The Guns of August (72 page)

They had marched twenty-five to twenty-eight miles on September 3. When the soldiers came into their billets, said a French witness, “they fell down exhausted, muttering in a dazed way, ‘forty kilometers! forty kilometers!’ That was all they could say.” In the coming battle many German prisoners were taken asleep, unable to go another step. The heat of the days was terrible. Only the expectation of reaching Paris “tomorrow or the day after” enabled them to march at all, and the officers did not dare undeceive them. In his fever to finish off the French, Kluck, besides wearing out his men, outstripped
not only his supply trains but also his heavy artillery. His compatriot in East Prussia, General von François, would not budge until he had at hand all his artillery and ammunition wagons. But François faced battle, whereas Kluck, thinking he faced only pursuit and mopping up, ignored the precaution. He believed the French incapable, after ten days of retreat, of the morale and energy required to turn around at the sound of the bugle and fight again. Nor was he worried about his flank. “The General fears nothing from the direction of Paris,” recorded an officer on September 4. “After we have destroyed the remains of the Franco-British Army he will return to Paris and give the IVth Reserve the honor of leading the entry into the French capital.”

The order to remain behind as flank guard of the German advance could not be carried out, Kluck bluntly informed OHL as he pushed forward on September 4. A two-day halt, necessary to allow Bülow to catch up, would weaken the whole German offensive and give the enemy time to regain his freedom of movement. Indeed, it was only by the “bold action” of his army that the crossings of the Marne had been opened to the other armies, and “it is now to be hoped that every advantage will be taken of this success.” Becoming angrier as he dictated, Kluck demanded to know how it was that “decisive victories” by the “other” armies—meaning Bülow—were always followed by “appeals for support.”

Bülow was furious when his neighbor transformed “the echelon in rear of the Second Army prescribed by OHL into an echelon in advance.” His troops, too, like most of the German units as they came up to the Marne, were exhausted. “We can do no more,” wrote an officer of the Xth Reserve Corps. “The men fall in the ditches and lie there just to breathe .… The order comes to mount. I ride bent over with my head resting on the horse’s mane. We are thirsty and hungry. Indifference comes over us. Such a life isn’t worth much. To lose it is to lose little.” Troops of Hausen’s Army complained of having “no cooked food for five days in a row.” In the neighboring Fourth Army an officer wrote: “We march all day in the broiling heat. With bearded faces and powdered with dust,
the men look like walking sacks of flour.” That the German advance was being achieved at the cost of the exhaustion and apathy of the troops did not alarm the field commanders. Like Kluck, they were convinced the French could not recoup. Bülow on September 3 reported the French Fifth Army “decisively beaten”—for the third or fourth time—and fleeing “utterly disorganized to south of the Marne.”

If not “utterly disorganized,” the Fifth Army was distinctly not in good shape. Lanrezac’s loss of confidence in Joffre, which he took no trouble to conceal, his quarrels with liaison officers from GQG and his dispute of orders infected his staff, half of whom were at odds with the other half. All were irritated and worried with nerves strained by the long agony of bringing up the rear of the French retreat. General Mas de Latrie of the XVIIIth Corps, which was nearest to the enemy, was expressing “anguish” at the condition of his troops. But however battered, the Fifth Army had got across the Marne with enough distance between itself and the enemy to be considered disengaged, thus fulfilling Joffre’s condition for resuming the offensive.

Although Joffre intended to make the effort “within a few days,” as he informed the government, he was not specific, and discouragement at GQG was deep. Every day liaison officers returned depressed from their visits to the armies over whom, as one of them said, “blew the winds of defeat.” Arrangements were being made to move GQG back another thirty miles to Chatillon-sur-Seine, and the move was carried out two days later, September 5. In ten days France had lost the cities of Lille, Valenciennes, Cambrai, Arras, Amiens, Maubeuge, Mézieres, St. Quentin, Laon, and Soissons, as well as coal and iron mines, wheat and sugarbeet areas, and a sixth of her population. A pall descended upon everyone when Rheims, in whose great cathedral every French king from Clovis to Louis XVI had been crowned, was abandoned as an open city to Bülow’s Army on September 3. It was not until two weeks later, in the angry aftermath of the Marne, that the bombardment took place which was to make the
cathedral of Rheims a symbol to the world like the Library of Louvain.

Joffre who had still shown no sign of nerves, whose appetite for three regular meals remained steady and his ten o’clock bedtime inviolable, faced on September 3 the one task that during this period caused him visible discomfort. He had made up his mind that Lanrezac must go. His stated reasons were Lanrezac’s “physical and moral depression” and his “unpleasant personal relations,” by now notorious, with Sir John French. For the sake of the coming offensive in which the role of the Fifth Army would be crucial and participation by the British essential, he must be replaced. Despite Lanrezac’s firm conduct of the battle of Guise, Joffre had convinced himself that since then Lanrezac had “morally gone to pieces.” Besides, he never ceased criticizing and raising objections to orders. This was not necessarily evidence of moral depression, but it annoyed the Generalissimo.

With few personal ideas of his own, Joffre was adept at taking advice, and submitted more or less consciously to the reigning doctrinaires of the Operations Bureau. They formed what a French military critic called “a church outside which there was no salvation and which could never pardon those who revealed the falsity of its doctrine.” Lanrezac’s sin was in having been right, all too vocally. He had been right from the beginning about the fatal underestimation of the German right wing as a result of which a fair part of France was now under the German boot. His decision to break off battle at Charleroi when threatened with double envelopment by Bülow’s and Hausen’s armies had saved the French left wing. As General von Hausen acknowledged after the war, this upset the whole German plan which had counted on enveloping the French left, and ultimately caused Kluck’s inward wheel in the effort to roll up the Fifth Army. Whether Lanrezac’s withdrawal came from fear or from wisdom is immaterial, for fear sometimes is wisdom and in this case had made possible the renewed effort Joffre was now preparing. All this was to be recognized long afterward when the French government, in a belated gesture of amends, awarded Lanrezac
the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor. But in the bitter failure of the first month Lanrezac’s
lèse majesté
made him intolerable to GQG. On the day he brought his army across the Marne, he was marked for the Tarpeian Rock.

Lanrezac’s mood, after all that had passed, was in reality not the most reliable; unquestionably the mutual distrust between him and GQG, whose so ever the fault, and between him and Sir John French made him a risk as a commander in time of crisis. Joffre felt it necessary to take every possible measure to avoid failure in the coming offensive. Including his dismissals of the next two days, Joffre in the first five weeks stripped the French Army of two army commanders, ten corps commanders and thirty-eight, or half the total number, of divisional generals. New and mostly better men, including three future Marshals, Foch, Pétain, and Franchet d’Esperey, moved up to fill their places. If some injustices were committed, the army was improved.

Joffre set out in his car for Sézanne where Fifth Army Headquarters was located that day. At a prearranged meeting place he conferred with Franchet d’Esperey, commander of the Ist Corps who turned up with his head wrapped in a bath towel because of the heat.

“Do you feel yourself capable of commanding an army?” Joffre asked.

“As well as anyone else,” replied Franchet d’Esperey. When Joffre simply looked at him, he shrugged and explained: “The higher one goes, the easier. One gets a bigger staff; there are more people to help.” That being settled, Joffre drove on.

At Sézanne he retired alone with Lanrezac and said to him: “My friend, you are used up and undecided. You will have to give up command of the Fifth Army. I hate to tell you this but I have to.” According to Joffre, Lanrezac thought for a moment and replied, “General, you are right,” and seemed like a man relieved of an overwhelming burden. According to Lanrezac’s own account, he protested vigorously and demanded that Joffre cite evidence, but Joffre would only repeat “Hesitant, undecided,” and complain that Lanrezac always made “observations” on orders given him. Lanrezac said this could
hardly be held against him since events proved all his observations correct, which, of course, was the trouble. But Joffre was obviously not listening. He made “facial expressions indicating I had worn out his patience and his eyes refused to meet mine.” Lanrezac gave up the struggle. Joffre emerged from the interview looking, according to his aide-de-camp, “very nervous,” a unique occasion.

Franchet d’Esperey was now sent for. Called from his dinner at the first mouthful of soup, he stood up, swallowed off a glass of wine, put on his coat, and left for Sézanne. Held up by a transfer of military supplies taking place unhurriedly at a crossroad, he jumped from his car. So well known in the army was his compact hard figure with a head like a howitzer shell, crewcut hair, piercing dark eyes, and sharp authoritarian voice, that the men, horses, and vehicles parted as if by magic. In the coming days, as tension and his temper rose, his method of dealing with roadblocks as he dashed from corps to corps was to fire his revolver out of the window of his car. To the British soldiers he eventually became known as “Desperate Frankey.” Fellow officers found him transformed from the jovial and friendly, though strict, commander they had known, to a tyrant. He became fierce, peremptory, glacial, and imposed a reign of terror upon his staff no less than upon the troops. Hardly had Lanrezac handed over to him the confidential dossier and relinquished command at Sézanne when the telephone rang and Hely d’Oissel, who answered it, was heard repeating “Yes, General. No, General,” with increasing irritation.

“Who’s that?” rapped out Franchet d’Esperey, and was told it was General Mas de Latrie of the XVIIIth Corps insisting he could not carry out orders for the next day because of the extreme fatigue of his troops.

“I’ll take it,” said the new Commander. “Hello, this is General d’Esperey. I have taken over command of the Fifth Army. There is to be no more discussion. You will march; march or drop dead.” And he hung up.

September 4 opened with a sense of climax felt in widely separated places; a kind of extra-sensory awareness that great events sometimes send ahead. In Paris, Gallieni felt this was the “decisive” day. In Berlin, Princess Blücher wrote in her diary, “Nothing is talked of but the expected entry into Paris.” In Brussels the leaves had begun to fall, and a sudden wind blew them in gusts about the street. People felt the hidden chill of autumn in the air and wondered what would happen if the war were to last through the winter. At the American Legation Hugh Gibson noted a “growing nervousness” at German Headquarters where there had been no announcements of victories in four days. “I am sure there is something big in the air today.”

At OHL in Luxembourg tension was at a pitch as the triumphant moment of German history approached. Stretched to the snapping point of endurance, the army was about to complete upon the Marne the work begun at Sadowa and Sedan. “It is the 35th day,” said the Kaiser with triumph in his voice to a visiting minister from Berlin. “We invest Rheims, we are 30 miles from Paris .…”

At the front the German Armies thought of the final battle in terms of a roundup rather than a combat. “Great news,” recorded an officer of the Fifth Army in his diary, “the French have offered us an armistice and are prepared to pay an indemnity of 17 billions. For the time being,” he added soberly, “the armistice is being refused.”

The enemy was considered beaten, and any evidence to the contrary was unwelcome. A horrid doubt entered the mind of General von Kuhl, Kluck’s Chief of Staff, upon the report of a French column near Château-Thierry singing as it marched in retreat. He suppressed his doubts, “as all orders for the new movement had already been given.” Apart from a few such instances there was no suspicion, or none that made itself felt upon command decisions, that the enemy was preparing a counter-offensive. Although signs were visible, German Intelligence, operating in hostile territory, failed to pick them up. An Intelligence officer from OHL came to the Crown Prince’s headquarters on September 4 to say that the situation
was favorable all along the front and that “We are advancing triumphantly everywhere.”

One man did not think so. Moltke, unlike Joffre, may have had no confidence in his own star but neither did he have the veil that confidence can sometimes draw before the eyes, and so he saw things without illusion. In this he resembled Lanrezac. On September 4 he was “serious and depressed,” and said to Helfferich, the same minister who had just talked to the Kaiser, “We have hardly a horse in the army who can go another step.” After a thoughtful pause he went on: “We must not deceive ourselves. We have had success but not victory. Victory means annihilation of the enemy’s power of resistance. When a million men oppose each other in battle the victor has prisoners. Where are our prisoners? Twenty thousand in Lorraine, perhaps another ten or twenty thousand altogether. And from the comparatively small number of guns captured, it seems to me the French are conducting a planned and orderly retreat.” The inadmissible thought had been spoken.