Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  The atrocity issue has been addressed at some length here, because it plays an important part in the evolution of allied public sentiment about the war, together with associated myths and legends. From the first weeks, some sceptics within the allied camp denounced tales of German ‘frightfulness’ as mere propaganda. Six American correspondents in Germany, headed by Irving S. Cobb of the Saturday Evening Post, sent a joint wire to the Associated Press on 7 September dismissing published accounts of horrors: ‘In spirit we unite in rendering the reports of German atrocities groundless, as far as we are able to … After spending two weeks with and accompanying the troops upward of 100 miles we are unable to report a single instance unprovoked.’

  This naïve proclamation sat oddly with such German newspaper reports as those of the Kölnische Zeitung four days earlier; far from denying stories of savage reprisals, it sought instead to justify them: ‘Our brave fellows were not prepared for the resistance of the inhabitants of the towns and villages which they were obliged to occupy. How could they expect to be shot at from windows and cellars? At first they were petrified with horror at such crimes, and only when their officers ordered it did they adopt punitive measures, burn houses, execute civilians.’ Modern researchers have assembled evidence which seems hard to question. A mood of hysteria overtook the Kaiser’s army in Belgium and France during August 1914, matched by a determination swiftly and ruthlessly to assert its supremacy. There was also, among some soldiers, a desire to wreak revenge on any victims to hand for battlefield setbacks and casualties. Unauthorised misdeeds are committed by every army in every war, but in this case the German hierarchy formally endorsed the legitimacy of its soldiers’ conduct.

  Many well-intentioned allied people, both soldiers and civilians, after discovering that some outrageous contemporary charges against the German army were false, thereupon concluded that all ‘atrocity stories’ should be disbelieved. Such a view grew among the British, especially, because of their respect for pre-war German culture. They were naïve. Their enemies indeed committed actions in Belgium and France in 1914 unworthy of a civilised society. In defence of German conduct, it is sometimes asserted that other European nations and their armies also behaved barbarously at times. The Russians were guilty of widespread atrocities against Polish Jews in 1914–15. The Belgians’ conduct in their Congo colony was consistently appalling. The record of British imperial security forces in India and Africa was tarnished by excesses towards civilians, as was that of the French in their overseas possessions. The British also sometimes acted deplorably during the 1920–21 independence struggle in Ireland.

  But the German policy – and policy it was – of seizing large numbers of hostages and murdering them wholesale in response to resistance, largely or wholly imagined, was unmatched in scale in Western Europe during that era. The excesses of the Kaiser’s nation cannot reasonably be compared with those of the Nazi regime that followed a generation later. But they make it more difficult to accept the indulgent view of some historians that a German victory in the conflict of 1914–18 would have represented the triumph of a nation and a cause morally indistinguishable from those of the allies.

  3 LANREZAC ENCOUNTERS SCHLIEFFEN

  All the while that the French armies had been hurling themselves upon the Germans along almost the entire length of France’s eastern frontier, the hosts of Moltke’s right wing tramped, tramped, tramped towards the centre of the stage, which they would dominate in the days ahead. In Belgium and northern France, rather than in Luxembourg, Alsace or Lorraine, the fate of Europe would be decided. Almost 600,000 German soldiers of two armies passed Brussels, then swept on southward towards the frontier of the two nations. In their path stood the French Fifth Army, soon to be joined by the British Expeditionary Force, together mustering just half the enemy’s strength.

  Joffre still cherished hopes that Belgian forces might strike at the German right flank when, as he wrongly expected, Moltke turned south of the Meuse. After the loss of Liège, the Belgians would most sensibly have retired to the frontier fortress of Namur, within reach of the main French army. But King Albert cared less for prudence than for clinging to national soil. He determined instead to fall back on his northern fortress of Antwerp, there to hold out until the allies marched to his relief – he himself reached the city on 20 August. Joffre’s GQG dismissed the Belgians’ insistent and accurate warnings, that the principal might of the German army was now surging through their country, headed for France.

  On the afternoon of 21 August, however, the commander of the French Fifth Army, Gen. Charles Lanrezac, suddenly recognised the strength of the enemy bearing down upon him. His formations lay beneath the descending mace of the German right wing, the critical stroke in Moltke’s implementation of the Schlieffen concept. Lanrezac’s force comprised four corps, and was three times as large as the little British Expeditionary Force coming up on his left, but it was nonetheless heavily outnumbered by the Germans. At that stage, GQG was still expecting Fifth Army to join with its neighbours further south in renewing Joffre’s grand offensive. Instead, its commander defied orders, abandoned his attacking role and began to pull back south of the Sambre, with the Germans crowding on his heels.

  Lanrezac, sixty-two years old, has had a poor press from historians, and it is easy to understand why. Though a clever man, one of his nation’s leading military intellectuals, he was also a boorish and ineffectual one, prey to a despondency beyond pessimism. He disdained the British, who returned his contempt with interest. He referred to the BEF as ‘L’armée W[ilson]’, because its sub-chief of staff was the only senior officer capable of speaking French, and thus deserving of notice. But Lanrezac’s grasp of developments in mid-August 1914 was much superior to that of Joffre. He was among the first French generals to realise that the Germans were advancing through Belgium in huge strength, and vainly urged the commander-in-chief to abandon his thrust in the Ardennes, ‘that deathtrap’. The repeated retreats which Lanrezac ordered on his own initiative seemed to Joffre as well as to the British pusillanimous. But they preserved Fifth Army for important service under a better commander. More immediately, Lanrezac’s handling of his forces denied the Germans the decisive clash in the north they were impatient to bring about.

  The commander-in-chief did not at first press his subordinate to attack. Thus Fifth Army was largely supine until, on 21 August, Karl von Bülow’s formations fell upon it near Charleroi. This heavily-built-up industrial region was poor country in which to fight a defensive battle, because it was difficult for artillery or infantry to gain a clear sight of the foe. That day, the Germans seized bridges across the Sambre, and held them against repeated counter-attacks. Next morning, France’s bloodsoaked 22nd, Bülow and his staff motored to a vantage point on high ground from which they could view operations. Lanrezac gave his two local corps commanders on the opposite side of the valley no orders, and thus on their own initiative they did what was expected of every French general in August. They attacked, committing their men to a succession of massed charges to recapture the river bridges. These were repulsed with 6,000 casualties.

  The destruction of two colonial infantry regiments, 1st Tirailleurs and 2nd Zouaves, passed into the bloody legend of the time. There was otherworldly close-quarter strife around the Tirailleurs’ colours, which changed hands repeatedly. The regiment’s report later noted, ungrammatically but vividly: ‘the colour-bearer was killed five times’. Lt. Edward Louis Spears, British liaison officer with Lanrezac, wrote of the regiment that attacked: ‘As if at manoeuvres, in dense formation, bugles blowing, drums beating and flags flying, it had dashed to the assault with the utmost gallantry. These brave men, in the face of machine-guns and artillery whose gunners can never have dreamed of such targets … were driven back in some confusion.’ Most of Fifth Army, we should remember, was new to the ghastly experiences that French forces further south had been enduring for a fortnight. Spears met some of Lanrezac’s men preparing to renew their assaults: ‘the
y were like eager children, as gay as if this were the dawn of a holiday and they were presently going to march down the road to make a day of it at the local fair’. Within a few hours, their radiant spirits were extinguished in a storm of machine-gun fire and high explosives.

  Lt. Spears – in those days he spelled his name ‘Spiers’ – became one of the most remarkable participants in the drama of 1914. He was twenty-eight, and an upbringing in France had conferred on him a talent rare among contemporary British soldiers – he spoke accentless French. Despite his youth and junior rank, from the first days of the campaign he made himself indispensable to the senior officers of the two allies, whose eminence intimidated him not at all. Four years later the French ambassador in London described Spears as ‘[a] most dangerous person … a very able and intriguing Jew who insinuates himself everywhere’. Many of Spears’s compatriots shared such disdainful sentiments. Later in the war Winston Churchill befriended him, and sceptical comrades sneered at the two as fellow mountebanks. But the British liaison officer became an eyewitness to crucial inter-allied exchanges, and later published a narrative of his experiences, Liaison 1914, which is a masterpiece.

  On Fifth Army’s front on 22 August, having crushed French attacks, the Germans launched their own advance. By late afternoon Lanrezac’s centre was collapsing, and his army had fallen back in disorder some six miles. Just three German divisions had inflicted a major defeat on nine French formations. The general was at first minded to counter-attack next day. However, when confronted with bad news from every sector, at 9.30 p.m. on 23 August he ordered a general retreat, hoping to turn and meet the Germans again on better terms, in new positions further south. He was not a moment too soon: though Bülow’s army had also suffered severe losses in the Sambre battles, its divisions were now deploying in strength south of the river. The French commander’s egregious error was that, having acted sensibly in defiance of orders, he left both Joffre and his nearby British allies supposing that he intended imminently to resume the offensive – which he did not.

  Between 20 and 23 August, 40,000 French soldiers died. By 29 August, total French casualties since the war began reached 260,000, including 75,000 dead. The Third and Fourth Armies in the Ardennes had suffered worst – of the Third’s 80,000 infantrymen, 13,000 had fallen. By the evening of 23 August, the ‘Battles of the Frontiers’ were over. They would remain the entire war’s bloodiest daily clashes of arms. And even as Lanrezac’s men were falling back, a few miles westwards the British Expeditionary Force met the Germans for the first time, at the dreary little Belgian industrial town of Mons.

  6

  The British Fight

  1 MONS

  On 3 August The Times’s military correspondent, that intelligent cad Col. Charles à Court Repington, declared that the Franco-German frontier would become the focus of the war’s first big military operations. He added fiercely: ‘If our troops fail at the rendezvous, history will assign our cowardice as the cause’ – meaning the sluggishness of Asquith’s government in agreeing to deploy British troops on the continent. On the 10th, Repington warned: ‘We must be prepared for a desperate enterprise on the part of the entire German navy, and for the attempted cooperation of the German army in an attack on us.’ Two days later he wrote sombrely: ‘We should not be under any illusion that the approaching Massenschlacht will be anything less than the most frightfully destructive collision of modern history,’ adding on 15 August: ‘It is at least possible that the war may last a long time.’

  That day the British Expeditionary Force’s commander-in-chief, Sir John French, arrived at Paris’s Gare du Nord, to be greeted by a large crowd undeterred by drizzling rain. Following the field-marshal’s subsequent meeting with France’s leaders at the Elysée Palace, Sir Francis Bertie described René Viviani as ‘harassed, nervous and anxious’. Meanwhile ‘the minister for war was more anxious to display his knowledge of English than to impart valuable information’. Amid huge uncertainties and apprehensions, it is scarcely surprising that the nerves of the principal players, none of them young men, were stretched to the limit. Bertie was probably unaware that Joffre was telling his government – never mind the people of France – almost nothing about events on the battlefield.

  It is an enduring British conceit that the First World War began in earnest only on 23 August, when the ‘Old Contemptibles’ of the BEF drubbed the Kaiser’s hosts at Mons, thus saving England by their exertions and Europe by their example. In truth, of course, the French army had been engaged in murderous strife for almost three weeks before the first of the King-Emperor’s soldiers fired a shot in anger; Serbia, Poland and East Prussia were already steeped in blood.

  In northern France during the first exchanges of the war the British contribution, though significant, was entirely subordinate to that of the vastly larger allied forces. Against 1,077 German infantry battalions, at the start of the campaign the French deployed 1,108, the Belgians 120 and the BEF … fifty-two. It is unlikely that the Kaiser ever spoke of Britain’s ‘contemptible little army’, as popular myth asserts, but its absurdly inadequate size justified such an appellation. French’s initial force comprised sixteen regiments of cavalry, the aforesaid fifty-two battalions of infantry, sixteen brigades of field guns, five batteries of horse artillery, four heavy batteries, eight field companies of Royal Engineers, together with service corps and suchlike supporting contingents. Later in the war – from 1916, as France became increasingly exhausted – Britain assumed a major role on the Western Front. In August 1914, however, the BEF conducted only a long retirement interrupted by two holding actions. German miscalculation and bungling, together with French mass and courage, did much more than British pluck to deny the Kaiser his victory parade down the Champs-Elysées. But this does not diminish the fascination with which posterity views the BEF’s first actions.

  The Anglo-Saxon allies were warmly welcomed to the continent. After a march on 13 August Lt. Guy Harcourt-Vernon wrote: ‘Last mile ½ battalion fell out to be seized by inhabitants & dosed with water and cider. Discipline appalling.’ Unit adjutants visited brigade paymasters to exchange officers’ English gold sovereigns for local francs. A café in the Place Gambetta of Amiens adopted a custom which had spread through all Europe’s warring camps: at 9 p.m., closing time, uniformed and civilian patrons alike rose and stood at attention while the band played in succession each allied national anthem. But the old women who supervised the local public baths treated their foreign visitors – by no means mistakenly – as lambs destined for slaughter. They mopped their eyes as they distributed free tea, saying, ‘Pauvres petits anglais, ils vont bientôt être tués.’

  The right wing of Moltke’s armies had farthest to march to do its part in the vast envelopment of Joffre’s forces. After smashing a path through Liège, two corps were detached to pursue the Belgian army, retiring north-westwards towards the fortress of Antwerp in hopes of eventual French succour; to occupy Brussels; and to secure lines of communication. These diversions significantly weakened the main ‘Schlieffen’ thrust south. Belgian forces were incapable of major offensive action, and could most sensibly have been masked until the French were beaten, then mopped up at leisure.

  The third week of August found the adjoining armies of Alexander von Kluck and Karl von Bülow, more than half a million men, plodding doggedly southwards through Belgium towards the French frontier. Some eyewitnesses who watched their progress were stricken with awe at what seemed an irresistible phenomenon. Richard Harding Davis, an American novelist and journalist, described their triumphal entry into Brussels at 3.20 p.m. on 20 August: ‘No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave or lava sweeping down a mountain. It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike.’ Harding Davis marvelled at the sense of power projected by thousands of men singing ‘Fatherland, my Fatherland’ ‘like blows from a giant piledriver’.

  As for their commanders, Kluck was si
xty-eight years old, of non-noble background, a tough, leathery professional who had risen on merit. Bülow was also sixty-eight, a Prussian aristocrat to whom Kluck was subordinate, though in the field the latter not infrequently ignored the fact. Moltke considered Bülow the ablest of his generals, and had thus entrusted him with the most critical responsibilities, but both he and Kluck were old men, well past fitness to assume leading roles in the greatest military operations in history, as would soon become apparent. Within Bülow’s two armies both men and beasts were already feeling their feet. In just one German cavalry division, seventy horses died of exhaustion in the first fortnight of the campaign, and most of the others could scarcely raise a trot. No system was adopted for regularly resting marching men, the better to husband their strength and minister to blistered feet.

  Towards them tramped the columns of the British Expeditionary Force, advancing through gently undulating countryside, basking in welcomes as warm as those its soldiers had everywhere met since disembarking at the Channel ports. ‘These French people are certainly enthusiastic beyond British comprehension,’ wrote Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox of the Grenadiers, ‘and it would do old England a world of good to see the unbounded patriotism and bon camaraderie displayed on all sides.’ Some men remarked on the profusion of mistletoe in the branches of roadside trees, though relatively few would live to kiss any woman beneath Christmas boughs. Recalled reservists made up at least half of the strength of every BEF unit: fresh from soft civilian life and wearing unbroken boots, they struggled to keep up.