The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (2 page)

On the basis of three decades of research on imperial Germany and World War I, I can state that the record on the implications of a German victory in 1914 is clear: The result would have been a German “condominium” over the Continent “for all imaginable time.” The Low Countries would have become German vassal states, parts of northeastern France and its Channel coast would have come under Berlin’s control, the countries between Scandinavia and Turkey would have been forced to join a German “economic union,” and Russia would have been reduced to its borders under Peter the Great.
¹²
The British policy of the balance of power—that is, of not allowing any European hegemony to emerge—would have lain in tatters. The Battle of the Marne was consequential in blocking these developments. In the succinct words of General Jean-Jacques Senant, military commander of the French Army Archives at the Château de Vincennes, to an international gathering of scholars in 2004, “The Battle of the Marne saved France and the rest of Europe from German domination. … Indisputably, it is the first turning point of the war.”
¹³

As well, a host of lesser myths and legends enshrouded the Marne in Carl von Clausewitz’s famous “fog of uncertainty” and refuse to disappear from the pages of contemporary accounts of the battle.
¹⁴
Some were simply propaganda designed for public consumption: the Kaiser’s planned entry into Nancy sitting astride a white charger in the white dress uniform of the Guard Cuirassiers; the twenty-meter-long German flag specially made to fly from the top of the Eiffel Tower; the ten railroad cars loaded with commemorative medals for the fall of Paris that accompanied Kluck’s First Army; and the twenty thousand Saxon soldiers who opted to be taken prisoner at the climax of the Battle of the Marne rather than to fight on. Others were the products of ambitious writers and mythmakers: General Édouard de Castelnau’s alleged disobeying of Joffre’s orders to abandon Nancy early in September (when the reverse was the case); General Ferdinand Foch’s putative communiqué that while his position at the Saint-Gond Marshes was “impossible … I attack;” Joffre’s reported command to his staff on the eve of the battle, accentuated by pounding his fist on the operations table, “Gentlemen, we shall fight it out on the Marne;” and General Maurice Sarrail’s outrageous claim that he had refused Joffre’s “order to abandon Verdun” and in the process assumed the title “Savior of Verdun.”

Indeed, the Allies were not short on creating myths and legends of their own. On the British side of the ledger, there remains the legend that the BEF “discovered” the gap at the Marne between German First and Second armies; that it thereafter brilliantly “exploited” the gap; and that, in the process, it “saved” France. On the French side, there persists the myth of the putative
miracle de la Marne.
¹⁵
For too long, this has served to obscure the fact that Joffre and his staff had not been the benefactors of a divine “miracle,” but rather had brought about what Louis Muller, the chief of staff’s orderly, called
“une victoire stratégique”
and
“un miracle mérite.”
¹⁶
This book will set the record straight.

Other myths were much more harmful, and again attest to the centrality of the Marne in the history of what was later called the Great War. Certainly, that of Richard Hentsch, a mere lieutenant colonel on the German General Staff, snatching victory from the hands of Generals von Kluck and von Bülow at the moment of certain triumph by ordering them to retreat behind the Marne was among the most damaging. It obscured for decades the truth behind the German retreat: a flawed command structure, an inadequate logistical system, an antiquated communications arm, and inept field commanders. In the verdict of the Germany official history of the war,
Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918
, General von Bülow of Second Army had been hesitant and insecure; General von Kluck of First Army, overly aggressive and unwilling to adhere to commands; and Chief of Staff von Moltke, not up to the strains of command. “In the hour of decision over the future of the German people,” the official historians concluded, “its leader on the field of battle completely broke down psychologically and physically.”
¹⁷

Perhaps most damaging, after the war numerous former commanders brought to the public the myth that the German armies had not been defeated in the field but rather denied victory by a “sinister conspiracy” on the part of Freemasons and Jews. Erich Ludendorff, the “victor” of the Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in 1914 and Germany’s “silent dictator” from 1916 to 1918, championed this school. In postwar writings, such as
The Marne Drama
, he assured a defeated nation that the “secret forces of Freemasonry,” the machinations of world Jewry, and the baleful influence of Rudolf Steiner’s “occult” theosophy on General von Moltke’s wife, Eliza, had combined forces against Germany.
¹⁸
Ludendorff’s absurd claims, of course, helped to launch the infamous “stab-in-the-back” postwar legend. This book judges the performance of the German armies and their commanders at the Marne on the basis of official operational records rather than on mischievous mythmaking.

Fritz Fischer, arguably Germany’s most famous historian of the latter half of the twentieth century, placed the Battle of the Marne squarely in the pantheon of that mythmaking. In 1974, he stated that in addition to the two best-known and most “highly explosive” German “moral-psychological complexes” arising from World War I—the “war-guilt question” of 1914 and the “stab-in-the-back legend” of 1918—there needed to be added a third: the Battle of the Marne. Or, better put, “the secret of the Marne,” that is, the “defeat at the Marne 1914.” From the moment that German troops stumbled back from the fateful river on 9 September, Fischer argues, first the government of Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and then the Army Supreme Command conspired “systematically to conceal” the enormity of the defeat from the public.
¹⁹
At the end of that twenty-year journey of deception and deceit lay another bid at redemption: World War II.

*
Estimates by the U.S. War Department.

*
There was to be a second in the early summer of 1918.

CHAPTER ONE
WAR: “NOW OR NEVER”

War is … an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will
.

—CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

“S
INCE I HAVE BEEN AT THE FOREIGN OFFICE,” ARTHUR NICOLSON
noted at Whitehall in May 1914, “I have not seen such calm waters.”
¹
Europe had, in fact, refused to tear itself to pieces over troubles in faraway lands: Morocco in 1905–06 and in 1911; Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908–09; Libya in 1911–12; and the Balkans in 1912–13. The Anglo-German naval arms race had subsided, as had the fears about the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, since Berlin had run out of money for such gargantuan enterprises. Russia had overcome its war with Japan (1904–05), albeit at a heavy price in terms of men and ships lost and domestic discontent. Few desolate strips of African or Asian lands remained to be contested, and Berlin and London were preparing to negotiate a “settlement” of the Portuguese colonies. France and Germany had not been at war for forty-three years and Britain and Russia for fifty-eight.

Partition of the Continent by 1907 into two nearly equal camps—the Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy, and the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia—seemed to militate against metropolitan Europe being dragged into petty wars on its periphery. Kurt Riezler, foreign-policy adviser to German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, cagily argued that given this model of great-power balance, future wars “would no longer be fought but calculated.”
²
Guns would no longer fire, “but have a voice in the negotiations.” In other words, no power would risk escalating minor conflicts into a continental war; instead, each would “bluff” the adversary up the escalatory ladder, stopping just short of war in favor of diplomatic settlement. Peace seemed assured.

EUROPE, 1914, SHOWING MAJOR RAIL LINES

Domestically, for most well-off and law-abiding Europeans, the period prior to 1914 was a golden age of prosperity and decency. The “red specter” of Socialism had lost much of its threat. Real wages had shot up almost 50 percent between 1890 and 1913. Trade unions had largely won the right to collective bargaining, if not to striking, and their leaders sat in parliaments. Many workers had embraced social imperialism, believing that overseas trade and naval building translated into high-paying jobs at home. Germany had paved the path toward social welfare with state-sponsored health insurance, accident insurance, and old-age pensions. Others followed. Women were on the march for the vote. To be sure, there was trouble over Ireland, but then official London hardly viewed Ireland as a European matter.

Paris, as usual, was the exception. The capital had been seething with political excitement since January 1914, when Gaston Calmette, editor of
Le Figaro
, had launched a public campaign to discredit Finance Minister Joseph Caillaux—ostensibly over a new taxation bill.
³
When Calmette published several letters from Caillaux’s personal correspondence, Henriette Caillaux became alarmed. First, that correspondence could make public her husband’s pacifist stance vis-à-vis Germany during the Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911; second, she knew that it included love letters from her to Joseph that showed she had conducted an affair with him at a time when he was still married. The elegant Madame Caillaux took matters into her own hands: On 16 March she walked into Calmette’s office, drew a revolver from her muff, and shot the editor four times at point-blank range. Her trial on charges of murder dominated Paris in the summer of 1914. Two shots fired by a Serbian youth at Sarajevo on 28 June paled in comparison.

Gavrilo Princip’s murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Habsburg throne, and his morganatic wife, Sophie Chotek, caused no immediate crisis in the major capitals. The dog days of summer were upon Europe. There ensued a mad rush to escape urban heat for cooler climes.
⁴
French president Raymond Poincaré and prime minister René Viviani were preparing to board the battleship
France
for a leisurely cruise through the Baltic Sea to meet Tsar Nicholas II at St. Petersburg. Kaiser Franz Joseph took the waters at Bad Ischl. Wilhelm II was about to board the royal yacht
Hohenzollern
for his annual cruise of the Norwegian fjords. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was off to the family estate at Hohenfinow to play Beethoven on the grand piano and to read Plato (in the original Greek). Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow saw no need to curtail his honeymoon at Lucerne.

Nor were military men much concerned. German chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke struck out for Karlsbad, Bohemia, to meet his Austro-Hungarian counterpart, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf. War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn was off to vacation in the East Frisian Islands. Navy Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz left Berlin for St. Blasien, in the Black Forest. Habsburg war minister Alexander von Krobatin took the cure at Bad Gastein.

Even the less prominent escaped the July heat. Sigmund and Martha Freud, like Moltke and Conrad, vacationed at Karlsbad. V. I. Lenin left Cracow to hike in the Tatra Mountains. Leon Trotsky took solace in a small apartment in the Vienna Woods. Adolf Hitler was back in Munich after a military court-martial at Salzburg had found the draft dodger unfit for military service (“too weak; incapable of bearing arms”).
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But had the exodus of European leaders been all that innocent? Or had some deeper design lain at its root? The first move in what is popularly called the July Crisis rested with Vienna. Few in power lamented the passing of Franz Ferdinand. He was too Catholic; he detested the Czechs, Magyars, and Poles within the empire; and he distrusted the ally in Rome. But the spilling of royal blood demanded an official response.

FOR MORE THAN HALF
a dozen years prior to 1914, Conrad von Hötzendorf had pressed war on his government as the only solution to the perceived decline of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. Daily, the frail, thin, crew-cut chief of the General Staff had stood at his desk and drafted contingency war plans against “Austria’s congenital foes” Italy and Serbia as well as against Albania, Montenegro, and Russia, or against combinations of these states. Each year, he had submitted them to Kaiser Franz Joseph and to Foreign Minister Aloys Lexa Count Aehrenthal. And each year, these two had steadfastly refused to act.

Why, then, was July 1914 different?
⁶
Conrad saw the murders at Sarajevo as a Serbian declaration of war. He cared little about the high school lads who had carried out the plot and about the secret organization “Union or Death,” or the “Black Hand,” that had planned it; his real enemy was Belgrade. He was determined not to let the last opportunity pass by “to settle accounts” with Serbia. He was haunted by the empire’s failure to use the annexationist crisis over Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908–09 to crush Serbian annexationist aspirations. There was also a personal motive: He informed his mistress Virginie “Gina” von Reininghaus that he was anxious to return from a war “crowned with success” so that he could “claim” her “as my dearest wife.” Honor was at stake as well. While the war might be a “hopeless struggle” against overwhelming odds, Conrad informed Gina on the day of the Sarajevo killings, it had to be fought “because such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously.”
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In a nutshell, Conrad’s position in July 1914, in the words of the new foreign minister, Leopold Count Berchtold, was simply: “War, war, war.”
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By 1914, Franz Joseph shared Conrad’s “war at any price” mind-set. Serbian arrogance had to be rooted out, by force if necessary. The kaiser was plagued by nightmares—of Solferino, where in 1859 he had led Austrian armies to defeat at the hands of France and Piedmont-Sardinia; and of Königgrätz, where in 1866 his forces had been routed by those of King Wilhelm I of Prussia. Thus in July 1914, Franz Joseph was prepared to draw the sword. Honor demanded no less. “If we must go under,” he confided to Conrad, “we better go under decently.”
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That left the foreign minister. In the past, Berchtold, like Aehrenthal, had resisted Conrad’s demands for war. But diplomacy had brought no security. Thus, Berchtold, emboldened by the hard-line stance of a small cohort of hawks at the Foreign Office, endorsed military measures. Just two days after the Sarajevo murders, he spoke of the need for a
“final and fundamental reckoning”
with Serbia.
¹⁰
And he worked out a set of assumptions to underpin his decision: Early and decisive action by Berlin would deter possible Russian intervention and “localize” the war in the Balkans.

But would Berlin play the role of gallant second? During past Balkan crises, Wilhelm II and his advisers had refused to back Habsburg initiatives with military force. Would July 1914 confirm that pattern? Berchtold, knowing that he needed diplomatic and military backing from Berlin, on 4 July dispatched Alexander Count Hoyos, his
chef de cabinet
, to sound out what the German position would be in the event that Vienna took actions to “eliminate” Serbia as a “political power factor in the Balkans.”
¹¹
It was a clever move, given the kaiser’s well-known propensity for personal diplomacy. In meetings the next two days with Wilhelm II, Bethmann Hollweg, Falkenhayn, and Undersecretary of the Foreign Office Arthur Zimmermann, Hoyos and Habsburg ambassador László Count Szögyény-Marich obtained promises of “full German backing” for whatever action Vienna took against Belgrade. There was no time to lose. “The present situation,” the kaiser noted, “is so favorable to us.” Diplomats and soldiers “considered the question of Russian intervention and accepted the risk of a general war.”
¹²
Austria-Hungary could count on “Germany’s full support” even if “serious European complications”—war—resulted. And in the apparent interest of “localizing the war” in the Balkans, Berlin was ready to point to the soon-to-be-vacationing Wilhelm II, Moltke, and Falkenhayn as “evidence” that Germany would be “as surprised as the other powers” by any aggressive Austro-Hungarian action against Serbia.
¹³

Having obtained what is often referred to as a blank check from Germany, Austria-Hungary was free to plot its actions. On 7 July, Berchtold convened a Common Council of Ministers at Vienna and apprised those present of Berlin’s staunch support, “even though our operations against Serbia should bring about the great war.”
¹⁴
War Minister von Krobatin favored war “now better than later.” Austrian premier Karl Count Stürgkh demanded “a military reckoning with Serbia.” Conrad von Hötzendorf as always was set on war. Only Hungarian premier István Tisza demurred. He desired no more Slavic subjects, given that his Magyars were already a minority within their half of the empire. And he feared that an attack on Serbia would bring on “the dreadful calamity of a European war.” But within a week he joined the majority view—on condition that Belgrade be handed a stringent ultimatum that would allow Habsburg officials to enter Serbia to hunt down the assassins.

The final decision for war was made at a special Common Council of Ministers convened at Berchtold’s residence on 19 July. It was quickly decided to hand the ultimatum, carefully crafted by the foreign minister’s staff to assure rejection, to Belgrade on 23 July and to demand acceptance within forty-eight hours. The day after the Common Council, Berchtold advised Conrad and Krobatin to begin their planned summer holidays “to preserve the appearance that nothing is being planned.”
¹⁵
Tisza’s countryman István Count Burián laconically noted: “The wheel of history rolls.”
¹⁶
Serbia rejected the ultimatum on 25 July. Sir Maurice de Bunsen, Britain’s envoy to Vienna, informed Whitehall: “Vienna bursts into a frenzy of delight, vast crowds parading the streets and singing patriotic songs till the small hours of the morning.”
¹⁷