The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  General von Kluck, the “last man on the right” in Schlieffen’s scheme, was at that moment considering a fateful decision. He felt himself close to the crisis on August 30. His troops on the far right had driven back units of Maunoury’s Army with success that Kluck thought was definitive. His pursuit in the center had not succeeded in catching up with the British. but the jettisoned piles of coats, boots, and ammunition found along the roadside which the British had dumped in their anxiety to bring away their men confirmed Kluck’s opinion of a beaten opponent. On his left a division which he had lent to Bülow to help at the battle of Guise reported the French fleeing from that battle. Kluck was fiercely determined to allow them no time to recover.

  Reports of the direction of Lanrezac’s retreat indicated that the French line did not extend as far west as had been expected. Kluck believed it could be rolled up north of Paris, making a wide sweep to the west and south of the city unnecessary. The change involved a shift in the direction of his advance from due south to southeast and would have the added advantage of closing the gap between his army and Bülow’s. Like everyone else he had begun the campaign assuming that reinforcements would be forthcoming from the left wing. He needed them now to replace the corps he had had to leave in front of Antwerp, the brigade in Brussels, the various units left to guard his ever-lengthening line of communications, not to mention his losses in combat. But reinforcements were not forthcoming. Moltke still had detached none from the left wing.

  Moltke had many worries. True to his temperament, “Gloomy Julius” was less elated by the advance of his conquering armies than depressed by the difficulties of the advance. It was now the 30th day, and the schedule called for victory over France between the 36th and 40th days. Although his right-wing commanders continued to report the French and English as “decisively beaten” and their retreat in terms of “rout” and “flight,” Moltke was uneasy. He noticed a suspicious lack of the usual signs of rout or disorganized retreat: Why were there so few prisoners? “A victory on the battlefield is of little account,” his old chief Schlieffen used to say, “if it has not resulted either in breakthrough or encirclement. Though pushed back the enemy will appear again on different ground to renew the resistance he momentarily gave up. The campaign will go on .…”

  Despite his concern Moltke did not go forward to investigate for himself but remained fretting at Headquarters, depending on delegates for reports. “It is heartbreaking,” he wrote to his wife on August 29, “how little suspicions der hohe Herr [the Kaiser] has of the seriousness of the situation. He has already a certain shout-hurrah! mood that I hate like death.”

  On August 30 as the German Armies approached the climax of their campaign, OHL moved forward from Coblenz to Luxembourg City, ten miles behind the borders of France. They were now in territory emotionally if not officially hostile and which, by reason both of proximity and sentiment, was a hub of Allied rumors. Whispers circulated of the 80,000 Russians coming to help the British and French. OHL was kept busy piecing together indications of a landing somewhere on the Channel coast. The actual landing of 3,000 British marines at Ostend which, by the time the news reached Luxembourg, had swollen to serious and even Russian proportions, added apparent reality to German fears.

  Besides the specter of Russians at his back, Moltke was bothered by the gaps in his battle line, especially between the armies of the right wing. There was one of twenty miles between Kluck and Bülow, another of twenty miles between Bülow and Hausen, and a third almost as wide between Hausen and the Duke of Württemberg. Moltke was uncomfortably conscious that the thinning spaces should have been filled by reinforcements drawn from the left wing which he had now committed to total involvement in the battle for the Moselle. He thought guiltily of Schlieffen’s insistence that the proper course was to leave the left wing on the defensive with minimum forces and send every division that could be spared to the First and Second Armies. But the vision of a breakthrough of the French fortress line still lured OHL. Vacillating, Moltke on August 30 sent his artillery expert, Major Bauer, to make a personal survey of Rupprecht’s front.

  At Rupprecht’s headquarters Bauer found “everything but concerted plans,” and when he drove to the front lines commanders and officers gave him conflicting opinions. Some, pointing to the unmistakable withdrawal of enemy divisions from their front, were confident of imminent success. Others complained of the “difficult wooded mountains” along the Moselle, south of Toul, where the attack was running into trouble. Even if it succeeded the troops would be open to flank attack from Toul and supply lines would be lacking, since all roads and railroads led through the fortified city. Toul would have to be taken first. Back at Sixth Army Headquarters the once-aggressive enthusiasm of Prince Rupprecht had cooled to recognition that he was engaged in a “difficult and unpleasant task.”

  To Bauer, representing the Supreme Command, the report of French withdrawals from this front was a bad sign, for it meant that the enemy was withdrawing units to reinforce his front opposite the German right wing. He returned to OHL with the conclusion, as he told Moltke, that while the attack on Nancy-Toul and the Moselle line was “not without chances,” it required an extended effort that seemed “not justifiable” at this time. Moltke agreed—and did nothing. He could not nerve himself to call off the offensive that had already cost so much. And the Kaiser wanted to ride in triumph through Nancy. No changed orders to the Sixth Army went out; full-scale effort to break the Moselle line continued.

  Von Kluck resented the failure to reinforce the marching wing at this critical time. But it was not so much the need to narrow his front as the belief that the French were already beaten and needed only to be rounded up that decided him to make an inward wheel. Instead of brushing the Channel with his sleeve he would brush Paris on the inside in direct pursuit of Lanrezac’s Army. That in the process he would be exposing his flank to attack by the garrison of Paris or by Maunoury’s forces falling back upon Paris in front of him was a danger he did not ignore but did not estimate highly. He considered the forces so far assembled under Maunoury as negligible. The possibility of their being reinforced he considered also negligible because the French, stumbling backward in the throes of defeat and disaster, must be too disorganized for such a maneuver. Moreover, he assumed that all their available forces were pinned down under the heavy pressure of the Crown Prince’s Army around Verdun and of Rupprecht’s Armies along the Moselle. One of his own corps, the laggard IVth Reserve, would be enough to leave in front of Paris to guard the flank of his army as it slid across to the east in front of the capital. After all, it had been proved in German war games that garrison forces inside an entrenched camp do not venture out until attacked, and the IVth Reserve, he believed, could contain the tatterdemalion collection of units under Maunoury. Having learned, from a captured letter, of Sir John French’s intention to quit the line and retreat behind the Seine, he regarded the BEF, his direct opponent up to now, as of no further account.

  Under the German system—in contrast to the French—Kluck as commander in the field was allowed the widest possible latitude for independent decision. Prepared by indoctrination, map exercises, and war games to find the correct solution of a given military problem, a German general was expected automatically to reach it when required. Though a deviation from the original strategy, Kluck’s plan to ignore Paris and go after the retreating armies was the “correct” solution now that it appeared to him possible to annihilate the French Armies in the field without enveloping Paris. According to German military theory a fortified camp should not be attacked until the enemy’s mobile forces were overwhelmed. These once destroyed, all the other fruits of victory followed. Although the lure of Paris was strong, Kluck determined not to be tempted from the path of proper military procedure.

  At 6:30 on the evening of August 30 a message reached him from von Bülow that made up his mind. It requested him to make the inward wheel in order to help Bülow “gain the full advantage of victory” ove
r the French Fifth Army. Whether Bülow was in fact asking for help to exploit a victory gained at St. Quentin or to compensate for a defeat suffered at Guise, is, whatever the words he used, uncertain. His request fitted in with what Kluck wanted to do in any event, and Kluck made his decision. The objectives he gave for the next day’s march were no longer due south but southeast toward Noyon and Compiègne in order to cut off the retreat of the French Fifth Army. To already protesting and footsore troops who had not rested since they had begun the advance at Liège sixteen days before, his order of August 31 read, “Again, therefore, we must call upon the troops for forced marches.”

  OHL, informed that the First Army would begin an inward wheel next morning, hurriedly approved. Unhappy about the gaps, Moltke saw a danger of the three armies of the right wing being unable to support each other in delivery of the final blow. Numbers had fallen below the prescribed density for an offensive, and if Kluck were to adhere to the original plan of a sweep around Paris the front would be stretched out for another fifty miles or more. Seizing upon Kluck’s move as a fortunate solution, Moltke telegraphed his approval the same night.

  The end was in sight: the scheduled defeat of France by the 39th day in time to turn against Russia; the proof of all German training, planning, and organization; the halfway step to winning the war and mastery of Europe. It remained only to round up the retreating French before they could regain cohesion and renew resistance. Nothing, not the gaps, nor the check to Bülow’s Army at Guise nor the fatigue of the men nor any last-minute faltering or error must be allowed to check the last dash to victory. With fierce urgency Kluck drove his army forward. As officers rode up and down the roads and sergeants rasped commands, the war-stained troops wearily formed columns on the morning of August 31 to begin another day of endless foot-slogging. Knowing nothing of maps or place names, they were unaware of the change of direction. The magic word Paris drew them on. They were not told that it was no longer their destination.

  Hunger added to their misery. They had outrun their supply lines, which were functioning inadequately owing to the destruction of bridges and railroad tunnels in Belgium. Repairs had not succeeded in keeping railheads up with the advance of the armies; the focal bridge at Namur, for one, was not repaired until September 30. Often the tired infantry after a long day’s march found the villages where they expected to billet occupied by their own cavalry. The cavalry, who were supposed to live off the country, were always so anxious about their supply trains and horses’ fodder that to secure these they “constantly installed themselves,” according to the Crown Prince, a former cavalryman himself, in places meant for the infantry. In a piece of unexpected testimony coming from this source, he added, “They always halted and got in the way of the infantry the moment things in front began to look ugly.”

  Kluck’s Army met an ugly surprise on September 1 when it ran into the heels of the British who unaccountably, since Kluck’s communiqué had said they were retreating “in the most complete disorder,” were able to turn upon the Germans and offer sharp and punishing combat. In a day of desperate fighting in and around the forests of Compiègne and Villers-Cotterets, the British rearguards held off the enemy while the main body of the BEF, to Kluck’s disgust, again got away. Postponing a “much-needed” rest for his troops, Kluck ordered a further march next day, shifting back slightly to the west in the hope of enveloping the British. Again they succeeded in escaping him “just in time,” to get across the Marne on September 3. His chance of finishing them off was now gone; having lost time, increased his casualties, and added marching distance, he resumed in no good temper his inward wheel in pursuit of the French.

  “Our men are done up,” wrote a German officer of Kluck’s Army in his diary of September 2. “They stagger forward, their faces coated with dust, their uniforms in rags. They look like living scarecrows.” After four days of marching an average of twenty-four miles a day over roads pitted with shellholes and barred by felled trees, “they march with eyes closed, singing in chorus so as not to fall asleep .… Only the certainty of early victory and a triumphal entry into Paris keeps them going .… Without this they would fall exhausted and go to sleep where they fall.” The diary testified to a problem that was becoming increasingly serious in the German advance, especially further east where Bülow’s and Hausen’s troops were coming through Champagne. “They drink to excess but this drunkenness keeps them going. Today after inspection the General was furious. He wanted to stop this general drunkenness but we managed to dissuade him from giving severe orders. If we used too much severity the Army would not march. Abnormal stimulants are necessary to combat abnormal fatigue.” “We will put all that right in Paris,” the officer concluded hopefully, he, too, evidently unaware of the new direction of the march.

  Through France as through Belgium the Germans left a blackened and defiled path as they passed. Villages were burned, civilians shot, homes looted and torn, horses ridden through rooms, artillery wagons dragged across gardens, latrines dug in the family burial plot of the Poincarés at Nubécourt. Kluck’s IInd Corps passing through Senlis, twenty-five miles from Paris, on September 2, shot the Mayor and six other civilian hostages. A stone marker, just outside the town on the edge of a field where they are buried, bears their names:

  Eugène Odène Mayor

  Emile Aubert Tanner

  Jean Barbier Carter

  Lucien Cottreau Café waiter

  Pierre Dewerdt Chauffeur

  J-B. Elysée Pommier Baker’s helper

  Arthur Régant Stonecutter

  September 2 was a happy day for General von Hausen who found himself billeted in the Château of the Comte de Chabrillon at Thugny on the Aisne. Occupying the countess’ bedroom, the General was delighted to discover from examination of her visiting cards that she was née Comtesse de Lévy-Mirepois in her own right, which caused him to sleep with that much extra pleasure in her bed. After dining on pheasant obtained by his supply officers who organized a shoot in the park of the château, Hausen counted the countess’ table silver and left an inventory of it with an old man in the village.

  That night Moltke, who after a second look had developed qualms about the flank that Kluck’s inward wheel was exposing to Paris, issued a new General Order. As in the matter of the left wing, it showed his uncertain hand. It ratified Kluck’s turn by ordering the First and Second Armies to “drive the French armies in a southeast direction away from Paris.” At the same time it attempted to guard against a possible danger by ordering Kluck’s army to follow “in echelon behind the Second Army” and make itself “responsible for the flank protection of the Armies.”

  In echelon! To Kluck the insult was worse than putting him, as OHL had done before, under Bülow’s orders. The grim-visaged Attila with rifle in one hand and revolver in the other, the pace-setter of the right wing, was not going to stay behind anybody. He issued his own orders to the First Army “to continue its advance over the Marne tomorrow [September 3] in order to drive the French southeastward.” He considered it sufficient for purposes of protecting the flank exposed to Paris to leave behind him his two weakest units: the IVth Reserve which was minus a brigade left back at Brussels and the 4th Cavalry Division which had suffered heavily in the fight against the British on September 1.

  Captain Lepic, an officer of Sordet’s Cavalry Corps, was reconnoitering northwest of Compiègne on August 31, the first morning of Kluck’s turn, when he saw at a little distance an enemy cavalry column of nine squadrons, followed fifteen minutes later by an infantry column with batteries, ammunition wagons, and a company of cyclists. He noticed they were taking the road for Compiègne rather than the direct southward road for Paris. Unaware that he was the earliest witness of a historic swerve, Captain Lepic was more interested to report that the Uhlans had discarded their distinctive helmets and were wearing cloth caps and that “they ask directions of the local people in bad French, saying ‘Englisch, Englisch.’” His information about their line of march di
d not as yet convey any great significance to GQG. The town and château of Cornpiègne, it was thought, might be attracting the Germans, and they could still take the road from Compiègne to Paris. Nor was Captain Lepic’s view of two columns necessarily indicative of Kluck’s whole Army.

  The French, too, on August 31, knew the campaign was coming to a climax. Their second plan—the plan of August 25 to shift the center of gravity over to the left in an effort to halt the German right wing—had failed. The mission of the Sixth Army which, together with the British and the Fifth Army, was to have made a stand on the Somme, had failed. Now the mission of the Sixth Army, Joffre acknowledged, was “to cover Paris.” The British, as he said privately, “ne veulent pas marcher,” and the Fifth Army, with Kluck in pursuit on its flank, was still in danger of being enveloped. Indeed, alarming news was brought that a spearhead of Kluck’s cavalry had already penetrated between the Fifth Army and Paris into the space left open by the British retreat. Clearly, as Colonel Pont, Joffre’s Chief of Operations told him, “it seems no longer possible to oppose the right wing with sufficient forces to arrest its enveloping movement.”

  A new plan was necessary. Survival was the immediate aim. At GQG Joffre with his two deputies, Belin and Berthelot, and the senior officers of the Operations Bureau discussed what was to be done. Into the “chapel” of the offensive the hot wind of events had forced a new idea—“to hold out” until the French Armies could stabilize a line from which to resume the offensive. Meanwhile, it was recognized, the German advance would extend its forces along a tremendous arc from Verdun to Paris. The plan this time, rather than to oppose the marching wing of the German Army, would be to cut it off by an attack upon the German center, reverting to the strategy of Plan 17. Only, now the battlefield was in the heart of France. A French defeat this time would not be a reverse as at the frontiers, but final.