The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (14 page)

The persistent encounter with suspected or real francs-tireurs prompted General Hans Gaede, deputy commander of XIV Corps, to issue a special decree defining just who constituted a franc-tireur. The decree was as sweeping as it was draconian. Any citizens of “France, England, Belgium, Russia and Japan” not in uniform and who in any way disrupted German military operations, communications, or supply were to be regarded as
Franktireure
. If caught in the act, they were “to be killed at once, naturally in self-defense.” If not caught red-handed, they were still to be executed, but only by emergency courts-martial requiring one officer. Residents of the “Reichsland” who were caught with arms were to be summarily executed; those merely suspected of such actions, handed over to formal courts-martial.
¹⁸
Without question, the war in the west had turned ugly in its first days.

The first of four engagements in the so-called Battle of the Frontiers had not gone well for France.
^†
Joffre, who had earlier heralded Bonneau’s seizure of Mulhouse, now allowed no news of its recapture by the Germans or of the number of casualties to be released. He relieved Bonneau, the hero of yesterday, of command—the first of many so-called
limogés
, so named because War Minister Messimy assigned them to rear duty at the army depot of Limoges, some four hundred kilometers away from the political nerve center of Paris. Within a week, Joffre would also sack Louis Aubier, commanding 8th CD in Alsace.

The Battle of Mulhouse had been fought for the wrong reason—national prestige—and at the wrong place—the southernmost flank of both armies. Joffre’s General Instruction No. 1 had made clear that he simply wanted to tie down enemy units to the south while he delivered his main blow against the Germans around the Metz-Thionville defenses. His German counterpart, Helmuth von Moltke, likewise had instructed the commanders on his left flank merely to “attract and to tie down” as many French forces “as possible” in the area between the Upper Moselle and Meurthe rivers to prevent the French from transporting them to their left wing, where the main German attack would be delivered through Belgium. Beyond that, they were to secure Alsace and Baden against invasion.
¹⁹

But as Carl von Clausewitz made abundantly clear in
Vom Kriege
, “war is the realm of uncertainty.” A host of “intangibles” such as interaction, friction, moral factors, and the “fog of uncertainty” at all times interacted with what he called “primordial violence” or “slaughter” and the “passions of the people” to prolong war, to escalate conflict, and to bedevil the best-laid plans of staff officers. Thus it was with regard to Alsace-Lorraine in 1914.

BAVARIAN CROWN PRINCE RUPPRECHT
and the staff of German Sixth Army departed Munich-Laim by train at 9:50
PM
on 7 August and arrived at their headquarters at Saint-Avold, a dreary industrial hamlet some forty kilometers east of Metz, at precisely 7:47
AM
on 9 August.
²⁰
It was hot, the air sullen. Sixth Army was composed of I Corps (Oskar von Xylander), II Corps (Karl von Martini), III Corps (Ludwig von Gebsattel), and I Reserve Corps (Karl von Fasbender)—183 infantry battalions, 28 cavalry squadrons, and 81 artillery batteries; roughly 220,000 men in all. The next night, Rupprecht, at age forty-five, also assumed command of Heeringen’s Seventh Army and Rudolf von Frommel’s III Cavalry Corps. Prewar plans for his forces to be augmented by Italian Third Army—two cavalry divisions at Strasbourg and three infantry corps on the Upper Rhine, possibly to storm Belfort by the seventeenth day of mobilization (M+17)—had died when Italy declared its neutrality on 2 August. Sixth Army was thus thinly spread out: about 2,960 men per kilometer of front as opposed to 11,100 for First Army, on the right wing. According to the operational plan (“Thoughts About the Operations of Sixth and Seventh Armies”) that Moltke had submitted to Sixth Army and that Rupprecht’s chief of staff, Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen, had refined on 6 August before leaving Munich, the Bavarians were to tie down French forces in Lorraine and thereby “gain time” for the war to be decided on the right flank of the German advance.
²¹

ARDENNES AND LORRAINE, AUGUST 1914

Rupprecht was born to King Ludwig III of Bavaria (crowned 1913) in Munich on 18 May 1869. He studied law and attended the War Academy. Most contemporaries described him as being regal, even handsome, with kind eyes and a smart mustache, but hardly martial. Once having chosen a military career, he advanced quickly: command of a regiment in 1899, of a brigade the following year, and of a division in 1903. He was given I Army Corps in 1906 and six years later, Fourth Army Inspectorate. Under the German federal system, it was natural that as head of the second most important kingdom in the empire he would command Bavarian forces in the war. Constituted as Sixth Army, Rupprecht’s men fought as a unified Bavarian force for the first (and last) time in Lorraine.

The Bavarian units, tired by the long rail journey from Munich, took advantage of their role as occupiers in what soon became a familiar pattern. At Blâmont, east of Lunéville, on 10 August, Captain Otto von Berchem, a staff officer of Xylander’s I Corps, reported that troops of 3d IB had looted local wine cellars. “The result was a most unpleasant drunken matins.” Fueled by the free red wine, the Bavarians shot off their rifles throughout the town, and in the bacchanalia also turned the guns on one another. Berchem’s observations were seconded by Sergeant Joseph Müller of 4th Chevauleger Regiment, who admitted having taken part in the “liberation” of the wine cellars.
²²
The Bavarians also reported countless incidents of civilians firing at them with hunting pieces. Lieutenant Colonel Eugen von Frauenholz, the future Bavarian military historian, noted some residents of Blâmont shooting at soldiers and horses from treetops and church steeples as they marched through the town.
²³
The 3d IB reacted to similar occurrences at Nonhigny and Montreux that same day by burning down both villages.
²⁴
It was a new and unexpected type of warfare, Frauenholz conceded.

Confusion reigned at Rupprecht’s headquarters. Bonneau’s theatrical charge into Mulhouse, in Krafft von Dellmensingen’s acid words, “had indeed drawn onto itself a good deal—the entire Seventh Army!”
²⁵
Both Sixth and Seventh armies scrambled furiously to get back on their original deployment schedules. Moreover, the overall situation remained unclear. Frommel’s cavalry had not managed to penetrate the French forward screen, and aerial reconnaissance had detected little fresh enemy movement. During a skirmish among elements of Bavarian 59th IB and 65th IB and French 15th ID and 16th ID as well as 2d CD of Joseph de Castelli’s VIII Corps at Lagarde (Gerden) along the Marne-Rhine Canal on 11 August, the Germans discovered a valuable document on the body of a fallen French general: A report from Édouard de Castelnau’s Second Army staff that six French army corps were being concentrated in the sixty-kilometer-wide Trouée de Charmes between Toul and Épinal.
²⁶
Krafft von Dellmensingen quickly calculated that this meant that the enemy had placed nine of its twenty-one active army corps (43 percent) on the southern flank.
²⁷
Sixth and Seventh armies were more than fulfilling the role of tying down as many French units as possible in the south accorded them in Moltke’s
Westaufmarsch
. Still, French intentions remained unclear.

Papa Joffre would soon provide clarity. From the Grand quartier général (GQG), situated in a schoolhouse at Vitry-le-François, a sleepy little town on the Marne River halfway between Paris and Nancy, Joffre on 11 August decided to launch a major offensive into Alsace-Lorraine north of the Vosges three days later in accordance with his Instruction générale No. 1.
²⁸
He anchored the extreme right wing on a new Army of Alsace, composed of Frédéric Vautier’s VII Corps, Albert Soyer’s 44th ID from the Army of the Alps, four reserve divisions, Aubier’s 8th CD, and five battalions of Chasseurs alpins from First Army—three army corps in all under Paul-Marie Pau, a veteran of 1870 brought out of retirement.
²⁹
Pau was charged with defending the vast stretch of frontier from the Swiss border north to the Col de la Schlucht, west of Munster (Münster) on the Fecht River. North of Pau, Joffre ordered Dubail’s First Army and de Castelnau’s Second Army to advance out of the Charmes Gap just south of the major German fortifications between Metz and Thionville. Dubail’s four corps would spearhead the attack. First, they would storm several valleys in the Vosges south of Mount Donon; thereafter, they were to seize Sarre bourg (Saarburg), sixty kilometers east of Nancy, and then hurl the enemy eastward into Lower Alsace and the region around Strasbourg. Three corps of Castelnau’s Second Army were to screen Dubail’s attack by advancing toward Dieuze (Duß) and Château-Salins, with two corps on First Army’s left moving against Morhange (Mörchingen), some forty-five kilometers northeast of Nancy. Joffre placed the rest of Castelnau’s forces on the left to guard against a possible German counterattack from Fortress Metz. Most importantly, the Army of Alsace was to secure the eastern flank of the attack by marching north without delay.

Joffre was, in fact, playing straight into Moltke’s hands. He continued to believe that the main German offensive by regular army corps was being launched into Lorraine against his own center, and hence he moved to counter this threat. All the while, he ignored evidence from his own intelligence branch, the Deuxième Bureau, that significant German units were advancing into Belgium.

Simple in conception, Joffre’s attack
³⁰
was fraught with danger—quite apart from the still-unconfirmed German thrust into central Belgium. The farther French forces advanced out of the Vosges passes and the Trouée de Charmes, the broader their fronts became: eventually, eighty kilometers for First Army and seventy for Second Army. Dubail’s dual objectives of Sarrebourg and Donon necessitated splitting his forces and thus exposing his flanks to German counterattack. Finally, the terrain was rugged, studded with hills, valleys, rivers, and ravines.

Joffre’s second invasion of Alsace-Lorraine was based on the wishful thinking inherent in his deployment plan. Accordingly, the strong German defensive line between Metz and Thionville—the so-called
Moselstellung—
simply
had
to be a screen for Moltke’s major troop concentration in the Ardennes and in German Lorraine. In fact, only five regular divisions manned the
Moselstellung
, giving the French a three-to-one advantage in the region. But in Alsace-Lorraine, where Joffre suspected no more than six German corps facing the twenty divisions of his own First and Second armies, Crown Prince Rupprecht in fact commanded eight army corps of twenty-four divisions.

General de Castelnau, a cultured nobleman and able strategist, already before the war had feared a possible German concentration in Lorraine and advised Joffre against an offensive into the area.
³¹
He preferred instead to stand on the defensive in well-prepared positions in front of Nancy. He repeated his concerns in August 1914. Joffre brusquely rejected this defensive mentality. No major enemy formations, he assured Castelnau, faced Second Army.
³²
And when news arrived from St. Petersburg on 13 August that the Russian steamroller would move into East Prussia the next day, Joffre gave the order to attack. “I count on you absolutely for the success of this operation,” he admonished Dubail and First Army. “It must succeed and you must devote all your energy to it.”
³³

At Saint-Avold, Rupprecht and Krafft von Dellmensingen, like Joffre, were chomping at the bit to go on the offensive. Both feared that the purely defensive role assigned to them by the Army Supreme Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL) would negatively affect the morale of their troops; any form of retreat would be disastrous. Hence, they began to toy with options. Krafft’s first plan was to advance to the line of the Upper Moselle and Meurthe rivers and thereby threaten the flank of the French center. On 11 August, he had dispatched Major Rudolf von Xylander of his staff to Seventh Army to urge greater speed on Heeringen and the two corps of Sixth Army that still had not reached Strasbourg from Mulhouse. Xylander found Heeringen’s General Headquarters to be in a state of “panic” due to the hurried shift up north, and because the former Prussian war minister had given Krafft’s plan the “cold shoulder.”
³⁴
One day later, Rupprecht received his first official instructions from the OHL: It was not “interested” in a joint advance by Sixth and Seventh armies
“across”
the Upper Moselle and the Meurthe; at best, it would sanction an advance
“against”
the two rivers under favorable conditions.
³⁵
As a sop to the Bavarians, the OHL agreed that they could reduce Fort Manonviller in French Lorraine.