by G. J. Meyer
Far away in East Prussia, at the Masurian Lakes, Hindenburg’s Eighth Army was closing in on Rennenkampf’s retreating Russians. Even that wasn’t the end of it: in Galicia, the main forces of the Austro-Hungarian army were engaged with more than two million Russian troops in yet another series of battles that were as confusing as they were bloody but in the end would prove little less important than Tannenberg and the Marne.
The only truly fluid sector of the Western Front remained as before the front’s western extreme. An incident of September 8 indicates just how confused the situation was, with large and small French, German, and British units in motion all over the landscape. In the afternoon a detachment of French cavalry suddenly came upon a caravan of three German automobiles. When the horsemen started toward them at a gallop, the drivers quickly turned and sped off. In one of the cars was Kluck, moving among the dispersed units of his army. Still tirelessly combative despite his sixty-eight years, Kluck remained confident of his chances. For three days the French had been throwing themselves at his position on the Ourcq. Having withstood these attacks and worn the French down, he now saw an opportunity to finish them off before some other enemy force—possibly the BEF—could fall on him from the rear. He ordered an attack. The goal this time would be an encirclement of the Sixth Army from the north. The assault would be led by a corps of infantry under General Ferdinand von Quast. This was one of the corps that Kluck had lent to Bülow and then taken back. It had crossed Belgium and France with Kluck, had fought at Mons, had been in the thick of things all through the campaign, and was very nearly spent. At the end of the day Kluck said in a message to his army that “the decision will be decided tomorrow by an enveloping attack.”
Early on the morning of Wednesday, September 9, Hentsch set out to find Kluck. The roads were jammed with soldiers and equipment moving eastward. This was Kluck’s shift of part of his army to positions from which it could protect its rear, along with the usual pathetic streams of refugees. The direction of the flow gave the appearance of an army in retreat. It appeared to support Bülow’s appeal for a general pullback. It took Hentsch five hours to cover fifty miles, and during those hours Quast unleashed his attack. The Sixth Army didn’t simply retreat—it fell apart. French troops fled in all directions.
In East Prussia, Rennenkampf was still withdrawing, trying to escape destruction at the hands of a German force that was smaller than his but brimming with confidence in the aftermath of Tannenberg. Desperate, he sent two of his divisions in a heroic, suicidal attack on the advancing German center. Both divisions were destroyed, but they accomplished their purpose. The Germans were stopped, and what remained of Rennenkampf’s army got away.
On the plains of Galicia, Conrad’s long fight with the Russians was ending in disastrous—in almost final—defeat. He had moved against the Russians despite being grossly outnumbered, despite learning that the Germans would not be able to support him, and despite the disappointment of learning that Romania with its army of six hundred thousand men would not be joining the Central Powers as hoped. He had sent thirty-one divisions against the Russians’ forty-five infantry and eighteen cavalry divisions, and the results were inevitable. The Austrians were driven back a hundred and fifty miles to the Carpathian Mountains. Conrad had lost more than four hundred thousand men—one hundred thousand killed, an equal number taken prisoner, two hundred and twenty thousand wounded—plus 216 pieces of artillery and a thousand locomotives. He had lost more than a fourth of the manpower with which he had begun the war, and among that fourth were insupportably large numbers of Austria-Hungary’s commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Less than a month and a half into the war, his capacity for dealing effectively not just with the Russians but even with smaller enemies was nearly exhausted. From now on Vienna would be not so much Berlin’s junior partner as a weak and burdensome appendage. The Germans would grow fond of saying that being allied with the Hapsburg empire was like being “shackled to a corpse.”
Conrad himself shared in a personal way in the immensity of the tragedy. “I have one of my sons seriously ill,” he lamented, “and the son that I idolized in a mound of corpses at Ravaruska.”
Around Verdun, where the French were hanging on by such a thin thread that Joffre twice authorized the commander of his Third Army to retreat if necessary, September 9 brought a final, convulsive German assault. The French had no reserves left, no way to seal up any holes in their front. They did, however, have the remains of their immensely strong defenses. In the years leading up to 1914 the main Verdun forts had been greatly improved, with deep sand and loose rock piled onto the original masonry and reinforced concrete as a top shell. Heavy artillery had been installed within armored retractable turrets. As a result, these forts could withstand direct hits even by the kinds of monster guns that had wrecked Liège and Namur, and they could also keep attackers under continuous fire. The rough terrain stiffened French resistance by making retreat almost impossible. At the same time it worked against the Germans by compounding the difficulties of bringing in artillery. The French not only kept their line intact but butchered the attackers as they themselves had been butchered in their earlier offensives. On the night of September 9 the Germans made a last effort to punch through, but in the darkness they ended up blasting away at one another.
When Hentsch arrived at First Army headquarters at last, Kluck was away, keeping a close eye on the victory unfolding at the Ourcq. Hentsch talked with Kluck’s chief of staff, explaining that the BEF was now north of the Marne, that Bülow was planning to withdraw, and that there was no alternative to Kluck’s withdrawal as well. While they were talking, a message arrived from Bülow reporting that he was starting his retreat. This left nothing to discuss or decide, so Hentsch departed. When Kluck learned of Hentsch’s visit and the plans for a retreat, his first reaction was to resist, to insist as always on pushing forward. When he learned that Bülow was already withdrawing, however, he had no choice but to yield. With Bülow moving north, his army was so vulnerable that nothing except retreat could possibly save it.
From the German perspective, the story of the Schlieffen right wing had a melancholy final chapter. At almost the same moment when Kluck was accepting the necessity of retreat, Quast’s corps was tearing apart the last of the disintegrating French defenses. Nothing lay between it and Paris but thirty miles of open, undefended ground. It must have been like having an impossible dream come true: all they had to do was keep marching. But then new orders arrived from Kluck: Quast was to call off his attack and turn back. The First Army was retreating.
It was over. Quast’s men had more marching to do, but now they would be heading back in the direction from which they had come.
No one felt the melancholy more deeply than Moltke. “I cannot find words to describe the crushing responsibility that has weighed upon my shoulders during the last few days and still weighs on me today,” he wrote his wife. “The appalling difficulties of our present situation hang before my eyes like a dark curtain through which I can see nothing.”
Background: The British Commanders
THE BRITISH COMMANDERS
ON AUGUST 3, 1914, WHEN THE TIMES OF LONDON REPORTED that Field Marshal Sir John French had been chosen to lead the British Expeditionary Force to France and the war, it was eager to make its readers understand that this was the best of all possible appointments in the best of all possible armies.
“There was not a moment’s hesitation,” the newspaper said of French’s selection. “No painful canvassing of candidates, no acrimonious discussion, no odious comparison of the merits of respective generals, no hint of favoritism, of Party intrigue.”
This happy state of affairs was possible, it explained, because French “surrounds himself with capable leaders and staff officers, and not only brings his troops to a high degree of efficiency, but also makes his officers a band of brothers, and establishes a good comradeship between all arms and all ranks.”
As an early exercise in
wartime propaganda, in helping the public take pride in its armed forces and the men chosen to lead them, this report was exemplary. As a reflection of the truth, it did not fall far short of absurd. In the art of generalship, French was rarely better than ordinary. An ability to identify and make use of the best available men was not among his talents, and no knowledgeable observer would credit him with displaying, or raising the forces under his command to, impressive levels of efficiency.
As for the officer corps being free of acrimony or favoritism or “party intrigue,” The Times could hardly have departed more shamelessly from the truth.
The British army of 1914 was a considerably more effective military instrument than it had been at the start of the century, when it experienced great difficulty (and had to resort to savagely brutal methods) in defeating a ragtag collection of guerrilla-farmers in South Africa’s Boer War. Since then it had improved its training, started at least to modernize its equipment, and established a general staff on the Prussian model. But in many ways—in its leadership above all—it remained stubbornly in the past. It was the army of a predemocratic culture in which a majority of the population was poor and powerless, the benefits of empire were reserved for a tiny elite, and people at every level of society were expected to accept the status quo as the natural order of things.
Britain was changing, however, and slowly the army, heels dug in, was being pulled along. At the start of the 1870s the government had ended the time-honored system by which officers bought their commissions and promotions, often paying fortunes to rise to the senior ranks. Even after this reform, however, only gentlemen were regarded as suitable candidates for the officer corps. The term gentleman applied only to individuals with the right family antecedents, and not even gentlemen found it possible to survive as junior officers without private sources of income. Late in the nineteenth century, when an outstanding young sergeant named William Robertson was offered the rare opportunity to accept a commission, he was unable to do so because his expenses as a junior lieutenant (everything from uniforms to mess fees to a share in supporting the regimental band) would have been at least four times his salary of £100. When they did somehow manage to become officers, “rankers” were commonly shunned and even viciously hazed by gentlemen unwilling to accept them.
This was the system that had produced Sir John French and the other generals at the head of the BEF. They were gentlemen almost to a man, the only exception being the aforementioned William Robertson, who by then had risen, almost miraculously, to major general. (He had taken a commission in the Army of India, where expenses were lower, and his tailor father made his uniforms.) As gentlemen they adhered to a code that elevated amateurism in all things to a supreme virtue. Hunting, shooting, polo, and weekend gatherings at country estates were proper activities. Too much seriousness—for example, too much reading even about military history and strategy—definitely was not. The kinds of disputes over theory that racked the French officer corps were unimaginable north of the Channel, where nobody in uniform cared about theories. The right connections, and a proper degree of aristocratic insouciance, were highways to advancement. They made the army an especially attractive career for the less intelligent sons of the very best families.
French himself, sixty-one years old in August 1914, was the son of a naval officer and had begun by entering the Royal Navy at age fourteen. At twenty-two he had switched to the cavalry, the most elite (and expensive) branch of the army, and thereafter he advanced with the help of impressive social skills and his dash as a horseman. In 1899, freshly promoted to major general, he went out to South Africa as commander of a cavalry division, and there he won fame for his boldness while learning to hate, and coming to be hated by, the famous and powerful Lord Horatio Kitchener. In 1912 he reached the summit, becoming chief of the imperial general staff, and though he resigned at the time of the Curragh Mutiny, this was such a respectable, gentlemanly act of disloyalty that it proved no obstacle to his later selection as head of the BEF. By the time he went to France he was a stocky, almost dumpy-looking man in late middle age, stolid, unimaginative, and sour. Kitchener still regarded him as reckless, and so ordered him in writing to do nothing that would put his army at risk.
Field Marshal Sir John French
“My confidence in the ability of the leaders of the French Army . . . is fast waning.”
French’s chief of staff in the Boer War had been a young colonel named Douglas Haig, who as a lieutenant general became commanding officer of one of the BEF’s two corps. A member of the whiskey-making Haig family of the Scottish borderlands, regarded by the true aristocrats as unworthy of admission to one of the elite cavalry regiments at the start of his career, Haig was not noticeably more intelligent than French but was gifted at acquiring influential patrons. He entered the military academy at Sandhurst at an unusually late age, having first attended Oxford, where he spent the standard three years but failed to earn a degree. Early in his career he failed the examination for entry to the army staff college but was rescued by his connections. His sister, married to a member of the Jameson whiskey dynasty who held the honorary position of keeper of the Prince of Wales’s racing yachts, got the Duke of Cambridge (an aged member of the royal family) to have the entry requirements waived on Haig’s behalf.
In the Boer War he attracted the favorable attention of Lord Kitchener while building a friendship with French. Haig was handsome and unmarried and outspoken about his disdain for women, and the lifelong bachelor Kitchener always approved of officers of that type. Haig won French’s gratitude by lending him the immense sum of £2,000, which French needed to extract himself from woman trouble. After South Africa Haig was made aide-de-camp to King Edward VII, a position that provided visibility in the loftiest circles. In 1905 he married the Honorable Dorothy Vivian, favorite maid of honor to the queen. The Haigs were the first nonroyal couple ever to be married in the chapel at Buckingham Palace; he had proposed seventy-two hours after meeting the lady, and one wonders what his bride thought when he wrote that “I have often made up my mind on more important problems than that of my own marriage in much less time.” Within a year of his marriage, when the British army entered the modern world by creating a general staff for the first time, Haig’s friends in government and at court campaigned to have him made its chief. This proved impossible, the candidate being only forty-four and never having held a major command, but afterward he never stopped angling for the job. He was still angling even as the BEF prepared for deployment, whispering his doubts about French’s abilities to everyone who would listen from his friend King George down, rarely failing to add that of course he was prepared to serve wherever needed. He always got a respectful hearing despite being wrong on a wide range of subjects: before the war he had pontificated that “the role of cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing” and “artillery only seems likely to be effective against raw troops.” It was typical of Haig that he was able to maintain a good relationship with French while despising him and trying to undermine him. Haig despised almost every one of his brother officers except his own subordinates—so long as those subordinates were sufficiently submissive. Almost paranoid in his belief that he was constantly being conspired against, he responded with endless intrigues of his own.
The other of the two corps with which the BEF began the war was supposed to be headed by James Grierson, but he dropped dead of a heart attack upon arriving in France. This was a stroke of luck for Haig. Grierson was a gifted infantry commander who, in the summer war games of 1912, had defeated Haig so completely, so humiliatingly, that the whole operation was brought to a stop ahead of schedule. Sir John French asked for Herbert Plumer as replacement for Grierson, but Kitchener sent Horace Smith-Dorrien instead. Again Haig was lucky. Plumer, like Grierson, was not only a very senior lieutenant general but an extremely capable one. He would have been a formidable rival, not only because Kitchener liked him but because years earlier, as an examiner at the staff college, he
had expressed a scaldingly negative opinion of his student Haig. But he arrived in France under a tremendous handicap: French’s intense dislike. He was under a microscope from the start, his every decision questioned.
French’s deputy chief of staff was the BEF’s archschemer, the wily Henry Wilson, who as director of military operations during the Curragh Mutiny had served as the Unionists’ spy inside the general staff and was described by Haig as “such a terrible intriguer, and sure to make mischief.” As Britain’s primary liaison to the French general staff before the war, Wilson had made important friends in Paris, and almost from the start of the war he was trying to use them to get himself promoted to chief of staff. He and French were united by their hatred of Kitchener, whom Wilson called “as much an enemy of England as Moltke.”
When French’s chief of staff was replaced, the job went not to Wilson but to “Wully” Robertson, who had performed brilliantly as the BEF’s quartermaster general in the opening weeks of the war. He was not French’s choice—Kitchener had blocked Wilson’s appointment—and not for the first time he paid the price of being up from the ranks. French regularly dined with Wilson while excluding Robertson. Haig was more careful in showing his disdain. “He means well and will succeed, I feel sure,” he wrote of Robertson. “How much easier though it is to work with a gentleman.”
At the top of this dysfunctional brotherhood stood the stern and iron-willed Kitchener. Like Joffre and Gallieni, he had spent most of his life in far-flung colonial outposts. At age twenty he had interrupted his training to serve as a volunteer on the French side in the Franco-Prussian War, and soon thereafter he was sent to the Middle East with the Royal Engineers. From then on his career was the stuff of legend. By 1886, when he was thirty-six, he was governor of Britain’s Red Sea territories. He became commander of the Egyptian army in 1892, a baron after putting down a rebellion in the Sudan in 1898, and Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum after leading the British forces to victory in the South African War (burning the farms of the Boers and herding their wives and children into concentration camps, where they died by the thousands). He was commander in chief in India from 1902 to 1909, battling endlessly with the viceroy, and from 1911 he ruled Egypt and the Sudan as British proconsul. By 1914 he had little knowledge of English society or politics and was so accustomed to being in charge of everyone and everything around him that he had virtually lost the ability to cooperate or delegate.
