The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (28 page)

It was a poor choice. Whereas Alfred von Schlieffen in 1908 had envisioned a distant, highly centralized command-and-control system, one in which the “modern Napoleon” would conduct operations from a “comfortable chair at a broad table” in a “house with roomy bureaus” by way of “wire and wireless telegraphy, telephone and signal apparatus, as well as hordes of trucks and motorcycles,”
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Moltke on 30 August had to settle for a small, dingy girls’ schoolhouse. “We have neither gas nor electric lights, only dim petroleum lamps,” he wrote his wife that day.
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An officer on Moltke’s operations staff was brutal in his assessment of the new headquarters. “Work conditions were simply scandalous. Desks consisted of several rough boards and trestles. There was no light at all.” Moltke worked out of a small schoolroom and Tappen out of an adjacent closet, “where operational discussions took place.”
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The “modern Napoleon’s” communications system consisted of a single radio transmitter.

IN TRUTH, COMMUNICATIONS REMAINED
the Achilles’ heel of the German armies in the west. One scholar has acidly noted, “The war began with an end to communications.”
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The OHL’s single Morse-type telegraph transmitter had a reach of just three hundred kilometers, which meant that by the time of the Battle of the Marne, Moltke could reach First Army only by way of relay stations at Péronne, Noyon, Compiègne, and Villers-Cotterêts; Second Army, only via Marle, Laon, and Soissons.
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Unsurprisingly, transmission delays of up to twenty hours were not uncommon. As late as 3 September, German wire connections had been established only as far as Esch-sur-Alzette on the Luxembourg-Lorraine border. The Field Telegraph Corps was headed by a “total novice,” General William Balcke, who had been promoted to the post from command of 82d IB and who neither understood nor cared about modern electronic communications.
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Moreover, his corps of eight hundred officers and twenty-five thousand men was too small to handle the daily traffic emanating from seven armies and nearly two million soldiers. “Troops, individual units and private parties” all vied with headquarters for time on the radio-telegraph. The two critical “strike” armies on the German right wing were without radio connection to each other, much less to their individual corps. First Army established electronic connections to its corps headquarters only after the Battle of Mons. Second Army likewise failed to connect to its corps headquarters before the Battle of Saint-Quentin. Neither the four higher cavalry commanders nor any of the army’s ninety-two infantry divisions possessed a telegraph section. To compound this neglect, what little existed in the way of communications was designed to function “from the bottom to the top, rather than the other way around,” for the simple reason that army commanders wanted to be free of direct “interference” from General Staff headquarters. Finally, the Germans in the west, like the Russians in the east, sent most of their messages in clear because ciphers were cumbersome to use and speedy transmission was required.
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IN TERMS OF FUTURE
operations, Moltke and Tappen on 27 August issued a new General Directive to their field commanders.
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They assumed that the Belgian army was in a “complete state of disintegration,” that the British would not be able to raise new armies “before from four to six months,” and that the French center and northern armies were “in full retreat in a westerly or southwesterly direction, that is, on Paris.” Thus, on the critical right wing, First Army was to advance to the lower Seine River, driving west of the Oise River; Second Army on Paris via La Fère and Laon; and Third Army on Château-Thierry by way of Neufchâtel-sur-Aisne. In the center, Fourth Army was to seize Reims on its way to Épernay, and Fifth Army to pass Châlons-sur-Marne and head for French army headquarters at Vitry-le-François. Sixth and Seventh armies were to secure the front in Lorraine—and, in case of a French withdrawal, to pursue the enemy across the Moselle River in the direction of Neufchâteau. Each army was to press the attack vigorously while simultaneously securing the flank of its neighbor(s). If the much anticipated French stand first along the Aisne and later along the Marne developed,
“a turn by the armies from a southwesterly to a southerly direction can be required.”
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Three conclusions are warranted. First, Moltke, Stein, and Tappen had basically abandoned Moltke’s modified Schlieffen Plan. By 27 August, that concept had degenerated into individual operations by the various army commanders in the west, each designed to achieve local successes in a separate theater. Second, Moltke, Stein, and Tappen had also abandoned the concept of a vast envelopment of Paris from the north and the west. The right wing was now no longer pursuing an envelopment strategy, but simply one of flank protection. Third, the entire German advance had slid off in a general southeasterly direction, away from Paris. Moltke was “advancing on all points,” but no longer southwest; rather, south and even southeast. This meant that if each army advanced as instructed by Moltke, securing the flank of its neighbor, “the overall alignment would be set by the left and by the centre, and not by the right.”
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The chief of the General Staff’s instructions of 27 August—with their advance warning that the armies might be “required” to change course “from a southwesterly to a southerly direction”—were a vote of confidence for Bülow’s concept of a purely tactical victory over Kluck’s design of a strategic envelopment of the enemy. The nagging question at the OHL was whether the right wing—depleted by 265,000 casualties, by Hans von Beseler’s III Corps detached to invest Antwerp, by Hans von Zwehl’s VII Reserve Corps sent to seal off Maubeuge, and by XI Corps and Guard Reserve Corps dispatched to East Prussia—remained sufficiently strong to crush Allied forces still in the field.

JOSEPH JOFFRE HAD LOST
the Battle of the Frontiers. At the Grand quartier général (GQG), his acolytes of the all-out offensive
(l’offensive à outrance)
were in a state of sudden and unexpected depression. Would the generalissimo be willing to recognize the full measure of the defeat? Would he be able to conjure up what Carl von Clausewitz called the “new and favorable factors” required of a great captain to avoid “outright defeat, perhaps even absolute destruction”?
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Joffre’s reputation, indeed his career, depended on his willingness and his ability to do so.

Reassessment began on the morning of 24 August. Joffre first laid out his future strategy in a candid letter to War Minister Adolphe Messimy.
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“We are condemned to a defensive supported by fortified places and large-terrain obstacles.” The immediate task was to surrender “the least possible” amount of terrain to the enemy; the longer-range aim was “to last as long as possible, while striving to attrit the enemy;” and the ultimate goal was “to resume the offensive when the [proper] moment arrives.” Gone were the sweeping Napoleonic brushstrokes of vast offensives, and in their place came sensible and effective movements of men and machines as if on a vast chessboard. Messimy provided governmental support. “Take swift means, brutally, energetically, and decisively. … The sole law of France at this moment is: conquer or die.”
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Joffre’s first move was to pull forces on the French left wing back to the line Maubeuge-Mézières-Verdun.
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This was followed by an accelerated shift of combat units from the right to the left—that is, from Alsace-Lorraine to the threatened region around Paris. Paul Pau’s Army of Alsace was further cannibalized for troops. Railroads and bridges in Lorraine that could be of use to the Germans were destroyed. For much of the week after 24 August, Joffre took advantage of his interior lines and used his superb Directorate of Railways to move units north to face the menacing German right wing sweeping down on the capital. On 1 September, Victor Boëlle’s IV Corps left Sainte-Menehould for Greater Paris in 109 trains; the next day, Pierre Dubois’s IX Corps embarked at Nancy bound for Troyes in 52 trains; and Émile-Edmond Legrand-Girarde’s XXI Corps departed Épinal for Gondrecourt in 74 trains.
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But what strategy to employ once the new formations were in place? Two alternatives dominated the discussions at GQG.
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Deputy Chief of Staff Henri Berthelot suggested that any new army being organized behind the Allied left wing could best be used to attack German forces immediately threatening Paris—in particular, the inner, or eastern, wing of Bülow’s Second Army. Joffre rejected Berthelot’s scheme since it was based on the ability of Fifth Army and the BEF to keep the German right wing in check while a new army was being stood up. He had little faith left in either Charles Lanrezac or Sir John French. Thus, he opted for a much bolder design: to form a new army well to the west of German First Army and then to drive it eastward into Kluck’s exposed outer right flank.

By 10
PM
on 25 August, Joffre’s staff had formalized his new plans in General Instruction No. 2.
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After a cursory admission that it had been “unable” to carry out the “offensive maneuver originally planned,” GQG defined the new strategy as being one

to reconstruct on our left a force capable of resuming the offensive by a combination of the Fourth and Fifth Armies, the British Army and new forces drawn from the east, while the other armies hold the enemy in check for such time as may be necessary.

More sacred French soil—another hundred kilometers—would have to be abandoned as the planned withdrawal was extended farther into the interior to the line Amiens-Reims-Verdun. Rear guards of Third, Fourth, and Fifth armies were to cover the retreat by conducting “short and violent counterattacks” in which artillery was to be “the principal element employed.” Belatedly, Joffre demanded a more “intimate combination of infantry and artillery.” A new “group of forces,” composed of at least one and perhaps even two army corps and four reserve divisions from Alsace-Lorraine and Paris, was to be assembled “before Amiens” or “behind the Somme.” This was to be Joffre’s “army of maneuver” (later designated Sixth Army), which was to envelop the German right wing. There, in a nutshell, was the genesis of the strategic plan for the Battle of the Marne.

But it would take time—perhaps too much time—and it was predicated on the entire Allied line holding fast. Joffre had two great fears. First, a gap had developed between Fourth and Fifth armies stumbling out of the Ardennes and back from the Sambre, respectively. The Germans, moving south on Hirson, on the Oise River, might discover this and attempt to break through. Thus, Joffre formed a Special Army Detachment under Ferdinand Foch—the future Ninth Army—out of two corps from Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army and two divisions from Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. Foch, recalled from the Grand Couronné de Nancy on 27 August, immediately moved to close the gap in the line. He would soon learn that both his only son, Cadet Germain, and his son-in-law, Captain Charles Bécourt, had been killed on 22 August as the Germans swept into Belgium.

Joffre’s greatest fear, as always, was the British. Sir John French seemed bent on retreating from the Germans faster than they could pursue. Somehow, Joffre had to sell the field marshal on his General Instruction No. 2. In typical fashion, and in sharp contrast with the sedentary Moltke, on 26 August, Joffre raced off to British General Headquarters (GHQ) at Saint-Quentin. Lanrezac of Fifth Army, on the British right, and Albert d’Amade, commanding a group of territorial divisions on the British left, were also summoned. The meeting took place in a neo-Pompeian house with closed shutters and dimly lit rooms. Sir John French and Henry Wilson, representing Chief of Staff Archibald Murray, who was away at Le Cateau and ill, arrived late. Lanrezac, his pince-nez hanging over his ears “like a pair of cherries,” was less than enthused about having to deal with the British at all. He found Joffre silent and dull, seemingly “wrapped in a cloak of enveloping dumbness.”
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Predictably, the meeting became another disaster.
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Sir John rattled off a long list of French failures, beginning with Joffre’s refusal to accept the fact that the Germans had crossed the Meuse in force and ending with Lanrezac’s failure to inform him of Fifth Army’s sudden retreat from the Sambre. These French “blunders” had increased the burden on the BEF and decreased the field marshal’s confidence in French decision making. Moreover, his army was exhausted and desperately needed a day of rest. He proposed falling back to Compiègne. A painful silence ensued. Lanrezac, bored by the British diatribe, merely shrugged. He cagily declined to inform the group that he had already ordered Fifth Army to “break contact with the enemy” and to continue its retreat twenty kilometers toward Laon prior to any counterattack he might mount.
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It was up to Joffre to save the day. He was in an unenviable position. His concentration plan, XVII, had been shattered by the Germans at great loss. Bülow’s Second Army had advanced south from the Sambre and was about to cross the Oise. If it did so, and in the process routed French Fifth Army, the campaign in the west would be lost. He desperately needed to hold the line of the Oise River, and for that he desperately needed the BEF. Joffre pulled himself together. He patiently explained the gist of his Instruction général No. 2: After the planned withdrawal to the line Amiens-Reims-Verdun, he would form French Fourth and Fifth armies as well as the BEF as a “mass of manoeuvre” on the French left “capable of resuming the offensive;” all he asked of Sir John was that the BEF keep its place in the line and “conform” to the movements of French Fifth Army and d’Amade’s Territorials. But he could not simply issue the field marshal a direct order: Sir John outranked him, and there existed no machinery to coordinate the actions of the British and French armies. As General Wilson translated Joffre’s presentation, Lanrezac, shoulders stooped slightly, gave the impression that he was bored. The atmosphere was funereal.