"Attack, whatever happens! The Germans are at the extreme limit
of their efforts...Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other."
FERDINAND FOCH
Fears that war would mean a continent in flames had literally come true by early September. The entire Western Front from Paris to the Alps had turned into a vast bloody slug fest in which more than a dozen armies were fully and simultaneously engaged. In the east, Galicia was the scene of a massive running battle between the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian forces of Field Marshal Conrad. In East Prussia the German 8th Army was following up its victory at Tannenberg with a pursuit aimed at the destruction of Rennenkampf's Russian 2nd Army near the Masurian Lakes.
Nothing was more critical than the point where the German right met Joffre's left. Still unaware of the existence of a new French army at Paris, seeing no reason to halt as Moltke had ordered, Kluck continued to plunge southward in search of the French 5th Army's flank or, failing that, whatever remained of the BEF. But his army was in danger of crumbling even as it advanced.
"Our soldiers are worn out," a member of Kluck's staff was recording as early as September 2nd. "For 4 days they have been marching 40 kilometers a day. The ground is difficult, the roads are torn up, trees felled, the fields pitted by shell like strainers. The soldiers stagger at every step, their faces are plastered with dust, their uniforms are in rags; one might call them living rag-bags. They march with closed eyes, and sing in chorus to keep from falling asleep as the march. The certainty of victory close at hand and of their triumphal entry into Paris sustains them and whips up their enthusiasm. Without this certainty of victory they would lie down where they are, to sleep at last, no matter where, no matter how. And, to give their bodies a drunkenness like that of their souls, they drink enormously. But this drunkenness also helps to keep them up. Today, after an inspection, the General(Kluck) was furiously angry. He wanted to put an end to this collective debauch. We have just persuaded him not to give severe orders. It is better no to be too strict, otherwise the army couldn't go on at all. For this abnormal weariness abnormal stimulants are needed. In Paris we shall remedy all this."
And Paris still seemed an achievable goal. The British, despite Sir John French's promise to rejoin the fight, were continuing to withdraw.(French would later explain this as an effort to connect as quickly as possible with reinforcements and supplies before turning north.)
Then everything changed. Intercepted German radio messages, some of them not in code, informed the French that Kluck was now heading not toward Paris but southeast. Papers found on a German officer who had taken a wrong turn and been shot dead by a French patrol indicated the same thing-showed not only where the various parts of Kluck's army were but where they had been ordered to go. Joseph Gallieni, quickly grasping the implications, assembled a small group of reconnaissance pilots and told them where he wanted them to fly the next morning and what he wanted them to look for. They returned with the news he wanted; Kluck' army, formed into 6 thick columns, was indeed moving to the southeast. In doing so it was exposing its right flank to Gallieni's new 6th Army. The opportunity for counterattack appeared to have come at last.
Gallieni ordered the 6th Army, still only half-organized and made up largely of inexperienced reserve troops, to get ready to move. Then he took off by car to visit British headquarters and get Sir John French to join in the attack. French was away when Gallieni arrived, and the staff officers who received this unexpected visitor did so with amused and barely concealed contempt. One of them said later that Gallieni, ungainly and unkempt in his high laced-up black boots and yellow leggings, looked like a "comedian," like somebody "no British officer would be seen talking to." After 3 hours of waiting, having extracted from his hosts nothing better than a promise that someone would telephone him after French's return, Gallieni departed. The promise call when it finally came, informed him that the BEF would be continuing its move to the south; the British had checked with Joffre and received no encouragement to cooperate with Gallieni. Wherever he turned, Gallieni found little cooperation. Joffre, though he approved Gallieni's attack, said he wanted it launched from south rather than north of the Marne. This would blunt its impact, Gallieni thought, and he spent long minutes on the telephone changing Joffre's mind. Worse, Joffre was reluctant to send the additional troops needed for hitting the Germans hard. Worst, when he understood just how rich in opportunity this situation was, how laden with potential glory, Joffre took the 6th army back from Gallieni, who then returned to Paris.
Kluck was too good a soldier to offer quite as fat a target as Gallieni hoped. Though he continued his advance, he did not leave his flank uncovered. He moved one corps-2 infantry divisions plus artillery-to the River Ourcq to his west, where it took up defensive positions facing Paris and was directly in the path of the French 6th Army as it began moving eastward. This corps, though made up of reserve units, was commanded by a capable officer,
Gronau moved his troops onto high ground, had them dig in, and used his artillery to tear at the French as they began arriving on the scene. The result was a battle so singularly uneven that it proved to be the undoing of any hopes for the quick destruction of Kluck's army. On the German side, success gave a last burst of life to Kluck's hopes of breaking the Entente left.
On September 5th France, Great Britain, and Russia entered into the Treaty of London, by which they formalized their Triple Entente and pledged that none of them would enter into a separate peace with Germany. On the same day a member of Moltke's staff,
arrived at Kluck's headquarters to alert him to the existence and probable approach of a French force in the west. While he was there, a report arrived from Gronau stating that he was under attack(by that same French force) and needed help. Kluck wasn't alarmed. He assumed that this was less a serious French assault than an attempt to trick him into halting the 1st Army's advance. But he did the prudent thing and detached another corps to go back to support Gronau. He also sent a message to Bulow, asking for the return of 2 corps that he had earlier made available to the 2nd Army. Bulow was reluctant to comply, knowing that doing so would weaken his own depleted right wing. If he had known that the BEF was now moving northward in his direction-French had turned around at last-he might not have agreed. But under the circumstances, with Kluck under attack and no one currently attacking him, Bulow had little choice. Though Kluck's reinforcement of Gronau was a turning point, the 1st backward movement by a sizable unit of the German right wing, it didn't mark the end of the offensive. Kluck was still bent on victory.
He was no longer defining victory as Paris, however, and that became a problem in terms of troop morale. For the soldiers of Kluck's army, arrival at Paris meant an end to their long ordeal. THis is clear in a German officer's account of an episode on September 3rd. "One of our battalions was marching wearily forward," he wrote. "All at once, while passing a crossroad, they discovered a signpost, on which they read; Paris, 37 kilometers(23 miles). It was the 1st signpost that hadn't been erased. On seeing it, the battalion was as though shaken up by an electric current. The word Paris, which they have just read, drives them crazy. Some of them embrace the wretched signpost, others dance around it. Cries, yells of enthusiasm, accompany these mad actions. This signpost is their evidence that we are near Paris, that, without doubt, we shall soon be really there. This notice board has had a miraculous effect. Faces light up, weariness seems to disappear, the march is resumed, alert, cadenced, in spite of the abominable ground in this forest. Songs burst forth louder." But now, with Kluck's shift to the southeast and the move back to the Ourcq, the dream of Paris had to be let go.
The Germans weren't, however, out of fight. By nightfall on September 5th, Gronau's artillery had badly disordered the advance of the French 6th Army, which was growing rapidly as reinforcements continued to arrive. At one point, when the French appeared to be on the verge on panic, a dashingly aggressive officer named
a man who like Petain had nearly reached retirement age without achieving the rank of general, led a heroic intervention with field artillery. Rolling his guns through the French infantry to where they could fire point -blank, he drove the Germans back.
After dark, judging correctly that he was badly outnumbered and that his stand had given Kluck sufficient time to adjust, Gronau pulled back from the Ourcq. In doing so he probably saved his corps. The 6th Army attacked by moonlight but found the Germans gone. Kluck,understanding now that the threat from the wast was a serious one, marched his entire army back across the Marne toward the Ourcq. As always, he was thinking aggressively, looking not just to defend himself but to encircle and destroy his enemy.
But by now Kluck was laden with problems. He was no longer engaged with the main line of French armies, no longer in position to contribute to the decision that appeared to be approaching along that line. In pulling back to the Ourcq, he had opened a 35 mile gap between his army and Bulow's, and in the next few days this gap would grow even wider. Between Kluck's and Bulow's armies were only 2 divisions of cavalry and a few units of light infantry-not nearly enough to hold off a significant enemy advance. The exploitation of such gaps had been the key to many of Napoleon's victories.
"Kluck marched his entire army back across the Marne to the Ourcq" is far too simple a statement to reflect what was happening that day. Every such movement meant yet another long and hurried trek, to be followed by yet another firefight, for men who had been marching and fighting for weeks. Kluck's men had been issued no rations in 5 days. They rarely got more than a few hours of sleep. Their uniforms were in tatters, and their boots were falling off their feet as they struggled to drag with them the cannon and shells without which they could neither attack nor defend themselves. And they were now out numbered.
The French 6th army, though fresh, was still too raw and unorganized to be a match for Kluck's now-hardened veterans. When it renewed its attack on September 6th, it again ran headlong into waiting German artillery. The result was another disaster-not merely a failure to dislodge Kluck's troops from their hastily improvised defenses but a debacle that left the French units shattered. Kluck's hopes of finishing off the 6th army began to look more plausible.
Off to the east, the French were falling back in several places, The anchoring strong point of their line, the great fortress of Verdun, was in deepening jeopardy. By September 6th it appeared possible that the entire line from Verdun southward might begin to come apart. Moltke's new plan, dual breakthroughs leading to a grand climatic encirclement, also was beginning to seem plausible. The hour of decision had arrived, and everyone knew it.
The BEF was feeling its way northward in company with a corps of French cavalry and making extremely slow progress. More by happenstance than design, it inched into the gap between Kluck and Bulow. This was a frightening and exciting development. If the 2 German armies converged, the BEF would be crushed. If the British pushed forward swiftly, on the other hand, they might break through to the German rear and create havoc there. They didn't move swiftly. In part this was because of mistakes; one British division spent an entire day moving in a confused circle, sot that at nightfall its lead units ran into the supply train that formed its own tail end. But it was also an understandable reaction to having enormous enemy forces on both of its flanks. What the British didn't know was that neither Kluck nor Bulow was in any position to turn on them.
Kluck, on their left, was occupied with the French 6th army. Bulow-now at the end of the continuous German line, with his own flank bare-was in a hard fight with Franchet d'Esperey's 5th army. Because of his return of 2 corps to Kluck, Bulow was weak on his right. He was being hammered there by a division commanded by the recently promoted
And his troops were being pushed back and out of position. Kluck and Bulow were alarmed when they learned that the British were now between them, and both reacted characteristically. Kluck swung some of his troops around to face a possible advance by the British but continued to batter away with his main force at the French. Bulow began to plan a withdrawal in which both his army and Kluck's would pull back at least 10 miles and reconnect north of the British.
The fighting intensified all along the line. The French were on the defensive everywhere but on their left; on the right the need was to hold the line against German armies trying to deliver the breakthrough that Moltke had ordered. Gallieni began filling Paris taxicabs with soldiers and sending them out to swell the ranks of the army that Joffre had taken from him. His energy, despite so many reasons to be grudging, caused the 6th Army to keep growing hour by hour.
The madness rose to its climax on September 8th and 9th. The outcome would depend on whether any of the German armies in the east could crack the French line or, alternatively, whether the German 1st Army or the French 6th Army could destroy its opponent. The Battle of the Marne became series of crises following one after another until finally something broke down. September 7th ended with Foch's new army seperated from General von Hausen's German 3rd by a treachrously soggy expanse of territory called the Marais(the Marsh) of Saint-Gond. Foch, determined as always to carry the fight to his enemy but naturally assuming that advance across a swamp was not feasible, had launched an attack around both sides. Both wings of this attack rain into a strong German defenses and were thrown back with heavy loss of life. Hausen's staff, meanwhile, had been exploring the interior of the Marais and discovering that it wasn't at all impassable as its name indicated. Early the next morning the Germans moved across it without the kind of artillery preparation that would have alerted the French, mounted a dawn charge that caught Foch's center unprepared, and forced it out of its defenses. Though this clash was a defeat for the French, it added to Foch's growing reputation, "Attack, whatever happens!" he said at Saint-Gond. "The Germans are at the extreme limit of their efforts. Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other!" He had been pushed back, but his line hadn't snapped. The Germans still didn't have the breakthrough on which all their hopes depended.
Not only at Saint-Gond but at many places along the front, the French, like the Germans, were near the end of their resources. "For my part I preserve only a confused and burning recollection of the days of 6th and 7th September," a cavalryman would observe afterward. "The heat was suffocating. The exhausted troops, covered with a layer of black dust sticking to their sweat, looked like devils. The tired horses, no longer off-saddled, had large open sores on their backs. The heat was burning, thirst intolerable...we knew nothing, and we continued our march as in a dream, under the scorching sun, gnawed by hunger, parched with thirst, and so exhausted by fatigue that I could see my comrades stiffen in the saddle to keep themselves from falling." A French General painted an even darker picture.
"What a mess!!" he exclaimed. "What a shambles!! It was a terrifying sight...no order in the ranks...straggling along...men emaciated, in rags and tatters, most without haversacks, many without riffles, some marching painfully, leaning on sticks and looking as though they were about to fall asleep."
Moltke, a 170 miles to the north at his headquarters in Luxembourg, was getting almost no reports from Kluck or Bulow. Kaiser Wilhelm was in Luxembourg also, complete with an enormous staff of his own advisory groups that also had staffs. This may be one reason why Moltke unlike Joffre, never ventured out to see for himself what was happening at the front. He had reason to fear that in his absence the kaiser, hungry for a great victory and (as Moltke told his wife in the deeply gloomy letters he sent home every day) incapable of understanding the dangers of the situation, would take personal command and do something disastrous.
While Hausen was attacking Foch across the Marais de Saint-Gond, Moltke again sent Colonel Hentsch, the head of his intelligence staff, off to the front my car. Hentsch's instructions-oral rather than written, so that whether he ultimately exceeded his authority can never be conclusively answered-were to visit the commanders of all but the 2 southernmost German armies, determine whether they were or were not in trouble, and send reports back to Moltke. Hentsch worked his way westward along the front, visiting the headquarters of the 5th Army of Crown Prince Wilhelm, the 4th Army of Duke Albrecht ofWurttemberg, and Hausen's 3rd Army, He found the situation of each of these armies acceptable, with no reason for alarm, and informed Moltke accordingly. It was evening when he got to Bulow's 2nd Army, and there the picture began to darken. Bulow had Franchet d'Esperey's battered but hard-fighting army in front of him, and between himself and Kluck to the west was a gap that now stretched for as much as 50 miles and had been penetrated by the BEF. A shaken Bulow told Hentsch that only a 'voluntary concentric retreat' by his army and Kluck's could divert a disaster. This wasn't a loss of nerve on Bulow's part. His position was dangerously weak. Petain's attacks had captured tactically important terrain, so that Bulow's right was continuing to be pushed back into an increasingly awkward position.
And this was only one of many emergencies. At the eastern end of the front, the French 1st and 2nd Armies were holding high ground near the Alsace border and repelling repeated attacks. The commander of the 2nd Army, Castelnau, absorbing news of the death in combat of his son(he would loose 2 more sons before the war ended), reported to Joffre that he had to withdraw from Nancy or risk the loss of his entire force. Joffre told him to hold where he was at all costs for at least another 24 hours. To Castelnau's north, around Verdun, the French 3rd Army was hanging on to rubble that once had been stout French fortifications and slaughtering the oncoming Germans.
Far away in East Prussia, at the Masurian Lakes, Hindenburg's 8th Army was closing in on Rennenkampf's retreating Russians. Even that wasn't the end of it: in Galicia, the main forces of the Austro-Hungarian army were engaged with more than 2 million Russian troops in yet another series of battles that were as confusing as they were bloody but in the end would prove little less important than Tannenberg and the Marne.
The only truly fluid sector of the Western Front remained as before the front's western extreme. An incident of September 8th indicates just how confused the situation was, with large and small French, German, and British units in motion all over the landscape. In the afternoon a detachment of French cavalry suddenly came upon a caravan of 3 German automobiles. When the horsemen started toward them at a gallop, the drivers quickly turned and sped off. In one car was Kluck, moving among the dispersed units of his army. Still tirelessly combative despite his 68 years, Kluck remained confident of his chances. For 3 days the French had been throwing themselves at his position on the Ourcq. Having withstood these attacks and worn the French down, he now saw an opportunity to finish them off before some other enemy force-possibly the BEF-could fall on him from the rear. He ordered an attack. The goal this time would be an encirclement of the 6th Army from the north. The assualt would be lead by a corps of infantry under
This was one of the corps that Kluck had lent to Bulow and then taken back. It had crossed Belgium and France with Kluck, had fought at Mons, had been in the thick of things all through the campaign, and was very nearly spent. At the end of the day Kluck said in a message to his army that "the decision will be decided tomorrow by an enveloping attack."
Early on the morning of Wednesday, September 9th, Hentsch set out to find Kluck. The roads were jammed with soldiers and equipment moving eastward. This was Kluck's shift of part of his army positions from which it could protect its rear, along with usual pathetic streams of refugees. The direction of the flow gave the appearance of an army in retreat. It appeared to support Bulow's appeal for a general pullback. It took Hentsch 5 hours to cover 50 miles, and during those hours Quast unleashed is attack. The 6th Army didn't simply retreat-it fell apart. French troops fled in all directions.
In East Prussia, Rennenkampf was still withdrawing, trying to escape destruction at the hands of a German force that was smaller than his but brimming with confidence in the aftermath of Tannenberg. Desperate, he sent 2 of his divisions in a heroic, suicidal attack on the advancing German center. Both divisions were destroyed, but they accomplished their purpose. The Germans were stopped, and what remained of Rennenkampf's army got away.
On the plains of Galicia, Conrad's long fight with the Russians was ending in disastrous-in almost final-defeat. He had moved against the Russians despite being grossly outnumbered, despite learning that the Germans wouldn't be able to support him, and despite the disappointment of learning that Romania with its army of 600,000 men wouldn't be joining the Central Powers as hoped. He had sent 31 divisions against the Russians' 45 infantry and 18 cavalry divisions, and the results were inevitable. The Austrians were driven back a 150 miles to the Carpathian Mountains. Conrad had lost more than 400,000 men-100,000 killed, and equal number taken prisoner, 220,000 wounded-plus 216 pieces of artillery and a 1,000 locomotives. He had lost more than a 4th of the manpower with which he had begun the war, and among that 4th were insupportably large numbers of Austria-Hungary's commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Less than a month and a half into the war, his capacity for dealing effectively not just with the Russians but even with smaller enemies was nearly exhausted. From now on Vienna would be not so much Berlin's junior partner as a weak and burdensome appendage. The Germans would grow fond of saying that being allied with the Hapsburg empire was like being "shackled to a corpse."
Conrad himself shared in a personal way in the immensity of the tragedy. "I have one of my sons seriously ill," he lamented, "and the son I idolized in a mound of corpses at Ravaruska." Around Verdun, where the French were hanging on by such a thin thread that Joffre twice authorized the commander of is 3rd to retreat if necessary, September 9th brought a final, convulsive German assault. The French had no reserves left, no way to seal up any holes in their front. The did, however, have the remains of their immensely strong defenses. In the years leading up to 1914 the main Verdun forts had been sand and loose rock piled onto the original masonry and reinforced concrete as a top shell. Heavy artillery had been installed within armored retractable turrets. As a result, these forts could withstand direct hits even by the kinds of monster guns that had wrecked Liege and Namur, and they could also keep attackers under continuous fire. The rough terrain stiffened French resistance by making retreat almost impossible. At the same time it worked against the Germans by compounding the difficulties of bringing in artillery. The French not only kept their line intact but butchered the attackers as they themselves had been butchered in their earlier offensives. On the night of September 9th the Germans made a last effort to punch through, but in the darkness they ended up blasting away at one another.
When Hentsch arrived at 1st Army headquarters at last, Kluck was away, keeping a close eye on the victory unfolding at the Ourcq. Hentsch talked with Kluck's chief of staff, explaining that the BEF was now north of the Marne, that Bulow was planning to withdraw, and that there was no alternative to Kluck's withdrawal as well. While they were talking, a message arrived from Bulow reporting that he was starting his retreat. This left nothing to discuss or decide, so Hentsch departed. When Kluck learned of Hentsch's visit and the plans of a retreat, his first reaction was to resist, to insist as always on pushing forward. When he learned that Bulow was already withdrawing, however, he had no choice but to yield. With Bulow moving north, his army was so vulnerable that nothing except retreat could possibly save it.
From the German perspective, the story of the Schlieffen right wing had a melancholy final chapter. At most the same moment when Kluck was accepting the necessity of retreat, Quast's corps was tearing apart the last of the disintegrating French defenses. Nothing lay between it and Paris but 30 miles of open, undefended ground. It must have been like having an impossible dream come true: all they had to do was keep marching. But then new orders arrived from Kluck: Quast was to call off his attack and turn back. The 1st Army was retreating.
It was over. Quast's men had more marching to do, but now they would be heading back in the direction from which they had come. No one felt the melancholy more deeply than Moltke. "I can't find words to describe the crushing responsibility that has weighed upon my shoulders during the last few days and still weighs on me today," he wrote his wife. "The appalling difficulties of our present situation hang before my eyes like a dark curtain through which I can see nothing."
