The First World War

by John Keegan

  The call fell on deaf ears. The damage had been done. It had been done, ironically, by latecomers to the invasion, the 17th and 18th Reserve Divisions, which had been retained for three weeks in their home district of Schleswig-Holstein to guard against the supposed danger of amphibious attacks by the British on the North Sea coast.34 Far from the scene of action, the divisions imbibed to the full the newspaper propaganda about francs-tireurs, as well as the objective reports of the Belgian army’s wholly unexpected tenacity in defence of the Meuse forts. It is difficult to estimate with hindsight which more enraged the Germans. Perhaps the latter: the myth of francs-tireurs in rooftops and hedgerows had the force of alarming rumour; the fact of real Belgian resistance not only exploded the fictive belief in Belgian passivity but threatened the smooth unrolling of the German advance in the west at its most critical point.

  Emmich’s task force, composed of the 11th, 14th, 24th, 28th, 38th and 43rd Brigades, specially detached from their parent divisions, together with the 2nd, 4th and 9th Cavalry Divisions and five élite Jäger (light infantry) battalions, all drawn from the peacetime army but reinforced for the operation, crossed the Belgian frontier on 4 August. It headed straight for Liège, twenty miles to the west, along the line of what today is the Aachen-Brussels international motorway. With them the units of the task force brought two batteries of 210 mm (8.4 inch) howitzers, the heaviest available until the Austrian and Krupp monsters could be got forward. On the morning of 5 August Captain Brinckman, recently the German military attaché in Brussels, appeared in Liège to demand Leman’s surrender.35 He was sent packing. The German bombardment on the eastern forts opened shortly afterwards. When the infantry and cavalry attempted to advance, however, they found the way barred. Because of blown bridges, the 34th Brigade had to be ferried across the Meuse in pontoons. The garrisons of the forts returned fire steadily, while the “interval troops” of the 3rd Division, manning the hastily dug entrenchments, fought manfully whenever the German advance guards tried to penetrate the line. Throughout the night of 5/6 August German casualties mounted steadily. They were particularly heavy at Fort Barchon, where the attackers “came on, line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until as we shot them down the fallen were heaped on top of each other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded.”36 There was, in the confused and bitter fighting of the night, a ghostly foretaste of what would ensue at places not yet touched by the war, at Vimy, Verdun and Thiepval.

  Yet there was also opportunity for success through leadership that the barbed wire and continuous trench lines of the Western Front would deny. Early in the morning of 6 August, General Erich Ludendorff, the liaison officer between Second Army and Emmich’s command, rode forward into the confusion to find that the commander of the 14th Brigade had been killed. Instantly assuming the vacancy, and ordering up a field howitzer to provide firepower at the point of assault, Ludendorff fought his new command through the straggling village of Queue-de-Bois to a high point from which he could look down, across the Meuse and the two unblown city bridges, into Liège itself. Unknown both to the Belgians and to the German high command, with which Ludendorff had lost touch, a force of 6,000 Germans had penetrated to the interior of Leman’s circle of defences. From his vantage point, Ludendorff ordered forward a party under a flag of truce to demand Leman’s surrender, which was again refused; a raiding force that followed was shot down at the door of Leman’s headquarters.37 Ludendorff’s bold sally nevertheless prompted Leman to leave the city and take refuge in Fort Loncin on the west side of the outer ring. Leman also decided to send the infantry, the 3rd Division and its supporting 15th Brigade, back to join the field army on the River Gette outside Brussels, believing that they would be overwhelmed in a battle with what he calculated were five German corps. There he miscalculated. The German brigades merely represented the five different corps to which they belonged. In the long run, however, his decision was justified, for it spared one-sixth of the Belgian army to fight in the defence of Antwerp, which King Albert had already chosen to make his strongpoint in Belgium’s last stand.

  A moment of equilibrium ensued. Ludendorff was inside the ring, but without sufficient force to compel a surrender. Most of Emmich’s command was outside the ring. Leman was determined to continue resistance as long as the forts remained intact, as all still did. The French government, to which Albert appealed for help, promised only to send Sordet’s cavalry corps and then just to reconnoitre. The British, who had been expected to deploy their Expeditionary Force of six divisions into Belgium, now decided to retain two at home. Joffre refused to extend the mass of his army northwards, since to do so would detract from his planned offensive towards the Rhine; he actually wanted Albert to bring the Belgian army down from Brussels, away from Antwerp, to join his left wing. The situation map showed a French army aligned towards Lorraine, a German army whose weight had not yet crossed either the Belgian or French frontier, a British army still mobilising to embark, a Belgian army concentrated in the centre of its homeland and, at Liège, a small German striking force immobilised by a handful of Belgian fortress troops guarding the crossings on the possession of which the future of military events in the west turned.

  The equilibrium was upset by Ludendorff. Large in physique and personality, utterly devoid of moral or physical fear, indifferent to the good opinion even of superiors, dislikeable, insensitive—he was to suffer the death of two stepsons during the coming war without faltering in his exercise of high command—Ludendorff resolved on the morning of 7 August to launch the 14th Brigade into the centre of Liège and take the chance that he would be opposed. He was not. Driving up to the gates of the old citadel, he hammered on the door with the pommel of his sword and was admitted.38 The surrender of the garrison gave him possession of the city. His bold sortie had put the bridges into his hands. He decided to return post-haste to Aachen and urge forward Second Army to complete his success.

  While he was away Emmich’s task force broke the resistance of Forts Barchon and Evegnée, though more by luck than deliberate reduction. That would wait upon the appearance of the monster howitzers which General von Bülow, at Ludendorff’s insistence, despatched on 10 August.39 The first road-transportable Krupp 420, diverted by demolitions, eventually arrived within range of Fort Pontisse on 12 August. After it was emplaced, the bombardment began. The crew, wearing head-padding, lay prone 300 yards away while the gun was fired electrically. “Sixty seconds ticked by—the time needed for the shell to traverse its 4,000 metre trajectory—and everyone listened in to the telephone report of our battery commander, who had his observation post 1,500 metres from the bombarded fort, and could watch at close range the column of smoke, earth and fire that climbed to the heavens.”40 The first of the shells, delay-fused to explode only after penetration of the fort’s protective skin, fell short. Six minutes later, the next was fired and then five more, each “walked up” towards the target as the elevation was corrected. The relentless approaching footfall of the detonations spoke to the paralysed defenders of the devastation to come. The eighth struck home. Then the gun fell silent for the night but next morning, joined by the other which had completed the journey from Essen, the bombardment reopened. The range had been found and soon the 2,000-pound shells were “stripping away armour plate and blocks of concrete, cracking arches and poisoning the air with heavy brown fumes.”41 By 12:30 Fort Pontisse was a wreck, its garrison physically incapacitated, and it surrendered. Fire then shifted to Fort Embourg, which surrendered at 17:30; Fort Chaudfontaine had been destroyed by the explosion of its magazine at nine o’clock. On 14 August it was the turn of Fort Liers, 09:40 hours, and Fléron, 09:45 hours. Finally, on 15 August, the howitzers, one of which was by now emplaced in the main square of Liège, reduced Forts Boncelle, 07:30 hours, and Lautin, 12:30 hours, before turning their fire on to Fort Loncin, to which General Leman had shifted his headquarters nine days earlier. After 140 minutes of bombardment the magazine was penetrated and the fortress destroyed in the
resulting explosion.

  The German pioneer troops who advanced to take possession found “a miniature Alpine landscape with débris strewn about like pebbles in a mountain stream … Heavy artillery and ammunition had been thrown everywhere; a cupola had been blown from its place … and had fallen on its dome; it now looked like a monstrous tortoise, lying on its shell.” Amid the ruins General Leman was found lying insensible. To Emmich, whom he had met on manoeuvres some years previously, he said from the stretcher on which his captors placed him, “I ask you to bear witness that you found me unconscious.”42

  The last two forts, Hollogne and Flémelle, surrendered without further fight on 16 August and the Krupp and Skoda guns were then broken out of their emplacements and diverted towards the forts of Namur, where they would arrive on 21 August and repeat the victory of Liège after three days of bombardment on 24 August. These two “naval battles on land,” in which guns heavier than those mounted by any Dreadnought had cracked armoured targets incapable of manoeuvre, spelt the end of a three-hundred-year-old military trust in the power of fortress to oppose the advance of a hostile army without the active intervention of supporting mobile troops. That trust had never been more than conditional in any case. The Prince de Ligne, one of the leading generals of the eighteenth-century fortress age, had written, “The more I see and the more I read, the more I am convinced that the best fortress is an army, and the best rampart a rampart of men.”43 Forts—at Maubeuge, at Przemysl, at Lemberg, at Verdun—would form the focus of intense fighting in 1914, 1915 and 1916—but only as fixed points of encounter around which decisive battle would be waged by fluid masses and mobile weapons. Ramparts of men, not steel or concrete, would indeed form the fronts of the First World War.

  Just such a rampart was in the making far to the south of the Meuse crossings even while Emmich’s task force was battering Liège and Namur into fragments. If the Emmich element in the German plan was bold, the French plan for the opening of the war was bolder in a different dimension, nothing less than a headlong offensive across the 1871 frontier into annexed Alsace-Lorraine. “Whatever the circumstances,” Plan XVII stated, “it is the Commander-in-Chief’s intention to advance with all forces united to attack the German armies.”44 Those the French expected to find, as in 1870, deployed along the common frontier between Luxembourg and Switzerland. Joffre’s scheme of operations was to throw forward his five armies in two groups, Fifth and Third on the left, Second and First on the right, with Fourth echeloned slightly in rear to cover the gap between the two masses, into which topography and fortification, the French calculated, would funnel any successful German advance.

  Had the Germans not long committed themselves to an entirely different plan that made the French dispositions both irrelevant and dangerous, Plan XVII was not ill-conceived. It was well adapted to the military geography, natural and man-made, of eastern France. Germany’s annexations of 1871 had robbed France of long lengths of her “natural” frontier, including the Rhine between Strasbourg and Mulhouse. They nevertheless left strong positions in French hands, including the high ground of Côtes de Meuse between Verdun and Toul and, further south, the crests of the Vosges mountains above Nancy and Epinal.45 The unfortified opening between, known as the Trouée de Charmes, was the trap into which the French hoped to tempt the Germans. The buttresses to left and right—Meuse heights, Vosges mountains—provided in any case firm points of departure, well furnished with road and rail heads and strongly fortified, for the two groups of armies to begin their descent into the Moselle and Rhine valleys. The two thrusts, by the Fifth and Third and the Second and First Armies respectively, were the essence of Plan XVII.

  Before either could be set in motion, however, Joffre had unleashed a preliminary assault, designed, as was Emmich’s into Belgium, to open the way for the larger offensive to follow. On 7 August General Bonneau’s VII Corps, based at Besançon, moved forward to seize Mulhouse in Alsace and, it was hoped, raise the countryside against the Germans. Bonneau expressed reluctance and showed it in practice. He took two days to cover the fifteen miles to Mulhouse and allowed himself to be driven out within twenty-four hours when the Germans counter-attacked. Worse, he then beat a retreat to Belfort on the Swiss frontier, the only fortress to have sustained resistance to the Germans throughout the Franco-Prussian war. The humiliation, actual and symbolic, incensed Joffre. He dismissed both Bonneau and Aubier, commander of the accompanying 8th Cavalry Division, on the spot. It was a warning of a greater purge to come. Joffre was a sacker. He had removed two obviously incompetent generals after the 1913 manoeuvres and already seven divisional commanders who had shown themselves torpid or unfit in the period of mobilisation and couverture.46 By the end of August he would have dismissed an army commander, three out of twenty-one corps commanders and thirty-one out of 103 divisional commanders. In September he was to dismiss another thirty-eight divisional commanders, in October eleven and in November twelve.47 Others were to be transferred, from active to territorial divisions, or demoted. In some divisions generals were given only a month to show their paces, sometimes less. The inappropriately named Generals Superbie and Bataille lasted respectively five weeks and ten days at the head of the 41st Division. Bolgert, who succeeded Bataille, lasted nine days before demotion to a reserve division, and must have thought himself lucky not to disappear altogether. The majority did. Only seven of the forty-eight commanders of peacetime infantry divisions were still en poste in January 1915. One, Raffenet, of the 3rd Colonial, had been killed, another, Boë of the 20th, had been severely wounded. A few, Deligny, Hache, Humbert, had been advanced to command corps; so, too, had Pétain, who started the war as a mere brigadier. The rest had gone for good. “My mind was made up on this subject,” Joffre would write later. “I would get rid of incapable generals and replace them with those who were younger and more energetic.” Right was on his side. French generals were too old—in 1903 their average age had been sixty-one against fifty-four in Germany—or, if younger, often unfit.48 Joffre, admittedly, set no example. Heavily overweight, he was devoted to the table and allowed nothing, even at the height of the crisis in 1914, to interrupt lunch. He was, for all that, shrewd, imperturbable and a keen judge of character, the qualities that would see the French army through the coming campaign as the crisis deepened.

  THE BATTLE OF THE FRONTIERS

  A curious interval of calm had followed the upheaval of mobilisation and the subsequent mass migration to the areas of concentration. Both French and German divisional histories record an interlude of a week or even ten days between detraining behind the frontier and the onset of action. It was spent in distributing stores, hurried exercises and deployment on foot towards the front. There was, for some very senior officers on both sides and for others who had read their history, a certain familiarity about the preliminary events. They resembled those of the first days of the Franco-Prussian War forty-four years earlier, with the difference that everything was working with greater efficiency. Otherwise, the troop trains looked the same, the long columns of horse, foot and guns looked the same, on the French side the uniform looked the same, on both sides even the weapons looked the same; the revolutionary power of quick-firing artillery and magazine-rifles had yet to reveal itself.

  The battlefront chosen by the French high command was, for much of its length, almost exactly the same also. True, in 1870, there had been no operations north of the point where the French met the Luxembourg frontier, while in 1914 the deployment areas of the French Third, Fourth and Fifth Armies reached from there towards Belgium. In Lorraine, however, the soldiers of the First Army found themselves treading the same roads as their grandfathers had done under the command of Napoleon III. The lines of departure were further to the west, transposed thence by the German seizure of territory that had been the price of defeat in 1871, but the avenues of advance were the same and so were the objectives: the line of the River Saar, Saarbrücken and the country beyond on the way to the Rhine. These had been given i
n Joffre’s General Instruction No. 1 of 8 August.49

  The Lorraine offensive opened on 14 August, when Dubail’s First Army, with de Castelnau’s Second echeloned to its left, crossed the frontier and advanced towards Sarrebourg. Bonneau’s setback at Mulhouse seemed forgotten. The French advanced as liberators and conquerors, bands playing, colours unfurled. The thought that the Germans might have plans of their own for victory in the lost provinces—to them “Reich territory”—appears to have crossed no mind in the French high command. Its intelligence underestimated the Germans’ strength and its judgement was that they would stand on the defensive. In fact the German Sixth and Seventh Armies, commanded by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria and General Josias von Heeringen, a Prussian ex-War Minister, comprised eight, not six, corps and were preparing to strike the French a weighty counterblow as soon as they overreached themselves.