The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (38 page)

THREE
G
ERMAN
ARMIES ADVANCED
into the 250-kilometer salient between “the horns of Paris and Verdun.” By 5 September, the critical sector bristled with seven opposing armies. From east to west, Foch’s Ninth Army (IX and XI corps) at Mailly-Sézanne fronted Max von Hausen’s Third Army (XII and XIX corps, XII Reserve Corps) and the left wing of German Second Army; Franchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army (XVIII, III, I, X corps), north of Provins, was up against the bulk of Karl von Bülow’s Second Army (VII and X corps, Guard Corps, X Reserve Corps, Guard Reserve Corps) and the left flank of German First Army; French’s BEF (I, II, III corps), well behind Joffre’s line south of Coulommiers, fronted the center of Kluck’s First Army (II, III, IX, IX corps, IV Reserve Corps); and Maunoury’s Sixth Army (VII Corps, Brigade Lamaze, Brigade Chasseurs, 45th Division) as well as units of Sarrail’s IV Corps were poised to advance out of Paris toward Meaux against Kluck’s right flank—specifically, Hans von Gronau’s IV Reserve Corps at Saint-Soupplets–Monthyon–Penchard.

Numerically, the Germans were inferior to the Allies at the critical point, the right wing. Kluck’s First Army of 128 battalions of infantry and 748 guns was ranged against 191 battalions and 942 guns of French Sixth Army and the BEF; Bülow’s Second Army and half of Hausen’s Third Army with 134 battalions and 844 guns faced 268 battalions and 1,084 guns of French Fifth and Ninth armies.
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It was a stark reversal from August 1914.

While Kluck’s First Army moved toward the Ourcq River northeast of Paris, German Second and Third armies advanced on the Aisne and Vesle rivers. As he approached Fismes on the Vesle, Bülow found the countryside littered with abandoned artillery caissons, rifles, ammunition, and uniforms. Hausen reported that he was heading toward Suippes “after fleeing enemy.” Bülow ordered “ruthless pursuit” of the “shaken adversary” to the Marne. The French were to be “attacked without delay wherever [they] stood.”
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En route, Reims would be asked to surrender; if it refused, it was to be reduced “while sparing its cathedral.”
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The German attack on Reims laid bare in microcosm Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke’s failure to coordinate his armies. On the afternoon of 3 September, Hausen ordered Hans von Kirchbach’s Saxon XII Reserve Corps to execute a bold strike
(Handstreich)
on Reims. Kirchbach decided on a nighttime attack by Alexander von Larisch’s 23d RID. It totally surprised the city’s garrison: 45th Reserve Brigade seized Fort Witry and 46th Brigade, Forts Nogent l’Abbesse and La Pompelle, without firing a shot. A cavalry patrol penetrated into the heart of Reims. At midnight, Kirchbach informed Hausen, “Reims in the hands of XII Reserve Corps.”
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THE ALLIED RETREAT, 30 AUGUST-5 SEPTEMBER 1914

Then, the totally unexpected: At 6:30
AM
^*
the next day, Kirchbach’s units came under heavy artillery fire—from Karl von Plettenberg’s 2d Guard Division (GD) of Bülow’s Second Army! Once again, communications had broken down. In the ensuing chaos, in which the Guard over forty-five minutes fired some 170 shells into the city, forty civilians were killed and the Notre-Dame de Reims Cathedral, in which French kings since Clovis had been crowned, was slightly damaged. Hausen at once informed Second Army: “Reims occupied by us. Cease fire.”
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Bülow stopped the shelling—and then imposed an “indemnity” of fifty million francs on Reims, to be doubled if his terms were not accepted within forty-eight hours. Hausen was incensed. In his unpublished memoirs, he tried to imagine the “brouhaha” that would have resulted had their roles been reversed and Saxon artillery fired on the Prussian Guard. He found it “painful” that Bülow had not offered “a word of apology,” not even an “explanation.”
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Interestingly, the minute German troops crossed into France, the reported incidents of francs-tireurs fire and German “reprisals”
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abated. Still, Allied propaganda seized on the shelling of Reims to depict the enemy as “Huns” and “Vandals.”

The debacle at Reims paled in comparison with Bülow’s main concern: Kluck and First Army. For almost two weeks, Second Army had tenaciously hounded Charles Lanrezac’s Fifth Army in brutal frontal attacks along the Sambre and Oise rivers. Moltke’s General Directive of 2 September had left the final defeat of the French to Second Army. There would be no more bloody frontal assaults. Bülow looked forward to finally enveloping Fifth Army’s left flank. He became angry on 3 September when he learned that Ferdinand von Quast’s IX Corps of First Army had, in fact, crossed the Marne on his right wing directly in front of Karl von Einem’s VII Corps. He grew downright livid when Kluck, pointedly “disobeying” Moltke’s General Directive of 2 September, late that night announced his intention to continue on a southeasterly course toward Montmirail.
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This would force Second Army to halt its advance so as not to collide with Kluck’s First Army. And it would be at least 7 September before First Army’s advance units could withdraw from the line Montmirail-Esternay. Kluck, Bülow moaned, had become “a thorn in his side.”

The crisis on the Marne at last spurred Luxembourg into action. Late in the evening of 4 September, Moltke and his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Tappen, drafted a new General Directive for their field armies. To make certain that it reached the intended recipients, they had it delivered by automobile the next morning as well. The new orders began with a few general observations. The OHL conceded that Joffre had taken numerous formations out of his right wing at Toul-Belfort and shifted them to his left wing around Paris; that he had simultaneously removed units from in front of German Third, Fourth, and Fifth armies with similar intent; and that he most likely was standing up new formations on his left wing. The original design to “push the entire French army against the Swiss frontier,” Moltke laconically wrote, “was no longer possible.” The German right wing was now threatened as it hung in the air at Meaux. Worse still, there were agent reports of major French troop concentrations at Lille, of British landings at Ostend and Antwerp, and of eighty thousand Russians having been brought from Archangel to Britain for future deployment in France.

Of course, it was disinformation, all of it. But to Moltke, these “shadow” forces seemed all too real. He had committed all his active and reserve forces at the start of the war, and they now stood deep in France and East Prussia. The entire Kaiser Wilhelm Canal linking the North Sea to the Baltic Sea, the northwest German coast, and the border with Denmark were open to British invasion since he had moved IX Reserve Corps out of Schleswig-Holstein and attached it to Kluck’s First Army. His prewar fears of a “three-front war” might yet be realized.

The new General Directive ordered Sixth and Seventh armies to tie down as many French forces as possible in Lorraine; Fourth and Fifth armies to continue to “drive” enemy forces facing them in the Argonne Forest “off in a southeasterly direction;” and First and Second armies to hold their positions east of Paris, to “parry offensively any enemy operations emanating from the region around Paris,” and “to lend each other mutual support.” Most opaquely, Third Army was to advance on Troyes—Vendeuvre-sur-Barse and, “as circumstances dictated,” either support First and Second armies “across the Seine in a westerly direction,” or turn south-southeast to buttress the German left wing in Lorraine.
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There is no evidence to suggest that Moltke or Tappen seriously contemplated moving up to the front to direct the final phase of the campaign, or even to dispatch a senior officer from the General Staff for that purpose. One may remember that during the Battle of Guise/Saint-Quentin, Joffre had spent the entire morning at Fifth Army headquarters at Marle overseeing the main French attack.

In fact, Moltke’s General Directive, when compared with Joffre’s General Instruction No. 5 or No. 6, seems more like a theoretical staff exercise than a formal operations plan. It consisted of general observations on the campaign in the west and of vague suggestions for First and Second armies to hold their present positions and simply ward off enemy attacks; for Seventh and Sixth armies to “hold” on the left wing; and for Fifth, Fourth, and Third armies in the center of the line to operate in concentric sweeps south and southwest. It was an admission that the Schlieffen-Moltke operational concept of the
Schwenkungsflügel
(pivot wing) enveloping the entire left wing and center of the French army had been abandoned. There were no provisions for coordinating the actions of First and Second armies on the Marne, only obvious and nonspecific suggestions for Kluck and Bülow to “lend each other mutual support.” Nor were there provisions to close the gap between Second and Third armies southeast of Reims. Hausen’s instruction to deploy Third Army as he saw fit to support one of two German flanks some three hundred kilometers apart defied logic. Finally, the mere hint of rumors concerning British and Russian troop disembarkations in France stampeded Moltke into creating a new Seventh Army in Belgium under General Josias von Heeringen, hastily brought up from commanding the old Seventh Army in Lorraine. Once formed, it was to become the extreme right wing of the German line.

Within hours, the lack of command and control from Luxembourg became manifestly evident. At the very moment that Moltke and Tap-pen were drafting their General Directive calling on Third Army to drive on Troyes-Vendeuvre, Hausen at 5
PM
on 4 September informed the OHL that he had ordered a day of rest for his forces. He repeated the message an hour later. “Troops desperately need a day of rest.” He did not budge from his decision when the two flanking armies, Second and Fourth, informed him that they were resuming the offensive early the next morning. He stood firm even after he belatedly received Moltke’s instruction to advance on Troyes-Vendeuvre at eight o’clock that night. Just before midnight, he informed the OHL for a third time in less than seven hours that Third Army would rest on 5 September.
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Moltke raised no objections.

Hausen took pains, both at the time and in his memoirs, to justify his decision.
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The men had reached the limits of their “psychological elasticity” as well as their “physical capability.” Between 18 and 23 August, they had marched 190 kilometers to the Meuse, and thereafter 140 kilometers to the Aisne—much of it under a broiling sun and the last thirteen days during constant combat. Ammunition, food, and uniforms desperately needed to be hauled up to the front. The horses were short on oats and needed to be reshod. Hausen chose not to inform Moltke that there was also a personal reason: He had come down with what was diagnosed as a severe case of “bloody dysentery.”

The German official history of the war later took Hausen to task.
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By his action, he had exposed the flanks of his two neighboring armies—most precipitously, his halt had created a thirty-kilometer gap between his Third Army and Bülow’s Second Army—and he had disrupted the planned seamless German advance on 5 September. But it failed to mention that with his action, Hausen had lost a splendid opportunity to exploit a twenty-five-kilometer gap that had developed between Foch’s Ninth Army and Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army. Especially Foch’s Army Detachment had taken a terrible pounding from Hausen’s two corps over the last two days: There had been heavy losses among infantry officers, the men were in a state of “serious fatigue” after “exhausting marches” and “the severity of the fighting,” and many of the reserve formations were in what Foch termed “an extremely pitiable state.” The entire region of Sommesous–Sompuis–Vitry-le-François was devoid of major French formations. From his headquarters at Sillery, Foch had informed Joffre that the Army Detachment, about to be reconstituted as Ninth Army, could at best survive two or three days of further attacks by German Third Army. It now gained twenty-four valuable hours in which to prepare its defensive line at the Saint-Gond Marshes and the heights south of Sézanne.
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It is difficult to disagree with the critique of Hausen. Every other German army had marched relentlessly under a searing sun during the last month. Every other army had suffered heavy casualties. Every other army needed rest and resupply. Some had in fact marched much greater distances than Third Army: First Army 500 kilometers and Second Army 440. Some, such as Second Army, had fought numerous more brutal engagements. It is hard to escape the verdict that Hausen simply was not made of the right stuff. For a second time since his failure to strike the flank of French Fifth Army south of Dinant, he failed to press a golden opportunity to break through the French line.

Above all, Moltke’s General Directive was a rude shock for First Army, which received the relayed radiogram at 6
AM
on 5 September. It entailed a painful retreat from advanced positions seized after long marches and heavy fighting between the Marne and Oise. Without direct radio communications either to the OHL or to Bülow’s Second Army on his left flank, Kluck had advanced almost in a vacuum. He was thus without insight into the overall situation of the campaign in the west and about to collide with the left wing of Bülow’s Second Army around Montmirail. He sent out no cavalry or aerial reconnaissance to the west, where French Sixth Army had been stood up, and was intent only on pursuing the British and French columns fleeing southward before him.