Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  The Russians also used a Maxim variant, chambered for a slightly lighter bullet than the British and Germans used. All such guns were water-cooled and weighed around forty pounds, plus boxed ammunition belts which added fifteen pounds apiece. They were normally served by a crew of three, and were accurate to 1,100 yards. Their bullets scoured a ‘beaten zone’ of some square yards around the aiming point, which increased killing power. The French favoured their own clip-fed, air-cooled Hotchkiss, a good gun despite a tendency to jam, but initially had fewer automatic weapons than did the Germans and British. In Joffre’s armies the machine-gun later came to be known, with heavy irony, as the ‘arme noble’, and every commander complained that he did not have enough of them. In August, however, no dashing officer wished to be associated with such ungentlemanly technology. What was remarkable in 1914 was that relatively few machine-guns generated prodigious carnage.

  Joseph Césaire Joffre, commander-in-chief and for a season near-dictator of France, directed its military destinies from GQG, his Grand-Quartier-Générale, located at a school in the Place Royer-Collard in the little Marneside town of Vitry-le-François. He commuted to work each morning at 5 o’clock from the nearby house of a certain M. Chapron, a retired engineer officer – Joffre himself was an engineer – with whom he was billeted. Each day at 11 a.m. he returned to Chapron’s for lunch, a ritual which enhanced his reputation for unshakeable calm. Only during the month of August 1914 did he abandon the additional custom of a post-prandial snooze. Dinner took place at 6.30; as in British officers’ messes, military ‘shop’ was barred from the headquarters staff’s conversation. Thereafter, a brief evening conference was held – le petit rapport – and at 9 p.m. the commander-in-chief retired to bed.

  Most British generals took pride in their personal appearance, but Joffre’s often verged on the slovenly. His corpulence was the object of some mockery: it was claimed that the regulation requiring every French officer to be capable of riding a horse with conviction had to be waived in his favour. He was sixty-two in 1914, and native talent had propelled his rise from humble origins as one of eleven children of a cooper. Most of his career had been spent in France’s colonies, but when the post of chief of staff of the army fell vacant in 1911 Joseph Gallieni, the obvious candidate, asserted vehemently that Joffre, and not he, must be the man. The general was famously a listener rather than a talker. He unsettled and indeed alarmed subordinate army commanders by sitting for hours in their headquarters, through conferences and crises, often without interjecting a word.

  A technician devoid of intellectual pretensions, he abhorred detail, and interested himself only in big decisions. He was supported at GQG by a group of men who, while not fools, thought and acted within a tightly-laced corset of convention; displays of imagination were unwelcome. Gen. Ferdinand Foch, probably France’s ablest and most inspirational soldier of his generation, is said to have warned a General Staff officer back in 1911 that Moltke would attempt a grand envelopment: ‘Tell General Joffre … Never forget this: the Germans will put thirty-five army corps into the field against us, with their right wing on the Channel coast.’ GQG, however, declined to acknowledge the critical importance of the north. Joffre committed the cardinal error of focusing his energies almost exclusively upon his own offensive along the German border. In the first three weeks of hostilities, he showed scant interest in his enemies’ intentions.

  If the commander-in-chief had been prudent, he would at least have delayed his own grand initiative until he knew that the Russians had started operations in the East. Soon after hostilities began, intelligence warned that the Germans looked unexpectedly strong in Belgium. But on 11 August, Joffre ordered his armies to start their main attacks – the advance into Alsace had been a mere bon-bouche. Two days later one-third of his total strength, many of the men peasants with the straw scarcely yet brushed from their hair, marched towards the Germans in Alsace-Lorraine. Cpl. Bernard Delabeye’s brigade was told with careless insouciance that its mission was to ‘lay siege to Strasbourg’. But the soldier viewed his brigadier and such braggadocio with scorn: ‘with his black coat and red trousers he seems a survivor of Solferino [in 1859]’. Delabeye thought no better of his colonel, who ordered them forward: ‘He is old and does not know about the deadly fire of an invisible enemy, which begins even before the attack. Under the deluge of shells and machine-gun fire the men run in every direction. The myth of the swift bayonet assault evaporates. The first to die fall without having glimpsed the enemy. When first [we] do see Germans, they are greyish shapes fifty metres distant, only identifiable by the spike on their helmets. Then follows a retreat which almost becomes a rout.’

  Col. Serret, France’s pre-war attaché in Berlin, had always worried that his country’s officers included an excess of dilettantes, rather than serious professionals schooled in modern tactics. He wrote in one of his reports: ‘France makes me think of a factory in which there are too many engineers and inventors but not enough foremen such as Germany has in abundance. Does modern warfare with its heavy armies demand a genius or hard labour?’ The French army had institutionalised the promotion of officers known to be elderly, incompetent or both, solely because of their seniority or connections. In 1914 this policy exacted a heavy toll: from top to bottom of society, within a fortnight of mobilisation tens of thousands of households were plunged into grief. A countess living in Nice had a sister-in-law who professed to be a spiritualist medium. Some months before the war, this woman predicted that the countess’s son would die of a gunshot wound at the age of twenty. In Alsace, the medium’s prediction was fulfilled.

  On the other side in Lorraine, the German Sixth Army was commanded by forty-five-year-old Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who also controlled Seventh Army on his left, in southern Alsace. In those days, and for the last time, German armies sustained their regional integrity: Rupprecht’s formations were overwhelmingly composed of Bavarians. Moltke had instructed him to sustain a strategic defensive – simply to tie down the largest possible French forces, while the grand envelopment took place in the north. Now, therefore, the two German armies waited upon the motions of Joffre.

  The French took Mulhouse once more on 19 August, inflicting considerable slaughter on their enemies. They themselves also suffered heavy losses, however, and this time received a cautious reception from the inhabitants. Those who rejoiced at their earlier arrival had suffered brutal retribution when the Germans returned, and now Alsatians feared a repetition. Gen. Paul-Marie Pau contented himself with taking the city, and declined to push on to the east. Further north, on 14 August the Second Army of Gen. Edouard de Castelnau entered western Lorraine – open countryside interspersed with coal- and salt-mining districts – in the accustomed French manner, led by mounted officers, colour-bearers and bands. The Germans did not seriously dispute their passage, because they had prepared an elaborate reception some twenty miles eastwards. Alsace-Lorraine was well supplied with strategic railways, stations with multiple sidings purpose-built for detraining troops such as that at the Lorraine frontier village of Chambrey, where the main building was constructed in the style, and on the scale, of a small Schloss. The German intention was to lure the French into a sack, allowing them to advance until they could be struck from three sides.

  On the 17th in London, The Times wrote optimistically about Joffre’s armies, through the fog of ignorance and misinformation which shrouded the battlefield: ‘They are ready, and more than ready, and it will not be surprising if they now move forward in the spirit which corresponds best with French military genius.’ And so they did. For four days, Castelnau’s advance proceeded slowly. German rearguards overreacted, pausing to burn every village they abandoned, and putting up a resistance sufficiently energetic to impede their prospects of luring forward the French, who suffered a thousand casualties before 9 a.m. on the 15th.

  Castelnau himself had opposed the offensive into Lorraine: he argued with notable prudence that his forces should merely hold th
eir strong positions on the hills around Nancy, and let the enemy do the attacking. Joffre, however, was insistent that the offensive should go ahead, and progress in the first few days convinced him of its success. Further south, First Army overran Sarrebourg. On the evening of the 19th, Castelnau again urged caution on his local corps commander, Ferdinand Foch. Next day, however, Foch and his neighbours launched their formations in close columns across rolling country broken only by expanses of woodland. The French threw forward 320 battalions and a thousand guns, which the Germans, who as it happened had chosen the same day to deliver their own massive blow, met with 328 battalions and over 1,600 guns. In the midst of Alsace-Lorraine, the rival attacks collided with shocking force and heavy losses on both sides.

  On the left, where the French deployed on an east–west axis, the Germans simply stood their ground and let Foch’s soldiers come to them. The splendidly arrayed masses of blue and red marched bravely across a wide, shallow valley towards the hilltop town of Morhange, where the occupiers had created a big military base. From its eminence, they enjoyed an uninterrupted south-westerly view for miles. They had had forty-four years’ leisure in which to study the ground and measure ranges for just this moment. They used it to the full, arranging their forces to meet the French with the formal precision of a military tattoo – or rather, perhaps, of a Napoleonic battlefield. On the plateau north-west of Morhange 150mm howitzers were emplaced, with lines of 77mms and machine-guns on the tiered lower slopes of the same heights. French aviators warned their commanders of the strength – indeed, near-impregnability – of the German position, but they were ignored. The attackers pressed forward in two vast columns, between the Forêt de Cremecy and the Forêt de Bride. Here was a battle which is today known only to specialist students of the war, yet was awesome in its scale and character.

  Consider the spectacle confronting the Germans on the commanding heights that morning: under Foch’s orders some 43,000 French soldiers advanced across the open fields below Morhange in full view of the enemy, to meet a hail of fire which ravaged their ranks. Two divisions were wrecked; a French officer described ‘a sublime chaos, infantrymen, gunners with their clumsy wagons, combat supplies, regimental stores, brilliant motor cars of our brilliant staffs all meeting, criss-crossing, not knowing what to do or where to go’. Behind the killing ground lay the hamlet of Fontaine Saint-Barbe. This became a casualty-clearing station for the French, though the medical facilities were overwhelmed. By afternoon, around Fontaine’s pump and communal washing place lay hundreds of groaning and bleeding men, many in extremis. Meanwhile, even worse things were happening on Foch’s right, where the entire neighbouring corps broke and fled, exposing his flank.

  The Germans began to press the reeling French from three sides. They launched Bavarian infantry to complete what the guns had begun. Foch’s corps admitted 5,000 casualties in the day’s fighting below Morhange, of whom 1,500 lie buried in a single cemetery: the real total may have been twice as many. Many of the dead bore Alsatian names, while 158 by some accident of fate were of Russian descent or citizenship – men whose names were crudely misrepresented on their gravestones as those of Picofay Borrisof, Nicolai Bororghin, Fryaje Dimitry. Among the dead also lay a sous-lieutenant of light infantry, Charles de Curières de Castelnau. Before the war, as Joffre’s chief of staff, Charles’s father the general shared in the creation of Plan XVII. He had nonetheless opposed the Lorraine offensive, only to be overruled by Joffre, who bore overwhelming responsibility for the horrors that befell French arms in the blood-logged fields before Morhange. Local inhabitants also paid heavily. In the valley lay the village of Dahlin. After the battle the victorious Bavarians razed its houses, executed its priest and deported the inhabitants, for allegedly displaying sympathy for the French. The victorious Prince Rupprecht wandered with his aides through the nearby forest of Dieuze, marvelling at the chaos of abandoned weapons, clothing and equipment.

  On the night of the 20th, Castelnau, who was furious with his subordinates, ordered a full retreat, fifteen miles back inside France to the Meurthe river and the heights known as the Grand Couronné of Nancy, which protected that city. A few days later, on the 24th, a reporter for Le Matin gave its readers an account which offered one of the few glimpses accorded to the French people of the disasters befalling their armies: ‘Companies, battalions passed in indescribable disorder. Mixed in with the soldiers are women carrying children on their arms … girls in their Sunday best, old people carrying or dragging a bizarre mixture of objects. Entire regiments were falling back in disorder. One had the impression that discipline had completely collapsed.’

  The commanding general had adopted a custom of reading aloud to his staff each morning the names of officers who had fallen the previous day. On 21 August there was a momentary break in his voice as he pronounced the words ‘Charles Castelnau’ – the first of his three sons to die in the war. Then his voice recovered, and he continued the recital to the end. On the Lorraine front, however, matters were not as bad as they looked: Castelnau was able to regroup his army remarkably quickly and effectively. The Germans had suffered sufficiently severely that they did not immediately press Foch’s men as they withdrew, but they were also able to drive back Castelnau’s northern and southern neighbours, and every French soldier found the experience painful. Before quitting Sarrebourg, Gen. Comte Louis de Maud’huy stood at attention with his staff amid heavy German shellfire while massed bands played the Marche Lorraine.

  Foch kept his job, indeed was soon promoted to an army command, because Joffre admired his energy and ‘cran’, even if he could scarcely applaud his achievement, at Morhange. It remains bewildering that the French commander-in-chief permitted, far less incited, the Lorraine offensive, because he never supposed that decisive results could be achieved there. Even before Morhange he was already shifting forces north, removing one corps from Castelnau and diverting another destined for his sector. Joffre had always told his commanders that their job was to tie down the maximum German forces, rather than to win the war, which would be contrived further north. If this was so, it is extraordinary that he accepted huge losses in pursuit of secondary objectives.

  But in August 1914 every commander was prodigal with manpower and careless about casualties – only much later were the belligerents obliged to recognise that flesh and blood were finite resources. The Kaiser declared with his usual extravagance that the Lorraine fighting on 20 August had produced ‘the greatest victory in the history of warfare’. At the heart of the frustration of German purposes in August 1914 lay a failure, by Wilhelm and his generals alike, to understand the magnitude of operations that would be necessary to secure a decision rather than a mere local success in a struggle between twentieth-century industrialised nations. When battlefields were populated by millions, killing mere tens of thousands of the enemy did not suffice.

  Yet in those days, the French disaster at Morhange was matched elsewhere. The banquet of slaughter in Alsace-Lorraine represented only one part of Joffre’s disastrous achievement. Even as it unfolded, elsewhere along the front other French armies were suffering still bloodier fates in piecemeal encounters with the Germans. The most northerly, Gen. Charles Lanrezac’s Fifth, a quarter of a million men strong, advanced into Belgium, up the Meuse past Sedan and Mezières as far as Dinant, before meeting the Germans. On the night of 14 August, after a long march Lt. Charles de Gaulle’s regiment collapsed into exhausted sleep slumped against houses on Dinant’s streets. Early the following morning, German shells began to fall on the town. The defenders, after experiencing a few moments of confusion, galvanised themselves. Amid a crackle of German small-arms fire, the French soldiers ran forward across a railway line, heading for a bridge over the Meuse now threatened by the enemy.

  De Gaulle himself had covered only twenty yards when ‘something struck my knee like a whiplash, making me trip. I dropped, and Sergeant Debout fell on top of me, killed outright. Then there was an appalling hail of bullets all round. I
could hear the muffled sound of them hitting the dead and wounded scattered over the ground. I extricated myself from my neighbours, corpses or little better.’ The young lieutenant astonished himself by surviving a long crawl to the Meuse bridge, where he helped to rally what was left of the regiment. At nightfall, he clambered aboard a cart carrying casualties to the rear. He was operated on for a bullet wound in the right fibula which had paralysed the sciatic nerve, but curiously caused him no pain. His regiment, along with the entire Fifth Army, began to retreat.

  Joffre and most of his senior officers expected the decisive battles to be fought by Lanrezac’s southerly neighbours in the centre of the line, on the Ardennes front. GQG had been handicapped in making France’s war plans by uncertainty about what part, if any, the British might play. Even now, as the little BEF tramped towards the Franco-Belgian border, the French high command displayed scant interest in what might, or might not, be happening up there. Joffre received a stream of reports from French airmen and from intelligence officers that large forces of Germans were crossing the front northwards, towards his left flank. The Belgians also described enemy masses traversing their country in long, grey-green columns. This merely led Joffre to the conclusion that since Moltke’s forces – whose overall numbers he much underestimated – were so strong on both flanks, they must be weak in the centre. Instead of focusing on the northern threat, the commander-in-chief addressed his large person to France’s own, supposedly decisive, thrust into Luxembourg and southern Belgium through the Ardennes. On 21 August he gave the order – among the most fateful in French history – for nine corps of Third and Fourth Armies to attack between Charleroi and Verdun, while the Fifth did likewise on the Sambre.

  The BEF’s Sir Henry Wilson wrote home that day: ‘It is at once a glorious and melancholy thought, that by this day week the greatest action that the world has ever heard of will have been fought.’ GQG told Third and Fourth Armies’ commanders to expect no serious opposition; in truth, however, they were advancing against ten German corps, commanded by the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. ‘Little Willy’ and his chief of staff were bent upon glory. Reconnaissance clearly revealed French intentions. Heedless of Moltke’s injunctions to adopt a defensive posture, the Germans had no intention of playing a passive role while others won the critical victories in accordance with Schlieffen. Thus, they unleashed their own men to advance to meet the French, precipitating a series of murderous encounter battles.