Elsewhere along the Western Front the Germans were scoring victory after victory. They were turning back French assault, achieving a high rate of success with their own offensives, and usually losing far fewer men. The reason isn't to be found in numbers as we have seen, the 2 sides were numerically just about equal. Even the German right wing had no consistent manpower advantage. A French counterattack that marked the climax of the Charleroi fight, for example, ended with 3 German divisions not only only stopping 9 of Lanrezac's divisions but ultimately driving them back 7 miles-even though the French force included 10 regiments of elite colonial troops, veterans akin to the men of the BEF. Clearly the Germans were doing something right, or the French were doing something wrong, or both.
The answer is "both". Even in the face of repeated bad results, generals throughout the French army threw their infantry against the Germans whatever the circumstances and kept doing so no matter how grisly the results. Lanrezac was a rare exception; he had been reluctant to attack at Charleroi, doing so only because 2 of his corps commanders insisted. Joffre's other commanders believed that French troops were supposed to charge, not crawl in the earth like worms. They were to win at the point of their bayonets, not by firing steel-clad packets of high explosives into the sky. The Germans, by contrasts, quickly became adroit, upon making contact with the enemy, at digging in, waiting to be attacked, and mowing down the attacker with rifle fire, machine guns capable of firing up to 600 heavy-caliber rounds per minute, and above all artillery. (From the start of the war to end, cannon would account for most of the killing.)
When the attackers fell back, the Germans would continue punishing them with their field artillery, firing shrapnel and high explosives. Then they would come out of their holes and keep the fleeing enemy on the move. From the start they were even better than the British at creating defenses for themselves with the trenching tools every man carried plus picks and shovels brought forward by combat engineers. The difference in the tactics of the 2 sides explains why, despite the lives they squandered at Mons and Le Cateau and later in other, bigger fights, the Germans had significantly lower casualties on the Western Front in 1914 than the French and British.
But as French casualties climbed without producing a single victory of consequence - it was "the most terrible August in the history of the world," said British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-Joffre found it necessary to conclude -that the French army's "cult of the offensive" had to be abandoned. On August 24th he unhappily announced that the armies of France were for the time being "forced to take defensive action based on our fortified positions and on the strong natural obstacles provided by the terrain, so as to hold on as long as possible, taking, meanwhile, all steps to wear down the enemy's strength and resume the offensive in due course." He ordered his left wing-his 3rd, 4th, and 5th armies to begin what would come to be known as the Great Retreat. Day after day, in relentless heat, weary French soldiers in their 100's of 1000's trudged farther and farther south. The BEF marched with them, covering more than a 190 miles in 13 days. One of its battalions retreated 55 miles in 36 hours.
Joffre also ordered the creation of a new army to lengthen his left. The 6th army was to be "capable of taking up the offensive again while the other armies contained the enemy's effort for the requisite period," Joffre said, but its position near Paris obviously had defensive implications. The Germans continued pursuit of Lanrezac's army after the defeat at Le Cateau ha awakened the government to the fact that Paris was in jeopardy.
Minister of War
examined the city's defenses and was alarmed by what he found. They were in a sorry state of neglect, at least in part because the army's fixation on the offensive had caused it to give little attention to defenses of any kind.
Messimy turned not to Joffre but to
for help, asking him to become military governor of Paris and offering him near-dictatorial powers to organize a defense of the city. Gallieni, who had been in semi retirement at the start of the war, agreed on one condition. He said he would need not only the garrison forces inside the city walls but a substantial mobile force capable of engaging the Germans as they approached. At least 6 corps would be needed for this purpose, he said.(A corps was usually made up of 2 sometimes 3 divisions of nearly 20,000 men each). Messimy agreed without hesitation, but in fact he had no authority to fulfill his pledge. It was Joffre alone who decided the deployment of troops, and Joffre showed no interest in assisting, or even consulting with him, either Gallieni or the government.
Nevertheless, Gallieni set to work immediately to ready Paris for a siege, bringing herds of livestock inside the walls to provide a supply of food, installing new lines of trenches, positioning artillery, and demolishing buildings to give the guns a clear line of fire. As this work proceeded, a political crisis erupted over the city's failure to start preparing earlier, the government fell, and Messimy was displaced(in part, ironically, for refusing to agree to the dismissal of Joffre). He took up his reserve army commission and went off to the front as a major. When Gallieni finally got his mobile force, it came to him in the form of Joffre's new 6th army, which was still in the early stages of being assembled. The 1st elements of this army, many of them brought in by train from stabilizing sectors at the eastern end of the front, were moved inside the Paris defensive perimeter as part of the Great Retreat. They were completely out of touch with Lanrezac and the BEF and not nearly ready for action in any case. Joffre evidently decided that he might as well let Gallieni have them, if only temporarily and if only to quiet the complaints coming from the government.
Behind the retreating French armies, sometimes even beside them in the spreading confusion, marched masses of Germans, tired but energized by the thought that they had the enemy on the run, that victory lay ahead. Joffre's plan was to pull back only as far as a line along the east-west course of the river Somme, call a halt there and , when circumstances were right, counterattack. This plan proved infeasible; when the French got to the Somme, the enemy was still right behind them. They had no choice but to cross the river and keep going.
Nobody, not even the high generals in their headquarters, had detailed understanding of what was happening along the front. British and French newspapers carried hair-raising but inspiring stories of how the Germans, the Huns, were committing suicide in throwing themselves against the guns and bayonets of the valiant defenders of civilization. In the German papers it was civilizations defenders who were advancing victoriously, moving constantly forward on the soil of a nation that had conspired to destroy their homeland. On both sides, anything that wasn't an outright defeat was made a cause for celebration, and every setback was either treated as a canny tactical adjustment or, more commonly ignored. Journalists were kept far from the action. Even the senior commanders, flooded with reports some of which were accurate and many of which weren't, could have little confidence that they knew what the enemy was doing or which side was doing more killing.
