The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (31 page)

THE ALLIED RETREAT, 26-30 AUGUST 1914

Already by 30 August, Moltke and his chief of operations, Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Tappen, were aware that the armies on the right wing were no longer advancing on a southwesterly course as originally prescribed, but rather more southerly. All thoughts of descending into the Lower Seine basin vanished. The immediate need now was to bring the movements of First and Second armies into concert with Third Army’s slow advance along the line of the Aisne between Rethel and Semuy. Accordingly, the OHL directed Bülow to march on Reims and there to link up with Hausen’s right flank. Bülow leisurely took La Fère, but halted his right wing at Marle.
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Yet again, Moltke declined to give a direct order to his senior commander in the field to speed up the advance—all the while mumbling
“ordre—contre-ordre—désordre”
^†
before Tappen and his puzzled staff.
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The shift toward the south was reinforced on 1 September when Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Fifth Army, straddling the Meuse River around Stenay, unexpectedly ran into a buzz saw. Was it a local attack? Or had Joffre mounted a major offensive out of the fortified region of Clermont-Dombasle-Verdun? German Fourth Army quickly provided the answer when it captured Langle de Cary’s attack order: French Third and Fourth armies, in unison with Ferdinand Foch’s special army detachment, had indeed launched a concerted counterattack against the center of the German line. Wilhelm’s Fifth Army was in danger of being crushed on the Meuse—near the very place, Sedan, where forty-four years earlier Moltke’s uncle had routed the Imperial Army of Napoleon III.

Moltke saw opportunity arising from the crown prince’s predicament. He spied another chance at a Cannae and immediately ordered the right wing of Max von Hausen’s Third Army to drive southeast from Château-Porcien across the Aisne, with Bülow’s left wing to follow. All cavalry units within riding distance were “urgently urged” to attack the enemy “today, if possible.”
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If all went according to plan, Third, Fourth, and Fifth armies could crush Joffre’s forces between Verdun and Reims. “There, in Moltke’s estimation,” Chief of the Military Cabinet Moriz von Lyncker noted in his diary, lies “the decision” in the war.
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In a letter to his wife, Moltke noted the immediacy of the moment and the excitement of the possibility. “The center armies will engage today and tomorrow; it will be the decisive battle [of the campaign], on whose outcome incredibly much depends.”
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Throughout the morning of 1 September, he demanded “immediate, ruthless prosecution of the attack” southeast by Third and Fourth armies, for “today’s success depends on this.”

But Moltke was to be denied his Cannae as the French retreated more rapidly than his forces could advance. Shortly after 1:30
PM
, Hausen reported that the enemy was rapidly withdrawing in great disorder to the Vesle River and that Third Army was “energetically” renewing its advance, “direction south.” The small fortress of Givet had finally fallen to the Saxons. Duke Albrecht of Württemberg soon followed with similar news from Fourth Army headquarters, noting that “according to prisoner interrogations, dissolution is setting in among French troops.” By 4
PM
, even the erstwhile threatened Fifth Army informed the OHL that it had been victorious all along the line and that the adversary was “fleeing” the battlefield.
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Moltke was ecstatic. He had once more defeated the French. And on such a special day! That night, he wrote his wife: “Today, on the day of the Battle of Sedan [1870], we have once again achieved a great success against the French.” The German official history of the war tartly noted: “And yet, basically nothing more had been achieved than that the enemy had once again escaped the hoped-for decisive blow by timely withdrawal.”
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The fighting in the Ardennes remained vicious. The terrain was rocky and wooded. Artillery pounded poorly dug trenches. Bayonet attacks by both sides, accompanied by bloodcurdling yells, punctuated attack after attack. Eugen Röcker, a company commander fighting with Fourth Army “between Verdun and Reims,” remembers the “hellish roar” of the French 75s as their shells whistled by and threw massive clumps of dirt through the air. A theology student at Tübingen University, Röcker screamed the words of Psalm 91
^*
above the din.
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Despite the repeated proclamations of “decisive victories,” the never-ending reports of “fleeing” French armies, and the hosannas that accompanied them at the OHL, there were doubters. One of these was Prussian war minister Erich von Falkenhayn. As early as 30 August, while visiting Sixth Army in Lorraine, he had expressed “doubts about the magnitude of successes to date.” He then toured the fronts of the German center armies to gain firsthand knowledge of the course of the war. The “real war” stood in stark contrast with the news bulletins from the front. Early in September, after having inspected the right-wing armies, Falkenhayn grew even more apprehensive. What was being reported “is not a battle won; that is [a] planned withdrawal.” There was no physical evidence of victory. “Show me the trophies or the prisoners of war,” he viciously demanded of Moltke.
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While the chief of the General Staff rebuked the war minister for meddling in operational matters, privately he shared Falkenhayn’s concerns. Although his armies had advanced to within ninety kilometers of Paris, Moltke confided his innermost fears to the banker Karl Helfferich. Somehow, the victories did not ring true. “We have had successes, but we have not yet won.”
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Victory, as Carl von Clausewitz had taught, “means the destruction of the opponent’s strength to resist.” And the French continued to “resist.” As a young officer with 7th Grenadier Regiment, Moltke had experienced “decisive victory” and had seen “shattered armies” during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 at Weißenburg, Wörth, and Sedan. In August 1914, there were too few captured guns, too few prisoners of war, he sadly noted. All signs seemed to indicate that the French were conducting an orderly retreat. “The hardest task is still ahead of us!” he warned Helfferich. But when Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm von Dommes, chief of the General Staff’s Political Section, suggested that “senior” members of the staff be dispatched to the fronts to gain personal insight into the overall situation, Moltke rejected this sensible idea. Neither his Supreme War Lord, Wilhelm II, nor his army commanders, he pathetically replied, “deserve such [a sign of] mistrust.”
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NOT FORGOTTEN IN THE
hectic drive “to the Marne” was the fact that the cherished Cannae might yet be achieved: on the German south wing, or
Südflügel
, in Lorraine. As early as 21 August, Moltke had sent Crown Prince Rupprecht and his chief of staff, Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen, a General Directive for the further campaigns of Sixth and Seventh armies: “Pursue in the direction of Épinal.” Krafft, who was doing his best to mount a full pursuit of the retreating French armies after the Battle of the Saar westward, was “thunderstruck” by this new order.
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It made no sense to abandon that pursuit toward Nancy, to halt and reorganize the troops, and then to march them off in an almost straight southerly direction across the face of the French strongholds at Nancy and Lunéville. But Moltke was not impressed by this line of reasoning. Two days later, he informed Rupprecht and Krafft that if the French “continued to fall back,” they were to charge after them “to the last breath of man a[nd] horse,” to cross the Moselle between Toul and Épinal, and then to head for Neufchâteau, on the Meuse. He left the final mop-up of French forces to the discretion of the Bavarians: They could either break the right wing of Joffre’s armies against the Swiss border or drive them into the waiting arms of German Fifth and Fourth armies in the Ardennes and the Argonne.
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Chief of Operations Tappen was truly expansive. Such an offensive “in grand style” against the 100,000 to 120,000 French troops he believed still to be in the Vosges might even “end the war.”
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Indeed, visions of a gigantic Cannae—a double envelopment of the entire French army—now seduced the OHL. Might Joffre’s forces not be crushed between German First and Second armies driving down from the north and Sixth and Seventh armies charging up from the south, while Third, Fourth, and Fifth armies “fixed” the rest of the French forces in the Ardennes and Argonne?

Such grand musings were rudely shattered just twenty-four hours after Rupprecht ordered Sixth Army to advance toward Charmes while Josias von Heeringen’s Seventh Army encircled French forces from the north. For at 5
AM
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on 25 August, Joffre’s two armies in Lorraine mounted a counterattack toward the northeast from their positions south of the Meurthe River.
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The initiative, won by Rupprecht in the Battle of the Saar, now returned to Joffre.

The Battle of the Trouée de Charmes (also known as the Battle of the Mortagne) was fought in rugged, hilly, wooded country crisscrossed by three major rivers—the Meurthe, the Mortagne, and the Moselle. The natural advantages all lay with the defenders, who, moreover, were familiar with the terrain from years of peacetime maneuvers. Heavy fighting ensued for two days. The brunt of the attack by Édouard de Castelnau’s XVI, XV, and XX corps of French Second Army fell on the Bavarian right wing (especially Oskar von Xylander’s I Corps and Karl von Fasbender’s I Reserve Corps). “Forward everywhere …
to the limit!”
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Castelnau admonished his corps commanders. Farther south, Yvon Dubail drove the two left corps of French First Army against Karl von Martini’s Bavarian II Corps and Fritz von Below’s Prussian XXI Corps around Serres, north of the Marne-Rhine Canal.

For a brief moment, Rupprecht’s army was threatened with envelopment. A relief attempt by Ludwig von Gebsattel’s Bavarian III Army Corps with 5th Infantry Division (ID) as well as 4th and 8th Ersatz divisions was rebuffed with heavy losses. Martini reported that many of his companies (normally 250) were down to thirty men, and that some infantry units of II Corps had sustained losses of up to 75 percent. Maximilian von Montgelas’s 4th Bavarian ID was reduced to three thousand men, having lost almost nine thousand in the fighting in Lorraine. Bavarian 1st Infantry Regiment (IR) took a thousand casualties in two days. Only a heavy downpour on 26 August and the fact that French gunners routinely broke for lunch from 1 to 3
PM
brought relief. At the height of the battle, Rupprecht learned that his eldest son, Luitpold, had died of infantile paralysis. That evening the OHL took away 8th Cavalry Division (CD) to beef up the front in East Prussia.

Fritz Burger, a deputy officer with Bavarian 1st Foot Artillery Regiment, noted the devastation around Blâmont on 27 August. “The broad, rolling countryside was a single sea of flames.” Domèvre-sur-Vezouze, a small town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, was “completely reduced to ashes. … Left and right nothing but smoking ruins.” The professor of art from Munich University mused: “Pompeii must have looked like this after the violent upheaval.” War was truly hell. “The blood of those [francs-tireurs] shot after courts-martial still stuck to a wall on my right.” Behind another smoldering ruin, he found the “bloody shirts and pants, knapsacks and rifles” of 190 French soldiers buried the day before. Once out of Domèvre, he came across “endless columns of wounded; wan, tired, sluggishly they moved along.”
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Major Rudolf von Xylander on Krafft’s staff similarly was shocked by the devastation at Maixe. “It looked extremely horrific everywhere; the farmsteads burned down; in many fields the French [soldiers with their red pants] lay as if in a field of poppies; many just lay in the road; a great number of horses and a great deal of material laid about. It smells terrible.”
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The Battle of the Trouée de Charmes ended in a bloody draw on 28 August.
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Thereafter, the front in Lorraine stabilized for almost a week. While Joffre used the relative calm to transfer more units—Georges Levillain’s 6th CD and Louis Comby’s 37th ID—to buttress his left wing around Paris, Moltke and Tappen devised a new plan for the Bavarian army. It was now to abandon the breakthrough in the direction of Neufchâteau and instead to reduce
la position de Nancy
, a heavily fortified belt of fortresses, woods, and heights that surrounded the capital of 120,000 inhabitants of the Meurthe-et-Moselle.

The change in plans had been occasioned in part by Tappen’s “displeasure” that Sixth Army had not already driven through the Charmes Gap.
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Moltke also poured out his venom over the putative “inactivity” of the Bavarians. “You visited Sixth Army,” he shot at General Karl von Wenninger on 30 August. “When will it finally attack?” Bavaria’s military plenipotentiary had indeed just returned from a tour of the front and had been deeply shaken by what he had seen: “burned-down villages, overturned wagons, dead horses, fresh graves.” The countryside was a wasteland of “still smoking, at times still burning ruins where there once were villages, animal corpses, wounded horses with deadly-sad eyes aimlessly wandering, the air filled with burning sweet smells” of the flesh of men and horses. Wenninger reminded Moltke that Rupprecht’s soldiers had suffered greatly during nineteen days of consecutive combat against an enemy “double our strength.” It elicited no sympathy. “That is also the case with other armies a[nd] still they attack!” Moltke snapped back. Growing more agitated by the minute, he accused the Bavarians of having used improper tactics. “Sixth Army’s losses all too often were unnecessary; the corps simply ran into art[illery] fire—that must come to an end!”
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