The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (24 page)

AS THE FIGHTING LEFT
the broken landscape of slag heaps and pitheads, it entered a gentler, more open, agricultural countryside. At this point, there were no physical obstacles to slow down the German advance—or the French retreat. The situation was ripe with choice.

Charles Lanrezac had good reason to fear for his Fifth Army. The immediate, mortal danger lay on his right flank facing east. The Grand quartier général remained blissfully ignorant of the danger. Joffre continued to insist that Moltke had deployed but six corps in the “weak” center of the German line, where he had in fact marshaled eight. Moreover, he was certain that the Germans would not fight in the rugged terrain of the Ardennes but instead make their stand just east of the forest. He had a point. The Ardennes was wooded, hilly, and irregular, oftentimes shrouded in fog and rain, traversed by muddy paths and roads, and cut by countless streams and ravines. Julius Caesar in 57 bc had taken ten days to cross “the forest of Arden.” The woods had been “full of defiles and hidden ways.” The enemy had been elusive and clever. “Wherever a cave, or a thicket, or a morass offered them shelter,” he recorded, “thither they retired.” Only what today are called “small-group tactics” had allowed Caesar eventually to “extirpate this race of perfidious men.”
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On 21 August, Joffre ordered his armies to attack the enemy “wherever encountered” throughout the Ardennes—the centerpiece of his deployment plan.
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Once across the forest between Liège and Bastogne, the French armies were to turn west and deliver a fatal right hook to the left flanks of German First, Second, and Third armies racing through Belgium. To maintain the element of surprise, no supply columns were attached to the French armies. The campaign began at six o’clock on a chilly morning shrouded by gray fog and rain; it ended late at night in dense mist following a heavy rain. Surprise and chaos were the order of the day. Few of Joffre’s commanders had bothered to study the terrain. Some of the more optimistic had maps of the Rhineland; of the Ardennes, only a very few had tourist maps or crude maps torn out of railway timetables.
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General Ruffey commanded Third Army at Verdun. An apostle of heavy artillery—which had earned him the sobriquet
“le poète du canon”
—Ruffey had made many enemies in the French army for seemingly slighting the famous 75s and for championing what Ferdinand Foch in 1910 had satirized as the “sport” of airpower. On 21 August, Ruffey moved his headquarters up to Marville to lead IV, V, and VI corps against Arlon. On his left, Fourth Army under Langle de Cary at Stenay pointed toward Neufchâteau. Already past the mandatory retirement age (sixty-four) in 1914, the energetic, bantam-like Langle de Cary had been entrusted by Joffre with breaking the back of the German offensive. In addition to his own three corps and Jules Lefèvre’s colonial corps, Fourth Army had been augmented by Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps (Fifth Army) and Pierre Dubois’s IX Corps (Second Army), giving it a fighting strength of about 160,000 men. To guard against a possible German thrust from Fortress Metz against the flank and rear of Third Army, Joffre had created the Army of Lorraine, composed entirely of reserve divisions, under General Maunoury. The three French armies numbered 377 battalions with 1,540 guns. They were to attack along a forty-kilometer front and to penetrate the Ardennes Forest to a depth of at least a dozen kilometers. Unfortunately, Ruffey was never informed of the creation or the mission of the Army of Lorraine. But it seemed to matter little at the time. Neither Sordet’s riders nor French aviators had spied any major German troop concentrations. “No serious opposition need be anticipated on the day of August 22nd,” GQG cheerily informed Ruffey and Langle de Cary.
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Joffre had entrusted Ruffey and Maunoury not only to carry out the centerpiece of his famous Plan XVII, but also to secure France’s vital iron-mining and steel-producing region, with an annual output of five million tons in 1913. German forces advancing from Metz-Thionville had already occupied or were threatening the great steel plants at Fraisans, Hayange, Longwy, and Briey. Other vital steel producers needed to be secured at Saint-Étienne, Fourchambault, Anzin, and Denain, among other places. France’s industrial war effort hung in the balance.

On that dismal morning of 22 August, Third and Fourth armies did not encounter the anticipated light German screen in the Ardennes, but rather the full weight of ten army corps. The southern Ardennes region around Metz-Thionville was held by Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia’s Fifth Army; it was advancing against the French fortress belt of Longwy and Montmédy—and eventually Verdun. To Wilhelm’s immediate right in the central and northern Ardennes around Luxembourg was Duke Albrecht of Württemberg’s Fourth Army; it was advancing against Neufchâteau. As the hub of the German wheel, the two armies (236 battalions with 1,320 guns)
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could afford to move at a relatively leisurely pace—much like the inside of a line of marchers in a band making a ninety-degree right turn—while waiting for the outer-rim armies of the pivot wing, or
Schwenkungsflügel
, to quick-march across Belgium and on to Paris.

But Crown Prince Wilhelm and his chief of staff, Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, were anxious for battle honors. On 21 August, they decided on their own initiative to mount an offensive against the French fortified cities of Longwy and Montmédy and “ruthlessly defeat everything that stood [in] between” at Longuyon, in the angle of the Chiers and Crusnes rivers. When Moltke reminded them that according to the concentration plan, “defense by Fifth Army imperative, not attack,” they simply ignored him.
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Visions of his own Cannae danced through the crown prince’s head.
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Despite the fact that Fifth Army’s offensive in the direction of Virton would create a twenty-kilometer-wide gap between Wilhelm’s army and that of Duke Albrecht, Moltke did not press his case. Thus, by 21 August, after Liège and Brussels had fallen, German Fourth and Fifth armies were advancing on a southwesterly course, while French Third and Fourth armies were moving up to the Ardennes on a northeasterly trajectory. A head-on collision was inevitable.

French historians refer to the events beginning on 21–22 August as the Battle of the Ardennes; German scholars as the twin Battles of Longwy and Neufchâteau. Neither is entirely correct. What developed, in the words of historian Sewell Tyng, was “a series of engagements, fought simultaneously by army corps, divisions, brigades and even battalions, for the most part independently of any central control and independently of the conduct of adjacent units.”
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German reconnaissance had detected the French advance and, accordingly, most of the troops of Fourth and Fifth armies were well dug in and supported by heavy artillery. Fog and rain helped their concealment. Moreover, the French deployed in a peculiar echelon formation: One officer has depicted it as being akin to a flight of stairs, descending from left to right, with each “stair” consisting of an army corps facing north. While this theoretically would allow each corps to attack either north or east, as the situation demanded, it also meant that the right flank of each corps depended fully on the advance of its neighbor on the right. Failure of one corps to do so not only imperiled the flank of the neighbor on the left, but also threatened to collapse the entire set of “stairs.”
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The latter case set in by the second day of the battle. Between 5 and 6
AM
on 22 August, Ruffey’s Third Army advanced through heavy fog. Charles Brochin’s V Corps was in the center of the line.
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Moving on Longwy and its steel furnaces, V Corps immediately stumbled into the well-prepared German defensive positions of Max von Fabeck’s XIII Corps. Brutal hand-to-hand combat ensued, with neither side able to make out friend from foe. Ruffey had placed his mobile
soixante-quinzes
up front so as to better sweep the German “screen” from the woods. But soon after the initial contact, the fog lifted, allowing the German 105mm and 150mm heavy howitzers’ high-angle fire to decimate Brochin’s 75s.
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Heroic French bayonet attacks foundered against well-hidden machine-gun positions. Panic ensued. One division broke and fled, leaving a huge gap in the middle of Third Army’s line. The next day, Joffre relieved Brochin of command of V Corps and replaced him with Frédéric Micheler.

Of Ruffey’s other two army corps, Victor-René Boëlle’s IV Corps fared no better: Its advance on Virton ran head-on into Hermann von Strantz’s V Corps; one of its infantry divisions also broke and ran.
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Maurice Sarrail’s VI Corps, beefed up with the addition of a third infantry division, stood its ground alone on the right side against Konrad von Goßler’s VI Reserve Corps. The German artillery fire, a French officer recalled, was lethal. “Thousands of dead were still standing, supported as if by a flying buttress made of bodies lying in rows on top of each other in an ascending arc from the horizontal to an angle of 60°.” A French sergeant likewise commented on the horror of the slaughter. “Heaps of corpses, French and German, are lying every which way, rifles in hand. Rain is falling, shells are screaming and bursting … we hear the wounded crying from all over the woods.”
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A corporal with French 31st Infantry Regiment (IR) recalled his comrades jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk in the dense forest, seeking shelter in ditches and potholes, “dazed by the thunderous explosions that followed them from clearing to clearing.”
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In the small villages, women and children dressed in their Sunday best were swept up in the carnage and tried to flee, carrying whatever goods they could on their shoulders. Eventually, the panic of the other two corps forced Sarrail’s VI Corps also to retreat to avoid a flanking movement by two German corps.

Ruffey, finally apprised of the existence of the Army of Lorraine at Verdun, at 1:30
PM
on 22 August contacted General Maunoury and pleaded for help for his embattled right wing. Maunoury responded at once.
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He ordered Jules Chailley’s 54th Reserve Infantry Division (RID) to advance to the line Ollières-Domprix, and Henry Marabail’s 67th RID to take up positions around Senon and Amel.
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But delays in relaying the general’s orders resulted in neither formation arriving in time to turn the tide of battle.

Ruffey’s offensive had collapsed. The “staircase” effect noted previously now set in for Langle de Cary’s neighboring Fourth Army advancing on Neufchâteau. Augustin Gérard’s II Corps, Fifth Army, on the extreme right was stopped dead in its tracks around 8
AM
, first by a massive artillery barrage and then by murderous machine-gun fire from Kurt von Pritzelwitz’s VI Corps (Fourth Army). On its left, Lefèvre’s colonial corps, veterans of France’s wars in Africa and IndoChina, nevertheless pushed on between the Forest of Chiny and Neufchâteau.
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The early-morning fog and rain had turned into searing heat and enervating humidity. Georges Goullet’s 5th Colonial Brigade and Arthur Poline’s XVII Corps were surprised in the thick woods near Bertrix, initially by German uhlans fighting dismounted and then by Kuno von Steuben’s XVII Reserve Corps and Dedo von Schenck’s XVIII Corps. Desperate, violent combat ensued.
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When Otto von Plüskow’s XI Corps of Saxon Third Army appeared from the north, the German iron ring around Bertrix was virtually complete. Without an escape route, Poline’s XVII Corps panicked, abandoned its artillery, and fled, leaving a breach in the front of Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army similar to that left by V Corps in the front of Ruffey’s Third Army.

A poilu
, Désiré Renault of 88th IR with Poline’s XVII Corps, on 22 August wrote home of the frightful slaughter. “The fighting has ended, all my buddies are beaten into retreat, and we, the wounded, have been left abandoned without care, dying of thirst. What a terrible night!” The coming dawn brought only more misery. “A new torture has added itself to the others: since the sun rose, the flies, drawn by the smell of blood, go after me fiercely.”
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Utterly exhausted and seriously wounded in the bludgeoning in the Ardennes, Renault was spared death or capture by two Red Cross nurses who carried him to a field hospital at Longwy.

Worse was yet to come at the small village of Rossignol, north of the Semois River and fifteen kilometers south of Neufchâteau. There, 3d Colonial Division ran hard up against 12th ID of Pritzelwitz’s VI Army Corps. In short order, it sent five battalions of
pantalon rouges
in waves against the Germans on a front roughly six hundred meters wide. One furious frontal bayonet charge after another, accompanied by lusty cries of
“En avant!,”
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was mowed down by murderous artillery and machine-gun fire. As darkness fell, 3d Colonial Division had ceased to exist: Eleven thousand of its fifteen thousand soldiers had been killed or wounded; its commander, General Léon Raffenel, had been shot; and its last remnants gallantly buried the regimental colors.

Rossignol for France constituted the deadliest campaign of the Battle of the Frontiers. Langle de Cary in classic understatement reported to Joffre from his headquarters at Stenay: “On the whole results hardly satisfactory.”
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He ignored the generalissimo’s demand that he resume the offensive the next day and instead ordered a retreat behind the Meuse and Chiers rivers near Sedan. Ruffey, furious that his infantry charges had not been supported by artillery, fell back on Verdun. Lanrezac’s hard-pressed Fifth Army at the Sambre could expect no help from either Third or Fourth armies. Maunoury’s unbloodied Army of Lorraine limped off to the safety of Amiens.