The First World War

by John Keegan

  They were shortly to do so. For four days the Germans fell back, contesting but not firmly opposing the French advance, which in places reached twenty-five miles into Reich territory. A German regimental colour was captured and sent for presentation to Joffre at Vitry-le-François, where he had established General Headquarters (GQG). Château-Salins was taken, then Dieuze, finally on 18 August, Sarrebourg, all places that had been French since Louis XIV’s wars against the Habsburgs in the seventeenth century. Then the front lost its sponginess. The French infantry found German resistance stiffening. The small Army of Alsace, advancing continuously on the First’s right, recaptured Mulhouse next day, but its success lent no support, for a wide gap yawned between it and Dubail’s positions. It was not the only gap. First Army was not firmly in contact with Second; west of the Saar Valley, Dubail and Castelnau were not in operational touch at all. Dubail was conscious of the weakness and intended on 20 August to mend it by launching an attack that would both restore contact and open a way through for Conneau’s Cavalry Corps (2nd, 6th and 10th Divisions) to debouch into the enemy’s rear and roll up his flank; but even as he set the attack in motion on the night of 19/20 August, the Germans were preparing to unleash their planned counter-offensive.50

  Rupprecht’s and Heeringen’s Armies had been temporarily subordinated to a single staff, headed by General Krafft von Delmensingen. Thus, while the French Second and First Armies co-ordinated their actions only as well as sporadic telephoning could arrange, the German Sixth and Seventh fought as a single entity. Here was the anticipation of a new trend in command, which would bring into being formations as large as existing communication systems could control. On 20 August its worth was swiftly demonstrated. Dubail’s night attack was checked as soon as begun. The setback was followed by a simultaneous offensive along the whole line of battle by the eight German corps against the French six. The French VIII Corps, which had reached the Saar at Sarrebourg, was overwhelmed; its artillery was outmetalled by the heavier German guns, under the fire of which the German infantry drove the French from one position after another.

  Heavy artillery did even worse damage to Second Army, which was struck by a concentrated bombardment along its whole front as day broke on 20 August. The XV and XVI Corps abandoned their positions under the infantry attacks that followed. Only the XX, on the extreme left, held firm. It was fighting on home ground and was commanded by General Ferdinand Foch, of exceptional talent and determination. While his soldiers clung on, the rest of the Army was ordered by Castelnau to break contact and retreat behind the River Meurthe, the line from which it had begun its advance six days earlier. It had very nearly been enveloped on both flanks, which would have resulted in irretrievable disaster to the whole French army, and had completely lost touch with the First Army, which Dubail was therefore obliged to disengage from battle also. By 23 August it, too, had returned to the Meurthe and was preparing to defend the river, hinging its defence on strong positions which Foch had established on the high ground of the Grand Couronné de Nancy. There the two armies entrenched to await further German assaults. Schlieffen had warned such assaults must not be attempted if the victory he had rightly anticipated would follow a French offensive in Lorraine. The temptation to exploit the victory proved, however, too strong to resist. Von Moltke yielded to the demands of Rupprecht and Delmensingen and sanctioned their renewal of the offensive which, between 25 August and 7 September, broke on the stout defences the French unexpectedly established along the Meurthe.51

  The significance of the French recovery on the right of their enormous front would take time to emerge. Elsewhere disaster persisted. Next above the First and Second Armies stood the Third and Fourth, given by Joffre the mission of penetrating the forest zone of the Ardennes and striking towards the towns of Arlon and Neufchâteau in southern Belgium. Their front of attack was twenty-five miles, the depth of forest to be penetrated about eight. Two considerations argued against Joffre’s offensive instructions. The first was that the terrain of the Ardennes—tangled woods, steep hillsides, wet valleys—impedes military movements, confining marching troops to the infrequent roads. The second was that the German armies, Fourth, commanded by the Duke of Württemberg, and Fifth, commanded by the German Crown Prince, were deployed to attack to the east on a collision course with the approaching French, and in exactly equal strength, eight corps against eight. Of this equality Joffre’s headquarters were quite unaware. The main French reconnaissance force, Sordet’s Cavalry Corps, had criss-crossed the Ardennes between 6 and 15 August without detecting the enemy’s presence. The troopers had ridden bare their horses’ backs—French cavalry had the bad habit of not dismounting on the march—but seen neither hide nor hair of the enemy. As a result, GQG had assured both de Langle, Fourth Army, and Ruffey, Third Army, on 22 August, that “no serious opposition need be anticipated.”52 Reports from French aviators had confirmed this wholly false judgement throughout the previous week.53

  The Germans were better informed than the French. Their aviators had reported significant enemy movements on the front of Fourth Army and, though what had been observed was the northward march of elements of Lanrezac’s Fifth Army towards the Meuse, the mistaken interpretation alerted the Germans to Joffre’s real intentions.54 On 20 August the Crown Prince’s army had remained in its positions while its heavy artillery had brought the French frontier fortresses of Montmédy and Longwy—both old and ill-defended—under bombardment, but on the morning of 22 August both it and Fourth Army were on the march.55 Fourth Army was particularly concerned with the danger of being outflanked and its headquarters issued orders for the corps on its left to take particular care to maintain contact with its neighbour.56

  In fact, it was the French, not the Germans, who risked being unhinged. Their formations were disposed “en echelon,” like a flight of steps descending in a shallow easterly direction from north to south, so that the flank of each corps was exposed on its left. Were the Germans to push hard against the top of the French front, there was a danger that the steps of the French line would separate in sequence, leading to the wholesale collapse of Fourth and Third Armies. That, on 22 August, was exactly what happened. In practice, it was Third Army which collapsed first. Advancing at daybreak, its vanguard ran into unexpected German resistance and, when a sudden bombardment overwhelmed its supporting artillery, the infantry were panicked into flight. The rest of the Army, with a gap yawning in its centre, was stopped in its tracks and had to fight hard to hold its position. Fourth Army, thus unsupported to its south, also failed to advance, except in the centre, a position held by the Colonial Corps. This, the only truly regular element of the French army, was composed of white regiments which in peacetime garrisoned the empire in North and West Africa and Indo-China. Its soldiers were hardened and experienced veterans. That was to be their undoing. Pressing forward with a determination the unblooded conscripts of the metropolitan army could not match, it rapidly became embedded in a far larger mass of Germans. Five of its battalions, advancing one behind the other on a front only 600 yards wide, launched repeated bayonet attacks through dense woodland, only to be thrown back by concentrated rifle and machine-gun fire. The harder the Colonials pressed, the higher their casualties mounted. By the evening of 22 August, the 3rd Colonial Division had lost 11,000 men killed or wounded, out of a strength of 15,000, the worst casualties to be suffered by any French formation in the Battle of the Frontiers.57 Its effective destruction spelt an end to Fourth Army’s efforts to take ground forward, just as V Corps’ collapse had halted Third Army’s offensive farther to the south.

  Plan XVII had thus been brought to a standstill along a crucial section of front, seventy-five miles wide, between Givet and Verdun. Joffre at first refused to credit the outcome. On the morning of 23 August he signalled de Langle de Cary to say that there were “only … three [enemy] corps before [you]. Consequently you must resume your offensive as soon as possible.”58 De Langle de Cary obediently attempted to do as ordered,
but his army was only driven further back that day. Unsuccessful, too, were the Third and the recently assembled Army of Lorraine. On 24 August, the Fourth Army retired behind the protection of the River Meuse and Third Army shortly followed. Much of Maunoury’s Army of Lorraine was meanwhile withdrawn to Amiens, where a new Army, the Sixth, was to be created around its complement of reserve divisions.

  The Battle of the Sambre

  On two sectors of the French frontier, Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes, the Germans had, by the end of the war’s third week, achieved significant victories. The scene of action was now to shift to the only sector as yet untouched by major operations, the frontier with Belgium. It was there that Germany’s offensive plan must succeed if Schlieffen’s dream of a six-week war were to be realised. The seizure of Liège had laid the ground. The consequent retreat of the Belgian field army to the entrenched camp at Antwerp had opened the way. The fall of Namur, clearly imminent by 24 August, would complete the clearing of the theatre of major obstacles. Most important of all, the French high command, despite the weight of warning given by the German invasion of eastern Belgium, remained apparently and obstinately blind to the danger that threatened. Lanrezac, commander of Fifth Army deployed at the northern end of the line, had begun to warn GQG, even before war was declared, that he feared an envelopment of his left—northern—flank by a German march into Belgium. Joffre, whose thoughts were fixed on his own offensive into Germany, dismissed these anxieties. As late as 14 August, when Lanrezac brought his concerns to GQG at Vitry-le-François on the Marne, east of Paris, and soon to lie within earshot of the guns, the Commander-in-Chief continued to insist that the Germans would not deploy any major force inside Belgium north of the Meuse.

  Over the next six days, Joffre began to reconsider, issuing orders that first directed Lanrezac’s Fifth Army into the angle between the Meuse and the Sambre, as a precautionary measure, then that instructed Lanrezac to join with the British Expeditionary Force in operations against the left wing of the German battle line, whose appearance in great strength in Belgium could no longer be denied.59 By that date the battle with von Kluck’s, von Bülow’s and von Hausen’s Armies—the battle of the Sambre to the French, Mons to the British—was already about to begin. It was in its opening stages what military theorists call a “battle of encounter,” the nature of which is decided by the actions of the troops engaged rather than by orders received from the top. Orders, indeed, discouraged engagement. Lanrezac, in a conference held at Chimay on the afternoon of 21 August, told the Chiefs of Staff of his subordinate corps that the plan was for Fifth Army to hold the high ground on the south bank of the Sambre.60 He feared that if he committed his soldiers to hold the dense belt of little industrial buildings and cottages—le Borinage—that line the bank between Charleroi and Namur, they would become involved in small-scale street fighting and be lost to his control. The Germans received similar orders from von Bülow, who was co-ordinating the movements of First and Third Armies as well as of his own Second, though given for different reasons. On 20 August Moltke had warned Bülow that the French were present in strength in front of him and the British were to his right, but in unlocated positions, and that he should in consequence attack across the Sambre only when Second and Third Armies could co-ordinate a pincer movement. On the morning of 21 August, Bülow accordingly wirelessed von Hausen that he was postponing Second Army’s advance, which meant that Third was to pause also.

  Events at a lower level then took charge. Rivers, unless wide, are always difficult to defend. Meanders create pockets that soak up troops and cause misunderstandings between neighbouring units as to where responsibilities start and end. Bridges are a particular problem: does a bridge which marks a boundary between units lie in one sector or another? Buildings and vegetation compound the problems, breaking lines of sight and impeding easy lateral movement along the river when local crises, requiring rapid reinforcement, arise. Long experience has taught soldiers that it is easier to defend a river on the far, rather than the near, bank but, if the near bank is to be defended, then it is better done behind it than at the water’s edge.61 All these truths were to be proved again in the battle that developed on the Sambre during 21 August.

  Lanrezac, with perfect orthodoxy, had ordered the bridges to be held only by outposts, while the bulk of the Fifth Army waited on higher ground, whence it could advance to repel a German crossing or mount its own offensive across the bridges into Belgium. The outposts at the bridges, however, found themselves in a dilemma. At Auvelais, halfway between Namur and Charleroi, for example, they were overlooked from the far bank, and requested permission either to cross or to fall back. Their regimental commander, bound by Lanrezac’s instructions, refused but sent more troops to support them. The reinforcements discovered more bridges than their orders indicated had to be defended. While they were making their dispositions, German patrols of Second Army appeared opposite, sensed an opportunity and requested permission to chance a crossing from corps headquarters. It was that of the Imperial Guard, which, fortuitously, Ludendorff happened to be visiting when the message arrived. Showing the same initiative as he had done fifteen days earlier at Liège, he took personal responsibility for approving the venture. The 2nd Guard Division attacked, found an undefended bridge—there were eight in a sector where the French troops had thought there was but one—and established a foothold. To the west of Auvelais, at Tergné, a patrol of the German 19th Division found another unguarded bridge and crossed without asking for orders. Responding to opportunity, the divisional commander sent a whole regiment to follow and drove the French defenders away. By the afternoon of 21 August, therefore, two large meanders of the Sambre were in German hands and a gap four miles wide had been opened across the river front.

  The results were characteristic of an encounter battle and greatly to the credit of the German front-line troops and their local commanders. Yet Lanrezac might still have retrieved the situation had he stuck to his original plan of holding the high ground south of the Sambre as his main position. Inexplicably, however, he now acquiesced in the decision of his two subordinates commanding III and X Corps to counter-attack, in an attempt to retake the meanders of the Sambre already lost. They tried and on the morning of 22 August their troops were repelled with heavy loss.

  The French infantry made a gallant show, advancing across the Belgian beet fields with colours unfurled and bugles sounding the shrill notes of the “charge.” As the ranks drew near to the German lines … rifles and machine guns pounded forth a rapid-fire of death from behind walls and hummocks and the windows of houses. Before it the attack wilted. Running, stumbling, crawling, the French sought cover as best they could, and the attack ended leaving the German Guard undisputed masters of the field.62

  That night both corps had taken positions on Lanrezac’s original and preferred line on the high ground with nothing to show for the day’s brave effort but yet more casualties. They were very heavy. Of the regiments engaged, each beginning with a strength of some 2,500 men, the 24th had lost 800, the 25th, a Cherbourg regiment, 1,200, the 25th (Caen) 1,000, the 49th (Bordeaux) 700, the 74th (Rouen) 800, the 129th (le Havre) 650.63 Strategically the result was even worse. Nine French divisions had been defeated by three German, and forced to retreat seven miles, contact with the Fourth Army, on the Meuse, had been broken, contact with the British Expeditionary Force at Mons had not been established and Sordet’s Cavalry Corps, which had wholly failed in its mission of finding the Germans before they fell on the French along the Sambre, was drawing back through Fifth Army’s positions, its men exhausted and its horses worn out. The situation did not improve during 23 August. Though parts of the Fifth Army tried to resume the offensive, it was the Germans who made ground, particularly on the right, where they got across the water obstacle of the Sambre-Meuse confluence in strength; that despite a counter-attack organised by General Mangin, thenceforth to be recognised as one of the French army’s most ferocious warriors. An hour before mid
night Lanrezac concluded he was beaten and telegraphed Joffre that as the “enemy is threatening my right on the Meuse … Givet is threatened, Namur taken … I have decided to withdraw the Army tomorrow.”64

  The Battle of Mons

  Lanrezac made no mention of the situation on his left, though there his British allies had also been locked in combat with the Germans throughout 23 August, showing considerably more effectiveness in defence of a water obstacle—the Mons-Condé Canal—than his own troops had done on the Sambre. The British Expeditionary Force, of one cavalry and four infantry divisions, had begun landing at Le Havre, Boulogne and Rouen eleven days before and had arrived on the canal on 22 August. By the morning of 23 August they were deployed on a front of twenty miles, II Corps to the west, I Corps, commanded by General Douglas Haig, to the east, with the whole of von Kluck’s First Army, fourteen divisions strong, bearing down on them from the north. General Sir John French, the BEF Commander, had expected to march level with Lanrezac in an advance into Belgium. News of Lanrezac’s defeat on the Sambre ruled that out but, when a message arrived from French Fifth Army headquarters just before midnight on 22 August, asking for assistance, he agreed to defend the canal for twenty-four hours. It was evidence of how poorly the French grasped the nature of the German onset that the request was actually for an attack into von Kluck’s flank; von Kluck’s flank already extended beyond both Fifth Army’s and the BEF’s positions. The British, if only for a moment, were to be cast into the role of opposing both the concept and the substance of the Schlieffen Plan—“Keep the right wing strong” were allegedly Schlieffen’s dying words—at the crucial point.