The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

  For 8 September, Joffre ordered Sixth Army to “gain ground towards the north on the right bank of the Ourcq.”132 Instead, Maunoury decided to regain the terrain lost the previous night and to outflank German First Army from the north. It was a poor decision. After initially capturing some ground northeast of Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, the French advance was repulsed by Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps, reinforced by 6th ID from Lochow’s III Corps. A second assault into the center of the enemy line at Trocy-en-Multien was shattered by German artillery. Gronau held the heights east of Étrépilly, but at great cost. “Nearly everything in the front lines became unraveled,” he noted in the corps’ war diary, “without Reserves [and] waiting in vain for relief and reinforcement in searing heat and without water or food.”133 And on the south of the line, Trossel’s 3d ID, pressured both by Blondlat’s Moroccan brigade and by other French forces moving up from the Marne, smartly withdrew to the heights of Congis above the Thérouanne, destroying the Marne bridges on its left. Another day ended in deadlock and extreme exhaustion for both sides.

  Kluck remained downright dogged. His favorite maxim came from Julius Caesar: “In great and dangerous operations one must not think but rather act.”134 He decided that 9 September would be his supreme act. “The decision will be obtained tomorrow,” he informed Moltke on the night of 8 September, “by an enveloping attack on the north under the command of General von Quast starting from the region of Cuvergnon.” Lochow’s III Corps and Quast’s IX Corps had at last arrived on the Ourcq. To the north, Lepel’s 43d Reserve Infantry Brigade had come down from Brussels.135 At the eleventh hour, First Army would snatch victory from the jaws of stalemate.

  Galliéni sensed as much. Perhaps still remembering the brief bout of pessimism that he had experienced the day before, Galliéni admonished Maunoury late on 8 September that it was “essential” to maintain his position and hold ground “with all your energy.”136 The commander of Sixth Army hardly needed the reminder. While conceding that his “decimated and exhausted” troops were no longer able to mount an offensive, he nevertheless assured Joffre, “I AM resisting in all my positions.” If the German pressure became too brutal, he would “refuse” his left flank “little by little,” concentrate his force toward the north, and await “the offensive of the British and the Fifth Army” on Kluck’s southern flank.137 Joffre, fully appreciating Kluck’s “very violent attacks,” concurred. “Avoid any decisive action by withdrawing your left, if necessary, in the general direction of the Entrenched Camp of Paris.”138 More concretely, he dispatched Louis Comby’s 37th ID from Fifth Army to buttress the Ourcq front, and he urged Albert d’Amade’s group of territorial divisions standing east of Rouen to advance at great speed toward Beauvais and interdict Lepel’s brigade.

  Quast’s IX Corps spent much of the morning of 9 September undertaking a leisurely attack on Clément Buisson’s 1st CD and Aymard Dor de Lastours’s 3d CD, then shifted to a bombardment of Boëlle’s IV Corps while the infantry prepared for the decisive assault. Kluck grew impatient. Time was running out. Near daybreak, he had finally received word that Bülow had withdrawn his right wing north of the Petit Morin, from Montmirail to Margny to Le Thoult–Trosnay.139 This further widened the gap between First and Second armies, guarded now as before only by 2d CD and 9th CD as well as by Richard von Kraewel’s mixed brigade (units from Quast’s IX Corps). Between 8:28 and 9:11 AM, Kluck and Kuhl had received several dire messages from Marwitz and Richthofen. “Strong infantry and artillery across the Marne bridge at Charly.” The second was equally distressing, “Strong enemy infantry advancing via Charly and Nanteuil; 5th Cavalry Division and [2d Cavalry Division] have orders to attack.” A third message, repeating the second, broke off with an ominous, “I must leave immediately.”140

  Kuhl called a staff meeting. It was agreed to press the attack on French Sixth Army. Kluck waited impatiently for Quast (and Sixt von Arnim) to mount the infantry assault that would decide the Battle of the Ourcq. To avoid immediate exploitation of his left flank by the BEF, the French cavalry corps, and de Maud’huy’s XVIII Corps, now heading into the corridor between German First and Second armies, Kluck at 9:30 AM withdrew Linsingen’s II Corps to the line May-en-Multien–Coulombs-en-Valois and ordered it to front the danger emanating from the Marne.141 Just in time. Around noon, Bülow sent Kluck a dire message: “Airmen report advance of four long enemy columns toward the Marne. … Second Army initiates retreat, right flank on Damery [in fact, Dormans].”142

  Still, Kluck, furor Teutonicus personified, pressed on with the attack. “Every man,” he admonished one of Quast’s staff officers, “must be convinced that the enveloping attack” on French Sixth Army “must bring the decision.” He urged Quast to drive for the line Lévignen-Betz without delay. If the right wing reached Dammartin-sur-Tigeaux by nightfall, “all will have been won.”143 Once again, Quast ran up against Déprez’s 61st RID, and once again he put it to flight. An aviator reported that Lepel’s brigade had engaged Maunoury’s left flank at Baron, northwest of Nanteuil-le-Haudouin. At that very moment, a visitor from the OHL arrived at First Army headquarters: Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, on what undoubtedly is the most famous staff tour in military history.

  * Greenwich Mean Time. German accounts give German General Time (one hour later).

  * Or 230 kilometers by air.

  * In December 1916, Nivelle replaced Joffre as commander in chief of the French army.

  * Given the destruction by Allied air raids in 1945 of the records of Third Army’s Strategic (Ia) and Tactical (Ib) sections, Hausen’s unpublished memoirs are critical.

  † “Fix bayonets! Advance by rushes!”

  * Unfortunately, the loss of the war diary of 32d ID during the Allied bombing of Potsdam in 1945 denies clarity as to the motive for the halt.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DECISION: THE MARNE

  I don’t know who won the Battle of the Marne, but if it had been lost, I know who would have lost it.

  —JOSEPH JOFFRE

  “IF THE PESSIMISTIC OBERSTLEUTNANT HENTSCH HAD CRASHED INTO a tree … somewhere on his journey of 8 September, or if he had been shot by a French straggler, we would have had a ceasefire two weeks later and thereafter would have received a peace in which we could have asked for everything.”1 These pithy words, published in 1965 by Jenö von Egan-Krieger, who as Karl von Bülow’s deputy adjutant had witnessed the Battle of the Marne at Second Army headquarters, in many ways encapsulate the most persistent myth of the Marne. To wit, had Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch of the General Staff not arrived at Bülow’s headquarters at Montmort-Lucy late that afternoon and by way of his pessimistic assessment of the situation helped persuade Bülow to initiate Second Army’s (and thereafter First Army’s) retreat behind the Marne River over the next two days, victory over France would have been secured. After all, lead elements of Alexander von Kluck’s First Army were just thirty kilometers from Paris. Bülow’s Second Army likewise seemed to be pressing on the capital. Max von Hausen’s Third Army was poised to break through Ferdinand Foch’s Ninth Army at the Saint-Gond Marshes. The French government had fled to Bordeaux. Thus, for an entire school of German military officers and writers, the “miracle of the Marne” consisted of Hentsch’s fateful order to retreat.

  This line of argumentation is to be found not only in the vast memoir literature, but also in the fourth volume of the German official history, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918. Usually factual and understated in its judgments, the official history loses its objectivity with Hentsch’s mission—to which it dedicates about fifty pages.2 Its depiction of the events of 8 and 9 September is one uninterrupted saga of victorious advances: in the Argonne and Ardennes forests, at the Marais de Saint-Gond, and along the Ourcq River. Every German unit is on the threshold of a breakthrough; every French on the point of defeat. Exit Hentsch from the story, and victory is assured. Beyond Germany, U.S. Army chief of staff Peyton C. March after the war expressed amazement that Germany’s senior army com
manders had readily obeyed orders from “a perfectly unknown lieutenant colonel … far exceeding his authority,” and suggested that the Allies erect a monument in their “Hall of Fame” to honor Hentsch.3

  BEFORE ANALYZING THE FINAL, dramatic turn of events of the Marne, I owe the reader three brief discourses: Who was Richard Hentsch; on what documentary evidence can we evaluate his mission; and how did it fit into the German staff system of 1914?4 Born 18 December 1869, the son of an army sergeant in the Inspectorate of Barracks at Cologne in the Prussian Rhineland, Hentsch because of “difficult family relations” decided in 1888 to enter the Saxon rather than the Prussian army. After a brilliant performance at the War Academy in Berlin, he alternated assignments to both the Prussian and Saxon General Staffs with infantry commands. In 1912, he served with Saxon XII Army Corps and the following year, in the rank of major as operations officer, with Saxon XIX Corps at Leipzig. In April 1914, Hentsch was promoted to lieutenant colonel and returned to the Prussian General Staff in Berlin as chief of the Third Section (Intelligence). He was a heavy smoker and had developed gallbladder problems that made him irritable and almost unapproachable.

  Supporters and detractors alike agree that Hentsch was a superb, if somewhat pessimistic, military analyst. Colonel Max von Mutius, aide-de-camp to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914, recalled Hentsch as “an exceptional, talented officer endowed with clear and sober judgment.”5 General Hermann von Kuhl, who as chief of staff of First Army in September “vigorously” argued with Hentsch about the order to retreat from the Ourcq, was fair in his postwar assessment. Hentsch on numerous occasions had worked under Kuhl at the General Staff—most recently in the Third Section, which Hentsch inherited from Kuhl. “I knew him as a very intelligent, prudent and reserved staff officer,” Kuhl wrote, “in whom one could have absolute confidence.”6 Similarly, Gerhard Tappen, chief of operations in 1914, was not spare with praise after the war. He called Hentsch “an unusually gifted General Staff officer” who impressed on the basis of his “firm and precise nature” as well as his “calm, clear and convincing reasoning.”7 After the Marne, Hentsch served in the campaigns against Serbia and Romania (1915–17) and received the order Pour le Mérite while with Army Group Mackensen in September 1917. He died at Bucharest in February 1918 after a gallbladder operation.

  BATTLE OF THE MARNE, 1914

  For all the rivers of ink spilled about the so-called Hentsch mission,8 there exists a single contemporary document: his report to the General Staff on 15 September 1914.* This is extremely important in light of the fact that Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke never put his instructions to Hentsch on paper; that neither Moltke nor Hentsch made notes of their final discussion “under four eyes” before the lieutenant colonel left Luxembourg; that the only two officers who accompanied Hentsch in his staff car (Captains Georg König and Hans Koeppen) participated in just some of Hentsch’s discussions with the various army commanders and their staffs; and that the other eyewitness accounts by General Staff officers Wilhelm von Dommes and Gerhard Tappen9 were submitted to the Reichsarchiv a decade after the Marne as it produced the critical fourth volume, The Marne Campaign—The Battle, of its official history.† Indeed, the Hentsch mission remained shrouded in the “fog of uncertainty” even for the Reichsarchiv historians in the 1920s, when they discovered that the General Staff’s files on it “contained as good as nothing.”10I have reconstructed Hentsch’s staff tour on the basis of 1914 diary excerpts that were submitted to the Reichsarchiv by leading staff officers and front commanders in the early 1920s, and which became available only after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1990.

  Third, Hentsch’s mission was not a “one-off,” an isolated shot in the dark, but rather consistent with what one scholar has called the “Tappen method.”11 As noted in chapters 3 and 7, Moltke and Tappen had used “special emissaries” to communicate with Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s Sixth Army in Lorraine. Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm von Dommes, Major Max Bauer, General Ludwig von Sieger, and Major Erich von Redern had all been sent to Rupprecht’s headquarters not with specific written orders but simply with general talking points. All four had no authority to direct Sixth Army’s operations. One, Dommes, had even been warned by Kaiser Wilhelm II “to avoid anything embarrassing that might give his planned ‘suggestions’ the impression of an ‘order.’”12 Yet in each case, Rupprecht and his chief of staff, Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen, had understood the nature of those missions as representing the “thoughts” of the Army Supreme Command (OHL). Hentsch’s mission was thus consistent with established General Staff practices.

  THE MOOD AT THE OHL on the morning of 8 September can only be described as bordering on panic.13 Moltke had received no word from First or Second armies the past two days. Both were reported to be within striking distance of Paris, yet one (First) had cut sharply across the front of the other (Second) at the Marne. French chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre had launched a massive counterattack along the entire front from Paris to Verdun. A new French Sixth Army seemed to be trying to envelop First Army’s right flank on the Ourcq. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) ever so slowly was marching into the fifty-kilometer-wide gap between First and Second armies. Moltke, fearing that First Army had already been attacked in the rear and was in danger of being ground up between French Sixth Army and the BEF, desperately needed clarity. He believed that neither he nor Tappen could be spared at Luxembourg and hence decided to dispatch another emissary. Dommes, chief of the Political Section and just promoted to colonel, volunteered. Moltke instead chose Hentsch because he had visited both Bülow’s and Kluck’s headquarters three days earlier and thus was better informed on the military situation at the Marne and the Ourcq.

  During the intense discussions among the four officers—Moltke, Tappen, Hentsch, and Dommes—in Tappen’s office, Moltke most likely gave Hentsch powers to initiate a general withdrawal of the right wing to the line Sainte-Menehould–Reims–Fismes–Soissons if First Army’s predicament made such a move “necessary.” Hentsch took this to constitute “full power of authority” (Vollmacht) to act in Moltke’s name.14 This certainly is what he shared with Captain König during their drive to the front. At a final meeting alone with Moltke sometime around 9 AM* on 8 September, Hentsch—according to Wilhelm II and half a dozen General Staff officers at the OHL—received no word to dissuade him of this interpretation.15 At 10 AM Hentsch, along with Captains König and Koeppen, left Luxembourg to visit Fifth, Fourth, Third, Second, and First armies.16 He decided on his own to undertake a grand tour of the entire front from the Argonne Forest to the Ourcq River rather than to proceed directly to Second and First armies. He was mentally “confident” and physically “fresh,” and showed no signs of the gallbladder ailment. But, as he confided to Captain König, he regretted that Moltke had declined to issue him orders in writing and that the chief of the General Staff had not gone to the front in person, or at least sent a more senior officer, such as Deputy Chief of Staff Hermann von Stein or Colonel Tappen. He feared that he would be made the “scapegoat” for whatever action he took.17

  The small motorcade arrived at Fifth Army headquarters in Varennes-en-Argonne at 1 PM on 8 September. Hentsch was pleased to learn that Crown Prince Wilhelm planned to storm Forts Troyon and Les Paroches the next day.18 He then continued to Fourth Army headquarters, arriving at Courtisols, on the Vesle River, at 3:15 PM. He received the welcome news that Duke Albrecht would advance along the Marne-Rhine Canal the next day. In short, both armies were engaged in heavy fighting in the rugged Argonne terrain. Each hoped to mount flanking offensives by their respective right wings: Wilhelm to envelop French Third Army east of Revigny and Albrecht to surround French Fourth Army east of Vitry-le-François. Hentsch used Fourth Army’s telephone link to inform Luxembourg that there was no urgency.19

  Hentsch left Courtisols at 4:30 PM for Châlons-sur-Marne. Hausen was at the front, but Chief of Staff Ernst von Hoeppner optimistically reported that Th
ird Army, despite the precarious position of its right wing due to having received its eighth and ninth SOS calls in two days from Second Army, was making “victorious but slow progress.”20 In fact, the audacious bayonet attack of Hausen’s Third Army had been stopped by French Ninth Army. Still, for Hentsch, no urgency. Shortly before leaving Châlons at 5:45 PM, Hentsch radioed Moltke: “3. Army’s situation and conception [of operations] entirely favorable.”21 Next, he was off to Second Army headquarters at Montmort-Lucy, where he arrived at 6:45 PM. Bülow returned from his command post at Fromentières half an hour later. The ensuing meeting was greatly to shape the Battle of the Marne.

  On arriving at the Château de Montmort, Hentsch’s cautious optimism waned. The shafts of the wagons of Second Army’s headquarters staff all pointed north, an indication of a planned withdrawal.* He held a brief, first meeting with Chief of Staff Otto von Lauenstein. At first, Lauenstein tried to reassure Hentsch that all was well. That very afternoon Bülow had rushed to the front at Champaubert upon receiving word that Louis Franchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army had broken through the seam between Otto von Emmich’s X Army Corps and Guenther von Kirchbach’s X Reserve Corps—only to return “laughing and in high spirits” because the report had proved to be false.22 But then Lauenstein became more serious. The day’s offensive by the left wing of Second Army had met with some success, but the right wing between Montmirail and Chézy had barely been able to maintain its positions and was in danger of being enveloped by French Fifth Army. Hentsch in the name of the OHL expressed the view that First Army would not be able to ward off French Sixth Army’s offensive emanating from Paris, and that “enemy formations” were exploiting the fifty-kilometer-wide corridor between First and Second armies.23