THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE

IN MEMORIAM
N. F. P. + E. L. P.

General Map showing
POSITION of the ARMIES
on the Eve of the Battle, and the central German lines of approach.

German Armies.
I–Von Kluck. II–Von Bülow.
III–Von Hausen. IV–Duke of Würtemberg.
V–Imperial Crown Prince.
VI–C. Prince of Bavaria (& troops from Metz).
VII–Von Heeringen.
French & British Armies:
6–Marmoury. B.E.F. British.
5–F. d’Espérey. 9–Foch.
4–DeLangle de Cary. 3–Sarrail.
2–DeCastelnau. 1–Dubail.

THE BATTLE OF
THE MARNE

BY
GEORGE HERBERT PERRIS

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF “THE DAILY CHRONICLE”
WITH THE FRENCH ARMIES, 1914–18

WITH TWELVE MAPS

JOHN W. LUCE & CO.
BOSTON
MCMXX

PREFACE

The great war has entered into history. The restraints, direct and indirect, which it imposed being gone with it, we return to sounder tests of what should be public knowledge—uncomfortable truths may be told, secret places explored. At the same time, the first squall of controversy in France over the opening of the land campaign in the West has subsided; this lull is the student’s opportunity. No complete history of the events culminating in the victory of the Marne is yet possible, or soon to be expected. On the German side, evidence is scanty and of low value; on that of the Allies, there is yet a preliminary work of sifting and measuring to undertake ere definitive judgments can be set down. Any narrative conceived in a scientific, not an apologetic or romantic, spirit may claim to further this end.

The difficulty lies less in following the actual movements of that great encounter—the most important of which, and their part in the result, can now be traced pretty accurately—than in estimating the factors that produced and moulded it. Yet, if we are right in holding the battle of the Marne to be essentially the completion of a chapter, the resultant of certain designs and certain misadventures, a vast strategical reversal and correction, such an estimate is necessary to the subject. How did the two chief antagonists envisage the process of modern warfare? Why was the action which was to close the first phase of the war, and largely to shape its after-course, fought not near the northern or eastern frontiers, but between Paris and Verdun? Why and how were the original plans of campaign modified to reach this result? What conditions of victory existed on the Marne that had been lacking on the Sambre? In a word, the key to the meaning of the battle must be sought in the character of the forces in play, their comparative numbers, organisation, and training, armament and equipment, leadership and inspiration.

No sooner is such an inquiry opened than a number of derivative problems appear. Where exactly lay the German superiority of force at the outset, and why was it not maintained? Was the first French concentration justifiable? If not, was it promptly and soundly changed? Could the northern frontier have been defended? Was Lanrezac responsible for Charleroi, and, if so, why not Castelnau for Morhange? Was the German plan of envelopment exaggerated? Could the British have done more at Mons, and were they slow and timorous when the hour arrived to turn about? Was Paris ever in danger? And, coming to the battle itself, how was it decided? What parts did Gallieni, Von Kluck, Sir John French, and Foch play? Was Joffre really master of the field? It may be too soon to answer fully such questions as these; it is too late to evade them.

Outside the mass of official and semi-official bulletins, dispatches, and explanations, much of it now best left to oblivion, a considerable literature has accumulated in France, including personal narratives by combatants of all arms, and critical essays from points of view the most diverse. With the rather cruel sincerity of the French intelligence, the whole military preparation of the Republic has been challenged; and, in the consequent discussion, many important facts have come to light. Thus, we have the texts of the most decisive orders, and many details of the dispositions of troops. We have Marshal Von Bülow’s valuable diary of field movements, and the critical reflections of distinguished officers like Lt.-Col. de Thomasson, Generals Malleterre, Berthaut, Verraux, Percin, Canonge, Bonnal, Palat, Cherfils, and Col. Feyler. Fragmentary statements by General Joffre himself, by Generals Foch, Lanrezac, and Maunoury, the Ministers of War, MM. Messimy and Millerand, by Generals von Freytag-Loringhoven, Von Kluck, and other German officers and men, give useful indications. We are also indebted to the more systematic works of MM. Hanotaux, Reinach, Engerand, and Babin; and, with regard to the British Force, the volumes of Marshal French and Major-General Maurice are important. These and other sources are cited in the pages of “Notes and References” at the end of the volume, in which some questions of detail, especially relating to the preparation of the battle, are discussed.

Having been privileged to watch the war in France from beginning to end, and to live with the French armies (as Correspondent attached to General Headquarters) for more than two years, the writer has also had exceptional opportunities of studying the terrain, and of discussing the drama as a whole and in detail with officers and men from the highest to the most humble. To name all those from whom he has received aid would be impossible; to name any might seem to associate them with conclusions for which he is solely responsible; but he may record his deep gratitude to the French Government, the Headquarters Staff, and the various Army Staffs, for the rare experience of which this volume is unworthy fruit.

February 1920.

German units are throughout numbered in Roman capitals (“the XX Corps”), Allied in ordinary figures (“the 20th Corps”).

The small figures in the text refer to “[Notes and References]” at the end of the volume.

CONTENTS

NOTES AND REFERENCES

The German Objective (p. [239]); The Opposed Forces (p. [240]); De Bloch’s Prophecy and French’s Confession (p. [242]); Criticisms and Defence of the French Staff (p. [244]); The Surprise in the North (p. [247]); The Abandonment of Lille (p. [252]); M. Hanotaux and the B.E.F. (p. [252]); The Fall of Maubeuge (p. [256]); Paris and the German Plan (p. [259]); Some Books on the Battle (p. [263]); General Bonnal and the British Army (p. [265]); Scenes at Farthest South (p. [266]); The Myth of the 42nd Division (p. [268]).

LIST OF MAPS

THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE

CHAPTER I
THE DELUGE

August 25, 1914: three weeks after Von Emmich opened the war before Liège; five days after the French Army of Lorraine was trapped at Sarrebourg and Morhange; two days after Namur fell, and Charleroi and Mons were abandoned.

On this black day, the 25th, while Louvain was burning, the 80,000 men of the old British regular Army made an average of 20 miles under a brazen sun, pursued by the enormous mass of Von Kluck’s marching wing. The 1st Corps under Haig came into Landrecies at 10 p.m., and, after a stiff fight and two or three hours’ sleep, trudged on to Guise; while the 2nd, Smith-Dorrien’s, at Le Cateau and towards Cambrai, spent most of a showery night in preparing for the battle of the morrow, which was to save the western flank of the Allies. On the British right, the French 5th Army, Lanrezac’s, surprised in the Charleroi–Namur–Dinant triangle by the onset of Von Bülow and the cleverly secreted approach of Von Hausen, had struck a wild blow, and then reeled back; the two German commanders were now driving it over the Belgian frontier from Avesnes to Rocroi. The 4th Army, under de Langle de Cary, no less heavily punished between Paliseul and Neufchateau in the Belgian Ardennes, was just reaching the French Meuse between Sedan and Stenay, there to dispute the passages against the Duke of Würtemberg. Eastward again, Ruffey, beaten back on a wide crescent from Virton to Briey in the Woevre by the Imperial Crown Prince, was standing better against a relaxed pressure, from toward Montmédy, through Spincourt, to Etain. Thus, Sarrail, in taking over the command of the 3rd Army, was able to make ready, though with inadequate means, for the three-sided defence of Verdun. On the eastern border, Castelnau and Dubail, withdrawing hardly from ill-starred adventures in Lorraine and Alsace, were rallying the 2nd and 1st Armies around the Nancy hills and on both sides of the Gap of Charmes. Mulhouse, twice captured, was finally abandoned by General Pau, with all save a corner of Alsace and the southern passes of the Vosges. “It is a cruel necessity,” said the official communiqué of August 26, “which the Army of Alsace and its chief have submitted to with pain, and only at the last extremity.” They had discovered that “the decisive attack” had to be met “in the north.” At that moment, in fact, a hardly less “decisive” attack was being met in the heart of Lorraine.

It was everywhere the same bitter story of defeat—defeat by surprise, by locally superior numbers, by superior armament, sometimes by superior generalship; and everywhere the retreat was accompanied and hampered by the flight of masses of peasantry and townsfolk whose flaming homes lit upon the horizon behind a warning to hasten their feeble steps.

Before we seek the Staffs in their shifting quarters, to explain this extraordinary situation, let us see what it meant for the commonalty of the armies, without whose strength and confidence the best plans must be as chaff in the wind. Over a million strong, they had left their homes, and gathered at their depots during these three weeks, to be whirled off to the frontiers and the first scarcely imaginable trial of modern conscript systems. It was a new thing in the world’s history, this sudden tremendous clash of the whole manhood of highly developed nations, armed with the most murderous machinery science could devise, and supported by vast reserves of wealth. It had fallen swiftly upon them, the doom that many learned men had declared to be impossible in the twentieth century; yet its essential nature was crude enough to be immediately understood, and the intelligence of France, though shocked, was not stunned. This million of peasants and workmen, merchants, manufacturers, priests, artists, idlers, and the nation behind them, were unanimous as never before. They knew the issue was not of their making; they knew equally that it could not be refused, but must be fought out, and that it would be a hard fight. The Napoleonic wars were to be eclipsed; and there was now no Little Corporal to flash his genius like a searchlight across Europe. The enemy had no less advantage in prestige than in effectives, preparation, initiative.

Few of the million guessed, as yet, that most of them were marked down for sacrifice. The general opinion was that it would be all over by Christmas, at latest. A four months’ war seemed tragic enough in those first days. With the unwonted agreement, an unwonted gravity spread across the sunny lands from the Channel to the Alps where the crops were ripening. If international idealism lay shattered, national democracy rose well to the trial—never better. No recrimination (even the murderer of Jaurès was set aside), no conspiracy, no guillotine, marked the great revival of the republican spirit. England would at least guard the coasts, and keep the seaways open. France went into the struggle without wavering or doubt.

And so, “Aux armes, Citoyens!”—for these, mark you, are, in very fact, citizen armies, independent, free-thinking, high-spirited fellows, no Emperor’s “cannon-food.” From the smallest hamlet to the boulevards of the great city, every pulse of life is feverishly concentrated upon their gathering and departure. At the barracks the reservists, clad, armed, equipped, are ready to entrain. Crowds of women, whose red eyes belie their brave words, children at their skirts, surround the gates, and run forward with bunches of flowers and tricolor rosettes. The officers carry bouquets at their saddle-bows, the men cap their rifles with roses and ribbons. At the railway station, long lines of goods-vans, with a few passenger carriages; more flowers and little flags; allied colours in front of the engine; a wag chalks up the direction: “Berlin, aller et retour.” The horses and guns are aboard; the men jostle in the open doorways, and exchange cries with the crowd. A stanza of the “Marseillaise” is broken by last adieux, shouts of “Vive la France!” and the curtain falls upon the first memorable act.

Interminable journeys follow, by road and rail, toward the frontiers, then from town to village, and from farm to farm of countrysides more and more deserted and desolate. In the passes of the Vosges, the hills and flats of Lorraine, the woods of the French Ardennes, the men accustom themselves uneasily to the oppressive heat of day and the chill and damp of night; to sore feet and chafed shoulders; to spells of hunger due to late or lost convoys; to the deprivation of accustomed comfort, and the thousand minor ills which in all times have been the ground-stuff of the showy tapestries of war. Superfluous graces of civilised life vanish before the irreconcilable need of economy in every effort. Officers begin to be honoured not for rank or show, but for the solid talents of leadership; pals are chosen, not from effusion of heart, but for assurance of help in emergency.

The mantles of the chasseurs are still blue, the breeches of the infantry red, the uniforms of the artillery and engineers nearly black; but already bright colours tend to disappear, and every other tone to assimilate with the dust of the high roads. By day and night there is but one traffic throughout these northern and eastern departments—files of cavalry, batteries of field-guns, columns of heavy-laden men, convoys of Parisian autobuses and hooded carts, pass incessantly through the silent forests out into the open plains. The civilian population steadily diminishes, even in the larger towns; the gendarmerie keep those who remain under suspicion of espionage. The frontier villagers welcome the marching troops hospitably, until local food supplies are exhausted, and until news comes in from the front of reverses and of foul cruelty to the peasants on the part of the enemy. Only a fortnight has gone by when the national confidence in a speedy victory receives this heavy blow. Bad news gathers and reverberates. It is a little difficult, after years of bloodshed, to recover the fresh sense of these first calamities. Men were then not yet broken to the pains, the abominable spectacles, of war. That their self-offering to the fatherland should win them an honoured grave might well be. But defeat at the outset, the shame of retreat almost before a blow could be struck, this was an incredible, monstrous, intolerable thing.

The incredible, however, generalised itself over all the highways of Lorraine and Belgium. Take any typical scene on the march-routes of August 22 or the following days.[1] The roads are black with columns of troops retreating west- and south-ward, more or less broken, linesmen, chasseurs, artillerymen, supply and special services, with their guns, munition wagons, Red Cross detachments, convoys of heavy-laden carts with wounded men sitting on top or clinging behind; and, in the breaks, crowds of panic-stricken peasants, in farm wagons or on foot, old men, women, and children, with bedding, boxes, bird-cages, and other strange belongings. Dismay broods like a palpable cloud over these pitiful processions. There is an incessant jostling. Drivers flog their horses cruelly. Wounded men drop by the wayside and lie there untended, their haggard faces stained with mire and powder, blood oozing through their coats, trickling out into the litter of torn knapsacks and broken arms. The sun blazes inexorably, the air is poisoned with clouds of dust, or drenching showers of rain produce another sort of misery; and ever the long stream of failure and fear flows on, eddying here and there into acute confusion as some half-mad woman sets up a cry: “The Prussians!”

Night follows day: soldiers and country-folk, hungry and exhausted, fall into the corners of any sheltered place they can find—an empty barn, the nave of a village church—for an unsatisfying sleep, or, too sick to sleep, watch the fantastic shadows and fugitive lights dancing upon the walls, mocking their anguished thoughts of the morrow. The batteries and convoys have gone on through the darkness, men rolling from side to side with fatigue on their horses or gun-carriages, as though drunk. With daybreak the greater trek recommences. The enemy has not been idle: in the distance behind rolls the thunder of heavy guns; pillars of smoke and flame rise from burning villages. And as, day after day, a new stage of retirement—increasingly controlled, it is true—is ordered, the question pierces deeper: What is to become of France?

Those who have lived at the centre as well as on the skirts of armed hosts become habituated to one enveloping condition: the rank and file, and even most of the officers, know little or nothing of what is passing outside their own particular spheres. It is in the nature and necessity of military operations, especially at the beginning and in a phase of rapid movement, that it should be so. Perhaps it is also a necessity of the psychology of endurance. Of these republican armies, only a small minority of the men were old soldiers; most of them had all they could do to adapt themselves, day by day and hour by hour, to the new world of violence, squalor, and general unreason in which they were now prisoned. They had to learn to bear fatigue and pain such as they had never known; to overcome the spasm of fear that grips the stoutest heart in unaccustomed emergencies; to thrust the bayonet not into a sandbag, but into soft, quivering flesh, and draw it forth again; to obey men who were incompetent and stupid, as well as born leaders. The German heavy shells, aeroplanes, motor transport, the formidable entrenchments and fields of wire—gradually they recognised these and other elements of the invader’s superiority. Weaklings cried: “We are betrayed. It is 1870 over again.” What could the bravest reply? Letters were few and far between. Newspapers were never so barren. What was Paris doing? What were Russia and England doing? The retreating columns marched with downcast eyes, wrapped in a moody silence.

By what revolt of the spirit did these apparently broken men become, a fortnight later, the heroes of the Marne? The answer must be that they were not broken, but were passing through the sort of experience which, in a virile race, wakens the dull-minded to their utmost effort, blows away the last traces of laxity and false idealism, and, by setting above every other fear the fear of a ruined Fatherland, rallies the whole mass on the elementary ground of defence to the death. Voices, lying voices, had whispered that France was diseased, body and soul, that the Republic would surely die of its corruptions. We have since discovered the immeasurable strength of democratic communities. Then it was questioned by the few, unsuspected by the many. England and America, even more than France, had outgrown any sort of liking for war. To be driven back to that gross test was a profound surprise. For the quick, proud French mind to find itself suddenly in face of defeat and the threat of conquest was a second and severer shock. The long retreat gave it time to perceive that this calamity arose largely from its own errors, and to re-group its forces in a truer conception of the character of modern warfare. Even Joffre may not have clearly realised this need; great instincts count in the crisis of leadership equally with powerful reasoning. Amid the tramp-tramp of the weary, dust-blinded columns, by the night bivouacs, under the rain of shrapnel and the crash of high explosive, men of the most diverse condition and character, shedding old vanities and new alarms, came down step by cruel step to the fundamental honesty, unity, and resolution of our nature. The mirage of an easy victory vanished; in its place a finer idea rose and rose till the armies saw nothing else: France must live! I may die, or be doomed to a travesty of life; at any price, France must be saved.

So the steel was tempered for the supreme trial.

CHAPTER II
A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS

I. The German Plan of Campaign

“Errors,” “vanities”? These words must be justified, however gently, however briefly. To regard the battle of the Marne without reference to the grievous beginnings that led to and shaped it would be to belittle and falsify a subject peculiarly demanding care for true perspective. The battle may be classed as negatively decisive in that it arrested the invasion long enough to enable the Allies to gain an equality of forces, and so to prevent a final German victory; it was only positively decisive in the larger sense that it re-created on a sounder base the military spirit and power of France, which alone among the Western Allies seriously counted in that emergency, and, by giving the army a new direction, the nation a new inspiration, made it possible for them to sustain the long struggle that was to follow. Perilous illusions, military as well as pacifist, were buried beside the Marne. A fashion of thought, a whole school of teaching was quietly sunk in its waters. The French mind rose to its full stature as the nature of the surprise into which it had fallen broke upon it.

This surprise was threefold. In the first place, the German plan of campaign was misconceived. That plan was grandiose in its simplicity. It rested upon a sound sense of the separation of the Allies: their geographical dispersion, which gave the aggressor the advantages famous in the career of Frederick the Great, as in that of Napoleon; the diversity of character, power, and interest within the Entente, which was, indeed, hardly more than an improvisation, without any sort of common organ, so far; its lack of unity not only in command but in military theory and practice generally. The first of these data indicated to the German Command the Frederician succession of swift offensives; the second narrowed the choice for the first effort, and suggested an after-work of political intrigue; the third had fortified Prussian pride and discipline with a daring strategy and an armament superior, in most respects, to anything the rest of the world had conceived to be possible. Which of the three great States, then, should be first struck down? The wildest Pan-Germanist could not reply “England,” in face of her overwhelming sea-power. So the British Empire, with the North Sea and Channel coasts, were, for the moment, ignored. Its internal problems, its peaceful, almost neutral, temper, its slow-mindedness in European affairs, were more regarded than the trivial military force which alone England could at once offer its friends. For speed was to be of the essence of the plan. Remained France and Russia; and here political as well as military calculations entered. The inchoate Empire of the East would, it was thought, be the slower in getting to its feet. Would a new Moscow expedition break its will for self-defence? The author of the “Willy-Nicky” letters imagined a better way. France would stand by her ally. The “Republic of the Rochettes and Steinheils,” however, was not naturally impregnable; when it was finished, would not “dear Nicky” be glad to return to the Drei-Kaiserbund, the old Bismarckian order, and to join in a friendly rearrangement of the world? So the conclusion, with all the neatness of a professorial thesis: Russia was to be held up—actively, on the south, by the Austro-Hungarian armies, passively on the north, by a screen of German troops—while France, as the principal enemy, was swiftly crushed. Thus far, there should have been no surprise.

It was otherwise with the plan of campaign itself, and there are details that will remain in question till all the archives are opened. Yet this now appears the only plan on which Germany could hope to bring an aggressive war to a successful issue. A repetition of the triumph of 1870 would not be enough, for, if France resisted as long this time, everything would be put in doubt. The blow must be still more swift and overwhelming. To be overwhelming, it must at once reach not portions, but the chief mass, of the French armies. But nowhere in the world had military art, working upon a favourable terrain, set up so formidable a series of obstacles to grand-scale manœuvre as along the line of the Meuse and Moselle Heights and the Vosges. A piercing of this line at the centre, between the fortified systems of Verdun–Toul on the north and Epinal–Belfort on the south, might be an important contributory operation; in itself it could not give a speedy decision. A mere diversion by Belgium, in aid of a main attack in Lorraine, would not materially alter this calculation. The full effects of surprise, most important of all factors in a short struggle, could only be expected where the adversary was least prepared, which was certainly across the north. These offensive considerations would be confirmed by a defensive consideration: German Lorraine, also, was so fortified and garrisoned as to be beyond serious fear of invasion. In neither direction could Alsace provide favourable conditions for a great offensive.

The political objects of the war being granted, these arguments would lead to the strategical conclusion: the strongest possible force will be so deployed, on a vast arc stretching from southern Lorraine to Flanders, that its superiority may at once be brought fully into play. The method was a variant drawn from the teaching of Clausewitz and Schlieffen. The “march on Paris” occupied in the plan no such place as it long held in the popular imagination. The analogy of closing pincers has been used to describe the simultaneous onset of seven German armies ranged in a crescent from the Vosges to Brussels; but it is uncertain whether the southern wing was originally intended to participate immediately in the destructive stroke, or whether this purpose followed upon the collapse of the first French offensives. The latter supposition is the more probable; and we may, therefore, rather picture a titanic bolas ending in five loaded cords, of which the two outer ones are the most heavily weighted. These two outer masses were (a) Kluck’s and Bülow’s Armies on the west; (b) the Crown Prince of Bavaria’s and Heeringen’s on the east. Approximately equal, they had very different functions, the road of the one being open, of the other closed; the one, therefore, being essentially offensive, the other provisionally defensive. Between these two masses, there were three lesser forces under Hausen, the Duke of Würtemberg, and the Imperial Crown Prince. While the eastern armies held the French forces as originally concentrated, the western mass, by an immense envelopment, was to converge, and the three inner bodies were to strike direct, toward the north-centre of France—perhaps toward the upper Seine, but there could hardly be a precise objective till the invasion developed[2]—destroying any resistance in their path. The eastern thrust which actually followed appears, on this hypothesis, as an auxiliary operation rather than part of a double envelopment: we shall see that, delivered at the moment when the Allies in the west were being driven in between Le Cateau and Givet, it failed against a successful defence of the only open road of the eastern frontier, the Gap of Charmes, and that it again failed a fortnight later. The other German armies went triumphantly forward. In every part of the field is evident the intention to conceal, even to hold back, the movements of approach, and so to articulate and synchronise them that, when the hour of the decisive general action had arrived, there should be delivered a single, sudden, knock-out blow.

II. The Forces in Play

In every part the German war-machine was designed and fitted to deliver such a blow. Its effective force was the second great element of surprise for the Entente.

It is now clear that, taking the field as a whole, France was not overwhelmed by superior numbers. True, as a French official report says, “the military effort of Germany at the outset of the war surpassed all anticipations”; but the element of surprise lay not in numbers, but in fighting quality and organisation. Of the whole mass mobilised in August 1914, one quarter was sent to the East. The remainder provided, in the last week of August, for employment against Belgium and France, an effective force of about 80 infantry divisions—45 active, 27 reserve, mixed Ersatz brigades presently grouped in 6 divisions, and 4 Landwehr divisions in course of formation,[3] with about 8 divisions of cavalry,—about a million and a half of men, for the most part young, highly trained and disciplined, including 115,000 re-engaged non-commissioned officers (double the strength of the French company cadres). Of the prodigious mass of this west-European force, about a half was directed through Belgium, and—essential fact—nearly a third passed to the west of the Meuse.

The French, on the other hand, admirably served by their railways,[4] put at once into the field 86 divisions (47 active, 25 reserve, 12 Territorial, and 2 Moroccan), of which 66 were at the front, with 7 divisions of cavalry, on the eve of the critical battles of the Sambre and the Gap of Charmes, in the third week of August. Before the battle of the Marne, all French active troops had been withdrawn from the Italian frontier, only a few Territorials being left there. An exact numerical comparison cannot yet be made. It seems certain, however, that, including five British and six Belgian divisions, in the whole field the Allies were not outnumbered. There was no great difference in cavalry.

But there was a vital difference in the infantry organisation, as to which the French Command had been completely deceived. Not only had it failed to foresee the creation of brigades of Ersatz troops (to say nothing of the Landwehr divisions which appeared in September): it had never contemplated the use of reserve formations as troops of shock. In the French Army, the reserve battalions, regiments, and divisions were so many poor relations—inadequate in younger officers and non-coms, insufficiently armed (especially in artillery), insufficiently trained and disciplined, and, accordingly, destined only for lesser tasks. When, as occurred almost at once under pressure of the successful example of the enemy, reserve divisions and groups of divisions had to be thrown into the front line, the homogeneity of the armies and the confidence of their chiefs suffered. Meanwhile, realising a plan initiated in 1913, the German Staff had created 16 army corps of reserves, of which 13 were used on the Western front, where they proved as solid as the regulars, and were given tasks as responsible in all parts of the field. The main mass of attack, therefore, consisted not of 22, but 34, army corps—a difference larger than the strength of the two armies of Kluck and Bülow to which the great enveloping movement was entrusted.[5] Without this supplementary force—the result not of numbers available, but of superior training and organisation—the invasion could hardly have been attempted, or would assuredly have failed. On the other hand, as we shall see, had it been anticipated, the French plan of campaign must have been profoundly modified.

The balance in armament was not less uneven. The French 3-inch field-gun from the first justified the highest expectations of its rapidity and accuracy of fire. But in pieces of heavier weight and longer range the inferiority was flagrant. While Frenchmen had been counting their “75” against heavier but less handy German guns, while they were throwing all the gravamen of the problem of national defence on three-years’ service, the enemy was developing a set of instruments which immensely reinforced his man-power. Instead of resting content with light guns, he set himself to make heavier types more mobile. The peace establishment of a German active corps included 160, a French only 120, guns. It was, however, in weight, rather than numbers, that the difference lay. Every German corps had 16 heavy 5·9-inch mortars. The French had no heavy artillery save a few batteries of Rimailho 6·1-inch rapid-fire pieces, and a few fortress cannon. In addition to 642 six-piece batteries of horse and field artillery (3·1-inch field-gun and 4·1-inch light howitzer), the German armies had, in all, before the mobilisation, 400 four-piece batteries of 5·9-inch howitzers and 8·2-inch mortars. The German artillery alone at the outset had aviators to correct their fire. “Thus,” says General Malleterre, speaking from experience in the long retreat[6]—“thus is explained the terrible surprise that our troops suffered when they found themselves overwhelmed at the first contact by avalanches of projectiles, fired from invisible positions that our artillery could not reach. For there was this of unexpected in the German attack, that, before the infantry assault, the deployment of units was preceded by showers of shells of all calibres, storms of iron and fire arresting and upsetting our shaken lines.”

In air services, in petrol transport, and in the art of field defences, also, the French were outmatched. Aviation was essentially their sport and science; but the army had shown little interest in it, and had made only a beginning in its two main functions—general reconnaissance and the ranging of artillery fire.[7] Thus ill-prepared for a modern large-scale offensive, France had not acquired the material or the tactic of a strategical defence. The light and rapid “75” had been thought of almost exclusively as an arm of attack, in which weight and range were now become the master properties. Its remarkable qualities for defence began to appear in the unfortunate actions presently to be traced, and were only fully understood many months later, when “barrage” fire had been elaborated. The mitrailleuse was essentially a French invention; but its greatest value—in defence—was not yet appreciated. The numerical provision of machine-guns was the same as that of the German Army (though differently organised). It was owing to a more considerable difference of tactical ideas that a legend grew up of an actual German superiority in this arm. In the French Army, all defensive methods were prejudiced; in the German, they were not. The deep trenches that might have saved much of Belgium and northern France were scouted, until it was too late, as incompatible with the energy and pride of a great army. The lessons from recent wars drawn, among others, by the Russian State Councillor, Jean de Bloch, fifteen years before,[8] went for nothing. “It is easy to be ‘wise after the event,’” writes Field-Marshal French; “but I cannot help wondering why none of us realised what the most modern rifle, the machine-gun, motor traction, the aeroplane, and wireless telegraphy would bring about. It seems so simple when judged by actual results.... I feel sure that, had we realised the true effect of modern appliances of war in August 1914, there would have been no retreat from Mons.”[9]

While the German armies were born and bred in the old offensive spirit, their masters had seen the difficulties created by the development of modern gunfire. With a tireless and pitiless concentration of will, the men had been organised, trained, and in every essential way provided, to carry out an aggressive plan of campaign. Yet their generals did not despise scientific field-works, even in the days of their first intoxication, as witness any French story of the battle of Morhange, or this characteristic note on the fighting in the region of Neufchateau and Palliseul: “The enemy, whom our aeroplanes and cavalry had not been able to discover, had a powerful defensive organisation: fields of wire entanglement on the ground; wide, deep holes concealing pikes and sword blades; lines of wire 2 yards high, barbed with nails and hooks. There were also, unfortunately, in certain of our corps, insufficiencies of instruction and execution, imprudences committed under fire, over-bold deployments leading to precipitate retreats, a lack of co-ordination between the infantry and the artillery. The enemy profited by our inexperience of the sort of defence he had organised.”[10] For the German soldiers at the outset of the war, this was only a passing necessity. The principle of the instant strategical offensive well expressed the spirit of an authoritarian Government bent on aggression, of its constituency, at once jealous and servile, and its war-machine, sustained by a feverishly developed industrialism. None of these conditions obtained under the Third Republic. Of the weaknesses of the French Army in tactical science, one result is sufficiently tragic proof; in the first month of the war, 33 army corps and divisional generals were removed from their commands.[11]

III. The French War Doctrine

It was not the fault, but the glory, of France that she lived upon a higher level, to worthier ends, than her old enemy. But if we find reason to suspect that, the nation having accepted the burden of taxation and armed service, its arms and preparation were not the best of their kind, that a superstitious fidelity to conservative sentiments and ideas was allowed to obscure the hard facts of the European situation and the changing nature of modern warfare, the fact that certain critics have plunged rashly into the intricacies of a most difficult problem, or the risk of being corrected when more abundant information appears, must not prevent us from facing a conclusion that is important for our subject. We do not espouse any partisan thesis, or question any individual reputation; we can do no more here than open a line of inquiry, and no less than recall that the men whose responsibility is in cause had suddenly to challenge fate on evidence at many points slighter than now lies before any studious layman.

In every detail, Germany had the benefit of the initiative. The French Staff could not be sure in advance of British and Belgian aid or of Italian neutrality, and it was bound to envisage the possibility of attack by the Jura, as well as by Belgium. It could not be sure that any smaller strength would secure the Lorraine frontier; and it was possibly right in regarding a defeat on the east as more dangerous than a defeat in the north. The distrust of fortification, whether of masonry and steel, or of field-works, may have become exaggerated by a too lively sense of the power of the newer artillery; but it had a certain basis in the fear of immobilising and paralysing the armies. To discover a happy mean between a dangerous obstinacy in defending a frontier, and a dangerous readiness to abandon precious territory and its people in order to preserve freedom of movement, was perhaps beyond any brain of that time. Nevertheless, when all allowances have been made, it must be said (1) that the importance of gaining time by defensive action was never realised, and this chiefly because of dogmatic prepossessions; (2) that the actual concentration expressed a complete misjudgment of the line of greatest danger; and (3) that these two faults were aggravated by the kind of offensive upon which all hopes were placed. The misapprehension of the German system of reserves, referred to above, and therefore of the total effective strength of the enemy, had led the French Staff to conclude that there was nothing to fear west of the Meuse, and at the same time had confirmed a temperamental belief in the possibility of crippling the attack by a rapid and unrestrained offensive. The whole conception was erroneous.

For Belgium, there was no other hope than a provisional defensive. In any war with Germany, the principal object for France, it now seems evident, must be to stave off the coup brusqué till Russia was fully ready, and England could bring more aid. But the traditional dogma was in possession; any doubt was damned as a dangerous heresy. The chief lesson of 1870 was now thought to be the folly of passivity. Looking back upon events, many French soldiers recognise, with General Malleterre, that the French strategy should have been “a waiting disposition behind a powerfully-organised Meuse front, with a mass of manœuvre ready to be directed against the principal attack.” “But,” adds this writer, “our minds had been trained in these latter years to the offensive à outrance.”[12] They had been trained in part upon German discussions, the deceptive character of which, and the very different facts behind, were not realised. At its best, for instance in Foch’s lectures at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre (1895–1901), there was in this teaching somewhat too much of emotion, too little of cold analysis. The faith in sheer energy and will is placed too high, the calculation of means to ends too slightly insisted upon. It is true, it is, indeed, a truism, that “the battle must not be purely defensive,” that “every defensive battle must be terminated by an offensive action, or it will lead to no result.” Foch himself, before he had risen to the supreme direction of the Allied armies, had learned to recognise that, with millions of men in play, no effort of will can suddenly give a decision, that the defensive may have to continue for months, even for years, a new war-machine may have to be built up, ere a victorious reaction becomes possible.

In the General Staff instructions of October 28, 1913, the doctrine had received its extremest expression. The milder instructions of 1895 were condemned as based upon the “most dangerous” idea that a commander might prefer defence on a favourable, to attack on an unfavourable, ground. “In order to avoid all misunderstanding on so important a point of doctrine, the new instructions admit only a single justification for the defensive in combat, that is, the necessity of economising troops on certain points in order to devote more forces to attacks; so understood, the defensive is, properly speaking, no more than an auxiliary of the offensive.” “The offensive alone leads to positive results”; this is the sole permissible rule governing the conduct of operations. Attacks must be pressed to the extremity without arrière-pensée or fear of heavy losses: “every other conception must be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war” (art. 5). “A Commander-in-Chief will never leave to his adversary the priority of action on the pretext of waiting for more precise information; he will, from the beginning of the war, stamp it with such a character of violence and determination that the enemy, struck in his morale and paralysed in action, will perhaps find himself compelled to remain on the defensive” (art. 6). “All the decisions of the command must be inspired by the will to seize and keep the initiative”; and they must be pursued “even if the information collected up to then on the forces and dispositions of the enemy be obscure and incomplete.” The plan should, indeed, be supple, so that changes can be made according to new information; but “success in war depends more on perseverance and tenacity than on ability in the conception of the manœuvre” (art. 15). “The French Army,” added the Commission which elaborated these rules, “returning to its traditions, now admits in the conduct of operations no law other than that of the offensive.”

Fortunately, no code can do more than hamper the natural elasticity of the French mind. But the direction of the armies from top to bottom, and even the traditional aim of keeping in hand a mass of manœuvre, which had figured strongly in the teaching of Foch and other military writers of ten or fifteen years before, were affected by the current prescriptions of the Staff. We cannot here attempt to trace the growth of the perversion. The spirit of the French command on the eve of the war is, however, sufficiently evidenced in its actual dispositions; and we know that it threw its only mass of manœuvre (the 4th Army) into the Belgian Ardennes in the third week of August, and had to fight the battle of the Marne without any general reserve. In brief, along with every arm and method of defence, the service of information, the preparation of battle, and the art of manœuvre—which is irreconcilable with a dogma of universal and unconditional attack—were depreciated and prejudiced.[13] In the strength and weakness of this creed, France entered the war.

The results in the lesser commands were serious enough. Speaking of the advance into the Ardennes, M. Hanotaux, in general an apologist of the old school, says that it was conducted “in an extremely optimistic mood,” that “mad bayonet charges were launched at a mile distance from the enemy without artillery preparation,” and that, “doubtless, the spirit of the offensive, ill-regulated and ill-restrained, among officers as well as men, was one of the causes of our reverse.” Officers and men took only too literally the rules on which they had been trained. Strengthened by the general belief in a short war, and by an exaggerated idea of the importance of first results, a like infatuation governed the strategy and the tactics of the French armies. A succession of surprises marks the light regard for information of the enemy’s means and movements, as a series of instant reverses measures the scorn for well-pondered manœuvre. Was France required by her Eastern ally to attack at once? The attack need not have surpassed the proportions of holding actions punctuating a stout defence. Was Belgium closed to the French armies by the old treaty of neutrality? That did not justify a plan of campaign which left the north uncovered to a German aggression. For all that followed from disunity of the Allied commands, England and Belgium share the responsibility. Had they, as well as Russia, been long in alliance, and Italy’s neutrality assured in advance, all might have gone otherwise; probably, indeed, there would have been no war. These circumstances do not afford excuse for a radically unsound conception of the danger and the reply.

A German attack through Belgium had been much and long discussed. If few would have said before the event, as the German Chancellor and Foreign Secretary pleaded immediately afterward, that it was “a question of life and death for the Empire,” “a step absolutely required,” it was at least more than probable; and we have Marshal Joffre’s word for it that the contingency was contemplated by the French Staff.[14] But two doubts remained, even in vigilant minds. Would the invasion by the north be large or small, and would it be more or less extensive, proceeding only by Belgian Luxembourg and the Meuse valley, or also by a more daring sweep across the Flanders plain into the valley of the Oise? Moltke had advocated a march to the North Sea coast, and a descent by the Channel ports, through the trouée of the Oise, upon Paris, turning not merely the principal line, but the whole system, of the French fortresses. Bernhardi had toyed with the idea of an even more extensive movement, violating Dutch territory, but seemed at last to favour the more limited project, “the army of the right wing marching by the line Trêves–Stenay, crossing Luxembourg and southern Belgium.” In fact, neither of these ways was taken. The invasion pursued a middle route, Holland being avoided, the descent upon the coast deferred, and armies thrown across both the Flanders plain and the difficult country of the Belgian Ardennes.

Notwithstanding the advertisement of the Kaiser’s chief Ministers in their famous pleas in justification, on the first day of the war, the French Staff do not seem to have anticipated anything more in the north than an attack by Luxembourg and the Ardennes, or to have altered their dispositions to meet it until the middle of August. We do not yet fully know what are the reasons for the arrest of the German offensive after the effective reduction of Liège, until August 19. Instead of six days, with, perhaps, three more for re-concentration, the German right wing took sixteen days in crossing Belgium. As this week of Belgium’s vicarious sacrifice saved France, it cannot be supposed to have been a voluntary delay made simply for the purpose of deceiving the Allies. It had that effect, however. Thwarted at Liège, the German command did everything it could to conceal the true nature of the blow it was about to deliver—by terrorising the population and occupying the mind of the world with its atrocities, by the ubiquitous activity of its cavalry screen, by avoiding Western Flanders and the coast, and by holding up the advance of its first three armies behind the line of the Gette and the Meuse till everything was ready. The Allies altogether failed to pierce the veil of mystery covering the final concentration. They were deceived (1) as to the main direction of the coming onslaught, (2) as to its speed, (3) as to its power in men and armament. General Sordet’s cavalry got little information during their Belgian wanderings; the few French aviators still less. No doubt, the Allies hoped for a longer Belgian resistance, especially at Liège and Namur, as the enemy expected a shorter. The French Staff clung blindly to its belief that it need expect, at most, only an attack by the Meuse valley and the Ardennes.[15]

The first French plan of campaign, then, envisaged solely the eastern and north-eastern frontier. The original concentration placed the two strongest armies, the 1st and 2nd (Dubail and Castelnau—each five corps) between Belfort and Toul; the 3rd and 5th (Ruffey and Lanrezac—three and five corps respectively) from Verdun to Givet, where the Meuse enters Belgium; the 4th (de Langle de Cary—three corps) supporting the right, at its rear, between the Argonne and the Meuse. Of 25 reserve divisions, three were kept in the Alps till Italy declared her neutrality, three garrisoned Verdun, and one Epinal. The remainder were grouped, one group being sent to the region of Hirson, one to the Woevre, and one before Nancy. There was also a Territorial group (d’Amade) about Lille. These dispositions are defended as being supple and lending themselves to a redirection when the enemy’s intentions were revealed.[16] We shall see that, within a fortnight, they had to be fundamentally changed, Lanrezac being sent into the angle of the Sambre and Meuse, de Langle bringing the sole reserve army in on his right, and Ruffey marching north into the Ardennes—a north-westerly movement involving awkward lateral displacements, the crossing of columns, and oblique marches. Some of the following failure and confusion resulted from the dislocating effect of a conversion so vast.

IV. The Three French Offensives

Instead of an initial defensive over most of the front, with or without some carefully chosen and strongly provided manœuvre of offence—as the major conditions of the problem would seem to suggest—the French campaign opened with a general offensive, which for convenience we must divide into three parts, three adventures, all abortive, into Southern Alsace, German Lorraine, and the Belgian Ardennes. The first two of these were predetermined, even before General Joffre was designed for the chief command; the second and third were deliberately launched after the invasion of Belgium was, or should have been, understood. A fourth attack, across the Sambre, was designed, but could not be attempted.

The first movement into Alsace was hardly more than a raid, politically inspired, and its success might have excited suspicions. Advancing from Belfort, the 1st Army under Dubail took Altkirch on August 7, and Mulhouse the following day. Paris rejoiced; General Joffre hailed Dubail’s men as “first labourers in the great work of la revanche.” It was the last flicker of the old Gallic cocksureness. On August 9, the Germans recovered Mulhouse. Next day, an Army of Alsace, consisting of the 7th Corps, the 44th Division, four reserve divisions, five Alpine battalions, and a cavalry division, was organised under General Pau. It gained most of the Vosges passes and the northern buttress of the range, the Donon (August 14). On the 19th, the enemy was defeated at Dornach, losing 3000 prisoners and 24 cannon; and on the following morning Mulhouse was retaken—only to be abandoned a second time on the 25th, with all but the southern passes. The Army of Alsace was then dissolved to free Pau’s troops for more urgent service, the defence of Nancy and of Paris.

The Lorraine offensive was a more serious affair, and it was embarked upon after the gravity of the northern menace had been recognised.[17] The main body of the Eastern forces was engaged—nine active corps of the 2nd and 1st Armies, with nine reserve and three cavalry divisions—considerably more than 400,000 men, under some of the most distinguished French generals, including de Castlenau, unsurpassed in repute and experience even by the Generalissimo himself; Dubail, a younger man, full of energy and quick intelligence; Foch, under whose iron will the famous 20th Corps of Nancy did much to limit the general misfortune; Pau, who had just missed the chief command; and de Maud’huy, a sturdy leader of men. As soon as the Vosges passes were secured, after ten days’ hard fighting, on August 14, a concerted advance began, Castelnau moving eastward over the frontier into the valley of the Seille and the Gap of Morhange, a narrow corridor flanked by marshes and forests, rising to formidable cliffs; while Dubail, on his right, turned north-eastward into the hardly less difficult country of the Sarre valley. The French appear to have had a marked superiority of numbers, perhaps as large as 100,000 men; but they were drawn on till they fell into a powerful system, established since the mobilisation, of shrewdly hidden defences, with a large provision of heavy artillery, from Morville, through Morhange, Bensdorf, and Fenetrange, to Phalsburg—the Bavarian Army at the centre, a detachment from the Metz garrison against the French left, the army of Von Heeringen against the right. The French command can hardly have been ignorant of these defences, but must have supposed they would fall to an impetuous assault. Dubail held his own successfully throughout August 19 and 20 at Sarrebourg and along the Marne-Rhine Canal, though his men were much exhausted. Castelnau was immediately checked, before the natural fortress of Morhange, on August 20. His centre—the famous 20th Corps and a southern corps, the 15th—attacked at 5 a.m.; at 6.30 the latter was in flight, and the former, its impetuosity crushed by numbers and artillery fire, was ordered to desist. The German commanders had concentrated their forces under cover of field-works and heavy batteries. Under the shock of this surprise, at 4 p.m., Castelnau ordered the general retreat. Dubail had to follow suit.

Happily, the German infantry were in no condition for an effective pursuit, and the French retirement was not seriously impeded. The following German advance being directed southward, with the evident intention of forcing the Gap of Charmes, and so taking all the French northern armies in reverse, the defence of Nancy was left to Foch, Castelnau’s centre and right were swung round south-westward behind the Meurthe, while Dubail abandoned the Donon, and withdrew to a line which, from near Rozelieures to Badonviller and the northern Vosges, made a right-angle with the line of the 2nd Army, the junction covering the mouth of the threatened trouée. In turn, as we shall see (Chap. III. sec. iii.), the German armies here suffered defeat, only five days after their victory. But such failures and losses do not “cancel out,” for France had begun at a disadvantage. Ground was lost that might have been held with smaller forces; forces were wasted that were urgently needed in the chief field of battle. Evidently it was hoped to draw back parts of the northern armies of invasion, to interfere with their communications, and to set up an alarm for Metz and Strasbourg. These aims were not to any sensible extent accomplished.

Despite the improbability of gaining a rapid success in a wild forest region, the French Staff seems to have long cherished the idea of an offensive into the Belgian Ardennes in case of a German invasion of Belgium, the intention being to break the turning movement by a surprise blow at its flank. By August 19, the French were in a measure prepared for action between Verdun and the Belgian Meuse. Ruffey’s 3rd Army (including a shortlived “Army of Lorraine” of six reserve divisions under Maunoury), and Langle de Cary’s 4th Army, brought northwards into line after three or four days’ delay, counted together six active corps and reserve groups making them nearly equal in numbers to the eleven corps of the Imperial Crown Prince and the Duke of Würtemberg. But, behind the latter, all unknown till it debouched on the Meuse, lay hidden adroitly in Belgian Luxembourg another army, the three corps of the Saxon War Minister, Von Hausen. Farther west, the disparity of force was greater, Lanrezac and Sir John French having only about seven corps (with some help from the Belgians and a few Territorial units) against eleven corps left to Bülow and Kluck after two corps had been detailed to mask the Belgian Army in Antwerp. Neither the Ardennes nor the Sambre armies could be further strengthened because of the engagements in Lorraine and Alsace.

A tactical offensive into the Ardennes, a glorified reconnaissance and raid, strictly limited and controlled, might perhaps be justified. The advance ordered on the evening of the defeat of Morhange, and executed on the two following days, engaging the only general reserve at the outset in a thickly-wooded and most difficult country, was too large for a diversion, and not large enough for the end declared: it failed completely and immediately—in a single day, August 22—with heavy losses, especially in officers.[18] Here, again, there was an approximate equality of numbers; again, the French were lured on to unfavourable ground, and, before strong entrenchments, crushed with a superiority of fire. Separated and surprised—the left south-west of Palliseul, the centre in the forests of Herbeumont and Luchy, the Colonial Corps before Neufchateau and Rossignol, where it fought literally to the death against two German corps strongly entrenched, the 2nd Corps near Virton—the body of the 4th Army was saved only by a prompt retreat; and the 3rd Army had to follow this movement. True, the German IV Army also was much exhausted; and an important part of the enemy’s plan missed fire. It had been soon discovered that the Meuse from Givet to Namur was but lightly held; and the dispatch thither of the Saxon Army, to cut in between the French 4th and 5th Armies, was a shrewd stroke. Hausen was late in reaching the critical point, about Dinant, and, by slowness and timidity, missed the chance of doing serious mischief.

Meanwhile, between the fields of the two French adventures into German Lorraine and Belgian Luxembourg, the enemy had been allowed without serious resistance to occupy the Briey region, and so to carry over from France to Germany an iron- and coal-field of the utmost value. “Briey has saved our life,” the ironmasters of the Rhineland declared later on, with some exaggeration. Had it been modernised, the small fortress of Longwy, situated above the River Chiers three miles from the Luxembourg frontier, might have been an important element in a defence of this region. In fact, its works were out of date, and were held at the mobilisation by only two battalions of infantry and a battery and a half of light guns. The Germans summoned Colonel Darche and his handful of men to surrender on August 10; but the place was not invested till the 20th, the day on which the 3rd Army was ordered to advance toward Virton and Arlon, and to disengage Longwy. Next day, Ruffey was north and east of the place, apparently without suspecting that he had the Crown Prince’s force besieging it at his mercy. On the 22nd, it was too late; the 3rd and 4th Armies were in retreat; Longwy was left to its fate.[19]

V. The Battle of Charleroi–Mons

The completest surprise naturally fell on the west wing of the Allies; and, had not the small British force been of the hardiest stuff, an irreparable disaster might have occurred. Here, with the heaviest preponderance of the enemy, there had been least preparation for any hostilities before the crisis was reached. On or about August 10, we war correspondents received an official map of the “Present Zone of the Armies,” which was shown to end, on the north, at Orchies—16 miles S.E. of Lille, and 56 miles inland from Dunkirk. The western half of the northern frontier was practically uncovered. Lille had ceased to be a fortress in 1913, though continuing to be a garrison town; from Maubeuge to the sea, there was no artificial obstacle, and no considerable body of troops.[20] The position to be taken by the British Expeditionary Force—on the French left near Maubeuge—was only decided, at a Franco-British Conference in London, on August 10.[21] On August 12, the British Press Bureau announced it as “evident” that “the mass of German troops lie between Liège and Luxembourg.” Three days later, a Saxon advance guard tried, without success, to force the Meuse at Dinant. Thus warned, the French command began to make the new disposition of its forces which has been alluded to.

Lanrezac had always anticipated the northern attack, and had made representations on the subject without effect.[22] At last, on August 16, General Joffre, from his headquarters at Vitry-le-François, in southern Champagne, agreed to his request that he should move the 5th Army north-westward into the angle of the Sambre and Meuse. At the same time, however, its composition was radically upset, the 11th Corps and two reserve divisions being sent to the 4th Army, while the 18th Corps and the Algerian divisions were received in compensation. On August 16, the British Commander-in-Chief, after seeing President Poincaré and the Ministers in Paris, visited the Generalissimo at Vitry; and it was arranged that the Expeditionary Force, which was then gathering south of Maubeuge, should move north to the Sambre, and thence to the region of Mons. On the same day, General d’Amade was instructed to proceed from Lyons to Arras, there to gather together three Territorial divisions of the north which, reinforced by another on the 21st and by two reserve divisions on the 25th, ultimately became part of the Army of the Somme. Had there been, on the French side, any proper appreciation of the value of field-works, it might, perhaps, not have been too late to defend the line of the Sambre and Meuse. It was four or five days too late to attempt a Franco-British offensive beyond the Sambre.

To do justice to the Allied commanders, it must be kept clearly in mind that they had (albeit largely by their own fault) but the vaguest notion of what was impending. Would the mass of the enemy come by the east or the west of the Meuse, by the Ardennes or by Flanders, and in what strength? Still sceptical as to a wide enveloping movement, Joffre was reluctant to adventure too far north with his unready left wing; but it seemed to him that, in either case, the intended offensive of the French central armies (the 3rd and 4th) across the Ardennes and Luxembourg frontier might be supported by an attack by Lanrezac and the British upon the flank of the German western armies—the right flank, if they passed by the Ardennes only; the left, if they attempted to cross the Flanders plain toward the Channel. Thus, it was provisionally arranged with the British Commander that, when the concentration of the Expeditionary Force was complete, which would not be before the evening of August 21, it should advance north of the Sambre in the general direction of Nivelles (20 miles north-east of Mons, and half-way between Charleroi and Brussels). If the common movement were directed due north, the British would advance on the left of the 5th Army; if to the north-east or east, they would be in echelon on its left-rear. General Joffre recognised that the plan was only provisional, it being impossible to define the projected manœuvre more precisely till all was ready on August 21, or till the enemy revealed his intentions.

It was only on the 20th that two corps of the French 5th Army reached the south bank of the Sambre—one day before Bülow came up on the north, with his VII Corps on his right (west), the X Reserve and X Active Corps as centre, the Guard Active Corps on his left, and the VII Reserve (before Namur) and Guard Reserve Corps in support. In this posture, on the evening of August 20, Lanrezac received General Joffre’s order to strike across the Sambre. Namur was then garrisoned by the Belgian 4th Division, to which was added, on the 22nd, part of the French 8th Brigade under General Mangin. Lanrezac had not even been able to get all his strength aligned on the Sambre when the shock came.[23] On the 21st, his five corps were grouped as follows: The 1st Corps (Franchet d’Espérey) was facing east toward the Meuse north of Dinant, pending the arrival, on the evening of the 22nd, of the Bouttegourd Reserve Division; the 10th Corps (Defforges), with the 37th (African) Division, on the heights of Fosse and Arsimont, faced the Sambre crossings at Tamines and Auvelais; the 3rd Corps (Sauret) stood before Charleroi, with the 38th (African) Division in reserve; the 18th Corps (de Mas-Latrie) was behind the left, south of Thuin. Of General Valabrègue’s group of reserve divisions, one was yet to come into line on the right and one on the left.

Could Lanrezac have accomplished anything by pressing forward into the unknown with tired troops? The question might be debatable had the Allies had only Bülow to deal with; but, as we shall see, this was by no means the case. Meanwhile, the British made a day’s march beyond the Sambre. On the 22nd they continued the French line west-north-westward, still without an enemy before them, and entrenched themselves, the 5th Cavalry Brigade occupying the right, the 1st Corps (Haig) from Binche to Mons, and the 2nd Corps (Smith-Dorrien) along the canal to Condé-on-Scheldt. West and south-west of this point, there was nothing but the aforesaid groups of French Territorials. The I German Army not yet having revealed itself, the general idea of the French command, to attack across the Sambre with its centre, and then, if successful, to swing round the Allied left in a north-easterly direction against what was supposed to be the German right flank, still seemed feasible. But, in fact, Kluck’s Army lay beyond Bülow’s to the north-west, on the line Brussels–Valenciennes; it is quite possible, therefore, that a preliminary success by Lanrezac would have aggravated the later defeat.

Battle of Charleroi–Mons

However that may be, the programme was at once stultified by the unexpected speed and force of the German approach. The bombardment of the nine forts of Namur had begun on August 20. Bülow’s Army reached the Sambre on the following day, and held the passages at night. Lanrezac’s orders had become plainly impossible, and he did not attempt to fulfil them. Early on the afternoon of the 21st, while Kluck approached on one hand and Hausen on the other, Bülow’s X Corps and Guard Corps attacked the 3rd and 10th Corps forming the apex of the French triangle. These, not having entrenched themselves, and having, against Lanrezac’s express orders, advanced to the crossings between Charleroi and Namur, there fell upon strong defences flanked by machine-guns, and were driven back and separated. Despite repeated counter-attacks, the town of Chatelet was lost. On the 22nd, these two French corps, with a little help from the 18th, had again to bear the full weight of the enemy. Their artillery preparation was inadequate, and charges of a reckless bravery did not improve their situation.[24] Most desperate fighting took place in and around Charleroi. The town was repeatedly lost and won back by the French during the day and the following morning; in course of these assaults, the Turcos inflicted heavy losses on the Prussian Guard. While the 10th Corps, cruelly punished at Tamines and Arsimont, fell back on Mettet, the 3rd found itself threatened with envelopment on the west by Bülow’s X Reserve and VII Corps, debouching from Chatelet and Charleroi.

That evening, the 22nd, Lanrezac thought there was still a chance of recovery. “The enemy does not yet show any numerical superiority,” he wrote, “and the 5th Army, though shaken, is intact.” The 1st Corps was at length free, having been relieved in the river angle south of Namur by the 51st Reserve Division; the 18th Corps had arrived and was in full action on the left about Thuin; farther west, other reserves were coming up, and the British Army had not been seriously engaged. The French commander therefore asked his British confrère to strike north-eastward at Bülow’s flank. The Field-Marshal found this request “quite impracticable” and scarcely comprehensible. He had conceived, rightly or wrongly, a very unfavourable idea of Lanrezac’s qualities; and the sight of infantry and artillery columns of the 5th Army in retreat southward that morning, before the two British corps had reached their positions on either side of Mons, had been a painful surprise. He was already in advance of the shaken line of the 5th Army; and news was arriving which indicated a grave threat of envelopment by the north-west. French had come out from England with clear warning that, owing to the impossibility of rapid or considerable reinforcement, he must husband his forces, and that he would “in no case come in any sense under the orders of any Allied General.” He now, therefore, replied to Lanrezac that all he could promise was to hold the Condé Canal position for twenty-four hours; thereafter, retreat might be necessary.

On the morning of the 23rd, Bouttegourd and D’Espérey opened an attack on the left flank of the Prussian Guard, while the British were receiving the first serious shock of the enemy. The French centre, however, was in a very bad way. During the afternoon the 3rd Corps gave ground, retreating in some disorder to Walcourt; the 18th was also driven back. About the same time, four surprises fell crushingly upon the French command. The first was the fall of Namur, which had been looked to as pivot of the French right. Although the VII Reserve Corps did not enter the town till 8 p.m., its resistance was virtually broken in the morning. Most of the forts had been crushed by the German 11- and 16-inch howitzers; it was with great difficulty that 12,000 men, a half of the garrison, escaped, ultimately to join the Belgian Army at Antwerp, Secondly, the Saxon Army, hitherto hidden in the Ardennes and practically unknown to the French Command, suddenly made an appearance on Lanrezac’s right flank. On the 23rd, the XII Corps captured Dinant, forced the passages of the Meuse there and at Hastière, drove in the Bouttegourd Division (51st Reserve), and reached Onhaye. The 1st Corps, thus threatened in its rear, had to break its well-designed attack on the Prussian Guard, and face about eastward. It successfully attacked the Saxons at Onhaye, and prevented them from getting more than one division across the river that night, so that the retreat of the French Army from the Sambre toward Beaumont and Philippeville, ordered by Lanrezac on his own responsibility at 9 p.m., was not impeded. Thirdly, news arrived of the failure of the French offensive in the Ardennes.

The fourth surprise lay in the discovery that the British Army had before it not one or two corps, as was supposed until the afternoon of August 23, but three or four active corps and two cavalry divisions of Kluck’s force, a part of which was already engaged in an attempt to envelop the extreme left of the Allies. Only at 5 p.m.—both the intelligence and the liaison services seem to have failed—did the British commander, who had been holding pretty well since noon against attacks that did not yet reveal the enemy’s full strength, learn from Joffre that this force was twice as large as had been reported in the morning, that his west flank was in danger, and that “the two French reserve divisions and the 5th French Army on my right were retiring.” About midnight the fall of Namur and the defeat of the French 3rd and 4th Armies were also known. In face of this “most unexpected” news, a 15-miles withdrawal to the line Maubeuge–Jenlain was planned; and it began at dawn on the 24th, fighting having continued through the previous night.

Some French writers have audaciously sought to throw a part, at least, of the responsibility for the French defeat on the Sambre upon the small British Expeditionary Force. An historian so authorised as M. Gabriel Hanotaux, in particular, has stated that it was in line, instead of the 20th, as had been arranged, only on the 23rd, when the battle on the Sambre was compromised and the turning movement north-eastward from Mons which had been projected could no longer save the situation; and that Sir John French, instead of destroying Kluck’s corps one by one as they arrived, “retreated after three hours’ contact with the enemy,” hours before Lanrezac ordered the general retreat of the 5th Army.[25] It is the barest justice to the first British continental Army, its commander, officers, and men, professional soldiers of the highest quality few of whom now survive, to say that these statements, made, no doubt, in good faith, are inaccurate, and the deductions from them untenable. It was not, and could not have been, arranged between the Allied commands that French’s two corps should be in line west and east of Mons, ready for offensive action, on August 20, when Lanrezac’s fore-guards were only just reaching the Sambre. General Joffre knew from Sir John, at their meeting on August 16, that the British force could not be ready till the 21st; and it was then arranged that it should advance that day from the Sambre to the Mons Canal (13 miles farther north). This was done. Bülow had then already seized the initiative. If the British could have arrived sooner, and the projected north-easterly advance had been attempted, Bülow’s right flank might have been troubled; but the way would have been left clear for Kluck’s enveloping movement, with disastrous consequences for the whole left of the Allies. It is not true that the British retreat preceded the French, or that it occurred after “three hours’ contact with the enemy.” Lanrezac’s order for the general retreat was given only at 9 p.m.; but his corps had been falling back all afternoon. Kluck’s attack began at 11 a.m. on the 23rd, and became severe about 3 p.m. An hour later, Bülow’s right struck in between Lanrezac’s 3rd and 18th Corps, compelling them to a retreat that left a dangerous gap between the British and French Armies. From this time the British were isolated and continuously engaged. “When the news of the retirement of the French and the heavy German threatening on my front reached me,” says the British commander (in his dispatch of September 7, 1914), “I endeavoured to confirm it by aeroplane reconnaissance; and, as a result of this, I determined to effect a retirement to the Maubeuge position at daybreak on the 24th. A certain amount of fighting continued along the whole line throughout the night; and, at daybreak on the 24th, the 2nd Division made a powerful demonstration as if to retake Binche,” to enable the 2nd Corps to withdraw. The disengagement was only procured with difficulty and considerable loss. Had it been further delayed, the two corps would have been surrounded and wiped out. They were saved by courage and skill, and by the mistakes of Kluck, who failed to get some of his forces up in time, and spent others in an enveloping movement when a direct attack was called for.

Such, in brief, is the deplorable story of the breakdown of the first French plan of campaign. By August 25, the local panics of the preceding days were arrested; but from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps the Allied armies were beaten back, and their chief mass was in full retreat. King Albert had shepherded his sorely stricken regiments into the entrenched camp of Antwerp, where, and in West Flanders, they were to drag upon the invader for nearly two months to come. For the rest, Belgium was conquered, much of it ravaged. The forces to which it had looked for aid were disappearing southward, outnumbered, outweighed in material of war, and severely shaken. But the heroic Belgians never thought of yielding. On August 25, they made a valuable diversion, striking out from Antwerp, and forcing the small German watching force to retire to near Brussels. This and the landing of 2000 British Marines at Ostend sobered the enemy, and caused the detention of two corps (the III and IX Reserve) before the Scheldt fortress. The shortlived victories of Rennenkampf and Samsonov at Gumbinnen and in the Masurian Lake region, threatening a greater invasion of East Prussia, also affected slightly the distribution of German troops, though it probably stimulated the urgency of the Western invasion. The French eastern armies were to keep inviolate the pivot of Verdun, the crescent of the Nancy hills, and the line of Epinal–Belfort. The tiny garrison of Longwy resisted till August 26, that of Montmédy till the 30th. Maubeuge held out from August 25 to September 7,[26] and might be expected to hold longer. The front of the retreating armies was never broken; but at what a price was their cohesion purchased—the abandonment of a wide, rich tract of the national territory, with much of its hapless population.

Enough has been said to show that the reverses of the beginning of the war which led to the long retreat were due not only to the brutal strength of the German invasion, but to bad information, bad judgment, bad organisation, an ill-conceived strategy and reckless tactics, on the side of the Allies. The impact on the north and north-west (including now the Crown Prince’s Army) of some 28 army corps—considerably over a million men—provided with heavy artillery, machine-guns, transport, and material on a prodigious scale, had never been dreamed of, and proved irresistible.

We shall now have the happier task of following the marvellous rally of will and genius by which these errors were redeemed.

CHAPTER III
JOFFRE STARTS AFRESH

I. Ecce Homo!

France, land of swift action and swifter wit, was the last one would expect to take kindly to the new warfare. She looked then, as her elders had always looked, for a Man. And she found one; but he was far from being of the traditional type.

Joseph Cesaire Joffre was at this time sixty-two years old, a burly figure, with large head upheld, grey hair, thick moustache and brows, clear blue eyes, and a kindly, reflective manner. His great-grandfather, a political refugee from Spain, named Gouffre, had settled in Rivesaltes, on the French side of the eastern Pyrenees, where his grandfather remained as a trader, and his father lived as a simple workman till his marriage, which brought him into easier circumstances. One of eleven children, Joffre proved an industrious pupil at Perpignon, entered the Ecole Polytechnique in 1869, advanced slowly, by general intelligence rather than any special capacity, entered the Engineers after the War of 1870, and during the ’eighties commenced a long colonial career. His report on the Timbuctoo Expedition of 1893–4, where he first won distinction, is the longest of his very few printed writings. It shows a prudent, methodical, lucid, and energetic mind, with particular aptitude for engineering and administration. After an interval in Paris as secretary of the Inventions Commission, the then Colonel Joffre went out to direct the establishment of defence works in Madagascar. In 1900, promoted general, he commanded an artillery brigade, in 1905 an infantry division. After other experience at the Ministry of War and in local commands, he became a member of the Higher War Council in 1910, and in July 1911 Vice-President of that body, and thus Commander-in-Chief designate.

This heavy responsibility fell to him almost by accident. It was the time of the Agadir crisis; France and Germany were upon the verge of war. M. Caillaux was Prime Minister, M. Messimy Minister of War, General Michel Vice-President of the Council, a position, at the end of a long period of peace, of little power, especially as the Council had only a formal existence. The Government recognised its weakness, but feared to establish a Grand Staff which might obtain a dangerous authority. Moreover, General Michel was not “well seen” by the majority of his colleagues. Messimy thought him lacking in spirit and ability.[27] There were also differences of opinion; Michel thought the reserves should be organised to be thrown into line directly upon the outbreak of hostilities, and he believed in the probability of an invasion by way of Belgium. Generals Pau and Gallieni were the first favourites for the succession. Both, however, would attain the age limit at the end of 1912. Gallieni declined on the further ground that his experience had been almost wholly colonial, and that he would not be welcomed by the metropolitan army. Michel’s ideas having been formally rejected at a meeting of the Higher War Council on July 19, 1911, the post was offered to Pau, a universally esteemed officer. The Ministry had decided to strengthen the post of Vice-President of the Council by adding to it the functions of Chief-of-Staff; but when Pau demanded the right to nominate all superior officers, Messimy hesitated, and turned to Joffre, the member of the Council having the longest period—over five years—of service before him.

Joffre was little known outside army circles; and he had none of the qualities that most easily bring popularity. Southerners would recognise his rich accent, but little else in this silent, though genial, figure. His profound steadiness, a balance of mind that was to carry him through the worst of storms, a cool reflectiveness almost suggesting insensibility, were qualities strange in a French military leader. He was understood to be a faithful Republican; but, unlike some high officers, he had never trafficked with party, sect, or clique, and he showed his impartiality in retiring the freethinker Sarrail and the Catholic de Langle de Cary, as in supporting Sir John French and in advancing Foch. When I looked at him, I was reminded of Campbell-Bannerman; there was the same pawkiness, the same unspoiled simplicity, the same courage and bonhomie. Before the phrase was coined or the fact accomplished, he prefigured to his countrymen the “union sacrée” which was the first condition of success; and to the end his solid character was an important factor in the larger concert of the Allies.

While there appears in Joffre a magnanimity above the average of great commanders, it is, perhaps, not yet possible to say that, through this crisis, his sense of justice was equal to every strain. There are friends of General Gallieni who would question it. The case of General Lanrezac is less personal, and more to our purpose. An officer of decided views and temper, who had been professor at St. Cyr in 1880, and had risen to be director of studies in the Staff College, he became a member of the War Council only six months before the outbreak of war, when the opinions formerly represented by General Michel, and partially and more softly by Castlenau, were definitely discredited.[28] Always sceptical of the orthodox doctrine of the general offensive, Lanrezac was convinced by information obtained at the beginning of the campaign that the great danger had to be met in the north, and that the armies should be shifted immediately to meet it. We have seen that Joffre would not accept this view till the third week in August, and still pursued an offensive plan which now appears to have been foredoomed to failure. Nevertheless, Lanrezac was punished for the defeat on the Sambre, by being removed from the command of the 5th Army; and, to the end of the war, the Generalissimo persisted in attributing the frontier repulses to subordinate blundering. Joffre’s action in the height of the crisis, his wholesale purge of the army commands, may be justified; it is too late to shelter the Staff of those days from their major share in the responsibility.

It must remain to his biographers to explain more precisely the extraordinary contrast between the errors we have indicated and the recovery we have now to trace. This much may here be said: Joffre was hardly the man, in days of peace, to grapple with a difficult parliament, or to conceive a new military doctrine. He was not, like his neighbour of the South, Foch, an intellectual, a bold speculator, a specialist in strategy, but an organiser, a general manager. The first French plan of campaign, for which he had such share of responsibility as attaches to three years in charge of the military machine, was the expression of a firmly established teaching, which only a few pioneers in his own world had consciously outgrown. It did not reflect his own temperament; but he could not have successfully challenged it, in the time at his disposal, against prejudices so inveterate, even if he had had the mind to do so. It was the first time all the services concerned in war preparations, including the War Council, the General Staff, the Staff Committee, the Higher War School, had come under a single control; and, even had there been no arrears, no financial difficulties, a greater permanence of Ministries, the task would have called for all one man’s powers of labour and judgment. Joffre was surrounded during that period by men more positive, in certain directions, than himself, more ambitious, men whose abilities could no more be defied than their influence. “He had more character than personality,” says one of his eulogists, who compares him with Turenne, citing Bossuet on that great soldier: “He was used to fighting without anger, winning without ambition, and triumphing without vanity.”[29] It was as though Nature, seeing the approach of a supreme calamity, had prepared against it, out of the spirit of the age—an age by no means Napoleonic—an adequate counter-surprise.

The slow growth and cumulation of his career are characteristic. It is all steady, scrupulous industry. It smacks of an increasingly civilian world. There is no exterior romance in the figure of Joffre, nothing mediæval, nothing meretricious. He is a glorified bourgeois, with the sane vigour and solidity of his race, and none of its more showy qualities. There is extant a lecture which he delivered in 1913 to the old scholars of the Ecole Polytechnique. He presented the Balkan wars for consideration as a case in which two factors were sharply opposed—numbers, and preparation. Setting aside high strategy and abstract teaching, he preached the virtue of all-round preparation—in the moral and intellectual factors, first of which a sane patriotism and a worthy command, as well as in the material factors of numbers, armament, supplies, and so on. “To be ready in our days,” he says, “carries a meaning it would have been difficult for those who formerly prepared and conducted war to grasp.... To be ready to-day, all the resources of the country, all the intelligence of its children, all their moral energy, must be directed in advance toward a single aim—victory. Everything must have been organised, everything foreseen. Once hostilities are commenced, no improvisation will be of any use. What lacks then will lack definitively. And the least omission may cause a disaster.”

That he and his Staff were caught both unprepared and ill-prepared gives an impish touch of satire to this passage. That it is, nevertheless, the authentic voice of Joffre is confirmed by one of his rare personal declarations in the course of the war. This statement was made in February 1915—when many of the commanders referred to had been removed, and the officership of the French Army considerably rejuvenated—to an old friend[30] who asked him whether Charleroi was lost under pressure of overwhelming numbers. “That is absolutely wrong,” replied Joffre. “We ought to have won the battle of Charleroi; we ought to have won ten times out of eleven. We lost it through our own faults. Faults of command. Before the war broke out, I had already noted that, among our generals, many were worn out. Some had appeared to me to be incapable, not good enough for their work. Some inspired me with doubt, others with disquietude. I had made up my mind to rejuvenate our chief commands; and I should have done so in spite of all the commentaries and against any malevolence. But the war came too soon. And, besides, there were other generals in whom I had faith, and who have not responded to my hopes. The man of war reveals himself more in war than in studies, and the quickest intelligence and the most complete knowledge are of little avail if they are unaccompanied by qualities of action. The responsibilities of war are such that, even in the men of merit, their best faculties may be paralysed. That is what happened to some of my chiefs. Their worth turned out to be below the mark. I had to remedy these defects. Some of these generals were my best comrades. But, if I love my friends much, I love France more. I relieved them of their posts. I did this in the same way as I ought to be treated myself, if it be thought I am not good enough. I did not do this to punish them, but simply as a measure of public safety. I did it with a heavy heart.”

Such were the character and record of the man upon whom, at the darkest moment in modern history, fell the burden of the destinies of liberal Europe; who was called upon to prove, against his own words, that a great leader must and can improvise something essential of what has not been prepared; who, between August 23 and 25, 1914, in a maze of preoccupations, had to provide the Western Allies with a second new plan of campaign. Some day his officers will tell the story of how he did it, of the outer scene at his shifting headquarters during those alarming hours, as the Emperor’s Marshals portrayed their chief pacing like a caged tiger by candlelight in a Polish hut, or gazing gloomily from the Kremlin battlements upon the flames that were turning his ambition to ashes. Joffre will not help us to such pictures; and in this, too, he shows himself to be representative of the modern process, which is anything but picturesque. If he had none of the romance of the stark adventurer about him, he had a cool head and a stout heart; and we may imagine that, out of the depths of a secretive nature, there surged up spontaneously in this crisis all that was worthiest in it, the stored strength of a Spartan life, the will of a deep patriotism, the lessons of a long, varied, pondered experience. So far from dire peril paralysing his faculties, it was now that they first shone to the full. Calm, confident, clear, prompt, he set himself to correct the most glaring errors, and to create the conditions of an equal struggle. We know from his published Army Orders what resulted. Castlenau, Pau, Foch were far away on the east, or at the centre. There were other advisers; but, in the main, this was Joffre’s own plan.

Before we state it, and trace its later modification, it will be well to recall the main features of the problem to be solved.

II. The Second New Plan

The first fact which had to be reckoned with was that the main weight of the enemy was bearing down across the north and north-east, and was, for the moment, irresistible. Retreat, at the outset, was not, then, within the plan, but a condition of it. There was no choice; contact with the invader must be broken if any liberty of action was to be won back. Defeat and confusion had been suffered at so many points, the force of the German offensive was so markedly superior, that an unprepared arrest on the Belgian frontier would have risked the armies being divided, enveloped, and destroyed piecemeal.

If the first stage of the retreat was enforced, its extension was in some measure willed and constantly controlled. For all the decisions taken, Joffre must have the chief credit, as he had the whole responsibility. The abandonment of large tracts of national territory to a ruthless enemy cannot be an easy choice, especially when the inhabitants are unwarned, and the mind of the nation is wholly unprepared (the defeats on the Sambre and the Meuse were not known for several days to the civil public, and then only very vaguely). A less cool mind might have fallen into temporising expedients. Maubeuge was to hold out for a fortnight more; the 4th Army had checked the enemy, and Ruffey had repulsed several attacks; Longwy had not yet capitulated. But the Commander-in-Chief was not deceived. He had no sooner learned the weight of Kluck’s flying wing than he realised that the only hope now lay in a rapid retirement. The fact that the British force, holding the west flank, depended upon coast communications for its munitions, supplies, and reinforcements, was an element to be counted. In every respect, unreadiness in the north dominated the situation.

Evidently the retreat must be stayed, and the reaction begun, at the earliest possible moment. Not only were large communities and territories being abandoned: the chief German line of attack seemed to be aimed direct at the capital, which was in a peculiar degree the centre of the national life. This consideration, which no Commander-in-Chief could have forgotten, was emphasised in a letter addressed at 5 a.m. on August 25 by the Minister of War, M. Messimy, to General Joffre. It contained a specific order from the Government—probably the only ministerial interference with the operations in this period—thus phrased: “If victory does not crown a success of our armies, and if the armies are compelled to retreat, an army of at least three active corps must be directed to the entrenched camp of Paris to assure its protection.” In an accompanying letter, the Minister added: “It goes without saying that the line of retreat should be quite other, and should cover the centre and the south of France. We are resolved to struggle to the last and without mercy.”[31] No doubt, these measures would, to Joffre, seem to “go without saying.” The retreat, so long as necessary, must be directed toward the centre of the country, and at the same time the capital must be protected.

There was another necessity of no less importance. The retreat must be covered on the east. After the reverse of Morhange–Sarrebourg, this was a continual source of anxiety. On August 25, the German Armies of Lorraine, now reinforced, were hammering at the circle of hills called the Grand Couronné of Nancy, and were upon the Moselle before the Gap of Charmes. Belfort and Epinal were safe, and Verdun was not yet directly threatened. Very little consideration of the rectangular battle front—the main masses ranged along the north, while a line of positions naturally and artificially strong favoured the French on the east—would lead to the further conclusion: to stand fast along the east, as cover for the retreat from the north. Castelnau and Dubail, therefore, were asked to hold their critical positions at any cost. At the same time, Mulhouse and the northern Vosges passes were abandoned; Belfort, Epinal, and even Verdun were deprived of every superfluous man, in order to meet the main flood of invasion. The evacuation of Verdun and Nancy was envisaged as a possibility. The line Toul–Epinal–Belfort could not be lost without disaster.

Such were the three chief conditions affecting the extent of the strategic retreat. Conditions are, however, to be made, not only suffered; and General Joffre had no sooner got the retreat in hand than he set himself to the constitution of a new mass of manœuvre by means of which, when a favourable conjuncture of circumstances should be obtained, the movement could be reversed. The simultaneous disengagement and parallel withdrawal of four armies, with various minor forces, over a field 120 miles wide and of a like depth, was an operation unprecedented in the history of war. The pains and difficulties of such a retreat, the danger of dislocation and demoralisation, are evident. Its great compensation was to bring the defence nearer to its reserves and bases of supply, while constantly stretching the enemy’s line, and so weakening his striking force. This could not, of course, be pure gain: the French and British Armies lost heavily on the road south by the capture of laggards, sick, wounded, and groups gone astray, as well as in killed and men taken in action. The Germans lost more heavily in several, perhaps in most, of the important engagements, and they were much exhausted when the crucial moment came. On the other hand, the Allies were constantly picking up reinforcements; while the enemy had to leave behind an army of occupation in Belgium, and large numbers of men to reduce Maubeuge, to garrison towns like Lille, Valenciennes, Amiens, St. Quentin, Cambrai, Laon, Rethel, Rheims, to terrorise scores of smaller places, and to provide guards and transport for ever-lengthening lines of communication.

Upon these chief elements Joffre constructed his new plan of campaign. It was first mooted, a few hours after the issue of the order for the general retreat, in the tactical “Note for All the Armies” of August 24, and in the strategical “General Instruction” of August 25. General Headquarters were then housed in the old College, in the small country town of Vitry-le-François. Here, far behind the French centre, undisturbed by the turmoil of the front and the capital, the Commander-in-Chief, aided by such men as General Belin (a great organiser particularly of railway services), General Berthelot and Colonel Pont, grappled with the dire problem and, in the shadow of defeat, imperturbably drafted the design of the ultimate victory.

The tactical note gathered such of the more urgent lessons of the preceding actions as were capable of immediate application: the importance of close co-operation of infantry and artillery in attack; of artillery preparation of the assault, destruction of enemy machine-guns, immediate entrenchment of a position won, organisation for prolonged resistance, as contrasted with “the enthusiastic offensive”; extended formation in assault; the German method of cavalry patrols immediately supported by infantry, and the need of care not to exhaust the horses. “When a position has been won, the troops should organise it immediately, entrench themselves, and bring up artillery to prevent any new attack by the enemy. The infantry seem to ignore the necessity of organising for a prolonged combat. Throwing forthwith into line numerous and dense units, they expose them immediately to the fire of the enemy, which decimates them, stops short their offensive, and often leaves them at the mercy of a counter-attack.” The Generalissimo offered his lieutenants no rhetorical comfort, but the purge of simple truth. He knew, and insisted on their understanding, that the shrewdest of strategy was useless if faults such as these were to remain uncorrected.

The “General Instruction No. 2,” issued to the Army Commanders at 10 p.m. on August 25, consisted of twelve articles, which—omitting for the moment the detailed dispositions—contain the following orders:

“1. The projected offensive manœuvre being impossible of execution, the ulterior operations will be regulated with a view to the reconstitution on our left, by the junction of the 4th and 5th Armies, the British Army, and new forces drawn from the region of the east, of a mass capable of resuming the offensive, while the other armies contain for the necessary time the efforts of the enemy.

“2. In its retirement, each of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Armies will take account of the movements of the neighbouring armies, with which it must keep in touch. The movement will be covered by rearguards left in favourable irregularities of the ground, so as to utilise all the obstacles to stop, or at least delay, the march of the enemy by short and violent counter-attacks, of which the artillery will contribute the chief element.

“6. In advance of Amiens, a new group of forces, constituted by elements brought up by railway (7th Corps, four divisions of reserve, and perhaps another active army corps), will be gathered from August 27 to September 2. It will be ready to pass to the offensive in the general direction St. Pol–Arras, or Arras–Bapaume.

“8. The 5th Army will have the main body of its forces in the region of Vermand–St. Quentin–Moy, in order to debouch in the general direction of Bohain, its right holding the line La Fère–Laon–Craonne–St. Erme.

“11. All the positions indicated must be organised with the greatest care, so as to make it possible to offer the maximum of resistance to the enemy.

“12. The 1st and 2nd Armies will continue to hold the enemy forces which are opposed to them.”

Articles 3, 4, and 5 specified the lines of retreat and zones of action of each of the Western forces. Articles 7, 9, and 10, like articles 6 and 8 quoted above, indicate the positions from which the projected offensive movement was to be made. The whole disposition may be summarised as follows:—On the extreme left, from the coast to near Amiens, the northern Territorial Divisions were to hold the line of the Somme, with the Cavalry Corps in advance, and the 61st and 62nd Reserve Divisions in support. Next eastward, either north or south of the Somme, was to come the new, or 6th Army, which was to strike north or north-east, on one side or the other of Arras, according to circumstances. Beside it, the British Army, from behind the Somme between Bray and Ham, would advance to the north or north-east. The 5th Army (article 8 above) had an exceedingly strong position and rôle. With the Oise valley before it, and the St. Gobain and Laon hills behind, it was to attack due northward between St. Quentin and Guise. The 4th Army was to reach across Champagne from Craonne to the Argonne either by the Aisne valley or by Rheims; while the 3rd hung around Verdun, touching the Argonne either at Grandpré or Ste. Menehould.

The great military interest of these arrangements must not detain us. Their publication reveals the fact, long unknown save to a few, that Joffre not merely hoped for, but definitely planned, a resumption of the offensive from a line midway between the Sambre and the Marne, that is, from the natural barrier of the Somme and the St. Gobain–Laon hills. We shall see that an effort was made to carry out these dispositions, and that it failed. The failure was lamentable, inasmuch as it doomed another large tract of country to the penalties of invasion. But, because the dispositions ordered on August 25 were only provisional details, not essentials, of the new plan, the military result was in no way compromised. While dealing with local emergencies or opportunities, Joffre envisaged steadily the whole national situation. The essentials of the “General Instruction” of August 25 were four in number: (a) a defensive stand by the armies of Alsace and Lorraine, and a provisional defensive by the two armies next westward, the 3rd and 4th; (b) a strictly controlled continuation of the northern retreat while reorganisation took place and forces were transferred from the east to the north-west; (c) an ultimate offensive initiated by the western and central armies, of which one additional, to be called the 9th, under General Foch, about to be interjected between the 4th and 5th, is not yet mentioned; (d) the constitution of a new left wing, to meet the extraordinary strength of the German right, and to attempt a counter-envelopment. The Amiens–Laon line fell out of the plan; the plan itself remained, and it is fully true to say that in it lies the germ of the battle of the Marne.

III. Battle of the Gap of Charmes

Everything was conditional upon the defence of the eastern frontier, now at its most critical phase.[32]

On the morning of August 24, Lunéville having been occupied on the previous day, the hosts of Prince Ruprecht and General Heeringen were reported to be advancing rapidly toward the entry of the Gap of Charmes by converging roads—the former, on the north, passing before the Nancy hills, southward; the latter, coming westward from around the Donon, by Baccarat. We have seen (p. [31]) that, on the other hand, the 2nd and 1st French armies, in preparation for a decisive action, were ranged in the shape of a right-angle—that of Castelnau (based on Toul) from the foothills north-eastward of Nancy, southward, to Rozelieures and Borville; that of Dubail (based on Epinal) from the northern end of the Vosges, westward, to the same point. How far these positions, with the prospect of being able to close in upon the flanks of the enemy, arose from necessary directions of the retreat, and how far from strategical design, whether of one or both of the army commanders, or of the Commander-in-Chief, does not here concern us; suffice it to say that the two generals won equal honour, and that the Grand Quartier effectively supervised this and subsequent developments of the situation. The opposed forces were now about equal in strength—nine corps on either side.

A space had been left at the point of the angle, north of the Forest of Charmes, west of Rozelieures; and this may have tempted the Germans forward. The 16th Corps of the French 2nd Army, the 8th and 13th of the 1st, with three divisions of cavalry under General Conneau masking them, were ready to fill this space, and, as soon as Lunéville had been lost, proceeded to do so, artillery being massed particularly on Borville plateau. On the afternoon of August 24, the pincers began to close, Dubail holding the imperilled angle and Heeringen’s left, while Castelnau beat upon the enemy’s northern flank. On the morning of the 25th, the Germans took Rozelieures; at 2 p.m. they abandoned it; at 3 p.m., Castelnau issued the order: “En avant, partout, à fond!” Foch’s 20th Corps, aiming at the main line of enemy communications, the Arracourt–Lunéville road, took Réméréville and Erbéviller, east of Nancy, and struck hard, farther south, at Maixe, Crevic, Flainval, and Hudviller, toward Lunéville, which was at the same time threatened on the south-west by the 15th Corps, reaching the Meurthe and Mortagne at Lamath and Blainville. By night, the enemy was conscious of his danger, and escaped constriction by a general withdrawal. On the 26th, further hard fighting confirmed the French victory. Positions were occupied at the foot of the Grand Couronné, on the north, and near St. Dié on the south, which were to save the situation a fortnight later. The Gap of Charmes was definitely closed. The German armies had suffered their first great defeat in the war; and, although little known to the outer world, it did much for the moral of the French ranks. On August 27, General Joffre issued an order praising this “example of tenacity and courage,” and expressing his confidence that the other armies would “have it at heart to follow it.”

Towards the north end of the Franco-German frontier, another check was administered at the same time to the Crown Prince’s Army, near Etain, half-way between Verdun and Metz. General Maunoury, with an ephemeral “Army of Lorraine,” consisting of three reserve divisions, formed part of the 3rd Army of General Ruffey, but was given by the G.Q.G. the special task of watching for any threat on the side of Metz. He could do little, therefore, to help Ruffey in the battle of Virton.[33] On August 24, however, a German postal van was captured with orders showing that the Crown Prince intended to attack in the belief that the French had engaged all their troops. Generals Ruffey, Paul Durand, Grossetti, and Maunoury held a hurried conference; and, the G.Q.G. having given permission, on the following day Maunoury struck out suddenly at the Crown Prince’s left, which was thrown back in disorder.

This victory might have been followed up. But General Joffre did not mistake the real centre of gravity of the situation, and would not change the basis of his new plan. He now considered the eastern front sufficiently secure to justify a transfer of certain units to meet the emergency in the western field. Thither, our attention may return.

IV. Battles of Le Cateau, Guise, and Launois

During the night of August 25—while Smith-Dorrien’s men were defending themselves at Solesmes and Haig’s at Landrecies—General Maunoury received the order to disengage his divisions, and to hurry across country to Montdidier with his Staff, there to complete the formation and undertake the command of the new 6th Army. This distinguished soldier was sixty-seven years of age. Wounded in the war of 1870, he had taken a leading part in the development of the French artillery, directed the Ecole de Guerre, and restored a strict discipline in the garrison of the capital as Governor of Paris. Two of his phrases will help to characterise this gallant officer. The first was that in which, in the moment of victory, he spoke of himself as having for forty-four years directed all his energies toward “la revanche de 1870.” The other was addressed to a group of fellow-officers who were discussing certain German brutalities. He could not understand such things, he said, and added: “When we are in their country, we will give them a terrible lesson in humaneness.”[34]

The Army of the Somme consisted at the outset of the 7th Corps, taken from Alsace (minus its 13th Division, left in Lorraine; plus the 63rd Reserve Division and a Moroccan Brigade from the Châlons camp); the 55th and 56th Divisions of Reserve, taken from the Verdun–Toul region; the 61st and 62nd Divisions of Reserve, detached from the Paris garrison to Arras, under General d’Amade, and brought back from Arras to Amiens. It was constituted in the most unfavourable circumstances; and the idea of a flank attack from the Arras–Amiens region, in support of an offensive from the old line of secondary fortresses La Fère–Laon–Rheims, was no sooner conceived than it had to be abandoned. Maunoury was compelled to send his divisions off piecemeal from railhead to the battlefield. The chief body of them had had such rest as a long journey in goods-vans permits; d’Amade’s reservists had been routed in the north, and had lost heavily. If Kluck had not been absorbed in the effort to destroy Sir John French’s little band of heroes, Maunoury’s task could never have been fulfilled.

The debt was quickly repaid. The moment had come when the British must be relieved, or exterminated. Between Le Cateau and Cambrai, on August 26, the three infantry divisions and two cavalry brigades of the 2nd Corps, although worn by long marches, checked the onrush of seven German divisions and three mounted divisions, including some of the best Prussian troops, supported by at least a hundred batteries. Again trusting to his guns while he planned a double envelopment, Kluck allowed his enemy to escape. While this first experience of massed artillery fire revealed the fine quality of our “Old Contemptibles,” it is a debated question whether General Smith-Dorrien’s temerity was justified. He had been expressly ordered to continue the retreat, and General Allenby had warned him of the risk he ran. A sharp blow upon the German right flank by Sordet’s cavalry and some of d’Amade’s battalions relieved the perilous situation. But the British losses were heavy after as well as during the battle. At night, during the disengagement, the 1st Gordons marched into the camp of a German division, and were taken prisoner almost to a man. The following is the judgment of the British Commander-in-Chief upon this affair: “The magnificent fight put up by these glorious troops saved disaster, but the actual result was a total loss of at least 14,000 officers and men, about 80 guns, numbers of machine-guns as well as quantities of ammunition, war material and baggage, whilst the enemy gained time to close up his infantry columns marching down from the north-east.... The hope of making a stand behind the Somme or the Oise, or any other favourable position north of the Marne, had now to be abandoned, owing to the shattered condition of the army, and the far-reaching effect of our losses at the battle of Le Cateau was felt seriously even throughout the subsequent battle of the Marne, and during the early operations on the Aisne. It was not possible to replace our lost guns and machine-guns until nearly the end of September.”[35]

At this time Bülow was pursuing Sir Douglas Haig along the Guise road. On the 27th, the 2nd Munster Fusiliers were cut off, and killed or captured, except a handful saved by the 15th Hussars. On the 28th, the weary remnant of an army which had marched 90 miles in four days, fighting continually, tramped down the Oise valley, from La Fère to Noyon. That evening, Gough’s cavalry, at the south of the Somme near Ham, and Chetwode’s a little farther east, in covering the retreat, had to bear two severe attacks, which they effectually broke. On August 26, Sir John French had met Generals Joffre and Lanrezac at St. Quentin, and had again found the attitude of the latter officer unsatisfactory. On August 29, at 1 p.m., General Joffre visited the British Commander at the latter’s headquarters in the Château of Compiègne. “I strongly represented my position,” Sir John reported to Lord Kitchener, “to the French Commander-in-Chief, who was most kind, cordial, and sympathetic, as he has always been.” The Field-Marshal was persuaded from this time on that “our stand should be made on some line between the Marne and the Seine.”

The needed relief had already been arranged when the conference took place, by a movement which we may summarise as an inclination of the 6th and 5th French Armies toward each other across the British rear. Sordet’s three cavalry divisions had already passed from the right to the left of the British Army. D’Amade’s Divisions had done something to check Von Kluck’s advance by the Bapaume–Amiens and Peronne–Roye highroads. Nevertheless, Von der Marwitz’s cavalry was on the Somme on August 28. That day Lanrezac’s Army, which had retired from the line Avesnes–Chimay west-south-westward, took positions south of the Oise between La Fère and Guise. On the following day, August 29, while Joffre had gone from Lanrezac’s headquarters at Laon to consult Sir John French at Compiègne, Maunoury and Lanrezac struck two hard blows, the one eastward from the Santerre plateau toward Peronne, the other north-west from the Oise toward St. Quentin, against the two flanks of Kluck.

In the former action, between the villages of Villers Bretonneaux and Proyart, 15,000 French chasseurs and troops of the line arrested a larger German force for a day and a night, then falling back toward Roye. Lanrezac was more successful in the simultaneous battle of Guise (extending to Ribémont on the west, and eastward to Vervins), although its original aim was not carried out. This was to wheel about, and to strike westward. The delicate manœuvre might have ended disastrously, for Bülow was closer than was thought, but for a rapid return to the old front. The left of the 5th Army (18th and 3rd Corps) crossed the Oise toward St. Quentin in the morning of the 29th, but was stopped in view of the arrest of the right (1st and 10th Corps) by heavy German attacks. The 3rd Corps was then transferred to the right; and, to the east of Guise, a serious repulse was inflicted on the German X Corps and the Guard.

This seems to have been the strongest of several factors which now produced a deep disturbance of the German plans. On August 28, according to Bülow’s war-diary,[36] the High Command, probably under the impression of Le Cateau, had ordered the I Army to continue south-westward to the Seine below Paris, and the II Army to make straight for the capital. Guise altered the whole prospect. Bülow had had to ask aid from Kluck (who, till August 27 subject to Bülow, was then given an independence of command which continued till September 10). Kluck, evidently the more forceful personality, and opposed to an immediate descent on Paris, then proceeded south-east to the Oise about Compiègne. The new direction was at once accepted by General Headquarters—a momentous change which will be discussed presently. Other important results were attained by these actions. The British Force was freed, and retired to the north bank of the Aisne, between Compiègne and Soissons, there to reorganise. At the same time, the neighbouring French armies, albeit outnumbered, were so ranged as to close the breach thus left against Kluck and Bülow, Field-Marshal French, not having received reinforcements, had rejected Joffre’s request to “stand and fight,” and refused to budge when it was repeated by President Poincaré and Lord Kitchener.[37]

Dislocation became apparent on both sides at this juncture. Kluck’s liaison with Bülow was not very good, or the movements just described would not have been possible. A considerable gap had also developed between Hausen and Bülow. True, there was a corresponding void between the French 5th and 4th Armies, a distance of 25 miles held only by a few flying columns. But behind this breach, a few miles to the south (between Soissons and Château Porcien), the new so-called 9th Army had begun to form on August 27, under General Foch, fresh from his failure and success in Lorraine.

It is difficult now not to regard this appointment in the light of later fame.[38] But the commander of the 20th Corps was already distinguished. It is noteworthy that Ferdinand Foch was born within 4 miles and four months of Joffre—at Tarbes in the Upper Pyrenees, on October 2, 1851. Of a solid and comfortable middle-class family, he is said to have called the Generalissimo’s attention, when he was offered the army command, to the fact that he had a brother who was a Jesuit priest. Joffre swept the hinted objection aside. Foch, who had served as subaltern in the 1870 war, had risen to be brigadier-general when he was made director of the Ecole de Guerre. Later, he commanded successively the 13th Division, the 8th Corps, and the 20th, of Nancy.

The new force he was now called upon to lead—consisting of the 42nd Division of the 6th Corps, taken from the 3rd Army, the 9th and 11th Corps, taken from the 4th Army, the 1st Moroccan Division, and two reserve divisions from the 4th Army—was not yet ready to enter into action. Joffre’s purpose in creating and placing it was not only to strengthen his centre, but to preserve the offensive force of the 5th Army. The German Staff probably did not know of the existence of Foch’s “detachment.” It did know that, farther east, its central armies, those of Duke Albrecht of Würtemberg and the Prussian Crown Prince, were not doing as well as had been expected. On August 28, de Langle, having obtained the Generalissimo’s leave to suspend the retreat of the 4th Army for a day, and a day only,[39] drove the German IV Army back across the Meuse between Sedan and Stenay with his right, while, with his left, he struck at the Saxons between Signy-l’Abbaye and Novion-Porcien (sometimes called the battle of Launois), where, in particular, the 1st Moroccan Division dealt faithfully with the I Saxon (XII German) Corps. The 3rd French Army was also deliberate in its retirement toward and around the northern limits of the entrenched camp of Verdun, and, on the 29th, near Dun-sur-Meuse, almost completely destroyed one of the Crown Prince’s regiments which tried to cross the river.

V. End of the Long Retreat

The position along the French front on this day was, therefore, more favourable than it had been. In Lorraine, there was a slackening of the German attacks, pending the arrival of fresh forces; and Castelnau, his weakened army fully rallied, was more confident of the issue. In the west, one new army had come, and another was coming, into line. At the right-centre and left-centre, the enemy had suffered checks which must have disturbed his arrogance, and caused hesitation and divided counsels that were presently to contribute to his undoing. They were checks only, however. A superiority of power remained; and Kluck’s right wing, doing forced marches of 25 to 30 miles a day, although the Allies broke most of the bridges behind them, was a very serious menace. Foch was not ready for a decisive engagement; and the Commander-in-Chief never wavered in his view that the general reaction must commence from the left.

So the offensive must be postponed, the subsidiary scheme of August 25 cancelled, the retreat prolonged. General Joffre had left Lanrezac, at noon on the 29th, with the knowledge that an offensive toward St. Quentin was impossible, and during the afternoon had listened to the representations of the British commander, who was accompanied by his three corps commanders and General Allenby. In his report of the interview, French says: “A general retirement on the line of the Marne was ordered, to which the French forces in the more eastern theatre of war were directed to conform,” adding: “Whilst closely adhering to his strategic conception, to draw the enemy on at all points until a favourable situation was created from which to assume the offensive, General Joffre found it necessary to modify from day to day the methods by which he sought to attain this object, owing to the development of the enemy’s plans and changes of the general situation.” It was a hard decision to retreat to the Marne, so abandoning the second great defence line established after the war of 1870, including the forts of La Fère, Laon, and Rheims. This new objective emphasised the dangerous unevenness of the front, for, on the 29th, de Langle’s Army was 40 miles north of the Marne (beyond Rethel), Lanrezac was 50 miles to the north (near Guise), Maunoury and the British were about 30 miles to the north (between Clermont and Compiègne). It was a bold decision. But there was something still more heroic to follow.

Retreat and pursuit now attained their maximum speed, the greatest pressure being always on the west. The city and important railway centre of Amiens was evacuated by d’Amade, and occupied by Kluck’s extreme right, on August 30 (the British base had already been moved to St. Nazaire). On that memorable Sunday, all the roads converging towards Paris were crowded with fugitives, whose panic-haste was only too well justified by the barbarities that marked the progress of the invasion. On the 31st, while the 5th Army was still north of Laon, Kluck was driving across the rearguards of Maunoury and of the British (restored to the general line, after a day’s rest) in the Clermont–Compiègne region. The curvature of the Allied line, and the threat of envelopment on the left, or division of the left from the centre, were acute. As we shall see, however, the enemy had fallen into a more perilous predicament. Paris had begun to be a major factor in the situation. The railways running southward from the capital were overwhelmed with multitudes of flying civilians; so that the detrainment of some of the reinforcements from the east had to be made at a point more distant than had been intended.[40]

The British Commander-in-Chief, conscious of the weakness of his means, but sensible also of what might happen to the great city, now expressed his readiness to take part in a general battle before Paris, provided that his flanks could be covered.[41] But neither of Joffre’s two new armies, the 6th and 9th, was ready for a decisive test. Kluck was hard upon the heels of d’Amade, Maunoury, and the British; and even on the Marne they might not be able to make a stand. Weighing up the possibilities from hour to hour, the Generalissimo concluded that he was not yet justified in risking everything. On September 1, from his headquarters, which were moved on that day from Vitry to a quiet château at Bar-sur-Aube, orders were issued to extend the retreat by another 30 miles to the south banks of the Aube and the Seine. “Despite the tactical successes obtained by the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Armies on the Meuse and at Guise,” he wrote, “the enveloping movement of the left of the 5th Army, insufficiently arrested by the British troops and the 6th Army, obliges the whole of our formation to pivot upon its right. As soon as the 5th Army has escaped the enveloping manœuvre against its left, the mass of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Armies will resume the offensive.” This order marks the moment at which Verdun became a pivot for the remaining portion of the western retreat. “We shall reach this line,” the Generalissimo added (September 2), “only if we are constrained. We shall attack, before reaching it, if we can realise a disposition permitting the co-operation of the whole of the forces.”

The “General Instruction No. 4” of September 1 indicated, as the turning-point, the line Bray-sur-Seine–Nogent-sur-Seine–Arcis-sur-Aube–Camp-de-Mailly–Bar-le-Duc. By the supplementary note of the following day, this line of arrest was pushed back a little farther still, from Pont-sur-Yonne (south-east of Fontainebleau), through Brienne-le-Château, to Joinville, 25 miles south of Bar-le-Duc. These positions were never reached; but the orders are of great interest, anticipating, as they did, the possibility of a movement that might well have involved the abandonment of Verdun and the creation of a new pivot at Toul–Nancy. Joffre’s public words are so few and sententious that the “General Order No. 11” may be given in full:

“Part of our armies are falling back to re-establish their front, recomplete their effectives, and prepare, with every chance of success, for the general offensive that I shall order to be resumed in a few days. The safety of the country depends upon the success of this offensive, which, in accord with the pressure of our Russian Allies, must break the German armies, that we have already seriously damaged at several points.

“Every man must be made aware of this situation, and strain all his energies for the final victory. The most minute precautions, as well as the most draconian measures, will be taken that the retirement be effected in complete order, so as to avoid useless fatigue. Fugitives, if found, will be pursued and executed. Army commanders will give orders to the depots so that these shall send promptly to the corps the full number of men necessary to compensate for losses sustained and to be foreseen in the next few days.

“The effectives must be as complete as possible, the cadres reconstituted by promotion, and the moral of all up to the level of the new tasks for the coming resumption of the forward movement which will give us the definitive success.

“At General Headquarters, September 2, 1914.

The General Commanding-in-Chief,
“Joffre”

CHAPTER IV
THE GREAT DILEMMA, PARIS–VERDUN

I. The Government leaves the Capital

Retreat to the Somme was much, to the Marne so much more as was to be appreciated only in the after-years of the war. Retreat to the Seine, besides endangering the venerable fortress and pivotal place of Verdun, left in peril of capture, perhaps of destruction, Paris, the richest and most beautiful city of Continental Europe, the seat of a strongly centralised system of government and many industries, the home of two millions of people, the converging point of the chief national roads and railways. That Government and people accepted such a risk speaks eloquently for the mind that imposed it upon them.

The passionate strain of those few days will ever rest in the memories of those who experienced it. News, vague and unexplained, of the northern invasion had fallen upon us with avalanche swiftness. Paris was almost universally regarded as its immediate objective. On August 27, the Viviani Ministry was reconstructed as an enlarged Government of National Defence, with M. Millerand in M. Messimy’s place at the Ministry of War, M. Delcassé at the Quai d’Orsay, M. Briand at the Ministry of Justice, and the Socialist M. Sembat at the Public Works. The same evening M. Millerand visited the Grand Quartier General at Vitry-le-François. “On the staircase,” he afterwards wrote, “I shook hands with General Maunoury, who was leaving for the north to take command of his new army. The Staff officers were working in tranquillity, silence, and order. The brains of the army functioned freely. General Joffre kept me long in conference. I never found him more calm, more master of himself, more sure of the future. I left him full of respect, admiration, and confidence.”[42] On the same day, General Gallieni was appointed military governor of Paris. Amongst the people of the capital, at least, this step excited keener interest, since it bore directly upon the question that was beginning to be asked on all hands—must we leave, or stay? Gallieni, who, long years before, had been Joffre’s chief in the military organisation of the colony of Madagascar, was, like him, of the type of soldier-administrator. But his temperament spoke of his Corsican origin; and he had asked for, and Joffre had refused him, an army command—circumstances to be remembered when we see him in action. A man of impeccable honesty, emphatic will, and few words, he immediately won the confidence of his men and the population at large, and in the height of the crisis presented a worthy, if somewhat stiff, personification of the new spirit which France began to exhibit before her armies had scored any victory.

On August 29, the French official bulletin (communicated to an anxiously waiting crowd of journalists in a stable-like building beside the Ministry of War, thereafter to be scanned greedily as the pièce de résistance of the world’s press) contained a partial revelation of the whereabouts of the enemy: “The situation from the Somme to the Vosges remains as yesterday.” At the same time, the new Government, in a manifesto to the nation, declared that “our duty is tragic, but simple: to repel the invader, to hold out to the end, to remain masters of our destinies.” This phrase “jusqu’au bout,” repeated by Gallieni a few days later—with its homologues, “jusqu’auboutist,” “jusqu’auboutisme”—was to become for years afterwards a catchword of the general resolve to fight to a victorious finish.

Refugees and wounded soldiers were now streaming into the city from the north, and families from the holiday resorts of the west and south. More than 30,000 fugitives from Belgium and the north of France reached the Nord Station on the 29th. A considerable current had begun to flow outwards, and during the next few days the railways were overwhelmed; but there was at no time real panic among the people of the great city. On Sunday the 30th, the first of a series of aeroplane raids provided a novel boulevard entertainment; the president of the City Council, M. Mithouard, advised residents to send their women and children into the country; and an edict was issued forbidding the papers to publish more than one edition daily. Railways, posts, and telegraphs were working subject to many hours’ delay. The city hospitals were being cleared. Thousands of civilians were helping the garrison to dig trenches, and clear fields of fire. The Bois and neighbouring lands were turned into a vast cattle and sheep farm; and large quantities of wheat were stored against the possibility of a siege.

On the night of the 31st, I received privately the alarming news—only made public on September 3—that the Government had that afternoon decided to abandon the capital. The staffs and papers of the Ministries were already being removed; Ministers themselves, with the President of the Republic, and the Ambassadors, except those of Spain and the United States, started for Bordeaux during the night of September 2. Many of the treasures of the Louvre and other museums and galleries were carried away at the same time. M. Poincaré and all the Ministers signed a lengthy manifesto declaring that they were departing “on the demand of the military authority,” in order to keep in touch with the whole country, after assuring the defence of the city “by all means in their power.” A quarter of the inhabitants of Paris had by now left, or were endeavouring to leave, the city. The remainder, very anxious—for the red-handed enemy was only a day’s march away—but still outwardly calm, preferred to any eloquence of political personages the terse promise of General Gallieni: “I have received the mandate to defend Paris against the invader. This mandate I shall fulfil to the end.” Certainly, the Government was in duty bound to see that it did not fall into the hands of Von Kluck. The utmost that can be said for the popular sentiment of the day is that, having prepared for departure, the chief magistrates of the Republic might perhaps have remained a few hours longer, when they would have discovered that there was no need to move after all.

II. Kluck plunges South-Eastward

The German Staff had, in fact, no immediate intention of attacking Paris; and Kluck, passing beyond gunrange of the outer forts of the entrenched camp, was racing south-east toward Meaux and Château-Thierry after the British and the French 5th Armies. This unexpected change of direction was only discovered on the afternoon of September 2, and confirmed during the next twenty-four hours by successive cavalry and aviation reports brought in to the headquarters of the British Army, Maunoury’s Army, and the Paris garrison. It had, in fact, begun two days before, though it could not then be considered decisive. No sooner had he occupied Amiens, and crossed the Somme and Avre, than Kluck began to alter his course from south-west to south-east, while Maunoury and the British continued due south (the former two days behind the latter). Thus, while conducting foreguard actions with the British, Kluck increasingly left aside Maunoury, and came into contact with the 5th Army. Under Joffre’s orders, Maunoury continued his direct march on Paris, his last units not leaving Clermont till early on the morning of September 2, whereas the Expeditionary Force had crossed the Aisne on August 30, and traversed Senlis, Crépy, and Villers-Cotterets on the following day, to pass the Marne at and near Meaux. It is true that detachments of the German extreme right got as far afield as Creil, on the evening of September 2, and Chantilly on the following morning, but they were no more than a flank guard. Senlis, on September 2, was the last place occupied in any force, the last scene of fighting, and of assassination, pillage, and incendiarism, on the main road to Paris, 23 miles away. Immediately in front lay the forests of Ermenonville and Chantilly, an uncomfortable country for what had become a mere wing-tip of the invasion.

While Maunoury’s exhausted troops were thus left liberty, behind these woods, to re-form and rest across the north-eastern suburbs of Paris (from Dammartin to the Marne), Kluck’s main body was making south-eastward after the British at a hot pace, at the same time closing up on its left with other forces coming due south from Soissons through Villers-Cotterets. Crépy-en-Valois was occupied by the Germans on September 1, 120,000 troops passing through toward Nanteuil-le-Haudouin and Betz, which were reached on September 3. By the time Gallieni got wind of the new direction, in fact, nearly the whole of Kluck’s Army and Bülow’s right wing were nearing Meaux and Château-Thierry (27 and 54 miles east of Paris). On September 3, the British blew up the Marne bridges behind them, and altered their line of retreat to south-west, reaching quietude and reinforcements on the Seine on September 4. Kluck pursued his south-eastward course, and, having crossed the Marne, Petit Morin, and Grand Morin, established himself, on September 5, with his Staff, in the house of a Dr. Alleaume in the little country town of Coulommiers. “This is the last stage,” he is reported as saying; “the day after to-morrow, we shall leave Coulommiers to enter Paris.”[43] That programme could not be carried out. Three days later, the boaster had fled, and Sir John French was ensconced in Coulommiers Town Hall.

Before we go on to trace the advantage the Allied commanders took of this situation, we may pause to consider two questions which have been, and may yet be, keenly discussed: (1) How came Kluck, reputedly one of the best of living German officers, to perform this evolution across Maunoury’s front, and so to reach a position that was to prove fatal to the whole enterprise? (2) Was the German Staff right in deciding to postpone the attack upon Paris?

It was natural that the problem should at first be posed in this double form, because, when information is scanty, it is easier to criticise an individual commander than a Grand Staff, and because the fate of a capital is more generally interesting than a strategical hypothesis. The most usual reply to the two questions was that, while the commander had made an evident blunder, the Command had only followed the orthodox military rule that no lesser objective should be allowed to interfere with that of breaking the enemy’s main armies, and, the French and British armies being unbroken, it was right not to adventure upon another task, the reduction of a great city which might be obstinately defended, till this was accomplished. That Berlin understood the importance of taking the French capital, and hoped to take it quickly, may be assumed.[44] Among other detailed evidence, the tardiness of a message from Berlin to the Ambassador of the United States (then still neutral) in Paris warning him to prepare for this event,[45] and the fact that the German armies were not at first provided with maps of the region of the capital (see note 2), reinforce the probability that this aim was originally, as after August 29, subordinated to that of a decisive battle.

But the wisdom of the decision has been strongly questioned. “First to beat the enemy army,” says General Cherfils, “is a means to an end, and generally the best. But this means is only a rule generally justified, not at all a principle. The principle of war is higher, and, like other principles, immutable—it is that the aim of war is to impose peace, and to this end to produce on the enemy government or command an effect of decisive demoralisation. We all know that Paris was not defended, and that, if the Germans had pushed right on to the capital with their I Army, nothing would have prevented them from destroying two of the forts, bombarding Paris, and entering the city. I ask if, at that hour, such a disaster would, not have produced an effect of demoralisation equal to the finest victory. The Germans neglected to put in play the terrifying surprise of such a catastrophe. I am sure the Grand Staff must have regretted it.”[46]

More convincing reasons than this may be found for the fact that Kluck was afterwards relegated, first to a lesser command, in which he was wounded, and then to the retired list. It is an exaggeration to speak of the city as “not defended.” The garrison consisted of four Territorial divisions, to which Maunoury could have added on September 5 the nine divisions of his new army. The ring of outer forts, with a circumference of nearly a hundred miles, was too long to be held by such a force; but it was also too long for investment or general attack by the ten or eleven divisions Kluck might have brought up. The German commander would, doubtless, have struck at a short sector; and the question, probably unanswerable, is whether the defenders, in their inadequate trenches connecting the old-fashioned forts, could have prevented him from breaking through, at least until the general battle on the Marne was won. It is highly probable they could have done so. It is certain that Gallieni would have made a spirited and obstinate defence; he had received specific permission to blow up the Seine bridges within the city, if he found it necessary to retire to the south bank. We know, also, that Kluck would have had to wait several days before his heavy artillery could be brought into position. Although the shortest distance between the outer forts and the boundaries of the city is about eight miles, much of Paris might then have been destroyed. But, the Government having gone south, would there have been any “decisive demoralisation”? And what, meanwhile, would have happened to the remaining armies? Assuming that the 6th French Army would have been wholly occupied with Kluck in the Paris area, instead of on the Ourcq, could Bülow, the Saxons, and the Duke of Würtemberg have fulfilled their task on the Marne? Would there not have been a dangerous gap on their right? Kluck would then have found it much more difficult to disentangle himself, and perhaps impossible, in case of a general retreat, to keep touch with his colleagues.

It has been stated, not very convincingly, that, in daring to pronounce against such an adventure, Kluck encountered the opposition of the Emperor and part of the Imperial Staff.[47] Von Bülow testifies that the Staff abandoned the advance on Paris directly after the order was given (p. [69]). The problem which had arisen was of a larger and graver character than that which has excited so much ingenious speculation.

III. Joffre’s Opportunity

For it was no exaggeration to say that a rapid victory was an essential condition of the German plan. The envelopment of the west wing of the Allies might succeed if it were effected by the time they reached the Somme, or a little beyond, but not later, and that for three main reasons. In the first place, there was, south of the Somme, Maunoury’s force, not large at first, but constantly growing, a grave threat to Kluck’s west flank, whether realised or not. In the second place, there was Foch’s new army forming at the centre; and, between Lanrezac and Foch, Bülow’s advance was so compromised that it had become necessary for Kluck to move eastward in order to relieve his comrade. Thirdly, Paris stood across the path of a more directly southward movement, with the certainty of delaying, and the probability of dislocating, an immediate attack. The design of envelopment by the west was, therefore, necessarily abandoned. Between August 29 and September 1, when he had passed the Somme, Kluck ceased his south-westerly course, which no longer had any important purpose, and came in touch with Bülow, to support his blow at the strongest of the French Armies, the 5th. It was probably thought, on the following days, that Maunoury would be locked up in Paris by a distraught Government, and that the British Army, virtually disabled, would not require very serious attention. Personal ambition, fear of being late for the action that was to give a dramatic victory, may have spurred on the commander of the I Army.[48]

So Kluck continued his course till his advance guards had reached a point on the Brie plateau 50 miles south-east of Paris. His first purpose was fulfilled. The space between the central lines of the German I and II Armies on September 4 may be roughly measured by the distance between Crépy-en-Valois and Fismes—no less than 50 miles. Next day, this space was bridged. It could not have been otherwise closed, except by arresting one or both forces, that is to say by suspending the whole enterprise. Paris had been covered as well as was possible with the forces in hand, the IV Reserve Corps, with a cavalry division, being left north of the Marne, while the II Corps was to turn from Coulommiers facing the south-east of the capital. It is uncertain how far Kluck knew of the strength or position of the French 6th Army.[49] As it afterwards came into action on the Ourcq, he could not know of it, for it was not yet fully constituted; but he had been repeatedly in conflict with some of its elements, from Baupaume to Senlis. The German Command can hardly have supposed that Paris would be left without a respectable garrison, especially as they were certainly cognisant of Gallieni’s proclamation. Whether they under- or over-estimated the strength Gallieni and Maunoury could put forth, the result would be much the same. In any case, Kluck must close up toward Bülow and cover his flank; new lines of communication must be organised; if the French should attempt a serious flank attack, it could be delayed till the main battle had been won.

It was, doubtless, a risky disposition, made more than risky by Kluck’s headstrong determination to have his full share in the decisive shock. British critics, with his failings in the north in mind, have dealt very severely with this commander; French writers, better acquainted with the fighting on the Ourcq, are more respectful. Kluck’s movement, like the advance of Prince Ruprecht and Heeringen across the face of Castelnau’s Army toward the Gap of Charmes, may have contained a large element of recklessness, born of foolish contempt for the retiring forces. But he was not responsible for the dilemma in which he was involved. The error was that of the German Grand Staff rather than of any particular commander. We shall see that, if Kluck was gambling, he had not lost his head. Had the Allied retreat been less prolonged, had he been able to come up with the French 5th and British Armies sooner, he might have won, or at least have stopped on the Marne, instead of the Aisne. He had no longer a free choice of his movements. To have stayed between Aisne and Marne would not have solved the problem; it would have eased the British advance. Every man was needed on the extreme front, if the whole aim of the invasion was not to be missed. Bülow had had to leave one corps behind at Maubeuge, and was just losing the support, on his left, of one of Hausen’s Saxon corps (the XI), ordered off to the Russian front. Foch’s new army of the centre had, doubtless, been discovered before this time, though its numbers would not yet be known. Kluck had to throw forward every regiment not demonstrably needed elsewhere. All the German commands were now engaged in a reckless gamble; but, where his masters lost their nerve, Kluck did not. To this complexion had the great enveloping movement come under pressure of the Joffrean dilemma. With all his anxieties, the French Generalissimo may well have smiled blandly as he saw the enemy enter between the horns of Paris and Verdun.

It is important to realise that the consequences we have to trace arose, not chiefly from individual blundering, but from the nature of the invasion, from a plan of campaign resting upon the need and expectation of a rapid victory, and the French manner of meeting it. To this need every lesser aim, however promising in itself, had been sacrificed. King Albert was allowed to carry his army into the shelter of Antwerp, there to prepare for the battle of the Yser. Ostend, Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, all the coast of Flanders and the Channel, with its hinterland, and with them the sea communications of England, were ignored in obedience to the strategical doctrine of the major objective, and in the sure belief that if this were attained, the rest would follow easily. The watching world was staggered by the immense boldness of these criminals. Joffre was in no wise intimidated, never thought of temporising, immediately saw that a most daring crime can only be overcome by a still more daring virtue, and set all his mind to the task of gathering the utmost force in the best position for the decisive test. That meant abandoning the north; so be it—he, too, must stake all on a blow.

After rescuing the armies from a deadly constraint on the frontier, after preparing a mass of manœuvre which would restore to him the initiative, after so lengthening the retreat that a virtual equality of forces was obtained, Joffre’s aim was to reach a level front whence, his flanks being safe, he could swing round the whole line in a sudden riposte. His wings were now, in a measure, protected; and the same process which had brought the Allied forces near their reserves, their supplies and their most favourable battleground had attenuated the enemy’s columns, dislocated their line, and prejudiced their power of manœuvre. The dilemma which Paris presented in the west, Verdun repeated at the other end of the line, 170 miles away. There, too, the beginnings of a modern defensive system were being extemporised. Sarrail had just succeeded Ruffey in command of the 4th Army; he would have defended, did, indeed, afterwards defend, his circle of forts and hill-trenches as Gallieni would have defended the capital. The Imperial Crown Prince was faced by a replica of Kluck’s problem—to attack the fortress of the Meuse Heights, and to that extent to neglect the French field armies; or to neglect the fortress, and risk all that might, and did, happen. Either the invaders must entangle themselves upon these protruding points, and so weaken the intermediate forces, or they must go forward to the crucial encounter leaving a peril unreduced upon either flank. That the Crown Prince’s answer was the same as Kluck’s indicates that it was not their individual answer only, but the decision of the Grand Staff.

On the west, there are, before the battle of the Marne, three main stages in the development of this result: the loss of a week at the outset in Belgium, which enabled the French command to shift its forces north-westward, and the British Army to assemble; the failure of the surprise on the Sambre and Meuse to produce a decision; and the failure, on or south of the Somme, either to envelop or to break the retreating masses. On the east, where there was less possibility of surprise or manœuvre, a like inability to pierce or envelop appeared in five successive failures: that of the Gap of Charmes on August 25; the battle of the Mortagne, at the beginning of September; the battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy on September 4–11; that of Fort Troyon on September 8–13; and that of the Crown Prince’s Army in course of the main battle of the Marne. To the German marching wing the most important mission had been entrusted; and its failure must be adjudged the most grave.

Its greatest exponents have admitted that the danger of dislocation is inherent in the tactic of envelopment; Clausewitz himself laid it down that the manœuvre should only be attempted when the force attacked is wholly engaged with the assailant’s centre.[50] After the Sambre, the German armies never had this opportunity; and ere they could change a plan that had governed all their dispositions, it had aggravated the disorder natural in so violent a pursuit. What at first sight looks like a sudden change of fickle fortune is, in fact, the logical end of an immense strategical deception, of weaknesses in an imposing organism discovered by a higher intelligence, and exploited by a higher prudence and courage. However the lesser questions we have touched be answered in the light of fuller knowledge, it seems sure that history will pronounce Joffre’s master idea one of the boldest and soundest conceptions to be found in military annals. It dominated the ensuing battle, which thus yielded an essentially strategic victory. Gallieni has been justly praised for the promptitude with which he took advantage of Kluck’s “adventurous situation.” The only alternative for the latter, however, was another situation hardly, if at all, less adventurous; and the choice was imposed upon him—as, at the other end of the line, upon the Crown Prince—by the French Commander-in-Chief. The manœuvrer had become the manœuvred before the battle began.

CHAPTER V
THE ORDER OF BATTLE

I. Gallieni’s Initiative

It was in the early hours of September 3 that the first definite evidence of Kluck’s divergence south-eastward was reported to the Military Government of Paris; but the officers in charge did not venture to disturb their weary chief, who received the news only when he rose in the morning.[51] At noon, he issued to the garrison the following note: “A German army corps, probably the Second, has passed from Senlis southward, but has not pursued its movement toward Paris, and seems to have diverged to the south-east. In a general way, the German forces which were in face of the 6th Army appear to be oriented toward the south-east. On our side, the 6th Army is established to the north-east of the entrenched camp on the front Mareil-en-France–Dammartin–Montgé. The British Army is in the region south of the Marne and the Petit Morin, from Courtevroult (west) to beyond La Ferté-sous–Jouarre (east).”

During the day, the news, the importance of which Gallieni immediately realised, was confirmed; the evening bulletin issued in Bordeaux announced that “the enveloping march of the enemy seems definitely conjured.” Perceiving the opportunity of striking a hard, perhaps a decisive, blow at the enemy’s flank, the Governor appears to have resolved at once to set Maunoury’s Army in movement,[52] and then to have proceeded to urge the Commander-in-Chief to make this the commencement of the general offensive which was to have taken place some days later, when the armies had re-formed behind the Seine. “If they do not come to us, we will go to them,” said Gallieni to his Chief of Staff, General Clergerie;[53] and at about 9 a.m. on September 4, he issued to the 6th Army the following order: “In consequence of the movement of the German armies, which appear to be slipping across our front in a south-easterly direction, I intend to send your army forward against their flank, that is to say in an eastward direction, in touch with the British troops. I will indicate your direction of march when I know that of the British Army; but take forthwith your dispositions so that your troops may be ready to march this afternoon, and to launch to-morrow (September 5) a general movement to the east of the entrenched camp.”

In course of the morning and forenoon of the same day (September 4), Gallieni had three telephonic conversations with the Generalissimo. Before the last of these communications, between noon and 1 p.m., the Governor, with General Maunoury, went by automobile to British headquarters at Melun. Sir John French was not there; but, during the evening, probably after hearing from General Joffre, he replied to Gallieni that the British Army would turn about on the morrow, with a view to the resumption of the offensive on September 6.[54] After reflection, in fact, the Generalissimo had accepted Gallieni’s view of the opportunity, and had issued during the evening orders to the three armies of the left to get into positions of attack on the 5th, and to commence the battle on the morning of the 6th. On the 5th, Sir John French visited General Joffre, who had now come over to Claye, on the road from Paris to Meaux, Maunoury’s headquarters. After the interview, there should have been no misunderstandings.

At the end of August, the French General Staff had moved from Vitry-le-François 40 miles farther south to Bar-sur-Aube, where, on the outskirts of the quiet little town, at the large country house called “Le Jard” (29 Faubourg de Paris), which had sheltered a century before the Tsar Alexander I and King Frederick William II of Prussia, the Commander-in-Chief was the guest of M. Tassin, a member of the Paris bar. Refusing all ceremony, General Joffre occupied a large first-floor room looking by two windows upon the gateway and the Paris highroad. But it was in a neighbouring schoolroom where the Staff bureaux were established, and to which the telegraph wires—nerves of the battle—were attached, that the historic orders for the great encounter were composed. On the evening of September 5, another southward move was made to Chatillon-sur-Seine, where, for three weeks, the Staff occupied the château of Colonel Maître, once belonging to Marshal Marmont. It was from the “Chambre de l’Empereur” in this old house, so called after a visit of Napoleon in 1814, that General Joffre issued his final summons to the troops on the morning of the battle.

The text of the General Instructions of September 4 and 5 is of great importance, for they determined at least the first shape of the ensuing struggle, and we will have to recall them in dealing with one of its most critical phases. For the moment, it will suffice to point out this apparent ambiguity, that, while the general offensive was to commence only on September 6, Maunoury’s Army was to discover itself on September 5, in a movement that would necessarily provoke strong resistance.

II. General Offensive of the Allies

General Joffre’s programme was embodied in the following series of army orders:

General Headquarters, September 4

“1. Advantage must be taken of the adventurous situation of the I German Army (right wing) to concentrate upon it the efforts of the Allied armies of the extreme left. All dispositions will be taken during the 5th of September with a view to commencing the attack on the 6th.

2. The dispositions to be realised by the evening of September 5 will be:

(a) All the available forces of the 6th Army, to the north-east, ready to cross the Ourcq between Lizy-sur-Ourcq and May-en-Multien, in the general direction of Château-Thierry [the last phrase was telephonically corrected at 10 p.m. to the following: “in a manner to attain the meridian of Meaux”]. The available elements of the 1st Cavalry Corps that are in the vicinity will be put under the orders of General Maunoury for this operation.

(b) The British Army, established on the front Changis–Coulommiers, facing east, ready to attack in the general direction of Montmirail.

(c) The 5th Army, closing up slightly to the left, will establish itself on the general front Courtacon–Esternay–Sezanne, ready to attack in the general direction south to north, the 2nd Cavalry Corps assuring connection between the British and 5th Armies.

(d) The 9th Army will cover the right of the 5th Army, holding the southern end of the Marshes of St. Gond, and carrying a part of its forces on to the plateau to the north of Sezanne.

3. The offensive will be begun by these different armies in the morning of September 6.”

September 5

(e) To the 4th Army: To-morrow, September 6, our armies of the left will attack in front and flank the I and II German armies. The 4th Army, stopping its southward movement, will oppose the enemy, combining its movement with that of the 3rd Army, which, debouching to the north of Revigny, will assume the offensive, moving westward.

(f) To the 3rd Army: The 3rd Army, covering itself on the north-east, will debouch westward to attack the left flank of the enemy forces, which are marching west of the Argonne. It will combine its action with that of the 4th Army, which has orders to attack the enemy.”

We are now in a position, before entering upon the particulars of the battle, to measure in its chief elements the very marked change in the balance and relation of forces which the French High Command had obtained by and in course of the retreat from Belgium. The most important of these elements are numbers and positions. Both are shown in detail in the following tabular pages, setting forth in parallel columns the dispositions of the opposed armies immediately before the action commenced.

STRENGTH AND POSITION OF THE ARMIES

(On September 5–6, except where otherwise indicated, in order from West to East)

The composition of the 1st and 2nd Armies of Generals Dubail and de Castelnau, and of the German armies facing them, is given in the chapter dealing with the defence of the eastern frontier (pp. [198–200]).

With so much accuracy as is yet possible, the relative strength of the opposed forces at the maximum was as follows:

SUMMARY OF STRENGTH

This comparison of totals is of only limited value, for two main reasons: (1) As has been explained, the German reserve divisions were markedly stronger than the French, and the German corps generally were more homogeneous. (2) The table shows only the maximum development of each army. Light artillery was probably in about the same proportion as the infantry, with a marked advantage of quality on the side of the Allies; it had not been possible to bring the full German superiority in heavy guns to bear on the new front. It will be safe to say that between the regions of Paris and Verdun the Allies had obtained a distinct superiority in active formations, and one more marked at the height of the battle in the area of decision. Antwerp and Maubeuge held before them bodies of German troops that might have turned the balance in the south; the occupation of towns and the guarding of communications retained others; whether from nervousness or over-confidence, Berlin had called two corps (11th and Guard R.C.) from France for the Russian frontier—a “fateful” step for which Ludendorff disclaims responsibility. On the other hand, two new French armies had been created, chiefly at the cost of the eastern border; many units had been re-formed; the upper commands had been strengthened; and the whole line had been brought near to its bases. “The farther the Germans advanced, the French and British adroitly evading a decisive action, the more the initial advantage passed from the former to the latter,” says a German writer already cited.[55] “The Germans left their bases farther and farther behind, and exhausted themselves by fatiguing marches. They consumed munitions and food with a fearful rapidity, and the least trouble in the supply services might become fatal to masses so large. Meanwhile, the French were daily receiving fresh troops, daily approaching their stores of munitions and food.”

This great overturn of material strength was the first advantage the French Command had worked for and obtained. It is to be noted that on neither side was any mass held as a general reserve. Joffre had hoped to keep back the 21st Corps, but even this proved impossible. “The strategic situation,” he telegraphed to M. Millerand on September 5, “is excellent, and we cannot count on better conditions for our offensive. The struggle about to begin may have decisive results, but may also have for the country, in case of check, the gravest consequences. I have decided to engage our troops to the utmost and without reserve to obtain a victory.”

III. Features of the Battlefield

The second advantage gained has already been indicated; it consisted in the attainment of a concave front resting upon the entrenched camps of Paris and Verdun, and by them guarded against any sudden manœuvre of envelopment. Intermediately, this front lay across the heights between the Marne and the Seine, along the chief system of main lines and highroads running eastward from the capital, those of Paris–Nancy. This 200-miles stretch of country, so typically French in character and history, loosely united by the Marne and the tributaries it carries into the Seine on the threshold of the capital—an agricultural country whose only large cities, Rheims and Châlons, were in the enemy’s hands—falls into four natural divisions, corresponding with the Allied left (west), left-centre, right-centre, and right (east).

The western region, between the suburbs of Paris and the gully holding the little river Ourcq and its canal, is the Ile-de-France and the Valois, rolling farmlands of beet and corn, with some parks, bordered on the north by the forests of Chantilly and Villers-Cotterets, and on the south by the broad valley of the Marne. A landscape most intimately French in its rich, spacious quietude, in the old-time solidity of its villages and their people, in the gracious dignity of its châteaux and ruined abbeys, with Meaux bells pealing across the brown slopes to the sister cathedral of Senlis, and both looking east to the giant donjon of La Ferté-Milon. This is the battlefield of the Ourcq, where Kluck was rounded up by Maunoury and the British. The ancient cathedral and market-town of Meaux marks its limit near the junction of the lesser and greater rivers.

East of the Ourcq this district becomes more crumpled in its rise towards the Montagne de Rheims; while, south of the Marne, extends the larger and richer country of Brie, famous for its cheeses, its fertés, erstwhile baronial strongholds, and for the scenes of some of Napoleon’s greatest victories. In structure, this is a broken triangular plateau, cut by westward-flowing streams (the Marne, Petit Morin, and Grand Morin), bounded on the south by the Seine and Aube, and rising eastward to the Montagne de Reims and the Falaises de Champagne, where it falls abruptly. Coulommiers, Château-Thierry, and Provins are substantial market-towns, and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Montmirail, and Sézanne smaller centres of rural life. This wide plateau of Brie, the Allied left-centre, was the starting-point of the British recoil, and the field contested by d’Espérey’s Army against Von Bülow.

Beyond the Rheims–Epernay wine district and the St. Gond Marshes (source of the Petit Morin), we pass into the great expanse of the Champagne moorlands, poor and thinly populated, where large tracts of chalk soil carry nothing but plantations of stunted pines and firs. Châlons-sur-Marne, its capital, has a large permanent garrison, with fixed camps and manœuvre grounds hard by. Vitry-le-François, at the junction of the Saulx and Ornain with the Marne, and of the Paris–Nancy and Châlons–Rheims railways, is the only other considerable town. On the west of this region, Foch held against Bülow and the Saxons; on the east occurred the shock of de Langle’s army with that of the Duke of Würtemberg.

Finally, beyond Revigny, the forces of General Sarrail and the Imperial Crown Prince fought across a more composite region, consisting, in the south, of the Barrois—the district of Bar-le-Duc—and, to the north of this, the near part of the thickly-wooded Argonne hills, the Verdun Heights, and the plain between. Verdun was and remained a defensive position worthy of its ancient renown; and the Argonne, with Valmy on one flank and Varennes on the other (to cite only two historic names), has always been a barrier against invasion secondary to the Heights of the Meuse. These latter are continued with only small breaks by the Heights of the Moselle, where, especially on the hills near Nancy, took place the coincident struggle by which the eastern defence line was preserved. While this must be borne in mind, as an essential part of the general French victory, it seems legitimate and convenient to treat it separately; a brief recital of what there occurred is, accordingly, postponed to the end of our narrative.

The military geographer will have much to add to this note of the lie of the land. He will be able to show that all the natural features of the country affected the result; the rivers of the western area inconveniencing both sides, but especially the invader; the patches of forest and the direction of highroads limiting their movements; the French gaining from a virtual monopoly of railway services a power of rapid transfer of troops that was one of the decisive factors of the battle. Everywhere, hill positions proved to be of great tactical value; and this is supremely true of the eastern ranges. The Argonne block delayed and split the Crown Prince’s columns, and so greatly helped Sarrail to maintain his line. The Upper Meuse and its earthy rampart were a still more precious protection. Between Verdun and Nancy, a distance of 60 miles, only one point was attacked, in the crisis, and this was held by a single fort, that of Troyon. Yet another hill range has signally aided the enemy in the end of the battle, when the victorious Allies were brought up sharp against the Laon Mountains, north of the Aisne. Throughout the field, superior knowledge of the ground must be counted among the advantages of the French.

The most important of these natural features, however, is of less consequence than the strategical gain of a front whereon the French wings were both safe, while the German wings were both threatened. Gallieni, in throwing the 6th Army upon Kluck’s flank, did but anticipate the inevitable by one or two days. What happened arose necessarily out of the strategy of the retreat, in the direction and form of which Joffre never lost his initiative. It is possible that, had he retired farther, the victory might have been more complete. Actually, the five German armies were drawn within a hemicycle 200 miles wide and 30 miles deep. Their right could not help passing before Maunoury, or their left before Sarrail, except by refusing battle. They dare not turn aside; but the penalty of going on was to offer two cheeks to the smiter. There is, however, no trace of hesitation. The common soldiers still thought they were advancing “Nach Paris.” At Headquarters, the tactic of envelopment having failed, everything was risked on a converging attack upon the French centre.

IV. The Last Summons

We can now enter upon the details of the titanic encounter with a clear impression of its general character. As soon as the relation of forces was realised, the tactical purposes dictated by the circumstances to either side were these, and could not be other: for the French, to attack on the wings, especially the western, where there was a promise of surprise, while holding firm at the centre till the pressure there was relieved; for the Germans, to procure a swift decision at the centre, while sufficiently guarding the threatened flanks. But their initiative gave the Allies the benefit of the move: precious hours elapsed ere Kluck could adequately reply. Thus, the disposition of forces governs the whole story of the battle, and gives it a natural unity. It began on the west and developed eastward, as it were, by a series of reverberations, until the shock was returned by Sarrail. In this direction, therefore, we must follow its successive phases. If we speak of a battle of the Ourcq, a battle of St. Gond, and so on, it is only to make what can but be a bird’s-eye view clearer by a just emphasis. These are so many acts in the battle of the Marne, one and indivisible.

We have referred above solely to the measurable factors; the moral of the armies will best be seen in the process and the result. But there is a prevision of it in the evenness of the alignment reached on September 5th—much superior to that of the enemy, for some units of the German centre were crowded together, while the Crown Prince’s troops were scattered—and in the readiness of these defeated and weary men for an instant recoil. On the morning of the 6th, the words of the Generalissimo rang out like a bugle-call along the front:

“G.H.Q. (Chatillon-sur-Seine), September 6, 7.30 a.m. (telegram 3948).

“At the moment when a battle is engaged on which depends the salvation of the country, every one must be reminded that the time has gone for looking backward. All efforts must be employed to attack and repel the enemy. Any troop which can no longer advance must at any cost hold the ground won, and be slain rather than give way. In the present circumstances, no failure can be tolerated.”

Sir John French struck a more conventionally cheerful note: “I call upon the British Army in France to show now to the enemy its power, and to push on vigorously to the attack beside the 6th French Army. I am sure I shall not call upon them in vain, but that, on the contrary, by another manifestation of the magnificent spirit which they have shown in the past fortnight, they will fall on the enemy’s flank with all their strength, and in unison with their Allies drive them back.”

No such general orders on the German side have been made public; but the following summons to the Coblentz Corps of the IV Army, signed by General Tulffe von Tscheppe u. Weidenbach, was afterward found at Vitry-le-François:

“The aim of our long and arduous marches has been achieved. The principal French forces have been compelled to accept battle after being continuously driven back. The great decision is now at hand. For the welfare and honour of Germany, I expect every officer and man, despite the hard and heroic fighting of the last few days, to do his duty unfailingly and to his last breath. Everything depends upon the result of to-morrow.”

CHAPTER VI
BATTLE OF THE OURCQ

I. A Premature Engagement

Exactly at noon on Saturday, September 5, the divisions of General Lamaze, constituting the right (save for elements connecting it with the British) of the French 6th Army, came under fire from advanced posts of General Schwerin’s IV Corps of Reserve, hidden on the wooded hills just beyond the highroad from Dammartin to Meaux. A surprise for both sides; and with this began the battle of the Ourcq.

The battlefield—a rough quadrilateral, extending from the Dammartin road eastward to the deep ditch occupied by the Ourcq and its canal, and bounded on the north by the Nanteuil–Betz highway, on the south by the looping course of the Marne—consists of open, rolling beet- and corn-fields where some part of the crops were still standing. A soldier would call it an ideal battlefield, its many and good roads helping the movement of troops, its wooded bottoms and the stone walls of its farmsteads and hamlets giving sufficient cover, its hills good artillery emplacements. The eastern and higher part of the plateau is crossed from south-east to north-west by three ridges, against which the French offensive beat in successive waves. The northernmost rises to 300 feet above the Ourcq, from near May-en-Multien, along the little river Gergoyne, by Etavigny and Acy, to Bouillancy; the central ridge, that of the Therouanne, runs from opposite Lizy-sur-Ourcq, by Trocy and Etrepilly, to Marcilly; the southernmost from Penchard, through Monthyon and Montgé, to Dammartin. The combat, as we shall see, began in the last-named area, its centre of gravity then moving northward. The Germans had the better of the hill positions, with forward parties well spread out; and, as in Lorraine and the Ardennes, directly they were threatened they entrenched themselves, though not continuously or deeply. Caught in full movement toward the Marne, Kluck’s rearguard at once protected itself as it had been taught to do. The position was an awkward one, in the angle of two river-courses. But the German communications necessarily traversed the Ourcq, and hereabouts the west bank rises high above the eastern, covering the passage and commanding the country for miles around.

Starting out in the morning from the hamlet of Thieux, 3 miles south of Dammartin, Lamaze’s columns were directed as follows: de Dartein’s Division, the 56th Reserve, on the left, toward St. Soupplets, by way of Juilly and Montgé; the 55th, under General Leguay, toward Monthyon, by Nantouillet; the Moroccan Infantry Brigade of General Ditte, toward Neufmontiers. After tramping nearly a hundred miles in three days and nights, with scanty food and sleep, and frequent rear actions, Lamaze’s Corps had spent a whole day at rest, and, though far from its full strength, was a little recovered from the pains of the retreat. The sight of Paris near at hand, and the feeling that the supreme crisis was reached, set up a higher spirit, and prepared the men for the stirring appeal of the Generalissimo. They were now to need all their recovered confidence and courage.

The 5th battalion (276th regiment) of the 55th Division was settling down to its midday meal in face of the hamlet of Villeroy, when it was surprised by a storm of shells from three of Schwerin’s batteries, masked by the trees on the heights of Monthyon and Penchard. A French 3-inch battery in front of the battalion, and another brought up toward Plessy-l’Eveque, at once returned this fire, as it was afterward found, with good effect. But the heavier German field-guns, stationed 8 or 9 miles away in the loop of the Marne, at Germigny and Gué-à-Tresmes, and farther north behind Trocy, were far out of range of the French pieces, and were worked with impunity until near the end of the battle. Between Monthyon and Penchard, the enemy had three groups of machine-guns, which kept up a deadly rain of bullets. In two and a half hours, the 5th battalion, just referred to, lost 250 men out of a short thousand; in course of the day, there fell of the 19th company all the chief officers, including the brilliant young writer, Lieut. Charles Peguy, and 100 men.[56] Nevertheless, the line jerked itself forward by short bounds past Plessis and Iverny toward the Montgé–Penchard ridge. Neufmontiers was the first village carried by assault; and, generally, the Moroccan chasseurs made the most rapid progress—their officers, with swords uplifted in gloved hands, leading them through the cornfields and orchards—until they reached the stronghold of Telegraph Hill, by Penchard, where they were thrice repulsed during the afternoon. By 6 p.m., the enemy being reinforced, all the captured ground was lost. The 55th Division, before Monthyon, and the 56th, on its left, were also at once arrested; but, having administered this check, Von Schwerin proceeded to abandon his advanced position, from Neufmontiers northward. On the left, a patrol of the 56th Division found St. Soupplets evacuated, at 9 p.m. In the evening, while the 7th Corps was coming in on its left, from the highroad between Plessis Belleville and Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, Lamaze’s front was drawn back lightly to the line Montgé–Cuisy–Plessy-l’Eveque–Iverny–Charny. Night brought a lull in the battle, a snatch of broken sleep for some of the rank and file at least. A harvest moon shone red through the smoke of flaming hayricks and farmhouses.

This was far from being what General Joffre had counted upon in ordering the 6th Army to be in a position on the morning of the 6th, as an essential part of the general offensive, to pass the Ourcq and march upon Château-Thierry. Maunoury was still 9 miles from the Ourcq at Lizy, with no prospect of an easy passage. “Some one had blundered.” It is clear that Maunoury’s reconnaissance service was gravely at fault. But there is more than that. In determining to precipitate the intended movement of the 6th Army, the Generalissimo depended upon the telephonic representations made to him by Gallieni. Knowing that, from his starting points on the morning of the 5th, Maunoury had 12 or 14 miles to make to reach the Ourcq, the Governor of Paris must have assumed that no opposition would be encountered—a rash conclusion in face of a commander like Kluck.[57] Lamaze’s force was too small to sweep aside any substantial rearguard, too large to come into action without giving the alarm. Why was the 7th Corps not in line with it? Everything must depend upon the efficacy of this flank blow. When the enemy was discovered on the hills of Monthyon and Penchard, should contact have been broken till the attack could be made in full force? Suppose that it did not then succeed, after the loss of precious hours? Cruel dilemma! The decision was to go ahead; and the result came near being the abortion of the whole plan of battle.

The morning of September 6 gave Lamaze an easy success on his left, offset by grievous difficulties on his right. The 56th Division, having occupied St. Soupplets at daybreak, rapidly reached the Therouanne at Gesvres, Forfry, and Oissery; and Marcilly was taken in the afternoon. The 55th, checked for a time at the central height of Monthyon, next met a more determined resistance before Barcy and Chambry. The former village was lost twice, and taken a third time, at the cost of many lives. Ditte’s brigade, strengthened by Zouaves from the 45th Division, reoccupied Neufmontiers, and took Penchard and Chambry, but failed before the Vareddes ridge. Everywhere it was the same tale; though served with the utmost courage, the bayonet is no match for the machine-gun. Before retreating toward the loop of the Marne, the Germans burned down, by means of hand grenades, the village of Chauconin, with its household goods and farm implements. It is curious that the large town of Meaux altogether escaped damage during the battle.

All possibility of surprise was now past; and an average gain of about 5 miles had been dearly bought. Kluck, just installed at Coulommiers, 14 miles away, had been instantly sobered by the news from his rear, and with a speed and judgment worthy of his repute had taken measures to meet the danger.[58] The French left, the 7th Corps, had no sooner come into action on this morning of the 6th than two enemy columns were signalled as having reached the Ourcq about Vareddes and Lizy. By the middle of the afternoon, when Lamaze was facing the hills beside Etrepilly, and General Vautier’s two divisions, which had easily attained the line Villers St. Genest–Brégy, were striking out from the first to the second line of heights, from Bouillancy to Puisieux, with the prospect of turning the right of the German IV Reserve Corps, they found this new adversary before them. It was a part of the II Corps, withdrawn from the British front by a hard night march, and now thrown adroitly against Maunoury’s left wing.

II. The British Manœuvre

To understand how this withdrawal, so big with results, was possible, and to do justice to Sir John French’s command in regard to it, we must leave Lamaze and Vautier at grips with the two German corps on the Ourcq, and turn for a moment to the situation south of the Marne.

The OURCQ Front.
Afternoon of Sept. 6.

On September 3, the British Army lay just south of Meaux, from Lagny to Signy Signets, having destroyed the Marne bridges behind it at General Joffre’s request. Kluck, as we have seen, was then approaching the river from the north-west, coming on at a great pace. Several of his Staff officers, pelting eastward from Meaux in an armoured automobile at nightfall, did not see that the last arch of the Trilport bridge was broken, pitched over, and were drowned. A little study of the map will show that Kluck’s rapid movement—his pontoon corps established bridges of boats across the Marne on the night of the 3rd, and the next day his patrols were beyond the Petit Morin and on the Grand Morin—required not simply a farther retreat, but a different direction of retreat, of the British force. To throw it up against the neighbouring French columns, those of the 5th Army (commanded by General Franchet d’Espérey since the evening of September 3) was exactly what Kluck was aiming at. To avoid such a calamity, and perhaps to tempt the rash commander farther south, Joffre asked Sir John French to retire some 12 miles farther, drawing his right south-westward, pivoting on his left. This manœuvre, which to the British commander could only seem the natural pursuance of the French Army Orders of September 2, by him received on the following day, was carried out on September 4. The Expeditionary Force, as it was called, had been on the Continent for hardly three weeks, had fought in that time two great battles and many smaller engagements, and had retreated 160 miles in twelve days, losing much material and nearly a fifth of its original strength, about 15,000 officers and men. Behind the Forest of Crécy, close to the railway junctions south of Paris, it was able, on the night of September 4 and during the 5th, to pick up much-needed reinforcements, bringing its effective strength up to five divisions and five cavalry brigades, with guns and supplies.

At midday on September 5, when the battle of the Ourcq was beginning, the I German Army had reached the following positions:—Marwitz’s IX Cavalry Division was north of Crécy, the II near Coulommiers. Richthofen’s V Cavalry Division was at Choisy, south-west of La Ferté-Gaucher, the Guard Cavalry a little farther east, near Chartronges. The II Corps was extended from the Marne near Montceaux to the Grand Morin west of Coulommiers. The IV Corps was on the latter river about La Ferté-Gaucher. The III Corps was on the great highroad about Sancy and Montceaux-les-Provins; and the IX north of Esternay. The general strategical significance of these dispositions will presently appear; for the moment, we are concerned with them specially in relation to Maunoury’s and the British Armies. Twelve hours later, Kluck’s front was advanced a little farther, extending from near Crécy-en-Brie, along the Grand Morin, by Coulommiers and La Ferté-Gaucher, to Esternay, with the cavalry of Marwitz before the centre and left. The bulk of this force was aimed at the 5th French Army; but the II and part of the IV Active Corps faced the British. Such was the position at the moment when Kluck, informed of the danger to his rearguard, decided to send back to the Ourcq his II Corps, bringing the western wing of the invasion to a sudden and humiliating end.

Neither at French nor at British Headquarters were these dispositions exactly known; still less could the German commander’s intentions be known. The last stage of the British retirement, asked for by General Joffre, had taken the body of Sir John French’s troops out of direct contact with the enemy. They had to embody newly-arrived men and guns, and then to return over this ground. Joffre’s order of September 4 had named as the British line for the evening of the following day “the front Changis–Coulommiers, facing east, ready to attack in the general direction of Montmirail”—due east, that is to say, not north-east. It is evident, from this instruction, that the Generalissimo (1) did not anticipate any serious resistance west or south of Coulommiers, for the British could not be fighting on their north flank while marching due east, and they could not start from Coulommiers when the enemy was 8 miles farther south; and (2) did not anticipate a sudden withdrawal of Kluck northward, which would require the British to turn thither in aid of Maunoury. When Joffre and French met at Melun on September 5, the instruction was modified, but not radically; it was now, in Sir John’s words, “to effect a change of front to my right—my left resting on the Marne, and my right on the 5th Army, to fill the gap between that army and the 6th.” The right of the 5th Army, however, was not at Coulommiers—both Changis and Coulommiers were in the hands of the enemy—but Courtacon, 12 miles farther to the south-east; and to join the 6th and 5th Armies implied a north-easterly, not an easterly frontage. Joffre so far recognised the difficulty of filling this wide space with five divisions as to instruct Gallieni to send across the Marne the 8th Division of the French 4th Corps; and this came in, with prompt effect, between Meaux and Villiers-sur-Morin, 5 miles farther south, beside the British 3rd Corps, at 9 a.m. on September 6. There then still remained a space of over 20 miles between the 6th and 5th Armies, and it is, therefore, idle to suggest, as some zealous partisans of Gallieni have done,[59] that the British commander was needlessly nervous as to the continuity of the line, when it became evident that considerable bodies of the enemy were spread across his path.

The BRITISH Turn-About

It was not till September 7 that any need appeared to help Maunoury. But, as we now know, Kluck ordered the withdrawal of his II Corps to the Ourcq at 3.30 a.m. on September 6—2½ hours before the beginning of the Allied offensive. The withdrawal was well covered, and was not observed for twenty-four hours. The change of direction of the British advance toward the north could not be effected with the instancy that paper strategists have imagined; and the necessity of keeping touch with d’Espérey continued. The question whether the British advance was timid and halting must be judged in the light of the facts not as we now know them, but as they revealed themselves from day to day; and in the light not of Gallieni’s desires or needs only, but of the whole battle, and particularly of the instructions given to the British Army by General Joffre, who alone was responsible for the whole battle. That Maunoury would be seriously engaged with Kluck’s rearguard on the afternoon of the 5th was not anticipated by the French; it could not, then, be anticipated by the British. Since criticisms are raised as to one side of a converging movement, it must be pointed out that, if the French attack on the Ourcq had been delayed for twelve hours, and had not anticipated the general offensive, all would have been well. Kluck would have been unable to evade one assailant in order to throw all his force upon the other; and the tasks of Maunoury and the British would have been more advantageously divided. We are here, apparently, in face of one of those failures of information and agreement which are liable to occur, even under the best leadership, between armies of different nationality when plans are suddenly changed. It may now be recognised that the battle of the Marne would have yielded a completer, cheaper, and speedier victory if the rectangular movement of the French 6th and British Armies had been more exactly designed and timed to a strict simultaneity. There was a lack of assimilation. Perhaps the British were slow in getting under weigh; it is much more certain that Gallieni was precipitate.

The front of the British 3rd (incomplete), 2nd, and 1st Corps at the opening of the offensive lay, then, from Villiers-sur-Morin, across the edge of the Forest of Crécy, by Mortcerf, Lumigny, Rozoy, and Gastins, to near the Forest of Jouy, where Conneau’s Cavalry Corps connected with the infantry of the 5th Army. The battle here opened with an enemy attack. To mask its withdrawal to the Ourcq, a part of the German II Corps had delivered, early on the morning of September 6, a blow at the British right, and fighting was sharp till noon over the farmlands of the Brie plateau between Hautefeuille and Vaudoy—that is, 8 miles south-west of Coulommiers. “At this time,” says Field-Marshal French, “I did not know that a retreat had really set in, or how the various German corps and divisions were placed.” Columns of the IV Active Corps were still farther south, to the east of Vaudoy, on the Provins road, with large forces of cavalry and the III Corps on their left. It was a delicate part of the front, the space between the British and 5th French Armies. During the afternoon, while the khaki line slowly progressed over the stubble fields and broken forest around the villages of Lumigny, Pezarches, and Touquin, unmistakable evidence began to come in that the German foreguard had become a rearguard, and that the body of the II Corps had been in retreat all day. The charred walls of the hamlets of Courchamps and Courtacon, destroyed with deliberate ferocity, marked the most southerly points of the invasion in the western field.[60] To the Allied soldiers who knew not Maunoury, it must have seemed that their offensive was commencing magically well. About 10 a.m., the British left and centre—the 4th Division and the 2nd Corps—had been surprised to find the pressure on their front suddenly relieved. On their right, the 1st Corps soon saw its way free, and strode northward. At 6.30 p.m., the IV Active Corps received orders to follow the II Corps back to the Ourcq. Thus, by evening on September 6, Sir John French was able to reach the Grand Morin, from Crécy-en-Brie eastward, with scouts beyond the stream at Maisoncelles. Coulommiers, where Kluck had had his headquarters, was occupied during the night.

The Allied plan was now fully revealed. Instead of presenting on the Grand Morin an ironclad face, safe in flank and rear, the I German Army had been suddenly thrown on to a rectangular defensive on a front of 50 miles between Betz and Courtacon, against attacks converging from the west, south-west, and south. That evening, at Joffre’s request, the British line was directed more to the north, thus emphasising the effect of Maunoury’s move. From this moment, the withdrawal of the whole of Kluck’s forces over the Marne must have been envisaged. On the following day, September 7, in fact, the III and IX Corps (west of Montmirail), were preparing to follow the IV Active Corps across the Marne; but the Allies were then aware of what was happening. Marwitz’s Cavalry Corps covered the movement along the Grand Morin, with one division to the west, one to the east, and one 4 miles north of Coulommiers, while Richthofen’s Divisions operated farther east, all available artillery supporting them. The task was fulfilled with much resource and energy; but the position was not one that could be long maintained, for the British 3rd Corps was at Maisoncelles, 4 miles beyond the Grand Morin, and the French 8th Division threatened the German flank at double this distance northward by occupying St. Fiacre and Villemareuil. At noon, Marwitz gave way, falling back to the Petit Morin, from La Ferté-sous-Jouarre south-eastward. By evening, the British 3rd and 2nd Corps were beyond the Grand Morin at La Haute Maison and Aulnoy; the 1st was held back somewhat from Chailly to near La Ferté-Gaucher, in touch with the French 5th Army. General de Lisle’s Cavalry Brigade, with the 9th Lancers and the 18th Hussars, showed especial vigour. The men were full of cheer, and ready for anything; but Sir John French was a careful commander. The measure of the enemy’s retreat could not be immediately taken through the curtain of cavalry and artillery—aviation was in its infancy in those days. All the strength available was in line; and it was so thin a line as to tempt surprise. The Field-Marshal considered the alternative of sending direct help round to Maunoury, but concluded that the best aid would be to drive rapidly to and across the Marne.[61]

III. A Race of Reinforcements

On the Ourcq, each adversary was bringing up reserves, and was trying to turn the other by the north, with a slight advantage in time on the French, but a superiority of speed on the German, side. We left the centre of the 6th Army, on September 6, practically stationary about Marcilly and Barcy; while, moving from Brégy and Bouillancy, the 7th Corps gained Puisieux and Acy during the afternoon, and the 8th Division, thrown across the Marne, drove some enemy contingents into the woods of the river loop east of Meaux. Maunoury decided to attack frontally the three plateaux of Vareddes, Trocy-Vincy, and Etavigny, throwing picked columns into the valleys between, that of the Therouanne at Etrepilly and the Gergoyne ravine at Acy-en-Multien, in the hope of turning the hill positions. His field batteries were now in force at Bouillancy, Fosse-Martin, La Ramée, Marcilly, and Penchard; but he had no heavy artillery. Worse, from September 5, when his only aviator was brought down at Vareddes, to September 9, when Captain Pellegrin found a machine and discovered the nest of German mortars in the gullies by Trocy, he had no air scouts, so that, almost throughout the battle, the German gunners dominated the field.

On September 7, Schwerin’s IV Reserve Corps, strengthened during the day by a part of the IV Active Corps, rallied against Lamaze’s harassed men, who, still untutored to spade work, suffered heavily, but did not give way. Ditte’s Moroccan Brigade commenced at dawn a new move toward Vareddes, was beaten off, spent the afternoon in a fearful hand to hand struggle on Hill 107, won it, but was finally driven back to Chambry. The Algerian troops of General Drude, the 45th Division, had come in on the right-centre; and they were able, during the morning, to make a long stride forward east of Marcilly. Beyond Barcy, however, they were immediately stopped; repeated charges were broken, many officers and men being left on the ground. During the night, under a brilliant moon, the north wing of the division cut its way into the village of Etrepilly, but could not carry the cemetery, 300 yards beyond, and had to fall back.

The 7th Corps was no more fortunate. After taking Etavigny and the hillsides above Acy with a rush, it was suddenly overwhelmed by a massive counter-attack of the newly arrived II Corps, and had to abandon both villages, re-forming before Bouillancy and Puisieux. Many units had lost nearly all their officers. A panic was threatened. At a moment when it seemed that the left of the army could not be saved, Colonel Nivelle, with five field batteries of the 5th artillery regiment, gave a first exhibition of the qualities which, two years later, were to secure the defence of Verdun, and to bring him to the chief command. Carrying forward through the wavering ranks of the infantry a group of his field-guns, he set them firing at their utmost speed upon the close-packed columns of the enemy. The “75” is a murderous instrument in such circumstances; and those greycoats who remained afoot broke in disorder. It was an hour’s relief; but manifestly this wild situation could not long continue. The enfeebled lines approached the extreme limit of endurance. And still the tide of slaughter swayed to and fro. Nogeon, Poligny, and Champfleury Farms—the first north, the others south, of Puisieux, large stone buildings topping the plateaux—were the scenes of most bloody and obstinate encounters. Nogeon, the largest of them, was stormed and lost three times at intervals during the day. Under sustained fire from Trocy, its massive walls were broken; the corn barns took fire and blazed across the expanse of the battlefield.

In the evening, Von Schwerin drew back his lines a little from the edge of the plateau, and the ruined farms and hamlets gave the French a precarious shelter. At the same time, a reciprocal attempt at envelopment by the north began to design itself. The 61st Reserve Division had just been brought up from Pointose; and Maunoury decided to throw it, with the 1st Cavalry Corps, out to his extreme left, the former at Villers St. Genest, the latter beyond Betz. Almost simultaneously, new German detachments reached the Ourcq, and were set to prolong to the north the front of the II and IV Corps, while a Landwehr Brigade acting as line of communication troops was summoned urgently from Senlis. There was now no question of the 6th Army fulfilling its original task; the utmost hope was that it might hold till the British came up, across the enemy’s rear. Maunoury had to cope with an equal mass in better positions—three strong corps, the IV, the II, and the IV Reserve, with the IV Cavalry Division—against Lamaze’s two Reserve Divisions, Drude’s Division, the 7th Corps, the 61st R.D., and the Cavalry Corps. Only the III and IX Corps and Marwitz’s Cavalry remained beyond the Marne; and, though the British pressure was increasing, the enemy’s withdrawal had not been seriously disturbed. Kluck’s boldness, skill, and decision were undeniable. It was evident that he had recovered from the first shock, and meant, if possible, to overwhelm its authors. Exhausted, and tormented by thirst, it was with sinking hearts that the Army of Paris looked up to the smoking hills.

Viewed from French General Headquarters, however, the prospect was more favourable. The retreat of the I German Army was gravely compromising the position of its neighbour, the II; and its effects were beginning to show farther to the east. For three days, these two forces were moving in opposite directions—Kluck to the north-west, Bülow to the south-east. The task of exploiting the dislocation thus produced fell to the British and d’Espérey’s Armies. The rôle of the 6th Army was thus radically changed by the development of events; but it remained as important as ever in the whole design. If Gallieni and Maunoury could have reviewed the field from the Ourcq to Verdun, they would have been well satisfied.

IV. The Paris Taxi-Cabs

I spent September 7 among the rear columns of the 6th Army. In the morning, the little town of Gagny, half-way between Paris and Claye (Maunoury’s headquarters), and the last point one could reach by rail from the city, was full of men of the 103rd and 104th regiments, belonging to the 4th Corps (General Boëlle), just arrived from Sarrail’s front. They sat in and before the cafés, lay on the grass of the villa gardens, lounged in the school playground, where their rifles were stacked and their knapsacks piled. Some had managed to get their wives and children to them, and were telling great tales of the first month of war. I went out into the deserted countryside toward the front, passing marching columns, motor-wagons, dispatch-riders, here a flock of sheep in charge of uniformed shepherds, there a woodland bivouac, and in the evening returned to Gagny. More regiments had arrived; the town was boiling from end to end. In the main street, a battalion was already marching out to extend Vautier’s left, a thin file of country folk watching them, waving handkerchiefs, the girls running beside the ranks to give some handsome lad a flower. Up the side roads, other columns waited their turn, standing at ease, or sitting on the edge of the pavement; a few men lay asleep, curled up against the houses. But the most curious thing was a long queue of Parisian taxi-cabs, a thousand or more of them, stretching through by-roads out of sight. The watchful and energetic Gallieni had discovered, at the cost of us boulevardiers, a new means of rushing reinforcements to the point where they were direly needed.

It was the idea of his chief of staff, General Clergerie. Joffre had at this moment only one remaining unit of the Regulars to give to Maunoury—a half of the 4th Corps, which had been brought round by rail from the Verdun front, and of which we have seen the 8th Division in action south of Meaux. The 7th Division had detrained in Paris during the afternoon of September 7. It was to be sent to Maunoury’s extreme left, near Betz, 40 miles away. Everything might now depend upon speed. It was found that only about a half of the infantry could be carried quickly by train. Clergerie[62] thought the remaining 6000 men might be got out by means of taxi-cabs. The Military Government of Paris already had 100 of the “red boxes” at its disposal; 500 more were requisitioned within an hour, and at 6 p.m. they were lined up, to our astonishment, beside the Gagny railhead. Each cab was to carry five men, and to do the journey twice, by separate outward and return routes. Measures were taken in case of accident, but none occurred. This first considerable experiment in motor transport of men was a complete success; and at dawn the 7th Division was in its place on the battlefield.

On September 8, the British Expeditionary Force, steadily gathering momentum, reached, and in part crossed, the Petit Morin, taking their first considerable number of prisoners, to the general exhilaration. On the left, the 3rd Corps advanced rapidly to the junction of that river with the Marne; but the enemy had broken the bridges at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, and held stubbornly to their barricades on the north bank through this night and the following day. Farther up the deep and thickly-wooded valley, the 2nd Corps had some trouble between Jouarre and Orly; while, on the right, the 1st Corps, after routing the German rearguards at La Trétoire and Sablonnières, made the passage with the aid of a turning movement by some cavalry and two Guards battalions of the 1st Division.

The orders of this day for the 6th Army were to attack on the two wings—Drude’s Algerian Division (relieving the exhausted 56th Reserve and the Moroccan Brigade), with the 55th Reserve, on the right, towards Etrepilly and Vareddes; the 61st Reserve Division, General Boëlle’s 7th Division, and Sordêt’s cavalry, on the left—while the 7th Corps stood firm at the centre, and, south of the Marne, the 8th Division pressed on from Villemareuil toward Trilport, in touch with the British. For neither side was the violence of the struggle rewarded with any decisive success. On the French right, the Germans had more seriously entrenched themselves, and had much strengthened their artillery. Lombard’s Division of the 7th Corps was heavily engaged all day at Acy; at night the enemy still held the hamlet, while the chasseurs faced them in the small wood overlooking it. On the left, the 7th Division of the 4th Corps had no sooner come into action than it had to meet a formidable assault by the IV Active Corps. This was repulsed; but the Cavalry Corps seems to have been unable to take an effective share in the battle. During the afternoon, German troops occupied Thury-en-Valois and Betz. Reinforcements were continually reaching them. At nightfall, although Boëlle’s divisions were resisting heroically, and even progressing, the outlook on the French extreme left, bent back between Bouillancy and Nantheuil-le-Haudouin, had become alarming. Maunoury, however, obtained from General Gallieni the last substantial unit left in the entrenched camp of Paris, the 62nd Division of Reserve, and gave it instructions to organise, between Plessy-Belleville and Monthyon, a position to which the 6th Army could fall back in case of necessity. In course of the night, Gallieni sent out from Paris by motor-cars a detachment of Zouaves to make a raid toward Creil and Senlis. It was a mere excursion; but the alarm caused is very comprehensible when the extreme attenuation of the supply lines of the German I Army is remembered. Marching 25 miles a day, and sometimes more, it had far overrun the normal methods of provisioning. During the advance, meat and wine had been found in plenty, vegetables and fruit to some extent, bread seldom; here, in the Valois, the army could not feed itself on the country, and convoys arrived slowly from the north. Artillery ammunition was rapidly running out. Hunger quickly deepens doubt to fear.

But Maunoury’s men were at the end of their strength. On the morning of September 9, a determined attack by the IV Active Corps, supported by the right of the II, was delivered from Betz and Anthilly. The 8th Division had been summoned back from the Marne, to be thrown to the French left. Apparently it could not be brought effectively into this action; and the 61st and 7th Divisions and the 7th Corps failing to stand, Nanteuil and Villers St. Genest were lost, the front being re-formed before Silly-le-Long. “A troop which can no longer advance must at any cost hold the ground won, and be slain rather than give way.” Such a summons can only be repeated by a much-trusted chief. Maunoury repeated it in other words. Thousands of men, grimy, ragged, with empty bellies and tongues parched by the torrid heat, had already gone down, willingly accepting the dire sentence. Few of them could hear or suppose that the enemy was in yet extremer plight. So it was. Early in the morning, Vareddes and Etrepilly had been found abandoned; greater news had been coming in for hours to Headquarters—some of it from the enemy himself by way of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where the French “wireless” operators were picking up the conversations of the German commanders. Marwitz was particularly frank and insistent; his men were asleep in their saddles, his horses broken with overwork. He was apparently too much pressed to wait for his message to be properly coded. By such and other means, it was known that Kluck and Bülow were at loggerheads, that, even on the order of Berlin, the former would not submit himself to his colleague, and that, in consequence, Bülow in turn had begun to retreat before Franchet d’Espérey.

CHAPTER VII
THE “EFFECT OF SUCTION”

I. French and d’Espérey strike North

The unescapable dilemma of the Joffrean strategy had developed into a second and peremptory phase. In deciding to withdraw from the Brie plateau and the Marne, rather than risk his rear and communications for the chance of a victory on the Seine, Kluck, or his superiors, had, doubtless, chosen the lesser evil. The marching wing of the invasion was crippled before the offensive of the Allies had begun; but Gallieni’s precipitancy had brought a premature arrest upon the 6th Army. Beside this double check, we have now to witness a race between two offensive movements—Bülow and Hausen pouring south with the impetuosity of desperation, while, along their right, the British Force and the French 5th Army struck north between the two western masses of the enemy with the fresh energy of an immense hope. Which will sooner effect a rupture?

Logically, there should be no doubt of the answer. Kluck was mainly occupied with Maunoury; Bülow, with Foch. Between them, there was no new army to engage the eight corps of Sir John French and Franchet d’Espérey. The cavalry and artillery force of Marwitz and Richthofen, strong as it was, could do no more than postpone the inevitable—always provided that Maunoury and Foch could hold out. Every day, the pull of Kluck to the north-west and of Bülow to the south-east must become more embarrassing. French writers have applied an expressive phrase to the influence of this pull—“effet de ventouse,” effect of suction—though hardly appreciating its double direction. The maintenance of a continuous battle-line is axiomatic in modern military science. It follows from the size of the masses in action, the difficulty, even with steam and petrol transport, of moving them rapidly, and their dependence upon long lines of supply. The soldier bred upon Napoleonic annals may long for the opportunity of free manœuvre; all the evolution of warfare is against his dream. An army neither feeds nor directs itself; it is supplied and directed as part of a larger machine executing a predetermined plan. Superiority of force is increased by concentration, and achieves victory by envelopment of the enemy as a whole, or his disintegration by the piercing of gaps, a preliminary to retail envelopment or dispersal. A course which loses the initial superiority and requires a considerable change of plan is already a grave prejudice; when to this is added a necessary expedient leading to an extensive disturbance of the line, prudence dictates that the offensive should be suspended until the whole mass of attack has been reorganised in view of the new circumstances. The German Command dare not risk such a pause. It persisted; and the penalty lengthened with every hour of its persistence. The more Kluck stretched his right in order to cover his communications by Compiègne and the Oise valley, the wider became the void between his left and the II Army, constantly moving in the opposite direction. When French and d’Espérey found this void, a like difficulty was presented to Bülow—to be enveloped on the right, or to close up thither, leaving a breach on his other flank, which the Saxon Army would be unable to fill. Thus, Maunoury’s enterprise on the Ourcq, though falling short of full success, produced a series of voids, and, at length, a dislocation of the whole German line, which was only saved from utter disaster by a general retreat.

Opening of the ALLIED OFFENSIVE
British Front & D’Espérey’s Left
Sept. 6, 6 a.m.

General Franchet d’Espérey, who had been brigadier in 1908, divisional commander in 1912, a gallant and energetic officer now fifty-eight years of age, successful with the 1st Corps at Dinant and St. Gerard in Belgium, and in the important battle of Guise, had, on September 3, succeeded Lanrezac at the head of the largest of the French armies, the 5th. Its task—in touch with Foch on the right, and with the British, through Conneau’s cavalry corps, on the left—was to press north toward Montmirail, against Kluck’s left (III and IX Corps, and Richthofen’s cavalry divisions) and the right wing of Bülow (VII Corps and X Reserve Corps). In later stages of the war, the junction of two armies often showed itself to be a point of weakness to be aimed at. With four active corps and three divisions of reserves in hand, d’Espérey had, even before the German withdrawal began, a considerable advantage—indicating Joffre’s intention that it should be the second great arm of his offensive, that which should make the chief frontal attack. On the other hand, the enemy held strong positions along the Grand Morin, and, behind this, along the Vauchamps–Montmirail ridge of the Petit Morin. During their retreat the Allies had used the opportunity offered by the valleys of the Marne and its tributaries for delaying actions; these streams were now so many obstacles across their path. The first French movement, on September 6, was powerfully resisted. On the left, the cavalry occupied Courtacon.[63] At the centre, the 18th and 3rd Corps co-operating (prophetic combination—Maud’huy, Mangin, and Petain!), the villages of Montceaux-les-Provins and Courgivaux, on the highroad from Paris to Nancy, which was, as it were, the base of the whole battlefield, were taken by assault. On the right, the 1st Corps was stopped throughout the forenoon before Chatillon-sur-Morin by the X Reserve Corps. D’Espérey detached a division, with artillery, to make a wide detour and to fall, through the Wood of La Noue, upon the German defences east of Esternay. Thus threatened, the enemy gave way; and the market-town of Esternay was occupied early on the following morning. The 10th Corps continued the line toward the north-east, after suffering rather heavy losses beyond Sezanne.

On the morning of September 7, the air services of the 5th Army reported the commencement of Kluck’s retreat; and soon afterwards a corresponding movement of Bülow’s right was discovered to be going on behind a screen of cavalry and artillery, supported by some infantry elements. D’Espérey had no sooner ordered the piercing of this screen than news was brought in of the critical position of the neighbouring wing of Foch’s Army, the 42nd Division and the 9th Corps, through which Bülow’s X and Guard Corps were trying to break, from the St. Gond Marshes toward Sezanne. He at once diverted his 20th Division to threaten the western flank of this attack (which will be followed in the next section) about Villeneuve-lès-Charleville. Meanwhile, rapid progress was being made on the centre and left of the 5th Army. Between Esternay and Montmirail extend the close-set parklands called the Forest of Gault, with smaller woods outlying, a difficult country in which many groups of hungry German stragglers were picked up during the following days. Through this district, the 1st Corps and the left of the 10th, with General Valabrègue’s three divisions of reserves behind, beat their way; while, farther west, in the more open but broken fields between the Grand and the Petit Morin, the 18th and the 3rd Corps made six good miles, to the line Ferté Gaucher–Trefols. More than a thousand prisoners were taken during the day, with a few machine-guns and some abandoned stores.

We have seen (pp. 124–5, 131) the British Expeditionary Force at the beginning of a like novel and exhilarating experience. Its five divisions, having seized Coulommiers on the night of September 6, had pressed on to the Petit Morin, and, from its junction with the Marne eastward to La Trétoire, where obstinate opposition was offered, had secured the crossings. D’Espérey’s left wing thus found its task lightened; and the 18th and 3rd Corps were ordered to sweep aside the remaining German rearguards, and to strike across the Petit Morin on either side of Montmirail. September 8 was thus a day rather of marching than fighting, except at Montmirail, on whose horse-shoe ridge the enemy held out for some hours.[64] In the evening, General Hache entered the picturesque town, and set up his quarters in the old château where Bülow’s Staff had been housed on the previous day. On the left, Maud’huy pushed the 18th Corps by Montolivet over the Petit Morin, and after a sharp action took the village of Marchais-en-Brie. On the right, the 1st Corps was checked at Courbetaux and Bergères, the German VII Corps having come into line; so that the 10th Corps, between Soigny and Corfelix, had to turn north-westward to its assistance. This was scarcely more than an eddy in the general stream of fortune. The moral effect of a happy manœuvre goes for much in the result. The British and d’Espérey’s men forgot all their sufferings and weariness in the spectacle of the enemy yielding. British aviators reported Kluck’s columns as in general retreat, certain roads being much encumbered. Bülow had necessarily withdrawn his right to maintain contact; his centre and left must follow if the pressure were continued.

The hour of decision approached. During the morning of Wednesday, September 9, Sir John French’s 2nd and 1st Corps crossed the Marne at Luzancy, Sââcy, Nanteuil, Charly, and Nogent-l’Artaud. This part of the valley was scarcely defended; and a brigade of the 3rd Division had progressed 4 miles beyond it by 9 a.m. Anxious news for the German Staff. Unfortunately, our right was arrested until afternoon by a threat of attack from Château-Thierry; and, lower down the river about La Ferté, the 3rd Corps, still represented only by the 4th Division and the 19th Brigade, was stopped until evening before the broken bridges and rifle-parapets on the northern bank. Some guns then carried over near Changis bombarded the German artillery positions beyond the Ourcq, a notice to quit that had prompt effect. Château-Thierry was left to the French 18th Corps, which occupied the town that night. Meanwhile, Smith-Dorrien and Haig entered the hilly country about Bezu, Coupru, and Domptin, on the road from Château-Thierry to Lizy-sur-Ourcq. Marwitz vainly essayed to obstruct the northward movement. Beaten in an action near Montreuil-aux-Lions, he informed Kluck that he could do no more, and hurried back to the line of the little river Clignon, about Bussiares and Belleau, which were reached by 4 p.m. A little later, British Aviators brought in word that the enemy had evacuated the whole angle between the east bank of the Ourcq and the Marne, and that, on the other hand, the withdrawal of the German I Army was creating a void beyond Château-Thierry: the cavalry of Richthofen, sent thither by Bülow, was in the same predicament as that of Marwitz farther west. At daybreak on September 10, Pulteney’s Corps left the Marne behind. Meeting no serious resistance, the British crossed the Clignon valley, and by evening occupied La Ferté-Milon, Neuilly-St. Front, and Rocourt.

These were marching days for the 5th Army. Conneau’s cavalry, reinforced by an infantry brigade and extra batteries, passed the Marne at Azy on the 9th, and, harrying Bülow’s right flank, reached Oulchy-le-Château next day. The 18th Corps, with the reserve divisions in support, pushed on from Château-Thierry toward Fère-en-Tardenois; and the 3rd Corps, which had occupied Montigny, half-way between Montmirail and the Marne, on the 9th, forced the passage, under heavy fire from the hills at Jaulgonne, on the 10th. The 1st Corps had a heavier task. Having progressed as far as the Vauchamps plateau, it was wheeled back to the south-east to help the 10th Corps, which d’Espérey had transferred to Foch’s Army of the centre, now in the gravest peril.

II. Battle of the Marshes of St. Gond

While the 6th Army, within sight of the Ourcq, was suffering its great agony, while the “effect of suction” was showing itself in the Anglo-French pursuit of Kluck, very different were the first results at the centre of the long crescent of the Allied front. Kluck was saved by his quick resolution, together with Marwitz’s able work in covering the rear. Bülow was in no such imminent danger. His communications with the north were at first perfectly safe. The situation of his right wing, which must either fall back or lose contact with the I Army, was awkward; but, doubtless, Kluck’s success would soon re-establish it. The circumstances indicated for the remainder of the II Army and the neighbouring Saxon Corps an instant attempt to break through the French centre, or at least to cripple it, and, with it, all Joffre’s offensive plan. The very strategic influence which helped the British and d’Espérey, therefore, at first threw a terrible burden upon Foch and the “detachment” which on September 5 was renamed the “9th Army”; yet it was by this same influence that, in the end, though by the narrowest of margins, he also won through.

The MARNE RE-CROSSED.
Morning of Sept. 9.

The theatre of this struggle is the south-western corner of the flat, niggardly expanse of La Champagne Pouilleuse, lying between the depression called the Marshes of St. Gond and the Sezanne–Sommesous railway and highroad. It is very clearly bounded on the west by the sharp edge of the Brie plateau; on the east it is bordered by the Troyes–Châlons road and railway. Sezanne on the west, and Fère Champènoise at the centre, are considerable country towns; the right is marked by the permanent camp of Mailly. To the north of Sezanne, the hill of Mondemont, immediately overlooking the marshes and the plain, and the ravine of St. Prix, on the Epernay road, where the Petit Morin issues from the marshes and breaks into the plateau, are key positions. The Marshes of St. Gond (so called after a seventh-century priory, of which some ruins remain) witnessed several of the most poignant episodes of Napoleon’s 1814 campaign “from the Rhine to Fontainebleau.” They were then much more extensive. Between the villages of Fromentières and Champaubert, there survives the name, though little else, of the “Bois du Desert,” where 3000 Russian grenadiers are said to have been slain or captured by Marmont’s cuirassiers, while hundreds of others were drowned. A month later, Blücher was back from Laon attacking on the same ground; and Marmont and Mortier were in full retreat along the road to Fère Champènoise. Pachod’s national guards, the “Marie Louises,” turned north to the marches of St. Gond as to a refuge. The Russians and Prussians surrounded them; and only a few of the French lads escaped by the St. Prix road. To-day the marshes are largely reclaimed and canalised; but this clay bed, extending a dozen miles east and west, and averaging more than a mile in breadth, fills easily under such a rainstorm as fell upon the region on the evening of September 9, 1914, and at all times it limits traffic to the three or four good roads crossing it. The chief of these, from Epernay to Sezanne and Fère Champènoise respectively, pass the ends of the marshes at St. Prix and Morains; the former is commanded by Mondemont; the latter by Mont Août, near Broussy.

Was this “last barrier providentially set across the route of the invasion”[65] forgotten? Joffre’s earlier plan did, indeed, involve the abandonment of all the plain extending to the Aube; the decision to stand on the line of the marshes was a consequence of Gallieni’s initiative. Foch’s Army had been carried beyond them in its retreat, but, fortunately, not far beyond. On the morning of September 5, advance columns of Bülow’s left had entered Baye; patrols had reached the Petit Morin bridge at St. Prix, and the north-centre of the marshes at Vert-la-Gravelle. A little more dash, and the Germans would have possessed themselves of all the commanding points. It was about 10 a.m. that Foch received the Generalissimo’s order closing the retreat: “The 9th Army will cover the right of the 5th Army, holding the southern passages of the Marshes of St. Gond, and placing a part of its forces on the plateau north of Sezanne.” Foch at once directed the appropriate movements; and, by the evening of September 5, the following positions were reached:

French Left.—Driven, back from St. Prix by forces belonging to Bülow’s X Active and Reserve Corps, the 42nd Division (General Grossetti) held the neighbouring hills from Villeneuve-lès-Charleville and Soisy to Mondemont.

Centre.—During the afternoon, Dubois advanced the 9th Corps (Moroccan Division and 17th Division) from Fère Champènoise to Broussy and Bannes, and thence pushed two battalions over the marshes to Toulon-la-Montagne, Vert-la-Gravelle, and Aulnizeux in face of the Prussian Guard Corps, the main body of which was at Vertus. The Blondlat Brigade of the Moroccan Division attacked Congy, but failed, and fell back on Mondemont. The 52nd Reserve Division was in support about Connantre.

French Right.—The 11th Corps (General Eydoux) rested on the east end of the marshes at Morains-le-Petit, and from here stretched backward along the course of the Champagne Somme to Sommesous, with the 60th Reserve Division behind it. They had before them the Saxon XII Active Corps and one of its reserve divisions. At Sommesous, General de l’Espée’s Cavalry Division covered a gap of about 12 miles between Foch’s right and de Langle de Cary’s left at Humbauville.

Thus, on the eve of the battle, the 9th Army, inferior to the enemy in strength, especially in artillery, presented to it an irregular convex front. Bülow was at Esternay on the west; Hausen was approaching the gap on its right flank; the centre was protruded uneasily to and beyond the St. Gond Marshes. The expectation of General Headquarters had, apparently, been that the German onset would fall principally on the right of the 5th Army. Foch was, therefore, instructed to give aid in that direction by pushing his left to the north-north-west, while the rest of his line stood firm until the pressure was relieved. In the event, these rôles were reversed: it was d’Espérey who had to help Foch. The original dispositions, however, had a certain effect upon the course of the battle. They gave the 9th Army a pivot on the Sezanne plateau; and the obstinacy with which this advantage was retained seems to have diverted the German commanders, till it was too late, from concentrating their force on the other wing, the line of attack from which the French had most to fear.

FOCH’S FRONT
Sept. 6, morning.
Sept. 7, night.

Foch was the offensive incarnate; but, on the morning of September 6th, he could do no more than meet, and that with indifferent success, Bülow’s attack upon his left-centre. He was weakest where the enemy was most strong: a large part of the French guns could not reach the field for the beginning of the combat; the 9th Corps, in particular, felt the lack of three groups of artillery it had left in Lorraine. Failing this support, the two battalions holding Toulon-la-Montagne were quickly shelled out of their positions. In vain Dubois, commanding the 9th Corps, ordered the Moroccan Tirailleurs to march on Baye, and the 17th Division to retake the two lost points. A crack regiment, the 77th, crossed the marshes and entered Coizard village, Major de Beaufort, cane in hand, on a big bay horse, at its head, crying to his men, shaken by rifle fire from the houses: “Forward, boys! Courage! It is for France. Jeanne d’Arc is with us.” The 2nd and 3rd battalions went on, and tried to climb Mount Toulon. The fighting continued all day, ending in a painful retreat to Mont Août through two miles of swampy ground, in which the men plunged up to the waist rather than risk the shell-ploughed causeway. The Guard followed as far as Bannes, and the X Corps occupied Le Mesnil Broussy and Broussy-le-Petit, where the French batteries arrested them. Small French detachments clung to Morains and Aulnay through the day and night; otherwise, the north of the marshes was lost. Against the left, Bülow was less successful. The 42nd Division and the Moroccan Division withstood repeated assaults of the X Corps at Soisy-aux-Bois and on the edge of the St. Gond Wood. The struggle, however, was most severe: Villeneuve, occupied on the evening of September 5, was lost at 8 a.m. on the 6th, recaptured an hour later, lost again at noon, and recovered at night. On the right, the 11th Corps had to evacuate Ecury and Normée under heavy fire; Lenharrée and Sommesous were partially in flames, but still resisted.

Unawed, in his quarters at Pleurs, Foch wrote the following order for the morrow:—“The General Commanding counts on all the troops of the 9th Army exerting the greatest activity and the utmost energy to extend and maintain beyond dispute the results obtained over a hard-pressed and venturesome enemy.” Many of the generals, lieutenants, and men may have thought these last words too highly coloured. Foch himself knew more of the real situation. He knew, as did Bülow, how gravely the latter was prejudiced by Kluck’s predicament. Already, the prospect had arisen of the I German Army being gripped by the closing vice of Maunoury and the British. Already, d’Espérey’s great force was moving north along Bülow’s flank toward Montmirail. Joffre’s masterstroke was revealed. Was the victory that Berlin and the armies counted as certain to slip away at the eleventh hour? For the first time in a triumphant generation, a German Army was in danger of defeat; nay, all the armies were in danger. Astounding change of fortune! The greycoat soldiery, dulling their weariness in the loot of cottages and farms, the subaltern officers, making free with the wine cellars of old manor houses, did not know it; but such was the fact. Their commanders were not the men easily to take alarm; yet, at this moment, alarm must have struck them.

III. Defence and Recapture of Mondemont

The grand manœuvre of envelopment had failed. The alternative plan remained: to smash the French centre and roll up the lines on either side. On the morning of September 7, this effort began with a fierce onslaught across the ravine of the Petit Morin against the Sezanne plateau from Mondemont to Villeneuve.

On Foch’s extreme left, nothing was gained. The 42nd Division was now receiving perceptible support from the 10th Corps of the 5th Army, which during the day, as we have seen, completed the clearance of the Forest of Gault, to the west of Villeneuve. Toward Mondemont, however, the X Active Corps made some progress, throwing the defenders back to the western borders of Soisy, again taking Villeneuve, and reaching through the St. Gond Wood nearly to the hamlet of Chapton. The bare crest called the Signal du Poirier gave the German gunners an excellent platform, with views over a large part of the French lines. One of their chief targets was the château of Mondemont, a two-story mansion, dating from the sixteenth century, with pepper-pot corner towers, enclosing a large square courtyard. General Humbert had set up here his Staff quarters; but by noon the bombardment had become so severe that he had to leave it to advanced posts of the Moroccan Division, first, however, insisting on taking a proper lunch in the salle-à-manger with the trembling family. These were sent to the rear, and Humbert moved to the neighbouring château of Broyes. In a later stage of the war, Humbert struck me rather as the thinker, a quiet, keen intelligence, and a fine gentleman. At this earlier time, one of the youngest generals in the French Army, he appears rather as the man of spirited action. Beaming with gay confidence, he abounded in the gestes that the French soldier so loves. Once several members of his escort were killed by a shell exploding in their midst; like Grossetti, afterwards to be known as “the Bull of the Yser,” danger only stimulated him. “The Germans are bottled up,” he said; “Mondemont is the cork. It must be held at any price.” At 5 p.m., a combined attack, by parts of the 42nd and Moroccan Divisions, with the 77th regiment of the 9th Corps, was made with the object of freeing the Mondemont position. Little ground was gained, and the losses were very heavy; it was a momentary relief, no more.

At length the German Command recognised that the French defence was weakest toward and beyond Fère Champènoise, and that a simultaneous attack by both their wings, with most strength on the east, might shatter it. First, however, the flank of the Guard Corps along the marshes must be cleared. This preliminary occupied the whole of September 7. On the west, Oyes was taken during the morning in the advance on Mondemont. On the east, the French companies outlying at Morains and Aulnay had to abandon these villages at 8 a.m., under threat of being taken in reverse along the railway. Morains is only four miles by highroad from Fère Champènoise; and here the picked infantry of the Guard were striking at the junction of the 9th and 11th Corps, with solid Saxon regiments closing in upon the latter to the south-east. Seeing their danger, Radiguet and Moussy concerted a movement by which, during the afternoon, Aulnizeux was taken and the German advance checked. In the evening, at the third attempt, the enemy recovered the village; and in the last hours of the night his general offensive along the Sezanne and Fère roads began. It will be convenient to follow first the western arm of the attack.

At 3 a.m. on September 8, after a sharp cannonade, the French machine-gunners on Mondemont Hill observed spectral forms approaching in open order—these were advanced parties belonging to the X Corps, with some elements of the Guard. They were easily repulsed; and, immediately afterwards, the much-thinned ranks of the 42nd and Moroccan Divisions, with the 77th regiment of the 9th Corps, were launched anew towards St. Prix. Although Bülow had received reinforcements, and had placed more batteries between Congy and Baye, the Moroccans occupied Oyes and its hill and the Signal du Poirier by 8 a.m., while the left of the 42nd carried Soisy at the point of the bayonet. Unfortunately, the debacle that was happening coincidentally on Foch’s right put any exploitation of this success out of the question. A fresh defensive front had to be created south of the marshes, facing east; the 77th regiment was recalled to St. Loup in the middle of the afternoon for this purpose. The 42nd Division seems to have been shaken by this removal of a sorely-needed support; and Bülow, promptly advised of it, ordered his columns forward once more.

On an islet in the west end of the marshes, between the villages of Villevenard and Oyes, stand a Renaissance gateway and other remnants of the ancient Priory of St. Gond, and in their midst the humble dwelling of “the last hermit of St. Gond,” as M. le Goffic calls him, the Abbé Millard, corresponding member of the French Antiquarian and Archæological Societies. A victim of dropsy, the Abbé was laid up when the approach of the Germans was announced. “So, then,” he calmly remarked, “I shall renew my acquaintance with Attila.” His housekeeper, a typically vigorous Frenchwoman, would have no such morbid curiosity. “You have no parishioners but the frogs, Monsieur le Curé; and they can take care of themselves against your Attila. Come along”—and, bundling some valuables into a wheelbarrow, and giving Father Millard a stick, she carried him off into safety. As they left, a body of Senegalese sharpshooters came up, and began to build across the highway an old-fashioned barricade of tree-trunks, carts, and blocks of stone. “Some barbed wire and a continuous trench, such as the Germans use, would have been better,” remarks M. le Goffic; “but we remained faithful to our old errors, and, nearly everywhere, our men fought in the open or behind sheaves and tree trunks.”

After hours of an ebb-and-flow of bayonet charges and hand to hand combats, the French lost in succession Broussy-le-Petit, Mesnil-Broussy, Reuves, and Oyes—all the morning’s gain had vanished by nightfall. With the Germans entrenched a mile away, and only a single Zouave battalion in reserve, Humbert insisted that Mondemont must be held; and his corps commander, Dubois, desperately seeking to cover the void on his right with the 77th Regiment, told the officers that retreat was not to be thought of. Heavy rain fell during the evening, obstructing the movements of all the armies. On both sides, that night, the chiefs knew that the issue was a matter of hours, of very few hours. We saw in the first section of this chapter that, on the evening of September 8, the left of the 5th French Army had passed, and its centre reached, the Petit Morin, while the 10th Corps immediately threatened Bülow’s flank at Bannay, only 2 miles west of Baye. The “effect of suction” was working wonderfully. An order found during the day on a wounded officer, directing that the regimental trains should be drawn up facing north, showed the preoccupations of the German Staff. If the Guard and the Saxons could complete the rout of Foch’s right-centre, they might yet win through; but there was no longer a moment to spare, for Bülow had no force capable of long withstanding d’Espérey’s north-eastward thrust.

Against Foch’s left, Bülow played his last stake at daybreak on September 9. A whole brigade, marching from Oyes under cover of mist, brushed aside the two battalions of sharpshooters, mounted Mondemont hill, and seized the château and village, which were rapidly provided with a garrison and machine-guns. The 42nd Division was in course of withdrawal at this time, its place being taken by the 51st Division of the neighbouring army. Humbert still would not take defeat: borrowing two battalions of chasseurs from Grossetti, he sent them to the assault of the promontory. They failed. At about 10.30 a.m., the 9th Corps lost Mont Août, the stronghold of Foch’s centre, and fell back upon the lower hills between Allemant and Linthes. If the whole left and centre of the 9th Army were not to be swept, after its right, into the plain, the last footing on the Sezanne plateau must be held at any price. But how? Many companies of the Moroccan Division had lost all their officers and most of their men. The breakdown of his right had driven Foch to an extreme expedient which we will presently follow more closely—the transfer thither of the 42nd Division; all Grossetti could do for Humbert after his early morning failure, therefore, was to lend him his artillery for a couple of hours. From Dubois and his own corps, Humbert was able again to borrow the 77th Regiment. After a massed fire of preparation on the woods and slopes around the château of Mondemont by nine batteries, the hungry, haggard survivors of the 77th, divided into two bodies under Colonels Lestoquoi and Eon, approached the hill from the west and east, while four companies gathered to the south of the château as a storming force under Major de Beaufort.

We have already seen this only too chivalric officer defying the prime conditions of modern warfare in the capture of Coizard; here is a yet more pathetic exhibition of the ancient style of heroism. It was 2.30 of a bright afternoon, the air oppressive with heat, smoke, and dust. The commandant called a priest-soldier from the ranks, and asked him to give supreme absolution to the men who wished to receive it. They knelt, and rose. The major, putting on his white gloves, then gave the order to charge. Bugles sounded; the men ran forward “in deep, close masses,” shouting and singing. Many fell before reaching the garden of the château. De Beaufort, standing for a moment under a tree to consider the next step, was shot dead. A few men got through a breach in the garden wall, only to meet a rain of bullets from loopholes in the house. A score of officers (including Captain de Secondat-Montesquieu, a descendant of the great French writer) were lost, with a third of the effectives. At 3.30, Colonel Eon withdrew the remainder of the storming party.

For a breathing space only. The château was, in fact, besieged. Three field-guns were brought within 400 yards of it; and at 6 p.m. three companies advanced upon the quadrangle of buildings, four others upon the village, at the foot of the hill. Forty minutes later, Colonel Lestoquoi led his last remaining company forward, crying: “Come on, boys; another tussle, and we are there.” This time, château, park, farm, and churchyard, and finally the village, were carried. “I hold the village and the château of Mondemont,” Lestoquoi reported to General Humbert; “I am installing myself for the night.”