The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  GALLANT LITTLE BELGIUM

  On 6 November 1913 Albert, King of the Belgians, visited Berlin. He was taken on one side by both the Kaiser and Moltke and warned that Belgium should throw in its lot with Germany in the coming war. Albert was no more blind to the drift of German war planning than were the general staffs of France and Germany. He recognised that his country was likely to be invaded. The Belgian military attaché in Berlin reported that Moltke had been enquiring what Belgium would do if a large foreign army crossed its territory. The answer, if that army were German, would be a defence on the Meuse based on the fortresses of Liege and Namur. But Belgium was not decided that the invader would be German. Right up until the war’s outbreak it continued to espouse a policy of pure neutrality, treating all its neighbours as potential enemies. To enable all-round defence, the main field army would be massed in central Belgium, with the fortified port of Antwerp to its rear. Thus Belgium would be as ready to strike against the French and British as against the Germans. The fact that the British showed so much concern for the protection of Belgium’s neutrality was seen as evidence of the self-interested nature of their policy, and a reason for Belgium distancing itself from the Entente as international tension mounted, not aligning itself with it.

  As Catholics, many Belgians felt sympathy for Austria-Hungary even after 23 July. They suffered a tremendous shock on 2 August. The Germans presented Belgium with an ultimatum, demanding passage for its army through Belgian territory and a reply within twelve hours. It was the occasion, if not the cause, for Britain’s entry to the war. Belgium’s neutrality was guaranteed by all the great powers acting collectively, and they included Germany as the successor state to Prussia. Legally Britain was under no obligation to act. But the threat to Belgium fused British strategic self-interest with liberal morality. It united the government and it rallied the nation. Britain responded with an ultimatum of its own, demanding that Germany respect Belgian neutrality. It expired at midnight on 4 August.

  For the Belgians, the issue now was not religious fellow-feeling but national identity. The manifestations of popular support for resistance surprised and gratified the King. His problem was that the army was in the throes of a reorganisation not due for completion until 1926. A field army of 117,000 was improvised, and 200,000 were left to man the fortifications. In theory all remaining able-bodied males were liable for service in the Garde Civique. In reality only those who resided in towns and fortified places were active and possessed the Garde Civique’s rather unmilitary uniforms: in 1913 it had 46,000 members. In the enthusiasm of early August 1914 about another 100,000 joined the non-active Garde Civique based in rural areas.

  The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 had attempted to codify the laws of war. They had recognised the rights of an invaded people to rise up in resistance, provided they formed themselves in organised bodies and were identifiable as belligerents. As the Belgian representative at the 1899 conference said: ‘If warfare is reserved exclusively for states and if the citizens are mere spectators, does one not thus lame the force of resistance, does one not thus deprive patriotism of its effectiveness? Is it not the first duty of the citizen to defend his fatherland?’9 The Germans opposed this interpretation. They argued that war on land was a matter for large standing armies only, and that the international recognition of the levee en masse and of guerrilla war would remove limits on war and lead to barbarism. Their field service regulations published the relevant articles of the Hague convention in an appendix, but the body of the text made clear that the general staff did not recognise the right of civilians to resist invasion.

  Germany was fearful of ‘francs tireurs’ - irregular combatants or literally ’free shooters’ - because of its experiences in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71. The war had been prolonged by France adopting the levee en masse. The Germans had responded by taking hostages, by organised and collective reprisals, and by increasingly random violence. They feared a recurrence when they invaded France again. In reality there was very little - and possibly no - civilian resistance to the German invasion. But the German army killed 5,521 civilians in Belgium and 896 in France. Citing the Germans’ suppression of the Herero uprising of 1904-5 in their colony in south-west Africa (modern Namibia), allied propagandists damned such practices as ‘colonial’. Stories of the atrocities focused on the rape of young girls, the cutting off of infants’ hands, and the execution of priests and nuns. The destruction of buildings - including the university library of Louvain and the cathedral of Reims - confirmed that anti-Catholicism was an element in the Germans’ motivations.

  The first wave of outrages clustered around the Germans’ attack on the fortresses of Liege. The siege began on 4 August and was not completed until Krupp 420mm and Skoda 305mm heavy mortars were brought up. But the frustrations of the advance were also self-inflicted. When the main German advance began, on 18 August and long after Sordet had reconnoitred the area, Alexander von Kluck’s 1st Army on the German right wing was expected to march an average 23 kilometres a day for three weeks. The railways were disrupted by Belgian and French sabotage, and the roads were cluttered with refugees. Lorry transport was in its infancy, so the supply systems of the armies once they were beyond their railheads were predominantly horse-drawn. Kluck’s army had 84,000 horses and much of its supply effort was devoted to the fodder - 2 million lbs a day - needed to feed them. Most of the transport formations were newly formed on mobilisation, with both men and horses new to the rigours and demands of military supply in war. Thus tired and exhausted infantrymen, having marched all day and perhaps having fought as well, had to set off in search of food before they could settle down for the night. The local civilian population, itself worried about its own food supply, was hardly disposed to be cooperative.

  On 4 August 1914 Belgian civilians had not yet learned to fear German soldiers. These young men pose alongside each other at Stavelot, just across the German border in the Belgian Ardennes

  Discipline was on a knife-edge. But the killing of civilians was not the product simply of alarmed and nervous reservists losing control. It was condoned and promoted from above. Conscious of both the need for speed and the threat of insurrection in their rear, army and corps commanders endorsed repression of imagined civilian resistance. One Saxon soldier, named Philipp, entered Dinant on the Meuse at 10 p.m. on 23 August, and found fifty civilians, ‘shot for having treacherously fired on our troops. In the course of the night many more were shot, so that we could count over 200. Women and children, with lamps in their hands, were forced to watch the horrible spectacle. Then we ate our rice among the corpses, as we had eaten nothing since the morning.’ 10 In all, 674 civilians were killed in Dinant by the Saxons on the orders of their corps commander. Conceived as a pre-emptive strike against anticipated franc-tireur activity, the massacre was justified by German claims that they had indeed been fired upon. The shots probably came from French soldiers on the other bank of the Meuse.

  THE SHOCK OF BATTLE

  The German army was not the only army to find that the strains of war caused discipline to collapse and buckle. Joffre began his campaign by pushing the French 1st and 2nd Armies against the German left, into the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, forfeited as part of the peace settlement in 1871. By 18 August he realised that the German right was swinging north of the Meuse. He deemed his 5th Army sufficient to counter the threat. The 5th Army was supported on its left by the British Expeditionary Force. It had been decided on 5 August that the BEF should go to France, but initially it deployed only five divisions, or about 100,000 men, the largest body that the diminutive professional British army could put into the field. With the Germans strong on their left and on their right, Joffre concluded that they must be weak in their centre, and so he directed his 3rd and 4th Armies to attack into the Ardennes, aiming to hit the German right wing on its left flank. In fact the German 4th and 5th Armies were also pushing into the Ardennes and a series of bloody encounter battles took place in the
forested and steep ground on 21-22 August.

  The ‘battles of the frontiers’ were the first occasion on which most French, German and British soldiers came face to face with modern firepower, and they were devastated and disorientated by the effects. Lieutenant Ernst von Röhm, on coming under heavy French fire in Lorraine, thought that at last he would see the enemy and got out his field glasses, ‘but there is nothing to recognise and nothing to see’. As the fire of his own unit slackened, he stood up and called on his comrades to do likewise. ‘I want to see how many are still fit to fight. The bugler, who has remained by my side like a shadow, says to me sadly: “Herr Leutnant, there is nobody there any more!” And in truth nobody is standing on the whole front line. Only three men are still unscathed, everybody else is dead or wounded.’11 On the other end of the line, at Mons on 23 August, the British army found itself holding ground against the main weight of Kluck’s 1st Army. Aubrey Herbert recalled that ‘It was as if a scythe of bullets passed directly over our heads about a foot above the earthworks. It came in gusts, whistling and sighing ... It seemed inevitable that any man who went over the bank must be cut neatly in two.’12

  In the fighting in the Ardennes on 21-22 August 1914, thick woods meant that the armies stumbled into each other while still formed in column of march The steepness of the hills made it difficult for field artillery to elevate sufficiently to engage

  Over a period of three days the allies were defeated along the entire length of the front. Forty thousand French soldiers were killed, and by 29 August their casualties totalled 260,000. They retreated. Rumour now fed panic. The 2nd Army had been shattered by the Germans in defensive positions on the Morhange heights, and fell back on the Grand Couronné de Nancy. On the morning of 24 August, Le Matin described the state of its 15th Corps: ‘Companies, battalions passed in indescribable disorder. Mixed in with the soldiers were women carrying children in their arms or pushing little carts in front of them, 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.’13 Within four days the gossip in a village in central France reported that in one of the 15th Corps’ regiments, ‘the men had reversed arms in front of the enemy. The colonel, outraged, killed six of his men with a revolver. So the soldiers had massacred their officers, then had taken to their heels, turning their backs to the enemy, and throwing into panic the army of Lorraine, which had been obliged to retreat 75 kilometres.’14

  The French army’s use of summary justice was more severe at this than at any other stage of the war. On 1 September the Ministry of War instructed the army to carry out death sentences within twenty-four hours. Soldiers were executed without trial. Joffre emphasised that requests for clemency were to be exceptional : ‘Men have been recovered in bivouacs or in the rear without packs and without rifles. It is indisputable that most of them have abandoned their posts in the terms defined by the code of military justice ... We must be pitiless with the fugitives.’15 France executed about 600 soldiers in the First World War, and the majority were shot in the first year of the war. The British pattern was similar to the French. They executed 346 soldiers between 1914 and 1920, almost all for desertion in the face of the enemy. Although the absolute numbers rose as the war progressed, that was because the army itself became bigger. When judged in relation to the size of the army, both convictions for desertion and executions peaked in the first year of the war.

  These British soldiers were regulars. Previous combat experience was not necessarily proof against a loss of nerve in this sort of fighting. Commandant Wolff, a veteran of France’s colonial campaigns, was executed on 1 September after he had raised a white flag and called on his men to retreat in the fighting on 25 August at Meurthe-et-Moselle. On the same night a British veteran of the South African war, Douglas Haig, commanding one of the two British corps as they fell back from Mons, panicked when one of his brigades clashed with German advance guards. It was an uncharacteristic response, probably the result of the fatigue that gripped the entire British force. Haig’s career prospered, but those of the two regimental commanding officers, who decided to surrender their exhausted battalions at St Quentin on 27 August, did not. Like Haig, both colonels had served in the South African war. They did not in fact surrender, but they were court-martialled and cashiered. One of them, J. F. Elkington of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, joined the French Foreign Legion, was badly wounded and awarded the Croix de Guerre, and was then reinstated in the British army in his old rank and given the DSO.

  A French farm-worker, described as a ‘spy traitor to his country’, shot near Reims in September 1914 to bolster the union sacrée in the fluid fighting following the battles of the frontiers, both sides convinced themselves that civilians could be agents for the enemy

  Joffre asserted his authority. By 6 September he had purged his army of fifty-eight generals who had failed to meet the demands of war. But there were tactical solutions as well. His instructions repeatedly insisted that infantry attacks should not be launched from too great a distance or prematurely. He emphasised the role of the artillery, not only in support of the attack but also in its preparation. Backed by their 75mms, the French infantry dug in. The battle of the Marne, fought between 6 and 9 September 1914, checked the German advance. One of the truly decisive battles of history, it is remembered as a battle of manoeuvre, but the fighting extended from Paris on the French left all the way across France to Verdun and then turned south to the French right resting on the Swiss frontier. On 6 September the sector from Verdun to Switzerland, 280 km, was already stable; by the 9th the sector from Verdun to Mailly, another 100 km, was also fixed. On that day only the 105 km from Mailly to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre was really fluid; the rest was dominated by a dogged defensive battle. French corps commanders, like Ferdinand Foch in the marshes of St Gond, continued to use the rhetoric of the offensive, but the key point was that their lines held fast. On 5 September the French had 465,000 75mm shells in reserve; by the 10th the reserves had slumped to 33,000. Free to choose their ground, the French gunners had good fields of fire. Employing delayed-action fuses for ricochet fire, a 75mm battery was able to sweep an area of 4 hectares, 400 metres deep, in 40 to 50 seconds. Its four guns, firing ten rounds of shrapnel a minute, discharged 10,000 balls. This was far more effective against advancing infantry than machine-guns.

  The French 75mm field gun was the artisan of the victory on the Marne Able to fire up to twenty shells a minute, it was deployed with good fields of fire in direct support of the infantry During the course of the battle French ammunition stocks fell by 432,000 rounds

  The Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, commanding the German 5th Army, later said of Moltke’s intentions, ‘The plan of the supreme command was simply to overrun the enemy’s country on as broad a front as possible.’16 This is accurate on two counts. First, if the French line had broken anywhere - particularly between Verdun and Toul or south of Nancy - the battle of the Marne would have been lost as surely as if things had miscarried round Paris: Moltke was looking for victory where he could get it, not where some grand design of envelopment suggested. Second, Moltke was in no position to exercise hands-on command in this battle. With his headquarters in Luxembourg, he was too far from the fighting, and used only one officer, his head of intelligence, Richard Hentsch, to go forward to seven separate army headquarters scattered over a massive front. Wireless communications were slow and often overloaded; they could take twenty-four hours in transmission, and by then had often been intercepted by the French.

  Posterity has seen the German invasion of France somewhat differently. It emphasises the strong right wing aiming to envelop the French army round Paris. But the right wing was not strong enough. It had detached forces to carry on operations to its rear - especially around Antwerp, behind whose fortifications the bulk of the Belgian army had withdrawn - and it had to occupy conquered territory. The army as a
whole had lost 265,000 men killed, wounded and missing by 6 September. Meanwhile the French, holding their positions in the east defensively, were able to redeploy troops to the west, using their own railway system. On 23 August the 24.5 divisions of the three armies of the German right wing faced 17.5 allied divisions. But between 27 August and 2 September an average of thirty-two trains travelled westwards every twenty-four hours. Joffre created a new army, the 6th, around Paris and outside the German envelopment. By 6 September the German right wing confronted a total of forty-one allied divisions.

  As Kluck’s 1st Army turned to face the threat to its flank from the 6th Army a gap opened between it and its neighbour, the 2nd Army under Karl von Bülow. Sir John French, the British commander-in-chief, had taken the British Expeditionary Force out of the line, planning to give it a rest behind the Seine and west of Paris. On 4 September the French realised - thanks not least to the use of aircraft for reconnaissance purposes - that the moment for a counter-stroke had arrived. Joffre stressed to the British that the BEF would be supported by the French 6th Army on its left and the 5th Army on its right, and pleaded with Sir John for it to enter the gap and strike Kluck’s exposed left flank. In reply, Sir John ‘tried to say something in French. For a moment he struggled with his feelings and with the language, then turning to an English officer ... he exclaimed: “Damn it, I can’t explain. Tell him that all that men can do our fellows will do.”‘17