A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  “Attack, whatever happens! The Germans are at the extreme limit of their efforts…Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other.”

  —FERDINAND FOCH

  Fears that war would mean a continent in flames had literally come true by early September. The entire Western Front from Paris to the Alps had turned into a vast bloody slugfest in which more than a dozen armies were fully and simultaneously engaged. In the east, Galicia was the scene of a massive running battle between the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian forces of Field Marshal Conrad. In East Prussia the German Eighth Army was following up its victory at Tannenberg with a pursuit aimed at the destruction of Rennenkampf’s Russian Second Army near the Masurian Lakes.

  Nothing was more critical than the point where the German right met Joffre’s left. Still unaware of the existence of a new French army at Paris, seeing no reason to halt as Moltke had ordered, Kluck continued to plunge southward in search of the French Fifth Army’s flank or, failing that, whatever remained of the BEF. But his army was in danger of crumbling even as it advanced. “Our soldiers are worn out,” a member of Kluck’s staff was recording as early as September 2. “For four days they have been marching forty kilometers a day. The ground is difficult, the roads are torn up, trees felled, the fields pitted by shells like strainers. The soldiers stagger at every step, their faces are plastered with dust, their uniforms are in rags; one might call them living rag-bags. They march with closed eyes, and sing in chorus to keep from falling asleep as they march. The certainty of victory close at hand and of their triumphal entry into Paris sustains them and whips up their enthusiasm. Without this certainty of victory they would fall exhausted. They would lie down where they are, to sleep at last, no matter where, no matter how. And, to give their bodies a drunkenness like that of their souls, they drink enormously. But this drunkenness also helps to keep them up. Today, after an inspection, the General [Kluck] was furiously angry. He wanted to put an end to this collective debauch. We have just persuaded him not to give severe orders. It is better not to be too strict, otherwise the army could not go on at all. For this abnormal weariness abnormal stimulants are needed. In Paris we shall remedy all this.”

  And Paris still seemed an achievable goal. The British, despite Sir John French’s promise to rejoin the fight, were continuing to withdraw. (French would later explain this as an effort to connect as quickly as possible with reinforcements and supplies before turning north.)

  Then everything changed. Intercepted German radio messages, some of them not in code, informed the French that Kluck was now heading not toward Paris but southeast. Papers found on a German officer who had taken a wrong turn and been shot dead by a French patrol indicated the same thing—showed not only where the various parts of Kluck’s army were but where they had been ordered to go. Joseph Gallieni, quickly grasping the implications, assembled a small group of reconnaissance pilots and told them where he wanted them to fly the next morning and what he wanted them to look for. They returned with the news he wanted: Kluck’s army, formed into six thick columns, was indeed moving to the southeast. In doing so it was exposing its right flank to Gallieni’s new Sixth Army. The opportunity for a counterattack appeared to have come at last.

  Gallieni ordered the Sixth Army, still only half-organized and made up largely of inexperienced reserve troops, to get ready to move. Then he took off by car to visit British headquarters and get Sir John French to join in the attack. French was away when Gallieni arrived, and the staff officers who received this unexpected visitor did so with amused and barely concealed contempt. One of them said later that Gallieni, ungainly and unkempt in his high laced-up black boots and yellow leggings, looked like “a comedian,” like somebody “no British officer would be seen talking to.”

  After three hours of waiting, having extracted from his hosts nothing better than a promise that someone would telephone him after French’s return, Gallieni departed. The promised call, when it finally came, informed him that the BEF would be continuing its move to the south; the British had checked with Joffre and received no encouragement to cooperate with Gallieni. Wherever he turned, Gallieni found little cooperation. Joffre, though he approved Gallieni’s attack, said he wanted it launched from south rather than north of the Marne. This would blunt its impact, Gallieni thought, and he spent long minutes on the telephone changing Joffre’s mind. Worse, Joffre was reluctant to send the additional troops needed for hitting the Germans hard. Worst, when he understood just how rich in opportunity this situation was, how laden with potential glory, Joffre took the Sixth Army back from Gallieni, who then returned to Paris.

  Kluck was too good a soldier to offer quite as fat a target as Gallieni hoped. Though he continued his advance, he did not leave his flank uncovered. He moved one corps—two infantry divisions plus artillery—to the River Ourcq to his west, where it took up defensive positions facing Paris and was directly in the path of the French Sixth Army as it began moving eastward. This corps, though made up of reserve units, was commanded by a capable officer, a General von Grönau. Grönau moved his troops onto high ground, had them dig in, and used his artillery to tear at the French as they began arriving on the scene. The result was a battle so singularly uneven that it proved to be the undoing of any hopes for the quick destruction of Kluck’s army. On the German side, success gave a last burst of life to Kluck’s hopes of breaking the Entente left.

  On September 5 France, Great Britain, and Russia entered into the Treaty of London, by which they formalized their Triple Entente and pledged that none of them would enter into a separate peace with Germany. On the same day a member of Moltke’s staff, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, arrived at Kluck’s headquarters to alert him to the existence and probable approach of a French force in the west. While he was there, a report arrived from Grönau stating that he was under attack (by that same French force) and needed help. Kluck was not alarmed. He assumed that this was less a serious French assault than an attempt to trick him into halting the First Army’s advance. But he did the prudent thing and detached another corps to go back to support Grönau. He also sent a message to Bülow, asking for the return of two corps that he had earlier made available to the Second Army. Bülow was reluctant to comply, knowing that doing so would weaken his own depleted right wing. If he had known that the BEF was now moving northward in his direction—French had turned around at last—he might not have agreed. But under the circumstances, with Kluck under attack and no one currently attacking him, Bülow had little choice. Though Kluck’s reinforcement of Grönau was a turning point, the first backward movement by a sizable unit of the German right wing, it did not mark the end of the offensive. Kluck was still bent on victory.

  He was no longer defining victory as Paris, however, and that became a problem in terms of troop morale. For the soldiers of Kluck’s army, arrival at Paris meant an end to their long ordeal. This is clear in a German officer’s account of an episode on September 3. “One of our battalions was marching wearily forward,” he wrote. “All at once, while passing a crossroad, they discovered a signpost, on which they read: Paris, thirty-seven kilometers [twenty-three miles]. It was the first signpost that had not been erased. On seeing it, the battalion was as though shaken up by an electric current. The word Paris, which they have just read, drives them crazy. Some of them embrace the wretched signpost, others dance around it. Cries, yells of enthusiasm, accompany these mad actions. This signpost is their evidence that we are near Paris, that, without doubt, we shall soon be really there. This notice board has had a miraculous effect. Faces light up, weariness seems to disappear, the march is resumed, alert, cadenced, in spite of the abominable ground in this forest. Songs burst forth louder.” But now, with Kluck’s shift to the southeast and the move back to the Ourcq, the dream of Paris had to be let go.

  The Germans were not, however, out of fight. By nightfall on September 5, Grönau’s artillery had badly disordered the advance of the French Sixth Army, which was growing rapidly a
s reinforcements continued to arrive. At one point, when the French appeared to be on the verge of panic, a dashingly aggressive officer named Colonel Robert Nivelle, a man who like Pétain had nearly reached retirement age without achieving the rank of general, led a heroic intervention with field artillery. Rolling his guns through the French infantry to where they could fire point-blank, he drove the Germans back.

  After dark, judging correctly that he was badly outnumbered and that his stand had given Kluck sufficient time to adjust, Grönau pulled back from the Ourcq. In doing so he probably saved his corps. The Sixth Army attacked by moonlight but found the Germans gone. Kluck, understanding now that the threat from the west was a serious one, marched his entire army back across the Marne toward the Ourcq. As always, he was thinking aggressively, looking not just to defend himself but to encircle and destroy his enemy.

  But by now Kluck was laden with problems. He was no longer engaged with the main line of French armies, no longer in position to contribute to the decision that appeared to be approaching along that line. In pulling back to the Ourcq, he had opened a thirty-five-mile gap between his army and Bülow’s, and in the next few days this gap would grow even wider. Between Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies were only two divisions of cavalry and a few units of light infantry—not nearly enough to hold off a significant enemy advance. The exploitation of such gaps had been the key to many of Napoleon’s victories.

  “Kluck marched his entire army back across the Marne to the Ourcq” is far too simple a statement to reflect what was happening that day. Every such movement meant yet another long and hurried trek, to be followed by yet another firefight, for men who had been marching and fighting for weeks. Kluck’s men had been issued no rations in five days. They rarely got more than a few hours of sleep. Their uniforms were in tatters, and their boots were falling off their feet as they struggled to drag with them the cannon and shells without which they could neither attack nor defend themselves. And they were now outnumbered.

  The French Sixth Army, though fresh, was still too raw and unorganized to be a match for Kluck’s now-hardened veterans. When it renewed its attack on September 6, it again ran headlong into waiting German artillery. The result was another disaster—not merely a failure to dislodge Kluck’s troops from their hastily improvised defenses but a debacle that left the French units shattered. Kluck’s hopes of finishing off the Sixth Army began to look more plausible.

  Off to the east, the French were falling back in several places. The anchoring strongpoint of their line, the great fortress of Verdun, was in deepening jeopardy. By September 6 it appeared possible that the entire line from Verdun southward might begin to come apart. Moltke’s new plan, dual breakthroughs leading to a grand climactic encirclement, also was beginning to seem plausible.

  The hour of decision had arrived, and everyone knew it.

  The BEF was feeling its way northward in company with a corps of French cavalry and making extremely slow progress. More by happenstance than design, it inched into the gap between Kluck and Bülow. This was a frightening and exciting development. If the two German armies converged, the BEF would be crushed. If the British pushed forward swiftly, on the other hand, they might break through to the German rear and create havoc there.

  They did not move swiftly. In part this was because of mistakes: one British division spent an entire day moving in a confused circle, so that at nightfall its lead units ran into the supply train that formed its own tail end. But it was also an understandable reaction to having enormous enemy forces on both of its flanks. What the British didn’t know was that neither Kluck nor Bülow was in any position to turn on them. Kluck, on their left, was occupied with the French Sixth Army. Bülow—now at the end of the continuous German line, with his own flank bare—was in a hard fight with Franchet d’Esperey’s Fifth Army. Because of his return of two corps to Kluck, Bülow was weak on his right. He was being hammered there by a division commanded by the recently promoted Brigadier General Pétain, and his troops were being pushed back and out of position. Kluck and Bülow were alarmed when they learned that the British were now between them, and both reacted characteristically. Kluck swung some of his troops around to face a possible advance by the British but continued to batter away with his main force at the French. Bülow began to plan a withdrawal in which both his army and Kluck’s would pull back at least ten miles and reconnect north of the British.

  The fighting intensified all along the line. The French were on the defensive everywhere but on their left; on the right the need was to hold the line against German armies trying to deliver the breakthrough that Moltke had ordered. Gallieni began filling Paris taxicabs with soldiers and sending them out to swell the ranks of the army that Joffre had taken from him. His energy, despite so many reasons to be grudging, caused the Sixth Army to keep growing hour by hour.

  The madness rose to its climax on September 8 and 9. The outcome would depend on whether any of the German armies in the east could crack the French line or, alternatively, whether the German First Army or the French Sixth could destroy its opponent. The Battle of the Marne became a series of crises following one after another until finally something broke down.

  September 7 had ended with Foch’s new army separated from General von Hausen’s German Third Army by a treacherously soggy expanse of territory called the Marais (the Marsh) of Saint-Gond. Foch, determined as always to carry the fight to his enemy but naturally assuming that advance across a swamp was not feasible, had launched an attack around both sides. Both wings of this attack ran into strong German defenses and were thrown back with heavy loss of life. Hausen’s staff, meanwhile, had been exploring the interior of the Marais and discovering that it was not at all as impassable as its name indicated. Early the next morning the Germans moved across it without the kind of artillery preparation that would have alerted the French, mounted a dawn charge that caught Foch’s center unprepared, and forced it out of its defenses. Though this clash was a defeat for the French, it added to Foch’s growing reputation. “Attack, whatever happens!” he had said at Saint-Gond. “The Germans are at the extreme limit of their efforts. Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other!” He had been pushed back, but his line had not snapped. The Germans still did not have the breakthrough on which all their hopes depended.

  Not only at Saint-Gond but at many places along the front, the French, like the Germans, were near the end of their resources. “For my part I preserve only a confused and burning recollection of the days of 6th and 7th September,” a cavalryman would observe afterward. “The heat was suffocating. The exhausted troops, covered with a layer of black dust sticking to their sweat, looked like devils. The tired horses, no longer off-saddled, had large open sores on their backs. The heat was burning, thirst intolerable…we knew nothing, and we continued our march as in a dream, under the scorching sun, gnawed by hunger, parched with thirst, and so exhausted by fatigue that I could see my comrades stiffen in the saddle to keep themselves from falling.” A French general painted an even darker picture. “What a mess!” he exclaimed. “What a shambles! It was a terrifying sight…no order in the ranks…straggling along…Men emaciated, in rags and tatters, most without haversacks, many without rifles, some marching painfully, leaning on sticks and looking as though they were about to fall asleep.”

  Moltke, a hundred and seventy miles to the north at his headquarters in Luxembourg, was getting almost no reports from Kluck or Bülow. Kaiser Wilhelm was in Luxembourg also, complete with an enormous staff of his own and advisory groups that also had staffs. This may be one reason why Moltke, unlike Joffre, never ventured out to see for himself what was happening at the front. He had reason to fear that in his absence the kaiser, hungry for a great victory and (as Moltke told his wife in the deeply gloomy letters he sent home every day) incapable of understanding the dangers of the situation, would take personal command and do something disastrous.

  While Hausen was attacking Foch across the Marais de Saint-Go
nd, Moltke again sent Colonel Hentsch, the trusted head of his intelligence staff, off to the front by car. Hentsch’s instructions—oral rather than written, so that whether he ultimately exceeded his authority can never be conclusively answered—were to visit the commanders of all but the two southernmost German armies, determine whether they were or were not in trouble, and send reports back to Moltke.

  Hentsch worked his way westward along the front, visiting the headquarters of the Fifth Army of Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Fourth Army of Duke Albrecht of Württemberg, and Hausen’s Third Army. He found the situation of each of these armies acceptable, with no reason for alarm, and informed Moltke accordingly. It was evening when he got to Bülow’s Second Army, and there the picture began to darken. Bülow had Franchet d’Esperey’s battered but hard-fighting army in front of him, and between himself and Kluck to the west was a gap that now stretched for as much as fifty miles and had been penetrated by the BEF. A shaken Bülow told Hentsch that only a “voluntary concentric retreat” by his army and Kluck’s could avert disaster. This was not a loss of nerve on Bülow’s part. His position was dangerously weak. Pétain’s attacks had captured tactically important terrain, so that Bülow’s right was continuing to be pushed back into an increasingly awkward position.

  And this was only one of many emergencies. At the eastern end of the front, the French First and Second Armies were holding high ground near the Alsace border and repelling repeated attacks. The commander of the Second Army, Castelnau, absorbing news of the death in combat of his son (he would lose two more sons before the war ended), reported to Joffre that he had to withdraw from Nancy or risk the loss of his entire force. Joffre told him to hold where he was at all costs for at least another twenty-four hours. To Castelnau’s north, around Verdun, the French Third Army was hanging on to rubble that once had been stout French fortifications and slaughtering the oncoming Germans.