The Guns of August (40 page)

The order produced “incredulous dismay” among the forward school of the Belgian General Staff and especially in the bosom of Colonel Adelbert, President Poincaré’s personal representative. Energetic and brilliantly qualified for the offensive in war, he was “less so” for diplomatic missions, ruefully admitted the French Minister to Belgium.

“You are not going to retreat before a mere cavalry screen?” exploded Colonel Adelbert. Astounded and angry, he accused the Belgians of “abandoning” the French without warning just at “the precise moment when the French cavalry corps had appeared north of the Sambre and Meuse.” The military consequences, he said, would be grave, the moral success to the Germans great, and Brussels would be uncovered to “raids by German cavalry.” This was his appreciation of the enemy strength that two days later was to take Brussels with over a quarter of a million men. However wrong his judgment and rude his tongue, Colonel Adelbert’s anguish, from the French point of view, was understandable. Retirement to Antwerp meant that the Belgian Army would withdraw from the flank of the Allied line and break off contact with the French on the eve of the great French offensive.

During the day of August 18 the King’s decision was changed several times in the agony of indecision between desire to save the Belgian Army from annihilation and reluctance to give up good positions just when French help might be arriving. Before the day was over the King’s dilemma was
solved for him by Joffre’s Order No. 13 of that date which made it clear that the main French effort was to be made in another direction, leaving Belgium to guard the passage west of the Meuse with what assistance could be obtained from the Fifth Army and the British. King Albert hesitated no more. He reconfirmed the order for retreat to Antwerp, and that night the five Belgian divisions were disengaged from their positions on the Gette and withdrawn to the Antwerp camp, which they reached on August 20.

Joffre’s Order No. 13 was the “get ready” signal for the great offensive through the German center upon which all French hopes were set. It was addressed to the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Armies and communicated to the Belgians and British. It instructed the Third and Fourth Armies of Generals Ruffey and De Langle de Cary to prepare to attack through the Ardennes and left two alternatives open to the Fifth Army, depending upon final appreciation of German strength west of the Meuse. In one case Lanrezac was to attack northward across the Sambre “in complete liaison with the Belgian and British armies”; in the other case, supposing the enemy engaged “only a fraction of his right wing group” west of the Meuse, Lanrezac was to recross the river and support the main offensive through the Ardennes, “leaving to the Belgian and British armies the task of dealing with the German forces north of the Sambre and Meuse.”

It was an impossible instruction. It required Lanrezac’s army—not a unit but a heterogeneous mass of three corps and seven separate divisions stretched over an area thirty miles wide—which was then in motion on its way up to the Sambre, to face two ways and in the second alternative to return to the original deployment which Lanrezac had so painfully succeeded in turning it away from only three days ago. It could have paralyzed Lanrezac and left him stock-still, waiting for Joffre to choose one alternative or the other. Instead, the phrase “only a fraction of his right wing” sealed his loss of confidence in GQG. Ignoring the second alternative he pushed on to the Sambre. He would be in position by August 20, he informed Joffre, to counterattack any enemy
forces attempting to cross the river between Namur and Charleroi and “to throw them back into the Sambre.”

Moving toward that rendezvous his battalions sang the “Sambre et Meuse,” a memorial of 1870 and favorite marching song of the French Army:

What dictated Order No. 13 was GQG’s fixed determination to carry through Plan 17, the bearer of all its hopes for victory by decisive battle. In August when the war was young the idea that it could be brought to a quick finish by decisive battle still prevailed. GQG firmly believed that however strong the German right wing, a French offensive through the German center would succeed in isolating and destroying it. That night Messimy, in “anguish” about the weakly defended frontier below the Sambre, telephoned to Joffre and was told the Generalissimo was asleep. His awe greater than his anguish, Messimy agreed that he should not be awakened. Berthelot said to him comfortingly, “If the Germans commit the imprudence of an enveloping maneuver through northern Belgium, so much the better! The more men they have on their right wing, the easier it will be for us to break through their center.”

On that day the German right wing was making its wheel through Belgium with von Kluck’s army on the outside advancing upon Brussels, von Bülow’s in the middle advancing upon Namur, and von Hausen’s on the inside advancing on Dinant. Namur, held by the Belgian 4th Division and garrison troops, stood alone, still generally regarded, despite what had happened at Liège, as an impregnable fortress. Even those who took heed of Liège thought Namur would at least hold out long enough to allow Lanrezac to cross the Sambre, make contact with its defenders, and pin his forces to the rim
of Namur’s circle of forts. Commandant Duruy, a former military attaché in Brussels who was sent as liaison officer to Namur, gloomily reported to Lanrezac on August 19 that he did not believe the fortress could hold for long. Cut off from the rest of their army, the defenders were low in morale as well as in ammunition. Though his views were disputed by many, Duruy remained adamant in his pessimism.

On August 18 von Kluck’s leading troops reached the Gette where they found themselves foiled of the Belgian Army. The destruction of that army was von Kluck’s task. He had hoped to accomplish it by driving through between the Belgians and Antwerp and rounding them up before they could reach the safety of their base. He was too late. King Albert’s withdrawal saved his army and kept it in being to become a menace to von Kluck’s rear when later he turned south for the march on Paris. “They always managed to escape our grasp so that their army has not been decisively beaten nor forced away from Antwerp,” von Kluck was obliged to report to OHL.

He must shortly make his southward turn not only with the Belgians at his rear but with a new enemy, the British, in front of him. The Germans had worked it out that the logical place for the British to land would be at the ports nearest to the front in Belgium, and von Kluck’s cavalry reconnaissance, with that marvelous human capacity to see what you expect to see even if it is not there, duly reported the British to be disembarking at Ostend, Calais, and Dunkirk on August 13. This would have brought them across von Kluck’s front at almost any moment. In fact, of course, they were not there at all but were landing farther down the coast at Boulogne, Rouen, and Havre. The Ostend report, however, caused OHL to worry that as von Kluck made his southward turn his right might be attacked by the British, and if he swung his left to meet them a gap might be opened between his army and von Bülow’s. To prevent such danger OHL on August 17 put von Kluck, to his extreme annoyance, under the orders of von Bülow. How it was possible for OHL to act on a report that the British were landing at Ostend and on the same day to tell Rupprecht that
the British had not yet landed and might not come at all is one of the curiosities of war which can only be explained by conjecture. Perhaps the staff officers at OHL who dealt with the left wing were a different group from those who dealt with the right wing, and failed to consult each other.

The commanders of the First and Second Armies were both within two years of seventy. Von Kluck, a strange, dark, fierce-looking man, hardly looked his age, in contrast to von Bülow with his white mustache and puffy face who looked more than his. Von Kluck, who had been wounded in the war of 1870 and acquired his ennobling “von” at the age of fifty, had been chosen before the war for the leading role in the march on Paris. His was the army that was supposed to be the hammerhead of the right wing, his that was to regulate the pace of the whole, his that had been given the greatest striking power with a density of 18,000 men per mile of front (about 10 per meter) compared to 13,000 for von Bülow and 3,300 for Rupprecht. But haunted by the specter of a gap, OHL thought that von Bülow in the center of the right wing would be in the best position to keep its three armies abreast of each other. Von Kluck, bitterly resenting the arrangement, promptly disputed von Bülow’s orders for each day’s march, causing such havoc, what with the garbled communications, that after ten days OHL was forced to rescind the order—whereupon a gap was indeed to open up, beyond recall.

The Belgians even more than von Bülow tried von Kluck’s temper. Their army by forcing the Germans to fight their way through delayed the schedule of march and by blowing up railroads and bridges disrupted the flow of ammunition, food, medicine, mail, and every other supply, causing the Germans a constant diversion of effort to keep open their lines to the rear. Civilians blocked roads and worst of all cut telephone and telegraph wires which dislocated communication not only between the German armies and OHL but also between army and army and corps and corps. This “extremely aggressive guerrilla warfare,” as von Kluck called it, and especially the sniping by
franc-tireurs
at German soldiers, exasperated him and his fellow commanders. From the moment his army
entered Belgium he found it necessary to take, in his own words, “severe and inexorable reprisals” such as “the shooting of individuals and the burning of homes” against the “treacherous” attacks of the civil population. Burned villages and dead hostages marked the path of the First Army. On August 19 after the Germans had crossed the Gette and found the Belgian Army withdrawn during the night, they vented their fury on Aerschot, a small town between the Gette and Brussels, the first to suffer a mass execution. In Aerschot 150 civilians were shot. The numbers were to grow larger as the process was repeated, by von Bülow’s army at Ardennes and Tamines, by von Hausen’s in the culminating massacre of 664 at Dinant. The method was to assemble the inhabitants in the main square, women usually on one side and men on the other, select every tenth man or every second man or all on one side, according to the whim of the individual officer, march them to a nearby field or empty lot behind the railroad station and shoot them. In Belgium there are many towns whose cemeteries today have rows and rows of memorial stones inscribed with a name, the date 1914, and the legend, repeated over and over:
“Fusillé par les Allemands”
(Shot by the Germans). In many are newer and longer rows with the same legend and the date 1944.

General von Hausen, commanding the Third Army, found, like von Kluck, that the “perfidious” conduct of the Belgians in “multiplying obstacles” in his path called for reprisals “of the utmost rigor without an instant’s hesitation.” These were to include “the arrest as hostages of notables such as estate-owners, mayors, and priests, the burning of houses and farms and the execution of persons caught in acts of hostility.” Hausen’s army were Saxons whose name in Belgium became synonymous with “savage.” Hausen himself could not get over the “hostility of the Belgian people.” To discover “how we are hated” was a constant amazement to him. He complained bitterly of the attitude of the D’Eggremont family in whose luxurious château of forty rooms, with greenhouses, gardens, and stable for fifty horses, he was billeted for one night. The elderly Count went around “with his fists clenched
in his pockets”; the two sons absented themselves from the dinner table; the father came late to dinner and refused to talk or even respond to questions, and continued in this unpleasant attitude in spite of Hausen’s gracious forbearance in ordering his military police not to confiscate the Chinese and Japanese weapons collected by Count D’Eggrernont during his diplomatic service in the Orient. It was a most distressing experience.

The German campaign of reprisals was not, except individually, a spontaneous answer to Belgian provocation. It had been prepared ahead of time, with usual German care for every contingency, and was designed to save time and men by cowing the Belgians quickly. Speed was essential. It was also essential to enter France with every available battalion; Belgian resistance which required troops to be left behind interfered with this objective. Proclamations were printed in advance. As soon as the Germans entered a town its walls became whitened, as if by a biblical plague, with a rash of posters plastered on every house warning the populace against acts of “hostility.” The punishment for civilians firing on soldiers was death, as it was for a variety of minor acts: “Any one approaching within 200 meters of an airplane or balloon post will be shot on the spot.” Owners of houses where hidden arms were discovered would be shot. Owners of homes where Belgian soldiers were found hidden would be sent to “perpetual” hard labor in Germany. Villages where acts of “hostility” were committed against German soldiers “will be burned.” If such an act took place “on the road between two villages, the same methods will be applied to the inhabitants of both.”

In summary the proclamations concluded: “For all acts of hostility the following principles will be applied: all punishments will be executed without mercy, the whole community will be regarded as responsible, hostages will be taken in large numbers.” This practice of the principle of collective responsibility, having been expressly outlawed by the Hague Convention, shocked the world of 1914 which had believed in human progress.

Von Kluck complained that somehow the methods employed “were slow in remedying the evil.” The Belgian populace continued to show the most implacable hostility. “These evil practices on the part of the population ate into the very vitals of our Army.” Reprisals grew more frequent and severe. The smoke of burning villages, the roads clogged with fleeing inhabitants, the mayors and burgomasters shot as hostages were reported to the world by the crowds of Allied, American, and other neutral correspondents who, barred from the front by Joffre and Kitchener, flocked to Belgium from the first day of war. A remarkable group of masters of vivid writing, the Americans included Richard Harding Davis for a syndicate of papers, Will Irwin for
Collier’s,
Irwin Cobb for the
Saturday Evening Post,
Harry Hansen for the
Chicago Daily News,
John T. McCutcheon for the
Chicago Tribune,
and others. Securing credentials from the German Army, they followed along with it. They wrote of the debris of sacked houses, the blackened villages in which no human was left but only a silent cat on a shattered doorstep, the streets strewn with broken bottles and broken windowpanes, the agonized lowing of cows with unmilked udders, the endless files of refugees with their bundles and wagons and carts and umbrellas for sleeping on rainy nights along the roadside, of the fields of grain bending over with ripeness and no one to reap them, of the questions asked over and over: “Have you seen the French? Where are the French? Where are the British?” A rag doll lying on the road with its head squashed flat by the wheel of a gun carriage seemed to one American correspondent a symbol of Belgium’s fate in the war.