The French and British, though jubilant at and in many cases astonished by the German withdrawal from the Marne, were badly battered, worn out, and running low on essential equipment. Many were almost to exhausted to move. "After 5 days and nights of fighting," one English soldier wrote, "decimated, spent and hungry, we are lying on the bare earth, with only one desire in our hearts-to get ourselves killed." And they were short of shells for their artillery. It is one measure of the sustained intensity of this new kind of warfare that the French faced critical shortages of ammunition for the
thier most effective field artillery piece, because only 10,000 rounds were being produced per day. This was barley 20% of the need.
For any number of such reasons, the armies of the Entente failed to close with the retreating Germans or exploit the huge gap that had prompted their withdrawal. They didn't attack in force until after the German 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armies had settled into fortified positions on high ground north of the Aisne, the next east-west river of the Marne. By then it was too late. The fighting was ferocious, with the British especially taking heavy losses in trying to force the Germans out of their defenses, but it accomplished essentially nothing, "3 days ago our division took possession of these heights and dug itself in," a German officer wrote to his parents. "2 days ago, early in the morning, we were attacked by an immesnsely superior English force, 1 brigade and 2 battalions, and were turned out of our positions. The fellows too out 5 guns from us. It was a tremendous hand-to-hand fight. How I escaped myself I am not clear. I then had to bring up supports on foot...and with the help of artillery we drove the fellows out of the position again. Our machine guns did excellent work; the English fell in heaps...During the 1st 2 days of the battle I had only one piece of bread and no water. I spent the night in the rain without any overcoat. The rest of my kit was on the horses which had been left behind with the baggage and which cannot come up into the battle because as soon as you put your nose up from behind cover the bullets whistle. War is terrible. We are all hoping that a decisive battle will end the war."
The fighting was anything but decisive, however, and the British and the French had lost whatever opportunity they might have had to force the Germans into a Great Retreat of their own. Some of France's richest mining and industrial areas remained in German hands.
The Germans made a final unsuccessful effort to capture Verdun, which if taken would have given them an anchoring strongpoint from which to keep their armies on the Marne. Without Verdun, the Marne line was untenable. In pulling back, the Germans had to abandon valuable real estate-notably the rail junctions of Reims, Amiens, and Arras.
British and French headquarters bubbled with optimism, with Sir John French predicting that his troops would be in Berlin within 6 weeks. Erich von Falkenhayn, the 53 year old general and former war minister who replaced a bitterly disappointed Moltke as head of the German general staff(illness was given as the excuse for Moltke's reassignment), was quicker to see that the war was now likely to be a long one. He encouraged
to pursue a negotiated settlement on either the Eastern or Western Front-perhaps a negotiated peace with Russia that would persuade the French too come to terms.
government in Washington had already offered its services as a mediator, and soon Denmark would do the same. It was already too late, however, for such overtures to bear fruit. None of the warring governments thought they could possibly accept a settlement in which they didn't win something that would justify all the deaths. The war had become self-perpetuating and self-justifying.
Though not as ebullient as French and Joffre, Falkenhayn believed that a decision in the field was still possible. Within days of taking command he was developing plans for a fresh offensive, and before the end of September he was putting those plans in motion. He had 2 primary aims; The 1st was to correct the Germans' single greatest vulnerability, their exposed right wing, which came to an unprotected end north of Paris. The other was to capture Antwerp, the last stronghold of the Belgian army, the greatest port on the north coast and , so long as it remained in enemy hands, a redoubt from which the Belgians and British could strike at Germany's line of supply.
Falkenhayn could have solved the problem of his exposed right wing by pulling back still farther-by withdrawing, for example, to a line running from the Aisne to Brussels or even east of Antwerp. But this would have surrendered most of the gains of Moltke's offensive, demoralizing the armies and outraging all of Germany. Instead, he took an aggressive approach, deciding to extend his line westward along the River Somme all the way to the Atlantic. Such a move was feasible only if the French failed to defend the region northwest of Paris, but if it succeeded the Germans would control all of northern France, the ports on the English Channel included. They would be positioned to resume the move on Paris from both the east and the west.
Like Kluck and Moltke before him, however, Falkenhayn was trying to do too much with the resources at hand. To strengthen his right, he ordered the transfer of the 6th and 7th Armies from Alsace and Lorraine(where they would be replaced by 2 of the several new armies now being formed). This wasn't easily accomplished; the movement of a single army required 140 trains, and only one rail line connected the German right more or less directly with the left. Partly because of the resulting delays, Falkenhayn's offensive westward along the Somme wasn't as strong as it should have been; it ran into a new French 10th Army and was stopped. That left Antwerp, which though more strongly fortified than even Liege(it was surrounded by 19 large, state-of-the-art, powerfully armed forts plus a number of smaller ones, and defended by nearly a 100,000 troops) seemed a more achievable objective.
Before the Germans began hauling their siege guns to Artwerp, General Sir Henry Wilson, the BEF's deputy chief of staff, suggested transferring the BEF from France, where it was tucked between 2 French armies on the Aisne, to its original position beyond the end of the French left. This meant, as the line now stood, moving the British troops to the Flanders region of western Belgium. Such a change, Wilson said, would put the BEF where it logically ought to be; close to the ports from which it drew its supplies, reinforcements, and communications. Sir John French was reluctant at 1st, thinking no doubt of the advantages of having one of Joffre's armies on each of his flanks. But when Winston Churchill pointed out that, if the BEF were in Flanders, the guns of the Royal Navy would be able to support if from the Channel, he changed his mind. A career cavalryman, French began to see the flat terrain of Flanders as a place where his mounted troops could prove their value at last, spearheading a plunge eastward into central Belgium and from there to Germany.
Now it was Joffre's turn to be reluctant. He feared that if the BEF again got into trouble, and if French started thinking again of taking his army back to England, a position on the coast would make withdrawal all too easy. When French announced that he was moving north with or without Joffre's assent, Joffre urged him to proceed slowly and cautiously. French instead moved so swiftly that soon Joffre was blaming his haste for the success of German attack along the Aisne and blaming his commandeering of scarce railcars for the German's capture of the industrial city of Lille. Falkenhayn's movement of troops and guns toward Antwerp had by this time awakened Joffre to the danger on his left. He moved his 2nd Army, which Foch now commanded, north into Flanders along with the British. The BEF's destination was west of Ypres, a lace-manufacturing center endowed with treasures of medieval architecture and suddenly important as the nexus of roads leading eastward into central Belgium and westward toward France and the Channel ports.
When the Germans began systematically crushing Antwerp's fortresses with their artillery, the British were more alarmed than the French. For a major port so close to England to fall into the hand of an enemy possessing a navy substantial as Germany's would be no trivial matter. Winston Churchill hurried a small force of marines-all that were available-to help with the Belgian's defense. Churchill himself went with it, met with Belgiums's king and queen, conferred with the Belgian commanders, and involved himself in the search for some way to hold the Germans off. He sent a telegram to the government in London, proposing that he be appointed British military commander in Antwerp and replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty. Members of the cabinet were said to have laughed when they read this message; it seemed typical Winston, too eager for adventure, constantly hatching wild ideas, always thinking of himself capable of anything. Kitchener, not only the secretary of state of war but the living symbol of the British military(it was his face that fiercely told young Englishmen that "Your County Wants You!" on the recruiting posters), didn't regard Churchill's suggestion as ridiculous at all. He knew the first lord fairly well and had apparently been impressed. He knew that Churchill had been almost alone in recognizing the importance of the Channel ports even before the turnaround at the Marne and in urging that something be done to secure them.(Nothing had been.) Kitchener proposed that Churchill be made a lieutenant general on the spot. The prime minister didn't agree.
By October 6th the Belgians themselves, staggered by round-the-clock German shelling, decided that Antwerp couldn't be saved and that giving it up was the only way to save their army. Churchill departed for home, and a day later 60,000 Belgian troops under the command of their king left the city. Demoralized, nerves stretched, they hurried west until they were almost in France, arranging themselves in a defensive line north of Ypres behind the barrier that the River Yser forms as it flows to the sea. There they waited while Foch's army began to extend their line to the south and British troops filed into Ypres from the west. The Germans, meanwhile, took possession of Antwerp. The end of resistance there freed 4 German corps, most of an army, for other uses. Whole corps of new, barely trained reserves, many of them student volunteers, were arriving in Belgium from Germany.
As commander of all German forces, Falkenhayn faced far broader problems than did French or even Joffre. He had the vast war in the east to deal with-a war that now stretched across 500 miles of front and in which his forces and those of the Austrians continued to be out numbered by frightening margins. The heroes of Tannenberg-Hindenburg and Ludendorff- were scrambling to cope with the Russian threat not only to East Prussia but to Silesia to its south and, farther south still, to the badly shaken armies of Vienna. 2 things were imperative. The Germans had to move south to connect with the Austrian left, shoring up Conrad's armies before they were overrun. And, not having enough troops to defend at every threatened point, they had to go on the offensive. They had to strike a blow that would stop Russian juggernaut before it became unstoppable.
Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their operations chief, Max Hoffmann, decided that they could satisfy both imperatives simultaneously by taking a newly formed 9th Army south by rail to the vicinity of Warsaw, a key base of operations for the Russians, There they could link up with the Austrian left and join it in a move against the 4 armies that the commander in chief of the Russian forces, the tsar's cousin
was sending towards Silesia. The 8th Army would remain behind to guard East Prussia. Ludendorff, bold as usual, wanted to take part of it south too, but Falkenhayn rejected this proposal as too risky.
These movements set the stage for the 1st Battle of Warsaw, in which 18 German and Austrian divisions found themselves in the path of 60 Russian divisions advancing on a 250-mile front. Conrad's assignment was to break the Russian line in the south by moving forward across the River San in Galicia, but is attempts to do so failed. Farther, north, the German right and center made swift progress at 1st but then were slowed by days of torrential rain. "From Czestochowa we advanced in forced marches,' an officer in charge of munitions transport wrote. "During the 1st 2 days roads were passable, but after that they became terrible, as it rained every day. In some places there were no roads left, nothing but mud and swamps. Once it took us a full hour to move one wagon, loaded with munitions and drawn by 15 horses, a distance of only 15 yards...Horses sank into the mud up to their bodies and wagons up to their axles...One night we reached a spot which was absolutely impassable. The only way to get around it was through a dense forest, but before we could get through there it was necessary to cut an opening through the trees. For the next few hours we felled trees for a distance of over 500 yards...For the past 8 days we have been on the go almost every night, and once I stayed in my saddle for 30 consecutive hours. During all that time we had no real rest. Either we did not reach our quarters until early morning or late at night. We consider ourselves lucky if we have one room and straw on the floor for the 7 of us. For 10 days I haven't been out of my clothes. And when we do get a little sleep it is almost invariably necessary to start off again at once...Long ago we saw the last of butter, sausages, or similar delicacies. We are glad if we have bread and some lard."
As the Germans struggled forward, the Russians had time to assemble a mass of forces and counterattack. The German left was gradually bent back under the weight of repeated assaults until it faced northward instead of eastward and appeared to be on the verge of disintegrating.
By October 17th the Germans saw that they had to withdraw or be destroyed. The 9th Army retreated 60 miles in 6 days, and by the time it was free of the Russians, it had lost 40,000 men. Overall the campaign had cost Germany a 100,000 casualties, including 36,000 men killed, the Austrians between 40,000 and 50,000. The Russians pulled their guns out of the slime, and Grand Duke Nicholas began reassembling his sodden forces for a resumption of their advance.
By the start of the German retreat from Warsaw, Sir John French was beginning to move some of his forces eastward in Flanders. Falkenhayn, at almost exactly the same time, was setting in motion a westward offensive over adjacent ground. Until hours before their armies crashed into each other, neither was expecting to encounter an enemy in force. Both commanders were after territory: French's goal was Brussels by way of Ghent, while Falkenhayn wanted the area directly west of Belgium and the port towns that would come with it. Each was eagerly aware that, if he could advance far enough, he might then be in position to turn away from the sea and encircle his enemy. Glory seemed just over the horizon.
Almost immediately, both sides encountered immovable resistance. A joint French-British thrust toward Ghent ran into Falkenhayn's main force and was thrown back. The Germans tried to tear through the Belgian line at the Yser, but they too were stopped. Thus was set in motion the month of carnage called the 1st Battle of Ypres.
The nightmare was nowhere more hellish than where the Germans met the remains of the Belgian army. The suffering was magnified for the Belgians by the impossibility of digging in the waterlogged ground of the Flemish lowlands; for the Germans by the terrors of trying to cross a river under infantry fire while British navy shells screamed down on them from the nearby Channel; for both sides by the approach of winter and the new experience of being not only wet but half-frozen day after day and night after night.
King Albert rallied the Belgian troops. He was a competent soldier and a young man of considerable courage. He was also motivated: Foch had sternly warned him that if he failed to hold this last silver of Belgium, he couldn't expect to retain his throne after the war. His Majesty positioned noncommissioned officers behind his line with orders to shoot any man who tried to retreat.
After days of murderous German shellfire that killed or wounded more than a 1/3 of the Belgians and effectively ended their ability to stand their ground, Albert played his last trump card.l He ordered the opening(in some places the process required dynamite) of sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea. The Germans, who were getting more and more men across the Yser and sensed that victory was near, couldn't understand what was happening. In the morning the ground was covered with ankle-deep water. Assuming that this was the result of the continuing rains, the Germans slogged on. By midnight, the water was knee-deep and still rising. The Germans not only had to give up any hope of continuing their offensive but spent a difficult night getting their troops back to dry land. Soon they were separated from the Belgians by a 5 mile wide, shoulder-deep lake, and that part of the fight was at an end. The German troops who had been attacking across the Yser were sent south to join in the fight around Ypres. They found themselves in a terrible struggle, often hand to hand, for the villages atop the low ridge that circled around Ypres to the north, east, and south. The German objective was to break through the Entente line on that ridge and close in on Ypres itself.
At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman's men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing-the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his 1st intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler's exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.
The Germans found progress against the British and French as hard as it had been against the Belgians. But when the BEF and Foch launched their own attacks, they too were quickly thwarted. Along this part of the line, however, there were no dikes to be opened, so that the opposing forces could be separated and their misery brought to an end. The fighting continued day and night, the 2 sides taking turns on the offensive, and as the casualties mounted companies were reduce to the size of platoons and the tattered remnants of units were mixed together helter-skelter. Officers were all but annihilated, so that young lieutenants found themselves in command of what remained of battalions and regiments.
The rain continued, the nights grew colder, men lay on the surface of the earth because any holes they dug immediately filled with water, and still somehow the fighting went on. The landscape, though almost uniformly flat, was broken by villages and patches of woodland and by rivers and canals and hedgerows and fences extending in every direction. This was far better for defense than offense, and practically impossible for cavalry(which in any case was proving to e helpless against machine guns). The British were often outnumbered, sometimes by margins that seemed impossible, but time after time they held off attacks or came back to recapture lost ground. One thing that saved them was the skill of their cavalry, acquired in the guerrilla fighting of the Boer War, in dismounting and fighting as infantry. What ultimately saved them, at Ypres as earlier at Mons and Le Cateau, was the accuracy and speed(and of course the courage) of the ordinary British rifleman. Here again the fire laid down by the Tommies was often intense enough to convince the Germans that they were advancing not against rifles but against machine guns.
The devastating effectiveness of the British fire, coupled with the inexperience of some of the German reserves thrown into the Ypres meat-grinder, led to perhaps the most poignant of the many butcheries of late 1914. Thousands of schoolboy recruits, many of them as young as 16, followed almost equally inexperienced reserve sergeants and officers in heavily massed formations directly at the waiting BEF. They formed a wall of flesh-British soldiers recalled them advancing arm in arm, singing as they came, wearing their fraternity caps and carrying flowers-that blind men could hardly have missed. They were moved down in rows. Where they somehow succeeded in driving back their enemies, they often didn't know what to do next and so milled around aimlessly until hit with a counterattack. Many thousands of these youngsters lie in a single mass grave a short distance north of Ypres. At the site is a sculpture, the figures of a pair of parents kneeling in grief, created after the war by the mother of one of them.
Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides, and horror after horror. One evening, at the end of a day of murderous infantry gunfights under constant artillery fire, one of the German reserve units managed at tremendous cost to drive the British out of the village of Bixshoote. Later they received word that they were to be relieved overnight. In their lack of experience they assembled and marched away before their relief arrived. Observing this, the British moved in and again took possession. In the following 2 weeks the Germans would try again and again to retake what they had given away, failing repeatedly and always with even more casualties than before.
Losses were no less shocking on the other side. When Scotland's Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was taken out of action, only about 30 men remained of the 1,000 plus who had come to France at the start of the war. The BEF was moving toward annihilation. In some places along the line the British were stretched so thin that the Germans, observing, outsmarted themselves. They decided not to attack at those points, thinking that such a tempting target must be a decoy behind which lay masses of British or French reserves. There were no such reserves.
Somehow, the Germans and British again launched simultaneous attacks on October 30th, and again they ran head-on into each other and grappled in a struggle in which the losses were almost insupportable on both sides. The next day the Germans alone were still attacking, and this time, at the village of Gheluvelt, another of their green reserve units broke through the defensive ring. Nothing lay between them and Ypres, but this sudden success after so much failure apparently was more than they could believe. While they waited for instructions, a British brigadier general found the only troops in the vicinity, the 7 officers and 357 enlisted men who remained of the 2nd Worcester Regiment, and ordered them to retake Gheluvelt. To get the village, these men had to cross a 1,000 yards of open ground, and during the crossing a 100 of them where cut down. The survivors, when they reached the edge of the village, darted into a grove of trees, fixed their bayonets, and attacked. 1,200 confused and frightened German soldiers, thinking that this ragged little gang must be the advance of some powerful force, ran for their lives. The Worcesters, with nothing between them and Ypres but open country, had sealed the hole.
That night Falkenhayn called a halt. He had no idea that the BEF was at the point of breakdown-out of reserves, nearly out of ammunition, at the limits of endurance. He still thought that a breakthrough was possible, but he wanted to assemble more trained and experienced troops before trying again.
Things became briefly quiet both in Flanders and in Poland in the early days of November, but almost daily the war continued to grow in size and change in shape. The 1st Canadian troops were in England now, being readied to cross the Channel and link up with the British. An entire corps of Indian troops, tough Gurkha units among them, was with the BEF in Flanders, and black troops from France's African colonies were arriving at the front as well. In the east, Hindenburg was named commander in chief of all German forces on the Russian front. Ludendorff continued as his chief of staff, and Hoffmann stay with him as well. When word came from Istanbul that the Ottoman Empire was entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, in Berlin and Vienna it must have sounded like a gift from heaven.
Before November was a week old, the Eastern and Western Fronts were heating up again.
put 2 armies on the march through Poland to Silesia, and other Russian armies were moving southwestward to the Carpathians. And Falkenhayn was almost ready to try again to take Ypres. The kaiser was still at Supreme Headquarters, and his presence was a big headache for Falkenhayn as it had been for Moltke. Wilhelm was constantly demanding a victory, a reason to don one of his most gorgeous uniforms and be paraded in triumph through some conquered city. In his protracted disappointment he was like a petulant adolescent, and no more useful.
During the lull in the Flanders struggle, Falkenhayn received a hurried visit from Ludendorff. As usual, and with Hoffmann's help as always, Ludendorff had an ambitious plan ready for execution. Also as usual, his plan was aimed not just at stopping the Russian armies advancing into Poland but at destroying them. He proposed to do this by allowing the Russians to advance beyond the railheads that were their source of support until they ran out of momentum. Then the Germans would descend on them from the north, taking them in the flank and rear, cutting them off from Warsaw and safety. But more troops were needed. This was what Ludendorff had come for: reinforcements. Falkenhayn refused; he had been assembling all the divisions he could find for the new attack in Flanders, and the kaiser was hounding him. Ludendorff departed in a fury. Another war, this one withing the German general staff, began at this time. It was between Falkenhayn and the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team, and it was over the question of whether the German's best hope of victory lay in the west of the east.
