The Guns of August (38 page)

Meanwhile at Vitry another visitor arrived in deep anxiety to try to convince GQG of the danger on the left. When Joffre had refused to have Gallieni at Headquarters, Messimy had given him an office in the War Ministry where all reports were channeled to him. Although these did not include Intelligence reports from GQG which Joffre systematically refrained from sending to the government, Gallieni had gathered enough information to detect the outlines of the great flood pouring down upon France. It was the “terrible submersion” that Jaurès, foreseeing the use of reserves in the front line, had predicted. Gallieni told Messimy he must go to Vitry to make Joffre alter his plans, but Messimy who was nearly twenty years Joffre’s junior and stood in awe of him said Gallieni must go himself as one to whom Joffre owed much of his career and whom he could not ignore. That was underestimating Joffre who could ignore anyone he chose. When Gallieni arrived, Joffre gave him only a few minutes and passed him on to Belin and Berthelot. They repeated the assurances they had given Lanrezac. GQG had its mind “closed to the evidence” and refused to consider the German advance west of the Meuse a serious threat, Gallieni reported to Messimy on his return.

Yet that evening, under pressure of increasing evidence, GQG began to waver. Joffre, replying to Lanrezac’s last urgent message, agreed to “study” the proposed shift of the Fifth Army and to permit “preliminary arrangements” for the movement, although he still insisted that the menace to Lanrezac’s flank was “far from immediate and its certainty far
from absolute.” By next morning, August 15, it had come much closer. GQG, with every nerve wound up for the great offensive, looked apprehensively to the left. A telephone call was put through to Lanrezac at 9:00
A.M.
authorizing him to prepare the movement but not to execute it without direct order of the Commander in Chief. During the day reports reached GQG that 10,000 German cavalry had crossed the Meuse at Huy; then another report came that the enemy was attacking Dinant and had seized the citadel commanding the city from the high rock of the right bank; then a further report that they had forced a crossing but had been met by Lanrezac’s Ist Corps pouring down from the left bank who had driven them back across the bridge in fierce combat (in which one of the first casualties was a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant named Charles de Gaulle). This was the corps whose movement across the river had been authorized on August 12.

The menace on the left could no longer be minimized. At 7:00
P.M.
Joffre’s direct order to move the Fifth Army into the angle of Sambre and Meuse was telephoned to Lanrezac, followed by his written order an hour later. GQG had succumbed—but not wholly. The order—Special Instruction No. 10—changed plans just far enough, it was felt, to meet the threat of envelopment but not so far as to give up the offensive of Plan 17. It acknowledged that the enemy “seems to be making his main effort by his right wing north of Givet”—as if Lanrezac needed to be told—and ordered the main body of the Fifth Army to move northwest “to operate together with the British and Belgian armies against the enemy forces to the north.” One corps of the Fifth Army was to remain facing northeast in support of the Fourth Army to whom the chief burden of carrying the offensive into the Ardennes was now transferred. In effect the order stretched out the Fifth Army to the west over a wider front than heretofore without added men to cover it.

Order No. 10 instructed the new spearhead, General de Langle de Cary, commander of the Fourth Army, to make ready for attack “in the general direction of Neufchâteau,” that is, into the heart of the Ardennes. To strengthen the fighting
quality of his army, Joffre set in motion a complicated exchange of troops between the armies of de Castelnau, Lanrezac, and de Langle. As a result, two corps which had trained under Lanrezac were taken from him and replaced by others new to his command. Although the new units included the two highly valued divisions from North Africa which the
Goeben
had tried to halt, the extra movements and last-minute changes aggravated Lanrezac’s bitterness and despair.

While the rest of the French Army charged to the east, he saw himself left to guard France’s unprotected flank from the blow he believed was designed to kill her. He saw himself given the heaviest task—though GQG refused to recognize it as such—with the smallest means. His temper was not improved by the prospect of operating in common with two independent armies—the British and Belgian—whose commanders outranked him and were unknown to him. His men must execute in the August heat a march of eighty miles requiring five days, and even if they reached the line of the Sambre before the Germans did he feared it might be too late. By then the Germans would have reached it in too great strength to be stopped.

Where were the British who were supposed to be on his left? So far no one had laid eyes on them. Though he could have learned from GQG exactly where they were, Lanrezac no longer put any faith in GQG and suspected darkly that France was the victim of a perfidious British trick. Either the BEF was a myth or it was playing out a last cricket match before joining the war, and he refused to believe in its existence unless it was seen personally by one of his own officers. Daily scouting parties which included Lieutenant Spears, British liaison officer with the Fifth Army, were sent out to scour the countryside but failed to find any men in khaki, a strange functioning of liaison which Lieutenant Spears in a famous book leaves unexplained. The failure added to Lanrezac’s sense of peril. Anxieties pressed upon him. “My anguish,” he wrote, “rose to its peak.”

At the same time as he issued Order No. 10 Joffre asked Messimy to transfer three Territorial divisions from coast defense
to fill the space between Maubeuge and the Channel. He was scraping the bottom of the barrel for a makeshift defense against the German right wing rather than subtract a single division from his cherished offensive. Not yet was he ready to acknowledge that the enemy’s will was being imposed on him. Not all the Lanrezacs, Gallienis, and reconnaissance reports in the world could shake GQG’s central conviction that the greater the German right wing, the more promising the prospects for the French seizure of initiative through the center.

The German march through Belgium, like the march of predator ants who periodically emerge from the South American jungle to carve a swath of death across the land, was cutting its way across field, road, village, and town, like the ants unstopped by rivers or any obstacle. Von Kluck’s Army poured through north of Liège and von Bülow’s south of the city, along the valley of the Meuse, toward Namur. “The Meuse is a precious necklace,” King Albert had said, “and Namur is its pearl.” Flowing through a broad canyon between rocky heights set back a space from the river on either side, the Meuse was a vacationland where in every other August, the traditional month of vacation, families picnicked, little boys swam, men fished from the banks under sun umbrellas, mothers sat in folding chairs knitting, little white sailboats tacked and skimmed, and the excursion boat ran from Namur to Dinant. Part of von Bülow’s army was now crossing the river at Huy halfway between Liège and Namur to advance along both banks upon the second of Belgium’s famed fortresses. Namur’s circle of forts, constructed in the same pattern as those of Liège was the last bastion before France. With confidence in the iron fist of the siege guns which had done their work so well at Liège and were now being dragged in von Bülow’s train toward their second assignment, the Germans expected to be through Namur in three days. On von Bülow’s left the Third Army commanded by General von Hausen was advancing upon Dinant so that the two armies were converging upon the angle of the Sambre and Meuse just as Lanrezac’s army was heading into it. While in the field
Schlieffen’s strategy was unrolling on schedule, behind the front a jagged crack appeared in the design.

On August 16 OHL, which had remained in Berlin until the end of the concentration period, moved to Coblenz on the Rhine some eighty miles behind the center of the German front. Here Schlieffen had envisaged a Commander in Chief who would be no Napoleon on a white horse watching the battle from a hill but a “modern Alexander” who would direct it “from a house with roomy offices where telegraph, telephone and wireless signalling apparatus are at hand, while a fleet of autos and motorcycles ready to depart, wait for orders. Here in a comfortable chair by a large table the modern commander overlooks the whole battlefield on a map. From here he telephones inspiring words and here he receives the reports from army and corps commanders and from balloons and dirigibles which observe the enemy’s movements.”

Reality marred this happy picture. The modern Alexander turned out to be Moltke who by his own admission had never recovered from his harrowing experience with the Kaiser on the first night of war. The “inspiring words” he was supposed to telephone to commanders were never part of his equipment and even if they had been would have been lost in transmission. Nothing caused the Germans more trouble, where they were operating in hostile territory, than communications. Belgians cut telephone and telegraph wires; the powerful Eiffel Tower wireless station jammed the air waves so that messages came through so garbled they had to be repeated three or four times before sense could be made of them. OHL’s single receiving station became so clogged that messages took from eight to twelve hours to get through. This was one of the “frictions” the German General Staff, misled by the ease of communications in war games, had not planned for.

The wickedly unobliging resistance of the Belgians and visions of the Russian “steam roller” crashing through East Prussia further harassed OHL. Friction developed in the Staff. The cult of arrogance practiced by Prussian officers affected no one more painfully than themselves and their allies. General von Stein, Deputy Chief of Staff, though admittedly intelligent,
conscientious, and hard-working, was described by the Austrian liaison officer at OHL as rude, tactless, disputatious, and given to the sneering, domineering manner known as the “Berlin Guards’ tone.” Colonel Bauer of the Operations Section hated his chief, Colonel Tappen, for his “biting tone” and “odious manner” toward subordinates. Officers complained because Moltke refused to allow champagne at mess and because fare at the Kaiser’s table was so meager it had to be supplemented with private sandwiches after dinner.

From the moment the French attack began in Lorraine, Moltke’s resolve to carry through Schlieffen’s total reliance upon the right wing began to slip. He and his staff expected the French to bring up their main forces on their left to meet the threat of the German right wing. As anxiously as Lanrezac sent out scouts looking for the British, OHL looked for evidence of strong French movements west of the Meuse, and up to August 17 found none. That vexing problem of war presented by the refusal of the enemy to behave as expected in his own best interest beset them. They concluded from the movement in Lorraine and the lack of movement on the west that the French were concentrating their main force for an offensive through Lorraine between Metz and the Vosges. They asked themselves if this did not require a readjustment of German strategy. If this were the main French attack could not the Germans, by a shift of forces to their own left wing, bring about a decisive battle in Lorraine before the right wing could accomplish it by envelopment? Could they not in fact accomplish a true Cannae, the double envelopment that Schlieffen had held in the back of his mind? Anxious discussions of this alluring prospect and even some preliminary shifting of the weight of gravity toward the left engaged OHL from August 14 to 17. On that date they decided that the French were not massing in Lorraine to the extent believed, and reverted to the original Schlieffen plan.

But once divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith. From then on, OHL was lured by opportunity on the left wing. Mentally, Moltke had opened his mind to an alternative strategy dependent on what the
enemy would do. The passionate simplicity of Schlieffen’s design for total effort by one wing and rigid cleaving to plan regardless of enemy movements was broken. The plan that had appeared so faultless on paper cracked under pressure of the uncertainties, above all the emotions, of war. Having deprived himself of the comfort of a prearranged strategy, Moltke was thereafter tormented by indecisiveness whenever a decision was required. On August 16 Prince Rupprecht required one urgently.

He wanted permission to counterattack. His headquarters at Saint-Avold, a dreary, undistinguished town sunk in a hollow on the edge of the dingy mining district of the Saar, offered no princely amenities, no château for his lodging, not even a Grand Hotel. Westward stretched before him a land of easy rolling hills under wide open skies with no obstacles of importance before the Moselle, and, glowing on the horizon, the prize—Nancy, jewel of Lorraine.

Rupprecht argued that his given task to engage as many French troops as possible on his front could best be accomplished by attacking, a theory exactly contrary to the strategy of the “sack.” For three days, from August 16 to 18, discussion raged over the telephone wire, happily all in German territory, between Rupprecht’s headquarters and General Headquarters. Was the present French attack their main effort? They appeared to be doing nothing “serious” in Alsace or west of the Meuse. What did this indicate? Suppose the French refused to come forward and fall into the “sack”? Suppose Rupprecht continued to retire, would not a gap be opened up between him and the Fifth Army, his neighbor to the right, and would not the French attack through there? Might this not bring defeat to the right wing? Rupprecht and his Chief of Staff, General Krafft von Dellmensingen, contended that it would. They said their troops were impatiently awaiting the order to attack, that it was difficult to restrain them, that it would be shameful to force retreat upon troops “champing to go forward”; moreover, it was unwise to give up territory in Lorraine at the very outset of the war, even temporarily, unless absolutely forced to.