The Marne, 1914
Page 25
Moltke chose not to inform Wenninger that he had dispatched yet another emissary, Major Max Bauer, to Bavarian headquarters that very day. Bauer, strongly hinting that he was acting on Moltke’s behalf, came up with another grand scheme. After storming la position de Nancy, Sixth and Seventh armies were “‘simply’ to pass through Charmes Gap” between Toul and Épinal, strike the French flank, and “drive the remainder of the Army of the Vosges into the arms of the German Fifth Army” around Verdun. In this way, Bauer assured the Bavarians, they would “bring about the decision” in the war.42 Flabbergasted by yet a further radical change in plans by the OHL, Krafft queried Bauer, Moltke’s expert on artillery, as to how long it might take to reduce the fortifications at Nancy. “Oh well, after our experiences at Liège and Namur you should be able to reduce them within 3 days.”43 Bauer promised Rupprecht the remaining 150mm field artillery from the fortresses of Metz, Strasbourg, Germersheim, and Mainz. But since there were no draft horses available for transport, General Otto Kreppel, commander, Bavarian Field Artillery, had to secure railways to move the heavy batteries and twenty-six trains of shells to Nancy. Rupprecht sadly recorded that the Bavarian army had lost three hundred officers and ten thousand men by the end of August 1914.44
While Rupprecht and Krafft drafted plans for Bauer’s small Cannae in the south, Major von Xylander just happened to be in Luxembourg. There, he learned “purely by accident” that the OHL no longer had “any desire” to take la position de Nancy. Lieutenant Colonel Tappen confirmed the rumor and added that Sixth and Seventh armies were just to “fix” French forces in equal numbers in Lorraine. Hardly had Xylander caught his breath than Deputy Chief of the General Staff Hermann von Stein let it be known that he expected the Bavarians “merely” to attack the “Bayon bridgehead” on the Moselle River, halfway between Nancy and Épinal to the south. Perhaps as early as “tomorrow.”45
It was pure Alice in Wonderland. What was it to be? Reduction of the Nancy salient? The drive through the Charmes Gap? The attack on the Bayon bridgehead? Or all of the above? Rupprecht took matters into his own hands: On 31 August, he decided as theater commander and as scion of a royal house that he had no choice but to follow Wilhelm II’s order to storm the Grand Couronné de Nancy, the natural three-hundred-meter-high protective ridge that extended from the German border to northeast of Nancy.
Krafft von Dellmensingen immediately did what any other good chief of staff would have done: He drove to Luxembourg to run Rupprecht’s decision by the OHL. He found the mood there downright ebullient. Tappen led off. “Everywhere the enemy is retreating. … The entire western wing is advancing with greatest marching effort.”He envied the men of First and Second armies. “Those people are conducting a promenade around France!” There would be “no holding along the Marne,” he assured Krafft. The French would be herded off in a southeasterly direction and “driven against the Swiss border.”46 There was no need even to contemplate shuttling forces to northern France, Tappen concluded, as the right wing sweeping toward Paris would bring its crushing might to bear in a few days, perhaps even the very next day!47
THE GERMANS
Kaiser Wilhelm II
THE GERMANS
Helmuth von Moltke, German chief of the general staff
General Alexander von Kluck, chief of staff, German 1st Army (center) with staff. General von Kuhl is on his right.
Erich Ludendorff, deputy chief of staff, German 2nd Army
General Karl von Bülow, German 2nd Army
THE FRENCH
Raymond Poincaré, president of France
General Ferdinand Foch, French 9th Army
General Édouard de Castelnau, French 2nd Army
THE FRENCH
General Joseph Joffre, French chief of general staff
General Fernand de Langle de Cary, French 4th Army (center). Joffre is at left.
General Charles Lanrezac, commander French 5th Army
THE FRENCH
General Auguste Yvon Edmond Dubail, French 1st Army
Joseph Galliéni, governor of Fortress Paris
General Michel-Joseph Maunoury
General Maurice Sarrail, French 3rd Army
THE BRITISH
H. H. Asquith, prime minister of the United Kingdom
Horatio Herbert Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war, Great Britain (center)
A recruiting poster featuring Lord Kitchener’s image
THE BRITISH
Field Marshal John French, commander-in-chief, British Expeditionary Force
Field Marshal Douglas Haig
Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, British deputy chief of staff
THE BRITISH
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, British II Corps
Fort Loncin, Liège, Belgium, November 1918
The library at Louvain
At noon on 1 September, Crown Prince Rupprecht called a meeting of his chief of staff and corps commanders. Krafft von Dellmensingen, as usual, favored offensive operations. La position de Nancy needed to be taken immediately so that Sixth Army could then break through the Charmes Gap and roll up the flank of the French forces facing Fifth and Fourth armies. To recall the heavy artillery being hauled up to the front would constitute “a definitive admission of defeat.”48 Oskar von Xylander spoke against Krafft. His I Corps had been badly battered in the advance on Nancy, and he feared that a “drawn-out, costly” siege could lead to the “disintegration” of his corps. The “only viable course was to withdraw.”49 Karl von Martini of II Corps was at the front and sent his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Franz Stängl, in his stead. Stängl led off with a litany of problems: The corps had sustained heavy losses, especially among the infantry; it lacked heavy artillery; its front was spread too thin and in danger of cracking under a sustained counterattack. Krafft craftily agreed. But the attack had been ordered by the OHL, he noted, and there was nothing he could do about that.50 The II Corps would just have to mount one final Herculean effort. Ludwig von Gebsattel of III Corps had “vainly” spoken the past week of “making Nancy a present” for King Ludwig III, but he now favored delaying the assault until his corps could be properly concentrated and the heavy artillery promised by Major Bauer was in place.51 Rupprecht, who considered the assault—especially on the Grand Couronné guarding Nancy—to constitute “an irresponsible, difficult undertaking,” readily took up Gebsattel’s notion of a delay. The crown prince confided to his war diary that he and Krafft had undergone a “test of nerves” and had both “lost their patience” at the meeting.52
The attacks on Bayon and the charge through the Trouée de Charmes were canceled. The great host of 272 guns was to be assembled before the Grand Couronné. The attack was set for the night of 4–5 September. Gebsattel’s Bavarian III Corps, which had largely been spared the fighting around Nancy and thus denied battle honors,53 would spearhead the assault.
“NEVER DO WHAT THE enemy wants for the very reason that he wants it,” the great Napoleon had counseled a century before. “Avoid a battleground that he has reconnoitered and studied, and with even more reason ground that he has fortified and where he is entrenched.”54 As is often the case, sound advice grounded in solid history was ignored. The Grand Couronné northeast of Nancy constitutes a plateau scarp that in the north is a mere ridge broken by buttes and mesas, but that near Nancy becomes wider and forms “an eastward projecting bastion measuring half a dozen miles from the [Moselle] to its apex.” The entire plateau of the Grand Couronné is “breached by transverse stream valleys”55 and erosion gaps. Attacking infantry from the north and northeast would have to batter their way across the plateau to assault Nancy. Key to the French defenders was the so-called Pont-à-Mousson Gateway, a broad opening in the Grand Couronné that cut the plateau east to the Moselle. It was protected by two pillars: the Mousson butte, to the north, and the Sainte-Geneviève Plateau, to the south.
As well, the French had carefully prepared the defenses around Nancy—and especially on the ridges o
f the Grand Couronné. It was one of the many ironies of the war that this work had been ordered by Foch, the apostle of the all-out offensive, after he assumed command of XX Corps at Nancy in August 1913. The French had left Nancy unfortified because it projected dangerously in front of the line of forts they had constructed in the 1880s through Toul, Épinal, and Belfort. Foch obviously thought Nancy worth saving from attack.
Specifically, Foch’s engineers had extended the defensive works three kilometers out to the heights of Malzéville. They had studded every approach to the escarpment with forts, artillery, machine guns, and barbed wire. They had dug deep trenches across roads and rail beds to slow the enemy advance. They had calibrated every piece of ground for the heavy Rimailho artillery as well as the soixante-quinzes. They had concealed much of this firepower in the ravines that dissected the Grand Couronné. Even geography had played into their hands. To the north of Nancy, 150-to 200-meter-high ridges shot straight up from the western banks of both the Meurthe and Moselle rivers, offering defenders a natural bulwark. The fallback position west of Nancy across the Moselle trench was even more formidable: The high plateau of the Forest of Haye in the angle formed by the Meurthe and the Moselle bristled with artillery emplacements and concrete forts. In between lay three water obstacles: the Mortagne River, 8 to 15 meters wide and 1.2 meters deep; the Moselle, 70 to 100 meters wide and between 0.60 and 1.50 meters deep; and the Canal de l’Est, 18 to 22 meters wide and 2.2 meters deep. All three would have to be crossed by the Bavarians after they had seized Nancy.56
French units, refreshed after the Battle of the Trouée de Charmes, were assigned positions around Nancy for the expected German assault.57 Castelnau deployed four corps of Second Army on the heights north and northeast of the city, with Jean Kopp’s 59th Reserve Infantry Division (RID) at Sainte-Geneviève and Émile Fayolle’s 70th RID at Amance. He then sited half of Pierre Dubois’s IX Corps southeast of Nancy behind the Meurthe: Émile Brun d’Aubignosc’s 68th RID at Saffais, Louis Espinasse’s XV Corps at Haussonville behind the Mortagne, and Louis Taverna’s XVI Corps as well as Louis Bigot’s 74th RID near Belchamp. Dubail placed Joseph de Castelli’s VIII Corps east of the Forest of Charmes and César Alix’s XIII Corps around Rambervillers. Léon Durand’s Second Reserves Group (three divisions) was divided among the active units. Émile-Edmond Legrand-Girarde’s XXI Corps was the last to arrive.58
But this formidable concentration was short-lived. Joffre was so confident of Nancy’s defenses that between 31 August and 2 September, he continued to strip his forces there to bolster the front around Paris. Unit by unit, Second Army had to surrender Espinasse’s XV Corps, three brigades of Dubois’s IX Corps, Justinien Lefèvre’s 18th ID, Camille Grellet de la Deyte’s 10th CD, and a chasseur brigade. First Army entrained Legrand-Girarde’s XXI Corps, bound for Paris.59 It now consisted mainly of Castelli’s VIII Corps and Pierre Roques’s XII Corps, 167,300 effectives and 5,400 sabers in all.60 Joffre was no longer interested in tying down (fixer) German forces in Lorraine, but merely in making a stand (durer) east of Nancy.61 By 4 August, Castelnau’s Second Army consisted of Taverna’s XVI Corps and Maurice Balfourier’s XX Corps (nine infantry divisions), Foch’s former unit, as well as the reserves (ten infantry divisions), roughly 120,500 soldiers as well as 3,800 cavalrymen and 536 pieces of artillery.62 Still, Second Army alone was superior to the attacking Bavarian Sixth Army.
NANCY AND THE GRAND COURONNÉ
THE ASSAULT ON THE Grand Couronné began a day ahead of schedule, in the heavy, humid night of 3–4 September. The air pressure caused by the massive artillery barrage was so powerful that it blew out the doors at Bavarian I, II, I Reserve, XIV, and XXI corps headquarters.63 In the morning, Crown Prince Rupprecht pushed his right wing north of Nancy along the Saffais Plateau and sent his left against Épinal. As well, he ordered Seventh Army to advance on Rambervillers, northeast of Épinal. Comprising mostly Landwehr formations, it quickly became bogged down in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Heavy fighting also ensued along the Meurthe River. But the main assault consisted of a frontal infantry attack on the Grand and Petit Mont d’Amance, northeast of Nancy, as well as Forts Saint-Nicolas-de-Port and Pont-Saint-Vincent, southeast of Nancy, and Frouard, northwest of Nancy. It was now or never on the Südflügel.
The desperate nature of the fighting immediately became apparent. At Mandray, a village ten kilometers southeast of Saint-Dié, the battle raged from house to house.64 French artillery on the Grand Couronné poured fire on the tight German waves as they attempted to cross the plains below. Chasseurs ferociously defended Mandray at every corner, finally retiring on the church. The soldiers of Eugen von Benzino’s Ersatz division blew open its barricaded door. With trumpets sounding the charge, the Bavarians stormed the sanctuary. They set the wooden stairs leading to the steeple on fire. The chasseurs there never had a chance.
At Maixe, a hamlet of five hundred people on the Marne-Rhine Canal, German reserves took a terrible pounding for fifteen hours from well-hidden French artillery, accurately directed by fliers.65 The Bavarian history of the war recorded, “Soon Hell broke loose. French heavy and light artillery shells whistled over our heads with their ear-shattering screams and their shrapnel, and the entire region was soon enveloped in a thick haze of smoke and dust.” Even well-dug-in infantry companies were hit hard. “Human torsos and individual [body] parts flew through the air” from wagons that had been abandoned in the village square. “Everywhere there was horror and despair, death and perdition; everywhere, there were wild screams of pain and fear.” Horses, as if whipped, ran about in panic, taking with them wagons and artillery caissons. The wounded screamed horribly—and had to be abandoned.
On 4 September, Sixth Army concentrated its artillery fire on the front along the Meurthe between the Forest of Vitrimont and Courbesseaux, but could not drive the French out. The next day, Rupprecht’s gunners shifted their fire to the area northeast of Nancy; roughly three thousand shells rained down on the Amance heights. Xylander’s I Corps fired off a thousand howitzer rounds on 5 September. Day and night the deafening artillery duel continued. Wave after wave of gray-clad Bavarian infantry debouched from the Champenoux Forest under cover of darkness to storm the front of the Grand Couronné—only to be cut down by murderous cross fire from the French 75s concealed on reverse slopes of the Mont d’Amance mesa and the Pain de Sucre butte guarding the eastern and southern approaches to the Grand Couronné. Still, the future of la position de Nancy hung by a thread on the second day of Rupprecht’s offensive.
Castelnau’s earlier optimism evaporated. He feared a repetition of the Battle of the Saar—decimation of Second Army if it stubbornly clung to defending the Grand Couronné. Reports from Durand’s reserve divisions and Balfourier’s XX Corps revealed that Second Army, recently depleted by Joffre, could not long withstand the Bavarian assault. At 2:30 PM on 5 September, Castelnau telegraphed the Grand quartier général (GQG): “I cannot depend upon a prolonged resistance.” He suggested a “timely withdrawal” behind the Meurthe and Moselle rivers, to the Forest of Haye or to the heights of Saffais and Belchamp—and perhaps even beyond.66
Joffre was not amused. Unlike his German counterpart, he never lost sight of the overall campaign and never gave in to momentary situations, no matter how dire they appeared. Thus, he began his “très urgent” epistle to Castelnau at 1:10 PM on 6 September with a lecture on strategy. “The principal mass of our forces is engaged in a general battle [along the Marne] in which the Second Army, too remote from the scene of operations, cannot take part.” If Second Army suddenly retreated to the line Belfort-Épinal, the two French armies in Lorraine would be separated from each other and defeated piecemeal. If First Army joined Castelnau’s retreat, all of Franche Comté, along with its capital, Besançon, and the major fortress Belfort, would be lost and the right wing threatened with envelopment and annihilation. Joffre deemed it “preferable” that Castelnau maintained his “present position” at Nancy “pending the outcome of this bat
tle.”67 The “little monk in boots” well understood the understated meaning of the term préférable. Incredibly, after the war he would claim that he had heroically resisted Joffre’s “order” to abandon Nancy. It became another legend of the Battle of the Marne.
Castelnau dug in. The French right in the area of Rehainviller-Gerbéviller held firm, staunchly defended by Taverna’s XVI Corps and Espinasse’s XV Corps, shattered earlier at Sarrebourg, as well as by Bigot’s 74th RID and Charles Holender’s 64th RID. The center and the left of the line from the Sânon River to the Forest of Champenoux saw the fiercest fighting, with outposts and villages frequently passing from one hand into the other.