The new face of war: a German Uhlan, or lancer, could seem a figure of ancient legend except for the mask that protects him from poison gas.
ELSEWEHRE THE SEARCH
1915 opened repetitiously and prophetically, which is to say that it opened with lethal violence on the grand scale. On New Year's Day, in the English Channel, a German submarine fired a torpedo into the hull of the British battleship Formidable and sent 546 seamen to their deaths. On the continent the French were on the offensive, or trying to be, all along their long front: in Flanders, the Argonne, Alsace and, most bloodily of all, the Champagne region west of Verdun. In the East, under appalling winter conditions that were causing hundreds of men nightly to freeze to death in their sleep, the Russians were slowly forcing the armies of Austria-Hungary back into the Carpathian passes that separated the plains of Galicia from the Hapsburg homeland. Beyond Europe, on the ice-packed heights of the Caucasus Mountains, the Russians and the weather together were destroying a badly led and ill-equipped army of Turks. There was bloodshed in Africa, in Asia, in the South Pacific, and in the South Atlantic-in improbable places all around the world.
All the belligerents were locked in a situation for which they were woefully unprepared. In the last 5 months of 1914 more than 800,000 Germans had become casualties, and more than a 100,000 of them were dead. French and Austro-Hungarian casualties, were in the million-man range, Russia's total approached twice that, hundred of thousands of Frenchman were listed as dead or missing, and more than half of the Tommies who had come over in August were dead or injured. In very country the shock was numbing. A monument in a single Parisian church, Notre -Dame des Victoires, displays the names of 80 parishioners killed in battle between August and December.
The worst of it was that this carnage had not come close to producing a decision. In every country shattered armies had to be rebuilt and expanded and sent out to do it all again. Some of the leaders-none more than Joffre of France and Britain's Sir John French-continued to believe that victory lay just ahead and could be achieved with one or two more effusions of sacrificial blood. Others-Falkenhayn in Germany, Kitchener in Britain-were able to see that a long and terrible struggle lay ahead. For all of them, optimists and pessimists alike, one question had become paramount:
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
All the camps but two, France and Austria-Hungary, were deeply divided over how to answer.
In Paris the domination fact was German occupation of a huge expanse of the French homeland: regions that included 14% of the nation's industrial workforce, 2/3 of its steel production, 90% of its iron mines, and 40% of its sugar refineries, along with substantial parts of its coal, wool, and chemical output. This made it easy for the French to agree on one great goal: to drive the Germans out, blast them out, burn them out, break their defensive line by any means possible and throw them back across the Rhine. More than in any of the other warring nations, only one man's opinion mattered. That man was "Papa" Joffre. Exclusive authority over questions of strategy had been in Joffre's hands from the start. If some were skeptical about the wisdom of trusting Joffre to such an extent, if calls for his removal had erupted during the weeks when his armies were in seemingly endless retreat, the Marne had silenced the doubters even if it had not entirely removed their doubts. Ambiguous as the victory may have been in terms of who had actually made it possible and what it meant for the long term, the simple fact that Joffre had been in command elevated his prestige to a level at which it was, and would long remain, above challenge. As shocking as Joffre's losses continued to be, his appetite for more of the same was undiminished. He remained certain that the war could still be a fairly short and glorious one, and he was determined to make it so.
A similar absence of disagreement pervaded official Vienna, but not because of any such high expectations. Austria-Hungary was forced into near-unanimity by sheer desperation. Its losses were particularly serious because the dual monarchy had less than a 1/3 of Russia's manpower to draw upon in trying to make whole its ravaged armies. Field Marshal Conrad's offensives into Galicia and Serbia had literally wiped out some of his most elite units, demoralized many of the survivors, and multiplied the difficulties of maintaining the enthusiasm of the empire's non-Germany majority. With Serbia unbeaten, with Russia continuing to advance, and with Italy's possible entry into the war on the side of the Entente, Austria-Hungary had only one possible 1st priority: to somehow keep the Russians from getting through the Carpathians. Achieving this goal was almost certain to require help from the Germans. The Austrians were already incapable of accomplishing anything of consequence without Berlin's assistance.
Conrad, rarely reluctant to engage the enemy, announced plans for a winter campaign aimed at driving the Russians back from the Carpathians and relieving the besieged fortress of Przemysl. He hoped, through a persuasive show of force, to discourage Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria(all of which were eager for a share in the spoils of war but uncertain of which side could make the best offer) from joining the Entente. He asked the Germans to contribute four divisions-upward of 60,000 troops-to this offensive. In doing so he put his allies on the spot. Nobody in the German high command supposed that Conrad was capable of moving effectively against the Russians without assistance, and nobody was confident that he could succeed even if his request was granted.
On the other hand his plan was far from pointless; if he did nothing but wait for the Russians to attack, the results could be disastrous. Falkenhayn had at his disposal four new corps, more than a 100,000 well equipped recruits led by experienced officers and noncoms. A struggle immediately erupted over how and where to use them.
What to do about Austria-the question that was, as Ludendorff told Falkenhayn, Germany's "great incalculable"-was only one of the puzzles facing the Germans as the winter deepened. They had not only the entire Western Front to deal with, the relentlessly growing French and British armies, but also a Russian streamroller that despite its huge losses continued to outnumber the German and Austrian forces in the east by overwhelming margins and was obviously preparing to resume the offensive. The Germans had no simple or obviously right way to balance these dangers and distribute the available resources-no clear way to victory on either front, never mind both. Nor were the leaders of the government or army agreed on what should be done. Their difference were so fundamental that they threatened the entire German war effort with paralysis.
Falkenhayn, the handsomely youthful-looking Junker who was now both chief of the general staff and war minister, appeared to have all the power needed to decide questions of strategy. And he knew what he wanted to do. Alarmed by the losses of 1914-he described his army as"a broken instrument"-he was convinced that Germany had no chance of defeating all the forces arrayed against it. A negotiated peace on one front of the other was therefore necessary. In the west, Falkenhayn believed, an acceptable peace could never be achieved without British acquiescence; the English Channel made Britain unconquerable, and the only way to bring it around was to take one of its allies out of the war. As for the east, the size of the front and of the Russian armies made victory improbable within a tolerable period of time. The answer, Falkenhayn thought, was to punish the Russians enough to make them receptive to an eventual settlement while focusing all possible force on the defeat of the French, whom he described as a sword in the had of the British "If we succeed in bringing Russia to terms," he said, "we could then deal France and England so crushing a blow that we could dictate peace terms."
He was unwilling to send to the east any troops that might usefully be used in the west, and he was similarly unwilling to thin his forces in East Prussia for the benefit of Conrad. This put him at odds with Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Both men-Ludendorff most importantly, because he and Max Hoffman were the brains of the team-saw opportunities to crush the Russians. Whether out of strategic conviction of jealously or some mixture of the two, both were contemptuous of Falkenhayn. And though Falkenhayn's two offices made him doubly the superior of Hindenburg and Lundendorff and every other member of the German High Command, his credibility had been damaged by his failure to break through at Ypres even after expending so many lives. Tanneberg and the Masurian Lakes had raised Hindenburg to heights of popular adulation comparable to those occupied by Joffre in France. He was not inclined to use his prestige to help or support Falkenhayn. Prodded by Lundendorff, he undercut Falkenhayn at every opportunity, spoke openly of Falkenhayn's unfitness for the positions he occupied, and encourage his admirers at court and in the government to do likewise. Falkenhayn, not surprisingly, responded in kind.
Things should have been simpler for the Russians because they, like the French and British, had only one truly dangerous enemy to contend with. But they too were divided and uncertain. The chief of the Russian general staff, the tsar's 6ft 6 and stick-figure-thin cousin and namesake the Grand Duke Nicholas Romanov, was a competent commander. He was also aggressive and determined to use the massive forces at his disposal to invade Germany and win the war in the east. But his political position was not strong. He despised the monk Rasputin, once informing him that if he visited army headquarters he would be hanged on the spot, and partly for this reason he was distrusted and feared by the Tsarina Alexandra, who had convinced herself that the grand duke coveted the imperial throne. Though Russia could have only one prime objective in 1915-to throw the Germans into terminal disarray-the question of how to accomplish this was anything but settled. Powerful members of the general staff wanted to strike directly at central Germany. Another faction wanted to complete the penetration of the Carpathians and finish off Austria-Hungary as a prelude to Germany's destruction. The grand duke, lacking clear guidance or firm support from Tsar Nicholas, was not well positioned to resolve such questions and lacked from convictions. His inclination was to try to satisfy everyone.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Friday, January 8, 2016
FLANDER FIEDLDS 2
Denied the manpower their original plan required, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann didn't give up. They moved their 9th army, the one that had had such a narrow escape from the Russians near Warsaw, back into East Prussia by train. There they combined it with the 8th army to form a mass of troops extending across 70 miles. They then waited as the Russians moved across Poland toward the west. When, as expected, the advance began to show signs of bogging down under its own tremendous weight and the difficulties of resupply, they sent their two armies down on it like a hammer. At the main point of contact the Germans actually had a numerical advantage, and the Russians were staggered. After 4 hours days of hard they began to retreat. The Germans pursued, hitting at the Russians repeatedly.
Falkenhayn was attacking again in Flanders, this time using more experienced troops and limiting himself to a narrower front. What he got wasn't victory but another series of inconclusive
battles all along the ridge outside Ypres, which was slowly being destroyed as the Germans shelled the ancient towers being used by the defenders as observation posts. Large and small groups of soldiers dashed from village to woodland, from canal to hedgerow, settling into firefights, advancing with bayonets, being thrown back and counterattacking while artillery from both sides rained shrapnel and high explosives down every target their spotters could find. The nature of the struggle is captured in the official account of First Ypres later prepared for the German general staff:
The enemy turned every house, every wood and every wall into a strong point, and each of them had to be stormed by our men with heavy loss. even when the first line of these fortifications had been taken they were confronted by a second one immediately behind it; for the enemy showed great skill in taking every advantage of the ground, unfavorable in any case to the attacker. To the east and south-east of Ypres, even more developed than in the north, there were thick hedges, wire fences and broad dikes. Numerous woods also of all sizes with dense undergrowth made the country almost impassable and most difficult for observation purposes. Our movements were constantly being limited to the roads which were swept by the enemy's machine-guns. Owing to the preparatory artillery bombardments the villages were mostly ruined by the time the infantry reached them, but the enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks before abandoning them. In the few villages streets that remained worthy of the name the fighting generally developed into isolated individual combats, and no description can do adequate justice to the bravery of the German troops on such occasions.
Nor, of course, it is possible to do justice to-perhaps even to understand-the bravery of the British and French troops who were defending those piles of stones and bricks. Even the barest chronology of how the villages near Ypres were taken and surrendered and taken again is enough to show why, in the end, hardly a stone was left standing upon a stone. Lambartzyde was captured by the Germans on October 23rd, retaken by the French a day later, recaptured by the Germans on October 28th taken yet again by the British and French on November 4th, recaptured by the Germans on November 7th, only to change hands twice more before finally and permanently ending up in the possession of the Germans.
Gradually, village by village, the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the Ypres Salient, the semicircle held by the French and British east of the town. But time after time they failed to break through. On several occasions various French and British generals suggested that a retreat might be in order. Always it was Foch who refused. Before the war he had written that an army is never defeated until it believes itself to be defeated. Now, with considerable help from the Tommies, he appeared to be proving his point.
The German offensive crested on November 11th when the most elite unit in the entire German army, the 1st Guards Regiment led by the Kaiser's son Prince Eitel Friedrich, drove the British troops out of nonnebosschen. It was a repeat of Gheluvelt. Once again nothing separated the Germans from Ypres, and once again a ragtag assortment of the only British soldiers in the neighborhood(not combat troops at all but cooks, drivers, staff officers-anyone who could pick up a rifle) mounted a seemingly hopeless counterattack. Once again the Germans thought that the mysteriously absent Entente reserves must be moving into action at last and fled. That turned out to be the last time the Germans came close to breaking through.
The fighting went on until November 22nd, with more attacks, but increasingly it was an obviously futile struggle in rain and cold mud by half-crazed and hungry men desperate for rest. Even the old lion Kitchener was horrified. "This," he exclaimed "is not war!' Whatever it was, if finally came to an end when the rains turned to snow and the mud froze hard and the impossibility of achieving anything became to obvious to be ignored. Both sides claimed victory, the Enente because they had held on to Ypres and kept the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, the Germans not only because they had kept the enemy from breaking through not because by the end they had captured so many of the strong points around the destroyed town that the British and French no longer had an adequate base from which to launch new offensives.
By the time the Flanders front shut down for the winter, the British had taken 50,000 casualties there. More than half of the 160,000 men that Britain had by then sent to France were dead or wounded France's Ypres losses are believed to exceed 50,000, Germany's at least 100,000. Burke's Peerage, the registry of Britain's noble had to postpone publication of its latest edition to make the editorial changes required by the death in combat of 66 peers, 95 sons of peers, 16 baronets, 82 sons of baronets, and 6 knights.
The Russian retreat across Poland continued, with the Germans in pursuit. First the Russians tried to withdraw behind an expanse of wet lowland marshes, but the Germans drove them out. Then they tried to make a stand at the city of Lodz, but on December 6th they were again forced to move on. They had lost another 90,000 men at Lodz, the Germans 35,000. The Germans were 30 miles east of Lodz, and in possession of a 136,000 Russian prisoners, when their drive finally came to a stop. Winter made the stop necessary-the killing Russian winter. "Only about half had overcoats," an English war correspondent observed of German soldiers captured in a Russian counterattack. "and these were made of thin, shoddy material that is about as much protection as paper against the Russian wind. When you know that the prison camps are all in Siberia, try and think of the lot of prisoners. Yet for the moment the Germans were content. They were allowed to sleep. This is the boon that the man fresh from the trenches asks above all things. His days and nights have been one constant strain of alertness. His brain has been racked with the roar of cannon and his nerves frayed by the irregular bursting of shell. His mind is chaos... But when a soldier is once captured he feels that this responsibility of holding back the enemy is no longer his. He has failed. Well, he can sleep in peace now."
Both sides settled down to hacking makeshift defenses out of the frozen earth. The Germans had lost a 100,000 men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting the astounding total of 530,000 casualties on the Russians. Their success, however, was of discouragingly limited value. As winter arrived, the Russians had 120 divisions on the front, and each division included 12 battalions. The Germans and Austrians together could muster only 60 divisions of 8 battalions each.
For Conrad and his armies, December was a month of high drama, of brief glory followed by final humiliation. As it opened, one of the Russian armies advancing against the Carpathians had taken possession of a mountain pass that gave it a gateway into Hungary. The commander of this Russian 8th army, a talented general named Alexei Brusilov, was in position to advance on Budapest and begin the conquest of the Hapsburg homeland. But at just this moment Conrad tried something that worked. He learned of a gap between Brusilov and the Russian army on its right, assembled an attack force, and on December 3rd drove it into the gap. The Russians were thrown off balance. In 4 days Conrad drove them back 40 miles. Though the masses of reinforcements sent forward out of the Russians reserve brought him to a halt by December 10th, the victory was an important one. It spoiled the Russians' hopes of crossing the Carpathians. It also rendered them incapable of executing a newly hatched plan to send a force from Krakow toward Germany. In combination with Hindenburg's and Ludendorff's November successes in Poland, it left the Russians bogged for the winter far from Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna.
Conrad poisoned his own hour of triumph by launching a year-end invasion of Serbia, his 3rd since the start of the war. The newest incursion started as promisingly as the others, with the Austrians quickly taking possession of much of the Serbian interior along with Belgrade. Just one day after the fall of Belgrade, however, in a moment of Balkan high drama, the mustachioed King Peter of Serbia, rifle in hand, announced to his soldiers that he was releasing them from their pledge to fight for him and the homeland but that he for one was going to the front, alone if necessary. This gesture rallied every doubting patriot to the cause. A counterattack organized by Serbian General Radomir Putnik-the same old soldier who had been caught vacationing in Austrian territory when the war began but was allowed to return home in an act of almost medieval courtesy by Emperor Franz Joseph-sent 200,000 Serb troops down on the overextended Austrians. The Austrians, who had gone days without food and were freezing in summer uniforms, fled back across the border. Again their losses were outlandish: 28,000 dead, a 120,000 wounded, 76,000 taken prisoner. The Serbs too had been badly hurt, with 22,000 wounded, 92,000 wounded, 9,000 captured or missing, and the survivors ravaged by dysentery and chlorea.
Never again, in the years of fighting that lay ahead, would the Austro-Hungarians be involved in a major offensive as anything more than adjuncts to the Germans. Never again would they win a major victory they could call their own. With the war scarcely begun, they were a spent force. With almost 4 years of war remaining, nearly 200,000 of Vienna's best troops-including ruinors numbers of its experienced officers and noncoms-were dead. Almost half a million had been wounded, and some 180,000 were prisoners of the Russians. There was fighting elsewhere as the year drew to a close. Even after the last assault at Ypres, the Western Front was never entirely quiet. Joffre kept ordering attacks wherever he thought the enemy wall might be weak. "Nibbling," he called it, but its cost in lives was high. By March it would add another 100,000 casualties to the French total.
People were becoming accustomed to the term world war. Since August there had been naval battles, some of them high in drama but none terribly important, all around the globe. There was bloodshed in Africa as the police and small military forces of the various European colonies jockeyed for advantage and the indigenous populations became involved, and in the Far East Japan helped itself to Germany's scattered holding.
The Middle East was being drawn in as well. The newest member of the Central Powers, Turkey, sent troops based in Syria into Persia. After so many years of watching the Europeans feast on its crumbling empire, the government in Constantinople was eager to recover some of its losses at last.
The British, in particular, were disturbed. When Russia suggested that a show of force near Istanbul might frighten the Turks and cause them to pull back from Persia, London found the idea attractive. A battleship was dispatched to the mouth of the Dardanelles, the narrow channel leading from the northeastern Mediterranean to Constantinople, the Black Sea, and Russia beyond. Upon arrival, the ship began shelling one of the outermost forts guarding the Dardanelles. Within half and hour the for was totally wrecked, incapable of defending itself or the sea route to Constantinople.
The battleship, never, threatened while it did its work, steamed serenely away. The whole thing had been so easy. First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill began to wonder: might the entire passage up to Constantinople be that easily taken.
In Flanders, where there had been so much horror, 1914 ended with a strange spontaneous eruption of fellow feeling. On Christmas morning, in their trenches began singing carols and displaying bits of evergreen decorated in observance of the occasion. The Tommies too began to sing.
Cautiously, unarmed Germans began showing themselves atop their defenses. Some of the British did the same. Step by Step this led to the gathering in no-man's-land of soldiers from both sides, to exchange of food and cigarettes, even games of soccer.
This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of the kind would happen again.
Denied the manpower their original plan required, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann didn't give up. They moved their 9th army, the one that had had such a narrow escape from the Russians near Warsaw, back into East Prussia by train. There they combined it with the 8th army to form a mass of troops extending across 70 miles. They then waited as the Russians moved across Poland toward the west. When, as expected, the advance began to show signs of bogging down under its own tremendous weight and the difficulties of resupply, they sent their two armies down on it like a hammer. At the main point of contact the Germans actually had a numerical advantage, and the Russians were staggered. After 4 hours days of hard they began to retreat. The Germans pursued, hitting at the Russians repeatedly.
Falkenhayn was attacking again in Flanders, this time using more experienced troops and limiting himself to a narrower front. What he got wasn't victory but another series of inconclusive
battles all along the ridge outside Ypres, which was slowly being destroyed as the Germans shelled the ancient towers being used by the defenders as observation posts. Large and small groups of soldiers dashed from village to woodland, from canal to hedgerow, settling into firefights, advancing with bayonets, being thrown back and counterattacking while artillery from both sides rained shrapnel and high explosives down every target their spotters could find. The nature of the struggle is captured in the official account of First Ypres later prepared for the German general staff:
The enemy turned every house, every wood and every wall into a strong point, and each of them had to be stormed by our men with heavy loss. even when the first line of these fortifications had been taken they were confronted by a second one immediately behind it; for the enemy showed great skill in taking every advantage of the ground, unfavorable in any case to the attacker. To the east and south-east of Ypres, even more developed than in the north, there were thick hedges, wire fences and broad dikes. Numerous woods also of all sizes with dense undergrowth made the country almost impassable and most difficult for observation purposes. Our movements were constantly being limited to the roads which were swept by the enemy's machine-guns. Owing to the preparatory artillery bombardments the villages were mostly ruined by the time the infantry reached them, but the enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks before abandoning them. In the few villages streets that remained worthy of the name the fighting generally developed into isolated individual combats, and no description can do adequate justice to the bravery of the German troops on such occasions.
Nor, of course, it is possible to do justice to-perhaps even to understand-the bravery of the British and French troops who were defending those piles of stones and bricks. Even the barest chronology of how the villages near Ypres were taken and surrendered and taken again is enough to show why, in the end, hardly a stone was left standing upon a stone. Lambartzyde was captured by the Germans on October 23rd, retaken by the French a day later, recaptured by the Germans on October 28th taken yet again by the British and French on November 4th, recaptured by the Germans on November 7th, only to change hands twice more before finally and permanently ending up in the possession of the Germans.
Gradually, village by village, the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the Ypres Salient, the semicircle held by the French and British east of the town. But time after time they failed to break through. On several occasions various French and British generals suggested that a retreat might be in order. Always it was Foch who refused. Before the war he had written that an army is never defeated until it believes itself to be defeated. Now, with considerable help from the Tommies, he appeared to be proving his point.
The German offensive crested on November 11th when the most elite unit in the entire German army, the 1st Guards Regiment led by the Kaiser's son Prince Eitel Friedrich, drove the British troops out of nonnebosschen. It was a repeat of Gheluvelt. Once again nothing separated the Germans from Ypres, and once again a ragtag assortment of the only British soldiers in the neighborhood(not combat troops at all but cooks, drivers, staff officers-anyone who could pick up a rifle) mounted a seemingly hopeless counterattack. Once again the Germans thought that the mysteriously absent Entente reserves must be moving into action at last and fled. That turned out to be the last time the Germans came close to breaking through.
The fighting went on until November 22nd, with more attacks, but increasingly it was an obviously futile struggle in rain and cold mud by half-crazed and hungry men desperate for rest. Even the old lion Kitchener was horrified. "This," he exclaimed "is not war!' Whatever it was, if finally came to an end when the rains turned to snow and the mud froze hard and the impossibility of achieving anything became to obvious to be ignored. Both sides claimed victory, the Enente because they had held on to Ypres and kept the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, the Germans not only because they had kept the enemy from breaking through not because by the end they had captured so many of the strong points around the destroyed town that the British and French no longer had an adequate base from which to launch new offensives.
By the time the Flanders front shut down for the winter, the British had taken 50,000 casualties there. More than half of the 160,000 men that Britain had by then sent to France were dead or wounded France's Ypres losses are believed to exceed 50,000, Germany's at least 100,000. Burke's Peerage, the registry of Britain's noble had to postpone publication of its latest edition to make the editorial changes required by the death in combat of 66 peers, 95 sons of peers, 16 baronets, 82 sons of baronets, and 6 knights.
The Russian retreat across Poland continued, with the Germans in pursuit. First the Russians tried to withdraw behind an expanse of wet lowland marshes, but the Germans drove them out. Then they tried to make a stand at the city of Lodz, but on December 6th they were again forced to move on. They had lost another 90,000 men at Lodz, the Germans 35,000. The Germans were 30 miles east of Lodz, and in possession of a 136,000 Russian prisoners, when their drive finally came to a stop. Winter made the stop necessary-the killing Russian winter. "Only about half had overcoats," an English war correspondent observed of German soldiers captured in a Russian counterattack. "and these were made of thin, shoddy material that is about as much protection as paper against the Russian wind. When you know that the prison camps are all in Siberia, try and think of the lot of prisoners. Yet for the moment the Germans were content. They were allowed to sleep. This is the boon that the man fresh from the trenches asks above all things. His days and nights have been one constant strain of alertness. His brain has been racked with the roar of cannon and his nerves frayed by the irregular bursting of shell. His mind is chaos... But when a soldier is once captured he feels that this responsibility of holding back the enemy is no longer his. He has failed. Well, he can sleep in peace now."
Both sides settled down to hacking makeshift defenses out of the frozen earth. The Germans had lost a 100,000 men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting the astounding total of 530,000 casualties on the Russians. Their success, however, was of discouragingly limited value. As winter arrived, the Russians had 120 divisions on the front, and each division included 12 battalions. The Germans and Austrians together could muster only 60 divisions of 8 battalions each.
For Conrad and his armies, December was a month of high drama, of brief glory followed by final humiliation. As it opened, one of the Russian armies advancing against the Carpathians had taken possession of a mountain pass that gave it a gateway into Hungary. The commander of this Russian 8th army, a talented general named Alexei Brusilov, was in position to advance on Budapest and begin the conquest of the Hapsburg homeland. But at just this moment Conrad tried something that worked. He learned of a gap between Brusilov and the Russian army on its right, assembled an attack force, and on December 3rd drove it into the gap. The Russians were thrown off balance. In 4 days Conrad drove them back 40 miles. Though the masses of reinforcements sent forward out of the Russians reserve brought him to a halt by December 10th, the victory was an important one. It spoiled the Russians' hopes of crossing the Carpathians. It also rendered them incapable of executing a newly hatched plan to send a force from Krakow toward Germany. In combination with Hindenburg's and Ludendorff's November successes in Poland, it left the Russians bogged for the winter far from Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna.
Conrad poisoned his own hour of triumph by launching a year-end invasion of Serbia, his 3rd since the start of the war. The newest incursion started as promisingly as the others, with the Austrians quickly taking possession of much of the Serbian interior along with Belgrade. Just one day after the fall of Belgrade, however, in a moment of Balkan high drama, the mustachioed King Peter of Serbia, rifle in hand, announced to his soldiers that he was releasing them from their pledge to fight for him and the homeland but that he for one was going to the front, alone if necessary. This gesture rallied every doubting patriot to the cause. A counterattack organized by Serbian General Radomir Putnik-the same old soldier who had been caught vacationing in Austrian territory when the war began but was allowed to return home in an act of almost medieval courtesy by Emperor Franz Joseph-sent 200,000 Serb troops down on the overextended Austrians. The Austrians, who had gone days without food and were freezing in summer uniforms, fled back across the border. Again their losses were outlandish: 28,000 dead, a 120,000 wounded, 76,000 taken prisoner. The Serbs too had been badly hurt, with 22,000 wounded, 92,000 wounded, 9,000 captured or missing, and the survivors ravaged by dysentery and chlorea.
Never again, in the years of fighting that lay ahead, would the Austro-Hungarians be involved in a major offensive as anything more than adjuncts to the Germans. Never again would they win a major victory they could call their own. With the war scarcely begun, they were a spent force. With almost 4 years of war remaining, nearly 200,000 of Vienna's best troops-including ruinors numbers of its experienced officers and noncoms-were dead. Almost half a million had been wounded, and some 180,000 were prisoners of the Russians. There was fighting elsewhere as the year drew to a close. Even after the last assault at Ypres, the Western Front was never entirely quiet. Joffre kept ordering attacks wherever he thought the enemy wall might be weak. "Nibbling," he called it, but its cost in lives was high. By March it would add another 100,000 casualties to the French total.
People were becoming accustomed to the term world war. Since August there had been naval battles, some of them high in drama but none terribly important, all around the globe. There was bloodshed in Africa as the police and small military forces of the various European colonies jockeyed for advantage and the indigenous populations became involved, and in the Far East Japan helped itself to Germany's scattered holding.
The Middle East was being drawn in as well. The newest member of the Central Powers, Turkey, sent troops based in Syria into Persia. After so many years of watching the Europeans feast on its crumbling empire, the government in Constantinople was eager to recover some of its losses at last.
The British, in particular, were disturbed. When Russia suggested that a show of force near Istanbul might frighten the Turks and cause them to pull back from Persia, London found the idea attractive. A battleship was dispatched to the mouth of the Dardanelles, the narrow channel leading from the northeastern Mediterranean to Constantinople, the Black Sea, and Russia beyond. Upon arrival, the ship began shelling one of the outermost forts guarding the Dardanelles. Within half and hour the for was totally wrecked, incapable of defending itself or the sea route to Constantinople.
The battleship, never, threatened while it did its work, steamed serenely away. The whole thing had been so easy. First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill began to wonder: might the entire passage up to Constantinople be that easily taken.
In Flanders, where there had been so much horror, 1914 ended with a strange spontaneous eruption of fellow feeling. On Christmas morning, in their trenches began singing carols and displaying bits of evergreen decorated in observance of the occasion. The Tommies too began to sing.
Cautiously, unarmed Germans began showing themselves atop their defenses. Some of the British did the same. Step by Step this led to the gathering in no-man's-land of soldiers from both sides, to exchange of food and cigarettes, even games of soccer.
This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of the kind would happen again.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
FLANDERS FIELDS
The French and British, though jubilant at and in many cases astonished by the German withdrawal from the Marne, were badly battered, worn out, and running low on essential equipment. Many were almost to exhausted to move. "After 5 days and nights of fighting," one English soldier wrote, "decimated, spent and hungry, we are lying on the bare earth, with only one desire in our hearts-to get ourselves killed." And they were short of shells for their artillery. It is one measure of the sustained intensity of this new kind of warfare that the French faced critical shortages of ammunition for the
75MM Cannon
thier most effective field artillery piece, because only 10,000 rounds were being produced per day. This was barley 20% of the need.
For any number of such reasons, the armies of the Entente failed to close with the retreating Germans or exploit the huge gap that had prompted their withdrawal. They didn't attack in force until after the German 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armies had settled into fortified positions on high ground north of the Aisne, the next east-west river of the Marne. By then it was too late. The fighting was ferocious, with the British especially taking heavy losses in trying to force the Germans out of their defenses, but it accomplished essentially nothing, "3 days ago our division took possession of these heights and dug itself in," a German officer wrote to his parents. "2 days ago, early in the morning, we were attacked by an immesnsely superior English force, 1 brigade and 2 battalions, and were turned out of our positions. The fellows too out 5 guns from us. It was a tremendous hand-to-hand fight. How I escaped myself I am not clear. I then had to bring up supports on foot...and with the help of artillery we drove the fellows out of the position again. Our machine guns did excellent work; the English fell in heaps...During the 1st 2 days of the battle I had only one piece of bread and no water. I spent the night in the rain without any overcoat. The rest of my kit was on the horses which had been left behind with the baggage and which cannot come up into the battle because as soon as you put your nose up from behind cover the bullets whistle. War is terrible. We are all hoping that a decisive battle will end the war."
The fighting was anything but decisive, however, and the British and the French had lost whatever opportunity they might have had to force the Germans into a Great Retreat of their own. Some of France's richest mining and industrial areas remained in German hands.
The Germans made a final unsuccessful effort to capture Verdun, which if taken would have given them an anchoring strongpoint from which to keep their armies on the Marne. Without Verdun, the Marne line was untenable. In pulling back, the Germans had to abandon valuable real estate-notably the rail junctions of Reims, Amiens, and Arras.
British and French headquarters bubbled with optimism, with Sir John French predicting that his troops would be in Berlin within 6 weeks. Erich von Falkenhayn, the 53 year old general and former war minister who replaced a bitterly disappointed Moltke as head of the German general staff(illness was given as the excuse for Moltke's reassignment), was quicker to see that the war was now likely to be a long one. He encouraged
CHANCELLOR BETHMANN HOLLWEG
to pursue a negotiated settlement on either the Eastern or Western Front-perhaps a negotiated peace with Russia that would persuade the French too come to terms.
WOODROW WILSON'S
government in Washington had already offered its services as a mediator, and soon Denmark would do the same. It was already too late, however, for such overtures to bear fruit. None of the warring governments thought they could possibly accept a settlement in which they didn't win something that would justify all the deaths. The war had become self-perpetuating and self-justifying.
Though not as ebullient as French and Joffre, Falkenhayn believed that a decision in the field was still possible. Within days of taking command he was developing plans for a fresh offensive, and before the end of September he was putting those plans in motion. He had 2 primary aims; The 1st was to correct the Germans' single greatest vulnerability, their exposed right wing, which came to an unprotected end north of Paris. The other was to capture Antwerp, the last stronghold of the Belgian army, the greatest port on the north coast and , so long as it remained in enemy hands, a redoubt from which the Belgians and British could strike at Germany's line of supply.
Falkenhayn could have solved the problem of his exposed right wing by pulling back still farther-by withdrawing, for example, to a line running from the Aisne to Brussels or even east of Antwerp. But this would have surrendered most of the gains of Moltke's offensive, demoralizing the armies and outraging all of Germany. Instead, he took an aggressive approach, deciding to extend his line westward along the River Somme all the way to the Atlantic. Such a move was feasible only if the French failed to defend the region northwest of Paris, but if it succeeded the Germans would control all of northern France, the ports on the English Channel included. They would be positioned to resume the move on Paris from both the east and the west.
Like Kluck and Moltke before him, however, Falkenhayn was trying to do too much with the resources at hand. To strengthen his right, he ordered the transfer of the 6th and 7th Armies from Alsace and Lorraine(where they would be replaced by 2 of the several new armies now being formed). This wasn't easily accomplished; the movement of a single army required 140 trains, and only one rail line connected the German right more or less directly with the left. Partly because of the resulting delays, Falkenhayn's offensive westward along the Somme wasn't as strong as it should have been; it ran into a new French 10th Army and was stopped. That left Antwerp, which though more strongly fortified than even Liege(it was surrounded by 19 large, state-of-the-art, powerfully armed forts plus a number of smaller ones, and defended by nearly a 100,000 troops) seemed a more achievable objective.
Before the Germans began hauling their siege guns to Artwerp, General Sir Henry Wilson, the BEF's deputy chief of staff, suggested transferring the BEF from France, where it was tucked between 2 French armies on the Aisne, to its original position beyond the end of the French left. This meant, as the line now stood, moving the British troops to the Flanders region of western Belgium. Such a change, Wilson said, would put the BEF where it logically ought to be; close to the ports from which it drew its supplies, reinforcements, and communications. Sir John French was reluctant at 1st, thinking no doubt of the advantages of having one of Joffre's armies on each of his flanks. But when Winston Churchill pointed out that, if the BEF were in Flanders, the guns of the Royal Navy would be able to support if from the Channel, he changed his mind. A career cavalryman, French began to see the flat terrain of Flanders as a place where his mounted troops could prove their value at last, spearheading a plunge eastward into central Belgium and from there to Germany.
Now it was Joffre's turn to be reluctant. He feared that if the BEF again got into trouble, and if French started thinking again of taking his army back to England, a position on the coast would make withdrawal all too easy. When French announced that he was moving north with or without Joffre's assent, Joffre urged him to proceed slowly and cautiously. French instead moved so swiftly that soon Joffre was blaming his haste for the success of German attack along the Aisne and blaming his commandeering of scarce railcars for the German's capture of the industrial city of Lille. Falkenhayn's movement of troops and guns toward Antwerp had by this time awakened Joffre to the danger on his left. He moved his 2nd Army, which Foch now commanded, north into Flanders along with the British. The BEF's destination was west of Ypres, a lace-manufacturing center endowed with treasures of medieval architecture and suddenly important as the nexus of roads leading eastward into central Belgium and westward toward France and the Channel ports.
When the Germans began systematically crushing Antwerp's fortresses with their artillery, the British were more alarmed than the French. For a major port so close to England to fall into the hand of an enemy possessing a navy substantial as Germany's would be no trivial matter. Winston Churchill hurried a small force of marines-all that were available-to help with the Belgian's defense. Churchill himself went with it, met with Belgiums's king and queen, conferred with the Belgian commanders, and involved himself in the search for some way to hold the Germans off. He sent a telegram to the government in London, proposing that he be appointed British military commander in Antwerp and replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty. Members of the cabinet were said to have laughed when they read this message; it seemed typical Winston, too eager for adventure, constantly hatching wild ideas, always thinking of himself capable of anything. Kitchener, not only the secretary of state of war but the living symbol of the British military(it was his face that fiercely told young Englishmen that "Your County Wants You!" on the recruiting posters), didn't regard Churchill's suggestion as ridiculous at all. He knew the first lord fairly well and had apparently been impressed. He knew that Churchill had been almost alone in recognizing the importance of the Channel ports even before the turnaround at the Marne and in urging that something be done to secure them.(Nothing had been.) Kitchener proposed that Churchill be made a lieutenant general on the spot. The prime minister didn't agree.
By October 6th the Belgians themselves, staggered by round-the-clock German shelling, decided that Antwerp couldn't be saved and that giving it up was the only way to save their army. Churchill departed for home, and a day later 60,000 Belgian troops under the command of their king left the city. Demoralized, nerves stretched, they hurried west until they were almost in France, arranging themselves in a defensive line north of Ypres behind the barrier that the River Yser forms as it flows to the sea. There they waited while Foch's army began to extend their line to the south and British troops filed into Ypres from the west. The Germans, meanwhile, took possession of Antwerp. The end of resistance there freed 4 German corps, most of an army, for other uses. Whole corps of new, barely trained reserves, many of them student volunteers, were arriving in Belgium from Germany.
As commander of all German forces, Falkenhayn faced far broader problems than did French or even Joffre. He had the vast war in the east to deal with-a war that now stretched across 500 miles of front and in which his forces and those of the Austrians continued to be out numbered by frightening margins. The heroes of Tannenberg-Hindenburg and Ludendorff- were scrambling to cope with the Russian threat not only to East Prussia but to Silesia to its south and, farther south still, to the badly shaken armies of Vienna. 2 things were imperative. The Germans had to move south to connect with the Austrian left, shoring up Conrad's armies before they were overrun. And, not having enough troops to defend at every threatened point, they had to go on the offensive. They had to strike a blow that would stop Russian juggernaut before it became unstoppable.
Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their operations chief, Max Hoffmann, decided that they could satisfy both imperatives simultaneously by taking a newly formed 9th Army south by rail to the vicinity of Warsaw, a key base of operations for the Russians, There they could link up with the Austrian left and join it in a move against the 4 armies that the commander in chief of the Russian forces, the tsar's cousin
GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS ROMANOV
was sending towards Silesia. The 8th Army would remain behind to guard East Prussia. Ludendorff, bold as usual, wanted to take part of it south too, but Falkenhayn rejected this proposal as too risky.
These movements set the stage for the 1st Battle of Warsaw, in which 18 German and Austrian divisions found themselves in the path of 60 Russian divisions advancing on a 250-mile front. Conrad's assignment was to break the Russian line in the south by moving forward across the River San in Galicia, but is attempts to do so failed. Farther, north, the German right and center made swift progress at 1st but then were slowed by days of torrential rain. "From Czestochowa we advanced in forced marches,' an officer in charge of munitions transport wrote. "During the 1st 2 days roads were passable, but after that they became terrible, as it rained every day. In some places there were no roads left, nothing but mud and swamps. Once it took us a full hour to move one wagon, loaded with munitions and drawn by 15 horses, a distance of only 15 yards...Horses sank into the mud up to their bodies and wagons up to their axles...One night we reached a spot which was absolutely impassable. The only way to get around it was through a dense forest, but before we could get through there it was necessary to cut an opening through the trees. For the next few hours we felled trees for a distance of over 500 yards...For the past 8 days we have been on the go almost every night, and once I stayed in my saddle for 30 consecutive hours. During all that time we had no real rest. Either we did not reach our quarters until early morning or late at night. We consider ourselves lucky if we have one room and straw on the floor for the 7 of us. For 10 days I haven't been out of my clothes. And when we do get a little sleep it is almost invariably necessary to start off again at once...Long ago we saw the last of butter, sausages, or similar delicacies. We are glad if we have bread and some lard."
As the Germans struggled forward, the Russians had time to assemble a mass of forces and counterattack. The German left was gradually bent back under the weight of repeated assaults until it faced northward instead of eastward and appeared to be on the verge of disintegrating.
By October 17th the Germans saw that they had to withdraw or be destroyed. The 9th Army retreated 60 miles in 6 days, and by the time it was free of the Russians, it had lost 40,000 men. Overall the campaign had cost Germany a 100,000 casualties, including 36,000 men killed, the Austrians between 40,000 and 50,000. The Russians pulled their guns out of the slime, and Grand Duke Nicholas began reassembling his sodden forces for a resumption of their advance.
By the start of the German retreat from Warsaw, Sir John French was beginning to move some of his forces eastward in Flanders. Falkenhayn, at almost exactly the same time, was setting in motion a westward offensive over adjacent ground. Until hours before their armies crashed into each other, neither was expecting to encounter an enemy in force. Both commanders were after territory: French's goal was Brussels by way of Ghent, while Falkenhayn wanted the area directly west of Belgium and the port towns that would come with it. Each was eagerly aware that, if he could advance far enough, he might then be in position to turn away from the sea and encircle his enemy. Glory seemed just over the horizon.
Almost immediately, both sides encountered immovable resistance. A joint French-British thrust toward Ghent ran into Falkenhayn's main force and was thrown back. The Germans tried to tear through the Belgian line at the Yser, but they too were stopped. Thus was set in motion the month of carnage called the 1st Battle of Ypres.
The nightmare was nowhere more hellish than where the Germans met the remains of the Belgian army. The suffering was magnified for the Belgians by the impossibility of digging in the waterlogged ground of the Flemish lowlands; for the Germans by the terrors of trying to cross a river under infantry fire while British navy shells screamed down on them from the nearby Channel; for both sides by the approach of winter and the new experience of being not only wet but half-frozen day after day and night after night.
King Albert rallied the Belgian troops. He was a competent soldier and a young man of considerable courage. He was also motivated: Foch had sternly warned him that if he failed to hold this last silver of Belgium, he couldn't expect to retain his throne after the war. His Majesty positioned noncommissioned officers behind his line with orders to shoot any man who tried to retreat.
After days of murderous German shellfire that killed or wounded more than a 1/3 of the Belgians and effectively ended their ability to stand their ground, Albert played his last trump card.l He ordered the opening(in some places the process required dynamite) of sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea. The Germans, who were getting more and more men across the Yser and sensed that victory was near, couldn't understand what was happening. In the morning the ground was covered with ankle-deep water. Assuming that this was the result of the continuing rains, the Germans slogged on. By midnight, the water was knee-deep and still rising. The Germans not only had to give up any hope of continuing their offensive but spent a difficult night getting their troops back to dry land. Soon they were separated from the Belgians by a 5 mile wide, shoulder-deep lake, and that part of the fight was at an end. The German troops who had been attacking across the Yser were sent south to join in the fight around Ypres. They found themselves in a terrible struggle, often hand to hand, for the villages atop the low ridge that circled around Ypres to the north, east, and south. The German objective was to break through the Entente line on that ridge and close in on Ypres itself.
At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman's men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing-the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his 1st intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler's exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.
The Germans found progress against the British and French as hard as it had been against the Belgians. But when the BEF and Foch launched their own attacks, they too were quickly thwarted. Along this part of the line, however, there were no dikes to be opened, so that the opposing forces could be separated and their misery brought to an end. The fighting continued day and night, the 2 sides taking turns on the offensive, and as the casualties mounted companies were reduce to the size of platoons and the tattered remnants of units were mixed together helter-skelter. Officers were all but annihilated, so that young lieutenants found themselves in command of what remained of battalions and regiments.
The rain continued, the nights grew colder, men lay on the surface of the earth because any holes they dug immediately filled with water, and still somehow the fighting went on. The landscape, though almost uniformly flat, was broken by villages and patches of woodland and by rivers and canals and hedgerows and fences extending in every direction. This was far better for defense than offense, and practically impossible for cavalry(which in any case was proving to e helpless against machine guns). The British were often outnumbered, sometimes by margins that seemed impossible, but time after time they held off attacks or came back to recapture lost ground. One thing that saved them was the skill of their cavalry, acquired in the guerrilla fighting of the Boer War, in dismounting and fighting as infantry. What ultimately saved them, at Ypres as earlier at Mons and Le Cateau, was the accuracy and speed(and of course the courage) of the ordinary British rifleman. Here again the fire laid down by the Tommies was often intense enough to convince the Germans that they were advancing not against rifles but against machine guns.
The devastating effectiveness of the British fire, coupled with the inexperience of some of the German reserves thrown into the Ypres meat-grinder, led to perhaps the most poignant of the many butcheries of late 1914. Thousands of schoolboy recruits, many of them as young as 16, followed almost equally inexperienced reserve sergeants and officers in heavily massed formations directly at the waiting BEF. They formed a wall of flesh-British soldiers recalled them advancing arm in arm, singing as they came, wearing their fraternity caps and carrying flowers-that blind men could hardly have missed. They were moved down in rows. Where they somehow succeeded in driving back their enemies, they often didn't know what to do next and so milled around aimlessly until hit with a counterattack. Many thousands of these youngsters lie in a single mass grave a short distance north of Ypres. At the site is a sculpture, the figures of a pair of parents kneeling in grief, created after the war by the mother of one of them.
Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides, and horror after horror. One evening, at the end of a day of murderous infantry gunfights under constant artillery fire, one of the German reserve units managed at tremendous cost to drive the British out of the village of Bixshoote. Later they received word that they were to be relieved overnight. In their lack of experience they assembled and marched away before their relief arrived. Observing this, the British moved in and again took possession. In the following 2 weeks the Germans would try again and again to retake what they had given away, failing repeatedly and always with even more casualties than before.
Losses were no less shocking on the other side. When Scotland's Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was taken out of action, only about 30 men remained of the 1,000 plus who had come to France at the start of the war. The BEF was moving toward annihilation. In some places along the line the British were stretched so thin that the Germans, observing, outsmarted themselves. They decided not to attack at those points, thinking that such a tempting target must be a decoy behind which lay masses of British or French reserves. There were no such reserves.
Somehow, the Germans and British again launched simultaneous attacks on October 30th, and again they ran head-on into each other and grappled in a struggle in which the losses were almost insupportable on both sides. The next day the Germans alone were still attacking, and this time, at the village of Gheluvelt, another of their green reserve units broke through the defensive ring. Nothing lay between them and Ypres, but this sudden success after so much failure apparently was more than they could believe. While they waited for instructions, a British brigadier general found the only troops in the vicinity, the 7 officers and 357 enlisted men who remained of the 2nd Worcester Regiment, and ordered them to retake Gheluvelt. To get the village, these men had to cross a 1,000 yards of open ground, and during the crossing a 100 of them where cut down. The survivors, when they reached the edge of the village, darted into a grove of trees, fixed their bayonets, and attacked. 1,200 confused and frightened German soldiers, thinking that this ragged little gang must be the advance of some powerful force, ran for their lives. The Worcesters, with nothing between them and Ypres but open country, had sealed the hole.
That night Falkenhayn called a halt. He had no idea that the BEF was at the point of breakdown-out of reserves, nearly out of ammunition, at the limits of endurance. He still thought that a breakthrough was possible, but he wanted to assemble more trained and experienced troops before trying again.
Things became briefly quiet both in Flanders and in Poland in the early days of November, but almost daily the war continued to grow in size and change in shape. The 1st Canadian troops were in England now, being readied to cross the Channel and link up with the British. An entire corps of Indian troops, tough Gurkha units among them, was with the BEF in Flanders, and black troops from France's African colonies were arriving at the front as well. In the east, Hindenburg was named commander in chief of all German forces on the Russian front. Ludendorff continued as his chief of staff, and Hoffmann stay with him as well. When word came from Istanbul that the Ottoman Empire was entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, in Berlin and Vienna it must have sounded like a gift from heaven.
Before November was a week old, the Eastern and Western Fronts were heating up again.
GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS
put 2 armies on the march through Poland to Silesia, and other Russian armies were moving southwestward to the Carpathians. And Falkenhayn was almost ready to try again to take Ypres. The kaiser was still at Supreme Headquarters, and his presence was a big headache for Falkenhayn as it had been for Moltke. Wilhelm was constantly demanding a victory, a reason to don one of his most gorgeous uniforms and be paraded in triumph through some conquered city. In his protracted disappointment he was like a petulant adolescent, and no more useful.
During the lull in the Flanders struggle, Falkenhayn received a hurried visit from Ludendorff. As usual, and with Hoffmann's help as always, Ludendorff had an ambitious plan ready for execution. Also as usual, his plan was aimed not just at stopping the Russian armies advancing into Poland but at destroying them. He proposed to do this by allowing the Russians to advance beyond the railheads that were their source of support until they ran out of momentum. Then the Germans would descend on them from the north, taking them in the flank and rear, cutting them off from Warsaw and safety. But more troops were needed. This was what Ludendorff had come for: reinforcements. Falkenhayn refused; he had been assembling all the divisions he could find for the new attack in Flanders, and the kaiser was hounding him. Ludendorff departed in a fury. Another war, this one withing the German general staff, began at this time. It was between Falkenhayn and the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team, and it was over the question of whether the German's best hope of victory lay in the west of the east.
The French and British, though jubilant at and in many cases astonished by the German withdrawal from the Marne, were badly battered, worn out, and running low on essential equipment. Many were almost to exhausted to move. "After 5 days and nights of fighting," one English soldier wrote, "decimated, spent and hungry, we are lying on the bare earth, with only one desire in our hearts-to get ourselves killed." And they were short of shells for their artillery. It is one measure of the sustained intensity of this new kind of warfare that the French faced critical shortages of ammunition for the
thier most effective field artillery piece, because only 10,000 rounds were being produced per day. This was barley 20% of the need.
For any number of such reasons, the armies of the Entente failed to close with the retreating Germans or exploit the huge gap that had prompted their withdrawal. They didn't attack in force until after the German 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armies had settled into fortified positions on high ground north of the Aisne, the next east-west river of the Marne. By then it was too late. The fighting was ferocious, with the British especially taking heavy losses in trying to force the Germans out of their defenses, but it accomplished essentially nothing, "3 days ago our division took possession of these heights and dug itself in," a German officer wrote to his parents. "2 days ago, early in the morning, we were attacked by an immesnsely superior English force, 1 brigade and 2 battalions, and were turned out of our positions. The fellows too out 5 guns from us. It was a tremendous hand-to-hand fight. How I escaped myself I am not clear. I then had to bring up supports on foot...and with the help of artillery we drove the fellows out of the position again. Our machine guns did excellent work; the English fell in heaps...During the 1st 2 days of the battle I had only one piece of bread and no water. I spent the night in the rain without any overcoat. The rest of my kit was on the horses which had been left behind with the baggage and which cannot come up into the battle because as soon as you put your nose up from behind cover the bullets whistle. War is terrible. We are all hoping that a decisive battle will end the war."
The fighting was anything but decisive, however, and the British and the French had lost whatever opportunity they might have had to force the Germans into a Great Retreat of their own. Some of France's richest mining and industrial areas remained in German hands.
The Germans made a final unsuccessful effort to capture Verdun, which if taken would have given them an anchoring strongpoint from which to keep their armies on the Marne. Without Verdun, the Marne line was untenable. In pulling back, the Germans had to abandon valuable real estate-notably the rail junctions of Reims, Amiens, and Arras.
British and French headquarters bubbled with optimism, with Sir John French predicting that his troops would be in Berlin within 6 weeks. Erich von Falkenhayn, the 53 year old general and former war minister who replaced a bitterly disappointed Moltke as head of the German general staff(illness was given as the excuse for Moltke's reassignment), was quicker to see that the war was now likely to be a long one. He encouraged
to pursue a negotiated settlement on either the Eastern or Western Front-perhaps a negotiated peace with Russia that would persuade the French too come to terms.
government in Washington had already offered its services as a mediator, and soon Denmark would do the same. It was already too late, however, for such overtures to bear fruit. None of the warring governments thought they could possibly accept a settlement in which they didn't win something that would justify all the deaths. The war had become self-perpetuating and self-justifying.
Though not as ebullient as French and Joffre, Falkenhayn believed that a decision in the field was still possible. Within days of taking command he was developing plans for a fresh offensive, and before the end of September he was putting those plans in motion. He had 2 primary aims; The 1st was to correct the Germans' single greatest vulnerability, their exposed right wing, which came to an unprotected end north of Paris. The other was to capture Antwerp, the last stronghold of the Belgian army, the greatest port on the north coast and , so long as it remained in enemy hands, a redoubt from which the Belgians and British could strike at Germany's line of supply.
Falkenhayn could have solved the problem of his exposed right wing by pulling back still farther-by withdrawing, for example, to a line running from the Aisne to Brussels or even east of Antwerp. But this would have surrendered most of the gains of Moltke's offensive, demoralizing the armies and outraging all of Germany. Instead, he took an aggressive approach, deciding to extend his line westward along the River Somme all the way to the Atlantic. Such a move was feasible only if the French failed to defend the region northwest of Paris, but if it succeeded the Germans would control all of northern France, the ports on the English Channel included. They would be positioned to resume the move on Paris from both the east and the west.
Like Kluck and Moltke before him, however, Falkenhayn was trying to do too much with the resources at hand. To strengthen his right, he ordered the transfer of the 6th and 7th Armies from Alsace and Lorraine(where they would be replaced by 2 of the several new armies now being formed). This wasn't easily accomplished; the movement of a single army required 140 trains, and only one rail line connected the German right more or less directly with the left. Partly because of the resulting delays, Falkenhayn's offensive westward along the Somme wasn't as strong as it should have been; it ran into a new French 10th Army and was stopped. That left Antwerp, which though more strongly fortified than even Liege(it was surrounded by 19 large, state-of-the-art, powerfully armed forts plus a number of smaller ones, and defended by nearly a 100,000 troops) seemed a more achievable objective.
Before the Germans began hauling their siege guns to Artwerp, General Sir Henry Wilson, the BEF's deputy chief of staff, suggested transferring the BEF from France, where it was tucked between 2 French armies on the Aisne, to its original position beyond the end of the French left. This meant, as the line now stood, moving the British troops to the Flanders region of western Belgium. Such a change, Wilson said, would put the BEF where it logically ought to be; close to the ports from which it drew its supplies, reinforcements, and communications. Sir John French was reluctant at 1st, thinking no doubt of the advantages of having one of Joffre's armies on each of his flanks. But when Winston Churchill pointed out that, if the BEF were in Flanders, the guns of the Royal Navy would be able to support if from the Channel, he changed his mind. A career cavalryman, French began to see the flat terrain of Flanders as a place where his mounted troops could prove their value at last, spearheading a plunge eastward into central Belgium and from there to Germany.
Now it was Joffre's turn to be reluctant. He feared that if the BEF again got into trouble, and if French started thinking again of taking his army back to England, a position on the coast would make withdrawal all too easy. When French announced that he was moving north with or without Joffre's assent, Joffre urged him to proceed slowly and cautiously. French instead moved so swiftly that soon Joffre was blaming his haste for the success of German attack along the Aisne and blaming his commandeering of scarce railcars for the German's capture of the industrial city of Lille. Falkenhayn's movement of troops and guns toward Antwerp had by this time awakened Joffre to the danger on his left. He moved his 2nd Army, which Foch now commanded, north into Flanders along with the British. The BEF's destination was west of Ypres, a lace-manufacturing center endowed with treasures of medieval architecture and suddenly important as the nexus of roads leading eastward into central Belgium and westward toward France and the Channel ports.
When the Germans began systematically crushing Antwerp's fortresses with their artillery, the British were more alarmed than the French. For a major port so close to England to fall into the hand of an enemy possessing a navy substantial as Germany's would be no trivial matter. Winston Churchill hurried a small force of marines-all that were available-to help with the Belgian's defense. Churchill himself went with it, met with Belgiums's king and queen, conferred with the Belgian commanders, and involved himself in the search for some way to hold the Germans off. He sent a telegram to the government in London, proposing that he be appointed British military commander in Antwerp and replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty. Members of the cabinet were said to have laughed when they read this message; it seemed typical Winston, too eager for adventure, constantly hatching wild ideas, always thinking of himself capable of anything. Kitchener, not only the secretary of state of war but the living symbol of the British military(it was his face that fiercely told young Englishmen that "Your County Wants You!" on the recruiting posters), didn't regard Churchill's suggestion as ridiculous at all. He knew the first lord fairly well and had apparently been impressed. He knew that Churchill had been almost alone in recognizing the importance of the Channel ports even before the turnaround at the Marne and in urging that something be done to secure them.(Nothing had been.) Kitchener proposed that Churchill be made a lieutenant general on the spot. The prime minister didn't agree.
By October 6th the Belgians themselves, staggered by round-the-clock German shelling, decided that Antwerp couldn't be saved and that giving it up was the only way to save their army. Churchill departed for home, and a day later 60,000 Belgian troops under the command of their king left the city. Demoralized, nerves stretched, they hurried west until they were almost in France, arranging themselves in a defensive line north of Ypres behind the barrier that the River Yser forms as it flows to the sea. There they waited while Foch's army began to extend their line to the south and British troops filed into Ypres from the west. The Germans, meanwhile, took possession of Antwerp. The end of resistance there freed 4 German corps, most of an army, for other uses. Whole corps of new, barely trained reserves, many of them student volunteers, were arriving in Belgium from Germany.
As commander of all German forces, Falkenhayn faced far broader problems than did French or even Joffre. He had the vast war in the east to deal with-a war that now stretched across 500 miles of front and in which his forces and those of the Austrians continued to be out numbered by frightening margins. The heroes of Tannenberg-Hindenburg and Ludendorff- were scrambling to cope with the Russian threat not only to East Prussia but to Silesia to its south and, farther south still, to the badly shaken armies of Vienna. 2 things were imperative. The Germans had to move south to connect with the Austrian left, shoring up Conrad's armies before they were overrun. And, not having enough troops to defend at every threatened point, they had to go on the offensive. They had to strike a blow that would stop Russian juggernaut before it became unstoppable.
Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their operations chief, Max Hoffmann, decided that they could satisfy both imperatives simultaneously by taking a newly formed 9th Army south by rail to the vicinity of Warsaw, a key base of operations for the Russians, There they could link up with the Austrian left and join it in a move against the 4 armies that the commander in chief of the Russian forces, the tsar's cousin
was sending towards Silesia. The 8th Army would remain behind to guard East Prussia. Ludendorff, bold as usual, wanted to take part of it south too, but Falkenhayn rejected this proposal as too risky.
These movements set the stage for the 1st Battle of Warsaw, in which 18 German and Austrian divisions found themselves in the path of 60 Russian divisions advancing on a 250-mile front. Conrad's assignment was to break the Russian line in the south by moving forward across the River San in Galicia, but is attempts to do so failed. Farther, north, the German right and center made swift progress at 1st but then were slowed by days of torrential rain. "From Czestochowa we advanced in forced marches,' an officer in charge of munitions transport wrote. "During the 1st 2 days roads were passable, but after that they became terrible, as it rained every day. In some places there were no roads left, nothing but mud and swamps. Once it took us a full hour to move one wagon, loaded with munitions and drawn by 15 horses, a distance of only 15 yards...Horses sank into the mud up to their bodies and wagons up to their axles...One night we reached a spot which was absolutely impassable. The only way to get around it was through a dense forest, but before we could get through there it was necessary to cut an opening through the trees. For the next few hours we felled trees for a distance of over 500 yards...For the past 8 days we have been on the go almost every night, and once I stayed in my saddle for 30 consecutive hours. During all that time we had no real rest. Either we did not reach our quarters until early morning or late at night. We consider ourselves lucky if we have one room and straw on the floor for the 7 of us. For 10 days I haven't been out of my clothes. And when we do get a little sleep it is almost invariably necessary to start off again at once...Long ago we saw the last of butter, sausages, or similar delicacies. We are glad if we have bread and some lard."
As the Germans struggled forward, the Russians had time to assemble a mass of forces and counterattack. The German left was gradually bent back under the weight of repeated assaults until it faced northward instead of eastward and appeared to be on the verge of disintegrating.
By October 17th the Germans saw that they had to withdraw or be destroyed. The 9th Army retreated 60 miles in 6 days, and by the time it was free of the Russians, it had lost 40,000 men. Overall the campaign had cost Germany a 100,000 casualties, including 36,000 men killed, the Austrians between 40,000 and 50,000. The Russians pulled their guns out of the slime, and Grand Duke Nicholas began reassembling his sodden forces for a resumption of their advance.
By the start of the German retreat from Warsaw, Sir John French was beginning to move some of his forces eastward in Flanders. Falkenhayn, at almost exactly the same time, was setting in motion a westward offensive over adjacent ground. Until hours before their armies crashed into each other, neither was expecting to encounter an enemy in force. Both commanders were after territory: French's goal was Brussels by way of Ghent, while Falkenhayn wanted the area directly west of Belgium and the port towns that would come with it. Each was eagerly aware that, if he could advance far enough, he might then be in position to turn away from the sea and encircle his enemy. Glory seemed just over the horizon.
Almost immediately, both sides encountered immovable resistance. A joint French-British thrust toward Ghent ran into Falkenhayn's main force and was thrown back. The Germans tried to tear through the Belgian line at the Yser, but they too were stopped. Thus was set in motion the month of carnage called the 1st Battle of Ypres.
The nightmare was nowhere more hellish than where the Germans met the remains of the Belgian army. The suffering was magnified for the Belgians by the impossibility of digging in the waterlogged ground of the Flemish lowlands; for the Germans by the terrors of trying to cross a river under infantry fire while British navy shells screamed down on them from the nearby Channel; for both sides by the approach of winter and the new experience of being not only wet but half-frozen day after day and night after night.
King Albert rallied the Belgian troops. He was a competent soldier and a young man of considerable courage. He was also motivated: Foch had sternly warned him that if he failed to hold this last silver of Belgium, he couldn't expect to retain his throne after the war. His Majesty positioned noncommissioned officers behind his line with orders to shoot any man who tried to retreat.
After days of murderous German shellfire that killed or wounded more than a 1/3 of the Belgians and effectively ended their ability to stand their ground, Albert played his last trump card.l He ordered the opening(in some places the process required dynamite) of sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea. The Germans, who were getting more and more men across the Yser and sensed that victory was near, couldn't understand what was happening. In the morning the ground was covered with ankle-deep water. Assuming that this was the result of the continuing rains, the Germans slogged on. By midnight, the water was knee-deep and still rising. The Germans not only had to give up any hope of continuing their offensive but spent a difficult night getting their troops back to dry land. Soon they were separated from the Belgians by a 5 mile wide, shoulder-deep lake, and that part of the fight was at an end. The German troops who had been attacking across the Yser were sent south to join in the fight around Ypres. They found themselves in a terrible struggle, often hand to hand, for the villages atop the low ridge that circled around Ypres to the north, east, and south. The German objective was to break through the Entente line on that ridge and close in on Ypres itself.
At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman's men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing-the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his 1st intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler's exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.
The Germans found progress against the British and French as hard as it had been against the Belgians. But when the BEF and Foch launched their own attacks, they too were quickly thwarted. Along this part of the line, however, there were no dikes to be opened, so that the opposing forces could be separated and their misery brought to an end. The fighting continued day and night, the 2 sides taking turns on the offensive, and as the casualties mounted companies were reduce to the size of platoons and the tattered remnants of units were mixed together helter-skelter. Officers were all but annihilated, so that young lieutenants found themselves in command of what remained of battalions and regiments.
The rain continued, the nights grew colder, men lay on the surface of the earth because any holes they dug immediately filled with water, and still somehow the fighting went on. The landscape, though almost uniformly flat, was broken by villages and patches of woodland and by rivers and canals and hedgerows and fences extending in every direction. This was far better for defense than offense, and practically impossible for cavalry(which in any case was proving to e helpless against machine guns). The British were often outnumbered, sometimes by margins that seemed impossible, but time after time they held off attacks or came back to recapture lost ground. One thing that saved them was the skill of their cavalry, acquired in the guerrilla fighting of the Boer War, in dismounting and fighting as infantry. What ultimately saved them, at Ypres as earlier at Mons and Le Cateau, was the accuracy and speed(and of course the courage) of the ordinary British rifleman. Here again the fire laid down by the Tommies was often intense enough to convince the Germans that they were advancing not against rifles but against machine guns.
The devastating effectiveness of the British fire, coupled with the inexperience of some of the German reserves thrown into the Ypres meat-grinder, led to perhaps the most poignant of the many butcheries of late 1914. Thousands of schoolboy recruits, many of them as young as 16, followed almost equally inexperienced reserve sergeants and officers in heavily massed formations directly at the waiting BEF. They formed a wall of flesh-British soldiers recalled them advancing arm in arm, singing as they came, wearing their fraternity caps and carrying flowers-that blind men could hardly have missed. They were moved down in rows. Where they somehow succeeded in driving back their enemies, they often didn't know what to do next and so milled around aimlessly until hit with a counterattack. Many thousands of these youngsters lie in a single mass grave a short distance north of Ypres. At the site is a sculpture, the figures of a pair of parents kneeling in grief, created after the war by the mother of one of them.
Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides, and horror after horror. One evening, at the end of a day of murderous infantry gunfights under constant artillery fire, one of the German reserve units managed at tremendous cost to drive the British out of the village of Bixshoote. Later they received word that they were to be relieved overnight. In their lack of experience they assembled and marched away before their relief arrived. Observing this, the British moved in and again took possession. In the following 2 weeks the Germans would try again and again to retake what they had given away, failing repeatedly and always with even more casualties than before.
Losses were no less shocking on the other side. When Scotland's Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was taken out of action, only about 30 men remained of the 1,000 plus who had come to France at the start of the war. The BEF was moving toward annihilation. In some places along the line the British were stretched so thin that the Germans, observing, outsmarted themselves. They decided not to attack at those points, thinking that such a tempting target must be a decoy behind which lay masses of British or French reserves. There were no such reserves.
Somehow, the Germans and British again launched simultaneous attacks on October 30th, and again they ran head-on into each other and grappled in a struggle in which the losses were almost insupportable on both sides. The next day the Germans alone were still attacking, and this time, at the village of Gheluvelt, another of their green reserve units broke through the defensive ring. Nothing lay between them and Ypres, but this sudden success after so much failure apparently was more than they could believe. While they waited for instructions, a British brigadier general found the only troops in the vicinity, the 7 officers and 357 enlisted men who remained of the 2nd Worcester Regiment, and ordered them to retake Gheluvelt. To get the village, these men had to cross a 1,000 yards of open ground, and during the crossing a 100 of them where cut down. The survivors, when they reached the edge of the village, darted into a grove of trees, fixed their bayonets, and attacked. 1,200 confused and frightened German soldiers, thinking that this ragged little gang must be the advance of some powerful force, ran for their lives. The Worcesters, with nothing between them and Ypres but open country, had sealed the hole.
That night Falkenhayn called a halt. He had no idea that the BEF was at the point of breakdown-out of reserves, nearly out of ammunition, at the limits of endurance. He still thought that a breakthrough was possible, but he wanted to assemble more trained and experienced troops before trying again.
Things became briefly quiet both in Flanders and in Poland in the early days of November, but almost daily the war continued to grow in size and change in shape. The 1st Canadian troops were in England now, being readied to cross the Channel and link up with the British. An entire corps of Indian troops, tough Gurkha units among them, was with the BEF in Flanders, and black troops from France's African colonies were arriving at the front as well. In the east, Hindenburg was named commander in chief of all German forces on the Russian front. Ludendorff continued as his chief of staff, and Hoffmann stay with him as well. When word came from Istanbul that the Ottoman Empire was entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, in Berlin and Vienna it must have sounded like a gift from heaven.
Before November was a week old, the Eastern and Western Fronts were heating up again.
put 2 armies on the march through Poland to Silesia, and other Russian armies were moving southwestward to the Carpathians. And Falkenhayn was almost ready to try again to take Ypres. The kaiser was still at Supreme Headquarters, and his presence was a big headache for Falkenhayn as it had been for Moltke. Wilhelm was constantly demanding a victory, a reason to don one of his most gorgeous uniforms and be paraded in triumph through some conquered city. In his protracted disappointment he was like a petulant adolescent, and no more useful.
During the lull in the Flanders struggle, Falkenhayn received a hurried visit from Ludendorff. As usual, and with Hoffmann's help as always, Ludendorff had an ambitious plan ready for execution. Also as usual, his plan was aimed not just at stopping the Russian armies advancing into Poland but at destroying them. He proposed to do this by allowing the Russians to advance beyond the railheads that were their source of support until they ran out of momentum. Then the Germans would descend on them from the north, taking them in the flank and rear, cutting them off from Warsaw and safety. But more troops were needed. This was what Ludendorff had come for: reinforcements. Falkenhayn refused; he had been assembling all the divisions he could find for the new attack in Flanders, and the kaiser was hounding him. Ludendorff departed in a fury. Another war, this one withing the German general staff, began at this time. It was between Falkenhayn and the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team, and it was over the question of whether the German's best hope of victory lay in the west of the east.
Monday, July 6, 2015
On August 3, 1914, when The Times of London reported that Field Marshal Sir John French had been chosen to lead the British Expeditionary Force to France and the war, it was eager to make its readers understand that this was the best of all possible appointments in the best of all possible armies.
"There wasn't a moment's hesitation," the newspaper said of French's selection. "No painful canvassing of candidates, no acrimonious discussion, no odious comparison of the merits of respective generals, no hint of favoritism, of Party intrigue."
This happy state of affairs was possible, it explained, because French "surrounds himself with capable leaders and staff officers, and not only bring his troops to a high degree of efficiency, but also makes his officers a band of brothers, and establishes a good comradeship between all arm and all ranks."
As an early exercise in wartime propaganda, in helping the public take pride in its armed forces and the men chosen to lead them, this report was exemplary, As a reflection of the truth, it didn't fall far short of absurd. In the art of generalship, French was rarely better than ordinary. An ability to identify and make use of the best available men wasn't among his talents, and no knowledgeable observer would credit him with displaying, or raising the forces under his command to, impressive levels of efficiency. As for the officers corps being free of acrimony or favoritism or "party intrigue," The Times could hardly departed more shamelessly from the truth.
The British army of 1914 was a considerably more effective military instrument than it had been at the start of the century, when it experienced great difficulty(and had to resort to savagely brutal methods) in defeating a ragtag collection of guerrilla-farmers in South Africa's Boer War. Since it had improved its training, started at least to modernize its equipment, and established a general staff on the Prussian model. But in many ways-in its leadership above all-it remained stubbornly in the past. It was the army of a predemocratic culture in which a majority of the population was poor and powerless, the benefits of empire were reserved for a tiny elite, and people at every level of society were expected to accept the status quo as the natural order of things.
Britain was changing, however, and slowly the army, heels dug in, was being pulled along. At the start of the 1870's the government had ended the time-honored system by which officers bought their commissions and promotions, often paying fortunes to rise to the senior ranks. Even after this reform, however, only gentlemen were regarded as suitable candidates for the officer corps. The term "gentlemen" applied only to individuals with the right family antecedents, and not even gentlemen found it possible to survive as junior officers without private sources of income. Late in the 19th century, when an outstanding young sergeant named
was offered the rare opportunity to accept a commission, he was unable to do so because his expenses as junior lieutenant(everything from uniforms to mess fees to a share in supporting the regimental band) would have been at least 4x his salary of 100 pounds. When they did somehow manage to become officers, "rankers" were commonly shunned and even viciously hazed by gentlemen unwilling to accept them.
This was the system that had produced
and the other generals at the head of the BEF. They were gentlemen almost to a man, the only exception being the aforementioned William Robertson, who by then had risen, almost miraculously, to a major general.(He had taken a commission in the Army of India, where expenses were lower, and his tailor father made his uniforms.) As gentlemen they adhered to a code that elevated amateurism in all things to a supreme virtue. Hunting, shooting, polo, and weekend gatherings at county estates were proper activities. Too much seriousness-for example, to much reading even about military history and strategy-definitely wasn't. The kinds of disputes over theory that racked the French officer corps were unimaginable north of the Channel, where nobody in uniform care about theories. The right connections, and proper degree of aristocratic insouciance, were highways to advancement. They made the army an especially attractive career for the less intelligent sons of the very best families.
French himself, 61 years old in August 1914, was the son of a naval officer and had begun by entering the Royal Navy at age 14, At 22 he had switched to the cavalry, the most elite(and expensive) branch of the army, and thereafter he advanced with the help of impressive social skills and his dash as a horseman. In 1899, freshly promoted to major general, he went to South Africa as commander of a cavalry division, and there he won fame for his boldness while learning to hate, and coming to be hated by, the famous and powerful
In 1912 he reached the summit, becoming chief of the imperial general staff, and though he resigned at the time of the Curragh Mutiny, this was such a respectable, gentlemanly act of disloyalty that it proved no obstacle to is later selection as head of the BEF. By the time he went to France he was a stocky, almost dumpy-looking man in late middle age, stolid, unimaginative, and sour. Kitchener still regarded him as reckless, and so ordered him in writing to do nothing that would put his army at risk.
"My confidence in the ability of the leaders of the French Army...is fast waning."
French's chief of staff in the Boer War had been a young colonel named
who as lieutenant general became commanding officer of one of the BEF's 2 corps. A member of the whiskey-making Haig family of the Scottish borderlands, regarded by the true aristocrats as unworthy of admission to one of the elite cavalry regiments at the start of his career, Haig was not noticeably more intelligent than French but was gifted at acquiring influential patrons. He entered the military academy at Sandhurst at an unusually late age, having 1st attended Oxford, where he spent the standard 3 years but failed to earn a degree. Early in his career he failed the examination for entry to the army staff college but was rescued by his connections. His sister, married to a member of the Jameson whiskey dynasty who held the honorary position of the keeper of the Prince of Wales's racing yachts, got the Duke of Cambridge(an aged member of the royal family) to have the entry requirements waived on Haig's behalf.
In the Boer War he attracted the favorable attention of Lord Kitchener while building a friendship with French. Haig was handsome and unmarried and outspoken about his disdain for women, and the lifelong bachelor Kitchener always approved of officers of this type. Haig won French's gratitude by lending him the immense sum of $2,000, which French needed to extract himself from woman trouble.
After South Africa Haig was made aide-de-camp to King Edward VII, a position that provided visibility in the loftiest circles. In 1905 he married the Honorable Dorothy Vivian, favorite maid of honor to the queen. The Haigs were the 1st non-royal couple ever to be married in the chapel at Buckingham Palace; he had proposed 72 hours after meeting the lady, and one wonders what his bride thought when he wrote the "I have often made up my mind on more important problems than that of my own marriage in much less time." Within a year of his marriage, when the British army entered the modern world by creating a general staff for the 1st time, Haig's friends in government and at court campaigned to have him made chief. This proved impossible, the candidate being only 44 and never having held a major, command, but afterward he never stopped angling for the job. He was still angling even as the BEF prepared for deployment, whispering his doubts about French's abilities to everyone who would listen from his friend King George down, rarely failing to add that of course he was prepared to serve wherever needed. He always go a respectful hearing despite being wrong on a wide range of subjects: before the war he had pontificated that "the role of cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing" and "artillery only seems likely to be effective against raw troops." It was typical of Haig that he was able to maintain a good relationship with French while despising him. Haig despised almost every one of his brother officers except his own subordinates-so long as those subordinates were sufficiently submissive. Almost paranoid in his belief that he was constantly being conspired against, he responded with endless intrigues of his own.
The other 2 corps with which the BEF began the war was supposed to be headed by
but he dropped dead of a heart attack upon arriving in France. This was a stroke of luck for Haig. Grierson was a gifted infantry commander who, in the summer war games of 1912, had defeated Haig so completely, so humiliatingly, that the whole operation was brought to a stop ahead of schedule. Sir John French asked for
as replacement for Grierson, but Kitchener sent
Instead. Again Haig was lucky. Plumer, like Grierson, was not only a very senior lieutenant general but an extremely capable one. He would have been formidable rival, not only because Kitchener liked him but because years earlier, as an examiner at the staff college, he had expressed a scaldingly negative opinion of his student Haig. But he arrived in France under a tremendous handicap: French's intense dislike. He was under a microscope from the start, his every decision questioned.
French's deputy chief of staff was the BEF's archschemer, the wily Henry Wilson, who as director of military operations during the Curragh Mutiny had served as the Unionists' spy inside the general staff and was described by Haig as "such a terrrible intriguer, and sure to make mischief." As Britain's primary liaison to the French general staff before the war, Wilson had made important friends in Paris, and almost from the start of the war he was trying to use them to get himself promoted to chief of staff. He and French were united by their hatred of Kitchener, whom Wilson called "as much an enemy of England as Moltke."
When French's chief of staff was replaced, the went not to Wilson but to "Wully Robertson, who had performed brilliantly as the BEF's quartermaster general in the opening weeks of the war. He was not French's choice-Kitchener had blocked Wilson's appointment-and not for the 1st time he paid the price of being up from the ranks. French regularly dined with Wilson while excluding Robertson. Haig was more careful in showing his disdain. "He means well and will succeed, I feel sure," he wrote of Robertson. "How much easier though it is to work with a gentlemen."
At the top of this dysfunctional brotherhood stood the stern and iron-will Kitchener. Like Joffre and Gallieni, he had spent most of his life in far-flung colonial outposts. At age 20 he had interrupted his training to serve as a volunteer on the French side in the Franco-Prussian War, and soon thereafter he was sent to the Middle East with Royal Engineers. From then on his career was the stuff of legend. By 1886, when he was 36, he was governor of Britain's Red Sea territories. He became commander of the Egyptian army in 1892, a baron after putting down a rebellion in the Sudan in 1898, and Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum after leading the British forces to victory in the South African War(Burning the farms of the Boers and herding their wives and children into concentration camps, where they died by the 1,000's). He was commander in chief in India from 1902 to 1909, battling endlessly with viceroy, and from 1911 he ruled Egypt and the Sudan as British proconsul. By 1914 he had little knowledge of English society or politics and was so accustomed to being in charge of everyone and everything around him that he had virtually lost the ability to cooperate of delegate.
He happened to be in England during the crisis of August 1914.(He had been invited to come home to be made an earl.) When the war began, he was on a ship preparing to return to Egypt. Asquith called him back to London, asking him to join the cabinet as secretary of state for war. He agreed but without enthusiasm; his sole remaining ambition was to become Viceroy of India, and until that became possible, he preferred to remain in Cairo. In his new post(he did not relinquish his commission as the army's senior field marshal, or the salary that went with it) he was 1st serving officer to hold a British cabinet post since the 1600's. He was a shrewd man and a living legend, as familiar a symbol of the empire as the King. Other members of the government and the army were skeptical when he predicted that the main German invasion force would cross Belgium before entering France, incredulous when he warned that the war was going to last 3 years at least and that Britain would have to build an army of a 1,000,000 men. He was right on all points. In the end not a 1,000,000 but 51/2 million men would serve in His Majesty's armed forces.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
BACK FROM THE MARNE
"Attack, whatever happens! The Germans are at the extreme limit
of their efforts...Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other."
FERDINAND FOCH
Fears that war would mean a continent in flames had literally come true by early September. The entire Western Front from Paris to the Alps had turned into a vast bloody slug fest in which more than a dozen armies were fully and simultaneously engaged. In the east, Galicia was the scene of a massive running battle between the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian forces of Field Marshal Conrad. In East Prussia the German 8th Army was following up its victory at Tannenberg with a pursuit aimed at the destruction of Rennenkampf's Russian 2nd Army near the Masurian Lakes.
Nothing was more critical than the point where the German right met Joffre's left. Still unaware of the existence of a new French army at Paris, seeing no reason to halt as Moltke had ordered, Kluck continued to plunge southward in search of the French 5th Army's flank or, failing that, whatever remained of the BEF. But his army was in danger of crumbling even as it advanced.
"Our soldiers are worn out," a member of Kluck's staff was recording as early as September 2nd. "For 4 days they have been marching 40 kilometers a day. The ground is difficult, the roads are torn up, trees felled, the fields pitted by shell like strainers. The soldiers stagger at every step, their faces are plastered with dust, their uniforms are in rags; one might call them living rag-bags. They march with closed eyes, and sing in chorus to keep from falling asleep as the march. The certainty of victory close at hand and of their triumphal entry into Paris sustains them and whips up their enthusiasm. Without this certainty of victory they would lie down where they are, to sleep at last, no matter where, no matter how. And, to give their bodies a drunkenness like that of their souls, they drink enormously. But this drunkenness also helps to keep them up. Today, after an inspection, the General(Kluck) was furiously angry. He wanted to put an end to this collective debauch. We have just persuaded him not to give severe orders. It is better no to be too strict, otherwise the army couldn't go on at all. For this abnormal weariness abnormal stimulants are needed. In Paris we shall remedy all this."
And Paris still seemed an achievable goal. The British, despite Sir John French's promise to rejoin the fight, were continuing to withdraw.(French would later explain this as an effort to connect as quickly as possible with reinforcements and supplies before turning north.)
Then everything changed. Intercepted German radio messages, some of them not in code, informed the French that Kluck was now heading not toward Paris but southeast. Papers found on a German officer who had taken a wrong turn and been shot dead by a French patrol indicated the same thing-showed not only where the various parts of Kluck's army were but where they had been ordered to go. Joseph Gallieni, quickly grasping the implications, assembled a small group of reconnaissance pilots and told them where he wanted them to fly the next morning and what he wanted them to look for. They returned with the news he wanted; Kluck' army, formed into 6 thick columns, was indeed moving to the southeast. In doing so it was exposing its right flank to Gallieni's new 6th Army. The opportunity for counterattack appeared to have come at last.
Gallieni ordered the 6th Army, still only half-organized and made up largely of inexperienced reserve troops, to get ready to move. Then he took off by car to visit British headquarters and get Sir John French to join in the attack. French was away when Gallieni arrived, and the staff officers who received this unexpected visitor did so with amused and barely concealed contempt. One of them said later that Gallieni, ungainly and unkempt in his high laced-up black boots and yellow leggings, looked like a "comedian," like somebody "no British officer would be seen talking to." After 3 hours of waiting, having extracted from his hosts nothing better than a promise that someone would telephone him after French's return, Gallieni departed. The promise call when it finally came, informed him that the BEF would be continuing its move to the south; the British had checked with Joffre and received no encouragement to cooperate with Gallieni. Wherever he turned, Gallieni found little cooperation. Joffre, though he approved Gallieni's attack, said he wanted it launched from south rather than north of the Marne. This would blunt its impact, Gallieni thought, and he spent long minutes on the telephone changing Joffre's mind. Worse, Joffre was reluctant to send the additional troops needed for hitting the Germans hard. Worst, when he understood just how rich in opportunity this situation was, how laden with potential glory, Joffre took the 6th army back from Gallieni, who then returned to Paris.
Kluck was too good a soldier to offer quite as fat a target as Gallieni hoped. Though he continued his advance, he did not leave his flank uncovered. He moved one corps-2 infantry divisions plus artillery-to the River Ourcq to his west, where it took up defensive positions facing Paris and was directly in the path of the French 6th Army as it began moving eastward. This corps, though made up of reserve units, was commanded by a capable officer,
GENERAL VON GRONAU
Gronau moved his troops onto high ground, had them dig in, and used his artillery to tear at the French as they began arriving on the scene. The result was a battle so singularly uneven that it proved to be the undoing of any hopes for the quick destruction of Kluck's army. On the German side, success gave a last burst of life to Kluck's hopes of breaking the Entente left.
On September 5th France, Great Britain, and Russia entered into the Treaty of London, by which they formalized their Triple Entente and pledged that none of them would enter into a separate peace with Germany. On the same day a member of Moltke's staff,
LIEUTENANT COLONEL RICHARD HENTSCH
arrived at Kluck's headquarters to alert him to the existence and probable approach of a French force in the west. While he was there, a report arrived from Gronau stating that he was under attack(by that same French force) and needed help. Kluck wasn't alarmed. He assumed that this was less a serious French assault than an attempt to trick him into halting the 1st Army's advance. But he did the prudent thing and detached another corps to go back to support Gronau. He also sent a message to Bulow, asking for the return of 2 corps that he had earlier made available to the 2nd Army. Bulow was reluctant to comply, knowing that doing so would weaken his own depleted right wing. If he had known that the BEF was now moving northward in his direction-French had turned around at last-he might not have agreed. But under the circumstances, with Kluck under attack and no one currently attacking him, Bulow had little choice. Though Kluck's reinforcement of Gronau was a turning point, the 1st backward movement by a sizable unit of the German right wing, it didn't mark the end of the offensive. Kluck was still bent on victory.
He was no longer defining victory as Paris, however, and that became a problem in terms of troop morale. For the soldiers of Kluck's army, arrival at Paris meant an end to their long ordeal. THis is clear in a German officer's account of an episode on September 3rd. "One of our battalions was marching wearily forward," he wrote. "All at once, while passing a crossroad, they discovered a signpost, on which they read; Paris, 37 kilometers(23 miles). It was the 1st signpost that hadn't been erased. On seeing it, the battalion was as though shaken up by an electric current. The word Paris, which they have just read, drives them crazy. Some of them embrace the wretched signpost, others dance around it. Cries, yells of enthusiasm, accompany these mad actions. This signpost is their evidence that we are near Paris, that, without doubt, we shall soon be really there. This notice board has had a miraculous effect. Faces light up, weariness seems to disappear, the march is resumed, alert, cadenced, in spite of the abominable ground in this forest. Songs burst forth louder." But now, with Kluck's shift to the southeast and the move back to the Ourcq, the dream of Paris had to be let go.
The Germans weren't, however, out of fight. By nightfall on September 5th, Gronau's artillery had badly disordered the advance of the French 6th Army, which was growing rapidly as reinforcements continued to arrive. At one point, when the French appeared to be on the verge on panic, a dashingly aggressive officer named
COLONEL ROBERT NIVELLE
a man who like Petain had nearly reached retirement age without achieving the rank of general, led a heroic intervention with field artillery. Rolling his guns through the French infantry to where they could fire point -blank, he drove the Germans back.
After dark, judging correctly that he was badly outnumbered and that his stand had given Kluck sufficient time to adjust, Gronau pulled back from the Ourcq. In doing so he probably saved his corps. The 6th Army attacked by moonlight but found the Germans gone. Kluck,understanding now that the threat from the wast was a serious one, marched his entire army back across the Marne toward the Ourcq. As always, he was thinking aggressively, looking not just to defend himself but to encircle and destroy his enemy.
But by now Kluck was laden with problems. He was no longer engaged with the main line of French armies, no longer in position to contribute to the decision that appeared to be approaching along that line. In pulling back to the Ourcq, he had opened a 35 mile gap between his army and Bulow's, and in the next few days this gap would grow even wider. Between Kluck's and Bulow's armies were only 2 divisions of cavalry and a few units of light infantry-not nearly enough to hold off a significant enemy advance. The exploitation of such gaps had been the key to many of Napoleon's victories.
"Kluck marched his entire army back across the Marne to the Ourcq" is far too simple a statement to reflect what was happening that day. Every such movement meant yet another long and hurried trek, to be followed by yet another firefight, for men who had been marching and fighting for weeks. Kluck's men had been issued no rations in 5 days. They rarely got more than a few hours of sleep. Their uniforms were in tatters, and their boots were falling off their feet as they struggled to drag with them the cannon and shells without which they could neither attack nor defend themselves. And they were now out numbered.
The French 6th army, though fresh, was still too raw and unorganized to be a match for Kluck's now-hardened veterans. When it renewed its attack on September 6th, it again ran headlong into waiting German artillery. The result was another disaster-not merely a failure to dislodge Kluck's troops from their hastily improvised defenses but a debacle that left the French units shattered. Kluck's hopes of finishing off the 6th army began to look more plausible.
Off to the east, the French were falling back in several places, The anchoring strong point of their line, the great fortress of Verdun, was in deepening jeopardy. By September 6th it appeared possible that the entire line from Verdun southward might begin to come apart. Moltke's new plan, dual breakthroughs leading to a grand climatic encirclement, also was beginning to seem plausible. The hour of decision had arrived, and everyone knew it.
The BEF was feeling its way northward in company with a corps of French cavalry and making extremely slow progress. More by happenstance than design, it inched into the gap between Kluck and Bulow. This was a frightening and exciting development. If the 2 German armies converged, the BEF would be crushed. If the British pushed forward swiftly, on the other hand, they might break through to the German rear and create havoc there. They didn't move swiftly. In part this was because of mistakes; one British division spent an entire day moving in a confused circle, sot that at nightfall its lead units ran into the supply train that formed its own tail end. But it was also an understandable reaction to having enormous enemy forces on both of its flanks. What the British didn't know was that neither Kluck nor Bulow was in any position to turn on them.
Kluck, on their left, was occupied with the French 6th army. Bulow-now at the end of the continuous German line, with his own flank bare-was in a hard fight with Franchet d'Esperey's 5th army. Because of his return of 2 corps to Kluck, Bulow was weak on his right. He was being hammered there by a division commanded by the recently promoted
Brigadier General Petain
And his troops were being pushed back and out of position. Kluck and Bulow were alarmed when they learned that the British were now between them, and both reacted characteristically. Kluck swung some of his troops around to face a possible advance by the British but continued to batter away with his main force at the French. Bulow began to plan a withdrawal in which both his army and Kluck's would pull back at least 10 miles and reconnect north of the British.
The fighting intensified all along the line. The French were on the defensive everywhere but on their left; on the right the need was to hold the line against German armies trying to deliver the breakthrough that Moltke had ordered. Gallieni began filling Paris taxicabs with soldiers and sending them out to swell the ranks of the army that Joffre had taken from him. His energy, despite so many reasons to be grudging, caused the 6th Army to keep growing hour by hour.
The madness rose to its climax on September 8th and 9th. The outcome would depend on whether any of the German armies in the east could crack the French line or, alternatively, whether the German 1st Army or the French 6th Army could destroy its opponent. The Battle of the Marne became series of crises following one after another until finally something broke down. September 7th ended with Foch's new army seperated from General von Hausen's German 3rd by a treachrously soggy expanse of territory called the Marais(the Marsh) of Saint-Gond. Foch, determined as always to carry the fight to his enemy but naturally assuming that advance across a swamp was not feasible, had launched an attack around both sides. Both wings of this attack rain into a strong German defenses and were thrown back with heavy loss of life. Hausen's staff, meanwhile, had been exploring the interior of the Marais and discovering that it wasn't at all impassable as its name indicated. Early the next morning the Germans moved across it without the kind of artillery preparation that would have alerted the French, mounted a dawn charge that caught Foch's center unprepared, and forced it out of its defenses. Though this clash was a defeat for the French, it added to Foch's growing reputation, "Attack, whatever happens!" he said at Saint-Gond. "The Germans are at the extreme limit of their efforts. Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other!" He had been pushed back, but his line hadn't snapped. The Germans still didn't have the breakthrough on which all their hopes depended.
Not only at Saint-Gond but at many places along the front, the French, like the Germans, were near the end of their resources. "For my part I preserve only a confused and burning recollection of the days of 6th and 7th September," a cavalryman would observe afterward. "The heat was suffocating. The exhausted troops, covered with a layer of black dust sticking to their sweat, looked like devils. The tired horses, no longer off-saddled, had large open sores on their backs. The heat was burning, thirst intolerable...we knew nothing, and we continued our march as in a dream, under the scorching sun, gnawed by hunger, parched with thirst, and so exhausted by fatigue that I could see my comrades stiffen in the saddle to keep themselves from falling." A French General painted an even darker picture.
"What a mess!!" he exclaimed. "What a shambles!! It was a terrifying sight...no order in the ranks...straggling along...men emaciated, in rags and tatters, most without haversacks, many without riffles, some marching painfully, leaning on sticks and looking as though they were about to fall asleep."
Moltke, a 170 miles to the north at his headquarters in Luxembourg, was getting almost no reports from Kluck or Bulow. Kaiser Wilhelm was in Luxembourg also, complete with an enormous staff of his own advisory groups that also had staffs. This may be one reason why Moltke unlike Joffre, never ventured out to see for himself what was happening at the front. He had reason to fear that in his absence the kaiser, hungry for a great victory and (as Moltke told his wife in the deeply gloomy letters he sent home every day) incapable of understanding the dangers of the situation, would take personal command and do something disastrous.
While Hausen was attacking Foch across the Marais de Saint-Gond, Moltke again sent Colonel Hentsch, the head of his intelligence staff, off to the front my car. Hentsch's instructions-oral rather than written, so that whether he ultimately exceeded his authority can never be conclusively answered-were to visit the commanders of all but the 2 southernmost German armies, determine whether they were or were not in trouble, and send reports back to Moltke. Hentsch worked his way westward along the front, visiting the headquarters of the 5th Army of Crown Prince Wilhelm, the 4th Army of Duke Albrecht ofWurttemberg, and Hausen's 3rd Army, He found the situation of each of these armies acceptable, with no reason for alarm, and informed Moltke accordingly. It was evening when he got to Bulow's 2nd Army, and there the picture began to darken. Bulow had Franchet d'Esperey's battered but hard-fighting army in front of him, and between himself and Kluck to the west was a gap that now stretched for as much as 50 miles and had been penetrated by the BEF. A shaken Bulow told Hentsch that only a 'voluntary concentric retreat' by his army and Kluck's could divert a disaster. This wasn't a loss of nerve on Bulow's part. His position was dangerously weak. Petain's attacks had captured tactically important terrain, so that Bulow's right was continuing to be pushed back into an increasingly awkward position.
And this was only one of many emergencies. At the eastern end of the front, the French 1st and 2nd Armies were holding high ground near the Alsace border and repelling repeated attacks. The commander of the 2nd Army, Castelnau, absorbing news of the death in combat of his son(he would loose 2 more sons before the war ended), reported to Joffre that he had to withdraw from Nancy or risk the loss of his entire force. Joffre told him to hold where he was at all costs for at least another 24 hours. To Castelnau's north, around Verdun, the French 3rd Army was hanging on to rubble that once had been stout French fortifications and slaughtering the oncoming Germans.
Far away in East Prussia, at the Masurian Lakes, Hindenburg's 8th Army was closing in on Rennenkampf's retreating Russians. Even that wasn't the end of it: in Galicia, the main forces of the Austro-Hungarian army were engaged with more than 2 million Russian troops in yet another series of battles that were as confusing as they were bloody but in the end would prove little less important than Tannenberg and the Marne.
The only truly fluid sector of the Western Front remained as before the front's western extreme. An incident of September 8th indicates just how confused the situation was, with large and small French, German, and British units in motion all over the landscape. In the afternoon a detachment of French cavalry suddenly came upon a caravan of 3 German automobiles. When the horsemen started toward them at a gallop, the drivers quickly turned and sped off. In one car was Kluck, moving among the dispersed units of his army. Still tirelessly combative despite his 68 years, Kluck remained confident of his chances. For 3 days the French had been throwing themselves at his position on the Ourcq. Having withstood these attacks and worn the French down, he now saw an opportunity to finish them off before some other enemy force-possibly the BEF-could fall on him from the rear. He ordered an attack. The goal this time would be an encirclement of the 6th Army from the north. The assualt would be lead by a corps of infantry under
GENERAL FERDINAND VON QUAST
This was one of the corps that Kluck had lent to Bulow and then taken back. It had crossed Belgium and France with Kluck, had fought at Mons, had been in the thick of things all through the campaign, and was very nearly spent. At the end of the day Kluck said in a message to his army that "the decision will be decided tomorrow by an enveloping attack."
Early on the morning of Wednesday, September 9th, Hentsch set out to find Kluck. The roads were jammed with soldiers and equipment moving eastward. This was Kluck's shift of part of his army positions from which it could protect its rear, along with usual pathetic streams of refugees. The direction of the flow gave the appearance of an army in retreat. It appeared to support Bulow's appeal for a general pullback. It took Hentsch 5 hours to cover 50 miles, and during those hours Quast unleashed is attack. The 6th Army didn't simply retreat-it fell apart. French troops fled in all directions.
In East Prussia, Rennenkampf was still withdrawing, trying to escape destruction at the hands of a German force that was smaller than his but brimming with confidence in the aftermath of Tannenberg. Desperate, he sent 2 of his divisions in a heroic, suicidal attack on the advancing German center. Both divisions were destroyed, but they accomplished their purpose. The Germans were stopped, and what remained of Rennenkampf's army got away.
On the plains of Galicia, Conrad's long fight with the Russians was ending in disastrous-in almost final-defeat. He had moved against the Russians despite being grossly outnumbered, despite learning that the Germans wouldn't be able to support him, and despite the disappointment of learning that Romania with its army of 600,000 men wouldn't be joining the Central Powers as hoped. He had sent 31 divisions against the Russians' 45 infantry and 18 cavalry divisions, and the results were inevitable. The Austrians were driven back a 150 miles to the Carpathian Mountains. Conrad had lost more than 400,000 men-100,000 killed, and equal number taken prisoner, 220,000 wounded-plus 216 pieces of artillery and a 1,000 locomotives. He had lost more than a 4th of the manpower with which he had begun the war, and among that 4th were insupportably large numbers of Austria-Hungary's commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Less than a month and a half into the war, his capacity for dealing effectively not just with the Russians but even with smaller enemies was nearly exhausted. From now on Vienna would be not so much Berlin's junior partner as a weak and burdensome appendage. The Germans would grow fond of saying that being allied with the Hapsburg empire was like being "shackled to a corpse."
Conrad himself shared in a personal way in the immensity of the tragedy. "I have one of my sons seriously ill," he lamented, "and the son I idolized in a mound of corpses at Ravaruska." Around Verdun, where the French were hanging on by such a thin thread that Joffre twice authorized the commander of is 3rd to retreat if necessary, September 9th brought a final, convulsive German assault. The French had no reserves left, no way to seal up any holes in their front. The did, however, have the remains of their immensely strong defenses. In the years leading up to 1914 the main Verdun forts had been sand and loose rock piled onto the original masonry and reinforced concrete as a top shell. Heavy artillery had been installed within armored retractable turrets. As a result, these forts could withstand direct hits even by the kinds of monster guns that had wrecked Liege and Namur, and they could also keep attackers under continuous fire. The rough terrain stiffened French resistance by making retreat almost impossible. At the same time it worked against the Germans by compounding the difficulties of bringing in artillery. The French not only kept their line intact but butchered the attackers as they themselves had been butchered in their earlier offensives. On the night of September 9th the Germans made a last effort to punch through, but in the darkness they ended up blasting away at one another.
When Hentsch arrived at 1st Army headquarters at last, Kluck was away, keeping a close eye on the victory unfolding at the Ourcq. Hentsch talked with Kluck's chief of staff, explaining that the BEF was now north of the Marne, that Bulow was planning to withdraw, and that there was no alternative to Kluck's withdrawal as well. While they were talking, a message arrived from Bulow reporting that he was starting his retreat. This left nothing to discuss or decide, so Hentsch departed. When Kluck learned of Hentsch's visit and the plans of a retreat, his first reaction was to resist, to insist as always on pushing forward. When he learned that Bulow was already withdrawing, however, he had no choice but to yield. With Bulow moving north, his army was so vulnerable that nothing except retreat could possibly save it.
From the German perspective, the story of the Schlieffen right wing had a melancholy final chapter. At most the same moment when Kluck was accepting the necessity of retreat, Quast's corps was tearing apart the last of the disintegrating French defenses. Nothing lay between it and Paris but 30 miles of open, undefended ground. It must have been like having an impossible dream come true: all they had to do was keep marching. But then new orders arrived from Kluck: Quast was to call off his attack and turn back. The 1st Army was retreating.
It was over. Quast's men had more marching to do, but now they would be heading back in the direction from which they had come. No one felt the melancholy more deeply than Moltke. "I can't find words to describe the crushing responsibility that has weighed upon my shoulders during the last few days and still weighs on me today," he wrote his wife. "The appalling difficulties of our present situation hang before my eyes like a dark curtain through which I can see nothing."
"Attack, whatever happens! The Germans are at the extreme limit
of their efforts...Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other."
FERDINAND FOCH
Fears that war would mean a continent in flames had literally come true by early September. The entire Western Front from Paris to the Alps had turned into a vast bloody slug fest in which more than a dozen armies were fully and simultaneously engaged. In the east, Galicia was the scene of a massive running battle between the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian forces of Field Marshal Conrad. In East Prussia the German 8th Army was following up its victory at Tannenberg with a pursuit aimed at the destruction of Rennenkampf's Russian 2nd Army near the Masurian Lakes.
Nothing was more critical than the point where the German right met Joffre's left. Still unaware of the existence of a new French army at Paris, seeing no reason to halt as Moltke had ordered, Kluck continued to plunge southward in search of the French 5th Army's flank or, failing that, whatever remained of the BEF. But his army was in danger of crumbling even as it advanced.
"Our soldiers are worn out," a member of Kluck's staff was recording as early as September 2nd. "For 4 days they have been marching 40 kilometers a day. The ground is difficult, the roads are torn up, trees felled, the fields pitted by shell like strainers. The soldiers stagger at every step, their faces are plastered with dust, their uniforms are in rags; one might call them living rag-bags. They march with closed eyes, and sing in chorus to keep from falling asleep as the march. The certainty of victory close at hand and of their triumphal entry into Paris sustains them and whips up their enthusiasm. Without this certainty of victory they would lie down where they are, to sleep at last, no matter where, no matter how. And, to give their bodies a drunkenness like that of their souls, they drink enormously. But this drunkenness also helps to keep them up. Today, after an inspection, the General(Kluck) was furiously angry. He wanted to put an end to this collective debauch. We have just persuaded him not to give severe orders. It is better no to be too strict, otherwise the army couldn't go on at all. For this abnormal weariness abnormal stimulants are needed. In Paris we shall remedy all this."
And Paris still seemed an achievable goal. The British, despite Sir John French's promise to rejoin the fight, were continuing to withdraw.(French would later explain this as an effort to connect as quickly as possible with reinforcements and supplies before turning north.)
Then everything changed. Intercepted German radio messages, some of them not in code, informed the French that Kluck was now heading not toward Paris but southeast. Papers found on a German officer who had taken a wrong turn and been shot dead by a French patrol indicated the same thing-showed not only where the various parts of Kluck's army were but where they had been ordered to go. Joseph Gallieni, quickly grasping the implications, assembled a small group of reconnaissance pilots and told them where he wanted them to fly the next morning and what he wanted them to look for. They returned with the news he wanted; Kluck' army, formed into 6 thick columns, was indeed moving to the southeast. In doing so it was exposing its right flank to Gallieni's new 6th Army. The opportunity for counterattack appeared to have come at last.
Gallieni ordered the 6th Army, still only half-organized and made up largely of inexperienced reserve troops, to get ready to move. Then he took off by car to visit British headquarters and get Sir John French to join in the attack. French was away when Gallieni arrived, and the staff officers who received this unexpected visitor did so with amused and barely concealed contempt. One of them said later that Gallieni, ungainly and unkempt in his high laced-up black boots and yellow leggings, looked like a "comedian," like somebody "no British officer would be seen talking to." After 3 hours of waiting, having extracted from his hosts nothing better than a promise that someone would telephone him after French's return, Gallieni departed. The promise call when it finally came, informed him that the BEF would be continuing its move to the south; the British had checked with Joffre and received no encouragement to cooperate with Gallieni. Wherever he turned, Gallieni found little cooperation. Joffre, though he approved Gallieni's attack, said he wanted it launched from south rather than north of the Marne. This would blunt its impact, Gallieni thought, and he spent long minutes on the telephone changing Joffre's mind. Worse, Joffre was reluctant to send the additional troops needed for hitting the Germans hard. Worst, when he understood just how rich in opportunity this situation was, how laden with potential glory, Joffre took the 6th army back from Gallieni, who then returned to Paris.
Kluck was too good a soldier to offer quite as fat a target as Gallieni hoped. Though he continued his advance, he did not leave his flank uncovered. He moved one corps-2 infantry divisions plus artillery-to the River Ourcq to his west, where it took up defensive positions facing Paris and was directly in the path of the French 6th Army as it began moving eastward. This corps, though made up of reserve units, was commanded by a capable officer,
Gronau moved his troops onto high ground, had them dig in, and used his artillery to tear at the French as they began arriving on the scene. The result was a battle so singularly uneven that it proved to be the undoing of any hopes for the quick destruction of Kluck's army. On the German side, success gave a last burst of life to Kluck's hopes of breaking the Entente left.
On September 5th France, Great Britain, and Russia entered into the Treaty of London, by which they formalized their Triple Entente and pledged that none of them would enter into a separate peace with Germany. On the same day a member of Moltke's staff,
arrived at Kluck's headquarters to alert him to the existence and probable approach of a French force in the west. While he was there, a report arrived from Gronau stating that he was under attack(by that same French force) and needed help. Kluck wasn't alarmed. He assumed that this was less a serious French assault than an attempt to trick him into halting the 1st Army's advance. But he did the prudent thing and detached another corps to go back to support Gronau. He also sent a message to Bulow, asking for the return of 2 corps that he had earlier made available to the 2nd Army. Bulow was reluctant to comply, knowing that doing so would weaken his own depleted right wing. If he had known that the BEF was now moving northward in his direction-French had turned around at last-he might not have agreed. But under the circumstances, with Kluck under attack and no one currently attacking him, Bulow had little choice. Though Kluck's reinforcement of Gronau was a turning point, the 1st backward movement by a sizable unit of the German right wing, it didn't mark the end of the offensive. Kluck was still bent on victory.
He was no longer defining victory as Paris, however, and that became a problem in terms of troop morale. For the soldiers of Kluck's army, arrival at Paris meant an end to their long ordeal. THis is clear in a German officer's account of an episode on September 3rd. "One of our battalions was marching wearily forward," he wrote. "All at once, while passing a crossroad, they discovered a signpost, on which they read; Paris, 37 kilometers(23 miles). It was the 1st signpost that hadn't been erased. On seeing it, the battalion was as though shaken up by an electric current. The word Paris, which they have just read, drives them crazy. Some of them embrace the wretched signpost, others dance around it. Cries, yells of enthusiasm, accompany these mad actions. This signpost is their evidence that we are near Paris, that, without doubt, we shall soon be really there. This notice board has had a miraculous effect. Faces light up, weariness seems to disappear, the march is resumed, alert, cadenced, in spite of the abominable ground in this forest. Songs burst forth louder." But now, with Kluck's shift to the southeast and the move back to the Ourcq, the dream of Paris had to be let go.
The Germans weren't, however, out of fight. By nightfall on September 5th, Gronau's artillery had badly disordered the advance of the French 6th Army, which was growing rapidly as reinforcements continued to arrive. At one point, when the French appeared to be on the verge on panic, a dashingly aggressive officer named
a man who like Petain had nearly reached retirement age without achieving the rank of general, led a heroic intervention with field artillery. Rolling his guns through the French infantry to where they could fire point -blank, he drove the Germans back.
After dark, judging correctly that he was badly outnumbered and that his stand had given Kluck sufficient time to adjust, Gronau pulled back from the Ourcq. In doing so he probably saved his corps. The 6th Army attacked by moonlight but found the Germans gone. Kluck,understanding now that the threat from the wast was a serious one, marched his entire army back across the Marne toward the Ourcq. As always, he was thinking aggressively, looking not just to defend himself but to encircle and destroy his enemy.
But by now Kluck was laden with problems. He was no longer engaged with the main line of French armies, no longer in position to contribute to the decision that appeared to be approaching along that line. In pulling back to the Ourcq, he had opened a 35 mile gap between his army and Bulow's, and in the next few days this gap would grow even wider. Between Kluck's and Bulow's armies were only 2 divisions of cavalry and a few units of light infantry-not nearly enough to hold off a significant enemy advance. The exploitation of such gaps had been the key to many of Napoleon's victories.
"Kluck marched his entire army back across the Marne to the Ourcq" is far too simple a statement to reflect what was happening that day. Every such movement meant yet another long and hurried trek, to be followed by yet another firefight, for men who had been marching and fighting for weeks. Kluck's men had been issued no rations in 5 days. They rarely got more than a few hours of sleep. Their uniforms were in tatters, and their boots were falling off their feet as they struggled to drag with them the cannon and shells without which they could neither attack nor defend themselves. And they were now out numbered.
The French 6th army, though fresh, was still too raw and unorganized to be a match for Kluck's now-hardened veterans. When it renewed its attack on September 6th, it again ran headlong into waiting German artillery. The result was another disaster-not merely a failure to dislodge Kluck's troops from their hastily improvised defenses but a debacle that left the French units shattered. Kluck's hopes of finishing off the 6th army began to look more plausible.
Off to the east, the French were falling back in several places, The anchoring strong point of their line, the great fortress of Verdun, was in deepening jeopardy. By September 6th it appeared possible that the entire line from Verdun southward might begin to come apart. Moltke's new plan, dual breakthroughs leading to a grand climatic encirclement, also was beginning to seem plausible. The hour of decision had arrived, and everyone knew it.
The BEF was feeling its way northward in company with a corps of French cavalry and making extremely slow progress. More by happenstance than design, it inched into the gap between Kluck and Bulow. This was a frightening and exciting development. If the 2 German armies converged, the BEF would be crushed. If the British pushed forward swiftly, on the other hand, they might break through to the German rear and create havoc there. They didn't move swiftly. In part this was because of mistakes; one British division spent an entire day moving in a confused circle, sot that at nightfall its lead units ran into the supply train that formed its own tail end. But it was also an understandable reaction to having enormous enemy forces on both of its flanks. What the British didn't know was that neither Kluck nor Bulow was in any position to turn on them.
Kluck, on their left, was occupied with the French 6th army. Bulow-now at the end of the continuous German line, with his own flank bare-was in a hard fight with Franchet d'Esperey's 5th army. Because of his return of 2 corps to Kluck, Bulow was weak on his right. He was being hammered there by a division commanded by the recently promoted
And his troops were being pushed back and out of position. Kluck and Bulow were alarmed when they learned that the British were now between them, and both reacted characteristically. Kluck swung some of his troops around to face a possible advance by the British but continued to batter away with his main force at the French. Bulow began to plan a withdrawal in which both his army and Kluck's would pull back at least 10 miles and reconnect north of the British.
The fighting intensified all along the line. The French were on the defensive everywhere but on their left; on the right the need was to hold the line against German armies trying to deliver the breakthrough that Moltke had ordered. Gallieni began filling Paris taxicabs with soldiers and sending them out to swell the ranks of the army that Joffre had taken from him. His energy, despite so many reasons to be grudging, caused the 6th Army to keep growing hour by hour.
The madness rose to its climax on September 8th and 9th. The outcome would depend on whether any of the German armies in the east could crack the French line or, alternatively, whether the German 1st Army or the French 6th Army could destroy its opponent. The Battle of the Marne became series of crises following one after another until finally something broke down. September 7th ended with Foch's new army seperated from General von Hausen's German 3rd by a treachrously soggy expanse of territory called the Marais(the Marsh) of Saint-Gond. Foch, determined as always to carry the fight to his enemy but naturally assuming that advance across a swamp was not feasible, had launched an attack around both sides. Both wings of this attack rain into a strong German defenses and were thrown back with heavy loss of life. Hausen's staff, meanwhile, had been exploring the interior of the Marais and discovering that it wasn't at all impassable as its name indicated. Early the next morning the Germans moved across it without the kind of artillery preparation that would have alerted the French, mounted a dawn charge that caught Foch's center unprepared, and forced it out of its defenses. Though this clash was a defeat for the French, it added to Foch's growing reputation, "Attack, whatever happens!" he said at Saint-Gond. "The Germans are at the extreme limit of their efforts. Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other!" He had been pushed back, but his line hadn't snapped. The Germans still didn't have the breakthrough on which all their hopes depended.
Not only at Saint-Gond but at many places along the front, the French, like the Germans, were near the end of their resources. "For my part I preserve only a confused and burning recollection of the days of 6th and 7th September," a cavalryman would observe afterward. "The heat was suffocating. The exhausted troops, covered with a layer of black dust sticking to their sweat, looked like devils. The tired horses, no longer off-saddled, had large open sores on their backs. The heat was burning, thirst intolerable...we knew nothing, and we continued our march as in a dream, under the scorching sun, gnawed by hunger, parched with thirst, and so exhausted by fatigue that I could see my comrades stiffen in the saddle to keep themselves from falling." A French General painted an even darker picture.
"What a mess!!" he exclaimed. "What a shambles!! It was a terrifying sight...no order in the ranks...straggling along...men emaciated, in rags and tatters, most without haversacks, many without riffles, some marching painfully, leaning on sticks and looking as though they were about to fall asleep."
Moltke, a 170 miles to the north at his headquarters in Luxembourg, was getting almost no reports from Kluck or Bulow. Kaiser Wilhelm was in Luxembourg also, complete with an enormous staff of his own advisory groups that also had staffs. This may be one reason why Moltke unlike Joffre, never ventured out to see for himself what was happening at the front. He had reason to fear that in his absence the kaiser, hungry for a great victory and (as Moltke told his wife in the deeply gloomy letters he sent home every day) incapable of understanding the dangers of the situation, would take personal command and do something disastrous.
While Hausen was attacking Foch across the Marais de Saint-Gond, Moltke again sent Colonel Hentsch, the head of his intelligence staff, off to the front my car. Hentsch's instructions-oral rather than written, so that whether he ultimately exceeded his authority can never be conclusively answered-were to visit the commanders of all but the 2 southernmost German armies, determine whether they were or were not in trouble, and send reports back to Moltke. Hentsch worked his way westward along the front, visiting the headquarters of the 5th Army of Crown Prince Wilhelm, the 4th Army of Duke Albrecht ofWurttemberg, and Hausen's 3rd Army, He found the situation of each of these armies acceptable, with no reason for alarm, and informed Moltke accordingly. It was evening when he got to Bulow's 2nd Army, and there the picture began to darken. Bulow had Franchet d'Esperey's battered but hard-fighting army in front of him, and between himself and Kluck to the west was a gap that now stretched for as much as 50 miles and had been penetrated by the BEF. A shaken Bulow told Hentsch that only a 'voluntary concentric retreat' by his army and Kluck's could divert a disaster. This wasn't a loss of nerve on Bulow's part. His position was dangerously weak. Petain's attacks had captured tactically important terrain, so that Bulow's right was continuing to be pushed back into an increasingly awkward position.
And this was only one of many emergencies. At the eastern end of the front, the French 1st and 2nd Armies were holding high ground near the Alsace border and repelling repeated attacks. The commander of the 2nd Army, Castelnau, absorbing news of the death in combat of his son(he would loose 2 more sons before the war ended), reported to Joffre that he had to withdraw from Nancy or risk the loss of his entire force. Joffre told him to hold where he was at all costs for at least another 24 hours. To Castelnau's north, around Verdun, the French 3rd Army was hanging on to rubble that once had been stout French fortifications and slaughtering the oncoming Germans.
Far away in East Prussia, at the Masurian Lakes, Hindenburg's 8th Army was closing in on Rennenkampf's retreating Russians. Even that wasn't the end of it: in Galicia, the main forces of the Austro-Hungarian army were engaged with more than 2 million Russian troops in yet another series of battles that were as confusing as they were bloody but in the end would prove little less important than Tannenberg and the Marne.
The only truly fluid sector of the Western Front remained as before the front's western extreme. An incident of September 8th indicates just how confused the situation was, with large and small French, German, and British units in motion all over the landscape. In the afternoon a detachment of French cavalry suddenly came upon a caravan of 3 German automobiles. When the horsemen started toward them at a gallop, the drivers quickly turned and sped off. In one car was Kluck, moving among the dispersed units of his army. Still tirelessly combative despite his 68 years, Kluck remained confident of his chances. For 3 days the French had been throwing themselves at his position on the Ourcq. Having withstood these attacks and worn the French down, he now saw an opportunity to finish them off before some other enemy force-possibly the BEF-could fall on him from the rear. He ordered an attack. The goal this time would be an encirclement of the 6th Army from the north. The assualt would be lead by a corps of infantry under
This was one of the corps that Kluck had lent to Bulow and then taken back. It had crossed Belgium and France with Kluck, had fought at Mons, had been in the thick of things all through the campaign, and was very nearly spent. At the end of the day Kluck said in a message to his army that "the decision will be decided tomorrow by an enveloping attack."
Early on the morning of Wednesday, September 9th, Hentsch set out to find Kluck. The roads were jammed with soldiers and equipment moving eastward. This was Kluck's shift of part of his army positions from which it could protect its rear, along with usual pathetic streams of refugees. The direction of the flow gave the appearance of an army in retreat. It appeared to support Bulow's appeal for a general pullback. It took Hentsch 5 hours to cover 50 miles, and during those hours Quast unleashed is attack. The 6th Army didn't simply retreat-it fell apart. French troops fled in all directions.
In East Prussia, Rennenkampf was still withdrawing, trying to escape destruction at the hands of a German force that was smaller than his but brimming with confidence in the aftermath of Tannenberg. Desperate, he sent 2 of his divisions in a heroic, suicidal attack on the advancing German center. Both divisions were destroyed, but they accomplished their purpose. The Germans were stopped, and what remained of Rennenkampf's army got away.
On the plains of Galicia, Conrad's long fight with the Russians was ending in disastrous-in almost final-defeat. He had moved against the Russians despite being grossly outnumbered, despite learning that the Germans wouldn't be able to support him, and despite the disappointment of learning that Romania with its army of 600,000 men wouldn't be joining the Central Powers as hoped. He had sent 31 divisions against the Russians' 45 infantry and 18 cavalry divisions, and the results were inevitable. The Austrians were driven back a 150 miles to the Carpathian Mountains. Conrad had lost more than 400,000 men-100,000 killed, and equal number taken prisoner, 220,000 wounded-plus 216 pieces of artillery and a 1,000 locomotives. He had lost more than a 4th of the manpower with which he had begun the war, and among that 4th were insupportably large numbers of Austria-Hungary's commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Less than a month and a half into the war, his capacity for dealing effectively not just with the Russians but even with smaller enemies was nearly exhausted. From now on Vienna would be not so much Berlin's junior partner as a weak and burdensome appendage. The Germans would grow fond of saying that being allied with the Hapsburg empire was like being "shackled to a corpse."
Conrad himself shared in a personal way in the immensity of the tragedy. "I have one of my sons seriously ill," he lamented, "and the son I idolized in a mound of corpses at Ravaruska." Around Verdun, where the French were hanging on by such a thin thread that Joffre twice authorized the commander of is 3rd to retreat if necessary, September 9th brought a final, convulsive German assault. The French had no reserves left, no way to seal up any holes in their front. The did, however, have the remains of their immensely strong defenses. In the years leading up to 1914 the main Verdun forts had been sand and loose rock piled onto the original masonry and reinforced concrete as a top shell. Heavy artillery had been installed within armored retractable turrets. As a result, these forts could withstand direct hits even by the kinds of monster guns that had wrecked Liege and Namur, and they could also keep attackers under continuous fire. The rough terrain stiffened French resistance by making retreat almost impossible. At the same time it worked against the Germans by compounding the difficulties of bringing in artillery. The French not only kept their line intact but butchered the attackers as they themselves had been butchered in their earlier offensives. On the night of September 9th the Germans made a last effort to punch through, but in the darkness they ended up blasting away at one another.
When Hentsch arrived at 1st Army headquarters at last, Kluck was away, keeping a close eye on the victory unfolding at the Ourcq. Hentsch talked with Kluck's chief of staff, explaining that the BEF was now north of the Marne, that Bulow was planning to withdraw, and that there was no alternative to Kluck's withdrawal as well. While they were talking, a message arrived from Bulow reporting that he was starting his retreat. This left nothing to discuss or decide, so Hentsch departed. When Kluck learned of Hentsch's visit and the plans of a retreat, his first reaction was to resist, to insist as always on pushing forward. When he learned that Bulow was already withdrawing, however, he had no choice but to yield. With Bulow moving north, his army was so vulnerable that nothing except retreat could possibly save it.
From the German perspective, the story of the Schlieffen right wing had a melancholy final chapter. At most the same moment when Kluck was accepting the necessity of retreat, Quast's corps was tearing apart the last of the disintegrating French defenses. Nothing lay between it and Paris but 30 miles of open, undefended ground. It must have been like having an impossible dream come true: all they had to do was keep marching. But then new orders arrived from Kluck: Quast was to call off his attack and turn back. The 1st Army was retreating.
It was over. Quast's men had more marching to do, but now they would be heading back in the direction from which they had come. No one felt the melancholy more deeply than Moltke. "I can't find words to describe the crushing responsibility that has weighed upon my shoulders during the last few days and still weighs on me today," he wrote his wife. "The appalling difficulties of our present situation hang before my eyes like a dark curtain through which I can see nothing."
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