Inside Namur, isolated shots fired by civilians during the night of 24 August also brought instant “reprisals”—thirty civilians were executed and 110 buildings (including the City Hall and much of the Grand’Place) torched. “Our soldiers have been fired on,” one German officer barked at a group of four hundred hostages. “We are going to act as we did at Andenne.* … More than 500 shot.” Charges that Belgian civilians “have also cut off our soldiers’ noses, ears, eyes and fingers” threatened to escalate the reprisals into an orgy of murder and burning.62 This was prevented at the last moment—and the hostages released—by the joint efforts of Bishop Thomas-Louis Heylen and the new city commandant, General Fritz von Below of XXI Corps.
General Michel had managed to march roughly fifty-six hundred soldiers of Belgian 4th ID out of the ruins just before Gallwitz’s forces stormed Namur in hopes of eventually joining King Albert at Antwerp. It was not to be. Near Bioul, 4th Infantry Division was intercepted by Saxon 23d RID and virtually its entire complement taken prisoner without a struggle.63 With the capture of Namur, the Germans had removed a vital corner post of the Allied front on the Meuse and the Sambre. Bülow’s Second Army was now free to march westward along the Sambre River.
* Belgian/French time (Greenwich Mean Time). German army records give German General Time (DGZ), one hour ahead.
* Casualty figures are notoriously inexact. Armies tend to understate their own and to overstate those of the enemy. Moreover, the records are incomplete: Many were not kept in the heat of battle and others were lost in subsequent actions. And there is little consistency in counting: The Germans only tallied wounded who were evacuated to field hospitals; the British included even those returned to duty after immediate, cursory treatment. I have used the term casualties to apply to men killed, wounded, captured, or missing in battle, but not to those affected by disease, mental trauma, psychiatric shock, neuralgia, or battle fatigue. See the entry “casualties” in Richard Holmes, ed., The Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 182–85.
* Ludendorff was assigned chief of staff of Eighth Army in East Prussia and, together with Paul von Hindenburg, defeated two Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. From 1916 to 1918, the two men exercised a “silent dictatorship” over Germany. In 1918, they helped invent the infamous “stab-in-the-back” lie, according to which Germany had never been defeated militarily but rather “stabbed in the back” by its domestic enemies—Jews, Socialists, and Communists. In November 1923, Ludendorff took part in Adolf Hitler’s so-called Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, hoping to use Bavaria as a springboard to topple the democratic and republican government in Berlin.
* Ludendorff never received a patent of nobility for his services, mainly because Kaiser Wilhelm II disliked his gruff nature.
* Biblical name for the devil or one of his associates.
† The nickname referred to the somewhat corpulent F. A. Krupp heiress, Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach; she was not amused.
* “Don’t kill, don’t kill!”
* In 1866 the Saxon army had not invaded Prussia, but had stood alongside the Austrians in Bohemia; thus, it was spared the fate of the Kingdom of Hanover, annexation. Under the Military Convention of 7 February 1867, Saxony was allowed to maintain its own War Ministry, army corps (XII), and cadet corps, but it had to undergo “Prussianization” in terms of organization and weaponry.
* French foreign minister Antoine de Gramont had instructed his ambassador to Prussia, Vincent de Benedetti, to seek out King Wilhelm I, then taking the cure at Bad Ems, to gain assurances that no member of the Hohenzollern family would ever seek the throne of Spain. Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck fueled the flames of war by editing out all conciliatory phrases from Wilhelm’s report of this discussion and then publishing it in the newspapers.
* Books printed before 1501.
* On 20–21 August, units of the Guard Reserve Corps, believing that they had been fired upon by francstireurs at Andenne, Belgium, killed 130 civilians in the town and an equal number in the outlying areas.
CHAPTER FIVE
DEADLY DEADLOCK: THE ARDENNES
A leader has the right to be beaten, but never the right to be surprised.
—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
AT MIDMORNING ON 22 AUGUST 1914, KARL VON BÜLOW AND HIS staff motored to the heights above Fleurus, northeast of Charleroi. It was a sun-drenched autumn day. The countryside was equally delightful—a bountiful land with numerous small settlements un-scarred by stone quarries, coal pits, or factories. “Large grain, potato and beet fields covered the land and grand, majestic rows of trees that lined both sides of the roads gave the countryside its particular character,” the general noted. “Individual manor houses and castles with large, often magnificent parks were scattered throughout the region.”1 It must have reminded him of the family’s hereditary estates in Mecklenburg. But when he reached the crest of the ridge at Fleurus, Bülow’s thoughts returned to more mundane matters. From where he stood, a gentle slope fell away to the deep ravines of the Sambre Valley, while the northeastern side of the industrial town of Charleroi consisted of a “threatening steep wall” of rock. The entire stretch of the river was covered for several hundred meters on both banks with a jarring jumble of slag heaps, small factories, warehouses, homes, and cobblestone streets—the so-called borinage.* It was not a good place to attack.
On the basis of the latest reports from Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, which suggested that the French had marshaled seven or eight army corps south of the Sambre and that no British formations had yet arrived on the French left, Bülow made his operational decision. He ordered the 137 battalions and 820 guns of Second Army—from left to right, Karl von Plettenberg’s Guard Corps, Otto von Emmich’s X Corps, Guenther von Kirchbach’s X Reserve Corps, and Karl von Einem’s VII Corps—to advance to the Sambre against Charles Lanrezac’s French Fifth Army of 193 battalions and 692 guns coming up from the south. With no enemy apparently in front of First Army, Bülow ordered Alexander von Kluck to alter his line of advance from southwest to due south so as to bring First Army into alignment with Second Army and to secure the latter’s flank as it turned against French Fifth Army. Both Kluck and his chief of staff, Hermann von Kuhl, vigorously protested the order. A turn to the south would expose First Army’s flanks to a possible attack by British forces, which they, unlike Moltke, believed had already landed at Ostend, Calais, and Dunkirk. They wanted to continue on a course north of Mons (Bergen) in order to turn the Allied flank.2 Bülow, fearing that this would create a gap between First and Second armies, overruled them.
SECOND ARMY’S ARRIVAL NORTH of the Sambre River finally forced French chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre to question his deployment plan. Until that point, Joffre, like almost no other senior commander in modern times, had lived in a world of denial, oblivious to all intelligence reports—French, British, and Belgian alike. At a time like this, his dominant characteristics—imperturbableness and stubbornness, if not downright pigheadedness—ill served the French army. For Joffre’s fixation on carrying out Plan XVII regardless of what the enemy did blinded him to the grave danger developing in Belgium. As late as 5 August, he still believed that the main German thrust into France was coming via Sedan rather than farther north by way of Namur, Dinant, and Givet, and that the Ardennes remained the least defended pathway into Germany. Put differently, he did not appreciate that the Ardennes constituted the hub of the German wheel through Belgium.
For two weeks, Joffre stubbornly insisted that his deployment plan be executed. From 8 to 14 August, he ignored intelligence reports from his Deuxième Bureau and from the Belgians that the Germans had at least six army corps heading for Liège. He grudgingly moved Louis Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps to Dinant, but in his Instruction particulière No. 6 insisted that the rest of Fifth Army be ready to storm the Ardennes; hence, he augmented it with 37th and 38th infantry divisions (ID) of African XIX Corps
.3 Reports from Jean-François Sordet’s cavalry corps, in fact, suggested no major German buildup in Belgium. Sordet had taken his horsemen on a mad three-day, 180-kilometer dash through southern Belgium, the Ardennes, and west of the Meuse River as far as Charleroi. Nowhere had they spotted significant enemy formations. Thus, the information Sordet sent to Joffre reinforced the generalissimo’s preconception of German intentions.
BATTLES OF CHARLEROI AND MONS, 21-24 AUGUST 1914
On 14 August, the day on which he launched the great offensive by First and Second armies in Lorraine (to coincide with the Russian offensive into East Prussia), Joffre had two distinguished visitors at the Grand quartier général (GQG) in Vitry-le-François.4 The first was Charles Louis Marie Lanrezac. Born on 31 July 1852 in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Lanrezac fought in the Franco-Prussian War and thereafter established his reputation at the Saint-Cyr Military Academy as a brilliant teacher and gifted theoretician. In 1906, he served under Joffre with 6th ID and became the general’s protégé. In 1911, Joffre briefly considered the “lion of the French army” for the post of deputy chief. Instead, Lanrezac was made divisional commander that year and corps commander in 1912. In the spring of 1914, he reached what might well have been the pinnacle of a stellar career when he was selected for the Supreme War Council and appointed commander-designate for Fifth Army in the event of war. Historian Sewell Tyng suggested that Lanrezac was “endowed with the gift of Cassandra,”* and that he “lacked confidence in himself, in his superiors and … in the men under his orders.”5 He also lacked faith in Joffre’s operations plan. When he was handed the details of the wartime mission for Fifth Army in May 1914, Lanrezac expressed grave concern about a design that discounted a German drive west of the Meuse River.6
By August, that concern bordered on panic. Lanrezac informed Joffre that the known German force in Belgium was equal to his Fifth Army plus the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in all eight army corps and four cavalry divisions. He strongly suggested that Fifth Army not face northeast for the charge through the Ardennes but rather north to deploy along the line of the Sambre River; failure to do so would allow Bülow to envelop Fifth Army’s flank as it marched toward the east. More, Lanrezac begged GQG not to proceed with its main offensive, and especially not to send Pierre Ruffey’s Third Army and Fernand de Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army into “that death-trap of the Ardennes.”7 In short, to cast aside the French deployment plan. Joffre would have none of this. “We are of the opinion that the Germans have not deployed there.”8
Joffre’s second visitor was even more formidable. Joseph-Simon Galliéni was France’s most distinguished soldier. Of Corsican stock, Galliéni was born at Saint-Béat, in southwestern France, on 24 April 1849. After serving in the Franco-Prussian War, he spent the next three decades in the colonies: Senegal, French Sudan, Indo-China, and Madagascar, where Joffre served under him. In 1905, Galliéni returned to France as commander of XIV Corps at Lyon; five years later, he was considered for the post of chief of the General Staff, but he declined. He retired in April 1914 but was reactivated in August to organize the defense of Paris.
Galliéni’s physical appearance alone commanded respect: Straight as an arrow and always immaculate in full-dress uniform, he had a rugged, chiseled face with piercing eyes, a white droopy mustache, and a pince-nez clamped on the bridge of his nose. Already rumored to be Joffre’s successor, he was unsurprisingly kept at arm’s length by the chief of the General Staff in a small office at Paris and denied forces with which to defend the capital. On 14 August, Joffre granted Galliéni a cursory few minutes of his time and then passed him off to Deputy Chief of Staff Henri Berthelot, a corpulent man stripped down to blouse and slippers to alleviate the torrid August heat. Joffre and Berthelot had as little time for Galliéni’s “alarmist” warnings of a German advance west of the Meuse as they had shown for Lanrezac’s concerns.
But the Grand quartier général planned without the Germans. The next day, 15 August, reports poured in that ten thousand enemy riders had crossed the Meuse at Huy and that Franchet d’Espèrey’s I Corps, recently detached from Lanrezac’s Fifth Army, was engaged in a fight with strong German troop formations around Dinant. These reports troubled Joffre: Could it be possible that Lanrezac and Galliéni were right in their assessments? Might the Germans really be trying to pull off a “grand Cannae,” suckering the main French advance into the Ardennes while two southern armies were driving through the Trouée de Charmes north to Sedan, and two (or three) armies were advancing through the Namur-Brussels gap south across the Sambre River? If this was the case, the entire French army might be swept up in a giant battle of encirclement west of the Ardennes.
These were trying days at Vitry-le-François. Raymond Poincaré’s cabinet was on the verge of dissolution. The Chamber of Deputies was demanding War Minister Adolphe Messimy’s resignation due to his inability to exert civilian control over Joffre and GQG. Georges Clemenceau was screaming for the president’s head. Poincaré, in turn, was incensed that Joffre refused to allow him to visit the front. The Belgians were accusing the French of having “abandoned” them to their fate. Lanrezac and Galliéni were badgering the General Staff with their “alarmist” assessments of German troop strength in Belgium. And the British remained as diffident as ever.
The German advances toward Huy and Dinant forced Joffre and Berthelot grudgingly to come to grips with the fact that the enemy might already be dictating the flow of battle. At 3:30 PM* on 15 August, Joffre sprang into action and issued the first of three major “instructions.” As a precautionary measure, Instruction particulière No. 10 ordered Lanrezac to move Fifth Army up into the right angle of the Meuse and Sambre rivers—that is, to face the approaching German Second Army around Charleroi and Third Army at Dinant. This necessitated a march of 120 kilometers in five days. As well, Joffre subordinated Sordet’s cavalry corps to Fifth Army. But still, the preconceived notions of German intentions and the fixation on the original concentration plan remained. While Special Instruction No. 10 acknowledged that the enemy seemed to be making “his principal effort by his right wing north of Givet,” it nevertheless ordered Lanrezac to spread his corps out in the direction of Mariembourg and Philippeville “in concert with the BEF and Belgian forces.” As stated earlier, it also forced him to surrender Joseph Eydoux’s XI Corps to Langle de Cary’s concurrently ordered attack “in the general direction of Neufchâteau”—that is, the heart of the Ardennes.9 Incredibly, Joffre informed Field Marshal Sir John French that apart from the forces around Liège, the Germans had only cavalry in Belgium. Lanrezac was convinced that Fifth Army alone stood between the Germans and defeat.
To be sure, the German buildup in Belgium could no longer be ignored. Thus, on 18 August, Joffre issued his second order (Instruction particulière No. 13) to the three armies on the French left.10 It was based in part on his latest assessment of the enemy’s strength and position “around Thionville, in Luxembourg and in Belgium.” Above all, the shift to the left was dictated by the fact that the French the day before had captured the order of battle of Bülow’s Second Army. Still, Joffre put the best spin on the captured document: He interpreted it to mean that the German center was weak because of Moltke’s concentration on both flanks, in Lorraine and in Belgium. Thus, Plan XVII was still on the table. But the Deuxième Bureau now estimated that there were thirteen to fifteen German corps between Liège and Thionville (Diedenhofen), divided into two “principal groups”: a northern wing of seven or eight corps and four cavalry divisions between Liège and Bastogne, and a southern wing of six or seven corps and two to three cavalry divisions between Bastogne and Thionville. Joffre compromised, in his own way. He decided to strike what he mistakenly insisted on calling the enemy’s “northern group” with his Third and Fourth armies around Sedan and Montmédy. Third Army was to advance toward Beuveille and Fourth Army toward Nives. Once they had defeated the German forces between Liège and Bastogne, Ruffey and Langle de Cary were to sweep west and roll u
p the flank and rear of the German northern armies. Intelligence reports from his cavalry still insisted that the enemy had not yet crossed the Meuse between Huy and Givet. Secrecy and surprise were the keys to Joffre’s design. “I draw your attention,” he lectured Langle de Cary, “to the necessity of not revealing our maneuver prior to the moment when it is unleashed.”11 In short, Joffre’s cherished offensive design seemed back on track.
With regard to Fifth Army, Joffre laid out two possible scenarios. If the German right wing marched on both banks of the Meuse in an attempt to pass the corridor between Givet and Brussels, Lanrezac “in complete liaison with the British and Belgian Armies” was to oppose this movement by outflanking the Germans from the north. But if the enemy deployed “only a fraction of his right wing” on the left bank of the Meuse, then Lanrezac was to wheel his forces east to help the drive through the Ardennes planned for Third and Fourth armies. The British and the Belgians would be left to deal with the German units in Belgium. For an army consisting of three corps and seven divisions spread over a front nearly fifty kilometers wide and on the move up to the Sambre, Special Instruction No. 13 was impossible. Lanrezac ignored it and continued his drive north, drums beating, bugles blowing, flags flying, and the men lustily singing the march “Sambre-et-Meuse.”
The Marne, 1914 Page 17