by Max Hastings
The last days of August and the first of September witnessed some allied heroism, but also scenes reflecting ignobility and squalor. Disgust was often expressed about German pillage in France, which was real enough; less was said about the excesses of retreating French and British soldiers, some of whom looted ruthlessly – especially alcohol. Edouard Cœurdevey recoiled from the spectacle of destruction created in Le Mesnil-Amelot in the Oise not by the enemy, but by French colonial troops: ‘The owners of the big farms live in unimaginably luxurious houses: crystal vases, pianos, billiard tables, sumptuous beds, all of which have been overrun by a savage soldiery. They have ripped open everything closed, thrown the contents onto the floor, pillaged what they pleased, dirtied everything that was no use to them, broken family portraits, thrown linen and women’s underwear on the floor, scattered provisions everywhere on beds, billiard tables and pianos. China lies smashed on the ground; some [soldiers] have [defecated] on the beds. The Germans wouldn’t have done worse.’
The armies’ medical facilities were overwhelmed by the scale of casualties. Around a third of British wounded who reached dressing stations subsequently died of gangrene. In the French army, medical aide Lucien Laby recorded that his own ambulance alone collected 406 casualties in the first month of the war, 650 in the second. Often, it was impossible to evacuate them during daylight, and by night they were hard to locate even with the aid of some of the French army’s ‘chiens sanitaires’ – 150 dogs specially trained for the role. Laby became accustomed to making summary and ruthless judgements: he abandoned those with no prospect of survival, and in some cases claims to have ended their sufferings with his pistol. His only equipment was a supply of dressings; he staunched one man’s haemorrhage by placing two hardtack biscuits on the wounds and applying a bandage as tightly as possible.
Inside dressing stations there were no lights, and often deep mud. Laby wrote: ‘What horrors! How many wounded men! All of them beg us to look after them and to take them first. A cellar is full of them as well as the whole house – in every room and on all the beds.’ Even evacuees fortunate enough to find space on overcrowded trains could expect little relief in the rear. Many received their first hospital treatment only after a lapse of four or five days. Tetanus was a massive killer. A chaplain at the American hospital in Neuilly described how he and colleagues asked each man where he was hit. ‘Several silently point to their throat, their head, their side. Some lift their covers to show great black patches surrounded by splashes of red. There is a sickly odour … This morning I gave absolution to a Lyonnais: his brain laid open, half his body paralysed but still quite conscious and sensible and able to answer yes or no to questions asked him.’
More than a few able-bodied soldiers exploited the chaos of the retreat to slip away from their units, some to rejoin later, professing to have become lost, others content to lag behind and become prisoners. Sir John French and his staff were not the only senior officers to succumb to defeatism: Gen. Joseph de Maistre, chief of staff of First Army, later told Spears that during the August disasters he seriously contemplated shooting himself. The British officer described a scene on 1 September, as men of Fifth Army continued to fall back north-east of Paris: ‘They looked like ghosts in Hades expiating by their fearful endless march the sins of the world. Heads down, red trousers and blue coats indistinguishable for dust, bumping into transport, into abandoned carts, into each other, they shuffled down the endless roads, their eyes filled with dust that dimmed the scalding landscape, so that they saw clearly only the foreground of discarded packs, prostrate men, and an occasional abandoned gun.’
Civilians struggled to avert the consequences of the tidal wave sweeping over their communities, some great and some small. The mayor of a hamlet named Défricheur interrupted a party of soldiers sweating as they dug a grave for a horse, to complain bitterly that it was too close to people’s houses. Grumbling, the soldiers moved away to begin their labours anew in a field. Few units on either side found time to bury dead men, never mind dead animals. ‘It is extraordinary how one gets used to this nomadic life,’ wrote Edouard Cœurdevey, ‘sleeping and eating here and there and not thinking of anything important because we know nothing. We see neither letters nor newspapers and cannot share in the drama which is unfolding … We march, stupid and mute – slaves of the god of war.’
Only a handful of the uniformed millions engaged on both sides of this movement of humanity, resembling a terrible animal migration, had any hint of the change of fortunes that was stirring. Joffre could boast some strategic gains from the events of August. Albeit at dreadful cost, the French onslaughts in Alsace-Lorraine had made it impossible for the Germans to shift troops to reinforce their right flank in Belgium. The Entente armies were growing stronger, as troops arrived from overseas colonies; Italy’s declaration of neutrality allowed France to remove the defenders of its southern border to reinforce the Western Front. Thanks to Fifth Army, d’Amade’s Territorials and the BEF, the Germans had lost the race to achieve decisive success in the north before Joffre redeployed to present first a shield and then a sword against their advance.
Throughout late August and early September, trains from the south crammed with men, vehicles, guns, horses were offloading north of Paris, joining the new Sixth Army of Gen. Joseph Manoury. German Alois Löwenstein, a mere lieutenant, wrote home that the French fought hard, and were well-led. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘they have the capacity to move huge masses of troops quickly & thus to attack our weakest points with superior numbers.’ This remark reflected a sharper awareness than was displayed by Löwenstein’s immeasurable superiors of the General Staff about the capabilities of the French railway system, now being exploited to critical effect.
Joffre placed Sixth Army under the authority of Gallieni, but vetoed the governor’s request for an additional corps to join the garrison of the capital: the fate of Paris must hang upon a great battle to be fought out of sight of its splendours. Privately, Joffre railed against what he considered the precipitate British retreat, which made it impossible to fight where he had wished, around Amiens. He nonetheless displayed almost oriental courtesy towards Sir John French and his subordinates, to their faces. Though the BEF constituted only 3 per cent of allied strength, its support was indispensable to a counter-offensive. The British were marching – albeit towards the rear – between Fifth and Sixth Armies; that was where they must be persuaded to stay.
Increasing evidence showed that Kluck had made a critical error: instead of encircling Paris, as Schlieffen had envisaged, or even making straight for the capital, he was pivoting his forces eastward, shortening the German stroke. He thus began to march across the front of the embryo army of Manoury, of whose existence the Germans were ignorant. Kluck’s action reflected the absolute conviction among Moltke’s generals that the critical actions of the campaign had been fought. Germany already held over 100,000 French prisoners; it now apparently remained only to garner the fruits of its triumph. Victory fever swept the Hohenzollern Empire: even in Berlin working-class areas, hitherto strongly hostile to the conflict, for the first time flags became visible at tenement windows. In the eu-phoria of the moment, novice German gunner Herbert Sulzbach set off for the front on 2 September frustrated that he was not already with his nation’s victorious army at the gates of Paris: ‘I was seized by a strange feeling, a mixture of happiness, exhilaration, pride, the emotion of saying goodbye, and consciousness of the greatness of the hour.’
During the past century, fierce controversy has swirled around the frustration of German hopes of absolute victory in 1914. It is sometimes suggested that Moltke’s grand envelopment failed only because he lacked vision and boldness properly to implement Schlieffen. Much is also made of the swerve north of Paris at the end of August, on the initiative of Bülow, as a fatal betrayal of a brilliant conception. Both theses are unconvincing. It is unlikely that any strategy would have enabled the Germans to achieve a decision in 1914, when the Western allies mobilis
ed forces broadly comparable with those of Moltke, unless those adversaries suffered an absolute collapse.
The chief of staff was bitterly criticised by his own compatriots, during and after the war, for weakening the German right in order to reinforce further south. It is true that Moltke showed an anxiety to ensure that every yard of German soil was defended, where history’s great captains might have accepted a need to yield ground elsewhere, in order to ensure a sufficiency of strength at the decisive point; he certainly erred in supporting Prince Rupprecht’s drive on Nancy. But this was a new world of warfare, pitting against each other forces of unprecedented vastness. The French army had become a much more impressive instrument than it was in 1870 or 1906, when Schlieffen retired. No responsible commander could have left exposed sectors in which Joffre’s men were known to be formidably strong.
Transcending all else is the probability that Schlieffen’s vision of a grand envelopment was incapable of fulfilment by an army dependent for mobility on the feet of its men and the hooves of its horses. The technologies of mobility and communication lagged far behind the twentieth-century revolution in the destructive power of weapons. In the pre-motorised age, defenders proved able to redeploy and reinforce more swiftly than attackers advanced, by the exploitation of rail links. It was a disastrous collective delusion, to suppose that a formula could be identified for achieving quick victory over three of the greatest powers in Europe. It is unlikely that even a Bonaparte could have contrived a different outcome in 1914. Like more than a few commanders and military sages in history, Count Alfred Schlieffen’s fatal limitation was that he lacked the grasp of logistics fundamental to all modern military operations: the daily weight of supply necessary to support an army in the field had doubled even since 1870. Rather than a strategist of genius, Schlieffen proved to be a fantasist who brought doom upon his foolish disciples.
On 1 September, the French secured intelligence which confirmed Kluck’s change of direction. A haversack caked with blood was brought from the front to one of Lanrezac’s staff officers. It had been taken from the body of a German cavalry officer and contained food, clothing and papers, together with a map. This not only revealed the deployments of every corps in Kluck’s army, but was also marked with pencil lines showing their intended bivouacs for that night – all of them north-east of Paris. Here was confirmation that the capital had been abandoned as Kluck’s immediate objective. The right wing of the German army was passing across the allied front, exposing itself to counter-attack.
A stream of intercepted signals emphasised the exhaustion of the enemy’s troops, together with mounting supply and transport difficulties. Moltke’s armies, and the horsepower on which their logistics were critically dependent, found themselves in grave difficulties far beyond their railheads, with animals at best inadequately fed, at worst suffering the ill-digested consequences of a diet of green corn. It was becoming evident that German reserve formations, which Moltke had designated for a key role, were struggling to fulfil this. Men fresh from civilian life were as unfit as their allied counterparts, and lacked adequate artillery fire support. As for their ailing beasts, one decrypted message pleaded for three lorry-loads of horseshoes and as many nails as could be found for the Guards Cavalry Division at Noyon. Kluck’s First Army alone had 84,000 horses, requiring almost two million pounds of fodder a day: thousands of animals were flagging or collapsing. There was an acute shortage of the wagons necessary for carrying hay.
Veterinary surgeons were also lacking: though even an infantry brigade had 480 horses, all the vets had been allocated to the cavalry and artillery. Many horses were tended by inexperienced and indeed starkly ignorant men, whose mistreatment hastened the animals’ demise. Meanwhile technology was of limited value, because all the armies suffered from the un-reliability of primitive motor vehicles. The diary of Lt. Edward Hacker, commanding a section of the Army Service Corps in the BEF, recorded a day during the retreat: ‘One of our lorries (a Thorney) over-heated at the brake and caught fire. Another, (a Wolseley) got its oil feed choked … We broke a petrol pipe on a Halley, which we had to braze up.’ This sort of daily experience was common to the motorised sections of every army in France, including the Kaiser’s. Serviceability rates were low, and fell fast amid the stresses of the campaign. During the German advance, every column had drastically breached the army’s peacetime regulation that its motor vehicles should travel only sixty miles a day, so as to permit maintenance. By September, two-thirds of Moltke’s 4,000 lorries had broken down.
Lanrezac’s formations were now deployed just south of the Aisne, sixty miles north-east of Paris. Manoury’s army, whose very existence remained unknown to the Germans, was massing forty miles north of the capital. And somewhat to the rear of both was the BEF. The cooperation of the British was essential, to launch the smashing blow against Kluck’s open flank that Joffre wanted. If Sir John French and his men merely sat on their hands while Joffre’s armies advanced, there would be a gaping, intolerable interval between them. ‘But I cannot ask [the British] to do this, having so far obtained nothing from them,’ the general wrote to the war minister on 1 September, adding gloomily, ‘in any case I do not know whether they would consent to this’. His foremost problem in the days that followed, as he prepared his counterstroke, was to persuade the boundlessly foolish, childishly sullen British C-in-C to participate.
Fortunately for Joffre and the allied cause, Kitchener that day made it plain to Sir John that under no circumstances would the British government countenance a unilateral withdrawal, abandoning France. The secretary for war copied to the C-in-C his telegram to the War Cabinet, dispatched on Wednesday evening: ‘French’s troops are now engaged in the fighting line, where he will remain conforming to the movements of the French army, though at the same time acting with caution to avoid being in any way unsupported on his flanks.’ Kitchener himself was later in no doubt that his conversation, and subsequent instructions, were decisive in compelling Sir John to abandon his intention to lead the BEF as rapidly as possible towards the coast.
After the battles of September had been fought, Gallieni sought credit for conceiving and executing the plan of attack which now unfolded. This was extravagant. Joffre was committed to launch a counter-offensive in the north before Gallieni was even appointed. Both men reached the same conclusion independently, and Joffre was in charge. But the governor’s energy and ingenuity were critical to massing Manoury’s army, and thereafter urging it into the fray. His contribution was symbolised by the manner in which he mobilised the capital’s entire transport resources to move forward troops – the legendary ‘taxi-cabs of the Marne’. The cabs were conscripted, sure enough, but they carried forward just 4,000 men, a single brigade, to join the 150,000 soldiers of Sixth Army. Gallieni nonetheless deserves his place among the inspirational figures of the moment, when many weaker vessels were cracking.
Foremost among these was, of course, Charles Lanrezac. On 3 September, with much reluctance because they were old comrades, Joffre sacked him. Fifth Army’s commander was Limogé, to use the contemporary French phrase for officers who were relieved of their posts, and dispatched figuratively, if not geographically, to the rear area barracks of Limoges. Lanrezac’s bitterness was not assuaged by the fact that Joffre in those days also purged many other generals who had been found wanting: in all, three army chiefs, ten corps and thirty-eight divisional commanders were replaced.
News of these wholesale changes quickly reached the BEF. Sir John French was delighted, though no man more richly deserved to be Limogé than himself. Humbler British officers were also heartened: on 4 September Guy Harcourt-Vernon heard a rumour that the neighbouring French armies had acquired new generals ‘young and full of ardour’. He was told that their predecessors had been shot for cowardice: ‘I wonder if that was true or not.’ Some of it was. While Joffre did not shoot failed generals, he authorised a ruthless programme of executions of ordinary soldiers found guilty of desertion or cowardice, p
our encourager les autres. ‘Men who abandon their units,’ Joffre wrote in an order of 2 September, ‘if there be any such, are to be hunted down and immediately shot.’ This achieved a prompt and useful effect, causing men to recognise the likely consequences if they fled the battlefield. In 1914, most of the French army displayed courage and determination, especially so given its men’s ghastly experiences in August. But its will to fight was stiffened by draconian sanctions enforced by firing squads.
Lanrezac was replaced by his foremost corps commander, Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, the tigerish officer who had distinguished himself in the fighting at Dinant and Guise, and would eventually become one of the most admired French generals of the war. Spears wrote that ‘his head reminded me of a howitzer shell’. The new army commander’s first address to his own staff on 4 September conveyed a galvanic shock: he warned that those who failed in their duty would be shot; that Fifth Army must prepare to fight the battle of its life. In the mood of the time, comrades pitied those who suffered execution, but few questioned the necessity for extreme penalties. Jules Allard was a former gendarme, now conscripted as a military policeman, who accompanied a chaplain and a lawyer to carry news of a capital sentence to one condemned private. All three then attended the execution, Allard recording laconically: ‘He refuses a blindfold. He himself gives the order to shoot; the doctor checks that he is indeed dead. He died as he should have lived.’
