A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (34 page)

Joffre did not 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 Noël 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 two 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 the 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 in 1911 and of a corps just one year after that. That at the beginning of the war he was not given an army is surprising; the religious factor is likely the reason. Grandmaison was promoted to brigadier general and did not long survive.

Those deemed to have insufficient faith in the offensive did not prosper. One such officer was Henri Philippe Pétain, who as a lowly assistant professor of infantry tactics at the École de Guerre had attracted unfavorable attention by persistently warning of the vulnerability of flesh and bone when confronted with twentieth-century firepower. In July 1914 he was, as a result, a mere colonel of fifty-eight, an obscure outsider expecting to be retired soon. Even mobilization and the start of the war brought no advancement. When the French Fifth Army assembled (its commander, Lanrezac, was only four years older than Pétain), Pétain 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 and 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.

Chapter 11

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.”

—F
ERDINAND
F
OCH

F
ears 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 slugfest 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 Eighth Army was following up its victory at Tannenberg with a pursuit aimed at the destruction of Rennenkampf’s Russian Second 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 Fifth 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 2. “For four days they have been marching forty kilometers a day. The ground is difficult, the roads are torn up, trees felled, the fields pitted by shells 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 they 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 fall exhausted. 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 not to be too strict, otherwise the army could not 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’s army, formed into six thick columns, was indeed moving to the southeast. In doing so it was exposing its right flank to Gallieni’s new Sixth Army. The opportunity for a counterattack appeared to have come at last.

Gallieni ordered the Sixth 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 three 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 promised 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 Sixth 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—two 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 Sixth Army as it began moving eastward. This corps, though made up of reserve units, was commanded by a capable officer, a General von Grönau. Grönau 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 5 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 Grönau stating that he was under attack (by that same French force) and needed help. Kluck was not alarmed. He assumed that this was less a serious French assault than an attempt to trick him into halting the First Army’s advance. But he did the prudent thing and detached another corps to go back to support Grönau. He also sent a message to Bülow, asking for the return of two corps that he had earlier made available to the Second Army. Bülow 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, Bülow had little choice. Though Kluck’s reinforcement of Grönau was a turning point, the first backward movement by a sizable unit of the German right wing, it did not 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 3. “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, thirty-seven kilometers [twenty-three miles]. It was the first signpost that had not 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 were not, however, out of fight. By nightfall on September 5, Grönau’s artillery had badly disordered the advance of the French Sixth Army, which was growing rapidly as reinforcements continued to arrive. At one point, when the French appeared to be on the verge of panic, a dashingly aggressive officer named Colonel Robert Nivelle, a man who like Pétain 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, Grönau pulled back from the Ourcq. In doing so he probably saved his corps. The Sixth Army attacked by moonlight but found the Germans gone. Kluck, understanding now that the threat from the west 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.