A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Certainly the BEF, compared with the vast forces that France and Germany had already sent to the Western Front, seemed so small as to risk being trampled. Kaiser Wilhelm, drawing upon his deep reserves of foolishness in exhorting his troops to victory, had called it Britain’s “contemptibly little army.” But man for man the BEF was as good as any fighting force in the world: well trained and disciplined, accustomed to being sent out to the far corners of the world whenever the empire’s great navy was not enough. The BEF was also an appealingly human, high-spirited army. Even the rank and file were career soldiers for the most part, volunteers drawn mainly from Britain’s urban poor and working classes, more loyal to their regiments and to one another than to any sentimental notions of imperial glory, and ready to make a joke of anything. When they learned what the kaiser had said about them, they began to call themselves “the Old Contemptibles.” When the first shiploads of them crossed from Southampton to Le Havre, they found the harbor jammed with crowds who burst into the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” The thousands of British troops—Tommies, they were called at home—responded by bursting spontaneously not into “God Save the King” but into one of the indelicate music hall songs with which they entertained themselves while on the march. The French watched and listened reverently, some with their hands on their hearts, not understanding a word and thinking that this must be the anthem of the United Kingdom.

  The BEF moved first to an assembly point just south of Belgium, and on August 20 began moving north to link up with Lanrezac’s Fifth Army and extend the French left wing. They were still en route when, on August 21, the units that Lanrezac had positioned near Charleroi on the River Sambre were struck by Bülow’s German Second Army. Sir John French, when he learned of this encounter, ordered his First Corps (two divisions commanded by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien) to move up toward the town of Mons, about eight miles west of Charleroi. From there, it was to cover Lanrezac’s flank.

  On the next day, with the Germans and French alternately attacking each other on the Sambre (Ludendorff, who happened to be in the area as a member of Bülow’s staff, organized the seizure of the bridges across the river), a scouting party of British cavalry encountered German cavalry coming out of the north. The Germans withdrew. The British, savvy veterans that they were, dismounted and began using their trenching tools to throw up earthwork defenses while Smith-Dorrien’s infantry came up from behind and joined them. They didn’t know what to expect when the sun rose, but they intended to be as ready as it was possible for men armed with little more than rifles to be.

  Ahead of them in the darkness was the entire German First Army. Its commander, Kluck (it was a gift to the amateur songwriters of the BEF that his name rhymed with their favorite word), knew nothing except that his scouts had run into armed horsemen, and that they claimed those horsemen were British. It did not sound serious; Kluck’s intelligence indicated that the main British force was either not yet in France or, at worst, still a good many miles away. There seemed no need to mount an immediate attack.

  Kluck at this point was an angry, frustrated man who didn’t want to be where he was and in fact shouldn’t have been there. He had recently been put under the orders of the more cautious Bülow, whose army was on his left. The Germans, like the French, were still in the early stages of learning to manage warfare on this scale, and they had not yet seen the value of creating a new level of command to direct forces as large as their right wing. Neither side had yet seen that when two or three armies are operating together and need to be coordinated, the answer is not to put the leader of one of those armies in charge of the others. It is almost inevitable, human nature being what it is, that a commander made first among equals in this way will give too much weight to the objectives and needs of his own army.

  General Alexander von Kluck Commander, German First Army

  An angry, frustrated man— and eager for a fight.

  General Otto von Bülow Commander, German Second Army

  Favored direct attack rather than encirclement.

  This is exactly what happened between the rough-hewn Kluck and the careful, highborn Bülow. Kluck had wanted to swing wide to the right, well clear of the French. Bülow insisted that he stay close, so that their two armies—plus Max von Hausen’s Third Army on his left—would be able to deal with Lanrezac together. Kluck protested, but to no effect. Bülow was a solid professional who had long held senior positions in the German army, and a decade earlier he had been a leading candidate to succeed Schlieffen as head of the general staff, losing out to Moltke largely because he favored a direct attack on the French in case of war, rather than envelopment. His approach in August 1914 was conventional military practice; if his army locked head to head with Lanrezac’s, Kluck and Hausen would be able to protect his flanks and then try to work around Lanrezac’s flanks and surround him. But Bülow’s orthodoxy (obviously the war would have opened in an entirely different way if he rather than Moltke had been in charge of planning since 1905) cost the Germans a huge opportunity. Left free to go where he wished, Kluck would have looped around not only the French but also the forward elements of the BEF. He then could have taken Smith-Dorrien’s corps in the flank, broken it up, and pushed its disordered fragments into Lanrezac’s flank. The possible consequences were incalculable; the destruction of Lanrezac’s army—of any of the armies in the long French line—could have led to a quick end to the war in the west. Continuing to protest, appealing to Moltke but finding no support there, Kluck had no choice but to follow orders. Doing so caused him to run directly into the head of the British forces, engage them where they were strongest instead of weakest, and give them a night to consolidate their defenses because he didn’t know he was faced with anything more dangerous than a roving cavalry detachment.

  On the morning of August 23 (a day marked by Japan’s declaration of war on Germany), Kluck ordered an artillery bombardment of the enemy positions in his path. When this ended at nine-thirty, thinking that the defenders must now be in disarray, his troops attacked—and were quickly shot to pieces in a field of fire so devastating that many of them thought they must be facing an army of machine guns. They attacked repeatedly and were cut down every time. What they were up against was the fruit of years of emphasis on what the British still called musketry. Every private in the BEF carried a .303 Lee Enfield rifle fitted with easily changed ten-round magazines and had been trained to hit a target fifteen times a minute at a range of three hundred yards. Most could do better than that. Every soldier was routinely given all the ammunition he wanted for practice, and high scores were rewarded with cash. These practices had been put in place after the South African War at the turn of the century, when the Tommies had found themselves outgunned by Boer farmers fighting as guerrillas, and this was the payoff.

  But as the day wore on, hour by hour and yard by bloody yard, the persistence of the Germans and the sheer weight of their numbers forced the British back. When the day ended, more than sixteen hundred of Smith-Dorrien’s men had been killed, and the Germans had lost at least five thousand. Kluck and his army had been stopped for a full day. In itself, one day meant little. But if the Germans could be stopped for another day and another after that, Moltke’s entire campaign would begin to fall to pieces.

  After sundown, the BEF’s Second Corps under Sir Douglas Haig having come forward to join Smith-Dorrien’s, the British again went to work on their defenses. But during the night an English liaison officer arrived at French’s headquarters with stunning news: Lanrezac, rather than holding his ground at Charleroi, was pulling back. This exposed the British right and gave them no choice but to pull back as well. French reacted bitterly. He regarded Lanrezac’s withdrawal—which probably saved his army and was conducted with great skill under difficult circumstances—as unnecessary. He had entered the war with a very British disdain for the French. That disdain now began to turn into entirely unjustified contempt.

  There arose in the aftermath of this bat
tle the strangest and most beautiful legend of the war. It was said that, when the British peril was at its height, a majestic figure had appeared high in the sky with arm upraised. Some said it had been pointing to victory, others that it held back the Germans as the Tommies got away. It came to be known as the Angel of Mons. Even more colorful was the simultaneous legend of the Archers of Agincourt. In the late Middle Ages at Agincourt—not a great distance from Mons—English yeomen armed with longbows had won a great victory over a much bigger force of mounted and armored French knights. Four hundred and ninety-nine years later there were stories of German soldiers found dead at Mons with arrows through their bodies.

  It was all nonsense. The disappointing truth, established beyond doubt by postwar investigations, is that the legends were journalistic inventions, and that they first emerged long after the battle. No one ever found a witness who had personally seen an angel, arrows, or anything of the kind.

  When the Germans resumed their attack on the morning of August 24, braced this time for tough resistance, they found nothing in front of them but abandoned entrenchments. They got back on the road, caught up with the BEF after two days of hard pursuit, and on August 26 hit Smith-Dorrien’s corps at Le Cateau. Under severe pressure, his men exhausted, Smith-Dorrien found it impossible to disengage and resume his retreat when ordered to do so by French. He was the proverbial man with a wolf by the ears, unable to take the initiative and unable to escape. He organized a rear guard that managed by the narrowest of margins to fight off envelopment. Le Cateau turned into a bigger, bloodier fight than the one at Mons, with fifty-five thousand British desperately holding off one hundred and forty thousand Germans. Ultimately, when the Germans found it necessary to pull back and regroup, the British were able to resume their retreat. They had taken some eight thousand casualties (more than Wellington’s at Waterloo) and lost thirty-six pieces of artillery. And already-strained relationships within the BEF command were worsened. French, who had disliked Smith-Dorrien for years and had not wanted him in his command, refused to believe that he had not been willfully disobedient. Smith-Dorrien, for his part, thought that Haig had been too slow in entering the fights both at Mons and at Le Cateau. It is a mark of how desperate the British were for something to feed into their propaganda machine that Le Cateau was celebrated, at the time and long afterward, as a British triumph. The only thing to celebrate was that the BEF was still intact when it made its escape.

  Elsewhere along the Western Front the Germans were scoring victory after victory. They were turning back French assaults, achieving a high rate of success with their own offensives, and usually losing far fewer men. The reason is not to be found in numbers; as we have seen, the two sides were numerically just about equal. Even the German right wing had no consistent manpower advantage. A French counterattack that marked the climax of the Charleroi fight, for example, ended with three German divisions not only stopping nine of Lanrezac’s divisions but ultimately driving them back seven miles—even though the French force included ten regiments of elite colonial troops, veterans akin to the men of the BEF. Clearly the Germans were doing something right, or the French were doing something wrong, or both.

  The answer is “both.” In the face of repeated bad results, generals throughout the French army threw their infantry against the Germans whatever the circumstances and kept doing so no matter how grisly the results. Lanrezac was a rare exception; he had been reluctant to attack at Charleroi, doing so only because two of his corps commanders insisted. Joffre’s other commanders believed that French troops were supposed to charge, not crawl in the earth like worms. They were to win at the point of their bayonets, not by firing steel-clad packets of high explosives into the sky. The Germans, by contrast, quickly became adroit, upon making contact with the enemy, at digging in, waiting to be attacked, and mowing down the attackers with rifle fire, machine guns capable of firing up to six hundred heavy-caliber rounds per minute, and above all artillery. (From the start of the war to the end, cannon would account for most of the killing.) When the attackers fell back, the Germans would continue punishing them with their field artillery, firing shrapnel and high explosives. Then they would come out of their holes and keep the fleeing enemy on the move. From the start they were even better than the British at creating defenses for themselves with the trenching tools every man carried plus picks and shovels brought forward by combat engineers. The difference in the tactics of the two sides explains why, despite the lives they squandered at Mons and Le Cateau and later in other, bigger fights, the Germans had significantly lower casualties on the Western Front in 1914 than the French and British.

  But as French casualties climbed without producing a single victory of consequence—it was “the most terrible August in the history of the world,” said British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Joffre found it necessary to conclude that the French army’s “cult of the offensive” had to be abandoned. On August 24 he unhappily announced that the armies of France were for the time being “forced to take defensive action based on our fortified positions and on the strong natural obstacles provided by the terrain, so as to hold on as long as possible, taking, meanwhile, all steps to wear down the enemy’s strength and resume the offensive in due course.” He ordered his left wing—his Third, Fourth, and Fifth Armies—to begin what would come to be known as the Great Retreat. Day after day, in relentless heat, weary French soldiers in their hundreds of thousands trudged farther and farther south. The BEF marched with them, covering more than a hundred and ninety miles in thirteen days. One of its battalions retreated fifty-five miles in thirty-six hours.

  Joffre also ordered the creation of a new army to lengthen his left. This Sixth Army was to be “capable of taking up the offensive again while the other armies contained the enemy’s effort for the requisite period,” Joffre said, but its position near Paris obviously had defensive implications. The Germans’ continued pursuit of Lanrezac’s army after the defeat at Le Cateau had awakened the government to the fact that Paris was in jeopardy. Minister of War Adolphe Messimy examined the city’s defenses and was alarmed by what he found. They were in a sorry state of neglect, at least in part because the army’s fixation on the offensive had caused it to give little attention to defenses of any kind.

  Messimy turned not to Joffre but to General Joseph Gallieni for help, asking him to become military governor of Paris and offering him near-dictatorial powers to organize a defense of the city. Gallieni, who had been in semiretirement at the start of the war, agreed on one condition. He said he would need not only the garrison forces inside the city walls but a substantial mobile force capable of engaging the Germans as they approached. At least six corps would be needed for this purpose, he said. (A corps was usually made up of two, sometimes three divisions of nearly twenty thousand men each.) Messimy agreed without hesitation, but in fact he had no authority to fulfill his pledge. It was Joffre alone who decided the deployment of troops, and Joffre showed no interest in assisting, or even consulting with, either Gallieni or the government.

  Nevertheless, Gallieni set to work immediately to ready Paris for a siege, bringing herds of livestock inside the walls to provide a supply of food, installing new lines of trenches, positioning artillery, and demolishing buildings to give the guns a clear line of fire. As this work proceeded, a political crisis erupted over the city’s failure to start preparing earlier, the government fell, and Messimy was displaced (in part, ironically, for refusing to agree to the dismissal of Joffre). He took up his reserve army commission and went off to the front as a major. When Gallieni finally got his mobile force, it came to him in the form of Joffre’s new Sixth Army, which was still in the early stages of being assembled. The first elements of this army, many of them brought in by train from stabilizing sectors at the eastern end of the front, were moved inside the Paris defensive perimeter as part of the Great Retreat. They were completely out of touch with Lanrezac and the BEF and not nearly ready for action in any case. Joffre evidently deci
ded that he might as well let Gallieni have them, if only temporarily and if only to quiet the complaints coming from the government.

  Behind the retreating French armies, sometimes even beside them in the spreading confusion, marched masses of Germans, tired but energized by the thought that they had the enemy on the run, that victory lay ahead. Joffre’s plan was to pull back only as far as a line along the east-west course of the River Somme, call a halt there and, when circumstances were right, counterattack. This plan proved infeasible; when the French got to the Somme, the enemy was still right behind them. They had no choice but to cross the river and keep going.

  Nobody, not even the high generals in their headquarters, had a detailed understanding of what was happening along the front. British and French newspapers carried hair-raising but inspiring stories of how the Germans, the Huns, were committing mass suicide in throwing themselves against the guns and bayonets of the valiant defenders of civilization. In the German papers it was civilization’s defenders who were advancing victoriously, moving constantly forward on the soil of a nation that had conspired to destroy their homeland. On both sides, anything that wasn’t an outright defeat was made a cause for celebration, and every setback was either treated as a canny tactical adjustment or, more commonly, ignored. Journalists were kept far from the action. Even the senior commanders, flooded with reports some of which were accurate and many of which were not, could have little confidence that they knew what the enemy was doing or which side was doing more killing.