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 BRITISH COMMANDERS


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 

                                                           WILLIAM ROBERTSON

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 

                                                    SIR JOHN FRENCH

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

                                                      LORD HORATIO KITCHENER

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.

                                               FIELD MARSHAL SIR JOHN FRENCH
"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

                                                          DOUGLAS HAIG
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 

                                                             JAMES GRIERSON

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

                                                         HERBERT PLUMER

as replacement for Grierson, but Kitchener sent

                                                         HORACE SMITH-DORRIEN
 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.
                                            

                                                           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."

                                               French Commanders



It may seem odd, at first, that almost no study of the French army at the start of the Great War fails to discuss 

                                                             Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison

Though a professional soldier, Grandmaison never achieved high rank, and he did nothing of importance in the war before being killed in combat(a fate his critics could consider poetic justice) in 1915.

Still, he deserves the attention. 3 years before the war began, as a lieutenant colonel in the Operations Bureau at army headquarters, Grandmaison delivered a pair of lectures that thrilled the generals in his audience. He heaped scorn on French military doctrine since the Franco-Prussian War, laying out a new approach that soon came to dominate the nation's military thinking.

His doctrine, remembered today as "the cult of the offensive," was rooted in the idea of all-out, nothing-held -back aggressiveness as the key to success in battle. And the word cult really does apply; by 1914 any French officer who failed to embrace it would find himself out of favor, suspect, and professionally sidetracked. The consequences were fateful, almost fatal. Faith in the offensive, in the power of men wielding bayonets to overcome any enemy, caused Joffre's generals to send their troops against German machine guns and artillery again and again in the war's opening months, and to persist even as casualties rose to horrifying levels.

Such thinking had been in the air of France in the prewar years. 

                                                            Philosopher Henri Bergson

later Nobel Prize winner, was preaching that elan vital, the life force, had a mystic power that if harnessed could enable the nation to defeat even the richer, more populous Germany next door. Also preaching was 

                                                                   Ferdinand Foch

the gifted strategist and military theorist who in 1908 became director of The War College in Paris. He declared in his books and the lectures that "the will to conquer is the 1st condition of victory." Grandmaison, enrolled at the college during Foch's tenure, became his disciple. Within a few years he was carrying belief in l'offensive a l'outrance, in aggressiveness without restraint, far beyond what even Foch had intended. His words were received with relief and gratitude by an officer corps tired of being told that the best France could hope for was to defend itself against the German military machine. Grandmaison's insistence that the generals should expect to conquer sounded to them like music. 

The triumph of the new doctrine came in 1911. That July,6 months after Grandmaison's electrifying lectures, a showdown over strategy erupted in France's Supreme War Council. The newly appointed commander in chief, a certain

                                                          General Victor Michel

put before the council ideas on how to prepare for war with Germany, He had based his proposals on a concept called offense-in-defense; if war broke out, he said, France's armies should be arrayed at varying distances from the nation's eastern borders, where they would wait for the Germans to make the 1st move)impressively, Michel foresaw their invasion of Belgium) before deciding where and how to strike back. There were advantages to such an approach. It would enable the French to know where the enemy forces were situated and where they were going before deciding how best to move against them. It could require the Germans to commit themselves, perhaps over commit themselves, and wear themselves down on the offensive while all French options remained open. But to the believers in offensive a l'outrance, such thinking was heresy and not to be endured. It rejected what Grandmaison had taught them; that "for the attack only 2 things are necessary. To know where the enemy is and to decide what to do. What the enemy intends to do is of no consequence." Such words imply a willful blindness to the realities of the battlefield, but the beliefs on which they were based prevailed. Michel found it necessary to resign, and the Grandmaisonites became not just popular but the dominant faction in French planning.

It now became necessary to find a replacement for Michel, and the same 

                                                        General Joseph Gallieni

who in 1914 would become military governor of Paris emerged as the pivotal figure. He had opposed Michel's proposals, but less on grounds of theory than because of concerns about Michel's personal capabilities and his intention, in case of war, to use reserves as frontline troops(something that the French generals abhorred but the Germans would do with significant success).

                                                 Minister of War Adolphe Messimy

offered the job to Gallieni himself, who was respected on all sides, and Gallieni declined. Asked to take a few days to reconsider, the general again immediately said no. He explained that he regarded himself as too old; he was 62 at the time, in uncertain health, and within 2 years of retirement. He said also that he had too little experience in the command of large armies, and that-what was most important to Gallieni himself, and most reflective of his integrity-he couldn't honorably assume an office that he had caused to become vacant by failing to support Michel. Gallieni asked to suggest someone else, he offered the name of

                                                                  Paul-Marie Pau

a respected senior officer who had lost an arm in the Franco-Prussian War. Pau however was politically unacceptable, a practicing Catholic at a time when republican France suspected Catholics of seeking a restoration of the monarchy.(Foch, educated by the Jesuits and brother of a Jesuit priest, carried the same liability.) Gallieni's 2nd suggestion, 

                                                              Joseph Joffre

presented no such difficulties. He was solidly republican but beyond that a man of no politics. Though he enthusiastically accepted the doctrines of Grandmaison, he was no ideologue and in fact displayed little interest in ideas of any kind. He had never attended any of the higher staff schools, had only limited experience in the command of large numbers of troops, and had never attempted to school himself in higher strategy. Because of the gaps in his experience, his appointment surprised many people. Gallieni however, knew what he was doing-he knew Joffre well.

Gallieni(his family, like the Bonapartes, were of Italian origin and had come to France from Corisca) was 21 years old when, on the very day in 1870 that France declared war on the Germans to start the Franco-Prussian War, he graduated from St. Cyr military academy. He was commissioned in the marine infantry, a branch that destined him for service in the network of colonies that France was establishing around the world. After the war, in which he became a prisoner of the Germans, he went on to assignments in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Tonkin(Vietnam). Responsibility came easily to him, and with responsibility came promotion. By the time he was 40 he was governor of French Sudan, and for 9 years beginning in 1896 he was governor general and commander in chief of the new colony of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. After putting down a rebellion there, he introduced an administration that made Madagascar not only peaceful but prosperous.

One of the needs at Madagascar was a system of fortifications for the colony's new naval base, and in 1896 an army engineer less than 3 years younger than Gallieni joined his staff and took charge of construction.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                        This was Joffre, who had started life as the eldest of 11 children of a village barrel maker in southern France, won a scholarship to Paris's elite Ecole Polytechnique, interrupted his education to participate in the defense of the city when the Germans besieged it, and upon graduation took an army commission after failing to land the civilian job that was his 1st choice. He married young, but when his wife died he volunteered for foreign assignments. By 1885 he was chief engineer in Hanoi, and in 1893 in Africa he won his 1st moment of fame and promotion to lieutenant colonel by successfully taking command of an expedition to Timbuktu after his commanding officer was killed by rebellious tribesmen. He was recalled to France in 1900, Gallieni 5 years later, and by 1911 the 2 were among the army's highest-ranking generals. Joffre didn't disappoint as commander in chief. He upgraded the army's training and equipment and reformed the promotion system, giving more weight to ability and performance than to political connections or ideological correctness.(He insisted, as a condition of his appointment, on being allowed to select an aristocratic Catholic, the talented General Noel de Castelnau, as his chief of staff.) He was content to leave the Operations Bureau, where strategies were hatched, in possession of Grandmaison and his followers. Under their influence, investment in artillery, especially heavy artillery, was seriously neglected. The reasons were obvious; bayonets, not big guns, were the supreme weapon.

In May 1913 the bureau issued 2 sets of new field regulations. One was for corps and armies, and the other for units of division size and smaller. Both were saturated with the Grandmaison doctrine. "Battles are beyond everything else struggles of morale," they declared. "Defeat is inevitable as soon as the hope of conquering ceases to exist. Success comes not to him who has suffered the least but to him whose will is firmest and morale strongest." Grandmaison's staff also drafted Plan 17, which discarded the Michel approach and was duly approved by Joffre as the definitive statement of how his armies would be deployed when war came. The French equivalent of Schlieffen Plan, Plan 17 disregarded even the possibility of a German move into western Belgium, an inexplicable decision in light of what Michel had concluded years earlier. Though Plan 17 was more flexible than the Schlieffen Plan, leaving Joffre free to decide where and when to attack, that he would attack was beyond question.

Adherents of the cult of the offensive did very well during these prewar years. Foch, who could have claimed to be the cult's grandfather, was given command of a division of 1911 and of a corps just 1 year after that. That at the beginning of the war he wasn't given an army is surprising; the religious factor is likely the reason. Grandmaison was promoted to brigadier general and didn't long survive. 

Those deemed to have insufficient faith in the offensive didn't prosper. One such officer was

                                                            Henri Philippe Petain

who as a lowly assistant professor of infantry tactics at the Ecole de Guerre had attracted unfavorable attention by persistently warning of the vulnerability of flesh and bone when confronted with 20th century firepower. In July 1914 he was, as a result, a mere colonel of 58, an obscure outsider expecting to be retired soon. Even mobilization and the start of the war brought no advancement. When the French 5th Army assembled(its commander, Lanrezac, was only 4 years older than Petain), Petain commanded a regiment and was still a colonel.

Gallieni had sunk into what appeared likely to be terminal obscurity. Before the start of the war, he had come around to Michel's view that if Germany invaded France, it would do so through Belgium. He had tried to explain his concerns to Joffre and the deep thinkers of the Operations Bureau but was ignored. Relieved by Joffre of responsibility for anything, he retreated to his country home and a kind of preretirement limbo. In July his wife died, and on the last day of the month he was informed by Messimy that, in case of mobilization, he would be named Joffre's principal deputy and successor if the need for succession arose. When mobilization came, he was given the promised title but no staff, no duties, no information about what was happening, and no access to the man whose chief support he was supposed to be. Joffre evidently regarded him as a rival and wanted to give him no opportunities to be seen or heard. Thus Gallieni, a thin almost comically homely man with tiny eyeglasses and a flamboyantly bushy mustache, spent the opening days of the war alone. He followed the opening movements of the armies on his maps and worried. 

He was unresentful. As the danger to Paris increased and alarmed members of the government began to complain of Joffre's retreat and talk of replacing him, it was Gallieni, to whom the politicians would cheerfully have given the supreme command, who urged patience.