Bergson notwithstanding, it was no miracle but the inherent ifs, errors, and commitments of the first month that determined the issue at the Marne. Kluck notwithstanding, faults of German command contributed as much as the verve of the French soldier to the outcome. If the Germans had not withdrawn two corps to send against the Russians, one of the two would have been on Bülow’s right and might have filled the gap between him and Kluck; the other would have been with Hausen and might have provided the extra strength to overwhelm Foch. Russia’s loyal launching of an unready offensive drew those troops away and was given tribute by Colonel Dupont, French Chief of Intelligence. “Let us render to our Allies,” he said, “the homage that is their due, for one of the elements of our victory was their debacle.”
Other “ifs” accumulated. If the Germans had not committed too much strength to the attempt at double envelopment by the left wing, if the right wing had not outrun its supplies and exhausted its men, if Kluck had stayed level with Bülow, if, even on the last day, he had marched back across the Marne instead of forward to the Grand Morin, the decision of the Mame might have been different and the six-week schedule for victory over France achieved—might have been, that is, except for the first and decisive “if”: if the six-week schedule itself had not been based on a march through Belgium. Quite apart from the effect upon the war as a whole of bringing Britain in, and the ultimate effect on world opinion, the addition of Belgium as an enemy reduced the number of German divisions that came up to the Marne and added five British divisions to the Allied line.
At the Marne the Allies achieved the numerical superiority they had not been able to muster at any one point in the Battle of the Frontiers. The missing German divisions were partly responsible, and the balance was tipped by the added French divisions drawn from the Third Army and from the embattled and unflinching armies of Castelnau and Dubail. All during the retreat while the other armies were giving ground, these two held shut the eastern door of France. For eighteen days they fought an almost continuous battle until, finally acknowledging failure too late, Moltke called off the attack on the French fortress line on September 8. If the French First and Second Armies had given way at any point, if they had weakened under Rupprecht’s final onslaught of September 3, the Germans would have won their Cannae and there would have been no opportunity for a French counter-offensive on the Marne, the Seine, or anywhere else. If there was a miracle of the Marne, it was made possible on the Moselle.
Without Joffre no Allied line would have existed to bar the German path. It was his impregnable confidence during the tragic and terrible twelve days of retreat that prevented the French Armies from disintegrating into a shattered and fragmentary mass. A more brilliant, more quick-thinking commander with ideas of his own might have avoided basic initial errors, but after the debacle the one thing France needed Joffre had. It is difficult to imagine any other man who could have brought the French Armies out of retreat, in condition and position to fight again. When the moment to turn came, alone he would have been insufficient. The stand he contemplated at the Seine might well have come too late. It was Gallieni who saw the opportunity and, with a powerful assist from Franchet d’Esperey, provoked the earlier counter-offensive. It was the broken figure of Lanrezac, allowed no share at the Marne, who in saving France from the original folly of Plan 17 made recovery possible. Ironically, both his decision at Charleroi and his replacement by Franchet d’Esperey were equally necessary to the counter-offensive. But it was Joffre, whom nothing could panic, who provided the army to fight it. “If we had not had him in 1914,” said Foch, his ultimate successor, “I don’t know what would have become of us.”
The world remembers the battle ever since by the taxis. A hundred of them were already in the service of the Military Government of Paris. With 500 more, each carrying five soldiers and making the sixty-kilometer trip to the Ourcq twice, General Clergerie figured he could transport 6,000 troops to the hard-pressed front. The order was issued at 1:00 P.M., the hour for departure fixed for 6:00 P.M. Police passed the word to the taxis in the streets. Enthusiastically the chauffeurs emptied out their passengers, explaining proudly that they had to “go to the battle.” Returning to their garages for gas, they were ordered to the place of assembly where at the given time all 600 were lined up in perfect order. Gallieni, called to inspect them, though rarely demonstrative, was enchanted. “Eh bien, voilà au moins qui n’est pas banal!” (Well, here at least is something out of the ordinary!) he cried. Each with its burden of soldiers, with trucks, buses, and assorted vehicles added to the train, the taxis drove off, as evening fell—the last gallantry of 1914, the last crusade of the old world.
After the incomplete victory of the Marne there followed the German retreat to the Aisne, the race to the sea for possession of the Channel ports, the fall of Antwerp, and the Battle of Ypres where officers and men of the BEF held their ground, fought literally until they died, and stopped the Germans in Flanders. Not Mons or the Marne but Ypres was the real monument to British valor, as well as the grave of four-fifths of the original BEF. After it, with the advent of winter, came the slow deadly sinking into the stalemate of trench warfare. Running from Switzerland to the Channel like a gangrenous wound across French and Belgian territory, the trenches determined the war of position and attrition, the brutal, mud-filled, murderous insanity known as the Western Front that was to last for four more years.
The Schlieffen plan had failed, but it had succeeded far enough to leave the Germans in occupation of all of Belgium and all of northern France down to the Aisne. As Clemenceau’s paper was tirelessly to remind its readers, month after month, year after year, “Messieurs les Allemands sont toujours à Noyon.” For their presence there, deep within France, the error of Plan 17 was responsible. It had allowed the enemy to penetrate too far to be dislodged by the time the French regathered their strength at the Marne. It permitted the breakthrough that could only be stemmed, and later only contained, at a cost of the terrible drain of French manhood that was to make the war of 1914–1918 the parent of 1940.* It was an error that could never be repaired. Failure of Plan 17 was as fatal as failure of the Schlieffen plan, and together they produced deadlock on the Western Front. Sucking up lives at a rate of 5,000 and sometimes 50,000 a day, absorbing munitions, energy, money, brains, and trained men, the Western Front ate up Allied war resources and predetermined the failure of back-door efforts like that of the Dardanelles which might otherwise have shortened the war. The deadlock, fixed by the failures of the first month, determined the future course of the war and, as a result, the terms of the peace, the shape of the interwar period, and the conditions of the Second Round.
Men could not sustain a war of such magnitude and pain without hope—the hope that its very enormity would ensure that it could never happen again and the hope that when somehow it had been fought through to a resolution, the foundations of a better-ordered world would have been laid. Like the shimmering vision of Paris that kept Kluck’s soldiers on their feet, the mirage of a better world glimmered beyond the shell-pitted wastes and leafless stumps that had once been green fields and waving poplars. Nothing less could give dignity or sense to monstrous offensives in which thousands and hundreds of thousands were killed to gain ten yards and exchange one wet-bottomed trench for another. When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting.
When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion. “All the great words were cancelled out for that generation,” wrote D. H. Lawrence in simple summary for his contemporaries. If any of them remembered, with a twinge of pain, like Emile Verhaeren, “the man I used to be,” it was because he knew the great words and beliefs of the time before 1914 could never be restored.
After the Marne the war grew and spread until it drew in the nations o
f both hemispheres and entangled them in a pattern of world conflict no peace treaty could dissolve. The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.
* In the chapel of St. Cyr (before it was destroyed during World War II) the memorial tablet to the dead of the Great War bore only a single entry for “the Class of 1914.” The mortality rate is further illustrated by the experience of André Varagnac, a nephew of the cabinet minister Marcel Sembat, who came of military age in 1914 but was not mobilized in August owing to illness, and found himself, out of the twenty-seven boys in his lycée class, the only one alive by Christmas. According to Armées Françaises, French casualties in the month of August alone amounted to 206,515, including killed, wounded, and missing out of total effectives for the armies in the field of 1,600,000. As these figures do not include officers or garrison and Territorial divisions, the number is believed to be nearer 300,000. Most were incurred during the four days of the Battle of the Frontiers. No separate figures have been published for the Battle of the Marne, but if the estimated losses through September 11 are added to those of August, the total through the first thirty days is equivalent to a daily loss of the whole population of a town the size of Soissons or Compiègne. No exact figures can be given because in line with GQG’s fixed policy against releasing any information of possible value to the enemy, casualty lists were not published. Nor is it possible to give comparable figures for the other belligerents because they tabulated losses at different intervals and on different basis. When the war was over, the known dead per capita of population were 1 to 28 for France, 1 to 32 for Germany, 1 to 57 for England and 1 to 107 for Russia.
Sources
The following list contains only titles cited in the Notes. It is confined to primary sources, including those biographies and special studies, like Ritter’s Schlieffen Plan, which include primary material. A short list of secondary works is given separately. All titles are given in English or French translation where these exist.
A full bibliography of the subject would fill a book. No other episode in history has been more fully documented by its participants. They seem to have known, while they lived it, that like the French Revolution, the First World War was one of the great convulsions of history, and each felt the hand of history heavily on his own shoulder. When it was over, despite courage, skill, and sacrifice, the war they had fought proved to have been, on the whole, a monument of failure, tragedy, and disillusion. It had not led to a better world. Men who had taken part at the command level, political and military, felt driven to explain their decisions and actions. Men who had fallen from high command, whether for cause or as scapegoats—and these included most of the commanders of August—wrote their private justifications. As each account appeared, inevitably shifting responsibility or blame to someone else, another was provoked. Private feuds became public; public controversies expanded. Men who would otherwise have remained mute were stung to publish, as Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien by Sir John French. Books proliferated. Whole schools of partisans, like those of Gallieni and Joffre, produced libraries of controversy.
Through this forest of special pleading the historian gropes his way, trying to recapture the truth of past events and find out “what really happened.” He discovers that truth is subjective and separate, made up of little bits seen, experienced, and recorded by different people. It is like a design seen through a kaleidoscope; when the cylinder is shaken the countless colored fragments form a new picture. Yet they are the same fragments that made a different picture a moment earlier. This is the problem inherent in the records left by actors in past events. That famous goal, “wie es wirklich war,” is never wholly within our grasp.
Official Government Publications
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE, Diplomatic Documents Relating to the Outbreak of the European War, 2 vols., ed. James Brown Scott, New York, Oxford, 1916. Contains the official publications of the various Foreign Offices which appeared at intervals after the outbreak, beginning with the hurriedly assembled and highly selective German White Book issued on August 4, 1914. Included are the Austro-Hungarian Red, Belgian Grey, French Yellow, German White, British Blue I and II, Italian Green, Russian Orange I and II and Serbian Blue Books.
FRANCE, Assemblée Nationale, Chambre des Deputés, Session de 1919. Procès-Verbaux de la Commission d’Enquète sur le rôle et la situation de la metal-lurgie en France: defense du Bassin de Briey, 1re et 2me parties.
———. Rapport de la Commission d’Enquète par M. Fernand Engerand, deputé. 1re partie: “Concentration de la metallurgic française sur la frontière de l’Est.” 2me partie: “La perte de Briey.”
These hearings (referred to in Notes as “Briey”), at which the principal chiefs of the French General Staff as well as field commanders were called to testify, are the basic source for French military policy in August, 1914. They grew out of the loss of the Briey iron ore basin which became critical as the war went on. Certain sinister underpinnings of the munitions industry with its interlocking Franco-German directorates led a deputy, M. Fernand Engerand, to pursue a persistent investigation into the circumstances of the loss of Briey and this led by natural stages to an investigation of French strategy at the outset of the war. When the war was over, M. Engerand succeeded in getting a Committee of Inquiry appointed of which he was named rapporteur. “As our inquiry unrolled with all its illustrious witnesses,” he wrote in his Report, it was plain that the truth about the origins and failure of Plan 17 was being “obstinately hidden” from the government and the Chamber of Deputies, but “we have tried to unravel the tangled and hidden threads of this month of August, 1914, the most tragic, perhaps, in all history of France.”
FRANCE, Ministère de la Guerre; Etat-major de l’Armée, Service Historique, Les Armées Françaises dans la grande guerre, Tome I, Vols. 1 and 2 and Annexes Paris, Imprimerie Nationale 1922–1925. Referred to in Notes as AF. The first volume of the Official History, beginning with the pre-1914 war plans and the Michel incident of 1911, covers the war through the Battle of the Frontiers. The second volume covers the Retreat up to the eve of the Battle of the Marne. The real value is in the two volumes of Annexes containing the texts of orders and communications between GQG and the armies. These are the most vivid and immediate source material of all.
GERMANY, Foreign Office, Outbreak of the World War; German documents collected by Karl Kautsky and edited by Max Montgelas and Walther Schucking, translated by Carnegie Endowment, New York, Oxford, 1924. Referred to in Notes as “Kautsky.” Assembled and published by the Weimar Government to supplement the original German White Book.
GERMANY, Genralstaab, Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege (Usages of War on Land), translated as The German War Book by J. H. Morgan, London, Murray, 1915.
GERMANY, Marine-Archiv, Der Krieg zur See, 1914–18, No. 5, Band 1, Der Krieg in dem Turkische Gewassen; Die Mittelmeer Division, Berlin, Mittler, 1928.
GERMANY, Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914–18, Band 1, Die Militärische Operationen zu Lande; Die Grenzschlachten im Westen, Band 3, Von der Sambre bis zur Marne, Berlin, Mittler, 1924.
GREAT BRITAIN, Committee of Imperial Defence, Historical Section, CORBETT, SIR JULIAN, Naval Operations: History of the Great War Based on Official Documents, Vol. I, New York, Longmans, 1920. Referred to in Notes as “Corbett.”
———, EDMONDS, BRIGADIER-GENERAL JAMES E., Military Operations: France and Belgium, 1914, Vol. I and volume of maps, 3rd ed., London, Macmillan, 1933. Referred to in Notes as “Edmonds.” This work of superb scholarship is particularly valuable for its selections from German and French sources, showing f
or a given date the actual situation of the BEF’s enemies and allies and how each appeared to the other.
———, FAYLE, C. ERNEST, Seaborne Trade, Vol. I, London, Murray, 1920.
GREAT BRITAIN, Foreign Office. British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, 11 vols., eds. G. P. Gooch and H. W. V. Temperley, London, 1927–38. Referred to in Notes as “BD.”
UNITED STATES, Department of State. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the U. S. Supplements, World War, 1914, Washington, G.P.O., 1928
Non-Official Sources
On Belgium
BASSOMPIERRE, BARON ALFRED DE, The Night of August 2–3, 1914, at the Belgian Foreign Office, tr. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1916.
BEYENS, BARON, Deux Années à Berlin, 1912–14, 2 vols., Paris, Plon, 1931.
CAMMAERTS, EMILE, Albert of Belgium, tr. New York, Macmillan, 1935.
CARTON DE WIART, HENRY (Belgian Minister of Justice in 1914). Souvenirs politiques, Brussels, Brouwer, 1948.
COBB, IRWIN S., Paths of Glory—Impressions of War Written at and near the Front, New York, Dutton, 1914.
DAVIS, RICHARD HARDING, With the Allies, New York, Scribner’s, 1914.
DEMBLON, CELESTIN (deputy of Liège), La Guerre a Liège: Pages d’un témoin, Paris, Lib. Anglo-Française, 1915.
D’YDEWALLE, CHARLES, Albert and the Belgians, tr. New York, Morrow, 1935.
ESSEN, LéON VAN DER, The Invasion and the War in Belgium from Liège to the Yser, tr. London, Unwin, 1917.
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