The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (48 page)

The trio motored on to Suippes and at 11
AM
briefly conferred with Hausen. The mood at Suippes was “depressing.” Hausen’s 32d ID had recently been shattered by Foch’s violent counterattacks, and his 24th RID had been battered by Ninth Army’s advance guards the night before near Connantray-Vaurefroy. If the word
cinders (Schlacke)
applied to anyone, it was to Third Army, which had lost 14,987 men in the first ten days of September.
⁹⁸
There was nothing to fall back on, as Dresden had already sent out all available reserves—111 officers, 351 noncommissioned officers, 4,050 ranks, and 330 horses.
⁹⁹
Incredibly, Hausen stated that Third Army, stretched across a forty-kilometer front, could hold its position until the new offensive with Seventh Army commenced. Moltke, although convinced that the French were about to mount a major assault to “pierce the right and center of Third Army” and afraid that Hausen’s forces “were no longer combat effective,” concurred.
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Sometime before 1
PM
, Moltke arrived at Fourth Army headquarters at Courtisols. The mood there was “confident.” Duke Albrecht assured Moltke that although he had lost 9,433 men in the last ten days, he could spare forces to shore up Hausen’s battered Third Army. His chief of staff, General Walther von Lüwitz, lectured Moltke that a major withdrawal would have a decimating “moral effect” on the troops.
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Then the proverbial bolt from the blue: Just as Tappen was drafting orders for Fifth, Fourth, and Third armies to maintain their positions, his staff overheard a relayed radio message from Bülow at Second Army headquarters to the OHL. “Enemy appears to want to direct his main offensive against the right flank and center of Third Army” in an obvious attempt to break through at Vitry-le-François.
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A “deeply shaken” Moltke saw no reason to doubt Bülow. The only countermeasure was to withdraw the entire German center to the line Suippes–Sainte-Menehould until the new offensive (with Seventh Army) could be launched on the right wing. Moltke and Tappen, appreciating that Second Army had sustained 10,607 casualties between 1 and 10 September, agreed. It was only fitting that Bülow, who had set the retreat in motion on 8 September, likewise initiated the final decision to undertake a general retreat all along the front.

Moltke was fearful that not only his right wing but now also his center stood on the point of collapse. He rushed back to Suippes. Hausen was incapacitated due to illness, now correctly diagnosed as typhus. Hoeppner, his chief of staff, was at the front. Thus, a Major Hasse on Third Army’s staff confirmed Bülow’s dire prognosis: Foch’s Ninth Army was threatening the entire front of Third Army. No sooner had Hasse completed his briefing than Third Army’s radio operators intercepted a call from Duke Albrecht’s Fourth Army to the OHL: “Strong enemy forces marching against Vitry-le-François and Maisons-en-Champagne.”
¹⁰³
There was not a moment to lose. At 1:30
PM
, Moltke made what he later called “the hardest decision of my life, [one] which made my heart bleed,”
¹⁰⁴
the general order to retreat in echelon. He instructed Second Army to fall back to Thuizy (southeast of Reims), Third Army to the line Thuizy-Suippes, Fourth Army to Suippes–Sainte-Menehould, and Fifth Army to east of Sainte-Menehould. This would essentially become the stationary trench line of the Western Front.

Moltke dispatched Dommes to bring the unwelcome news to Fourth and Fifth armies, where Dommes in horror discovered that their army corps were down to but ten thousand infantrymen each. Moltke, for his part, motored on to Bülow’s headquarters. Lieutenant Colonel Matthes, who basically had taken over operational decisions from the “sick, almost pathetic” Lauenstein, never forgot the chief of staff’s shaken state. “Constant nervous facial twitching betrayed his extremely strained condition to all those present.”
¹⁰⁵
Moltke declined to motor on to First Army. Perhaps finally acknowledging the lack of leadership on the German right wing, he placed Heeringen’s new Seventh Army at Saint-Quentin under his most senior army commander—Karl von Bülow.
¹⁰⁶

Moltke returned to his headquarters in the Hôtel de Cologne at Luxembourg in a driving downpour around 2
AM
on 12 September. His first order was to relieve the severely ill Max von Hausen of command of Third Army. He next briefed Wilhelm II on his tour of the front. According to Hans von Plessen, chief of Imperial Headquarters, the kaiser became enraged, “slammed his fist on the table and forbade any further retreat.”
¹⁰⁷
Moltke then went to bed, where he was comforted by several of his staff officers—and by his wife, Eliza.

In a belated bid to reverse what they considered to be the rapidly escalating disaster occasioned by Moltke’s order to retreat, Deputy Chief of Staff von Stein and Chief of Operations Tappen set off early in the morning of 13 September on a tour of army headquarters. At Montmédy, they came across Dommes, returning from Fourth and Fifth armies. The trio quickly agreed on a last-ditch effort to save the German campaign in the west: They would plug the still-twenty-kilometer-wide gap between First and Second armies by withdrawing one army corps each from Third, Fourth, and Fifth armies. They informed Wilhelm II of their plans by telegraph at 8
PM
. There is no record of the kaiser’s response.

General von Einem, until then commander of VII Corps and now head of Saxon Third Army, offered up XII Corps and Duke Albrecht’s XVIII Corps from Fourth Army. Chief of Staff Schmidt von Knobelsdorf of Fifth Army grudgingly agreed to release VI Corps—which was, in fact, fighting with Albrecht’s Fourth Army. Even then, he did so only on condition that it first be given a day of rest and not be subjected to “long marches.” Bülow, when informed of the plan, believed it might effect at least a “much desired moral success.”
¹⁰⁸
Whether the three corps’ exhausted men and horses could even have made the 100-to-150-kilometer march must remain an open question, as must their possible deployment once there, for the fronts were rapidly moving during the German retreat from the Marne. Whatever the case, by the time Stein, Tappen, and Dommes returned to Luxembourg “frozen through and through” at 5:15
AM
on 15 September, events there had overtaken their plan.

For on 14 September, Chief of the Military Cabinet von Lyncker had informed Wilhelm II that “Moltke’s nerves are at an end and [he] is no longer able to conduct operations.”
¹⁰⁹
The kaiser had agreed and in what has been depicted as “a terrible scene” had ordered Moltke to step down on grounds of “ill health.”
¹¹⁰
Deputy Chief of Staff von Stein, in Moltke’s words, was also “sacrificed.”
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The decision took Moltke completely by surprise. “I refuse to do this! I
AM
not sick. If H[is] M[ajesty] is unhappy with the conduct of operations, then I will go!”
¹¹²
But in the end he accepted what he twice called his “martyrdom” to spare both his Supreme War Lord and the nation embarrassment.
¹¹³
Prussian war minister von Falkenhayn was to succeed Moltke, but the change in command would not be made public until 20 January 1915 to conceal the defeat at the Marne. Indeed, when Falkenhayn on 28 September requested that the Foreign Office publish a General Staff report on the debacle at the Marne, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg forbade such disclosure.
¹¹⁴

On 11 September, Einem, en route to taking over Third Army, by chance had come across Moltke at Reims. “I met a totally broken and disconcerted man.” Incredibly, Moltke began the conversation by asking Einem, “My God, how could this possibly have happened?” Einem lost his composure. “You yourself ought to know the answer to that best of all! How could you ever have remained at Luxembourg and allowed the reins of leadership totally to slip from your hands?” Moltke was taken aback. “But, dear Einem, I could not possibly have dragged the Kaiser through half of France during our advance!” Einem’s “harsh” reply was meant to cut to the quick. “Why not? The Kaiser most likely would not have had anything against it. And if your Great Uncle could square it with his sense of responsibility to take his King right onto the battlefields of Königgrätz [1866] and Sedan [1870], you and the Kaiser could at least have come sufficiently close to the front to keep the reins in your hands.”
¹¹⁵
For Moltke, the war thus ended as it had begun—with a brutal, negative comparison to his uncle, the Elder Moltke.

To the German soldiers at the sharp end of the stick, the order to retreat seemed grotesque. They did not feel like a beaten army. Georg Wichura, whose 5th ID for days had valiantly held up the advance of the BEF and the French cavalry corps between Monbertoin and Montreuil-aux-Lions, was “decimated” by the order. The “mood swing” among his men was “terrible, everywhere confused looks.” “A thousand serious thoughts went through their heads,” the division’s diary noted. “Legs like lead. Silent and exhausted, as if in a trance, the column plods on ahead.”
¹¹⁶
Similar reactions were noted at Third Army. The order to retreat arrived like a “bolt of thunder” at 133d RIR. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Schmidt, recalled, “I saw many men cry, the tears rolled down their cheeks; others simply expressed amazement.” Lieutenant Colonel Wilke of 178th IR noted “understandable shrugging of shoulders, sad shaking of heads. … Finally, it all turned into a dumbfounded silence filled with ominous anticipation.”
¹¹⁷
The general feeling among the Saxon troops was that “it was not our fault, we stood our ground.”
¹¹⁸

At Second Army, Oskar von Hutier, commanding 1st Guard Division, refused to obey the order to retreat.

I ordered my mount in order to rush up to the front. I already had my left foot in the stirrup when the Division’s Deputy Adjutant … leaped from his horse and came over to me with a deadly pale look. When I asked him what was wrong, he whispered in my ear: “We must all retreat immediately.”

Hutier’s reply: “Have they all gone crazy?”
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Paul Fleck, commanding 14th ID, VII Corps, likewise was dumbfounded. “This could not be. … Victory was ours.” He obeyed the order only after having it confirmed by Second Army’s chief of staff, von Lauenstein.
¹²⁰
Colonel Bernhard Finck von Finckenstein, commanding the prestigious 1st Kaiser Alexander Guard-Grenadier-Regiment, remonstrated that the enemy was “in wild flight” from the front. The order to retreat “hit us like the blow of a club. Our brave troops had to give up the bloody victory only so recently achieved and to surrender the battlefield to the enemy. That aroused bitter feelings.”
¹²¹
Major von Rantzau of 2d Grenadier Regiment even toyed with insubordination: “Colonel, I respectfully report that we have lost confidence in our leadership [OHL].”
¹²²
Captain Walter Bloem of 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers with Kluck’s First Army dismissed the French “Victory of the Marne” as an “utter fraud.” He and the men of B Company took solace in draining ninety bottles of claret in four hours.
¹²³
Only the hope in a new offensive brought some relief.

The first order of business for the German armies after their retreat from the Marne was to resupply the troops and salvage whatever war materials had been damaged or abandoned. By 10 September, the Prussian War Ministry issued formal orders for full-scale scavenging to begin.
¹²⁴
Cavalrymen were to be buried only in their “underwear and pants,” with boots, tunics, and equipment gathered for reuse. Dead and wounded infantrymen were to be stripped of all ammunition and weapons “already in the front lines.” Casings from artillery shells, broken machine guns, shattered artillery pieces, caissons, and harnesses were to be gathered up. All parts from downed aircraft and Zeppelins likewise were to be retrieved. “War Socialism” was in full flower at the front.

FOR JOFFRE
, the order of the Day was straightforward and urgent—“to pursue energetically and leave the enemy no respite: victory depends on the legs of our infantry.”
¹²⁵
Abandoning his plan to envelop the German right wing, Joffre now ordered French Third to Sixth and Ninth armies and the BEF to pursue the retreating Germans in echelon on a northeasterly course.
¹²⁶
Specifically, Sixth Army was to advance on Soissons, the BEF on Fismes, Fifth Army on Reims, and Ninth Army on Sommesous and Châlons. As well, he called Joseph de Castelli’s VIII Corps up from Charmes and Bayon in Lorraine to press the attack. For four days, Joffre’s armies fought a bloody battle of pursuit against dogged German rear guards over fields littered with the stinking remains of men and beasts, broken war equipment, burning villages, and streams of refugees. But the legs of the French infantry were as tired as those of the German, and slowly the enemy slipped out of Joffre’s grasp.

The Battle of the Marne ended in anticlimax. On 11 September, torrents of rain and a sudden cold snap further dogged the already exhausted troops. Heavy clouds and dense mist grounded Joffre’s aircraft. Deep mud slowed the horse-drawn artillery. In the confusion, Douglas Haig’s gunners mistakenly shelled their own infantry. All along the line, the Allied armies advanced barely fifteen kilometers a day against a retreating enemy. By 13–14 September, the erstwhile German pivot wing, reinforced by the new Seventh Army from Saint-Quentin, had dug in on the commanding heights along the northern bank of the Aisne River. On 13 September, Maunoury informed Joffre that Sixth Army, “which has not had a day of rest in about fifteen days, very much needs 24 hours rest.”
¹²⁷
Franchet d’Espèrey the next day refused to obey Joffre’s order to mount a major offensive northward toward Berry-au-Bac, Gernicourt, and Neufchâtel. “It is not rear guards that are in front of us,” he testily lectured the generalissimo, “but an organized [defensive] position.”
¹²⁸
Even the feisty Foch informed GQG the next day that Ninth Army was meeting “great resistance” along its “entire front.”
¹²⁹
And at the lowest stratum of command, Sub-Lieutenant J. Caillou of 147th IR matter-of-factly noted that while his unit had received 2,300 reinforcements since August, by the time it reached the Aisne it had suffered 2,800 casualties “out of a complement of 3,000.”
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