A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (24 page)

The Germans, by this time, had hauled into Belgium the weapons that would decide the fate of Liège, two new kinds of monster artillery: 305mm Skoda siege mortars borrowed from Austria, plus an almost unimaginably huge 420mm howitzer secretly developed and produced by Germany’s Krupp steelworks. Neither gun had ever been used in combat. The bigger of the two weighed seventy-five tons and had to be transported by rail in five sections and set in concrete before going into action. It could fire up to ten 2,200-pound projectiles per hour, each shell carrying a hardened head and a delayed-action fuse so that it penetrated its target before exploding. It had a range of nine miles, its projectiles following such a high trajectory that they came down almost vertically. It had to be fired electrically so that the two-hundred-man crew operating it, their heads covered with protective padding, could move three hundred yards away and lie down on the ground before detonation. Once “registered”—its elevation and direction set so that every round landed on target—it was a hellishly destructive weapon, capable of breaking apart even the strongest of the Liège forts and vaporizing the men inside. It was a fitting opening act for a hellishly destructive war.

The Austrian 305mm Skoda siege mortar
One of the weapons that broke the defenses of Liège.

The big guns arrived at Liège on August 10, but two days more were needed to get them in place. By this time, off to the south, Joffre’s Alsace offensive had captured several towns, but on August 11 the Germans counterattacked and brought the advance to a stop. The day after that Austria’s Field Marshal Conrad, launching the punitive campaign that he had so long craved, sent three armies totaling four hundred and sixty thousand men into Serbia, where they soon were moving rapidly across easy terrain toward the mountains to the east.

On August 13, after taking several shattering hits, Fort Chaudfontaine at the southeastern corner of the Liège circle surrendered, with only seventy-six of the 408 members of its garrison still alive. Later on the same day two more of the forts, similarly devastated, also surrendered. On August 15 Fort Lonçin ceased to exist when the twenty-third 420mm shell fired at it penetrated its ammunition stores and set them off. Taking possession, the Germans found Belgian General Leman lying in the wreckage. As he was being carried away, he opened his eyes. “I ask you to bear witness,” he said to the German commander, “that you found me unconscious.” Though a few of the forts had not yet surrendered or been destroyed, their ability to interfere with the German advance was at an end. Moltke’s armies were ready, the road to the west was open, and the right wing went into motion almost exactly on Schlieffen’s schedule. German engineers hurried to repair rail lines destroyed by the Belgians, and trains rolled forward one after another, carrying the mountains of supplies needed to support the offensive. More than five hundred trains were crossing the Rhine every twenty-four hours; in the first sixteen days after troop movements began, 2,150 trains crossed a single bridge at Cologne—one every ten minutes. And with good reason. Kluck’s First Army alone required five hundred and fifty tons of food every day. Its eighty-four thousand horses consumed eight hundred and forty tons of fodder daily.

Things now started happening at an accelerating pace and on an expanding scale, and it became uncommon for anything to happen as anyone had expected or intended. By August 16, in a heroically speedy if tragically premature response to the French government’s calls for the opening of a second front, Russia inserted its First Army into East Prussia. This move was far in advance of what the Germans had thought possible; obviously other Russian armies would be arriving soon, and so Moltke was faced with a possible disaster in the east long before the fight in the west could be decided. That same day a Serbian counterattack stopped the Austrians and threw them back in disorder. Suddenly major developments were occurring daily.

August 17: A collision of German and Russian troops at Stallupönen in East Prussia ends inconclusively; the Germans are forced into a retreat that disrupts their plans, but they take three thousand prisoners with them.

August 18: Joffre broadens his eastward offensive by sending the French Second Army into Lorraine. The invasion makes good progress, but only because Moltke has ordered the German Sixth Army to fall back. He too has a plan for Lorraine: to allow the French to advance until they are between his Fifth Army to the north and Seventh Army to the south. Then they can be hit on both flanks and destroyed. This trap, if successful, could produce a victory on the German left so decisive that the success of the Schlieffen right wing might become unnecessary. The Austrians are hit again in Serbia and suffer another severe defeat. Four Russian armies enter Galicia, the Austrian part of Poland (there being no country of Poland in those days—it was long ago divided among Russia, Germany, and Austria). The Austrians are not nearly as prepared as they should be for this offensive because of Conrad’s decision to invade Serbia.

August 19: The French continue to advance in Lorraine.

August 20: Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the German Sixth Army in Lorraine and temporarily in command of the Seventh Army as well, watches as the French offensive overextends itself and runs out of momentum. Unable to resist so tempting a target (“We cannot ask our Bavarian soldiers to retreat again,” he complains, “just when they feel absolute superiority over the enemy facing them”), he orders a counterattack that proves to be brilliantly successful, inflicting tremendous casualties on the French and driving them back across the border to the city of Nancy. Even Nancy is nearly abandoned. It is saved by a defense and counterattack organized by a corps commander named Ferdinand Foch, another sudden hero who will loom ever larger in the years of war to come (and will receive word this very week that his son-in-law and only son have been killed in combat). Rupprecht’s counterattack, for all its success, is a serious mistake. It neither destroys the French Sixth Army nor captures anything of strategic importance. Instead it pushes the French backward out of Moltke’s trap, returning them to their line of fortresses. The latest developments in technology have, as time will prove, made these fortresses capable of standing up even under the kinds of guns that broke Liège, and in the weeks ahead their strength will permit Joffre to shift troops from his right wing to his imperiled left. The Germans’ chances of achieving a breakthrough are vanishingly small, but Rupprecht thinks otherwise. Wanting to press his advantage, he asks—all but demands—that Moltke send him more troops. Moltke, in one of his departures from a Schlieffen Plan in which all possible manpower was supposed to be concentrated in the right wing, agrees.

On this same day the Austrian invasion of Serbia is transformed from a failure into a humiliating rout: the Austrian forces take fifty thousand casualties, including six thousand men killed, and flee back across the border. The Russians and Germans collide again in East Prussia, this time at a place called Gumbinnen, and again the fighting is bloody but inconclusive. The Germans pull back, but the Russians do not pursue. The commander of the Eighth Army, Max von Prittwitz, telephones Moltke and reports that he is in trouble and needs to withdraw from East Prussia. This is disastrous news tactically, strategically, and in terms of morale. East Prussia is the homeland of the Junkers, Prussia’s hereditary elite, and as such it is the cradle of Germany’s general staff. The thought of the Junker farms being left to the mercies of rampaging Cossack horsemen is horrifying. But once again, as with Rupprecht, Moltke decides that he is too far from the action and too lacking in reliable information to disagree. He does not challenge Prittwitz’s decision, does not tell him to stand and fight.

In Belgium, meanwhile, things continued to go well for the Germans. Having done their work at Liège, the big guns were quickly moved westward to Namur, a cluster of nine forts nearly as strong as Liège and a junction of six rail lines. Namur surrendered after five days of shelling. The Germans, however, had something to regret: their failure to cut off and destroy the Belgian army before it slipped off to Antwerp, near the coast. Now Kluck had to reduce his army by two corps in order to keep the Belgians from coming back south and threatening his lines of communication. But the French and Belgians had made an equally serious mistake in failing to send troops to Namur while it still might have provided them with a fortified base from which to block the German advance. Such a move, with enough troops involved, would have had a good chance of succeeding. Now, with that opportunity gone, Lanrezac was going to have to find a way to stop the Germans in open country.

As the Germans took possession of Brussels, they paused to give themselves a parade—the first such celebration since the Franco-Prussian War. From there, while continuing westward, they began to bend their route toward the south, toward Paris. In their wake they were leaving a trail of killings that, even after the truth was separated from the exaggerations of propaganda, would disgrace them in the eyes of the world, give their enemies reason to argue that this was a war for civilization, and begin the long process that would end with the United States entering the war against them. They destroyed towns. They took civilian hostages, including women and children. They killed many of these hostages—in some cases machine-gunning them by the score. They killed priests simply because they were priests (while claiming that they were leaders of a guerrilla resistance). They destroyed the storybook city of Louvain, with its exquisite medieval university and irreplaceable library.

To the extent that such acts can be explained—not excused, but explained—they had tangled origins. In the Franco-Prussian War the Germans had suffered significant casualties at the hands of
franc-tireurs,
civilian snipers and guerrillas, some of whom were urged on by French priests. They were determined not to have a repeat. When they encountered guerrillas in Belgium, they lashed out viciously. The German newspapers carried sensational accounts of German soldiers being mutilated and killed by Belgian townsfolk. These stories were read by the troops, angering and frightening them and causing them to respond with further violence. And senior officers were fixated on the same idea that had made the violation of Belgian neutrality possible in the first place—the idea that Germany was in a life-or-death struggle and so had no choice but to take extreme measures. “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal,” Moltke observed. “But we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.”

Wherever enemy armies were believed to be approaching, in Belgium and in France, in southwestern Germany and in East Prussia, in Serbia and in Poland, the civilian populations fled by the hundreds of thousands in whatever way they could. Roads became clogged with refugees and their livestock and whatever possessions they could load onto wagons and carts. Whenever armies wanted to use those same roads, the civilians had to make for the fields and woods.

Belgian civilians, displaced by war, crowd the docks of Antwerp waiting for passage to Britain.