The Guns of August (37 page)

“The special motive of the Force under your control,” he wrote, “is to support and cooperate with the French Army … and to assist the French in preventing or repelling the invasion by Germany of French or Belgian territory.” With a certain optimism, he added, “and eventually to restore the neutrality of Belgium”—a project comparable to restoring virginity. As the “numerical strength of the British force and its contingent reinforcement is strictly limited,” and keeping this consideration “steadily in view,” it will be necessary to exercise “the greatest care towards a minimum of loss and wastage.” Reflecting Kitchener’s disapproval of French offensive strategy, his order stated that if asked to participate in any “forward movements” in which the French were not engaged in large numbers and in which the British might be “unduly exposed to attack,” Sir John was to consult his government first and must “distinctly understand that your command is an entirely independent one and that you will in no case come in any sense under the orders of any Allied general.”

Nothing could be more unequivocal. At one stroke Kitchener had canceled the principle of unity of command. His motive was to preserve the British Army as a nucleus for the future; the effect, given a captain of Sir John’s temperament, was practically to nullify the order to “support” and “cooperate” with the French. It was to haunt the Allied war effort long after Sir John was replaced and Kitchener himself was dead.

On August 14 Sir John French, Murray, Wilson, and a staff officer, encouragingly named Major Sir Hereward Wake, arrived at Amiens, where the British troops detrained for further advance to the concentration area around Le Cateau and Maubeuge. On that day as they began moving up, Kluck’s Army began moving down from Liège. The BEF, marching cheerfully up the roads to Le Cateau and Mons, were greeted enthusiastically along the way with cries of
“Vivent les
Anglais!”
The happiness of the welcome gave point to Lord Kitchener’s dampening notice to his troops that they might expect to “find temptations, both in wine and women,” which they must “entirely resist.” The farther north the British marched, the greater was the enthusiasm. They were kissed and decked with flowers. Tables of food and drink were set out and all British offers of pay refused. A red tablecloth with bands of white sewn on it to form the St. Andrew’s cross of the Union Jack was flung over a balustrade. The soldiers tossed their regimental badges, caps, and belts to smiling girls and other admirers who begged for souvenirs. Soon the British Army was marching with peasants’ tweed caps on their heads and their trousers held up by string. All along the way, wrote a cavalry officer afterward, “we were feted and cheered by the people who were soon to see our backs.” Looking back on it, he remembered the advance of the BEF to Mons as “roses all the way.”

O
N THE
W
ESTERN
F
RONT
the fifteenth day brought an end to the period of concentration and preliminary attacks. The period of offensive battle began. The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages. On the road east from Nancy the French passed a stone marker inscribed, “Here in the year 362 Jovinus defeated the Teutonic hordes.”

While on the far right the Army of General Pau renewed the offensive in Alsace, the First and Second Armies of Generals Dubail and de Castelnau marched through two natural corridors in Lorraine which determined the French line of attack. One led toward Sarrebourg, objective of Dubail’s Army; the other descending from the ring of hills around Nancy called the Grand Couronné, led via Château Salins into a valley terminating in the natural fortress of Morhange, objective of de Castelnau’s Army. The Germans had prepared the region against expected French attack with barbed wire, trenches, and gun emplacements. At both Sarrebourg and Morhange they had well-fortified positions from which they could only be dislodged by an attack of irresistible
élan
or bombardment by heavy artillery. The French counted on the first and scorned the second.

“Thank God we don’t have any!” replied a General Staff artillery officer in 1909 when questioned about 105 mm. heavy field artillery. “What gives the French Army its force is the lightness of its cannon.” In 1911 the War Council proposed to add 105s to the French Army, but the artillery men themselves, faithful to the famous French 75s, remained unalterably opposed. They despised the heavy field cannon as drags upon the mobility of the French offensive and regarded them, like machine guns, as defensive weapons. Messimy as War Minister and General Dubail, then on the General Staff, had forced through an appropriation for several batteries of 105s, but through changes of government and the continued contempt of the artillery corps, by 1914 only a few had been incorporated into the French Army.

On the German side the Lorraine front was held by the Sixth Army of Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria, and by the Seventh Army of General von Heeringen which on August 9 was placed under Prince Rupprecht’s orders. Rupprecht’s mission was to hold as many French troops on his front as possible in order to keep them away from the main front opposite the German right wing. He was to accomplish this, according to Schlieffen’s strategy, by falling back and drawing the French forward into a “sack” where, having lengthened their line of communications, they could be engaged in battle while the decision took place elsewhere. The essence of the plan was to let the enemy in this sector come on as he showed every disposition to do and, while tempting him into a tactical victory, inflict upon him a strategic defeat.

Like the plan for East Prussia, this strategy involved psychological dangers. In the hour when the trumpets sounded, when his fellow commanders were advancing to victory, it required Rupprecht to accept obediently the necessity of withdrawal, not a pleasing prospect to a vigorous commander with an appetite for glory, especially not to one of semi-royal rank.

Erect and good-looking in a disciplined way, with straightforward eyes and a sensible mustache, Rupprecht had no touch about him of his capricious predecessors, the two King Ludwigs of Bavaria whose several and excessive passions,
one for Lola Montez and the other for Richard Wagner, had caused one king to be deposed and the other to be declared mad. He came in fact from a less eccentric branch of the family which had provided the regent for the mad king, and as a direct descendant of Henrietta, daughter of Charles I of England, was legitimist Stuart heir to the English throne. In memory of King Charles, white roses decorated the palace of Bavaria every year on the anniversary of the regicide. Rupprecht had a more current Allied connection in the person of his wife’s sister Elizabeth who was married to King Albert of Belgium. The Bavarian Army, however, was thoroughly German. They were “barbarians,” reported General Dubail after the first days of battle, who before evacuating a town sacked the houses in which they had been billeted, ripped up the chairs and mattresses, scattered the contents of closets, tore down curtains, smashed and trampled furniture, ornaments, and utensils. These, however, were as yet only the habits of troops sullenly retiring. Lorraine was to see worse.

For the first four days of Dubail’s and Castelnau’s offensive, the Germans retired slowly according to plan, fighting only rearguard action against the French. Down the broad straight roads bordered with plane trees the French came in their blue coats and red trousers. At every rise in the road they could see great distances over the checkerboard of fields, one green with alfalfa, the next gold with ripe grain, another brown, already plowed for the next crop, others dotted with haystacks in neat rows. The 75s spoke with piercing shriek over the fields as the French entered the territory that had once been theirs. In the first combats against a not too determined German resistance the French were victorious, although the German heavy artillery, when used, tore terrible gaps in their lines. General Dubail on August 15 passed carts bringing back the wounded, pale and mangled, some with limbs blown off. He saw a battlefield of the previous day still strewn with corpses. On the 17th the XXth Corps of de Castelnau’s army, commanded by General Foch, took Château Salins and reached within striking distance of Morhange. On the 18th Dubail’s army took Sarrebourg. Confidence soared;
offensive à outrance
appeared to have triumphed; the troops exulted and saw themselves on the Rhine. At that moment Plan 17 began to crumble, had, indeed, been crumbling for many days.

On the front opposite Belgium, General Lanrezac had all this time been hammering at GQG for permission to face north into the oncoming German right instead of northeastward for the offensive into the Ardennes against the German center. He saw himself being enveloped by the German forces coming down west of the Meuse whose true strength he suspected, and he insisted on being allowed to shift a part of his army to the left bank of the Meuse into the angle with the Sambre where it could block the German path. Here he could hold a line along the Sambre, the river that rises in northern France and flows northeast through Belgium, edging the mining district of the Borinage, to join the Meuse at Namur. Along its banks rise cone-shaped slag heaps; coal barges ply its waters coming out of Charleroi, city of the kingly name that ever after 1914 would have for French ears a sound as mournful as Sedan.

Lanrezac bombarded GQG with reports from his own reconnaissance of German units and movements which indicated a mass pouring through on either side of Liège in hundreds of thousands, perhaps 700,000, “maybe even two million.” GQG insisted the figures must be wrong. Lanrezac argued that strong German forces would come down on his flank through Namur, Dinant, and Givet just at the time the Fifth Army would be entering the Ardennes. When his Chief of Staff, Hely d’Oissel, whose normally melancholy demeanor was growing daily more somber, came to GQG to plead his case, the officer who received him cried: “What, again! Is your Lanrezac still worrying about being flanked on his left? That won’t happen and”—he added, voicing GQG’s basic thesis—“if it does, why so much the better.”

Nevertheless, though determined to let nothing detract from the main offensive planned to start on August 15, GQG could not be entirely impervious to the mounting evidence of an enveloping maneuver by the German right wing. On August 12 Joffre permitted Lanrezac to move his left corps to
Dinant. “High time,” Lanrezac muttered caustically, but the move no longer sufficed, he insisted; his whole army must be shifted westward. Joffre refused, insisting the Fifth Army must remain oriented eastward to perform its appointed role in the Ardennes. Always jealous of his authority, he told Lanrezac, “The responsibility of stopping the enveloping movement is not yours.” Exasperated, like all men of rapid mind at the blindness of others and accustomed to respect as a strategist, Lanrezac continued to hector GQG. Joffre grew irritated at his constant criticism and contentiousness. He conceived the whole duty of generals was to be lions in action and dogs in obedience, an ideal to which Lanrezac, with a mind of his own and an urgent sense of danger, found it impossible to conform. “My inquietude,” he wrote later, “increased from hour to hour.” On August 14, the last day before the opening of the offensive, he went in person to Vitry.

He found Joffre in his office buttressed by Generals Belin and Berthelot, his Chief and Assistant Chief of Staff. Belin, once known for his vivacity, was already showing the strain of overwork. Berthelot, quick and clever, like his opposite number, Henry Wilson, was an inveterate optimist who found it temperamentally difficult to anticipate trouble. He weighed 230 pounds and, having early conceded the victory of August heat over military dignity, worked in blouse and slippers. Lanrezac, whose dark Creole face was already sagging with worry, insisted the Germans would appear on his left just when he would be deep in the Ardennes where the difficult terrain made quick success unlikely and a turnabout impossible. The enemy would be left to complete his enveloping maneuver unopposed.

Speaking in what Poincaré called his “creamy tones,” Joffre told Lanrezac that his fears were “premature.” He added, “We have the impression the Germans have nothing ready there”—“there” meaning west of the Meuse. Belin and Berthelot repeated the assurance of “nothing ready there” and endeavored at once to soothe and encourage Lanrezac. He was urged to forget about envelopment and think only of the offensive. He left GQG, as he said, “with death in my soul.”

On his return to Fifth Army headquarters at Rethel on the edge of the Ardennes he found on his desk a report from GQG Intelligence which compounded his sense of doom. It estimated an enemy force across the Meuse of eight army corps and four to six cavalry divisions—in fact an underestimate. Lanrezac instantly sent an aide with a letter to Joffre calling his attention to these reports “coming from your own headquarters” and insisting that the movement of the Fifth Army to the region between Sambre and Meuse should be “studied and prepared from this moment.”