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.

                                                             The Marne



As big and confused and drawn out as it was, the Battle of Tannenberg was a model of clarity and simplicity compared with the more famous Battle of the Marne, which has come down to us in history as the fight that saved Paris but in fact was settled by one side's decision not to fight.

Far more than Tannenberg, "First Marne"(there would be another huge and crucial encounter in almost exactly the same place four long years later) wasn't a single great encounter but a weeks-long series of maneuvers punctuated with bursts of ferocious combat. It involved millions rather than mere hundreds of thousands of troops, and they were stretched out over vast expanses of territory. Its starting date is hard to pinpoint; traditionally it has been placed on or about September 5th, but events began flowing toward it during the closing days of August, at the time when the Germans were destroying the Russian 2nd Army in East Prussia.

All the French and German forces, as August ended, were still arranged in the order in which they had begun the war. Kluck's 1st Army was still the outer edge of the Schleiffen right wing, but now it was well south of Belgium, setting the pace for the rest of the German line as it swung down toward Paris like a great hour hand in counterclockwise motion.

South of Verdun, the German left was also pushing toward Paris but making much slower progress. In place after place there, in woods and fields and on stony hilltops, men were dying by the thousands in savage, obscure fights the names of which are almost completely forgotten today.

Movement had always been most pronounced at the other end of the line, where Lanrezac and the British Expeditionary Force were no longer even attempting to turn and fight. The situation north of Paris had become almost surreal; hundreds of thousands of weary French and British doggedly trudging southward, hundreds of thousands of equally weary Germans following in their tracks, and almost none of them doing any actual fighting. Looming over all was the idea of Paris, the supreme symbolic prize but also a great if dubiously prepared fortress with a 60-mile perimeter of defensive walls and artillery emplacements. Bulow, when he got there, was supposed to besiege it while Kluck went around. One question was whether Bulow could get there. Another was whether, having arrived, he could take the city. The Germans had encircled Paris in the Franco-Prussian War but failed to get inside.

Schlieffen had predicted that a decisive battle would take place on or about the 40th day after mobilization. As the 25th day arrived, then the 30th, mounting tension and the increasing exhaustion
of the troops as they drew closer to Paris made it seem that a climax of some kind had to be imminent.

The commanders on both sides had little reason to feel that they were in charge of, rather than reacting to, events. At German supreme headquarters, which had been moving westward in cautious steps from Berlin to Koblenz and then on to Luxembourg, the continuing progress of Kluck and Bulow was igniting celebration. Moltke did not join in. As his armies penetrated deeper into France, clashing with or pursuing the French according to what Joffre was ordering his generals to do on any given day, his contact with them became increasingly tenuous.(Radio was still a new and highly unreliable medium.) Keenly aware of his own blindness, under no illusions about his ability to direct the campaign with so little knowledge of what was happening at the front, Moltke became unwilling to issue orders. Expectations became cloudy, prediction impossible, every shred of information precious. Would Kluck, his army worn down and outrunning its lines of supply, really able to circle all the way around Paris and still remain capable of attacking the French? Or might the best chances now be in Alsace and Lorraine, where the French defenses were reported to be vulnerable?

Joffre, even he surrendered great expanses of countryside, was accomplishing important things. He was making it impossible for the Germans to close with his left and force it into a fight it had little chance of winning. And he was maintaining good order; his armies remained fully under control in conditions that could easily have produced chaos. They were staying in formation and following routes and timetables worked out by headquarters, their every move planned, coordinated, and carefully directed. But this couldn't continue.

Unless they were going to march past Paris and leave it to the Germans, at some point soon the French, and presumably the British, were going to have to stop and make a stand. When this was going to be possible, or where or even whether, remained unclear. The sphinx like Joffre was sharing his plans, if at this point he had any, with no one.

Lanrezac was daily more pessimistic. Sir John French, thinking it likely that France had already lost the war, was talking of saving his little army by pulling it out of the line, perhaps even taking it back to England. The only really aggressive commander remaining in the area was Kluck, but his aggressiveness was taking a heavy toll on his troops. They were now advancing an average of more than 20 miles daily, each man burdened with his 10 lb rifle and his 60 or more pounds of gear as the hot dry summer of 1914 blazed on. Often, at the end of a long day on the march, the men had to spread out across the countryside and forage for meat and the vegetables that were, providentially, being harvested in abundance at summer's end. As they moved 60 and then 80 miles beyond the farthest points that their railway support could reach support could reach their horses began to collapse, the problem of supply threatened to become unmanageable.

The German cavalry had difficulty operating in this country; rivers, canals, woods, and other obstructions slowed and complicated every foray. When horsemen closed with enemy troops, they found themselves no match for machined guns and magazine-fed rifles. The labor of constantly moving artillery, and with it 1000's of shells, was terrible and endless.

Things were little better for the French and British, but as they drew closer to Paris they were moving toward rather than away from supplies and reinforcements. They were able to make increased use of the railroad network centered on the capital. The city was seized in with fear. Politicians asked if Joffre intended to retreat forever, got no answer, and called for his dismissal. 

On Lanrezac's left the British were retreating so fast-the infantry given only 4 hours' rest in 24 hours, the cavalry even less-that the Germans no longer knew where they were or if they remained a factor that had to be reckoned with. In his haste, French left Lanrezac's flank once again exposed. But the Germans too were having a hard time keeping their armies aligned. Kluck was outrunning Bulow and beginning to realize that somewhere out in front of him-a juicily tempting target-was Lanrezac's naked flank. On August 27th he had received fresh instructions from Moltke reiterating that his mission continued to be what it had been from the beginning; to march around Paris and proceed from there to the east. By this time, however, Moltke was receiving sketchy reports of a buildup of forces near Paris. The activity being reported was the birth of the French 6th Army, which Joffre had let General Gallieni have for the defense of the capital. Moltke saw these new forces, correctly, as a threat to his right wing.

Accordingly, on August 28th he sent new instructions. Kluck was to stay not just in line with Bulow but slightly behind him-"in echelon" is the military term. But he neglected to say anything about the new threat from the direction of Paris, thus making it impossible for the 1st Army's commander to see how these new orders were necessary or even made sense. To put himself in echelon with Bulow, Kluck would have had to stop his advance for a day or more, perhaps even turn around. In doing so he would have thrown away his chance to hit Lanrezac, perhaps to start the unraveling of the French left, and possibly to win the war. He decided that if he continued to move forward but shifted toward southeast, he could fulfill the letter of his new orders, bring his army closer to where Bulow was heading if not literally to Bulow's side, and continue his pursuit. Destroying Lanrezac's army, or at a minimum pushing it eastward out of Bulow's path and away from Paris, would surely satisfy the spirit of his instructions even if it violated their letter. And so Kluck crossed the River Marne on September 3rd and pushed on. He felt free to do so because he was ignorant of one important fact and wrong about another; ignorant of the new French army taking shape to the west, wrong in believing that the mysterious disappearance of the British meant that the BEF was no longer an effective fighting force.

Among Joffre's problems, at this point, was getting the BEF back into the war. He needed the cooperation of Sir John French-something easier said than done, the British commander having decided that his allies weren't only unreliable but doomed. Joffre hoped that he could restore French's confidence, and make a try at blocking the German advance in the process, by having Lanrezac attack Bulow's army near the towns of St. Quentin and Guise. Learning that Lanrezac was unwilling, Joffre went to 5th Army headquarters and confronted his old friend in person. When Lanrezac continued to resist, Joffre threatened to dismiss him. "If you refuse to carry out my orders," Joffre was reported to have said, "I'll have you shot!"

Joffre went next to the BEF's headquarters at Compiegne. There, in the grand chateau that had become a base of operations for the BEF's staff, he all but begged French to turn his army around, assuring him that in doing so he would be protected by Lanrezac on his right and by the new 6th Army on his left. French refused. He said that the sorry state of his army left him with no choice but to take it south of Paris for at least 10 days of refitting and recuperation.

Lanrezac's attack had begun, meanwhile, and quickly developed into a hard fight. The French were soundly whipped on their left; Lanrezac had again been correct in warning that the German 2nd Army would overwhelm them there. But on the right, at Guise, the battle seesawed inconclusively and the French were able to hold. At one critical point their position was saved when the dashing

                                                           General Louis Franchet d'Esperey

a flamboyant character whom the admiring British troops called Desperate Frankie, led an almost theatrical counterattack on horseback, his sword held aloft, accompanied by unfurled regimental banners and a band playing "La Marseillaise." The other side had its moment of glory after the Prussian First Foot Guards, as elite a unit as any in the armies of Germany, was thrown back and seemed in danger of falling apart. 

                                                              Prince Eitel Friedrich

The 2nd of Kaiser Wilhelm's 6 sons, took command. Beating a drum, he rallied the troops and led them forward in a successful counterattack. The Prince survived, but his son of the commander of the guards corps was killed. Most of the generals on both sides were men in their 50's and 60's, and many had sons in uniform. As the fighting went on and losses continued to be heavy among junior officers responsible for leading attacks and organizing defenses, news that yet another general's son had been killed became almost commonplace.

At Guise, Lanrezac found himself with both flanks so dangerously exposed that he had no choice but to withdraw. Bulow, though he declared victory in reporting to Moltke, had taken heavy casualties. He decided that he had to stop for a day. He asked Kluck to move closer-farther east-to support him. Kluck, hungrier than ever for Lanrezac's flank, agreed. Joffre had had no choice but to accept Lanrezac's decision to resume his retreat. Without the BEF he lacked the manpower to make a stand, as desperately necessary as a stand of some kind was beginning to be.

French, no doubt, was guided in his obstinacy by the instructions he had received from Kitchener before leaving England;  to regard his army as independent of the French and to protect it from destruction. Despite his concerns, however, the condition of the BEF was something short of desperate. The corps commanded by Smtih-Dorrien, having borne the brunt at Mons and Le Cateau, was indeed no longer fully functional. But the other corps, the one commanded by Haig, had still seen little hard fighting. Haig had, in fact, agreed to an appeal from Lanrezac to move his corps north to join in the fight at Guise, but before he could act he was countermanded by French. This had deepened Lanrezac's sense of betrayal.

In his reports to London, the BEF's commander had much to say about his lack of confidence in the French but little about his own movements and plans. It was only obliquely, from other sources, that the cabinet learned that he had denied Joffre's urgent request for help, that he had decided to move behind Paris, and that he was even considering a withdrawal to the coast. Kitchener sent a wire asking him to explain. When French replied that he was indeed withdrawing south of the River Seine and that "my confidence in the ability of the leaders of the French Army to carry this campaign to a successful conclusion is fast waning," Kitchener shot back another message informing him that he was expected to "as far as possible conform to the plans of General Joffre for the conduct of the campaign." In response, French again gave vent to his disdain for his allies and emphasized how unready the BEF was to withstand further combat. It may have been the haughtiness of his tone-"I think you had better trust me to watch the situation and act according to circumstances"-that prompted Kitchener to don his field marshal's uniform and cross the Channel by destroyer that night.

The next afternoon Kitchener, French, and Joffre met at the British embassy in Paris. Joffre told the Englishmen that with trainloads of troops pouring in from the east, he now had two armies in formation-not only the 6th at Paris but also a new 8th, which was to be inserted immediately east of the 5th. The Germans, he said, were probably unaware of these new units, and almost certainly couldn't know that a new French army now lay on their right. Thus it might now be possible to turn the tables-if the BEF would come forward. French argued, complained, and resisted. As he would acknowledge in his postwar memoir, he not only had no confidence in his allies but was deeply offended by Kitchener's sudden appearance in France. He thought that His Lordship was undercutting him with the impossible French and insulting him by wearing his uniform rather than attire appropriate to what he now was; a representative not of His Majesty's army but of the government. Kitchener too French into a separate room. It's not clear what was said there. French's account states that he put Kitchener in his place in no uncertain terms, but the aftermath of the conversation makes that unlikely. When the 2 men emerged, there was no further need for discussion. French was prepared to take the BEF north.

Joffre went to 5th Army headquarters, took his old friend Lanrezac off for a stroll in a nearby schoolyard, and there relieved him of his command. Lanrezac may have saved France by first to understand what the Germans were planning in Belgium, by putting his army in the path of the Schlieffen right wing, and by being the only army commander unwilling to sacrifice his troops in futile attacks. He had absorbed blow after blow from the invaders, performing well Charleroi and Guise and keeping his army in good order through its long retreat. But now he had become expendable. Was he, as Joffre would claim, too worn down to remain capable of acting decisively? Or was Joffre unable to forgive subordinates who disagreed with him and turned out to be right? It hardly mattered. What did matter was that Lanrezac hated Sir John French and French hated him. Joffre was determined to do everything possible to satisfy the British. Lanrezac's successor was obvious;

                                                     Franchet d'Esperey, Desperate Frankie
a particular favorite of the BEF.

Farther to the east, the front was aflame. Moltke was hurling his 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th Armies against the French 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st. The Germans were repulsed, fell back, and were counterattacked in their turn. Joffre by this point was firing generals almost wholesale; by September 6th he would replace the commanders of 2 of his original 5 armies, 7 corps, and 20 infantry and 4 cavalry divisions. Other officers were rising to fill vacancies. 

                                                                Ferdinand Foch
after performing well as corps commander in Lorraine at the start of the war and heroically during the retreat that followed, was promoted to command of the new 9th Army. 

                                                            Henri Philippe Petain
whose brigade had distinguished itself as part of Lanrezac's command in early fighting in Belgium, was given a division.

Uncertainty gave way to panic. The government left Paris for Bordeaux on the Atlantic Coast. But in the midst of it all Joffre remained impassive, maddeningly silent, calm. No matter how alarming the situation, how terrible the emergency, the tall and rotund generalissimo never seemed disturbed. He became famous for the care he took always to have a good lunch followed by a nap, end the day with a good dinner, and always get a full night's sleep(in bed at 9, back at work at 5). Even when things seemed to be at their worst, he made his staff understand that under no circumstances was his rest to be disturbed. But between mealtimes and bedtimes he was steadily on the move, using a big touring car driven by a Grand Prix racing champion to make repeated visits to his generals, especially those on the left. Thus he was able to keep himself in touch with events and observe his subordinates in action. He said so little during his visits, has so little to say even when told of shocking events or asked for guidance, that some of the men who dealt with him decided that he was little better than a stately idiot and that his principal contribution was his tranquilizing example. He has also been described as viciously political and self-serving behind his rock like exterior. He has been accused of dismissing subordinates not so much for failure to perform as for becoming potential rivals or, worst of all, for showing their chief to have been wrong.

But fools rarely succeed under the kinds of circumstances confronting Joffre, and it wasn't by accident that things began to turn his way. The decision to strip troops from his embattled right wing and send them west by rail was his, and the consequences couldn't have been more important. The number of divisions facing the German right, 17 and a half on August 23rd, rose to 41 by September 6th. In his way, gradually, Joffre gave himself one of the greatest advantages a general can have; superior mass. He magnified the significance of what has to be considered Moltke's most grievous mistake; his incremental removal of nearly a quarter of a million men from the right wing, which was left without enough divisions to do all the things needing to be done.

Thus the great strike force that had obsessed Schlieffen literally to his dying breath found itself outnumbered. It was also enfeebled; bone tired, short of supplies, and increasingly without food. It is possible that Moltke's greatest mistake was in sending reinforcements to his left, which was in no danger, and accomplishing little of importance, instead of to Kluck and Bulow, where they might have made all the difference. Apparently he was discouraged from doing so by the Belgians' destruction of key railways.

The French, in contrast to the Germans, were reaping all the benefits of fighting on home ground with interior lines of communication. Every 24 hours another 32 trains arrived at the capital loaded with troops and guns from the east. Even now, however, Joffre could find no way of stopping the Great Retreat. He continued to wait and watch. "A natural reluctance to abandon even provisionally more of our own territory," he wrote to the minister of war as late as September 3rd, "must not make us engage too early in general battle that might be launched in unpropitious circumstances."

Moltke now made a change of strategy so far-reaching that it amounted to the end of the Schlieffen Plan. Kluck and Bulow were told to advance. They were to stand in place and face west against whatever forces the enemy was mustering near Paris. All the German armies were to return to the attack. The 3rd Army was to fight its way southward to the River Seine. The 4th and 5th were to advance west of Verdun, the 6th and 7th to force a crossing of the Moselle River. The goal of this last two pairs of armies was to break through on their respective fronts, link up, and so encircle the entire French right in the area around Verdun. Never in history had there been an encirclement on such a scale; it would dwarf Tannenberg. There was no way of being confident that such a thing was possible. The irony of this sudden and drastic shift was that its success would depend on the ability of the German left wing to get past the very fortifications whose strength had made the Schlieffen Plan seem necessary in the 1st place.

It's difficult to judge whether Moltke's change of thinking was rooted in a genuine expectation of success or a desperate sense that his right wing was doomed to failure. It's certain that he did not believe the triumphal reports that continued to arrive at his headquarters and cause his staff to rejoice. "We must not deceive ourselves," he told a member of the German government. "We have had successes, but we have not had victory. Victory means annihilation of the enemy's power of resistance. When armies of millions of men are opposed, the victor has prisoners. Where are ours?...The relatively small number of captured guns shows me that the French have withdrawn in good order and according to plan. The hardest work is still to be done." 

As remote as he was from the action, as inadequate as knowledge of the situation on the ground was, his intuition was sound.

                                                 The Junkers


IT IS PART OF THE STRANGE DARK POETRY OF THE GREAT WAR

that the battle of Tannenberg, the most dramatic and complete victory achieved by either side in more than 4 years of bloody struggle, was fought in East Prussia. 

This was sacred ground. Though the most remote and least developed region of the German federation-so remote that in 1914 it lay north of Russian Poland and today it is part of Poland-East Prussia was in a sense the heart of the Hohenzollern empire. It was the ancient home of a collection of families who were neither conspicuously wealthy nor particularly distinguished in any other way but regarded themselves as Germany's rightful leaders and were regarded as such by their king.

Hindenburg himself was a son of one of those families, which for him made the victory exquisitely sweet. He had saved the tabernacle from violation, overnight turning himself into a national idol. He had kept alive not only Germany's hopes of winning the war but his kinsmen's hope that their privileged place in the life of Germany wouldn't be lost, and that the weaknesses and contradictions of that special place-its absurdities, even-could continue to be ignored.

The Germany that Hindenburg and his kind dominated had come a long way since the Franco-Prussian War. Long regarded as the land of musicians and dreamy philosophers and Black Forest Elves, by 1914 it was the most modern, efficient, innovative, and powerful economy in Europe. Not only in industrial output but in science, even in the arts. Germany was a powerhouse. Militarily it was so strong that Britain, France, and Russia had good reason to fear that even in combination they might not be able to stand up against it. 

Politically, though, Germany was a kind of Rube Goldberg device. Its system of government hadn't evolved like those of Britain and France, hadn't been passed down from time immemorial like Russia's or gradually improvised like Vienna's. Instead it was the creation of one man,

                                                                Otto von Bismarck
                                                                Germany's Iron Chancellor
                                           "Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death"

He had designed it not so much to help Germany become a modern state as to keep modernity at bay-while, not incidentally, concentrating as much power as possible in his own hands. Its deficiencies had been serious from the start, and they grew more serious as the years passed, the world changed, and the Bismarckin system failed to keep pace. By the 2nd decade of the 20th century, with Bismarck long dead, those deficiencies had become dangerous. Ultimately they would render the system incapable of functioning under the strain of the Great War.

The root of the problem was that the empire, when it was declared in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in 1871, was completely dominated by Prussia, the most powerful of the German states and the one that had led the others to victory over France. Prussia King,

                                                                     Wilhelm I

was proclaimed the 1st kaiser by a jubilant crowd of sword-brandishing princes and generals. It's not possible to understand the peculiar nature of Prussia, or why Prussia would ultimately not only fail but pass out of existence, without understanding what Wilhelm meant when he said that the creation of the new empire felt like a kind of death-that the day it happened was the most miserable of his life.

What he feared was the disappearance of "the old Prussia," a thing that since the Middle Ages had come to be holy not only to his Hohenzollern ancestors but to the kingdom's landholding gentry. The old Prussia was a place like no other in Europe, and its people were like no other. It arose in what is now northern Poland, east of where the Vistula River runs northward into the Baltic Sea, and originally it was the homeland not of Germans but of Slavs. In the 13th century the

                                                            Teutonic Knights

an order of religious warriors created to participate in the Crusades, were invited to help ambitious German nobles seize the territories around the Vistula. The area east of the river was taken from Slavic tribe called the Prussians, who disappeared from history but left their name to be picked up by the early Hohenzollerns when they needed something to call the insignificant little quasi-kingdom that the Holy Roman emperor permitted them to establish on the outermost fringe of the German world. 

Though the Teutonic Knights tried to recruit Germans to settle east of the Vistula, the soil was to poor and the climate too dank to be powerfully attractive. The Slavs were permitted to remain if they converted to Christianity. Gradually, as the generations passed, German and Slavic families intermarried and gave rise to an ethnically mixed local aristocracy that came to be known as the Junkers. The irony is that when Prussia became dominant in Germany and Prussia's military might made Germany one of the Great Powers of Europe, the world saw this half-Slavic Junker elite as the most Germanic of Germans. Some of the most Prussian of the Prussian-for example

                                                          Karl von Clausewitz

who wrote the classic On War-bore names that were Slavic in origin.

The Junkers weren't, as a group, rich, and their estates weren't large. Life was often almost hardscrabble, requiring much labor and generating barely enough income to sustain a marginally aristocratic way of life. The people who grew up on those estates were, as a rule, neither particularly sophisticated. They were pious and provincial Lutherans, upright and sober, hardworking and hardheaded and often hard-hearted, with a deeply ingrained reverence for the law, for property rights, and for the class structure atop which they sat. What came to distinguish them above all was their almost mystic bond not to Prussia as a nation but to the Hohenzollern dynasty. This bond developed slowly, and what made it develop was the advantage if offered the Junkers. In return for their loyalty, they were assured nearly exclusive access to the more coveted positions in the Prussian army and civil service-opportunities for their sons to win a measure of power, snatches of glory, and sometimes, though not commonly, real wealth. 

The Junkers evolved into Prussia's hereditary military elite. A culture emerged that was unlike any other in Europe, and army, it was said, that happened to have a country attached to it. This arrangement was threatened by the Napoleonic wars at the start of the 19th century and by the revolution that shook Europe in 1848.

                                                Prussian King Frederick William IV
horrified the Junkers by granting the revolutionaries a constitution, though this was rescinded at the 1st opportunity.


Having barley survived these upheavals, the Junkers emerged more conservative than ever, their hatred of change in any form deeply ingrained.

Kaiser Wilhelm I wasn't a man of great intellect, but it was perceptive of him to find little to celebrate in the creation of his empire. In the most visible ways, the empire was a glorious achievement, one that put him at the pinnacle not only of Germany but of Europe and appeared to multiply the opportunities available to the Junker elite. But on a deeper level the new situation was fraught with difficulties, especially for the Junkers. 1st among the problems was the question of legitimacy. The Junkers were determined to maintain their special connection to the crown and the prerogatives that came with it.

The Hohenzollern dynasty wanted much the same thing. But if the Junkers had been a small slice of the population of Prussia, they were an even smaller part of the empire. In the new world of giant industries and great cities, they remained a tribe of provincial farmers without real economic power.

Inevitably, the Junkers came to seem an anachronism to the increasing numbers of Germans who knew how different things were in America, Britain, and France. As agriculture became a  less important element in the economy, what little prosperity the Junkers traditionally had came under threat. The richer and more educated the German nation grew, the more prominent among the peoples of the world, the odder it seemed that East Prussia should dominate as it did.

What is most odd is how little resistance to Junker privilege other Germans displayed during the half century that the empire existed. Bismarck, again, made this possible. Though he had deep roots in Junkerdom and for much of his early adulthood had worked a family farm, Bismarck was never entirely trusted or accepted by his own class. (His mother, and outsider from the professional classes, had given young Otto an education that made him more cosmopolitan than was considered quite proper.) He was permitted to create the empire only on the basis of certain understandings. He made it not a centralized country but a federation in which Bavaria, Baden, Wurttemberg, and other states were allowed semiautonomy under their ruling families while Prussia stood supreme.  He fashioned a constitution that concentrated nearly all political power in the hands of the monarch(who remained King of Prussia in addition to being Kaiser) and the officials he appointed. He did so with the tacit understanding that the Junkers would continue to be specially favored. And so they were. Though it would have been politically awkward to fill every important chair with Junker bottoms, the Junkers could always be confident of getting more than their statistically fair share. Bismarck's system made ample room for economic liberalism-that was good for revenues and so for the army-but made political liberalism, and above all democracy, impossible.

This wasn't a system well equipped to deal with the tensions of a modern capitalist and industrial society, and even Bismarck had trouble making it work. After he passed from the scene, his successors were sometimes barely able to keep its wheels turning. In a free market for agricultural products, the Junker estates would have sunk into bankruptcy; to save them, the government enacted so many tariffs on food imports that Germany became what has been described as a "welfare agency for needy landowners." There was a legislature, the Reichstag, but it had little power. As men infected with democratic and even socialist notions became increasingly common within the Reichstag, the Junkers kept them in check by joining forces with industrial interests in what came to be called the alliance of iron and rye. They were greatly helped by an electoral system that gave more votes to people with land and money. 

In consequence, 1000's of Germans of professional attainment, people with education and talent, had no real voice in public affairs. The political life of the nation remained in an atrophied state. The Reichstag, though it did have a role in budget-making, was otherwise little more than a debating society. In England and France the members of the legislature-The House of Commons and the Chamber of Deputies-chose the prime minister. Thus they, and the people who elected them, had a real connection to the levers of power and could regard themselves as a kind of ultimate authority. Their counterparts in Germany were essentially impotent. Their parties, instead of being contenders for control of the government, were held at arm's length by a government that remained very nearly what it had been in feudal times; a collection of Junkers chosen by their king. The result, in the short term, was widespread public indifference to politics. In tougher times it was a recipe for alienation.

The problem of how the Junkers were going to keep intact what remained of the old Prussia extended into the army. With all their limitations and faults, the Junkers were never expansionist imperialists. They weren't even German nationalists; many of them cared little about Germany except as an extension of Prussia power. What they wanted was the little world of their forebears, and every new stage of growth, of expansion, made that world less sustainable. Even the expansion of the army, unavoidable in the arms race that gripped the great powers of Europe at the start of the 20th, deeply troubled many traditionalists. Just as for a good Junker the only thoroughly acceptable army officer was an East Prussian of acceptable family background, so too the only dependable recruit was an ignorant and docile East Prussian farm boy. The increasing numbers of alternatives-growing hordes of city dwellers and factory workers, many of them infected with modern notions-were aliens and not to be trusted.

Tensions associated with such questions cost Erich Ludendorff, himself an upstart whose father had sold insurance, his place on Moltke's planning staff just a year before the start of the Great War. He had become convinced that a larger army was essential of the Schlieffen Plan was to remain practicable in the face of increasing French and Russian strength, and he began pressing for the creation of 6 new army corps. When only half this total was approved, he continued to demand more. After being told to keep silent but refusing, he was banished from the staff. This was a blow; it meant that, in case of war, Ludendorff wouldn't become Moltke's chief of operations. He had brought this punishment down on himself by touching 2 sets of raw nerves. The government and the army didn't want to stir up resistance in the Reichstag by asking for too big an increase in military spending too quickly. And many influential Junkers knew that it wouldn't be possible to find nearly enough young aristocrats to fill the officer billets in 6 new corps. Outsiders in large numbers would have to be given commissions. The biggest army that Germany was capable of mustering wasn't likely to be the kind of army that the Junkers could continue to control.


While Lundendorff departed Berlin for Dusseldorf and command of a nonelite regiment(his not being given a unit of the Prussian Guard was seen as another rebuke), the man who would become his archenemy was rising almost effortlessly. 4 years older than Lundendorff, Erich von Falkenhayn had been a favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm's since 1911, the year he had become a regimental commander in the guard. Just a year after that he was made a major general, and in 1913 he was promoted again and made minister of war. Though surprising even to his fellow generals, this rapid ascent(and still the greater promotion that would soon follow) is explicable in terms of Falkenhayn's background. He was very nearly the ideal Junker. Tall and slender, haughtily elegant in bearing, he had been raised on a modest farm in easternmost East Prussia to a family that traced itself back to the 20th century and the Teutonic Knights and had produced one of Frederick the Great's generals. He was a pure product of the old Prussia, and Ludendorff's opposite in far too many ways.