Even before concentration was underway, the campaign started. On the night of 1–2 August the 16th Division had bloodlessly secured Luxembourg’s railways. The first combat operation then began early on 4 August, when after an ultimatum demanding free passage an assault force of 39,000 men crossed into Belgium, violating the Kingdom’s neutrality, and marched towards the fortified city of Liège.58 The city’s rapid capture was vital, for as a fortress it blocked any German advance into Belgium and as a key rail hub it was essential for the supply of troops passing through the country. The invaders had hoped to find just 6,000 soldiers, supported by 3,000 members of Belgium’s home guard, the Garde Civique. Instead, they were confronted by 32,000 men with thirty machine guns and 150 artillery pieces garrisoning the twelve forts encircling the city or manning hastily dug earthworks outside. This first operation set the tone for much of the ensuing campaign. First, it was costly. The initial attempts to storm the forts, each furnished with modern armaments and able to withstand calibres of up to 210mm, were repulsed with heavy casualties. Some units lost over half their men. On 8 August the German High Command (Oberste Heeresleitung – OHL) abandoned the assaults and ordered in another 60,000 troops and siege artillery. In a rare case of harmonious and decisive allied cooperation, the Habsburg army loaned four batteries of super-heavy Skoda 305mm howitzers to the German army, and it was these, along with the force’s five 420mm Krupp mortars, which battered the fortresses into submission.
Second, the operation was intensely frustrating. Commanders, conscious of racing against the clock, fumed at the delays: ‘We’re still sitting here in front of this damned fortress,’ fulminated General von Einem, commander of the second, larger force sent to take Liège, on 11 August. ‘If only we could advance!’59 The Habsburg guns could not be brought up until the next day, and it was thus only on 16 August, already two days behind the schedule set out in Schlieffen’s 1905–6 plan, that the last of Liège’s forts capitulated. The bloodiness of the fighting and frustration at the delay both contributed to the third feature that would mark this operation and the rest of the campaign: violence by German troops against civilians. Already on 4 August, the first day of invasion, civilians were shot down. When heavy fighting began the following day, executions and massacres mounted. German soldiers, shocked and disorientated by their first experience of modern war, became convinced that they were being ambushed by inhabitants. ‘One cannot grasp the havoc wreaked by the bestial mob in Liège,’ recounted one soldier who was probably part of a force that had infiltrated between the forts and entered the city on the morning of 6 August:
When we forced an entry into the city after a brief fight outside it, we were at first greeted with cheers by women. At the same time, the sly population hung white flags, white dresses, teacloths etc. out of the windows . . . However, that was just a malicious trick . . . Scarcely had we passed the houses when rifle barrels were poked out of the windows and we were shot in the back. There were also shots aimed at our legs fired from cellar coal holes.60
The city’s population, as later investigation discovered, had indeed at first greeted the advancing troops, mistaking them for British soldiers. The fierce fire that the Germans had faced soon after came, however, not from civilians but from Belgian troops, whose use of cover and smokeless munitions made them hard to see. The sudden shift from an initial, apparently friendly reception to a lethal hail of bullets understandably led the Germans to conclude that they were victims of civilian treachery. Similar reports of inhabitants’ aggression, some also prompted by confusion at the rudimentary, civilian character of the Garde Civique’s uniforms, but almost none of which were true, flooded in from other units engaged around the city. By 8 August von Einem rued what he called the ‘terrible character’ of the hostilities: ‘the population is energetically taking part in the war’.61 In just five days, his troops massacred 850 Belgian civilians and burned down around 1,300 buildings in retaliation. Moltke, believing that his worst fears of the 1871 ‘franc tireur’ war repeating itself were being realized, issued a ‘Solemn Warning’ on 12 August. Condemning the Belgian population for illegally joining the fighting and committing ‘atrocities’ against his men, he threatened dire punishment. Any individual who behaved in this way would, he promised, be ‘immediately shot according to martial law’.62
While this heavy fighting was going on around Liège, the French opened their campaign in the south. On 7 August one corps raided over the German frontier into Upper Alsace, captured the region’s major city of Mülhausen on the following day, but after twenty-four hours was thrown out. The main French offensive, the first stage of which was an assault by two armies into Alsace-Lorraine, opened on 14 August. The attack was intended to pin down as much enemy strength as possible so that other troops could manoeuvre further north against the centre of the German line. By 19 August the Republic’s tricolour again flew over Mülhausen.63 This defence of German territory, not Moltke’s more famous attack through Belgium and north-west France, produced the bitterest fighting seen in August. The German Seventh Army lost nearly 18,000 men to wounds alone, an extraordinary 12 per cent of its strength, in repelling the French invasion of Alsace and then going over to the offensive. The Sixth Army, covering Lorraine, lost 7.6 per cent of its strength to wounds that month, the two German armies in the centre suffered 7 per cent casualties, and the German First, Second and Third Armies a relatively light 4 per cent as they charged through central Belgium.64
For Alsatian civilians, caught between two groups of nervous, heavily armed soldiers, these were nightmarish days. Border villages were fought over and bombarded, the men forced by one side or the other to dig trenches and bury dead, sometimes under fire. Agricultural work stopped as it was unsafe to venture into the fields.65 The Germans distrusted the population, especially after some of Mülhausen’s citizens greeted the first invaders. Commanders complained of the ‘extremely hostile attitude’ that their soldiers encountered. Rumours of treason circulated and combat officers raged that ‘inhabitants . . . are shooting with small calibre pieces at our men’. As at Liège, the German army reacted violently, with summary executions.66 The French invaders sometimes behaved no better, despite their pretensions to be the liberators of an oppressed ‘French’ population. Already during the first raid on 7–10 August, French troops shot labourers whom they imagined were disguised German soldiers and burned down the farms of inhabitants believed to be aiding the defenders.67
What made the invasions so awful, however, was not just the killing but also the extensive arrests and deportations carried out by the French army. The French War Ministry ordered its troops on 22 August, near the end of the second, larger offensive, to hold hostage officials and teachers in Alsace-Lorraine. Hundreds of harmless lower state, community and Church officials, as well as some quite important ones like the Mayor of Mülhausen, were taken and imprisoned in France. Eight thousand military-aged Alsatian men were also rounded up and interned; an extraordinarily high number given the short duration of the campaign and the small area overrun. Most officials were German, and so not only security fears but also French desire to exclude malign influences from the population may have motivated the order to remove them. The deportations of military-aged men were excused as a measure to protect them from German reprisals, although probably equally if not more important was the wish to deny the enemy army new recruits once it reoccupied the province. The French authorities’ intense suspicion of the deportees, who were all carefully interrogated to assess their national loyalties, certainly testifies to motives beyond concern for their welfare.68 More difficult to explain is the forced removal of over 3,000 women, children, youths and pensioners. Some were evacuated later for their own safety from a small, 8,000-square kilometre border strip that the French managed to retain throughout the war. However, and not implausibly given both the arrests of German officials in 1914 and the exclusionary policies and expulsions that followed the French annexation of the province at the conflict’s en
d, the Germans complained of what amounted to wartime ethnic cleansing; a campaign to weed out pro-Reich elements from an indigenous population assumed to be naturally Francophile.69
Throughout mid-August, the French fought to seize control of the campaign. The second stage of their offensive, intended to be decisive, opened on 21 August with the Third and Fourth Armies advancing north-east against the German centre in the Ardennes. General Joseph Joffre, the Chief of the French General Staff, had failed to recognize that the Germans were committing reserve divisions immediately to combat and consequently underestimated their total strength and assumed this part of the line to be weak. A breakthrough here would have permitted him to outflank his enemy’s right wing, halting its manoeuvre in Belgium. In fact, the nine corps that attacked were faced by ten corps of the German Fourth and Fifth Armies, and French plans quickly unravelled. Rather than smashing through a weak German centre and cutting off enemy troops advancing further north, Joffre’s offensive instead broke against fierce resistance from the hub of Moltke’s swing through Belgium. French units were outfought. Their reconnaissance was sloppy, leading to infantry and even artillery being surprised and destroyed. Coordination between units was poor, a problem exacerbated by regimental commanders’ frequent failure to keep higher commands in touch with their situation. In the hilly terrain, the Germans’ high-angle howitzers offered a distinct advantage over their opponents’ 75mm cannon. Worse still, the French infantry often lacked any fire support at all when it went forward. The commander of Joffre’s Third Army, General Ruffey, saw this as decisive for his troops’ defeat. Their attacks, he warned on 23 August, had ‘failed solely because they were not prepared by artillery, or even by the fire of infantry’.70 The Germans also made errors. Units were devastated by shrapnel when, in trying to follow their pre-war training, they waited too long to deploy from close formations into skirmisher lines. Nonetheless, by the end of the three-day battle, German troops had inflicted 40,000 fatalities on the French and forced their enemies into headlong retreat.71
Further north, the German swing through central and southern Belgium, the defining manoeuvre of the August battles, had begun on 18 August. For the troops of the right wing, the month was dominated by frantic, strenuous marching as they attempted to get around the French army’s left flank. The men of the northernmost First Army, who had furthest to travel, typically notched up 30 or 40 kilometres per day.72 This was an extraordinary performance, especially as so many were reservists ripped out of civilian life just a fortnight earlier and now in uniform, armed and heavily laden. Each carried an eleven-kilo pack stuffed with underwear, a spare pair of boots, sewing and washing kit, cap, two iron rations, tent pegs, rope and thirty rounds of ammunition. With coat and poncho, mess kit, rifle and multifarious accoutrements, including a bayonet, shovel, another ninety rounds of ammunition and water bottle, hung around his body on leather strapping, each soldier’s load totalled around thirty kilos.73 Topping it all off was the Pickelhaube, the infamous spiked helmet of the Prussian infantryman. It may have symbolized Prussia’s martial spirit, but few items of headgear less practical have been fashioned. Made of leather, heavy and sweaty, it gave little protection from the sun and none at all from enemy projectiles. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was able to endure the strain of marching with this kit in blazing heat and clouds of dust. Exhausted soldiers littered the roadsides, marking the path of rapidly advancing units. Two-fifths of all cases of heatstroke in the German army over the four and a quarter years of war were treated that first month.74 Discipline also began to fray. Ernst Baier, a Sergeant Major in Grenadier Regiment 2, described how during rest stops the men plundered cafes and restaurants while their captain looked on. The artillery and cavalry were worse, he insisted, but infantry too were guilty of ‘all sorts of heroics of the genre of wine cellar-smashing and house-burning’.75
While the soldiers of the right wing did not lack opportunities for genuine heroics, they faced less danger than their comrades further south. Battle casualties (killed, wounded and missing) in the three northernmost German armies totalled 5 per cent of strength in the last ten days of August; bloody, to be sure, but still about half the rate in the southernmost Sixth and Seventh Armies and just a third of that suffered by Fourth Army in the Ardennes.76 Among the three armies, Second Army saw the toughest fighting, clearing the way to the Meuse River at the start of the campaign and fighting off the French Fifth Army on the Sambre River on 21–23 August. The First and Third Armies on either side faced little significant opposition before the last days of the month. The bulk of the Belgian army had retreated to the northern fortress of Antwerp and even the arrival of the much-vaunted British Expeditionary Force directly ahead of the First Army at Mons on 23 August posed few problems; the Germans simply knocked it back with their weight of numbers. Nonetheless, throughout the advance, these same German troops felt themselves to be in great danger. They feared less the enemy military than the Belgian population. As at Liège and in Alsace, the soldiers lashed out. Their progress was marked by executions, hostage-taking, some of whom were used as human shields, massacres and destruction. The German right wing was the epicentre of violence in which other armies further south also participated, and which resulted that summer and autumn in the murder of 5,521 Belgian and 906 French civilians, and the deliberate demolition of between 15,000 and 20,000 buildings.77
These ‘atrocities’, taking place in an invasion that the Reich’s Chancellor himself had publicly conceded was illegal, dealt a reputational blow from which imperial Germany never recovered. Entente governments were quick to protest against the violence and their countries’ newspapers cast the German advance through Belgium and northeastern France emotively as the ‘march of the barbarians’.78 The German army’s destruction of world-famous cultural treasures appeared to vindicate the description. Neutral opinion was particularly shocked by the force’s bombardment of Rheims Cathedral on 17–19 September, a measure undertaken because, it was claimed, the French were directing their artillery fire from its towers. There was also great international horror at a rampage by troops in Louvain in the last week of August that destroyed a sixth of the city, including the university library with its priceless collection of medieval manuscripts, and cost 248 citizens their lives.79 Elsewhere too, the invaders were vicious: Visé, the first Belgian town to face systematic destruction with 23 civilian dead; Aarschot, where 156 inhabitants were killed; Tamines, with 383 massacred; and Dinant, which suffered 674 killed, almost 10 per cent of its population; these quickly became notorious as sites of German brutality.80 British and French propaganda interpreted the violence not just as military excesses or even war crimes but as more fundamental manifestations of a perverse and savage German ‘Kultur’, the polar opposite of their own ‘civilization’. Their press’s outraged rhetoric was highly gendered and sexualized. Belgium’s invasion and the atrocities perpetrated there were portrayed as literal violations of the country and its people. Sadistic Prussian officers and brutish soldiers were accused of raping Belgian and French innocents. Fantasies, ironically adapted from Belgian colonial misdeeds in the Congo earlier in the century, of the invaders mutilating and cutting off (usually female) children’s hands also came to define German barbarity for peoples in the Entente countries.81
The German soldiers were not monsters. Nor, despite the absurd stereotypes of Entente propaganda, and the occasional historian who has uncritically echoed them, was German culture at fault.82 Even anti-Catholicism and racism, which were embraced by some parts of the Reich’s population, lack conviction as primary explanations for the violence, as Catholic Germans served in large numbers in the invasion force and ethnicity divided rather than united civilian victims: French, Belgians and Alsace-Lorrainers in the west and Poles and Jews living in the city of Kalisz in the east were all subjected to German military violence in August 1914.83 War atrocities, as research on the later twentieth century has demonstrated, are not the preserve of psychopaths or ideologues. Put them wi
th comrades in a military environment under discipline and ‘ordinary men’ too will kill.84 Moreover, German soldiers had good, if misguided, reasons to fear civilian attack in 1914. The last major war in which Germans had fought, the 1870–71 conflict, had been characterized by quick victories over the French army followed by a protracted campaign against an estimated 57,000 guerrillas. Francs tireurs – the contemporary name for these irregular combatants – had killed some 1,000 German soldiers and forced the General Staff to allocate another 120,000, around a quarter of the army, to guard the lines of communication.85
As important in alerting troops to the probability of a ‘people’s war’ were their own mobilization experiences. These men had, after all, just left a country whose population was busily engaged in setting up home guards and blocking roads in order to catch the mythical ‘gold cars’. Troops rolling west across Germany were also struck by the sight of civilian volunteers armed with hunting rifles or shotguns standing beside the railway embankments and guarding every bridge. Ernst Baier, who had travelled with his regiment from Stettin, was not the only soldier who thought ‘they looked like guerrilla fighters’.86 These sights prepared the way for the uncritical acceptance of stories of civilian aggression at Liège, which were passed by word of mouth and disseminated by newspapers among the waiting soldiers of the main invasion force in early August. They had become better in the telling. The Belgian population was accused not just of illegally taking up arms but of violating all rules of civilized warfare. Not only men but women too were said to have participated in the fighting, launching fanatical attacks with revolvers, kitchen knives and even boiling water. Wounded Germans’ hands and feet had been cut off and children were said to have poked their eyes out.87 When the main invasion began on 18 August, troops were thus already scared, angry and deeply suspicious of the enemy’s civilians. Baier, for example, was pondering female Belgians’ ‘atrocities’ already on 13 August, while his regiment was still on German soil. In any attack, he had told his parents grimly, ‘no quarter will be given’.88
Ring of Steel Page 17