Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  Likewise another brigade, embittered after suffering a repulse, vented frustration about its losses on the village of Soumagne, where 118 inhabitants were shot or bayoneted and a hundred houses destroyed. German soldiers told survivors: ‘It is your brothers who are firing on us from the fort of Fléron.’ On the 6th, two hundred civilians from the communities of Romsée and Olne were used as a human shield by Germans advancing on the forts of Embourg and Chaudfontaine. Other hostages were held captive and unfed on the Meuse bridges for several days, to deter Belgian artillery from destroying them. On 8 August infantrymen herded into a nearby meadow seventy-two inhabitants of Melen, including eight women and four girls under thirteen, and executed them. When the local burgomaster arrived in hopes of identifying and burying the dead, he too was shot; most of the village was burned. Sixty-four people likewise perished in Olne and Saint-Hadelin, and another forty in Riessonart. By 8 August, some 850 civilians had been killed around Liège and 1,300 buildings punitively burned by the Germans, to appease their hysteria or assert their dominance. A local tax inspector at Francorchamps, whose father had been murdered, protested to a German officer that no local citizen had raised a hand against his forces. The soldier shrugged and responded in French: ‘It doesn’t matter. At Liège you kill our men. We also have the right to kill you.’

  The Belgians’ emplacements were proof against field artillery; only the heaviest metal cast by Krupp and Skoda could penetrate their casemates. Graf Harry Kessler, a forty-six-year-old reservist Rittmeister commanding an ammunition train outside Liège, was surprised one morning to meet Austrian artillerymen. They told him they had arrived ‘hotfoot from Trieste’, bringing four batteries of Skoda 305mm howitzers. These vast weapons opened fire on 12 August, soon accompanied by four 420mm Krupp monsters, each with a crew of two hundred men, which were fired electrically from a distance of three hundred yards, and delivered armour-piercing projectiles. The defence of Liège was terminated by violent eruptions of earth and concrete, rendings of steel and human flesh: in one place, a single shell killed three hundred defenders. Gen. Leman was carried unconscious, choked by fumes, from the ruins of Fort de Loncin. Thirty-odd shells sufficed for each bastion: those on the right bank of the Meuse fell on the 13th, while the river’s left bank was cleared three days later.

  The capture of Liège had cost the attackers 5,300 casualties. The eleven-day siege did not impose a matching delay on the German advance, because the mass of the Kaiser’s armies had anyway needed time to concentrate before they swept onwards. Some formations were already hastening down a twelve-mile-wide corridor to the French frontier, through which two vast armies must somehow squeeze. But the struggle for Liège did cause disruption: the invaders’ right flanking armies were denied the quick passage they needed to achieve their long, long crossing of Belgium and northern France before Joffre’s forces could redeploy to meet them.

  Some pre-war German military pundits had argued that a swift, devastating, absolute war was preferable to a sustained and limited conflict. One such author wrote in 1913: ‘Ruthless destruction of the enemy’s forces and weapons is the most humane objective, strange as that sounds. The more generously and widely the term “humanity” is defined, the less effectual war-making becomes … [and thus] the longer a war will last, and the more heavily its consequences will weigh upon the entire existence of the belligerents. Only uninhibited commitment of every element of strength can achieve the swift and decisive overthrow of the enemy.’ This was what Moltke was attempting in August 1914.

  In the first weeks of the European war, the armies of France also made their own dramatic attempt to force an outcome, before German operations had attained full momentum. Along hundreds of miles of the interface between the belligerents from Belgium to the Swiss border, Joffre’s formations began to move forward in fulfilment of Plan XVII. The exotic horsemen of Gen. Jean-François Sordet’s cavalry corps, clad in Napoleonic finery, made a dash towards Liège ahead of the French Fifth Army, to be greeted with wild enthusiasm by Belgian civilians everywhere along their road. But on 8 August, ten miles from the city, Sordet’s dragoons and lancers met German forces. They fell back, having merely exhausted their unhappy mounts; gleaming French helmets, breastplates and horsehair plumes were not matched by effective weapons. British cavalry carried infantry rifles and were trained for dismounted action, but Sordet’s men had only swords and 1890-model carbines – little more use than pistols.

  A light-cavalry sergeant later described the frustrations his regiment suffered when it attempted to charge enemy horsemen in Belgium, only to meet the deadly fire of German infantry, which emptied many saddles: ‘That’s what happened over and over again – perhaps twenty or thirty times.’ At each encounter, their numbers shrank. Horse management was a critical military skill, but that of the French army was lamentable. Sordet’s cavalry rode thirty-five miles a day through the first weeks of the campaign, and some regiments covered far greater distances: the 9th Cuirassiers recorded in their war diary that they moved a hundred miles in just forty-eight hours. Soon their horses – exhausted by carrying a weight of 250 pounds apiece, poorly fed, stinking from untended saddle sores – were foundering in scores. Unlike British cavalrymen, who were trained to lead their animals as much as possible, to husband their strength for action, the French – and Germans – rode many hapless beasts to death.

  As the armies brushed and skirmished in these early encounters, many men flaunted their innocence. Pte. Charles Stein of the Belgian Grenadiers saw German shells bursting, and delighted in their perceived beauty – until he saw his own compatriots fleeing in consequence. On the night of the 11th, a frightened sentry in Stein’s unit shot a cow which grazed too close to his post. A company of German reservists likewise glimpsed shadowy movements in early-morning mist, and opened a heavy fire which killed several cattle and a returning patrol before order was restored. When a dud shell landed near French Capt. Plieux de Diusse, he bent curiously to pick it up until a veteran shouted that he would burn himself – de Diusse had no inkling that projectiles were hot.

  Even as Moltke’s columns tramped across Belgium, further south the first serious clashes unfolded between his formations and those of Joffre. On 3 August the French advanced into the ‘lost provinces’ annexed by Prussia after its victory in 1871. It is doubtful how many Frenchmen in 1914 nursed real emotion about Alsace-Lorraine. One young blood questioned some years earlier shrugged that their loss was ‘a historical event … I don’t think that this question interests the youth of today or the country, nor does it interest me.’ In 1908 the newspaper La Patrie asserted, ‘for most Frenchmen the dismemberment is an event as distant as the Seven Years War’.

  But those who minded did so passionately. Gen. Louis-Napoléon Conneau, for instance, who commanded a cavalry corps in 1914, observed a pre-war ritual of bivouacking with his regiment of dragoons for one night each year beside a frontier post marking the gateway to Alsace. More than a few such men, now at the head of France’s armies, shed tears as they set forth to liberate people whom they regarded as oppressed fellow countrymen – though 380,000 Alsace-Lorrainers eventually fought as conscripts in the German army. The province of Alsace, German-speaking but French-ruled for most of its modern history, extends about a hundred miles from north to south, but is less than forty miles deep. Its western landscape is dominated by the Vosges mountains – Vogesen to Germans, just as Alsace was Elsass and Lorraine Lothringen. The frontier between France and Alsace ran along a steep, densely forested ridge rising in places to 3,000 feet.

  In the north, the Germans had constructed the vast fortress of Mutzig, with a network of underground bunkers, to protect the approach to Strasbourg. In the south, towards the textile town of Mulhouse, between the Vosges and the Alps lay the old floodplain of the Rhine. This constituted a corridor barely twenty miles wide, which alone offered ready access to an army. Most of the province was rustic peasant country, known for cheese, wine and lace-making. It had little strategic si
gnificance, because it was a cul-de-sac: beyond lay southern Germany’s hills and forests, major obstacles. Moreover, the Alsatian front was much more readily reinforced and supplied from Germany than from France. But Moltke correctly anticipated that, in the event of war, the French army would find irresistible the lure of recovering the eastern provinces.

  The Germans who deployed to defend Alsace gazed in wonder at the first French soldiers they glimpsed before them, clad in the same long blue overcoats, red trousers and képis their fathers of the Prussian army had known and vanquished back in 1870. One of the Kaiser’s men wrote home: ‘They really look like something out of a picture-book.’ Joffre and his officers could not complain that they were unwarned about the folly of adherence to brilliant plumage. In the spring of 1914 Col. Serret, military attaché in Berlin, submitted a long report about his hosts’ latest manoeuvres. He identified the importance of their howitzers and heavy artillery, which senior officers in Paris discounted. He emphasised the benefits of German grey-green uniforms in reducing visibility, and urged that French soldiers should not merely abandon their traditional garb, but also forswear shining sword hilts, cooking utensils, even buttons. He quoted the Kaiser: ‘[For centuries] we have believed that military dress should be aesthetically pleasing … fighting at close quarters, in order to kill it was important to be able to recognise each other. Now that we deploy some kilometres apart, we should not show ourselves.’ Wilhelm, said Serret, regretted the passing of brilliantly attired soldiers, but declared that war had now become ‘a melancholy and dirty affair’.

  The colonel was infuriated by a contrarian article which appeared in Le Temps of 30 April. This claimed that other nations regretted adopting drab uniforms, and that France was fortunate to have rejected such folly. Serret wrote again to the War Ministry, deploring the fact that old-fashioned uniforms made its men the most conspicuous in the world: ‘This difference in visibility, where the most insignificant [French] soldier must attract immediate attention, would have a more serious [adverse] effect on morale than being asked to fight with an inferior rifle.’ He added that the gleaming French army ‘would hold the record for visibility in the face of its adversaries’. In July a new regulation belatedly introduced sensible new greyish-blue service dress – the ‘bleu horizon’ – but this had not yet been issued when the killing began.

  Though Gen. Yvon Dubail’s 260,000 men in Alsace constituted the biggest of France’s five armies – reorganised as seven during the weeks ahead – commanders in the south were instructed by Joffre that their task was merely to engage and contain the largest possible enemy forces, while their comrades further north struck the decisive blows. The Germans at first offered no serious resistance: on the road to Mulhouse, Dubail’s men suffered only a hundred casualties. At 3 p.m. on 8 August, the French people were invited to rejoice that the tricolour flew once more over the city, which the enemy had evacuated. The liberators’ arrival was greeted with repeated renderings of the Marseillaise and dancing in the streets. Gen. Louis Bonneau, the local French commander, who was himself a son of the province, staged a two-hour victory parade, and issued a bombastic proclamation: ‘Children of Alsace, after forty-four years of painful waiting, French soldiers once more tread the soil of your noble land. They are the first labourers in a great work of revenge.’

  Celebrations were short-lived. Twenty-four hours later, the Germans committed massive reinforcements and counter-attacked. In oppressive heat, there was confused fighting in woods and vineyards, in which not all the Kaiser’s soldiers proved themselves heroes. When Maj. Otto Teschner ordered a frontal attack, only his officers and a few men obeyed – others clung to the shelter of a gravel pit. Teschner was obliged to threaten to shoot waverers, to stem a panic-stricken rush to the rear. Another officer, sent to discover what was happening at the front, met streams of men fleeing: ‘They told me that they had been beaten and wanted to [retreat] across the Rhine.’ But then the tide turned. The Germans prevailed, the French abandoned Mulhouse. Bonneau, much shaken, ordered a general retreat back across the frontier to Belfort.

  Joffre was infuriated by both the military reverse and the moral humiliation. He castigated Bonneau for halting his advance to celebrate in Mulhouse, when he should have pushed on to destroy the Rhine bridges. The commander-in-chief had intended that a display of panache in Alsace should lift the spirits of the entire army. Here now, instead, was Bonneau asserting that he was pressed, and demanding reinforcements. The general and his principal subordinate were sacked, being held responsible for conducting the retreat ‘in an indescribable disorder, a chaos of horse, guns and stragglers’. Joffre nonetheless concealed news of the repulse from the French public: here was an early manifestation of the high-handed manner in which France’s C-in-C would exercise his command.

  The Kaiser’s allies, however, were swiftly informed of this triumph. ‘In the evening news spread of a splendid German victory over the French at [Mulhouse],’ wrote Austrian schoolteacher Itha J. ‘These Germans! Are they really the rising new force? Is the old glory of France destined to fall, its star to wane and fade?’ But many German soldiers in Alsace were as shocked and traumatised as their French enemies by this first brief experience of battle. On 10 August, an artillery officer said to Sgt. Wilhelm Kaisen: ‘For so long, one looked forward to war, but now that we see its harsh reality one turns away with a shudder.’ Kaisen wrote to his girlfriend Helene: ‘His words burned into my consciousness, for I know others think the same. Just as he spoke, someone rushed in, reporting that France was asking for peace. You cannot imagine how enthusiastically that story was received. Oh, these madmen. They don’t know what it’s all about – that a struggle for existence has begun which will be fought to the last pfennig. This war will be Europe’s last.’

  Further north, thirty-seven-year-old warrant officer Ernst Klopper – a peacetime artist from Pforzheim – succumbed to melancholy as he contemplated the battlefield. His dead comrades were laid out in rows for burial, while the French village which they had died to capture was almost burnt out. Klopper was distressed by the clamorous appeals for food, water, rescue from horses, pigs and cattle trapped in their stalls and pens. ‘I do not like to record these wicked atrocities,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I never saw anything sadder than a battlefield with so many victims dead and wounded. Despite our victory, I feel deeply depressed. It looks as though the ancient Huns had been here: everything is smashed to pieces. Kitchens, trunks, cellars ransacked for food and drink. Even the manure heaps are burning.’

  Millions of men in their first actions shared the confusion of Jacques Rivière, twenty-eight-year-old French intellectual and friend of André Gide. As he and his comrades watched houses collapse and burn under fire, they somehow fancied themselves attending a military tournament, a fantasy war, a firework display staged in a vast arena. Observing cavalry manoeuvring across the front, Rivière wondered how they would distinguish between French and German horsemen at a distance, and swiftly discovered this was impossible. His unit opened a brisk fire on their own dragoons, fortunately without effect. Hearing shellfire, like all novice warriors they were uncertain whether it was outgoing or incoming. Ever more fanciful figures of speech occurred to Rivière: three Uhlans jogging with upraised lances across a meadow on the distant horizon ‘look like vessels tossing on the distant billow’.

  But some young men displayed, briefly at least, a burning enthusiasm. Lucien Laby, a twenty-two-year-old military medical student who had been mobilised as a stretcher-bearer, felt so frustrated by his non-combatant role that on 10 August he asserted that he stripped off his red cross armband to go freelancing with a few comrades in search of Germans to kill. He wrote in his diary that his passions were roused by reports of enemy atrocities, including stories of ambulances being fired on. ‘We tell no one because these little amateur expeditions would be repressed.’ Claiming to have achieved his purpose, he returned to his appointed role. ‘For a long time I have been longing to do this and now I sha
ll do my duty as a medic with a much lighter heart.’

  The first clashes in Alsace were crude affairs. The rival armies repeatedly committed men to attack in huddled masses, direct from the line of march, without attempting to deploy in open order. Commanders shrugged that such tactics were inescapable when so many unexpected encounter battles took place. Men advancing shoulder to shoulder were more likely than a scattered rabble to preserve momentum. But the consequences were devastating whenever French or German attackers met the machine-guns and artillery of their opponents.

  Professional soldiers had had plenty of time to contemplate this prospect: almost a decade earlier in Manchuria, automatic weapons did immense execution, watched by many European military observers. Following that experience, the Germans adopted Maxim guns for their own army – 12,500 were in service by 1914, designated the MG08, with many more in production. There is a popular myth that Moltke’s regiments deployed proportionately more automatic weapons than the BEF, but this was not so. The British Vickers, sighted up to 2,900 yards, was likewise a modification of the Maxim, which became the begetter of most heavy machine-guns for the next half-century, though in the first weeks of the war British newspapers used the French word for automatic weapons – ‘mitrailleuses’.