The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (37 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT
CLIMAX: THE OURCQ

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory
.

—GEORGES CLEMENCEAU

I
N 1914, ROUGHLY ONE IN TEN FRENCHMEN LIVED IN PARIS. THE CITY
proper covered 80 square kilometers; with the surrounding Department of the Seine, it extended to 480. Paris was one of the few major fortified capitals in Europe.
¹
One ring of fourteen inner forts had withstood the German siege of 1870–71, and it had been augmented with an outer ring of twenty-five forts by 1890. Both were designed to protect Paris in case of an attack—or of a domestic uprising. As the distant roar of Alexander von Kluck’s heavy artillery became ever more audible, the government of Premier René Viviani fell. President Raymond Poincaré was able to secure the newfound “sacred union” by way of a cabinet reshuffle that left Viviani as premier but brought Alexandre Millerand in as the new minister of war, replacing Adolphe Messimy. To Joffre’s great delight, Millerand, the former moderate Socialist who had helped him pass the Three-Year Law in 1913, quickly rallied to defend the generalissimo’s autocratic style of command in the face of the Chamber of Deputies’ attempts to gain insight into military operations.

On 30 August, a German Taube aircraft dropped three bombs and some leaflets on the Quai de Valmy. By next day, a state of panic existed in the capital. The staff of the Ministry of War was instructed to send families to the countryside and then to depart for Tours.
²
The mail was already three days late, when it arrived at all. The Central Telegraph Office had been cut off from London. Most newspapers had stopped publishing. Grand hotels were being turned into hospitals. An exodus of perhaps a hundred thousand people was in full swing. Automobiles and cabs could be seen rushing people and their most precious belongings to the southern and western railway stations. There, they jostled for space with incoming French wounded and German prisoners of war. By noon, the Montparnasse Station was packed with ten thousand Parisians seeking to board trains for Rennes, Saint-Malo, and Brest. At the Invalides Station, usually reserved for the military, enough people had booked for Brittany to fill the trains for a week.

On 2 September, the forty-fourth anniversary of the Battle of Sedan (1870), the government left Paris for Bordeaux. In its absence, Parisians turned to a sixty-five-year-old former colonial soldier for succor. As the newly appointed military governor of Paris, General Joseph-Simon Galliéni commanded four territorial divisions and the 185th Territorial Brigade. Over the coming days, he received reinforcements in the form of a marine artillery brigade and 84th Territorial Division as well as 61st and 62d reserve infantry divisions (RID).
³
Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre, conceding the imminent danger to the capital, dispatched Michel-Joseph Maunoury’s newly formed Sixth Army, soon to be augmented by IV Corps from Third Army, to Paris and placed it at the disposal of the military governor.
⁴

Galliéni did not disappoint. In his first public proclamation, on 3 September, he promised to defend Paris “to the last extremity.”
⁵
That morning, he called out military engineers and civilian laborers armed with axes and saws to cut down the undergrowth of brush and hedges that obscured the line of fire of the capital’s 2,924 guns—ranging from massive 155mm siege guns to rapid-fire 75s.
⁶
They likewise demolished houses and sheds that Galliéni deemed to obstruct his artillery. Munitions depots were stocked with a thousand shells per heavy gun. Hospitals and penitentiaries were evacuated and readied for the anticipated flood of wounded men. Fire departments were put on alert. Grocery stores were filled for the expected siege with bread wheat for forty-three days, salt for twenty, and meat for twelve. Gas to produce electricity for three months was requisitioned from the countryside.
⁷
Pigeons were placed under state control in case telegraph and radio communications broke down. For three days, thousands of tons of concrete were poured and millions of meters of barbed wire strung for new defensive lines. Galliéni, who had fought at Sedan in 1870 and thereafter been interned in Germany, was determined that the enemy, should it take Paris, would find little of value: The bridges over the Seine River were to be blown up, and even the Eiffel Tower was to be reduced to scrap metal. Former Captain (now Lieutenant Colonel) Alfred Dreyfus joined the artillery.

All the while, cavalry scouts and pilots from both the French Armée de l’air and the British Royal Flying Corps kept Galliéni abreast of the German advance on Paris from Creil, Senlis, Clermont-sur-Oise, the Forest of Compiègne, and Soissons. Just after 8
AM
on 3 September, British aviators spied “a great column” of German artillery and infantry advancing from Verberie to Senlis.
⁸
Later that afternoon, the news took a dramatic turn: Fliers reported massive columns of gray-clad enemy infantry—four corps in strength—that had suddenly shifted onto a southeasterly course toward Château-Thierry, Mareuil-sur-Ourcq, and Lizy-sur-Ourcq.
⁹
A single German corps stood between Kluck and Paris in echelon formation south of Chantilly. This could mean only one thing: Kluck was advancing into the gap between French Fifth Army and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) around Montmirail, screened just by Louis Conneau’s newly created cavalry corps. Joffre, apprised of this by Galliéni as he was moving his headquarters to Bar-sur-Aube, remained imperturbable: The French army would continue to follow his General Instruction No. 4 of 1 September, as amended the following day.
¹⁰

Late in the night of 3 September, Galliéni, as
commandant des armées de Paris
, made a key decision: If Kluck continued on a southeasterly trajectory, he would rally all available troops in the Paris Entrenched Camp and strike First Army’s exposed right flank.
¹¹
The following morning, French aviators confirmed that Kluck continued to head southeast. Without awaiting formal orders from Joffre, Galliéni sent word to Maunoury’s Sixth Army to be ready to march east by afternoon. He placed Antoine Drude’s newly arrived Algerian 45th Infantry Division (ID) at Maunoury’s disposal, raising Sixth Army (reinforced by 7 September with IV Army Corps from Maurice Sarrail’s Third Army) to about 150,000 soldiers. Galliéni planned to assault the western flank of the German army that “seemed to be gliding past Paris behind the front.”
¹²

At Bar-sur-Aube, Joffre had independently arrived at the same operational concept. The Germans, in the words of historian Robert Doughty, occupied a “deep concave line between Paris, the Seine, the Aube, and Verdun.” If Joffre could draw them farther into the salient between Paris and Verdun, perhaps he could cut them off with an attack on the “neck” of that salient in the direction of Meaux by Galliéni’s garrison forces and Maunoury’s Sixth Army.
¹³
Since Meaux lay thirty kilometers east of Paris on the Marne River, Joffre’s concept closely paralleled Galliéni’s. Rivers of ink would later be spilled as to which man first arrived at the operational concept that would unleash the Battle of the Marne. In the end, the decision was Joffre’s to make.
¹⁴

All that remained was for Sir John French to join the attack. The BEF, about to be augmented by 6th ID from Ireland and 4th ID from Britain, had crossed the Marne on 3 September and had finally stopped just east of Paris and south of Meaux. As ever, Joffre was concerned over what he politely termed the “fragility” of his left wing. Others were more direct in their dealings with the British. Galliéni, with Maunoury in tow, tried personal diplomacy. The field marshal was not at British headquarters at Melun, but off with his corps commanders at the Marne. Nor was General Henry Wilson at Melun. All Galliéni could get was what has been described as a “tedious” three hours of “talk and argument” with Archibald Murray.
¹⁵
Referred to even by his friends as “super-disciplined and super-obedient,” the BEF’s chief of staff refused to undertake anything until his boss was back. Galliéni returned to Paris dejected—and convinced that Murray was incapable of seeing the great strategic opportunity at hand. “Old Archie” Murray, revealing
“une grande répugnance”
toward Galliéni,
¹⁶
continued the British retreat southwest behind the Grand Morin River. The BEF constituted just 3 percent of Allied forces and had lost twenty thousand men along with half of its artillery.

That same day, Sir John French was supposed to discuss the situation with the new commander of Fifth Army, Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, at Bray-sur-Seine. But the field marshal was still with his corps commanders. In his stead, he sent Wilson, who was always willing to accommodate the French. Franchet d’Espèrey and Wilson quickly found common ground. There should be a joint attack in the direction of Montmirail: Below the Marne, French Fifth Army would approach Kluck’s First Army from the south and the BEF from the west; north of the river, French Sixth Army would march eastward toward Château-Thierry.
¹⁷
Wilson set two conditions: that Sixth Army cover the BEF’s flank and that it mount an “energetic attack” north of Meaux. Franchet d’Espèrey concurred—a bold act for a man in charge of Fifth Army for barely twenty-four hours.

In the meantime, Joffre, having spent hours in solitude under a tall weeping ash in the courtyard of the school that served as his headquarters, penned his Instruction général No. 5. He ordered Maurice Sarrail’s Third Army, Fernand de Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army, and Ferdinand Foch’s Special Army Detachment (now formally designated Ninth Army) to halt their retreat, stand their ground, and, if possible, be ready to join in a full Allied counterattack on 6 September.
¹⁸
On 4 September, over his favorite dinner of Brittany leg of lamb at the Château Le Jard, Joffre received the news for which he had been desperately waiting: a note from Franchet d’Espèrey promising “close and absolute co-operation” between Fifth Army and the BEF, and assurance that Fifth Army, although “not in brilliant condition” after its recent encounters with German Second Army, would reach the Ourcq River the next day. “If not, the British will not march.”
¹⁹
Joffre after the war gave full credit to Franchet d’Espèrey: “It is he who made the Battle of the Marne possible.”
²⁰

With that welcome news in hand, Joffre delighted his staff: “Then we can march!”
²¹
At ten o’clock that night, he put the finishing touches to Instruction général No. 6. It set out the basic operations plan for the Battle of the Marne, to begin on the morning of 7 September. Maunoury’s Sixth Army was to cross the Ourcq “in the general direction of Château-Thierry;” the BEF was to “attack in the general direction of Montmirail;” Franchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army was to advance “along the line Courtacon-Esternay-Sézanne;” and Foch’s Ninth Army was to cover Fifth Army’s right flank around the Saint-Gond Marshes.
²²
At Galliéni’s urging, Joffre moved the date for the attack up to 6 September—something that he would later regret.
²³
In London, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Russia signed a declaration that none of their governments would conclude a separate peace with either Germany or Austria-Hungary.

The next morning, 5 September, Joffre apprised War Minister Millerand of the seriousness of the hour. The “strategic situation,” he began, was “excellent.” He could not “hope for better conditions” for the offensive. He was determined “to engage all our forces without stint and without reservation to achieve victory.” But he also reminded the newly appointed minister that nothing was ever certain in war. “The struggle in which we are about to engage may have decisive results, but it may also have very serious consequences for the country in case of a reverse.”
²⁴

Joffre’s final thoughts, as always, were with the British. Would they, as Franchet d’Espèrey had assured him, actually “march”? Or would French and Murray yet again find a reason to continue the BEF’s retreat? Joffre moved on two fronts. First, he appealed to the government for a second time to use diplomatic channels to get London to stiffen Sir John’s resolve. Next, he raced off to British headquarters at the Château Vaux-le-Pénil, nearly two hundred kilometers away at Melun, to meet with French. It was a dangerous journey through country infested with enemy cavalry patrols. Arriving at Melun around 2
PM
, Joffre made one last appeal for cooperation. It was high drama. He informed Sir John that the French army, down to the “last company,” stood ready to attack the invader to save France. “It is in her name that I come to you to ask for British aid, and I urge it with all the power that is in me.” Growing more agitated with every sentence, Joffre reminded the field marshal that now was the time to move; that the next twenty-four hours would be decisive; that the time for retreating was over; that no man was to yield even a foot of French soil; and that those who could (or would) not advance “were to die where they stood.” He then moved from appeal to taunt. “I cannot believe that the British Army, in this supreme crisis, will refuse to do its part—history would judge its absence severely.” Finally, banging his fist on the table in the little Louis XV salon, Joffre moved from taunt to challenge: “Monsieur, le Maréchal, the honour of England is at stake!”
²⁵
His face flushed with emotion and tears welling in his eyes, Sir John stumbled in vain over a few phrases in French. He then turned to one of his officers and inelegantly blurted out, “Damn it, I can’t explain. Tell him that all that men can do our fellows will do.”
²⁶
History records that Joffre, upon reaching his new headquarters at Châtillon-sur-Seine, hailed his staff with the words “Gentlemen, we will fight on the Marne.” That is pure legend.