The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

  JOSEPH JOFFRE HAD LOST the Battle of the Frontiers. At the Grand quartier général (GQG), his acolytes of the all-out offensive (l’offensive à outrance) were in a state of sudden and unexpected depression. Would the generalissimo be willing to recognize the full measure of the defeat? Would he be able to conjure up what Carl von Clausewitz called the “new and favorable factors” required of a great captain to avoid “outright defeat, perhaps even absolute destruction”?52 Joffre’s reputation, indeed his career, depended on his willingness and his ability to do so.

  Reassessment began on the morning of 24 August. Joffre first laid out his future strategy in a candid letter to War Minister Adolphe Messimy.53 “We are condemned to a defensive supported by fortified places and large-terrain obstacles.” The immediate task was to surrender “the least possible” amount of terrain to the enemy; the longer-range aim was “to last as long as possible, while striving to attrit the enemy;” and the ultimate goal was “to resume the offensive when the [proper] moment arrives.” Gone were the sweeping Napoleonic brushstrokes of vast offensives, and in their place came sensible and effective movements of men and machines as if on a vast chessboard. Messimy provided governmental support. “Take swift means, brutally, energetically, and decisively. … The sole law of France at this moment is: conquer or die.”54

  Joffre’s first move was to pull forces on the French left wing back to the line Maubeuge-Mézières-Verdun.55 This was followed by an accelerated shift of combat units from the right to the left—that is, from Alsace-Lorraine to the threatened region around Paris. Paul Pau’s Army of Alsace was further cannibalized for troops. Railroads and bridges in Lorraine that could be of use to the Germans were destroyed. For much of the week after 24 August, Joffre took advantage of his interior lines and used his superb Directorate of Railways to move units north to face the menacing German right wing sweeping down on the capital. On 1 September, Victor Boëlle’s IV Corps left Sainte-Menehould for Greater Paris in 109 trains; the next day, Pierre Dubois’s IX Corps embarked at Nancy bound for Troyes in 52 trains; and Émile-Edmond Legrand-Girarde’s XXI Corps departed Épinal for Gondrecourt in 74 trains.56

  But what strategy to employ once the new formations were in place? Two alternatives dominated the discussions at GQG.57 Deputy Chief of Staff Henri Berthelot suggested that any new army being organized behind the Allied left wing could best be used to attack German forces immediately threatening Paris—in particular, the inner, or eastern, wing of Bülow’s Second Army. Joffre rejected Berthelot’s scheme since it was based on the ability of Fifth Army and the BEF to keep the German right wing in check while a new army was being stood up. He had little faith left in either Charles Lanrezac or Sir John French. Thus, he opted for a much bolder design: to form a new army well to the west of German First Army and then to drive it eastward into Kluck’s exposed outer right flank.

  By 10 PM on 25 August, Joffre’s staff had formalized his new plans in General Instruction No. 2.58 After a cursory admission that it had been “unable” to carry out the “offensive maneuver originally planned,” GQG defined the new strategy as being one

  to reconstruct on our left a force capable of resuming the offensive by a combination of the Fourth and Fifth Armies, the British Army and new forces drawn from the east, while the other armies hold the enemy in check for such time as may be necessary.

  More sacred French soil—another hundred kilometers—would have to be abandoned as the planned withdrawal was extended farther into the interior to the line Amiens-Reims-Verdun. Rear guards of Third, Fourth, and Fifth armies were to cover the retreat by conducting “short and violent counterattacks” in which artillery was to be “the principal element employed.” Belatedly, Joffre demanded a more “intimate combination of infantry and artillery.” A new “group of forces,” composed of at least one and perhaps even two army corps and four reserve divisions from Alsace-Lorraine and Paris, was to be assembled “before Amiens” or “behind the Somme.” This was to be Joffre’s “army of maneuver” (later designated Sixth Army), which was to envelop the German right wing. There, in a nutshell, was the genesis of the strategic plan for the Battle of the Marne.

  But it would take time—perhaps too much time—and it was predicated on the entire Allied line holding fast. Joffre had two great fears. First, a gap had developed between Fourth and Fifth armies stumbling out of the Ardennes and back from the Sambre, respectively. The Germans, moving south on Hirson, on the Oise River, might discover this and attempt to break through. Thus, Joffre formed a Special Army Detachment under Ferdinand Foch—the future Ninth Army—out of two corps from Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army and two divisions from Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. Foch, recalled from the Grand Couronné de Nancy on 27 August, immediately moved to close the gap in the line. He would soon learn that both his only son, Cadet Germain, and his son-in-law, Captain Charles Bécourt, had been killed on 22 August as the Germans swept into Belgium.

  Joffre’s greatest fear, as always, was the British. Sir John French seemed bent on retreating from the Germans faster than they could pursue. Somehow, Joffre had to sell the field marshal on his General Instruction No. 2. In typical fashion, and in sharp contrast with the sedentary Moltke, on 26 August, Joffre raced off to British General Headquarters (GHQ) at Saint-Quentin. Lanrezac of Fifth Army, on the British right, and Albert d’Amade, commanding a group of territorial divisions on the British left, were also summoned. The meeting took place in a neo-Pompeian house with closed shutters and dimly lit rooms. Sir John French and Henry Wilson, representing Chief of Staff Archibald Murray, who was away at Le Cateau and ill, arrived late. Lanrezac, his pince-nez hanging over his ears “like a pair of cherries,” was less than enthused about having to deal with the British at all. He found Joffre silent and dull, seemingly “wrapped in a cloak of enveloping dumbness.”59

  Predictably, the meeting became another disaster.60 Sir John rattled off a long list of French failures, beginning with Joffre’s refusal to accept the fact that the Germans had crossed the Meuse in force and ending with Lanrezac’s failure to inform him of Fifth Army’s sudden retreat from the Sambre. These French “blunders” had increased the burden on the BEF and decreased the field marshal’s confidence in French decision making. Moreover, his army was exhausted and desperately needed a day of rest. He proposed falling back to Compiègne. A painful silence ensued. Lanrezac, bored by the British diatribe, merely shrugged. He cagily declined to inform the group that he had already ordered Fifth Army to “break contact with the enemy” and to continue its retreat twenty kilometers toward Laon prior to any counterattack he might mount.61

  It was up to Joffre to save the day. He was in an unenviable position. His concentration plan, XVII, had been shattered by the Germans at great loss. Bülow’s Second Army had advanced south from the Sambre and was about to cross the Oise. If it did so, and in the process routed French Fifth Army, the campaign in the west would be lost. He desperately needed to hold the line of the Oise River, and for that he desperately needed the BEF. Joffre pulled himself together. He patiently explained the gist of his Instruction général No. 2: After the planned withdrawal to the line Amiens-Reims-Verdun, he would form French Fourth and Fifth armies as well as the BEF as a “mass of manoeuvre” on the French left “capable of resuming the offensive;” all he asked of Sir John was that the BEF keep its place in the line and “conform” to the movements of French Fifth Army and d’Amade’s Territorials. But he could not simply issue the field marshal a direct order: Sir John outranked him, and there existed no machinery to coordinate the actions of the British and French armies. As General Wilson translated Joffre’s presentation, Lanrezac, shoulders stooped slightly, gave the impression that he was bored. The atmosphere was funereal.

  Sir John French sprang into action. He was flummoxed. “I know nothing of this Order,” he petulantly barked out. He turned to Henry Wilson. The latter allowed that he had received Joffre’s instruction during the night, but had not studied it, much less translated
it for Sir John. Joffre was livid, but he maintained his customary calm. The atmosphere had turned from ice cold to hostile. Another pained silence followed. Junior officers dared not speak. French and Lanrezac refused to speak to each other directly. When Sir John invited the group to lunch, Lanrezac declined.62

  Charles Huguet, chief of the French Military Mission at GHQ, summarized the conference as having been conducted with “extreme coolness” and “lack of cordiality.” It had “achieved no military result.”63 Later that night, Huguet informed Joffre, back at Vitry-le-François, that the BEF had not only lost a battle, but “all cohesion.” It would require “serious protection” from the French army before it could reorganize.64 Joffre moved with alacrity.65 He enacted General Instruction No. 2, standing up French Sixth Army under Michel-Joseph Maunoury out of VII Corps and four reserve divisions around Amiens. He formally abolished Pau’s Army of Alsace since most of its units had already been sent to Sixth Army. And with another stroke of the pen, he crossed off the hapless Army of Lorraine, sending its infantry divisions to Third Army and its staff to Sixth Army. It was Joffre at his best: decisive, resolute, unflappable.

  Colonel Huguet’s reference to a “battle lost” concerned Le Cateau. While the French and British held their desultory discussions at Saint-Quentin, advance guards of Kluck’s First Army had, at dusk on 25 August, attacked the Coldstream Guards of Sir Douglas Haig’s I Corps, withdrawing on the east side of the Forest of Mormal. In fact, Haig had callously disobeyed Field Marshal French’s order to assist British II Corps. He instead prepared to shelter for a few hours in deserted army barracks at Landecries. There occurred several street fights with Kluck’s advance guard that night. This minor, accidental encounter set off near panic at corps headquarters—where Haig’s staff prepared to destroy the unit’s records—and at Saint-Quentin—where French’s chief of staff, Sir Archibald Murray, “completely broken down,” could scarcely be sustained by “morphia or some drug” before “promptly” slipping into a “fainting fit.”66 Landecries was not Haig’s finest hour. It was one of the rare occasions on which the normally steady Haig became “rattled,” possibly the aftereffects of a severe bout of diarrhea from the night before. Standing on a doorstep, revolver in hand, he cried out to John Charteris, his chief of intelligence, “If we are caught, by God, we’ll sell our lives dearly.”67 He was spared the sale. The I Corps continued its retreat toward the Aisne River the next morning.

  Yet again, the greater danger faced Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps, falling back on the west side of the Forest of Mormal. Delayed by the passage of Jean-François Sordet’s cavalry corps across its line of retreat, II Corps was itself harassed by more of Kluck’s advance guards. It just managed to reach Solesmes, where it found cover under the guns of Sir Thomas Snow’s newly arrived 4th ID. But late that night, Sir Edmund Allenby’s cavalry division (CD) reported that Kluck was closing in on the BEF. Smith-Dorrien decided that his best chance lay in preparing his defenses and then “giving the enemy a smashing blow.”68 Twice he communicated his decision to GHQ. At 3:30 AM, he ordered his units to stand their ground on a low ridge running west of Le Cateau.

  BATTLE OF LE CATEAU

  BATTLE OF GUISE

  The Battle of Le Cateau coincidentally fell on the 568th anniversary of the Battle of Crécy, where Edward III of England had defeated the far superior army of Philip VI of France. But in 1914, fate favored the stronger battalions. At 6 AM, the guns of Kluck’s First Army, sited on the heights above the town, unleashed a deadly barrage. At first, Smith-Dorrien’s center managed to hold its own against the infantry assaults of Friedrich Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps. But on the right flank, left unprotected by Haig’s retreat from Landecries, Ewald von Lochow’s III Corps drove forward to envelop British II Corps. Furious counterattacks failed to repel the Germans, and 19th IB as well as 5th ID seemed threatened with destruction. On the left flank, too, the situation grew precarious as Georg von der Marwitz’s II Cavalry Corps and two infantry divisions of Hans von Gronau’s IV Reserve Corps attacked “Snowball” Snow’s 4th ID. British II Corps was saved from possible annihilation by a timely sortie by Sordet’s cavalry corps against Gronau’s IV Reserve Corps and by an almost suicidal attack by Henri de Ferron’s 84th Territorial Division against Alexander von Linsingen’s II Corps moving up to join Gronau’s units.

  In contrast with the brutal offensive infantry assaults supported by massive artillery barrages at Charleroi, in the Ardennes, and in Lorraine, Le Cateau was a battle waged on open and largely treeless fields, in which British riflemen fought from prone positions and rarely had the luxury of digging rifle pits. It in many ways was more like a battle out of the U.S. Civil War or the Franco-Prussian War than the fighting one normally associates with World War I. Still, the British suffered 7,812 casualties at Le Cateau, their greatest battle (and losses) since Waterloo. The next day, gray and gloomy with heavy down-pours, the commanders of two exhausted battalions surrendered rather than offering battle near Saint-Quentin.69

  By 28 August, intensely hot again, the BEF had put the Oise River between itself and the pursuing Germans. Even the ever-optimistic Henry Wilson was seen at the new headquarters in Noyon mumbling, “To the sea, to the sea, to the sea.”70 French communications at Belfort intercepted Wilhelm II’s ebullient radio message to the troops: “In its triumphant march, First Army today approaches the heart of France.”71 Still, Le Cateau was a bitter pill for Kluck to swallow. For a second time (after Mons), he had inflicted a tactical defeat on the British, but at great (unspecified) cost to his own forces and delay in the great sweep through northeastern France. And for a second time, due to poor intelligence and reconnaissance, he had failed to “achieve the desired annihilation.”72

  LE CATEAU STIRRED JOFFRE to still more feverish activity. Around 6 AM on 27 August, he dispatched an urgent appeal to Lanrezac, reminding the commander of Fifth Army to launch the counterattack against the Germans that Joffre seemingly had promised French at the conference in Saint-Quentin the day before.73 The situation had grown more critical since then, given that Hausen’s Third Army had crossed the Meuse at Dinant. Joffre called for an immediate strike northwest from the region of the Oise River between Hirson and Guise. Yet again, Lanrezac prevaricated. He preferred to withdraw another twenty kilometers south, there to regroup, and then to attack from around Laon. All the while, Huguet bombarded Vitry-le-François with ever more dire reports concerning the British army.74 By early afternoon on the twenty-seventh, it had evacuated Saint-Quentin, exposing Lanrezac’s left flank. At 5:45 PM, Huguet reported that the BEF’s situation was “extremely grave” and that its retreat threatened to turn into a “rout.” In a final communiqué later that evening, he informed Joffre that after Le Cateau, two British infantry divisions were “nothing more than disorganized bands incapable of offering the least resistance,” and that the entire BEF was “beaten, incapable of a serious effort.” At 8:10 PM, Joffre gave Lanrezac a direct order to attack toward Saint-Quentin.

  It was a bold plan. Bülow’s Second Army was moving in a southwesterly direction—Karl von Einem’s VII Corps and Guenther von Kirchbach’s X Reserve Corps were approaching the British near Saint-Quentin—and thus offered an inviting flank for a counterattack. Of course, Joffre also knew that the plan was risky because he was asking much of a battered and exhausted army that had just marched almost three hundred kilometers first up to and then back from the Sambre. Fifth Army would have to execute a ninety-degree turn from northwest to west—while facing major enemy forces. Hence, Joffre dispatched one of his staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel Alexandre, to Lanrezac’s headquarters at Marle to monitor the attack. Unsurprisingly, neither the professor from Saint-Cyr nor his chief of staff, Alexis Hély d’Oissel, was amused by being lectured by a junior officer. Lanrezac sent Alexandre back to Vitry-le-François with a brutal peroration: “Before trying to teach me my business, sir, go back and tell your little strategists to learn their own.”75

  Joffre’s new dep
loyment plan must have reminded Lanrezac of his recent trials and tribulations in the Battle of Charleroi. There, Fifth Army had been boxed into the triangle formed by the Sambre and Meuse. Now he was being asked to fight in a similar triangle around Guise, where the Oise River, after flowing east to west, turns sharply southwest. More, he would have to divide his forces: While Émile Hache’s III Corps and Jacques de Mas-Latrie’s XVIII Corps would drive west against Bülow’s formations harassing the British around Saint-Quentin, a single corps, Gilbert Defforges’s X, would have to secure the northern front toward Guise as well as to cover Fifth Army’s right flank and rear. That would leave only Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps in reserve.76

  At 9 AM on 28 August, Lanrezac had a not-unexpected visitor: Joseph Joffre. The chief of staff was “shocked” by his commander’s physical appearance: “marked by fatigue, yellow complexion, bloodshot eyes.”77 In what both officers later admitted was a “tense and heated” meeting, they exchanged views. Lanrezac, without informing Joffre of the dispositions he had made during the night to realign his corps according to GQG’s new design, launched a biting attack on Joffre’s overall strategic plan and reminded him of the great fatigue of Fifth Army and the overwrought “nerves” of some of its commanders. Joffre, fully aware that he could not afford either militarily or politically to have the BEF crushed on French soil, lost his customary calm. He exploded. “His rage was terrific,” Lieutenant Edward Spears, British liaison officer with French Fifth Army, recorded. “He threatened to deprive Lanrezac of his command and told him that he must obey without discussion, that he must attack without his eternal procrastination and apprehensiveness.”78 When Lanrezac coldly countered that he possessed no written orders, Joffre sat down, seized paper and pen, and provided same. “As soon as possible, the Fifth Army will attack the German forces that were engaged yesterday against the British Army.”79