The Marne, 1914

by Holger H. Herwig

  Above all, Moltke’s General Directive was a rude shock for First Army, which received the relayed radiogram at 6 AM on 5 September. It entailed a painful retreat from advanced positions seized after long marches and heavy fighting between the Marne and Oise. Without direct radio communications either to the OHL or to Bülow’s Second Army on his left flank, Kluck had advanced almost in a vacuum. He was thus without insight into the overall situation of the campaign in the west and about to collide with the left wing of Bülow’s Second Army around Montmirail. He sent out no cavalry or aerial reconnaissance to the west, where French Sixth Army had been stood up, and was intent only on pursuing the British and French columns fleeing southward before him.

  In the late afternoon, Kluck at Rebais had a visitor from Luxembourg: Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, chief of the OHL’s Intelligence Section. It was Hentsch’s first visit to the front, designed to establish better lines of communication among the field armies. Hentsch was not a bearer of good news. He informed Chief of Staff Hermann von Kuhl that Crown Prince Rupprecht’s armies were tied down at Nancy and Épinal, unable to break through the Charmes Gap and drive north, and that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Fifth Army and Duke Albrecht’s Fourth Army had made little progress around Verdun. Most likely, Joffre had used this stagnation of the fronts on the left and in the center of the German line to shuttle troops to the area around Paris, on Kluck’s right.40 First Army could expect an attack from the west any day.

  Kuhl at once realized that he was “confronted with an entirely new situation.” Without the “breakthrough on the upper Moselle,” the giant Cannae being planned for the French army could not take place. The enemy “was by no means being held [down] everywhere” by Moltke’s other armies; in fact, “large displacements of troops were in progress.” The danger on First Army’s right flank had come out of nowhere. It was real. It had to be addressed at once. “The suggestion, which we had made that morning, of first throwing the French back across the Seine, was finished.”41 Reluctantly, Kuhl agreed with Hentsch that First Army’s four corps had to be withdrawn behind the Marne over the next two days “calmly and in orderly fashion” to a line Meaux–La Ferté-sous-Jouarre–La Ferté-Gaucher. This would then enable Second Army to swing around on its left and face Paris, its right wing on the Marne and its left wing on the Seine.

  THE EVE OF THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE, 2 SEPTEMBER 1914

  Having reached full agreement with First Army, Hentsch the next day traveled to Second Army headquarters at Champaubert. He repeated his (and Moltke’s) bleak assessment of the German campaign in the west, and bemoaned the lack of four army corps “with which we could win the campaign.”42 One can only wonder whether he regretted the General Staff’s earlier dispatch of Guard Reserve Corps and XI Army Corps to the Eastern Front, as well as of II Corps to besiege Antwerp, and of VII Reserve Corps to invest Maubeuge. It was now the thirty-fifth day of mobilization. Schlieffen had prescribed victory on the thirty-ninth or fortieth day.

  THE BRUTAL HEAT FINALLY broke on 5 September. The first engagement in what came to be called the Battle of the Marne took place forty kilometers northeast of Paris. The future battlefield was bordered to the north by Villers-Cotterêts, the Bois du Roi, and Lévignen; to the east by the Ourcq River, which meandered on a southwesterly course from La Ferté-Milon to Lizy-sur-Ourcq before flowing into the Marne between Congis and Varreddes; and to the south by the Canal de l’Ourcq and the Marne. The land bordered by these three obstacles consisted of a hilly plateau studded with numerous villages, orchards, and grain fields. It was cut by three small streams: from north to south, the Grivelle, Gergogne, and Thérouanne. Each was embedded between gently rising wooded slopes of 80 to 120 meters; the chalky soil in places was dotted with bogs,43 difficult terrain to do battle.

  What Kuhl had called the “phantom Paris” became “flesh and blood” by 5 September. Early that warm and clear morning, General Maunoury, in accordance with Joffre’s General Instruction No. 6, had advanced out of the Paris Entrenched Camp with Sixth Army. Once a ragtag collection of 80,000 reservists and second-line troops, Sixth Army now totaled 150,000 men: Victor Boëlle’s IV Corps, Frédéric Vautier’s VII Corps, Henri de Lamaze’s Fifth Group of 55th RID and 56th RID, Antoine Drude’s 45th ID, Charles Ebener ’s Sixth Group of 61st RID and 62nd RID, and Jean-François Sordet’s cavalry corps.44 Maunoury placed 55th RID and 56th RID as well as a Moroccan brigade north of Dammartin-en-Goële; Étienne de Villaret’s 14th ID of VII Corps and 63rd RID at Louvres; a brigade from the cavalry corps north of Claye-Souilly; and Raoul de Lartigue’s 8th ID at the Marne on his right flank to maintain communications with Sir John French and the BEF. These were some of the units that German fliers had spotted on 3 and 4 September.

  A slender, almost delicate soldier of sixty-seven, Maunoury had been wounded in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and had served for a while as military governor of Paris. He was now all that stood between Kluck and the capital. He planned to march his ten infantry divisions to a position northeast of Meaux, and from there to strike Kluck’s right flank the next day along the north bank of the Marne. Louis Gillet’s reserve cavalry brigade had scouted Maunoury’s route of advance toward Meaux and found no German forces.45 It thus came as a total surprise when around noon a hail of 77mm artillery shells from the heights of Monthyon, northwest of Meaux, burst into the thick marching columns of 14th Infantry Division.

  The unsuspected adversary was Hans von Gronau. Detached to guard First Army’s right flank, IV Reserve Corps stood to the north of, and at right angles to, Kluck’s main force around Barcy and Chambry. Gronau, at age sixty-four, was a Prussian artillery specialist. After several rotations through the General Staff in the 1880s and 1890s, he had commanded artillery regiments and brigades. Retired in 1911 and ennobled two years later, he was reactivated at the outbreak of the war.46 At the Ourcq, Gronau commanded a much-depleted force: 43d Infantry Brigade (IB) had been taken from him to invest Brussels, with the result that IV Reserve Corps consisted of a mere fifteen (rather than the normal twenty-five) battalions of infantry and twelve batteries of light artillery.47 It had neither aircraft nor electronic communications. With just 22,800 men, it was 12,000 under full strength. Moreover, Otto von Garnier’s 4th Cavalry Division (CD) had but twelve hundred sabers, having been battered by British 1st Cavalry Brigade and Royal Horse Artillery around Néry on 1 September. Still, the vigilant Garnier kept up his patrols and detected French cavalry, some scouts, and a strong column of infantry marching toward Montgé-en-Goële, halfway between Paris and Meaux. Were these merely French advance guards? Or units of the Paris Garrison out on patrol? Or had Joffre somehow managed to cobble together a new army north of the capital?

  Without aerial reconnaissance and with the western horizon blocked by a series of wooded hillocks between Saint-Soupplets and Penchard, the safe option was to stay put and await developments. But the wily Gronau threw out the textbook and made a quick decision that most likely would have resulted in failure at most staff colleges. “Lieutenant-Colonel, there is no other way out,” he informed his chief of staff, Friedrich von der Heyde, “we must attack!”48 Without delay, Gronau sent 7th RID and 22d RID to occupy the long, wooded ridge around Saint-Mard, Dammartin, and Monthyon. Their orders were simple: Attack any and all forces approaching out of the west. At 11:30 AM, Gronau’s artillery spotted a mighty host of French infantry and artillery—de Lamaze’s 55th RID and 56th RID as well as Ernest Blondlat’s 1st Moroccan Brigade. They advanced northwest of Iverny along cobblestone roads lined with shimmering poplars, past gray stone farmhouses with gray slate roofs, and through fields of beets, mustard, wheat, and clover. As soon as they were within range, Gronau opened fire.

  The battle raged fiercely throughout the day. A German artillerist (Hoyer) with 7th Reserve Field Artillery Regiment wrote home that the gun crews “were killed like flies.” Some nearby batteries lost all their officers; his own unit, 70 percent. “And the horses!” In a nearby stable Hoyer found fift
y dead in a single heap.49 An anonymous noncommissioned officer with 26th Infantry Regiment (IR) remembered the horror of the battlefield. “The cadavers of animals of all kind lie everywhere and spread a horrible smell.” After a brief rest and a two-hundred-liter barrel of red wine “liberated” at a “swampy farm,” the men of the 26th moved on through “high grass, bushes and thickets.” They found a small wood. “Sharp cracks beside us, ahead of us and above us. One shrapnel after another rains down on us. It covers the entire wood. We run from one large tree to another. … Countless wounded and dead lie all around us.”50 Darkness finally brought relief. German IV Reserve Corps held the ridge. Maunoury had not been able to cross the 120-meter-deep valley of the Ourcq River. Meaux remained well out of his reach.

  Gronau’s swift action proved critical to the course of the Battle of the Marne. It denied Joffre the all-important element of surprise.51 Instead of Maunoury striking Kluck’s right flank unawares, it was now French Sixth Army that had been taken by surprise. Moreover, the action had taken place a full eighteen hours before Joffre originally had planned to mount his great offensive between Verdun and Paris, thus throwing his overarching concept into question. Gronau and his band of valiant reservists, in the words of the German official history, had “with one bold stroke” finally brought clarity: “The German army’s right flank was, in fact, seriously threatened.”52 And “with a rare appreciation of the strategic realities,”53 Gronau understood that he was vastly outnumbered (about six to one) and withdrew IV Reserve Corps to relative safety ten kilometers behind the small Thérouanne stream. He would receive the coveted Pour le Mérite two years after he had first earned it at Monthyon.

  Shortly before midnight on 5 September, the telephone rang at First Army headquarters at Rebais. It was Gronau with news of the encounter with Maunoury’s Sixth Army. Chief of Staff von Kuhl, who at 7 PM had only received spotty news from Aircraft B65 that a minor engagement had occurred near Meaux,54 at once grasped the gravity of the situation. There were but two choices—regroup and retreat to defensive positions to protect the German outer right flank, or blunt the French attack with a counteroffensive. Kuhl chose the latter. Kluck agreed: “Wheel 1. Army to the right at once, quickly form up on the right, attack across the Ourcq.”55 Just after midnight, Kluck and Kuhl ordered Alexander von Linsingen’s II Corps to quick-march from south of the Marne to west of the Ourcq in the direction of Lizy-sur-Ourq and Germigny-l’Évêque, there to buttress Gronau’s position behind the Thérouanne. Later on the afternoon of 6 September, they also dispatched Friedrich Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps to west of the Ourcq. It was a hard undertaking, as both corps had to cross two, and in some places three, river barriers. Yet the two corps incredibly managed two days of forced marches that stood out in the annals of the Prussian army: sixty kilometers on 7 September and seventy the following day, over bloated corpses of men and beasts alike, past columns of wounded and prisoners of war, through poplar woods and pear orchards.

  It was a daring decision with potentially deadly ramifications. For, in the process, a fifty-kilometer-wide gap developed in First Army’s line between Varreddes and Sancy-lès-Provins, at the southern limit of the German advance. Appreciating the danger, Kuhl rushed Manfred von Richthofen’s I Cavalry Corps and Georg von der Marwitz’s II Cavalry Corps into the breach. These rear guards were to defend first the trench of the Grand Morin River, then, if that fell, the trench of the Petit Morin, and finally the trench of the Marne. Gronau established a line of defense between Vincy-Manoeuvre and Varreddes. Knowing that major reinforcements were on the way, he sought out a comfortable ditch and took a nap.

  AT DAWN ON 6 September, 980,000 French and 100,000 British soldiers with 3,000 guns assaulted the German line of 750,000 men and 3,300 guns between Verdun and Paris.56 Joffre, who had been able to reinforce his armies with a hundred thousand reservists, issued the troops a stirring appeal. “The salvation of the country” was in their hands. There could be “no looking back.” The sacred ground of France was to be held “at whatever cost;” “be killed on the spot rather than retreat.” Anything even resembling weakness would not be “tolerated.”57 President Poincaré, at Bordeaux, had to get the text through unofficial channels. He understood the seriousness of the hour. “We are going to play our part for all we are worth in what will be the greatest battle humanity has ever known.”58 Charles Huguet, French military plenipotentiary to the BEF, for the first time in weeks detected cheer at GHQ now that the Great Retreat was finally over. “When day dawned on the ever-memorable morning of 6th September,” Field Marshal Sir John French wrote, he had regained some of his earlier “great hopes” for victory. “The promise of an immediate advance against the enemy” sent “a thrill of exultation and enthusiasm throughout the whole force.”59 Deputy Chief of Staff Wilson giddily assured his French counterpart, Henri Berthelot, that the Allied armies would be in Germany “in 4 weeks.”60

  The most critical sector of the front was between Paris and the Marne. There, the battle would rage for four days. Much of it would be fought in a maze of waterways that served as tributaries to the Marne: the Ourcq, which flowed north and south on both sides of Maunoury’s advance; the Petit Morin and the Grand Morin, which ran east and west across the line of advance of French Fifth Army and the BEF; and finally the Saint-Gond Marshes, from which the Petit Morin arose and where Foch’s Ninth Army stood.

  At first, both Kluck and Bülow took the forces attacking Gronau’s corps to be nothing more than French rear guards covering Joffre’s withdrawal on Paris—at most a sortie designed to relieve pressure on the French armies south of the Seine. General von der Marwitz, in fact, asked the kaiser’s court chaplain to prepare a suitable “entry text” for Paris, “but not too long!”61 The Germans were disabused of the notion of encountering only French rear guards during the night of 6 September. Men from Duke Albrecht of Württemberg’s 30th IB, Fourth Army, had found Joffre’s stirring appeal to his troops near Frignicourt, south of Vitry-le-François.62 Albrecht’s headquarters, which had a telephone link to Luxembourg, immediately passed the document on to Moltke. Sometime around 8 PM, the chief of the General Staff sent it out to the other army commands. He did not counter it with a stirring appeal of his own. He was content simply to hand it over to the press with a quixotic message that the war needed to end with a peace that would “for all foreseeable future” see Germany “undisturbed by any foe.”63 There was now no doubt that the Allies’ retreat had ended and that they had gone on the attack. Specifically, Gronau’s battle with vastly superior French forces the day before pointed to an attempt to envelop the German right wing.

  Chief of Operations Tappen, just promoted to the rank of colonel, was delighted. The “Day of Decision” was finally at hand. He burst into a meeting of his operations and intelligence officers: “Well, we finally get hold of them. Now it will be a fierce fight. Our brave troops will know how to do their job.” No more retreats, no more avoiding battle by the enemy. It was now just a matter of applying “brute force.”64

  Kluck and Kuhl faced another major decision. Should they break off the battle and fall back from their advanced position in the acute angle of the Marne and the Ourcq? Should they, together with Bülow’s Second Army, withdraw to defensive positions between the Marne and the Ourcq and there parry Joffre’s flanking maneuver? Or should they continue the battle and seek a quick, decisive victory over Maunoury’s Sixth Army? Yet again, both opted to blunt the French thrust with a counteroffensive. Realizing that First Army’s three (under strength) corps on the Ourcq were too weak to mount a counterattack against 150,000 French soldiers, they turned to Bülow. Shortly after 8 AM on 7 September, they telegraphed Second Army headquarters at Champaubert: “II, IV and IV Reserve Corps heavily engaged west of the lower Ourcq. Where III and IX Army Corps? What is your situation?” No reply. They repeated the message, adding “Urgently request answer.” It crossed paths with a radiogram from Second Army wishing to know, “What is your situation?” Finally, a thi
rd request from Kuhl, “Engagement III and IX Corps at the Ourcq urgently required.”65 No reply.

  The German army’s prewar neglect of communications and control was glaringly apparent.66 During the Battle of the Marne, Luxembourg had direct telephone connections via Fourth Army with Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh armies on the relatively stagnant German left and center. But it could communicate with the fluid First and Second “strike” armies only by way of a single wireless set, which was prone to interruptions by weather and to jamming by French field stations and the Eiffel Tower. Messages often arrived so mutilated at Bülow’s and Kluck’s headquarters that they had to be re-sent three or four times. Field telegraph stations managed to get only twenty-nine of fifty-nine reports from First Army’s fliers to Kluck and Kuhl between 1 and 5 September. There were no electronic ties between First and Second armies, or between them and their army corps and cavalry corps. A host of intelligence officers languished at the OHL and were not attached to the various corps commands where they might have done some good. No one thought of using airplanes to pass important orders along the line. The distance between Bülow’s headquarters at Montmort and Kluck’s at Vandrest (and later Mareuil), after all, was a mere fifty-five kilometers, or half an hour by air. The two commanders were thus effectively cut off from discussing the rapidly developing situation with each other—and with Moltke, who was 435 kilometers by automobile* away from Second Army headquarters and 445 from First Army headquarters.67