The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  From the moment the French attack began in Lorraine, Moltke’s resolve to carry through Schlieffen’s total reliance upon the right wing began to slip. He and his staff expected the French to bring up their main forces on their left to meet the threat of the German right wing. As anxiously as Lanrezac sent out scouts looking for the British, OHL looked for evidence of strong French movements west of the Meuse, and up to August 17 found none. That vexing problem of war presented by the refusal of the enemy to behave as expected in his own best interest beset them. They concluded from the movement in Lorraine and the lack of movement on the west that the French were concentrating their main force for an offensive through Lorraine between Metz and the Vosges. They asked themselves if this did not require a readjustment of German strategy. If this were the main French attack could not the Germans, by a shift of forces to their own left wing, bring about a decisive battle in Lorraine before the right wing could accomplish it by envelopment? Could they not in fact accomplish a true Cannae, the double envelopment that Schlieffen had held in the back of his mind? Anxious discussions of this alluring prospect and even some preliminary shifting of the weight of gravity toward the left engaged OHL from August 14 to 17. On that date they decided that the French were not massing in Lorraine to the extent believed, and reverted to the original Schlieffen plan.

  But once divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith. From then on, OHL was lured by opportunity on the left wing. Mentally, Moltke had opened his mind to an alternative strategy dependent on what the enemy would do. The passionate simplicity of Schlieffen’s design for total effort by one wing and rigid cleaving to plan regardless of enemy movements was broken. The plan that had appeared so faultless on paper cracked under pressure of the uncertainties, above all the emotions, of war. Having deprived himself of the comfort of a prearranged strategy, Moltke was thereafter tormented by indecisiveness whenever a decision was required. On August 16 Prince Rupprecht required one urgently.

  He wanted permission to counterattack. His headquarters at Saint-Avold, a dreary, undistinguished town sunk in a hollow on the edge of the dingy mining district of the Saar, offered no princely amenities, no château for his lodging, not even a Grand Hotel. Westward stretched before him a land of easy rolling hills under wide open skies with no obstacles of importance before the Moselle, and, glowing on the horizon, the prize—Nancy, jewel of Lorraine.

  Rupprecht argued that his given task to engage as many French troops as possible on his front could best be accomplished by attacking, a theory exactly contrary to the strategy of the “sack.” For three days, from August 16 to 18, discussion raged over the telephone wire, happily all in German territory, between Rupprecht’s headquarters and General Headquarters. Was the present French attack their main effort? They appeared to be doing nothing “serious” in Alsace or west of the Meuse. What did this indicate? Suppose the French refused to come forward and fall into the “sack”? Suppose Rupprecht continued to retire, would not a gap be opened up between him and the Fifth Army, his neighbor to the right, and would not the French attack through there? Might this not bring defeat to the right wing? Rupprecht and his Chief of Staff, General Krafft von Dellmensingen, contended that it would. They said their troops were impatiently awaiting the order to attack, that it was difficult to restrain them, that it would be shameful to force retreat upon troops “champing to go forward”; moreover, it was unwise to give up territory in Lorraine at the very outset of the war, even temporarily, unless absolutely forced to.

  Fascinated yet frightened, OHL could not decide. A Staff major named Zollner was sent to Sixth Army Headquarters at Saint-Avoid to discuss it further in person. He said OHL was considering a change in the planned retirement but could not give up the sack maneuver completely. He returned with nothing settled. Hardly had he gone when an airplane reconnaissance report was received of local French movements backward toward the Grand Couronné which were “immediately interpreted” by the Sixth Army Staff as evidence that the enemy was not coming forward into the sack after all and therefore the best thing to do was to attack him as quickly as possible.

  Matters were at a crisis. More telephone conversations ensued between Rupprecht and von Krafft at one end and von Stein and Tappen at the other. Another messenger from OHL, Major Dommes, arrived—this was on August 17—with news that made a counteroffensive appear more desirable than ever. He said OHL was now sure the French were transferring troops to their western wing and were not “tied” to Lorraine; he reported the success of the siege guns at Liège which made the French fortress line look less formidable; he said OHL now believed the English had not yet landed on the Continent and, if a decisive battle could be quickly fought here in Lorraine, they might never come at all. But of course, said Major Dommes, he was obliged by Moltke’s instructions to warn of all the hazards of a counteroffensive of which the chief and overwhelming one was that it would be a frontal attack—that anathema of German military doctrine—with envelopment impossible because of the mountains and the French fortresses.

  Rupprecht retorted that there was less risk in attack than in further retreat, that he would take the enemy by surprise and might unbalance him, that he and his staff had considered all the risks and intended to master them. Working himself up with another eloquent ode to the offensive spirit of his gallant troops who must not be required to withdraw further, he announced he had made up his mind to attack unless he received a definite order from OHL prohibiting him. “Either let me attack,” he shouted, “or issue definite orders!”

  Confounded by the Prince’s “forceful tone,” Dommes hurried away to OHL for further instructions. At Rupprecht’s headquarters “we waited, wondering if we would receive the prohibiting order.” They waited all morning of the 18th, and when no word had come by afternoon von Krafft telephoned to von Stein demanding to know if an order was to be expected. Once again all the advantages and all the misgivings were thrashed over. Out of patience, von Krafft asked for a Yes or No. “Oh, no, we won’t oblige you by forbidding an attack,” von Stein replied with something less than the authority of a modern Alexander. “You must take the responsibility. Make your decision as your conscience tells you.”

  “It is already made. We attack!”

  “Na!” answered von Stein, using a vernacular expression implying a shrug, “then strike and God be with you!”

  Thus the sack maneuver was abandoned. The order was given for the Sixth and Seventh Armies to turn around and prepare for the counteroffensive.

  Meanwhile the British, whom the Germans supposed not to have landed, were moving up toward their designated position on the left end of the French line. The continued rapturous greeting of the French populace sprang less from any deep love of the British, their antagonists for centuries, than from an almost hysterical thankfulness at the appearance of an ally in the struggle that was life or death for France. To the British soldiers, kissed, fed, and bedecked with flowers, it seemed like a celebration, a huge party of which they were unaccountably the heroes.

  Their pugnacious Commander in Chief, Sir John French, disembarked on August 14 with Murray, Wilson, and Huguet who was now attached to the British command as liaison officer. They spent the night in Amiens and went to Paris next day to meet the President, Premier, and Minister of War. “Vive le Général French!” cried the delirious crowd of 20,000 who packed the square in front of the Gare du Nord and lined the streets. “’Eep, ’eep, ’ooray! Vive l’Angleterre! Vive la France!” All along the route to the British Embassy crowds, said to be greater than those who greeted Blériot when he flew the Channel, cheered and waved in happy welcome.

  Poincaré was surprised to find his visitor a man of “quiet manner … not very military in appearance” with a drooping mustache whom one would take for a plodding engineer rather than the dashing cavalry commander of his reputation. He seemed slow and methodical without much élan and, despite his French son-in-law and a summer home in Normandy, able to speak
few words of recognizable French. He proceeded to horrify Poincaré by announcing that his troops would not be ready to take the field for ten days, that is, until August 24. This was at a time when Lanrezac already feared that August 20 might be too late. “How we have been misled!” Poincaré wrote in his diary. “We thought them ready down to the last button and now they will not be at the rendezvous!”

  In fact a puzzling change had come over the man whose most notable qualification for command, apart from seniority and the right friends, had been until now his military ardor. From the moment he landed in France Sir John French began to exhibit a preference for the “waiting attitude,” a curious reluctance to bring the BEF to action, a draining away of the will to fight. Whether the cause was Kitchener’s instructions with their emphasis on keeping the army in being and their caution against risking “losses and wastage,” or whether it was a sudden realization percolating into Sir John French’s consciousness that behind the BEF was no national body of trained reserves to take its place, or whether on reaching the Continent within a few miles of a formidable enemy and certain battle the weight of responsibility oppressed him, or whether all along beneath his bold words and manner the natural juices of courage had been invisibly drying up, or whether, fighting on foreign soil for someone else’s homeland, it was simply a feeling of limited liability, no one who has not been in the same position can judge.

  What is certain is that from the start Sir John French’s meetings with his Allies left them variously disappointed, startled, or outraged. The immediate purpose for which the BEF had come to France—to prevent her being crushed by Germany—appeared to escape him, or at least he seemed to react to it with no sense of urgency. He appeared to think that his independence of command, which Kitchener had so stressed, meant he could “choose his own hours for fighting and his hours of resting,” as Poincaré put it, indifferent to the possibility that the Germans might overrun France in the meantime, making any further question of fighting obsolete. As the inescapable Clausewitz had pointed out, an allied army operating under independent command is undesirable, but if unavoidable it is at least essential that its commander “should not be the most prudent and cautious but the most enterprising.” During the next three weeks, the most critical of the war, the reason for Clausewitz’s italics was to become clear.

  Next day, August 16, Sir John visited GQG at Vitry where Joffre discovered him to be “firmly attached to his own ideas” and “anxious not to compromise his army.” Sir John French in his turn was not impressed, owing perhaps to a British officer’s sensitivity to social background. The struggle to republicanize the French Army had produced an unfortunate proportion, from the British point of view, of officers who were not “gentlemen.” “Au fond, they are a low lot,” Sir John wrote to Kitchener some months later, “and one always has to remember the class these French generals mostly come from.” Indubitably the French generalissimo was the son of a tradesman.

  On this occasion Joffre politely but urgently expressed his desire that the BEF should go into action on the Sambre along with Lanrezac on August 21. Contrary to what he had told Poincaré, Sir John French said he would do his best to meet this date. He requested that, as he was to hold the exposed end of the French line, Joffre should place Sordet’s cavalry and two reserve divisions “directly under my orders.” Joffre, needless to say, refused. Reporting the visit to Kitchener, Sir John French said he was “much impressed” by General Berthelot and the Staff, who were “deliberate, calm and confident” and exhibited a “total absence of fuss and confusion.” He expressed no opinion of Joffre beyond noting that he seemed to realize the value of a “waiting attitude,” a curious and self-revealing misjudgment.

  The next visit was to Lanrezac. The taut temper at Fifth Army Headquarters appeared in Hely d’Oissel’s first greeting to Huguet when he drove up in a car with the long-sought British officers, on the morning of August 17: “At last you’re here. It’s not a moment too soon. If we are beaten, we’ll owe it to you.”

  General Lanrezac appeared on the steps to greet his visitors whose appearance in the flesh did not dispel lingering suspicions that he was being tricked by officers without divisions. Nothing said in the ensuing half-hour did much to reassure him. Speaking no English and his vis-à-vis no useful French, the two generals retired to confer alone without interpreters, a procedure of such dubious value that to explain it as done out of a mania for secrecy, as suggested by Lieutenant Spears, seems hardly adequate. They emerged shortly to join their staffs, of whom several were bilingual, in the Operations Room. Sir John French peered at the map, put on his glasses, pointed to a spot on the Meuse, and attempted to ask in French whether General Lanrezac thought the Germans would cross the river at that point which bore the virtually unpronounceable name Huy. As the bridge at Huy was the only one between Liège and Namur and as von Bülow’s troops were crossing it as he spoke, Sir John French’s question was correct if superfluous. He stumbled first over the phrase “cross the river” and had to be prompted by Henry Wilson who supplied “traverser la fleuve,” but when he came to “à Huy,” he faltered again.

  “What does he say? What does he say?” Lanrezac was asking restively.

  “… à Hoy” Sir John French finally managed to bring out, pronouncing it as if he were hailing a ship.

  It was explained to Lanrezac that the British Commander in Chief wished to know if he thought the Germans would cross the Meuse at Huy. “Tell the Marshal,” replied Lanrezac, “I think the Germans have come to the Meuse to fish.” His tone, which he might have applied to some particularly dim-witted question at one of his famous lectures, was not one customarily used toward the Field Marshal of a friendly army.

  “What does he say? What does he say?” Sir John French, catching the tone if not the meaning, asked in his turn.

  “He says they are going to cross the river, sir,” Wilson answered smoothly.

  In the mood engendered by this exchange, misunderstandings flourished. Billets and lines of communication, an inevitable source of friction between neighboring armies, produced the first one. There was a more serious misunderstanding about the use of cavalry, each commander wanting the use of the other’s for strategic reconnaissance. Sordet’s tired and half-shoeless corps which Joffre had assigned to Lanrezac had just been pulled away again on a mission to make contact with the Belgians north of the Sambre in the hope of persuading them not to retreat to Antwerp. Lanrezac was in dire need—as were the British—of information about the enemy’s units and line of march. He wanted use of the fresh British cavalry division. Sir John French refused it. Having come to France with only four divisions instead of six, he wished to hold the cavalry back temporarily as reserve. Lanrezac understood him to say he intended employing it as mounted infantry in the line, a contemptible form of activity which the hero of Kimberley would as soon have used as a dry-fly fisherman would use live bait.

  Most serious of all was the dispute over the date when the BEF would be ready for action. Although on the previous day he had told Joffre he would be ready by the 21st, Sir John French now reverted, either out of pure pique or from the uncertain state of his nerves, to what he had told Poincaré, that he would not be ready until the 24th. To Lanrezac it was the final affliction. Did the British General suppose the enemy would wait for him? he wondered, although not aloud. Obviously, as he had known from the start, the British were not to be relied on. The interview closed “with flushed faces.” Afterward Lanrezac informed Joffre that the British would not be ready “until the 24th at the earliest,” that their cavalry were to be used as mounted infantry and “cannot be counted on for any other purpose,” and raised the question of possible confusion with the British along the roads, “in the event of retirement.” The phrase produced a shock at GQG. Lanrezac, the “veritable lion” of admired aggressiveness, was already considering the possibility of retreat.

  Sir John French also received a shock upon arriving at his headquarters, temporarily at Le Cate
au, where he learned that the commander of his IInd Corps, his good friend General Grierson, had died suddenly that morning in the train near Amiens. French’s request to Kitchener for a particular general to replace Grierson—“please do as I ask you in this matter,” he wrote—was refused. Kitchener sent out General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien with whom French had never got on, both being opinionated men. Like Haig, Smith-Dorrien had no great respect for the Commander in Chief and tended to act on his own initiative. Sir John French took out his resentment of Kitchener’s choice in a heightened aversion to Smith-Dorrien and vented it, when all was over, in that sad and twisted document he entitled 1914 which a distinguished reviewer was to call “one of the most unfortunate books ever written.”

  At Belgian Army Headquarters in Louvain on August 17, the day when Sir John French was meeting Lanrezac and Rupprecht was demanding permission to counterattack, Premier de Broqueville came to discuss with King Albert the question of removing the government from Brussels to Antwerp. Detachments of all arms of von Kluck’s army, outnumbering the Belgians four or five to one, were reported attacking the Belgian line at the river Gette 15 miles away; 8,000 troops of von Bülow’s army were reported crossing the bridge at Huy, 30 miles away, and heading for Namur. If Liège had fallen what could Namur do? The period of concentration was over, the main German advance was on its way, and as yet the armies of Belgium’s guarantors had not come. “We are alone,” the King said to De Broqueville. The Germans, he concluded, would probably overrun central Belgium and occupy Brussels and “the final issue of events is still uncertain.” It was true that the French cavalry was expected that day in the area of Namur. Joffre, when informing King Albert of their mission had assured him that in the best opinion of GQG the German units west of the Meuse were merely a “screen.” He had promised that further French divisions would soon arrive to cooperate with the Belgians against the enemy. King Albert did not think the Germans at the Gette and at Huy were a screen. The mournful decision for the government to leave the capital was taken. On August 18 the King also ordered a general retreat of the army from the Gette to the fortified camp of Antwerp and the removal of Headquarters from Louvain fifteen miles back to Malines.