The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

  Interestingly, Tappen rejected all suggestions that the OHL, or at least a small operations staff, move up to the front behind the German right wing on the grounds of “technical difficulties as well as stodginess.”68 One can only speculate whether Moltke, for his part, remembered that in 1866 his uncle had supervised the movements of his armies during the Battle of Königgrätz from the Roskosberg, above the Bistritz River, and that he had likewise led from the front in 1870 during the Battle of Sedan from a ridge high above the Meuse River near Frénois.

  ALL THE WHILE, the fighting west of the Ourcq raged on. Blondlat’s Moroccan brigade and the right wing of Louis Leguay’s 55th RID first went into action on the French right flank on 6 September. Linsingen’s II Corps, just arrived, furiously counterattacked with heavy artillery. Soon the entire front from Barny to Trilport erupted with murderous artillery fire and spirited infantry charges. The French initially gained the upper hand, but by nightfall both sides fell exhausted into defensive positions. In the ensuing dark, the Germans could make out the glow of Paris’s massive searchlights.

  Linsingen urged greater speed on Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps; it arrived the next morning, 7 September. As senior corps commander, Linsingen took command and repositioned his forces: From right to left, Sixt von Arnim was to charge the front at Étavigny; Gronau was to hold the middle at Trocy-en-Multien; Kurt von Trossel with 3d ID and 22d RID was to cover Gronau’s left near Germigny-l’Évêque; and Linsingen was to secure the left flank at Trilport. Maunoury in the meantime received reinforcements from Paris: Céleste Déprez’s 61st RID, Drude’s 45th ID, and the rest of Vautier’s VII Corps, just up from Alsace. Unbeknown to the French commander, a German reserve infantry brigade under Rudolf von Lepel had been released by the surrender of Brussels and was marching south toward Nanteuil-le-Haudouin—against Sixth Army’s left flank. Still, Maunoury enjoyed a numerical advantage of thirty-two infantry battalions and two cavalry divisions.

  Maunoury vigorously resumed the offensive at 7 AM on 7 September.69 In the middle of the front, Gronau’s fatigued IV Reserve Corps, stiffened by the arrival of Sixt von Arnim’s 15th Brigade, threw Léon Lombard’s 63d RID into panic with a hurricane bombardment followed by massed infantry charges. Only a heroic counterattack by Colonel Robert Nivelle’s 5th Artillery Regiment of 45th ID—firing shells from its 75s into the massed German infantry at the rate of twenty rounds per minute—prevented a complete collapse.* French Fifth Group of Reserve Divisions likewise was driven back, and its commander, de Lamaze, seriously considered falling back on Paris. On the southern flank, the men of 8th RID were “in a state of extreme fatigue,” and Lartigue was forced to have the division stand down around noon. In the north, Sixt von Arnim’s 16th Brigade shattered Déprez’s 61st RID, but a combination of exhaustion after its nightlong forced march and a counterattack by Vautier’s VII Corps prevented it from enveloping the French left flank. Still, 61st RID fell back as far as Nanteuil-le-Haudouin. Maunoury sent Louis de Trentinian’s 7th ID from IV Corps to take its place in the left of his line. Galliéni rushed François Ganeval’s 62d RID out to hold the line at the Ourcq.

  At 10 AM on 7 September, First Army headquarters received word that an aviator had spotted two columns of British soldiers slowly moving north out of the Forest of Crécy toward the joint of German First and Second armies.70 Kluck and Kuhl could wait no longer. Still without a reply from Bülow to their request for reinforcements, they seized the initiative and ordered Ewald von Lochow’s III Corps and Quast’s IX Corps, both temporarily assigned to Bülow, to leave Second Army’s right wing in broad daylight and quick-march to the Ourcq.71 For Kuhl had decided to master what now threatened to be assaults on both his wings by way of an all-out offensive on the right, designed to crush Maunoury’s Sixth Army before the BEF could engage German First or Second army.

  Incredibly, neither Kluck nor Kuhl was aware that General von Bülow shortly after midnight on 7 September had already pulled back his right wing, fearing that his soldiers were too exhausted to ward off another French frontal attack. Bülow withdrew III and IX corps of First Army as well as his own X Reserve Corps fifteen to twenty kilometers behind the shelter, such as it was, of the Petit Morin River—some eight hours before First Army’s duumvirate ordered them to march to the Ourcq. Bülow radioed Moltke of his action at 2 AM. He declined to inform Kluck via dispatch rider. By his action, Bülow created a gap of some thirty kilometers between the right wing of Second Army and the left wing of First Army. Kluck and Kuhl, by recalling III and IX corps, widened that gap to about fifty kilometers. Failure to communicate once again bedeviled the German army commanders on the right pivot wing.

  Having pulled back his right wing, Bülow next ordered an attack by his left wing. Realizing that Second Army was down to the strength of only three full corps, he once again enlisted the help of two Saxon infantry divisions from Hausen’s Third Army.72 General von Einem, commanding VII Corps on Second Army’s right, thought the plan madness: At the very moment that the enemy might discover and then exploit the German gap astride the Petit Morin, “Bülow shifts the center of gravity to his left wing!” What use would victory there be, he mused, “if we are enveloped on the right and separated from First Army?”73

  In fact, the German position on the Marne and the Ourcq defies rational analysis. Without firm direction from the OHL, both commanders had developed their own operational concepts. Bülow insisted that First Army’s primary function, as laid down in Moltke’s General Directive of 5 September, was to protect his right flank against a possible French sortie out of le camp retranché de Paris. Thus, it was paramount that Kluck break off the battle with Maunoury and shift his army left to join up with Second Army’s right wing. As well, it was critical that Hausen’s Third Army defeat Foch’s Ninth Army on Bülow’s left flank before Fanchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army could exploit Second Army’s exposed right flank. Kluck, on the other hand, insisted that the only way to break the French offensive was to destroy Maunoury’s Sixth Army before the British, whose fighting capabilities he by and large denigrated, could take their place on the left flank of French Fifth Army south of the Grand Morin River. Bülow made no effort to coordinate the operations of the two “strike” armies or to bring Moltke fully into the calculus.74 Just after 7 PM on 7 September, Richthofen’s cavalry corps reported that British advance guards had crossed the Grand Morin at La Ferté-Gaucher. They were about to enter the gap in the German line.

  For the Germans, 7 September was the critical day in the Battle of the Marne. Kluck and Kuhl, as noted previously, had hastily taken II and IV corps out of the line on the Marne and rushed them north to aid Gronau’s corps on the Ourcq. Bülow had then withdrawn III and IX corps as well as X Reserve Corps behind the Petit Morin—only to have had Kluck and Kuhl eight hours later order III and IX corps to leave Bülow’s right wing and to march north in order to help defeat Maunoury’s French Sixth Army. None of these orders was shared, much less discussed beforehand. In the process, as is well known, Bülow, Kluck, and Kuhl had created a fifty-kilometer-wide gap between First and Second armies—one into which the BEF was slowly stumbling as it headed north between Changis, on the Marne, and Rebais, south of the Petit Morin. The eighth of September would thus see two distinct battles: Kluck versus Maunoury on the Ourcq, and Bülow versus Franchet d’Espèrey on the two Morins.

  Kluck’s bold, aggressive decision remains highly controversial. He had already “disobeyed” Moltke’s General Directive to remain “echeloned” to the right and behind Second Army. Now he literally snatched two corps from Bülow’s right wing and rushed them to the Ourcq. To Kluck, time was the critical factor. Could he defeat Maunoury before the BEF drove through the gap in the German line and into the back of either First Army or Second Army? How long could Richthofen’s and Marwitz’s cavalry corps hold the line of the Grand Morin against the three advancing British corps? When would Lepel’s brigade finally arrive on the left flank of French Sixth Army? Kluck answered those rhetori
cal musings by ordering “every man and every horse” west of the Ourcq to deliver the final and fatal blow to Maunoury’s Sixth Army. It was a last-minute, all-out gamble. The campaign in the west hung on it.

  At Luxembourg, General von Moltke yet again was on the verge of panic. “Today a great decision will come about,” he wrote his wife, Eliza, on 7 September, “since yesterday our entire army is fighting from Paris to Upper Alsace. Should I have to give my life today to bring about victory, I would do it gladly a thousand times.” He lamented the “streams of blood” that had already been shed and the “countless” homes and lives that had been destroyed. “I often shudder when I think of this and I feel as though I need to accept responsibility for this dreadfulness. …”75 These were not the words of a great captain.

  GERMAN SECOND ARMY on the Marne was a battered force. It had marched 440 kilometers under a broiling sun along dusty roads. Food and fodder had been irregular, and the half-ripe fruit and oats it found along the way only added to the misery of man and beast alike. It had fought most of the major engagements on the right wing—Liège, Namur, Charleroi, and Guise/Saint-Quentin. From around 260,000 soldiers at the start of August, it was down to 154,000 by the end of the month. About 9,000 men had succumbed to heat sores, exhaustion, and hunger; 12,151 were listed as wounded; and 5,061 had been killed.76 After three days on the Petit Morin, Bülow informed the OHL, his army had shrunk from its initial seven to less than four corps, many at least 20 percent understrength.77 In the only change in a major command undertaken by the German army during the “march to the Marne,” Bülow replaced Guenther von Kirchbach with Johannes von Eben as commander of X Reserve Corps.

  On 6 September, Eben’s corps ran hard up against Gilbert Defforges’s X Corps between Montmirail and Le Thoult as it came to the aid of Otto von Emmich’s X Corps on his left. A violent battle ensued. Franchet d’Espèrey had admonished his troops not to surrender an inch of sacred soil. Fifth Army managed to advance five kilometers along its entire front, but at Le Thoult French X Corps was thrown five kilometers back across the Petit Morin. Both sides were at the limit of their physical capabilities. Richard von Süsskind, commanding 2d Reserve Guard Division with Eben’s X Reserve Corps, reported, “The division is very exhausted. Though still able to attack, it is no longer in condition to continue the offense.”78 He spoke as well for many other division commanders.

  When Bülow ordered First Army’s III and IX corps as well as his own X Reserve Corps fifteen kilometers behind the Petit Morin early in the morning of 7 September, one of Eben’s battalions of 74th Reserve Infantry Regiment (RIR) did not receive the order to withdraw. Quickly surrounded on all sides and with its back against the Petit Morin, it was mercilessly gunned down in what is called “the massacre of Guebarré Farm”: 93 men surrendered and 450 lay dead. The French had ignored the white handkerchiefs that German soldiers had tied to their rifles and raised above the trenches as a sign of surrender.79

  The situation on Bülow’s left flank became critical. After an intensive night bombardment—unusual at this stage in the war—a brigade of Théophile Jouannic’s 36th ID from Louis de Maud’huy’s XVIII Corps around noon on 8 September surprised and threw terror into several companies of German VII Corps at Marchais-en-Brie, just northwest of Montmirail.80 Although minor in itself, the brilliant French tactical action at Marchais-en-Brie constituted what historian Sewell Tyng has labeled one of those “there the battle was won” defining moments of the large Battle of the Marne.81 For the French assault had tremendous operational and even strategic ramifications. With German X Reserve Corps completely flanked from the west, Montmirail was indefensible. Moreover, Eben’s IX Reserve Corps was outflanked on both sides. Of much greater concern to Bülow and his chief of staff, Otto von Lauenstein, was that Second Army’s right wing, recently denuded of two corps bound for the Ourcq, was further jeopardized. They ordered VII Corps and X Reserve Corps to fall back ten kilometers east to the line Margny–Le Thoult. It was a major mistake. The two corps on Second Army’s right flank now stood from north to south, facing west, and were thus utterly unable to shift right and close the gap with Kluck’s First Army. In fact, that gap as a result had widened by fifteen kilometers.82 Bülow’s right wing “was no longer threatened, it was turned.” The “path to the Marne” lay open for the left-wing corps of French Fifth Army—and the BEF.

  Ever so slowly, Sir John French’s forces, enhanced by William Pulteney’s III Corps, on the morning of 6 September had begun its march to the front. It was headed for the open spaces of the Brie Plateau, a rich agricultural area best known for its cheeses. The plateau was cut east to west by the ravines of the Grand Morin, Petit Morin, Marne, Upper Ourcq, Vesle, Aisne, and Ailette rivers, passable only on bridges. To the north lay the three great forests of Crécy, d’Armainvilliers, and Malvoisine.83 The BEF deployed in an easterly direction from Tournan-en-Brie, Fontenay-Trésigny, and Rozay-en-Brie (which the British called Rozoy), almost twenty kilometers behind the line where Joffre had wanted it to start. “Desperate Frankie,” as the British jokingly called Franchet d’Espèrey, was furious and repeatedly demanded a more rapid advance. But at Rozoy, Sir Douglas Haig, feeling “uneasy about his left,” where he suspected units of Marwitz’s cavalry corps, halted the advance of I Corps, allowing Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps to make good its escape to the Ourcq.84 Six pilots of the Royal Flying Corps found only open roads ahead of Haig. Thus, when Sir John French ordered Haig to resume his advance at 3:30 PM, I Corps unsurprisingly encountered only abandoned positions. This notwithstanding, by nightfall Haig was roughly twelve kilometers behind the day’s objective. He had lost a mere seven men killed and forty-four wounded.

  The next day, 7 September, aerial reconnaissance, in the stilted language of the British official history, again “confirmed the general impression that the enemy was withdrawing northward.”85 The day brought little action, just a continued hesitant advance by the BEF into the gap between German First and Second armies. Sir John had long ceased to be the dashing cavalry officer who had ridden to glory fourteen years earlier during the relief of Kimberley in the Boer War. “Old Archie” Murray, his chief of staff, continued to urge caution. The men tramped happily north singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and certain of their guardian, the “Angel of Mons.” Marwitz’s thin cavalry screen could undertake only brief sorties to block the BEF crossing the Grand Morin.

  Not only the French had become exasperated at the slow pace of the British advance. Lord Ernest Hamilton of Eleventh Hussars noted, “In the strict sense there was no battle during the British advance. The fighting … was desultory. … The advance at first was slow and cautious.”86 John Charteris, Haig’s chief of intelligence, observed that although “keen,” the men “moved absurdly slowly.” The cavalry, Haig’s true love, “were the worst of all, for they were right behind [!] the infantry.”87 Exasperated, Galliéni at Paris dispatched Lartigue’s 8th ID south of Meaux to establish contact between the BEF and Franchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army.88 It was a murderous advance. The Germans held the seventy-to one-hundred-meter-high ridges above Meaux, their machine guns well concealed on the wooded crests of the Marne, and poured lethal fire into the French ranks crossing the valley floor below them.

  On the diplomatic front, Joffre moved quickly to intervene when it seemed to him that Galliéni was driving the British too hard and thereby arousing “the touchiness of Field Marshal French.” On 7 September, he cabled Horatio Herbert Lord Kitchener in London to extend his “warmest thanks” for Sir John’s “constant,” “precious,” and “energetic” support of the Allied attack.89 Alliance cohesion was secured.

  At 10:10 AM on 8 September, German Aircraft B75 reported that the BEF was advancing “more rapidly” from La Ferté-Gaucher and Rebais in the general direction of Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin. Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps was in the center of the line, flanked by Haig’s I Corps on its right and “Putty” Pulteney’s III Corps on its left.90 It was another sunny day. By noon
, the BEF had reached the Petit Morin, a shallow stream barely six meters wide. The Royal Flying Corps reported only small enemy columns ahead. Marwitz’s cavalry corps fought a brief but gallant rear action—and headed north. Then a “violent thunderstorm” with “torrents of rain”91 slowed the BEF’s further advance. An impatient Joffre at 8 PM dashed off a communiqué to Sir John French confirming the gap between the two enemy armies and deeming it “essential” that the BEF exploit this by marching northeast before the Germans reinforced their cavalry with infantry and artillery. The BEF, in his opinion, should cross the Marne between Nogent-l’Artaud and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where the winding river was roughly sixty meters wide.92 In three days and while outnumbering the enemy at least ten to one, “Johnnie” French’s army had advanced just forty kilometers. The BEF’s importance lay in its role as an “army in being,” to borrow a naval term.

  Joffre’s problems were not, however, confined to the Germans. On 8 September, the generalissimo discovered to his chagrin that Galliéni, in his capacity as military governor of Paris, the previous day had cabled the government at Bordeaux for instructions on how to “evacuate the civilian population” of the capital’s outlying suburbs and instructed prefects and the police to find “emergency locations” for the evacuees.93 The usually aggressive governor, having pulled all units out of Paris to assist Maunoury on the Ourcq, for a brief moment was overcome by pessimism. If Maunoury were defeated, how could he hold the capital against Kluck’s expected assault? Joffre, barely able to control his anger, cabled War Minister Millerand to “rescind” Galliéni’s “dangerous” communication. “I remain the only judge of what is worth saying about the operations. … The Military Governor of Paris is under my orders, and therefore does not have the right to correspond directly with the Government.”94 It was vintage Joffre.