A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (28 page)

But as the day wore on, hour by hour and yard by bloody yard, the persistence of the Germans and the sheer weight of their numbers forced the British back. When the day ended, more than sixteen hundred of Smith-Dorrien’s men had been killed, and the Germans had lost at least five thousand. Kluck and his army had been stopped for a full day. In itself, one day meant little. But if the Germans could be stopped for another day and another after that, Moltke’s entire campaign would begin to fall to pieces.

After sundown, the BEF’s Second Corps under Sir Douglas Haig having come forward to join Smith-Dorrien’s, the British again went to work on their defenses. But during the night an English liaison officer arrived at French’s headquarters with stunning news: Lanrezac, rather than holding his ground at Charleroi, was pulling back. This exposed the British right and gave them no choice but to pull back as well. French reacted bitterly. He regarded Lanrezac’s withdrawal—which probably saved his army and was conducted with great skill under difficult circumstances—as unnecessary. He had entered the war with a very British disdain for the French. That disdain now began to turn into entirely unjustified contempt.

There arose in the aftermath of this battle the strangest and most beautiful legend of the war. It was said that, when the British peril was at its height, a majestic figure had appeared high in the sky with arm upraised. Some said it had been pointing to victory, others that it held back the Germans as the Tommies got away. It came to be known as the Angel of Mons. Even more colorful was the simultaneous legend of the Archers of Agincourt. In the late Middle Ages at Agincourt—not a great distance from Mons—English yeomen armed with longbows had won a great victory over a much bigger force of mounted and armored French knights. Four hundred and ninety-nine years later there were stories of German soldiers found dead at Mons with arrows through their bodies.

It was all nonsense. The disappointing truth, established beyond doubt by postwar investigations, is that the legends were journalistic inventions, and that they first emerged long after the battle. No one ever found a witness who had personally seen an angel, arrows, or anything of the kind.

When the Germans resumed their attack on the morning of August 24, braced this time for tough resistance, they found nothing in front of them but abandoned entrenchments. They got back on the road, caught up with the BEF after two days of hard pursuit, and on August 26 hit Smith-Dorrien’s corps at Le Cateau. Under severe pressure, his men exhausted, Smith-Dorrien found it impossible to disengage and resume his retreat when ordered to do so by French. He was the proverbial man with a wolf by the ears, unable to take the initiative and unable to escape. He organized a rear guard that managed by the narrowest of margins to fight off envelopment. Le Cateau turned into a bigger, bloodier fight than the one at Mons, with fifty-five thousand British desperately holding off one hundred and forty thousand Germans. Ultimately, when the Germans found it necessary to pull back and regroup, the British were able to resume their retreat. They had taken some eight thousand casualties (more than Wellington’s at Waterloo) and lost thirty-six pieces of artillery. And already-strained relationships within the BEF command were worsened. French, who had disliked Smith-Dorrien for years and had not wanted him in his command, refused to believe that he had not been willfully disobedient. Smith-Dorrien, for his part, thought that Haig had been too slow in entering the fights both at Mons and at Le Cateau. It is a mark of how desperate the British were for something to feed into their propaganda machine that Le Cateau was celebrated, at the time and long afterward, as a British triumph. The only thing to celebrate was that the BEF was still intact when it made its escape.

Elsewhere along the Western Front the Germans were scoring victory after victory. They were turning back French assaults, achieving a high rate of success with their own offensives, and usually losing far fewer men. The reason is not to be found in numbers; as we have seen, the two sides were numerically just about equal. Even the German right wing had no consistent manpower advantage. A French counterattack that marked the climax of the Charleroi fight, for example, ended with three German divisions not only stopping nine of Lanrezac’s divisions but ultimately driving them back seven miles—even though the French force included ten regiments of elite colonial troops, veterans akin to the men of the BEF. Clearly the Germans were doing something right, or the French were doing something wrong, or both.

The answer is “both.” In the face of repeated bad results, generals throughout the French army threw their infantry against the Germans whatever the circumstances and kept doing so no matter how grisly the results. Lanrezac was a rare exception; he had been reluctant to attack at Charleroi, doing so only because two of his corps commanders insisted. Joffre’s other commanders believed that French troops were supposed to charge, not crawl in the earth like worms. They were to win at the point of their bayonets, not by firing steel-clad packets of high explosives into the sky. The Germans, by contrast, quickly became adroit, upon making contact with the enemy, at digging in, waiting to be attacked, and mowing down the attackers with rifle fire, machine guns capable of firing up to six hundred heavy-caliber rounds per minute, and above all artillery. (From the start of the war to the end, cannon would account for most of the killing.) When the attackers fell back, the Germans would continue punishing them with their field artillery, firing shrapnel and high explosives. Then they would come out of their holes and keep the fleeing enemy on the move. From the start they were even better than the British at creating defenses for themselves with the trenching tools every man carried plus picks and shovels brought forward by combat engineers. The difference in the tactics of the two sides explains why, despite the lives they squandered at Mons and Le Cateau and later in other, bigger fights, the Germans had significantly lower casualties on the Western Front in 1914 than the French and British.

But as French casualties climbed without producing a single victory of consequence—it was “the most terrible August in the history of the world,” said British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Joffre found it necessary to conclude that the French army’s “cult of the offensive” had to be abandoned. On August 24 he unhappily announced that the armies of France were for the time being “forced to take defensive action based on our fortified positions and on the strong natural obstacles provided by the terrain, so as to hold on as long as possible, taking, meanwhile, all steps to wear down the enemy’s strength and resume the offensive in due course.” He ordered his left wing—his Third, Fourth, and Fifth Armies—to begin what would come to be known as the Great Retreat. Day after day, in relentless heat, weary French soldiers in their hundreds of thousands trudged farther and farther south. The BEF marched with them, covering more than a hundred and ninety miles in thirteen days. One of its battalions retreated fifty-five miles in thirty-six hours.

Joffre also ordered the creation of a new army to lengthen his left. This Sixth Army was to be “capable of taking up the offensive again while the other armies contained the enemy’s effort for the requisite period,” Joffre said, but its position near Paris obviously had defensive implications. The Germans’ continued pursuit of Lanrezac’s army after the defeat at Le Cateau had awakened the government to the fact that Paris was in jeopardy. Minister of War Adolphe Messimy examined the city’s defenses and was alarmed by what he found. They were in a sorry state of neglect, at least in part because the army’s fixation on the offensive had caused it to give little attention to defenses of any kind.

Messimy turned not to Joffre but to General Joseph Gallieni for help, asking him to become military governor of Paris and offering him near-dictatorial powers to organize a defense of the city. Gallieni, who had been in semiretirement at the start of the war, agreed on one condition. He said he would need not only the garrison forces inside the city walls but a substantial mobile force capable of engaging the Germans as they approached. At least six corps would be needed for this purpose, he said. (A corps was usually made up of two, sometimes three divisions of nearly twenty thousand men each.) Messimy agreed without hesitation, but in fact he had no authority to fulfill his pledge. It was Joffre alone who decided the deployment of troops, and Joffre showed no interest in assisting, or even consulting with, either Gallieni or the government.

Nevertheless, Gallieni set to work immediately to ready Paris for a siege, bringing herds of livestock inside the walls to provide a supply of food, installing new lines of trenches, positioning artillery, and demolishing buildings to give the guns a clear line of fire. As this work proceeded, a political crisis erupted over the city’s failure to start preparing earlier, the government fell, and Messimy was displaced (in part, ironically, for refusing to agree to the dismissal of Joffre). He took up his reserve army commission and went off to the front as a major. When Gallieni finally got his mobile force, it came to him in the form of Joffre’s new Sixth Army, which was still in the early stages of being assembled. The first elements of this army, many of them brought in by train from stabilizing sectors at the eastern end of the front, were moved inside the Paris defensive perimeter as part of the Great Retreat. They were completely out of touch with Lanrezac and the BEF and not nearly ready for action in any case. Joffre evidently decided that he might as well let Gallieni have them, if only temporarily and if only to quiet the complaints coming from the government.

Behind the retreating French armies, sometimes even beside them in the spreading confusion, marched masses of Germans, tired but energized by the thought that they had the enemy on the run, that victory lay ahead. Joffre’s plan was to pull back only as far as a line along the east-west course of the River Somme, call a halt there and, when circumstances were right, counterattack. This plan proved infeasible; when the French got to the Somme, the enemy was still right behind them. They had no choice but to cross the river and keep going.

Nobody, not even the high generals in their headquarters, had a detailed understanding of what was happening along the front. British and French newspapers carried hair-raising but inspiring stories of how the Germans, the Huns, were committing mass suicide in throwing themselves against the guns and bayonets of the valiant defenders of civilization. In the German papers it was civilization’s defenders who were advancing victoriously, moving constantly forward on the soil of a nation that had conspired to destroy their homeland. On both sides, anything that wasn’t an outright defeat was made a cause for celebration, and every setback was either treated as a canny tactical adjustment or, more commonly, ignored. Journalists were kept far from the action. Even the senior commanders, flooded with reports some of which were accurate and many of which were not, could have little confidence that they knew what the enemy was doing or which side was doing more killing.

With the BEF and Lanrezac’s army in almost headlong flight, it seemed to many on Moltke’s staff that the Germans had already won in the west; “complete victories” were being declared. Belgium was firmly in hand, and the right wing was in France and staying on Schlieffen’s schedule. The German Fourth and Fifth Armies had broken the back of the French offensive in the Ardennes, and in the southeast Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria continued to report that he was gaining ground, taking thousands of prisoners and capturing guns. Rupprecht was also continuing to badger Moltke for more troops with which to press his advantage. Moltke agreed. He also decided to send three infantry corps and a cavalry division to East Prussia. These were fateful moves. Combined with Moltke’s earlier adjustments—the use of two corps to besiege Antwerp, and of another to besiege a French stronghold at Maubeuge—they would reduce his right wing from seventeen corps to fewer than twelve. This was a reduction of two hundred and seventy-five thousand men, and it was in addition to the Germans’ battlefield losses. The hammer upon which Schlieffen had wanted to bet everything thus shrank by nearly a third. Meanwhile Joffre was doing the opposite, using his rail lines to transfer increasing numbers of troops from his right to his left. Even as the Germans continued their advance, in terms of manpower the balance at the western end of the front was gradually shifting in France’s favor.

Moltke’s decision to dispatch troops to East Prussia has been much criticized but is easy to understand. He had good reason to be alarmed not only by the situation in East Prussia but by what was happening all across the eastern theater. He knew that the Austrian invasion of Serbia—an invasion he had opposed, arguing rightly that all of the Hapsburg empire’s available troops were needed against Russia—had ended in total defeat. He knew too that massive Russian forces were engaging the Austrians on the Galician plain to the north of Serbia, and that if this too ended badly, Conrad’s position would become desperate. And his own commander in East Prussia had told Moltke that the German position there was already desperate. That commander, the fat and elderly Max von Prittwitz, an intelligent enough general but one with no combat experience, had at his disposal a single army of some one hundred and thirty-five thousand men—eleven undermanned divisions of infantry and one of cavalry, barely one-tenth of Germany’s available total. Moving against this Eighth Army, a small one by the standards of 1914, were two exceptionally large Russian armies that outnumbered it by a huge margin. The Russian First Army, commanded by General Pavel von Rennenkampf (German surnames were not uncommon in the Russian aristocracy and senior officer corps), had been first to cross the border into German territory, approaching from the east. Thereafter it had continued to move forward, capturing towns, burning the farms of the Junkers, and clashing with elements of Prittwitz’s army first at Stallupönen and then at Gumbinnen. It was shortly after the Gumbinnen fight, and upon learning that the Russian Second Army under General Alexander Samsonov was entering East Prussia from the south with fourteen and a half infantry divisions, four divisions of cavalry, and 1,160 guns, that Prittwitz had telephoned Moltke and told him that he had to abandon East Prussia. He was afraid that if he stayed where he was, Samsonov would soon be behind him and able to block his escape. The situation was ripe for an encirclement that would end in the destruction of the Eighth Army and leave Germany defenseless in the East. There was no alternative to withdrawing behind the north-south Vistula River, Prittwitz said. Moltke did not demur. Giving up the Prussian homeland was an intolerable thought, but everything being accomplished in France would become meaningless if the Eighth Army were lost.