’s VI Corps also to retreat to avoid a flanking movement by two German corps.

  Ruffey, finally apprised of the existence of the Army of Lorraine at Verdun, at 1:30 PM on 22 August contacted General Maunoury and pleaded for help for his embattled right wing. Maunoury responded at once.42 He ordered Jules Chailley’s 54th Reserve Infantry Division (RID) to advance to the line Ollières-Domprix, and Henry Marabail’s 67th RID to take up positions around Senon and Amel.43 But delays in relaying the general’s orders resulted in neither formation arriving in time to turn the tide of battle.

  Ruffey’s offensive had collapsed. The “staircase” effect noted previously now set in for Langle de Cary’s neighboring Fourth Army advancing on Neufchâteau. Augustin Gérard’s II Corps, Fifth Army, on the extreme right was stopped dead in its tracks around 8 AM, first by a massive artillery barrage and then by murderous machine-gun fire from Kurt von Pritzelwitz’s VI Corps (Fourth Army). On its left, Lefèvre’s colonial corps, veterans of France’s wars in Africa and IndoChina, nevertheless pushed on between the Forest of Chiny and Neufchâteau.44 The early-morning fog and rain had turned into searing heat and enervating humidity. Georges Goullet’s 5th Colonial Brigade and Arthur Poline’s XVII Corps were surprised in the thick woods near Bertrix, initially by German uhlans fighting dismounted and then by Kuno von Steuben’s XVII Reserve Corps and Dedo von Schenck’s XVIII Corps. Desperate, violent combat ensued.45 When Otto von Plüskow’s XI Corps of Saxon Third Army appeared from the north, the German iron ring around Bertrix was virtually complete. Without an escape route, Poline’s XVII Corps panicked, abandoned its artillery, and fled, leaving a breach in the front of Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army similar to that left by V Corps in the front of Ruffey’s Third Army.

  A poilu, Désiré Renault of 88th IR with Poline’s XVII Corps, on 22 August wrote home of the frightful slaughter. “The fighting has ended, all my buddies are beaten into retreat, and we, the wounded, have been left abandoned without care, dying of thirst. What a terrible night!” The coming dawn brought only more misery. “A new torture has added itself to the others: since the sun rose, the flies, drawn by the smell of blood, go after me fiercely.”46 Utterly exhausted and seriously wounded in the bludgeoning in the Ardennes, Renault was spared death or capture by two Red Cross nurses who carried him to a field hospital at Longwy.

  Worse was yet to come at the small village of Rossignol, north of the Semois River and fifteen kilometers south of Neufchâteau. There, 3d Colonial Division ran hard up against 12th ID of Pritzelwitz’s VI Army Corps. In short order, it sent five battalions of pantalon rouges in waves against the Germans on a front roughly six hundred meters wide. One furious frontal bayonet charge after another, accompanied by lusty cries of “En avant!,”* was mowed down by murderous artillery and machine-gun fire. As darkness fell, 3d Colonial Division had ceased to exist: Eleven thousand of its fifteen thousand soldiers had been killed or wounded; its commander, General Léon Raffenel, had been shot; and its last remnants gallantly buried the regimental colors.

  Rossignol for France constituted the deadliest campaign of the Battle of the Frontiers. Langle de Cary in classic understatement reported to Joffre from his headquarters at Stenay: “On the whole results hardly satisfactory.”47 He ignored the generalissimo’s demand that he resume the offensive the next day and instead ordered a retreat behind the Meuse and Chiers rivers near Sedan. Ruffey, furious that his infantry charges had not been supported by artillery, fell back on Verdun. Lanrezac’s hard-pressed Fifth Army at the Sambre could expect no help from either Third or Fourth armies. Maunoury’s unbloodied Army of Lorraine limped off to the safety of Amiens.

  More than eleven thousand poilus paid the butcher’s bill. At Virton, 8th ID lost 5,500 of its 16,000 men. At Ethe, 7th ID was so badly mauled that it was depicted as having been “stomped.” At Ochamps, 20th IR lost almost half (1,300) of its soldiers; the neighboring 11th IR, 2,700 out of 3,300 men. Goullet’s 5th Colonial Brigade had entered the Ardennes with 6,600 effectives; it left with only 3,400.48 Langle de Cary reported to Joffre that of one of his corps (40,000 men), roughly 15,000 remained combat-ready; more than 15,000 had been killed or wounded. The survivors were evacuated to Vouziers between 23 and 31 August.49

  But the Germans had not escaped unscathed. Duke Albrecht’s Fourth Army suffered 7,540 men dead or missing and 11,678 wounded between 21 and 31 August, with Schenck’s XVIII Corps and Pritzel-witz’s VI Corps each sustaining about 6,000 casualties. Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Fifth Army in the same period lost 7,488 men dead and missing and 11,529 wounded.50 Still, a delirious Wilhelm II awarded his son the Iron Cross, First and Second Class—as he had earlier to Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.

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bsp; AS THE TWO OPPOSING sides battled each other into bloody exhaustion in the Ardennes, the final drama of the Battle of Charleroi unfolded south of the Sambre River. Once Bülow realized that his corps commanders had attacked an entire French army across the wide Sambre front, he quickly appreciated that he needed help to secure both his flanks and victory. A discussion with Otto von Lauenstein, his chief of staff, on the night of 23 August confirmed the tension at Bülow’s headquarters at Walcourt. “There were critical hours yesterday and during the night,” Lauenstein noted, “in which the worry whether all would go according to plan almost gained the upper hand. Our operation had undoubtedly been most audacious.”51 There existed only one option: to renew the attack on Lanrezac the next morning, 24 August, and to call on the two flanking armies to lend support.

  Bülow had already contacted Hausen’s Third Army earlier that day to press across the Meuse at Dinant; he repeated that plea on 24 August. At noon welcome (if deceptive) news arrived from Third Army. “Sector seized; French gone; our right wing [at] Florennes-Philippeville.” Bülow was ecstatic. The battle was almost won. Around 3 PM, he triumphantly cabled Moltke. “Enemy’s right flank decisively defeated by 2 Army. 3 Army across the Maas toward Philippeville. To be passed on to the Kaiser. All [armies] continue the attack.”52

  Still, Bülow worried that he had received no news from Kluck or his chief of staff, Kuhl. First Army seemed to be continuing its march southwest, ignoring Bülow’s repeated requests that it turn onto a more southerly course and thereby maintain contact with Second Army’s right flank. Lauenstein shared his commander’s anxiety. “If my friend and my right neighbor Kuhl now deals with the English as we have dealt with the French, then the first phase of the campaign in the western theater will have been decided in our favor.”53 It was time for Bülow to issue a direct order to First Army: “IX Army Corps is to advance immediately west of Maubeuge in order to carry out an enveloping attack against the enemy’s left wing. III Army Corps is to join it in echelon formation.”54

  But whereas Bülow was able to intimidate Hausen and his chief of staff, Ernst von Hoeppner, the same was not the case with Kluck and Kuhl. First Army’s duumvirate appreciated that they were the hammer that was to smash the Allied armies around Paris, and they were not about to let Bülow interfere with that goal. “Hour after hour went by,” in the words of the German official history, without a reply from First Army. Bülow and Lauenstein seethed with anger. Moltke had, after all, put First Army under Bülow’s command. By late afternoon, Bülow had lost all patience. “Where II and IV Army Corps today?” he testily demanded to know from Kluck. “How does the battle stand today?” Finally, he issued a barely concealed reminder of their command relationship. “Request daily to be notified accordingly.”55 Moltke at Koblenz chose not to pull his field commanders into line.

  FIRST ARMY WAS ABOUT to make contact with the British Expeditionary Force. On 19 August, Wilhelm II reportedly* had “commanded” Kluck to “exterminate the treacherous English” and to roll over Field Marshal French’s “contemptible little army.”56 First Army stood west of Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. It had marched nearly 250 kilometers in eleven days, much of it in excruciating heat and suffocating dust. Information gathered from local villagers suggested to Kluck that seventy thousand British troops were moving on Mons. But communications with Second Army remained nonexistent, and no orders had been received from Moltke. Nor had anyone thought of sending out liaison officers to coordinate the operations of First and Second armies, so critical to the Moltke-Schlieffen design.57 Kluck and Kuhl simply planned “to cut the English off” from establishing contact with Lanrezac’s Fifth Army.

  They did not have long to wait. Friedrich Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps, Ferdinand von Quast’s IX Corps, and Ewald von Lochow’s III Corps blindly advanced from north to south along the twenty-meter-wide Mons-Condé Canal against Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Army Corps.58 Had Kluck finally turned toward the south as requested by Bülow? Not a word of this reached Second Army. At the bend in the British line at Mons, where it turned southeast toward Peissant, Manfred von Richthofen’s* I Cavalry Corps was approaching Sir Douglas Haig’s I Army Corps. Field Marshal French’s role was to protect Lanrezac’s left flank; Kluck’s was to roll up the British left flank between Saint-Aybert and Jemappes.

  The two armies were advancing through some of the ugliest real estate in Europe. Once a medieval textile town, Mons in 1914 was in the heart of the Belgian coalfields. It had all the flavor of the Industrial Revolution—polluted ditches, swamps, watercourses, and canals. Railroads and cobbled roads further dissected the fields and farms and willow forests. Pitheads and smoking slag heaps, some as high as thirty meters, rounded off the landscape.

  This phase of the Battle of the Frontiers began inauspiciously enough near Casteau. Field Marshal French, wisely having rejected a plea from Lanrezac to wheel east to strike Bülow’s Second Army in the flank and thus expose the BEF to Kluck’s First Army, was advancing in the direction of Soignies, as Joffre had requested in Special Order No. 15 of 21 August. Suddenly, 4th Dragoon Guards of 2d Cavalry Brigade came upon riders of Kluck’s 9th Cavalry Division; a small skirmish ensued. Owing to inadequate reconnaissance, neither commander suspected the imminent clash of their entire forces. Both were thus surprised when, between 9 and 10 AM on the misty and rainy morning of Sunday, 23 August, Quast’s IX Corps blundered into Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps near Mons. A furious battle ensued all along the grimy Mons-Condé Canal: While Quast’s artillery mercilessly battered the BEF’s lines with shell and shrapnel, Smith-Dorrien’s Fourth Middlesex and Second Royal Irish riflemen endlessly directed their accurate Lee-Enfield fire (“fifteen rounds a minute”) into wave after wave of gray German infantry coming at them in close formation. Corporal John Lucy later recalled the carnage:

  A great roar of musketry rent the air. … For us the battle took the form of well ordered, rapid rifle-fire at close range as the field of grey human targets appeared, or were struck down, to be replaced by further waves of German infantry who shared the same fate. … Such tactics amazed us, and after the first shock of seeing men slowly and helplessly falling down as they were hit [it] gave us a great sense of power and pleasure.59

  Captain Walter Bloem of 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers also attested to the lethality of the battlefield. The gently undulating hills and meadows around the canal were “dotted with little grey heaps,” fallen German infantrymen. “Wherever I looked, right or left,” he noted, “were dead and wounded, quivering in convulsions, groaning terribly, blood oozing from fresh wounds.”60

  It was much the same story farther west at Jemappes, where Lochow’s III Corps similarly fed its infantry into deadly enemy rifle fire. By day’s end, the BEF had suffered sixteen hundred casualties; Kluck and Kuhl chose not to reveal German losses, which have been estimated at about five thousand. Although the British abandoned both Mons and Jemappes by nightfall and began to fall back toward Le Cateau, the day’s battle had ended inconclusively. Kluck and Kuhl, who had wanted to sweep around the British left flank while anchoring their own left flank on Mons, felt cheated of victory over the BEF by Bülow’s constant demands that First Army at all times maintain close contact with Second Army. Moreover, they were annoyed that the enemy had once again eluded encirclement and that their own infantry had shown such profound contempt for the enemy’s firepower. Mons was thus best forgotten.

  For the British—both soldiers and the public at home, both then and now—Mons became one of the great legends of the war. There were many stories of what occurred that day, but they all had some elements in common: At one point in the battle, when the waves of gray German infantry seemed about to sweep across the canal and mop up the remnants of Smith-Dorrien’s “Old Contemptibles,” the skies parted brightly to reveal a knight in shining armor mounted on a white horse (Saint George?) while archers from above showered the German lines with arrows and white-robed angels shielded the BEF from hostile fire. The “Angel of Mons”61 thus b
ecame for the British both a sign of divine intervention on their behalf and a symbol of hope for the duration of the war.

  As Kluck resumed his attack the next day, 24 August, the entire Allied front suddenly seemed to collapse. Lanrezac, upon receiving news that Namur had capitulated and that Hausen’s Third Army was crossing the Meuse south of Dinant, had decided by ten o’clock on the night of 23 August to fall back along the line Givet-Maubeuge. He reached his decision without consulting Joffre and without informing Sir John French, thus further eroding an already shaky relationship with the British commander. Fifth Army’s precipitous retreat caused a twelve-kilometer-wide gap to develop between French Fifth Army’s left and the BEF’s right. “Johnnie” French felt “left alone” by Lanrezac and poured out his bitterness to Joffre at GQG. At 2 AM on 24 August, he ordered a general retreat from Mons southwest to Le Cateau. Despondency seemed to have overtaken him. He queried Lord Kitchener about the possibility of falling back on Le Havre—and Britain? He toyed with the idea of sheltering his forces in Maubeuge.62 And he threatened to withdraw the entire BEF behind “the lower Seine”—that is, behind Fortress Paris. For the Allies, the Great Retreat had begun.

  The agony of defeat was recorded by future historian Marc Bloch, a sergeant with French 272d IR. The retreat for him began in the “stifling heat” of the morning of 25 August. In village after village on the left bank of the Meuse, he encountered fleeing French peasants. “Wrenched from their homes, disoriented, dazed, and bullied by the gendarmes, they were troublesome but pathetic figures.” Men, women, and children passed by in silent marches taking what little they could in small hand-pulled wagons. On 26 August, the burning sunshine cruelly turned to steaming rain. The retreat, “the monotony of each day,” plodded onward toward the west, “continually retreating without fighting.” Where and how would it end? “Oh, what bitter days of retreat, of weariness, boredom, and anxiety!”63