The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

  Moltke insisted on remaining at Koblenz partly to keep a close eye on the volatile kaiser, and partly to be equidistant from the Eastern Front. He resisted several pleas from Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Tappen, his chief of operations, to move at least the OHL closer to the front in Belgium, perhaps somewhere north of Namur, with the argument that this “insurrectionist” land had not yet been pacified.34 Incredibly, Moltke directed General William Balcke, his chief of field telegraphy, to take up headquarters at Bad Ems, well hidden in a small valley east of the General Staff nerve center at Koblenz. And in sharp contrast with his French counterpart, Joffre—who used his private chauffeur, Georges Bouillot, winner of the French Grand Prix in 1912 and 1913, to rush him to the various army commands—Moltke left execution of his war plans to the individual army commanders. He remained firm in the belief that peacetime staff rides and war games had sufficiently honed their skills at interaction and cooperation, and that the “intentions” of the General Staff could best be relayed “orally through the sending of an officer of the High Command.” Most especially, he placed his trust in the sixty-eight-year-old Bülow, whom he considered to be Germany’s “most competent” army commander.35

  BY 18 AUGUST, the second Battle of the Frontiers (also known as Sambre-et-Meuse, or Charleroi) was about to begin. The northern German armies were driving west across the undulating plains of Brabant into Hainaut Province—Kluck just south of Brussels, and Bülow along the Wavre-Namur axis. The right wing of Hausen’s Third Army as well as elements of the left wing of Bülow’s Second Army were closing on Namur, at the junction of the Sambre and Meuse rivers. At Andenne and Seilles, where Bülow’s men crossed the Meuse, and at Aarschot, where Kluck’s troops drove the Belgian army behind the Gette, the pattern established at Battice and Visé repeated itself. German soldiers were convinced that civilians had fired on them and, worse, mutilated the bodies of their fallen comrades. “Man hat geschossen!” (“We have been shot at!”) became the battle cry. Reprisals were swift and harsh: Suspected shooters were rounded up and executed, homes of suspected armed civilians burned to the ground, priests as well as burgomasters taken hostage, and hundreds of Belgians deported to Germany in cattle cars.36

  General Ludwig von Sieger, chief of field munitions and recently returned from Liège, regaled Imperial Headquarters with gruesome stories of the “bestiality” of Belgian civilians in the path of war. Many had “clawed out the eyes and cut the throats” of wounded German soldiers. Despite the constant prewar reminders of francs-tireurs in 1870–71, Moltke’s warriors simply had been unprepared for this form of irregular warfare. “But now we are finally moving against [Belgian] residents with utmost severity,” Sieger was happy to report. “They have been executed en masse, their villages razed.” He concluded that such “ruthless severity” had not been “without effect.”37

  At other places in Belgium, the German advance was more orderly and less brutal. After Liège, General von Einem’s VII Corps, part of Bülow’s Second Army, pointed west toward Wavre. The plains of Brabant were a welcome relief from the concrete forts of Liège. “The land has been cultivated just like it is at home,” Einem noted in his diary. “It is very pretty, stretching well off to the distance; a great region to do battle.” By 20–21 August, VII Corps had passed Wavre and approached Waterloo. “99 years ago all those people who today are our enemies defeated Napoleon and his Frenchmen there,” he ruefully noted. “We are now on historic ground and today will advance along the same roads that took [Field Marshal Gebhard von] Blücher and his victorious formations to Waterloo or Belle Alliance.”38 Einem, the graduate of the Prussian Military Academy, had fulfilled one of his youthful dreams. He could not repress his feelings. “On the basis of [my] studies, I knew the configurations of the land so well that nothing surprised me”—except the British Lion Mound of 1826, a conical heap with 226 steps leading up to a great stone lion. A century ago the battle had been fought in rain; in 1914, a blazing sun scorched the fields.

  The Belgian army, its brief heroics at Haelen notwithstanding, was in danger of being cut off from Antwerp by German First and Second armies along the line of the Gette. King Albert appealed to Joffre for French forces to come north across the Sambre to strike the enemy armies driving toward Antwerp in the flank. Joffre coldly replied that German formations west of the Meuse were but a “screen” for the main German drive around Sedan.39 The truth of the matter is that Joffre continued to ignore warnings from both his intelligence staff and his field commanders that as many as eight German army corps and four cavalry divisions were already in Belgium, and instead clung to his firm belief that the Germans would not cross the Meuse in force but concentrate their efforts in the center, through the Ardennes. Obstinacy and stolidity, two of his main character traits, hampered early reassessment.

  On 18 August, Moltke repeated his earlier placement of German Sixth and Seventh armies in Alsace-Lorraine under a single command—that of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria—and “subordinated” Kluck to Bülow in Belgium.40 It was an ill-advised move. Bülow at once used his new authority to order Kluck to release Alexander von Linsingen’s II Corps to execute a flank attack left from north of Diest against the retreating Belgian forces in hopes of encircling them before they reached Antwerp, while First and Second armies, each with three corps, advanced on the Gette from the east. Kluck was furious. He believed that his command authority had been infringed upon, that the new orders to II Corps only meant needless further marching and fatigue, and that Bülow’s action would force him to cover the advance of II Corps, thereby slowing his advance toward the west. His anger was at full tide when he discovered the same day that King Albert had refused to make a stand on the Gette and instead had ordered a withdrawal behind the Dijle River to Fortress Antwerp. He found little consolation in the fact that Ferdinand von Quast’s IX Corps had inflicted severe losses (1,639 officers and men) on the Belgians’ left at Tirlemont.41

  King Albert reached Antwerp on 20 August, only to be met by a sharp protest concerning the “retreat before a mere cavalry screen” from Colonel Jacques Aldebert of the French Military Mission. Aldebert, obviously briefed by Joffre, still insisted that the Germans would not advance beyond the Meuse in force. Had King Albert done the right thing? Or should he have withdrawn to the southwest to link forces with the British?42 As King of the Belgians, he refused to abandon his country. By falling back on Antwerp—which Moltke had hoped to prevent—he forced Kluck to detach Hans von Beseler’s III Reserve Corps (and later also IX Reserve Corps) to cover Antwerp and its garrison of sixty thousand men, thereby substantially weakening First Army.

  Albert’s decision to abandon his capital was militarily unimportant. Brussels was not a fortress. It had no strategic arteries. It had not figured in prewar military planning. When foreign diplomats discovered that the Garde civique was digging trenches and mustering companies in the city’s parks, they pleaded (successfully) with Burgomaster Adolphe Max to end the foolishness, to declare Brussels an “open city” and thus spare it the fate of Liège. At 3:30 PM on 20 August, Friedrich Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps entered the city with divisional bands playing the patriotic march “Die Wacht AM Rhein;” the troops paraded for hours before their commander. American ambassador Brand Whitlock likened the German entry by a “mighty grey, grim horde” to a “thing of steel that came thundering on with shrill fifes and throbbing drums.”43 The Germans imposed an indemnity of 50 million francs on Brussels and 450 million on Brabant Province, to be paid within ten days. News of the fall of the Belgian capital evoked “fierce joy in Berlin.” Church bells rang well into the night and people embraced one another, “frantic with delight.”44 Brussels had been spared destruction.

  THE ADVANCE TO LOUVAIN AND ANTWERP

  Not so Louvain (Leuven). When troops of First Army approached the city on 19 August, its forty-two thousand inhabitants—mainly educated, genteel people such as priests, nuns, professors, and wealthy retirees—sensibly declared it to be an “open city.
” Kluck thought it sufficiently secure to establish his headquarters there for the next four days. An uneasy truce held for almost a week under the cover of martial law in what the Germans called Löwen. Then, as First Army moved out toward the French border, fears mounted at the OHL that King Albert’s forces might see this as the moment to sally out from Antwerp and hit Kluck’s overextended supplies and communications network. Elements of Belgian 2d ID and its cavalry detachment in fact did so on 25–26 August, driving some German units back as far as Malines (Mechelen) and Louvain. By the afternoon of 25 August, about ten thousand German troops—many just arrived from the siege of Liège—bivouacked in Louvain.

  Suddenly, an alarm sounded.45 Eyewitnesses could not agree whether it was at 5:30, or 6:30 PM. Both sides did agree that sporadic shooting broke out by 8 PM. It soon spread through the city’s main streets and squares. The tac-tac of machine guns then joined in. The whistles of emergency workers pierced the dusk that by now had enveloped Louvain. The cry of “We have been shot at!” was taken up by countless German soldiers—fueled by fear, panic, hunger, exhaustion, and drink. The few Belgian civilians who dared venture out saw a heavy red glow and gray smoke swirl down the Boulevard de Tirlemont and across the Place de la Station and the Place du Peuple. The flames spread to the Palais de Justice, the Church of Saint-Pierre, the university, and the Clothworkers’ Hall with its library of 230,000 volumes, including more than 1,000 incunabula* and 750 medieval manuscripts. Dead horses littered the streets. Corpses were collected and piled up at the Place de la Station. Priests and members of the Garde civique were singled out for abuse.

  For three days, Louvain lived in terror. On 27 August, the Germans announced that they were about to bombard the city and expelled 10,000 civilians. The bombardment was never carried out. When the fires finally died down, 248 citizens had been killed, perhaps as many as 40,000 deported to Germany, and twenty-one hundred buildings destroyed. Hugh Gibson, secretary of the American legation in Brussels, visited Louvain on 28 August.46 “The road was black with frightened civilians carrying away small bundles from the ruins of their homes. Ahead was a great column of dull gray smoke which completely hid the city. We could hear the muffled sound of firing ahead.” A small boy joyously cried out, “Les Américains sont arrivés! Les Américains sont arrivés!” After assuring the lad that the Americans had not arrived in Belgium, Gibson penetrated deeper into Louvain. He was confronted by burning houses and cinders so thick that he had to put on his motoring goggles. Many of the city’s former stately homes were little more than “blackened walls with smouldering timbers inside.” The streets were littered with wreckage: “hats and wooden shoes, German helmets, swords and saddles, bottles and all sorts of bundles which had been dropped and abandoned when the trouble began.” Telegraph and trolley wires were down. Dead men and horses littered every square. Countless houses were still burning. The Boulevard de Tirlemont “looked as though it had been swept by a cyclone.” Everywhere, the looting and shooting continued unabated. “It was all most businesslike.”

  The story of what occurred at Louvain during those terrible three days in August quickly made its way around the world and has remained a topic of debate ever since. For the Germans, the looting, burning, and shooting were “justified reprisals” for armed civilians inserting themselves into a military battle. There is a great deal of comment in German unit histories about the soldiers being tired, hungry, thirsty, and drunk from “liberated” wine stocks. But there is equal insistence on having witnessed Belgian civilians firing from windows and rooftops. General von Kluck in his memoirs conceded that “tough and inexorable reprisals” including “summary shooting of individuals” and “punitive burning of houses” had been applied by “local commanders on the spot.”47 The German official history of the war merely acknowledged that 27th Landwehr Brigade stood in and around Louvain on 27–28 August and that Belgian soldiers and Civic Guardsmen had discarded their uniforms and shot at German regulars “from behind bushes and houses.”48 Not a word more.

  For the Allies, Louvain became synonymous with German “barbarism.” Hundreds of lurid posters showing the Germans as modern-day “Huns” and Wilhelm II as “the modern Attila” or as “King of the Vandals” circulated almost immediately. Undoubtedly, the most famous was produced in the United States. It showed a giant gorilla, wearing a German spiked helmet with the word militarism inscribed on it and sporting a Kaiser Wilhelm–like upturned mustache, emerging from the sea against the background of a burned-out European city. In his right hand he held a bloody club labeled KULTUR; in the other, a bare-bosomed damsel obviously in distress.49 American journalists from Collier’s Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Chicago Tribune, among others, fed their readers a steady diet of despondent Belgian refugees, burned-out cities, rotting animal and human corpses, and taunting “Huns.” In their exhaustive study, German Atrocities 1914, historians John Horne and Alan Kramer conclude that while there “is no serious evidence that the German actions in Louvain were premeditated,”50 the “reprisals” of arson, executions, expulsions, and deportations were part of a systematic policy of intimidation and terror. They record a total of 4,421 Belgian civilians killed.51

  THERE REMAINED NAMUR, the last of the great eastern Belgian for tresses not yet taken. It not only was an important commercial center at the confluence of the Meuse and Sambre rivers, but also a potential rallying and sallying point for Franco-Belgian formations.52 By 18 August, the three infantry divisions of Max von Gallwitz’s Guard Reserve Corps were advancing on Namur. The next morning, Moltke’s staff sent Gallwitz a detailed siege plan prepared already in peacetime.53 It contained data on the size of the fortress, the number of defenders, the caliber and placement of guns, and even a step-by-step plan of attack. Gallwitz ignored it. The front was fluid, and he was not about to halt the advance to conduct a leisurely, medieval siege. Instead, he persuaded Bülow to send him XI Corps—of Hausen’s Saxon Third Army—as reinforcement. It was the first of many such encroachments to come. Hausen raised no objection, although he would have preferred to detach XII Reserve Corps instead in order to keep his regulars in the line of advance.54

  The Romans had built a fortified outlook post on a rocky ledge overlooking Namur and the Meuse Valley in the third and fourth centuries; Emperor Charles V had constructed a citadel, La Médiane, on the very spot between 1542 and 1555; and Sebastien de Vauban had greatly expanded the citadel into a stone fortress for Louis XIV of France. Napoleon I had demolished large parts of the citadel since he saw no need for it as he had expanded his empire far to the east. But the new Kingdom of Belgium saw merit in the old ruins as part of its planned east-west line of defense, and thus hired Brialmont to fortify Namur between 1888 and 1892. He sited a ring of nine forts some eight kilometers from the center of the city and linked them (as at Liège) with an elaborate system of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. In August 1914, la position fortifiée de Namur was defended by thirty-five thousand soldiers, mostly of Augustin Michel’s Belgian 4th ID as well as four regiments of fortress infantry. At the last moment, the garrison had been augmented by Belgian 8th Infantry Brigade—which, finding itself isolated at Huy, had blown up the bridges over the Meuse there and fallen back on Namur. King Albert’s orders again were straightforward: “Resist to the last.”55 Carrier pigeons maintained contact between Namur and the Belgian field army.

  On 20 August, Gallwitz, an artillery specialist, began to test Namur’s defenses by randomly shelling one of its forts, Marchovellette. But he was not about to repeat the senseless massed infantry assaults with which Emmich had shattered a good part of his X Corps at Liège. Instead, he methodically concentrated his forces—Guard Reserve Corps to the north and Saxon XI Corps to the southeast of Namur. Then he brought up the heavy siege guns released by the surrender of Liège: four batteries of Austrian Škoda howitzers and one battery of the Krupp Big Berthas. Finally, he convinced Bülow to attack the French at Charleroi to tie down Charles Lanrezac’s French Fif
th Army and so prevent it from lifting the siege at Namur.

  Gallwitz got serious on 21 August, pulverizing Namur’s forts relentlessly with his heavy siege guns.56 Two forts were reduced within forty-eight hours. Two counterattacks by Michel’s men were easily beaten back. By 23 August, the entire northern and eastern fronts of la position fortifiée de Namur had been reduced and five of its nine forts put out of commission. In all, the Germans fired 126 Krupp 420mm shells, 573 škoda 305mm shells, and 6,763 coastal artillery 210mm shells at Namur.57 Only 45th and 148th regiments, 45th IB, from Augustin Gérard’s II Corps of French Fifth Army managed to approach Namur. They arrived just in time for the vanguard to be swept up in the German assault. On the evening of 23 August, the Prussians and Saxons stormed Namur. Gallwitz took sixty-seven hundred Belgian and French prisoners of war, captured twelve field guns as well as the forts’ defensive artillery, and added vast stores of ammunition, food, and wagons to his corps. German losses were but nine hundred, of which one-third were fatal. Overall Belgian losses were set at fifteen thousand men, two-thirds of whom had belonged to 4th ID.58

  The capture of Namur yet again was accompanied by acts of terror on the part of the occupiers. As before, the cry “We have been shot at!” sufficed to stampede German commanders into severe “retaliation.” Upon receiving reports that nineteen armed civilians had fired on his men, Hans von Kirchbach, commanding XII Reserve Corps, reacted swiftly. “We burned down the houses from which the shots had come.”59 Saxon soldiers sent countless letters home confirming the “reprisals.” Arthur Prausch, with 139th IR advancing on Namur, wrote his brother that civilians had fired on his unit and that he had seen comrades “with their throats slit” lying in the streets.60 Villages where such “despicable acts” purportedly occurred were immediately burned to the ground. “In one village we shot 35 men as well as several women, including two priests. … They all lie heaped in a pile.” Max Basta, 65th IR, Württemberg 16th Reserve Infantry Division (RID), likewise wrote home his impressions of the brutal nature of the war south of Namur. “All Belgian villages have been leveled to the ground; we marched through smoldering ruins.” He most remembered the smell of destruction. “The swirling smoke caused by burning human and animal corpses forced our eyes to tear.” It had become a harsh war. “Whoever fired on our troops or in any way appeared suspicious was gunned down.”61 Namur’s inhabitants were gathered up to witness the public executions, and then released.