by John Keegan
THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE
“It is the thirty-fifth day,” the Kaiser exulted to a delegation of ministers to his Luxembourg headquarters on 4 September, “we are besieging Rheims, we are thirty miles from Paris.”94 The thirty-fifth day had an acute significance to the German General Staff of 1914. It lay halfway between the thirty-first day since mobilisation, when a map drawn by Schlieffen himself showed the German armies poised on the Somme to begin their descent on Paris, and the fortieth, when his calculations determined that there would have been a decisive battle.95 That battle’s outcome was critical. Schlieffen, and his successors, had calculated that the deficiencies of the Russian railways would ensure that not until the fortieth day would the Tsar’s armies be assembled in sufficient strength to launch an offensive in the east. Between the thirty-fifth and the fortieth day, therefore, the outcome of the war was to be decided.
On 4 and 5 September, the commanders issued the orders which would set the engagement in motion. “The enemy,” von Moltke admitted, on 5 September, “has eluded the enveloping attack of First and Second Armies and has succeeded, with part of his forces, in gaining contact with Paris.”96 First and Second Armies were therefore to stand on the defensive outside Paris, while Third Army was to advance towards the upper Seine and Fourth and Fifth Armies were to attack to the south-east, with the object of opening a way for the Sixth and Seventh to cross the River Moselle and complete the encirclement of the enemy. This was the opposite of what Schlieffen had intended; his plan was for the First and Second Armies to drive the French into the arms of the left wing. On 4 September, Joffre had issued General Instruction No. 6 which exactly anticipated Moltke’s recognition of his predicament and proposed means to exploit it. “It is desirable to take advantage of the exposed position of the German First Army to concentrate against it the strength of the Allied armies [opposite].”97 Accordingly, the Sixth Army, at the outermost extremity, was to cross the Ourcq, a tributary of the Marne, and advance round the Germans’ flank, while the BEF, the Fifth Army and Foch’s Ninth Army were to make a fighting advance northward; effective date of the order, 6 September. The biter was to be bit. The German, not the French, army was to be the target of an encirclement.
What stood between conception of the order and its realisation were water barriers, not the Marne itself, but its tributaries, the Ourcq, which flows north to south athwart the line of advance of Maunoury’s Sixth Army, and the Morins—the Grand and the Petit—which run east to west, and so across the front of the BEF and the Sixth and the Ninth Armies; the latter’s room for manoeuvre was further impeded by the Marshes of the St. Gond which formed part of the riverine system. None of the waterways was a serious obstacle. They defined, nevertheless, the lines on which action was to be joined and required preparation for deliberate attack. That necessity, as it proved, was to favour the Germans rather than the French, thanks to tactical quick-thinking by a commander on the spot at a critical point. The man was General von Gronau, an artillery officer commanding IV Reserve Corps. His formation had played little part in the campaign thus far, had indeed been much weakened by transfers of units to act as flank guards for the main body of First Army. Von Gronau, nevertheless, remained alert to his responsibilities. His Corps held station on the outermost edge of the German invasive swathe and was therefore not only in a vulnerable position itself but stood security on the right for the whole offensive deployment. On the morning of 5 September, as Maunoury’s Sixth Army probed forward to take up attacking positions for the following day, he was seized by disquiet at the reports sent back by his attached cavalry division. Its patrols found advancing French troops all across its front. As the IV Reserve Corps was aligned at right angles to and to the rear of von Kluck’s First Army, that meant that the enemy was manoeuvring to take First Army in flank and roll it up. His response was instantaneous and courageous. He decided to attack.
The German advance, 1914
As Maunoury’s advance guard, the 55th and 56th Reserve Divisions and the Moroccan Brigade, breasted forward towards the Ourcq in the mid-morning of 5 September, they were suddenly brought under fire by the rifles, machine guns and artillery of Germans who were occupying terrain supposed empty. The French went to ground and a fierce firefight broke out that lasted the rest of the day. As darkness fell, von Gronau wisely judged he had won the time necessary to save First Army from surprise attack and disengaged his troops, who slipped away to the line the French had intended to assault on 6 September. In bright moonlight the French followed, launching attacks against positions the Germans had already abandoned.
The battle of the Marne had therefore opened a day earlier than Joffre had intended, and on terms dictated by the enemy. Thanks to von Gronau’s independent action, the beckoning open flank which offered the opportunity for an encirclement had been covered and von Kluck given the warning necessary to hurry reinforcements from his central to his right before the danger heightened. Kluck reacted with an energy and decisiveness he had not shown during the days when he had let his army drift reactively eastward in the footsteps of Lanrezac’s defeat. By the morning of 6 September, he had transferred his II Corps from south of the Marne to west of the Ourcq, to form a line north of von Gronau’s position and he would successively transfer northward the IV Corps on 7 September, the III Corps on 8 September and the IX Corps on 9 September. What strategists call “interior lines” were now working in von Kluck’s favour, as they had worked for Joffre in the last week of August and first week of September, when he had brought the constituents of Sixth and Ninth Armies behind the fighting front from the armies that were holding their ground in Alsace and Lorraine.
There was this difference. It was critical. Joffre’s transfers had not altered the strategic situation on the Eastern Front, which had stabilised as soon as the French ceased to attack and found strong defensive positions behind the Meuse and Moselle. Kluck’s withdrawals, by contrast, weakened his principal front at the point where his mission was still to deliver a decisive, war-winning blow and at a moment, in the very last of the forty days which were expected to bring victory, when the French were gathering to deliver their counter-offensive over the same ground. Indeed, by 9 September, the fortieth day itself, the German First Army, instrument and hope of Schlieffen’s vision, was not on the Marne at all, but had been withdrawn in its entirety to the Ourcq, where it faced not Paris, in popular imagination the object of the whole campaign, nor the mass of the French army, its strategic target, but Maunoury’s detached manoeuvre force. Between the German First Army and Second an enormous gap had opened, thirty-five miles wide, which the Germans could disregard only because they believed that the enemy troops opposite, the British Expeditionary Force, lacked the strength and had demonstrated the disinclination to penetrate.98
The high command of the BEF, though not its brave soldiers, had given von Moltke, Kluck and Bülow reason for so believing. Sir John French, “the little Field Marshal,” stout, florid, peppery, had proved a dashing cavalry leader in the British Army’s small wars. At the head of his country’s only field army in the largest war ever to involve it, he displayed an increasing tendency to nerves. The losses at Mons had unsettled him, the far heavier losses at Le Cateau had shaken his resolve altogether. He feared that the BEF would fall to pieces unless given a respite to rest and re-equip. What heightened his anxieties was his fixed conviction that Lanrezac had let him down, retreating from the Sambre without warning and leaving the BEF to cover the withdrawal. Before August was out, he had come to hate Lanrezac and to distrust the French generally. For Joffre he retained a personal regard but, as he told Kitchener on 30 August, “my confidence in the ability of the leaders of the French Army to carry this campaign to a successful conclusion is fast waning.”99 During the next days, he spoke of transferring his base from the Channel ports to Brittany, of the impossibility of allowing the BEF to “take up a position in the front line for at least ten days,” of retiring behind the Seine by “marching for some eight
days … at a considerable distance from the enemy.”100 It took Kitchener’s visit to Paris on 2 September to check this defeatism but he remained unwilling to rejoin battle. As late as 5 September, when it had been made clear to him that the participation of the BEF in the counter-offensive prescribed by Joffre’s General Instruction No. 6 was essential to its success, he continued to prevaricate. Only when Joffre found the time, at this moment of acute crisis, to visit his headquarters and make a personal appeal did he stiffen. French was an emotional man. Joffre’s clutching of his hands and supplication in the name of “France” set tears running down his cheeks. He tried his ally’s language, fell tongue-tied, then blurted at a staff officer who spoke French better, “Damn it, I can’t explain. Tell him that all man can do our fellows will do.”101
Difficulties remained. The BEF had fallen too far to the rear to join at once with Sixth and Fifth Armies in the general offensive. “Desperate Frankie,” the new commander of Fifth Army whom all his British collaborators admired, fell into a rage at his ally’s apparent unco-operativeness. Sixth Army, marching up in echelon to bar its advance into the German rear, but opposed progressively by the whole of Kluck’s strength, faltered under one counter-attack after another. It would have been surprising if it had not. In any case an improvised force, its components—four Reserve divisions, only two Active divisions, and a collection of cavalry and Active North African formations—lacked both the quality and the numbers to stand up to Kluck’s First Army, which contained eight Active divisions, besides Reserve and cavalry formations. The distances over which the arriving German divisions had to travel, compared to those Sixth Army had covered from the eastern frontier, were quite short. The IX Corps, which appeared opposite Maunoury’s left flank on the morning of 9 September, had made the longest march, but it was one of only forty miles. It deployed intact and in vigour. The corps which had arrived earlier had blunted all Maunoury’s efforts to take ground, and had continually counterattacked. One critical situation had been saved for the French only by a dashing intervention of the 45th Division’s artillery, led by Colonel Nivelle, a future commander of the French army, another by the arrival from Paris of a portion of the city’s garrison mounted in commandeered taxicabs, an episode of future legend. The battle of the Ourcq, between 5 and 8 September, nevertheless tended Kluck’s way. On the evening of 8 September, he felt confident enough to signal his subordinates that “the decision will be obtained tomorrow by an enveloping attack.” The Schlieffen Plan, in short, might be about to work after all.102
Geography spoke otherwise. The aggressiveness Kluck’s army had shown against Maunoury’s had actually worked to enlarge the gap that now loomed between it and Second Army, a gap too wide for the only German troops not engaged elsewhere, those of 2nd and 9th Cavalry Divisions, to fill. They were, moreover, too weak to oppose the force marching up to exploit the weakness in the German line the gap presented. True to his reluctant word, Field Marshal French started the whole of the BEF forward on 6 September and, though it had ten miles to make up before it reached Joffre’s intended point of departure, it soon covered the distance, bringing with it the elements of a new, third, corps, formed in France on 21 August. The intervention of the British, who fought a sharp encounter action at Rozoy, alarmed von Kluck. Even more alarmed was von Bülow, whose Second Army was heavily engaged throughout the day against the French Fifth Army, galvanised by the leadership of its new commander, Franchet d’Esperey. On 7 September Bülow radioed the high command to warn that he was withdrawing the troops on the east of the gap, into which the BEF was marching, behind the Petit Morin river, for safety, a retreat of ten miles and more. Worse, under pressure during the day, he was obliged to swing his right wing northward, thereby further widening the gap between his army and von Kluck’s and leaving the way open for a full-scale Allied advance to the Marne.
The right wing of the German army was now divided effectively into three sections, with Kluck’s First Army north of the Marne, the right of von Bülow’s Second Army south of the Marne but falling back towards it across the waterways of the Grand and Petit Morin, and his left, which connected only weakly with von Hausen’s Third Army, positioned on the Petit Morin itself, in the Marshes of the St. Gond, where that river rose. The whole region “is a country of great open spaces; highly cultivated, dotted with woods and villages, but with no great forests, except [those to the south]. It is cut from east to west by the deep valleys, almost ravines, of the Grand Morin, Petit Morin, the Marne, the upper course of the Ourcq, the Vesle, the Aisne and the Ailette.” The Marshes of the St. Gond are a topographical exception, “a broad belt of swamp land … [extending] from east to west nineteen kilometres, with an average width of three kilometres … five lesser roads and three foot-paths cross [the marshes] from north to south, but they are otherwise impassable, forming a military obstacle of the first importance.”103 Von Bülow’s left, and the right of von Hausen’s Third Army were, on 6 September, firmly embedded on the northern edge of the marshes, with Foch’s new Ninth Army positioned on the other side. The mission given him by Joffre was to protect the flank of Fifth Army, battling to drive von Bülow beyond the Marne. It was in character that he chose to interpret it offensively. While his centre and right stood fast, he ordered his left, the 42nd Division, to advance, supported by the Moroccan Division and part of IX Corps. During 6 and 7 September they battled valiantly to work their way round the western end of the marshes, while the rest of Ninth Army and the Germans opposite conducted artillery duels over the sodden ground of the marshes themselves.
The battle of the marshes threatened to descend into a stalemate, as that on the eastern frontier had become. Then it was transformed by the uncharacteristic boldness of von Hausen. This Saxon general has been described as too deferential to the wishes of the Prussian Kluck and Bülow on his right, too overawed by the German Crown Prince who commanded on his left, to take forthright decisions in the handling of his own army. On 7 September he displayed an independence that contradicted both judgements. Persuading himself that the ferocity of the two previous days’ fighting had blunted the enemy’s alertness, he decided to launch a surprise night attack. In the moonlit early morning of 8 September, the Saxon 32nd and 23rd Reserve Divisions and the 1st and 2nd Guard Divisions advanced through the marshes and across the dry ground further east, fell on the French with the bayonet and drove them back three miles. This was a local victory that shook the confidence of Foch’s Ninth Army, which lost further ground on its right during the day and merely held its own on the left.
The events of 8 September prompted Foch to draft the later legendary signal: “My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.”104 It was probably never sent. Nevertheless, the general’s actions bore out the spirit of those words. During 9 September, using reinforcements lent by Franchet d’Esperey, and in expectation of the arrival of XXI Corps from Lorraine, Foch succeeded in plugging every gap in the line opened by Hausen’s continuing offensive and did, at the day’s end, actually manage to organise a counter-attack at the right-hand extremity of his army’s position. Merely by holding his front, Foch achieved a sort of victory.
On the Ourcq, meanwhile, 9 September was also a day of crisis. Kluck’s First Army was now fighting as an independent entity, separated from Bülow’s Second Army by a forty-mile gap into which the BEF was pushing northward towards the Marne almost unopposed, but still formidably strong and still committed to attack. With four corps in line, it still outnumbered Maunoury’s Sixth Army and, overlapping the flanks of the French to north and south, still retained the chance of winning an encirclement battle and so reversing the increasingly dangerous situation on the critical right wing. The weight of his deployment was in the north, where von Quast’s IX Corps, supported by von Arnim’s III, was positioned and prepared to fall on the French 61st Reserve Division, turn its flank and drive into the rear of the defenders of Paris. On the morning of 9 September von Quast began his attack opposed
initially only by the weak artillery of the French 1st and 3rd Cavalry Divisions. When his troops came up against the positions of the 61st Reserve Division, they drove the French infantry to flight, so that by early afternoon they were poised to sweep forward into undefended territory. The balance of advantage on the Marne seemed once more to have tilted the Germans’ way.
The Mission of Lieutenant-Colonel Hentsch
That was the local reality. Von Quast sensed no resistance to his front. His soldiers were elated by success. Paris, only thirty miles distant, beckoned. The way to the French capital seemed to lie open and victory therefore to promise. Then, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Quast received a telephone call from Kluck’s headquarters. The offensive was to be discontinued. An order for retreat had been received. The First Army was to retire northward towards the Marne and it appeared not the First Army only but the whole of the right wing. Local reality was dissolved in a larger reality. The great advance, the sweep through Belgium and northern France, the master stroke that was to end the war in the west before the fortieth day, had failed. Schlieffen’s vision had evaporated in the heat of battle.
