A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (32 page)

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 Bülow 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 be 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 as 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 sphinxlike 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 twenty miles daily, each man burdened with his ten-pound rifle and his sixty 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 sixty and then eighty miles beyond the farthest points that their railway support could reach and 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 machine guns and magazine-fed rifles. The labor of constantly moving the artillery, and with it thousands 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 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 four hours’ rest in twenty-four, 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 Bülow and beginning to realize that somewhere out in front of him—a juicily tempting target—was Lanrezac’s naked flank. On August 27 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 Sixth 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 28 he sent new instructions. Kluck was to stay not just in line with Bülow 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 First Army’s commander to see how these new orders were necessary or even made sense. To put himself in echelon with Bülow, 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 the southeast, he could fulfill the letter of his new orders, bring his army closer to where Bülow was heading if not literally to Bülow’s side, and continue his pursuit. Destroying Lanrezac’s army, or at a minimum pushing it eastward out of Bülow’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 3 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 were not 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 Bülow’s army near the towns of St. Quentin and Guise. Learning that Lanrezac was unwilling, Joffre went to Fifth 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 Compiègne. There, in the grand château 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 Sixth 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 ten 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 Second 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 second of Kaiser Wilhelm’s six sons, took command. Beating on a drum, he rallied the troops and led them forward in a successful counterattack. The prince survived, but the son of the commander of the guards corps was killed. Most of the generals on both sides were men in their fifties and sixties, 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. Bülow, 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 Smith-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 Sixth at Paris but also a new Eighth, which was to be inserted immediately east of the Fifth. The Germans, he said, were probably unaware of these new units, and almost certainly could not 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 took French into a separate room. It is 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 two men emerged, there was no further need for discussion. French was prepared to take the BEF north.

Joffre went to Fifth 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 being 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 at 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 Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Armies against the French Fourth, Third, Second, and First. The Germans were repulsed, fell back, and were counterattacked in their turn. Joffre by this point was firing generals almost wholesale; by September 6 he would replace the commanders of two of his original five armies, seven corps, and twenty infantry and four cavalry divisions. Other officers were rising to fill the vacancies. Ferdinand Foch, after performing well as a corps commander in Lorraine at the start of the war and heroically during the retreat that followed, was promoted to command of the new Ninth Army. Henri Philippe Pétain, whose brigade had distinguished itself as part of Lanrezac’s command in early fighting in Belgium, was given a division.