by Norman Stone
Off the armies went, and the first move was German. The great fortress of Liège had to be taken if the Germans were to pass through Belgium easily – they needed the railways, and Liège was the key. On 7 August they took the central citadel by a ruse, and the outer forts then fell to Austrian heavy guns that had been specially brought in. By 18 August the German concentration was complete, and a huge force entered the Belgian plains. There were three armies – three quarters of a million men, in fifty-two divisions – their left flank fixed in the Lorraine fortifications around Metz and Thionville. There were weaker forces further south, along the Franco-German border.
In effect the three German armies were moving into undefended space, and they marched fast – twenty miles a day, an extraordinary achievement. The Belgians just withdrew to their other two fortresses – the Antwerp complex, on the sea, and Namur. There was a French army (Lanrezac’s Fifth) south of that area, and the British Expeditionary Force was forming up to its left, but there were no engagements for some time. The French commander, Joseph Joffre, was not as concerned as he might have been, because he was staging what he regarded as a gigantic counter-offensive over the German border – Plan XVII, by which the Germans were supposed to be driven back to the Rhine, over Alsace and Lorraine. This was a disaster. On 20 August, at Morhange-Sarrebourg, French troops were shattered as they charged uphill into machine guns; then they were attacked, and lost 150 guns and 20,000 men as prisoners. On 21 August Joffre tried again, this time in the Ardennes, the hilly and wooded area of north-eastern France and southeastern Belgium. It was the German centre, and since there had been such evidence of strength on the German right and left, the centre was supposed to be weak. There was another disaster, as the French ran into a force of their own size, but one equipped with the sort of artillery that could deal with fighting in woods, whereas the French standard gun, the 75 mm, was ineffective in that terrain. Further to the north-west Lanrezac’s army also did badly, and began to retreat away from Namur. It lost touch with the British, whose commander, Sir John French, waxed irascible. On 23 August the right-hand German army, Kluck’s First, ran into the British on the Mons–Conde canal, and British regulars, firing one round every four seconds, held off considerably superior numbers, inflicting three times the 1,850 losses they themselves suffered. In the afternoon, German howitzers arrived to deal with the difficult situation and the British retreated, parallel with Lanrezac’s army. The French had lost heavily – 75,000 killed by the end of August, with a further 200,000 losses in wounded and prisoners. The Germans had lost far fewer, and they were coming in fast from the north, without much opposing them. A great Franco-British retreat started, with a view to a regrouping around Paris.
It was well-managed: at no stage were guns captured, and no German encirclement threatened. Losses were at once made up, and the French had a huge advantage, in that the railways behind their lines could shuttle troops from the south-east to the north-west far faster than the Germans could follow on foot. The Germans had had only 4,000 lorries, and two thirds of them broke down before the retreat ended; besides, the Meuse bridges had been destroyed, and the Belgians had sabotaged their railways and most of the tunnels: only 400 miles of the 2,500-mile network were back in operation by early September. Ammunition was a priority for the horse-transport, and the horses themselves could only be fed on green corn, which made them sick. Kluck’s army had 84,000 horses, and the beasts dropped dead at the side of the road, so there were delays in the hauling of heavy guns. What with the troops’ exhaustion in the August heat, some units were down to half their nominal strength. There was a further headache with communications. Moltke, back in Koblenz, was too far away, and wireless worked very clumsily as well as openly: the French could listen in. There was a system of limited decentralization in the German army which enabled what seems in retrospect to have been an almost miraculous advance, but generals quite often did not really know what their neighbours were doing. Between 5 and 9 September, as the battle of the Marne was being fought, the German High Command issued no orders at all, and on the last two days received no reports. There were other problems, of troops being taken away from the decisive front for purposes that also seemed essential – two corps for Antwerp and Maubeuge, and two further ones for East Prussia; Namur also occupied troops. Moltke wasted effort by ordering his left-wing armies to attack, which they ineffectually did towards Nancy, rather than shifting them to the right. On 27 August he ordered a more-or-less general advance, with the two right-wing armies moving towards the lower Seine and Paris, and then on 2 September altered this so that they moved east of Paris, the right-hand one, Kluck’s First, crossing to the south-east, across the northern side of the city. This change happened in part because Kluck’s neighbour to the east, Bülow’s Second Army, had been checked by the French Fifth at Guise, and Kluck himself had run into quite serious British resistance at Le Câteau (26 August), and so the German right was bunched closer together and the sweep west of Paris was abandoned.
Joffre at this moment was keeping his nerve better than Moltke. He meant to raise fresh troops and to shift others from the eastern side to the west, where a new army could attack Kluck’s open right-hand flank. These movements started on 25 August. There were initial problems with the British: Sir John French proposed more or less to withdraw from the battle and prepare for return to England, if necessary. French was browbeaten only when Lord Kitchener arrived in full-dress Field Marshal’s uniform to order him to conform with the French plans. Meanwhile, a new French coalition government insisted on defence of the capital, and it was strengthened by troops intended for the new army to the north-west. When on 3 September Kluck turned east from Paris to keep his links to Bülow’s army, the way was open for a stroke against his western flank. Between the capital and Verdun, there was a further German advance, over the river Marne, though it did not lead anywhere: attacks were exchanged by the German Second Army and Foch’s new Ninth, in the marshes of St Gond. On 4 September Joffre ordered an attack on the 6th from the Paris and Verdun sides, but fighting started the day before, when the new French army on the western side (Sixth) clashed on the river Ourcq with part of Kluck’s forces: it was then that troops were ferried from Paris by taxi – a great patriotic legend, though the taxis kept their meters running. With some difficulty this attack was held, but Kluck marched two of his corps from his own left wing back towards the right, and this meant that a gap opened up between his and Bülow’s armies, roughly between the Grand and Petit Morin rivers, tributaries that flowed from the south into the Marne.
Just before the gap, by chance, stood the British Expeditionary Force, and it moved forward, cautiously, into almost empty space, driving a wedge between the two armies of the German right. In general, the German armies on the right were now considerably inferior to the forces that the Allies now had – twenty divisions to thirty – and, besides, the Germans were running out of ammunition, whereas the French were learning to use their field guns more sensibly. On 8 September there was a staff conference at Moltke’s headquarters and an Intelligence colonel went off by motor-car to interview Kluck and Bülow. He discovered that Bülow had decided to withdraw if the British crossed the Marne, which, on the 9th, fliers reported had happened. Kluck would have to retreat accordingly, though he did not wish to. Moltke, his courage failing, visited other army commanders on 11 September and ordered the Third, Fourth and Fifth Armies, to the east, also to withdraw. Between 9 and 14 September the Germans fell back to a chalk ridge rising 500 feet above the river Aisne, and the infantry were ordered to fortify the position. Troops dug in, with barbed wire defences, could not easily be spotted by artillery and were invulnerable to rifles; they could only be dislodged by hand-grenades, and these had to be thrown from close to. Joffre supposed that the Germans were on the run, and his men were made to attack, despite exhaustion, bad weather and lack of munitions. Allied attacks on the Aisne positions therefore got nowhere, and by the end of September that part of the fron
t was fixed – a stalemate.
The French had had great hopes of Russian victory; money had been invested in strategic railways, the doubling of tracks and the lengthening of platforms. One outcome was that Russian mobilization did proceed as the Germans had feared, and there were large numbers of soldiers on the East Prussian border by mid-August, though all sorts of ancillary services were not yet available to back them up. As they had promised, the Russians invaded East Prussia with some thirty divisions, in two armies, the First, moving west, and the Second, some way to the southwest, moving north from Warsaw. In theory, they should have been able to trap the single German army, the Eighth, as it concentrated on the eastern border and the fortress of Königsberg, but the theory was difficult to realize. The two Russian armies were separated by a region of lakes and forest, where troops would not be easy to spot, and the Russian cavalry was quite ineffective, for lack of supplies, almost as soon as it crossed the border. Besides, there were railways available to the Germans, running east–west, whereas the Russians could only march forward from Grodno or Warsaw, shuffling through the dust of August roads. The Russian situation was difficult again, because communications were exceedingly poor, such that telegrams had to be brought up from Warsaw by motor-car, in bundles. Samsonov, commanding the Russian Second Army, had nearly twenty divisions, infantry and cavalry, and it was difficult for these even to keep in communication with each other, let alone with another army; Russian orders were broadcast over the radio without even being encoded, since that took too long, and there were not the non-commissioned officers who could be trusted with the task. German Intelligence therefore knew everything that was going on.
Still, the Germans began badly. Their Eighth Army had thirteen divisions, and its obvious tactic was to strike at one of the two Russian armies before the other could join up with it. On 20 August the Germans staged a frontal attack on the eastern invaders – the First Army – and lost 8,000 men (of 30,000 attackers) in an afternoon. On 22 August the commander, von Prittwitz, panicked, gabbling out to Moltke on the telephone that he would have to give up East Prussia and fall back on the great river Vistula. He was dismissed, and a retired general, Paul von Hindenburg, took over, with, as chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, known before the war as an energetic organizer; he had also shown panache at Liège. They were a good team. Ludendorff was very competent, but praise went to his head, and he could lose a sense of proportion. Hindenburg was the foot on the brake, though he sometimes referred to himself ironically as ‘the shop sign’. The important thing was for the new commanders to keep their heads, as the Russian Second Army struggled northwards in the rear of their own forces, worsted in the frontier battle to the east. These forces were pulled back – part by rail, transferred to the western side of the Russian Second Army, and part by foot along paths that led straight towards the eastern flank of that same army. It, meanwhile, plodded forward without any idea of what was happening. The First Army was told to busy itself with the fortress city of Königsberg, on the Baltic shores, and therefore subtracted itself altogether from proceedings concerning the Second Army. On 24 August the Second Army collided with the Germans, and for a time its centre made progress – illusory progress, as the further it moved north the more of it would be caught in the two arms of the German flank attacks. On the 26th, the western one moved, striking through a disordered and bewildered Russian left, and cutting its communications. Next day, the eastern one caught the Russian right, and its advance-guards met up with the other enveloping troops from the west. In the middle of the entrapment were four Russian army corps, the troops running short of everything, their commanders quite baffled as to what was happening. In packets, they surrendered on 28 August – almost 100,000 men (with 50,000 killed and wounded) and 500 guns – and their commander shot himself. It was an enormous defeat, the most spectacular of the war, and it became a legend. There was a village not far off, Tannenberg, where in the Middle Ages the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by Slavs. That village gave its name to the battle, and ‘Tannenberg’ became a symbol of Germanic pride. It also gave Hindenburg and Ludendorff a reputation that lasted to the very end of the war, and even beyond. The Tannenberg monument was quite close to Hitler’s wartime headquarters at Rastenburg, both of them later blown up by Russians or Poles.
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The Russians withdrew back over the borders, narrowly defeating a German effort to penetrate the eastern one, in the lakes of Masuria, and there was a pause on the Russo-German front. However, there was some compensation for the Russians, because against Austria-Hungary they did well. The agony of the Habsburg empire was beginning. Over fifty Russian infantry and eighteen cavalry divisions were being mustered in southern Poland and the western Ukraine by the end of August, and the Austro-Hungarian forces were considerably weaker – thirty divisions to begin with, and eight more to come from the Balkans. In artillery, they were weaker than Russian divisions. They were also victims of collapsing-empire syndrome, otherwise known as ‘overstretch’ – the contest between pride and reality.
The Austro-Hungarian commander, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf,2 was a clever man. He knew that his forces (in all, not even fifty infantry divisions, which received less money – £25,000,000 – than the British six) were too weak to deal with Russia, quite apart from Serbia, the army of which was roughly one quarter the size of Austria-Hungary’s. He had an undertaking with Moltke that he would use nearly all of his army against Russia, while Germany dealt with France. However, the war with Serbia was undeniably popular, and his forces would be strong enough to deal with that if the Russians were not, at once, an effective threat. Without telling the Germans, he arranged for the armies destined for the Russian front to ‘detrain’ (as the British army calls it) along the Carpathian mountains, a hundred miles from the border. The Russians could toil through the plains of Galicia, southern Poland, the Germans in East Prussia would perhaps move into northern Poland, and meanwhile the other half of the Austro-Hungarian army would settle the hash of the Serbians. Conrad could always explain to the Germans that this situation had long been foreseeable – that war would come about between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and that the Russians would be slow to make up their minds, so that the mobilization of Austria-Hungary would probably have been decided against Serbia in the first instance. This was not really a very plausible excuse, the war minister himself subsequently admitting that no one had had any real doubts as to whether Russia would intervene. Provoking her was the reason for the war. When the Germans heard what was happening, they protested, in a bombardment of messages, from the Kaiser downwards.
Conrad had to explain that the troops had already set off for the Balkans – in German eyes, an absurd misuse of a Great Power’s troops at the start of a world war. Could they be rerouted? He asked his railway experts, and they were appalled: how could trains be re-routed along single-track lines in the middle of a general mobilization? The railways in Austria-Hungary reflected the fact that it was a multi-national empire, each people having to be bought off with this or that impractical concession. To stop Austrian goods reaching Hungary, for example, nineteen lines ended in buffers on the Austro-Hungarian border, and you had to travel from Austrian Slovenia, a few miles from Hungarian Croatia, either by a picturesque mountain railway or, more quickly, via Budapest. There were still private lines, and the railway in Bosnia had a different gauge, so that everything had to be transhipped on the border, at Bosnisch-Brod. The railway experts said that the mobilization against Serbia, already ordained, would have to take its course, but once the troops had detrained in the Balkans they could be loaded back into their trains and taken to the Russian front. The railwaymen were probably exaggerating, not too many of the troops of the four army corps in question having, in fact, left Prague and Budapest when Russian mobilization occurred. The experts did behave with paralysing caution, knowing that if anything went wrong there could be a disaster (railway-management was a key to this war, the German official history devoting two of i
ts eleven volumes to the subject). They even decreed that, to avoid any possible snarl-up, all trains were to move at what they called ‘maximum parallel graphic’, by which was meant the maximum speed of the worst train on the worst line – ten miles per hour. Anything else, and the pins on the maps would have become hopelessly jumbled, with watering, coal and telegrams in a mess. It is true that even the best-run railways could go wrong – on the lines of the French Nord there was an accident every day, and it is true that, just before the British offensive on the Somme two years later, there was a traffic jam at Amiens station that went on for eighteen miles. Still, the Austro-Hungarian railway experts’ caution meant that mobilization occurred at a speed less than that of a decent bicycle.