1st Blood


The war began on August 2nd, when an advance force of German cavalry moved into Luxembourg to seize its network of railways. That same day Germany delivered an ultimatum to Belgium, demanding unobstructed passage for its armies.

Young King Albert

refused. His little army of only 7 divisions totaling 117,000 troops, began blowing up bridges and rail lines leading into Belgium from Germany. Now suddenly the little city of Liege, always locally important as a center of road, rail, and water transportation, became the most important place on the continent. There defenses, on high bluffs looming over the River Muse, dominated the narrow passage through which the Schlieffen right wing had to pass on its way westward. Unless these defenses were overcome, and quickly, the German advance would be blocked almost at its starting point and the entire offensive reduced to shambles.

Liege was not your ordinary city, it was a ring of 12 massive forts that together made it one of the most formidable military strong points in the world. Each of the forts contained 8 or 9 big guns under armored turrets, and each was built of reinforced concrete and designed to withstand direct hits from the heaviest  artillery then in existence.

General Gerard Leman

The Belgian commander at Liege, had some 8,000 troops inside the fort, plus as a mobile force, a division of 24,000 troops infantry, 500 cavalry, and 72 field guns.

The Germans, as part of their mobilization plan, had formed, trained, and stationed near the border a special strike force of 30,000 men plus mobile field artillery whose sole mission was to attack and neutralize the forts. When the lead elements of this force moved on Liege from the south on August 4th, they were greatly outnumbered by the defenders, but immediately launched a night assault. They met ferocious fire, and where thrown back. They quickly attacked again and again were repulsed. This put the Germans in a desperate situation. Leman, ordered by King Albert to hold his position at all costs(meaning death before surrender or retreat), learned of the appearance of German cavalry to his north and concluded that he would soon be surrounded. To keep his mobile force from capture, he sent it off to join the main Belgian army.

This helped remove a quarter of Belgium's total fighting forces from danger of encirclement and capture, but at a price; it ended any possibility that Leman would have enough troops to keep the Germans at a distance from which their guns would be unable to do their worst.

There now arrived on the scene, and on the world stage, an obscure German officer who quickly established himself as the hero of the siege and with startling speed would become one of the most important men in the German army. This was

Erich Ludendorff

(Note the absent of the von in the name-he wasn't a member of Prussia's Junker Aristocracy). Recently promoted to Major General, a tall portly, double-chinned 49 year old, Ludendorff was on temporary assignment as liaison between the Liege assault force and the German 2nd army, which was still assembling on the German side of the border. There had been good reason for giving Ludendorff this assignment; a few years earlier, as a key member of Moltke's staff he had developed the plans for the reduction of the Liege fortifications. (He had once spent vacation in Belgian in order to examine the defenses at 1st hand).

Now in the German army, unlike the French, it was customary to send staff officers into the field, into combat, where they could observe their plans in action, assist in making adjustments when reality began to intrude, and learn from the experience. But Lundendorff was constitutionally incapable of remaining a mere observer or adviser. He was the one who had sent the cavalry that, by by showing itself north of Liege, had caused Leman to send most of his troops away. Then, coming upon a brigade whose commander had been killed in one of the early attacks, he put himself in charge.

Bringing howitzers forward and directing their fire on the Belgian defenses, he led an assault that gave him possession of an expanse of high ground from which the city and its central citadel were clearly visible. When he could see no sign of activity around the citadel(because Leman had moved to one of the outlying forts),

Ludendorff drove to it. He shouted a demand for surrender while pounding on the gate with the pommel of his sword. Astoundingly, he was obeyed in spite of being greatly outnumbered. Thus the centerpiece of the Liege defenses fell into German hands almost without effort. Even though the circle of forts was still intact, all were now isolated and without any support except what they could give another. Ludendorff then hurried back into Germany to see to it that more and bigger guns were brought forward without delay.

Moltke's 7 western armies, meanwhile, were forming up on a north-south line just inside the German border south of Holland. Picture a clock with Pairs at its center. The line of armies was in the upper-right portion of the clock's face, extending, roughly, from one to 3 o'clock. The biggest and norther most of these armies, positioned to the north and east of Liege, was commanded by

General Alexander von Kluck

a tough, aggressive, irascible, 68 year old hardened infantryman who had begun life as a commoner and had been elevated to the nobility in reward for decades of distinguished service. Remarkably for a high ranking German officer, Kluck had never had a tour of duty on the high commander's headquarters staff. His 1st army, almost a 1/3 of a 1,000,000 men strong, was assigned to be the outer edge of the right wing.

It would have the longest distance to travel as it moved westward across Belgium and then looped toward the southwest. If things went perfectly it would, on its way to Paris, move around and past the westernmost end of the French defensive line. It would then continue southward, circle all the way around Paris, and move back to the east. Then finally it would hit the French line from the rear, pushing it into other German armies positioned at 2 and 3 o'clock and crushing it in a great vice. 

The Germans did students of the war a lasting favor by arranging their armies in numerical order. Next to Kluck, immediately to his south during the mobilization(later to his east, as the Schlieffen wheel made its great turn), was the 2nd army under

General Karl von Bulow

a member of the High Prussian Aristocracy who was also in his late 60's. Then came the 3rd and 4th and so on down to the 7th, which was almost as far south as Paris and had the Swiss border on its left. The 1st three of these armies made up the right wing, and through that wing no longer included as big a part of the German army as Schlieffen had intended, it was still an awesome force of 75,000 troops. This was war on a truly new scale; the army with which Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo had totaled 60,000 men.

The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd armies would be side by side as they drove forward. Their left would be protected by the rest of the German line. Though their right would be exposed, this would be no problem if Kluck could get around the equally exposed French left. His primary assignment, until he had circled Paris, was not to engage the enemy but to keep moving. If circumstances developed in such a way as to permit him to strike at the flank of the French left as he advanced, perhaps crippling it, so much the better. That would be secondary, however. The goal was Paris.

The 2nd armies on the German left, the 6th and the 7th, were not intended to be an attack force. Their role was to absorb an expected advance by the French into Alsace and Lorraine, stopping the invaders from breaking through while keeping them too fully engaged to spare troops for the defense of Paris. Between the 3 armies of the right wing and the 2nd on the left were the 4th and 5th armies, the latter commanded by 

Imperial Crown Prince Wilhelm

the Kaiser's eldest son.

They were to provide a connecting link between the defensive force in the south and the right wing, keeping the line continuous and free of gaps. The would be the hub of the wheel on which the right wing was moving, and they wouldn't have to move either far or fast. They would be an anchor, a pivot point, for the entire campaign. They were to become the killing machine into which Kluck was to drive the French after his swing around Paris.

French General Joffre, 

for his part, had his 1,000,000-plus frontline troops organized into 5 armies. They too were forming up in a line and were in numerical order, with the 1st on the right just above Switzerland. The French 2nd army was immediately to its north, the 3rd above it, and so on northward and westward in a great arc that ended approximately midway between Paris and the starting point of Kluck's army. Joffre's 1st, 2nd and 3rd armies, as they took up their backs to the chain of superfortresses(Verdun,Toul,Epinal, and Belfort) that France had constructed between Switzerland and Belgium. The 4th and 5th, being to the north and west of these forts, had no such strong points to fall back on.

The 5th commanded by Joffre's friend and protege

Charles Lanrezac

was problematic. It was the end of the French line in exactly the same way that Kluck's army was the end of the German, with no significant French forces to its north or west. Its left flank ended, as tacticians say, "up in the air"-out on a limb. This position carried withing it the danger that the Germans might get around Lanrezac's left, exposing him to attack in the flank or from the rear. In the opening days of the war, however, this danger seemed so hypothetical to Joffre as to be unworthy of concern.

Neither Lanrezac nor Joffre had any real way of knowing what the Germans were going to do. Until mobilization was completed, it wouldn't be possible to make much use of the cavalry that was supposed to function as the eyes of the army. The commanders on both sides could do little more than make educated guesses, using whatever information came in from spies or could be gained from the questions of captured soldiers. The sheer size of their armies and the theater of operations, and the unavoidable remoteness of hundreds of thousands of men, compounded the intelligence problem.

The individual armies, too, would be half-blind as they went into action. And they would be far more vulnerable then their size would suggest. A mass of infantry on the move is like nothing else in the world, but it may usefully be thought of as an immensely long and cumbersome caterpillar with the head of a nearsighted tiger. It's structured to make its head as lethal as possible, ready at all times to come to grips with whatever enemy comes into its path. A big part of an army commander's job is to make certain that it is in fact the head that meets the enemy, so that the tiger's teeth-men armed with guns and blades and whatever other implements of destruction-are available to them-can either attack the enemy or fend off the enemy's attack as circumstances require. An advancing army's worst vulnerability lies in the long caterpillar body behind the head.

Great battles can be won when a tiger's head eludes or even accidentally misses the head of its enemy and makes contact with its body instead. When this happens the enemy is "taken in the flank", and if an attacking head has sufficient weight it can quickly tear the enemy's body apart, finally reducing even the head to an isolated, enfeebled remnant. Much the same can happen when an army on the move is taken in the rear, or surrounded and cut off from its lines of supply. Hence the importance that Moltke and Joffre attacked to arranging their armies in an unbroken line, so that each could protect the flanks of its neighbors. Even though in doing so, both generals would start the war with one end of their lines unprotected. Now Joffre, like Moltke, was intent upon taking the offensive. His master plan reflected the French government's refusal to permit any move into neutral territory.

It assumed that the Germans too would stay out of Belgium and Luxembourg, and so its assumed further that the 1st great clash of the war would take place on the French-German border, somewhere between Verdun to the north and the fortress of Belfort to the south. Joffre's 5 armies were more than sufficient to maintain a solid line while attacking from one end of that border to the other, so he saw no reason to be concerned about Lanrezac's left, which would be anchored on Luxembourg. 

Joffre's advantage was that he wasn't irrevocably committed to attacking at any specific place or time or even to attacking at all. Unlike Moltke he had options-he could change his plans and the disposition of his armies according to how the situation developed. This ability quickly proved important; when the Germans moved into Luxembourg and then on to Liege, Joffre was able to order the 4th and 5th armies to shift around and face northward. He expected the Germans to come from the northeast, through Begium's 

Ardennes Forest 

toward the French city of

Sedan.

The left wing would move north to meet them.

Lanrezac wasn't so sure. As word reached him of the intensifying assualt on Liege, he could think of no reason for it unless the Germans needed to clear a path to the west. Even before war was declared-he sent word to Joffre expressing concern about what would happen if the Germans advance westward while his army stayed south of the Belgium border or moved east to join in the French offensive "In such case," he warned, "the 5th army... could do nothing to prevent a possible encircling movement against our left wing." Joffre of course didn't respond; he was certain that no such thing would happen. A week later, with the Germans continuing to concentrate troops opposite Liege, Lanrezac sent another appeal. "This time there can be no doubt," he said, "They are planning a wide encircling movement through Belgium. I ask permission to change the direction of the 5th army toward the north." He had it exactly right, but Joffre remained unpersuaded, confident that whatever was happening around Liege must be a German feint intended to lure his forces out of position. His full attention was focused on launching an capture of France's lost provinces would be a tremendous symbolic triumph.

But as a precaution, though, he did send cavalry on a scouting expedition into Belgium. When they found no evidence of German activity-inevitably, the German not yet having moved beyond Liege-Joffre felt free to proceed with his own plans. His 1st army began crossing into Alsace as early as August 7th, the day Ludendorff captured the Liege citadel, and it made good progress. Another week passed, and the direction of the German right wing became undeniable, before Joffre at last responded to Lanrezac's warnings, telling hi almost laconically that "I see no objection-(to the contrary) to your considering the movement that you propose." Even then he added, with thinly veiled annoyance that, "the threat is as yet only a long term possibility and we are not absolutely certain that it actually exists." Lanrezac started northward, not knowing that it was already too late for him to escape being outflanked in exactly the way he had feared from the start.

The Germans, by this time, had hauled into Belgium the weapons that would decide the fate of Liege, two new kinds of monster artillery;

The 305 mm Skoda siege Mortars 

borrowed from Austria, plus an almost unimaginably huge

420 mm Howitzer

secretly developed and produced by Germany's 

Krupp Steelworks.

Neither of these guns had ever been used in combat. The bigger of the 2 weighing 75 tons and had to be transported by rail in 5 sections and set in concrete before going into action. It could fire up to 10 2,200 lb projectiles per hour, each shell carrying a hardened head and a delayed-action fuse so that it penetrated its target before exploding. It had a range of 9 miles, its projectiles following such a high trajectory that they came down almost vertically. It had to be fired electrically so that the 200 men crew operating it, their heads covered with protective padding, could move 300 yards away and lie down on the ground before detonation. Once "registered"- its elevation and direction set so that every round landed on target-it was a hellishly destructive weapon, capable of breaking apart even the strongest of the Liege forts and vaporizing the men inside. It was a fitting act for a hellish destructive war.

The big guns arrived at Liege on August 10th, but 2 days more were needed to get them in place. By this time, off to the south, Joffre's Alsace offensive had captured several towns, but on August 11th the Germans counterattacked and brought the advance to a stop. The day after that Austria's Field Marshall Conrad, launching the punitive campaign that he had so long craved, sent 3 armies totaling 400,000 men into Serbia, where they soon were moving rapidly across easy terrain toward the mountains to the east.

On August 13th, after taking several shattering hits, 

Fort de Chaudfontaine

At the southeastern corner of the Liege circle surrendered, with only 76 of the 408 members of its garrison still alive. Later that day 2 more of the forts, with similar devastation, also surrendered. On August 15th 

Fort Loncin

ceased to exist when the 23rd 420mm shell fired at it penetrating its ammunition stores and set them off. After taking possession, the Germans found Belgium General Leman lying in the wreckage. As they carried away, he opened his eyes and said, "I ask you to bear witness that you found me unconscious," and even though a few of the forts had not yet surrendered or been destroyed, their ability to interfere with the German advance was at an end.

Moltke and his armies were ready, the road to the west was open and the right wing went into motion almost exactly on Shclieffen's schedule. The German engineers hurried to repair the rail lines that was destroyed by the Belgians, and trains started to roll one right after another, carrying the mountains of supplies needed to support the offensive. Over 500 trains were crossing the Rhine every 24 hours; 16 days after the troops had began to move, 1,250 trains had already crossed a single bridge at Cologne- 1 every 10 minutes. And with good reason: Kluck's 1st army alone by itself required 550 tons of food every day. Its 84,000 horses consumed 840 tons of fodder alone daily.

Now things started happening at an accelerating pace and on an expanding scale, and it became uncommon for anything to happen as anyone had expected or intended. By August 16th, in a heroically speedy if tragically premature response to the French government's call for the opening of a 2nd front, Russia inserted its 1st army into east Prussia. This move was far in advance of what the Germans had thought possible; obviously other Russian armies would be arriving soon, and so Moltke was faced with a possible disaster in the east long before the fight in the west could be decided. On this same day a Serbian counterattack stopped the Austrians and threw them back in disorder. Suddenly major developments were occurring daily.

Now on August 17th; a collision of German and Russian troops at Stalluponen in East Prussia ends inconclusively; the Germans are forced into a retreat that disrupts their plans, but they take 3,000 prisoners with them.

On August 18th; Joffre broadens his eastward offensive by sending the French 2nd army into Lorraine. The invasion makes good progress, only because Moltke has ordered the German 6th army to fall back. He also had a plan for Lorraine; to allow the French to advance until they are between his 5th army to the north and 7th army to the south. Then they can be hit on both flanks and destroyed. If this is successful, it could produce a victory on the German left so decisive that the success of the Schlieffen right wing might become unnecessary. 

August 19th; The French continue to advance in Lorraine.

On August 20th;

Crown Prince Rupprecht

of Bavaria, Commander of the 6th German army in Lorraine and temporarily in command of the 7th army as well, watches as the French offensive over extends itself and runs out of momentum. Unable to resist so tempering a target, "We can't ask our Bavarian soldiers to retreat again," he complains, "Just when they feel absolute superiority over the enemy facing them," he then orders a counterattack that proves to be brilliantly successful, inflicting tremendous casualties on the French and driving them back across the border to the city of  Nancy, which is nearly abandoned. It's saved by a defense and counterattack organized by corps 

Commander Ferdinand Foch.

Rupprechts counterattack for all its success, is a serious mistake. It neither destroys the French 6th army nor captures anything of strategic importance. Instead it pushes the French backwards out of Moltke's trap, returning them to their line of fortresses. And with the latest developments in technology made these fortresses capable of standing up even under the kinds of guns that broke Liege, and in the weeks ahead their strength will permit Joffre to shift troops from his right wing to his imperiled left. The Germans' chances of achieving a breakthrough are vanishingly small, but Rupprecht thinks otherwise. Wanting to press his advantage, he all but demands-that Moltke send him more troops. Moltke, in one of his departures from a Schlieffen Plan in which all possible manpower was suppose to be concentrated in the right wing agrees.

On this very same day the Austrian invasion of Serbia is transformed from a failure into a humiliating vout; the Austrian forces take 50,000 casualties, including 6,000 men killed and flee back across the border. The Russians and Germans collide again in East Prussia, this time at a place called Gumbinnen, and again the fighting is bloody but inconclusive.

The Germans pull back, but the Russians don't pursue. The commander of the 8th army,

Max von Prittwitz

Telephones Moltke and reports that he is in terrible trouble and needs to withdraw from East Prussia. This news is disastrous tactically and strategically. East Prussia is the homeland of the Junkers, Prussia's hereditary elite, and as such it's the cradle of Germany's General Staff. The mere thought of the Junker farms being left to the mercies of rampaging Cossack horsemen is horrifying. But, as with Rupprecht, Moltke decides that he is to far from the action and too lacking in reliable information to disagree. He doesn't challenge Prittwitz's decision.

In Belgium things continued to go well for the Germans. Having done their work at Liege, the big guns were quickly moved westward to Namur

a cluster of 9 forts nearly as strong as Liege and junction of 6 rail lines. Namur surrendered after 5 days of shelling. But the Germans had something to regret; their failure to cut off and destroy the Belgian army before it slipped off to Antwerp, near the coast. Kluck had to reduce his army by 2 corps in order to keep the Belgians from coming back south and threatening his lines of communications.

The French and Belgians had made an equally serious mistake in failing to send troops to Namur while it still might have provided them with a fortified base from which to block the German advance. Such a move with enough troops involved, would have had a good chance of succeeding. Now, with that opportunity gone, Lanrezac was going to have to find a way to stop the Germans in open country.

The Germans took possession of 

Brussels.

Now, while continuing westward, they began to bend their route toward the south, toward Paris. In their wake they were leaving a trail of killings that, even after the truth was separated from the exaggerations of propaganda, would totally disgrace them in the eyes of the world, and give their enemies reason to argue that this was a war for civilization, and began the long process that would end with the United States entering the war against them. They destroyed towns, took civilian hostages, including women and children, and killing them- in some cases machine-gunning them by the score. They were killing priests simply because they where priests(trying to claim that they were leaders of a guerrilla resistance). They also destroyed the storybook city of 

Louvain, with its exquisite medieval university and irreplaceable library. Now, the extent of these acts can be explained-never excused, but explained-they had tangled origins.

The Germans suffered significant casualties in the Franco-Prussia War at the hands of franc-tiraurs, civilian snipers and guerrillas. The Germans were determined not to have a repeat. When they encountered guerrillas in Belgium, they lashed out viciously. The German newspapers carried sensational accounts of German soldiers being mutilated and killed by Belgian townsfolk. The German troops read the stories and they became angered and frightened, causing them to respond with further violence. The senior officers were fixated on the same idea that had made the violation of Belgian neutrally possible in the 1st place-the idea that Germany was in a life or death struggle, so they had no choice but to take extreme measures.

"Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal," Moltke observed. "But we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences".

It was so bad, whenever enemy armies were believed to be approaching, in Belgium, France, Southwestern Germany, East Prussia, Serbia, and Poland, the civilian populations fled by the 100"s of 1'000's in whatever way they could. Roads became clogged with refugees and their livestock and whatever possessions they could load onto wagons and carts. When the armies used the same roads, the civilians had to make for the fields and woods. 

Belgian civilians who had been displaced by the war, had started crowding the docks of Antwerp waiting for passage to Britain. 

But Europe was more focused on the fortunes of the armies, not the savaging and suffering that the war was already visiting on the innocent, as the middle of August passed. By August 21st things seemed to be moving rapidly to a climax, and on this same day, 

a 2nd Russian army entered East Prussia and began taking town after town. The Russian's plan was obvious; their 2 armies would converge on Germany's one eastern army, which they vastly outnumbered, and obliterate it. The road to Berlin would be wide open, and the Germans would have no way of saving themselves except by pulling apart their long wall of armies in the west.

Kaiser Wilhelm was almost unhinged by the news from East Prussia. He seated himself on a bench and told his companions-the heads of his military and naval cabinets-to sit down as well. The 2 men, no doubt trying to be properly deferential to their emperor, pulled up a 2nd bench and sat on it. "Do you already hold me in such contempt that none will sit beside me?" the Kaiser cried. This was the 1st sign that the Kaiser was not going to stand up well under the strain of war.

It was on August 21st, too, that Joffre launched a new offensive, sending the 3rd and 4th armies. That formed the center of his line northward into the Ardennes. By now it had become obvious that the Germans' main attack wouldn't be coming from that direction, and Joffre guessed that their center couldn't possibly be very strong. His intelligence bureau had estimated that the Germans would begin the war with 68 combat-ready divisions in the west-not 78 infantry and 10 cavalry divisions plus 14 brigades of territorial militia, as was actually the case. It assumed incorrectly that the Germans would like the French, regard their newly mobilized reserved troops as too green for action. Joffre therefore reasoned that if the Germans had enough strength on their left to push back his offensive in Alsace-Lorraine and enough on their right for a drive across Belgium, the center had to be vulnerable. By thrusting upward into southwestern Belgium, he thought, he could penetrate far enough to strike the German right wing in its flank and separate it from its sources of supply and reinforcements.

The 14 French divisions sent into the Ardennes ran head-on into exactly 14 German divisions that found strong defensive positions in the region's rough wooded hills and were well equipped with machine guns and artillery. The French attacked and attacked again under increasingly hopeless conditions until finally, weakened by appalling casualties, they had no choice but to stop. The fight at the town of Rossignol was sadly typical; of the 14,000 crack colonial troops thrown at the Germans there, nearly a 1/3 were shot dead.

Lanrezac's 5th army might have been mangled in this offensive as well, if not for his warnings and appeals and Joffre's grudging decision to allow him to stay farther west. Now the 5th was the only French army not fully engaged. By now it was clear that Lanrezac had been right all along; the main German invasion force was to his north, moving through Belgium virtually unopposed. A 75 mile shift had taken Lanrezac's left to a point across the River Sambre from the town of Charleroi. Lanrezac didn't know where the Germans were and had little in the way of instructions from Joffre, and so he did something that was extremely unfashionable in the French army of 1914; he had his troops take up defensive positions.

It was fortunate that he did. The next day his army was hit by advance units of Bulow's 2nd army coming out of the east. The striking fact here is that Lanrezac, at the far left end of the French line, had met not the end of the German right wing under Kluck but the army on Kluck's left. Important as Lanrezac's move to the north was, it had not reached far enough to intercept the outer of the German right. All 5 French armies were now locked in combat, but this was true of only 6 of Germany's. Kluck's army was out somewhere to the north and west, beyond Lanrezac's reach and meeting no serious resistance at it plowed its way forward.

By this point all of Joffre's offensives had been beaten back, several of them ending in severe disorder. French casualties for the war's 1st month are believed to have totaled 260,000, of whom 75,000 were killed (27,000 on August 22nd alone). Among the dead were more then 10% of France's regular and reserve officers. The cult of the offensive wasn't delivering its promised results.

As a young French Captain named Charles De Gaulle would say of the fight in which he was wounded and had his eyes opened, "In a moment it's clear that all the courage in the world can't prevail against gunfire."

The Germans, except on their right where continued movement was essential, tended to rely on their artillery and let the French attack 1st. In this way they held their own at worst and took significantly fewer casualties overall; 18,000 of their troops were killed on the Western Front in August, a fraction of the French and British total.

And Kluck, with Bulow keeping pace on his left and the German line unbroken all the way to Switzerland, was pounding to the southwest on schedule. The Schlieffen Plan was being achieved. The stage was set for Kluck to swing around Lanrezac and continue on to Paris.

Or so it seemed until Sunday, August 23rd. Then suddenly, Kluck crashed into a mass of dug in riflemen freshly arrived from England. It must have been a shock. Kluck hadn't known that British troops were in the neighborhood. He hadn't even known, until the day before, that they were in France in sufficient numbers to take the field.