The Guns of August (44 page)

Over the crack of musketry and crash of shells a deeper sound like that of a gigantic drum could be heard in the distance. The German siege guns had begun the bombardment of the forts of Namur. Dragged down from Liège, the 420s and 305s had been brought within range, cemented into emplacements, and were now pouring their two-ton shells on a second Belgian fortress. The shells came over with “a long singing scream,” wrote an Englishwoman who had led a volunteer ambulance corps to Namur. They seemed to be coming directly at the listener wherever he stood and to explode within a yard of him wherever they hit. The town cowered through two days of the terrible sound as destruction thundered out of the sky upon the forts around them. The same effects as at Liège of explosive gases, of concrete crumbled like plaster, of men in the underground chambers driven mad
were repeated. Cut off from the rest of the Belgian Army, the garrison troops and the 4th Division felt themselves deserted. Commandant Duruy, Lanrezac’s liaison officer at Namur, returned to Fifth Army headquarters to say he did not think the forts would hold out another day without some evidence of French help. “They must see the French troops marching along with colors unfurled and a band playing. There must be a band,” he pleaded. Three French battalions—one regiment of some 3,000 men—were sent off that night and joined the defense of Namur next morning. The defense numbered 37,000. The German force engaged in the assault from August 21 to 24 ranged from 107,000 to 153,000 with 400 to 500 pieces of artillery.

On the night of August 21 Sir John French reported to Kitchener that he did not think there would be serious fighting before the 24th. “I think I know the situation thoroughly and I regard it as favorable to us,” he wrote. He did not know it as thoroughly as he thought. Next day, as British troops were marching up the road to Mons “in the general direction of Soignies,” cavalry patrols reported a German corps marching down the Brussels-Mons road, also making for Soignies. From their position they could be expected to reach the village that night. It seemed unlikely the enemy would wait for Sir John’s target date of the 24th. More alarming news was brought by a British aviator who reported another German corps marching down a road far enough to the west to outflank the British left. Envelopment. Suddenly, in startling clarity the menace loomed before British eyes—at least before the eyes of the Intelligence section. The “sweep” Kitchener eternally talked of was no longer an idea, but columns of living men. The staff commanders, under Henry Wilson’s influence, discounted it. Wedded, through Wilson, to French strategy they were no more inclined than GQG to accept an alarmist view of the German right wing. “The information you have acquired and conveyed to the Commander in Chief appears to be somewhat exaggerated,” they decided, and left marching orders unchanged.

They were conscious of treading on territory of past triumphs.
Ten miles south of Mons they passed through Malplaquet on the border between France and Belgium and saw by the roadside the stone monument marking the spot where Marlborough had defeated the armies of Louis XIV and won immortality in a French folk song. Ahead of them between Mons and Brussels lay Waterloo. Returning to that victorious field, almost on the hundredth anniversary of the battle, they could not but feel confident.

As the heads of their columns neared Mons on the 22nd, part of a cavalry squadron scouting the road north of the canal saw a group of four horsemen riding toward them. They looked unfamiliar. At the same instant the strange riders saw the British, and halted. There was a kind of breathless pause before each realized he was looking at the enemy. The Uhlans turned to rejoin the rest of their squadron and galloped back, chased by the British, who caught up with them in the streets of Soignies. In a sharp skirmish the Uhlans were “hampered by their long lances and a good many threw them away.” The British killed three or four and left the somewhat restricted field victorious. Captain Hornby, leader of the squadron, was awarded the DSO as the first British officer to kill a German with the new pattern cavalry sword. The war had opened in correct style with the most encouraging results.

First contact having been made on the road to Soignies as expected, the staff commanders were given no cause to change their estimate of the enemy’s strength or position. German strength opposing the British was put by Wilson at one or possibly two corps and one cavalry division, which was inferior or at most equal to the BEF’s two corps and a cavalry division. Wilson’s forceful character, high spirits, and recognized familiarity with the ground and with the French carried greater persuasion than the reports of Intelligence officers—especially as Operations officers traditionally discount estimates by their brother bureau on the theory that Intelligence always assumes the worst. The death of Sir James Grierson, who among the British had been the closest student of German military theory and practice, gave Wilson’s theories, which were a duplicate of GQG’s, that much greater
sway. Battle on the morrow was expected with confidence by the staff and corps commanders if not by Sir John French.

His mood was still murky; his hesitancy almost a replica of Lanrezac’s. When General Smith-Dorrien, just arrived in France to replace Grierson, came up on the 21st he was told to “give battle on the line of the Condé Canal.” When Smith-Dorrien asked if this meant offensive or defensive, he was told to “obey orders.” One factor worrying Sir John French was ignorance of Lanrezac’s plan of battle on his right flank and fear of a gap opening between them. He set off in a motorcar on the morning of the 22nd to confer with his unpleasing neighbor; but on being told en route that Lanrezac had gone forward to corps headquarters at Mettet where the Xth Corps was now in the heat of combat, he returned without meeting him. One piece of good news met him at Headquarters. The 4th Division, left behind in England at the start, had arrived in France and was on its way forward. The lengthening shadow of the German advance through Belgium and the withdrawal of the Belgian Army to Antwerp had decided Kitchener to send it over.

General von Kluck was more surprised than the British by the cavalry clash on the road at Soignies. Up to this moment—so effective were French and British security measures—he did not know the British were in front of him. He knew they had landed because he had read the news in a Belgian newspaper which published Kitchener’s official communiqué announcing the safe arrival of the BEF “on French soil.” This announcement on August 20 was the first England, the world, and the enemy knew of the landing. Kluck still thought they had landed at Ostend, Dunkirk, and Calais, chiefly because he wanted to think so, his intention being to “attack and disperse” the British along with the Belgians before meeting the French.

Now, as he moved down from Brussels, he had to worry about a Belgian sortie from Antwerp at his rear and a possible pounce upon his flank by the British, mysteriously deploying, so he thought, somewhere in Belgium to his right. He kept trying to edge his army westward in order to find and meet the
British, but Bülow, in constant fear of a gap, kept issuing orders pulling him inward. Kluck protested. Bülow insisted. “Otherwise,” he said, “the First Army might get too far away and not be able to support the Second Army.” On discovering the British squarely in front of him at Soignies, Kluck again attempted a shift to the west in order to find the enemy flank. When again prevented by Bülow he protested furiously to OHL. OHL’s notion of British whereabouts was even dimmer than the Allies’ notion of the whereabouts of the German right wing. “It appears from here that no landings of great importance have taken place,” said OHL, and rejected Kluck’s proposal. Deprived of the opportunity to envelop the enemy and condemned to frontal attack, Kluck moved wrathfully on Mons. His orders for August 23 were to cross the canal, occupy the ground to the south, and force the enemy back into Maubeuge while cutting off his retreat from the west.

Bülow on that day, August 22, was having as much trouble with Hausen on his left as with Kluck on his right. As Kluck’s tendency was to get ahead, Hausen’s was to lag behind. With advance units of his army already engaged across the Sambre against Lanrezac’s Xth Corps, Bülow planned a battle of annihilation in a great joint attack by his own and Hausen’s Army. But on the 22nd Hausen was not ready. Bülow complained bitterly of “insufficient cooperation” from his neighbor. Hausen complained equally bitterly of “suffering” from Bülow’s constant demands for help. Deciding not to wait, Bülow threw three corps into a violent attack upon the line of the Sambre.

During that day and the next Bülow’s and Lanrezac’s Armies grappled each other in the Battle of Charleroi, Hausen’s Army joining in by the end of the first day. These were the same two days when the French Third and Fourth Armies were wrestling with disaster in the fog and forest of the Ardennes. Lanrezac was at Mettet to direct the battle, a process which consisted largely of agonized waiting for divisional and corps commanders to report back what was happening to them. They in turn found it hard enough to find out what was happening from units under heavy fire or gripped in combat
in village streets or stumbling back exhausted and bleeding with hardly an officer left to make a report. Visual evidence reached Mettet before reports. A car carrying a wounded officer drove into the square where Lanrezac and his staff paced anxiously, too restless to remain indoors. The wounded man was recognized as General Boë, commander of a division of the Xth Corps. With a face the color of ashes and eyes of tragedy, he whispered slowly and painfully to Hely d’Oissel who ran to the car, “Tell him … tell the General … we held on … as long as we could.”

On the left of the Xth Corps, the IIIrd Corps in front of Charleroi reported “terrible” losses. The sprawling industrial town lying on both sides of the river having been penetrated by the Germans during the day, the French were fighting furiously to dislodge them. When the Germans attacked in dense formation—as was their habit before they learned better—they made perfect targets for the 75s. But the 75s, which could fire 15 times a minute, were supplied with shells at a rate sufficient for only 2.25 shots per minute. At Charleroi the “Turcos” of the two Algerian divisions, recruited by voluntary enlistment, fought as valiantly as had their fathers at Sedan. One battalion charged a German gun battery, bayoneting the gunners, and returned with two men unwounded out of the battalion’s complement of 1,030. Everywhere the French were enraged or demoralized, according to the circumstances in different sectors, by the shelling from batteries they usually could not see or get at. They felt helpless rage at the hawk-shaped German airplanes overhead which acted as artillery spotters and whose flight over their lines was invariably followed by a new burst of shells.

By evening Lanrezac had to report the Xth Corps “forced to fall back” having “suffered severely”; the IIIrd Corps “heavily engaged”; “heavy casualties” in officers; the XVIIIth Corps on the left intact but General Sordet’s Cavalry Corps on the far left “greatly exhausted” and also forced to fall back, leaving a gap between the Fifth Army and the British. It proved to be a gap of ten miles, wide enough for an enemy corps. Lanrezac’s anxiety was so acute as to move him to
send word to Sir John French asking him to relieve pressure on the French by attacking Bülow’s right flank. Sir John replied he could not comply, but promised to hold the line of the Mons Canal for twenty-four hours.

During the night Lanrezac’s position became further imperiled when Hausen brought four fresh corps and 340 guns into action on the Meuse. He attacked during the night and gained bridgeheads across the river which were counterattacked by Franchet d’Esperey’s Ist Corps whose mission was to hold the Meuse along the right side of Lanrezac’s front. His was the only corps of the Fifth Army to entrench its position.

Hausen’s intention, in compliance with orders from OHL, was to attack southwest toward Givet where he expected to come in upon the rear of Lanrezac’s Army, which could then be caught between his and Bülow’s forces, and destroyed. Bülow, however, whose units in this sector had taken as severe punishment as they had given, was determined to mount a massive and terminal attack, and ordered Hausen to attack directly westward toward Mettet upon the body of the Fifth Army instead of southwestward across its line of retreat. Hausen complied. This was an error. It engaged Hausen all during August 23 in frontal attack against the strongly held positions and vigorous generalship of Franchet d’Esperey’s corps and it left Lanrezac’s line of retreat open—an opening through which the opportunity for a battle of annihilation was to slip away.

Through the hot clear hours of August 23 the summer sky was spattered with the greasy black puffs of bursting shells. The French had instantly dubbed them
“marmites”
after the cast-iron soup pot that sits on every French stove.
“Il plut des marmites”
(It rained shells) was all that one tired soldier could remember of the day. In some places the French were still attacking, trying to throw the Germans back across the Sambre; in others they were holding; in still others they were retreating in crippled, broken disorder. The roads were choked with long columns of Belgian refugees, coated with dust, weighted down with babies and bundles, pushing wheelbarrows,
dully, tiredly, endlessly moving toward no goal or home or refuge but only away from the awful roar of guns to the north.

The refugee columns passed through Philippeville, twenty miles from Charleroi where Lanrezac had his headquarters that day. Standing in the square, with red-trousered legs apart and hands clasped behind his back, Lanrezac watched them somberly, saying nothing. Above his black tunic his dark face looked almost pale and his fleshy cheeks sunken. He felt “prey to extreme anxiety.” Enemy pressure was bending against him from all sides. No guidance came from GQG except to ask his opinion of the situation. Lanrezac felt acutely conscious of the gap made by the retreat of Sordet’s cavalry. At noon came the news, foreseen yet still incredible, that the Belgian 4th Division was evacuating Namur. The city dominating the confluence of Sambre and Meuse, as well as the forts on the heights behind it, would soon be in Bülow’s hands. No word came from General de Langle de Cary of the Fourth Army to whom Lanrezac had sent a message that morning asking for a maneuver to strengthen the sector where their forces joined.