A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  On this same day the Austrian invasion of Serbia is transformed from a failure into a humiliating rout: the Austrian forces take fifty thousand casualties, including six thousand men killed, and flee back across the border. The Russians and Germans collide again in East Prussia, this time at a place called Gumbinnen, and again the fighting is bloody but inconclusive. The Germans pull back, but the Russians do not pursue. The commander of the Eighth Army, Max von Prittwitz, telephones Moltke and reports that he is in trouble and needs to withdraw from East Prussia. This is disastrous news tactically, strategically, and in terms of morale. East Prussia is the homeland of the Junkers, Prussia’s hereditary elite, and as such it is the cradle of Germany’s general staff. The thought of the Junker farms being left to the mercies of rampaging Cossack horsemen is horrifying. But once again, as with Rupprecht, Moltke decides that he is too far from the action and too lacking in reliable information to disagree. He does not challenge Prittwitz’s decision, does not tell him to stand and fight.

  In Belgium, meanwhile, things continued to go well for the Germans. Having done their work at Liège, the big guns were quickly moved westward to Namur, a cluster of nine forts nearly as strong as Liège and a junction of six rail lines. Namur surrendered after five days of shelling. The Germans, however, had something to regret: their failure to cut off and destroy the Belgian army before it slipped off to Antwerp, near the coast. Now Kluck had to reduce his army by two corps in order to keep the Belgians from coming back south and threatening his lines of communication. But the French and Belgians had made an equally serious mistake in failing to send troops to Namur while it still might have provided them with a fortified base from which to block the German advance. Such a move, with enough troops involved, would have had a good chance of succeeding. Now, with that opportunity gone, Lanrezac was going to have to find a way to stop the Germans in open country.

  As the Germans took possession of Brussels, they paused to give themselves a parade—the first such celebration since the Franco-Prussian War. From there, while continuing westward, they began to bend their route toward the south, toward Paris. In their wake they were leaving a trail of killings that, even after the truth was separated from the exaggerations of propaganda, would disgrace them in the eyes of the world, give their enemies reason to argue that this was a war for civilization, and begin the long process that would end with the United States entering the war against them. They destroyed towns. They took civilian hostages, including women and children. They killed many of these hostages—in some cases machine-gunning them by the score. They killed priests simply because they were priests (while claiming that they were leaders of a guerrilla resistance). They destroyed the storybook city of Louvain, with its exquisite medieval university and irreplaceable library.

  To the extent that such acts can be explained—not excused, but explained—they had tangled origins. In the Franco-Prussian War the Germans had suffered significant casualties at the hands of franc-tireurs, civilian snipers and guerrillas, some of whom were urged on by French priests. They were determined not to have a repeat. When they encountered guerrillas in Belgium, they lashed out viciously. The German newspapers carried sensational accounts of German soldiers being mutilated and killed by Belgian townsfolk. These stories were read by the troops, angering and frightening them and causing them to respond with further violence. And senior officers were fixated on the same idea that had made the violation of Belgian neutrality possible in the first place—the idea that Germany was in a life-or-death struggle and so had no choice but to take extreme measures. “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal,” Moltke observed. “But we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.”

  Wherever enemy armies were believed to be approaching, in Belgium and in France, in southwestern Germany and in East Prussia, in Serbia and in Poland, the civilian populations fled by the hundreds of thousands in whatever way they could. Roads became clogged with refugees and their livestock and whatever possessions they could load onto wagons and carts. Whenever armies wanted to use those same roads, the civilians had to make for the fields and woods.

  Belgian civilians, displaced by war, crowd the docks of Antwerp waiting for passage to Britain.

  But Europe was focused on the fortunes of the armies, not the savagery and suffering that the war was already visiting on the innocent, as the middle of August passed. By August 21 things seemed to be moving rapidly to a climax. On that day a second Russian army entered East Prussia and began taking town after town. The Russians’ plan was obvious: their two armies would converge on Germany’s one eastern army, which they vastly outnumbered, and obliterate it. The road to Berlin would then be open, and the Germans would have no way of saving themselves except by pulling apart their long wall of armies in the west. Kaiser Wilhelm was almost unhinged by the news from East Prussia. After nervously pacing the garden outside his headquarters, he seated himself on a bench and told his companions—the heads of his military and naval cabinets—to sit down as well. The two men, no doubt trying to be properly deferential to their emperor, pulled up a second bench and sat on it. “Do you already hold me in such contempt that none will sit beside me?” the kaiser cried. It was an early sign, the first of many, that he was not going to stand up well under the strain of war.

  It was on August 21, too, that Joffre launched a new offensive, sending the Third and Fourth Armies that formed the center of his line northward into the Ardennes. By now it had become obvious that the Germans’ main attack would not be coming from that direction, and Joffre guessed that their center couldn’t possibly be very strong. His intelligence bureau had estimated that the Germans would begin the war with sixty-eight combat-ready divisions in the west—not seventy-eight infantry and ten cavalry divisions plus fourteen brigades of territorial militia, as was actually the case. It assumed incorrectly that the Germans would, like the French, regard their newly mobilized reserve troops as too green for action on the front lines. Joffre therefore reasoned that if the Germans had enough strength on their left to push back his offensive in Alsace-Lorraine and enough on their right for a drive across Belgium, the center had to be vulnerable. By thrusting upward into southeastern Belgium, he thought, he could penetrate far enough to strike the German right wing in its flank and separate it from its sources of supply and reinforcement.

  The fourteen French divisions sent into the Ardennes ran head-on into exactly fourteen German divisions that found strong defensive positions in the region’s rough wooded hills and were well equipped with machine guns and artillery. The French attacked and attacked again under increasingly hopeless conditions until finally, weakened by appalling casualties, they had no choice but to stop. The fight at the town of Rossignol was sadly typical: of the fourteen thousand crack colonial troops thrown at the Germans there, nearly a third were shot dead. Lanrezac’s Fifth Army might have been mangled in this offensive as well, if not for his warnings and appeals and Joffre’s grudging decision to allow him to stay farther west.

  Now the Fifth was the only French army not fully engaged. And by now it was clear that Lanrezac had been right all along: the main German invasion force was to his north, moving through Belgium virtually unopposed. A seventy-five-mile shift had taken Lanrezac’s left to a point across the River Sambre from the town of Charleroi. Lanrezac didn’t know where the Germans were and had little in the way of instructions from Joffre, and so he did something that was extremely unfashionable in the French army of 1914: he had his troops take up defensive positions. It was fortunate that he did. The next day his army was hit by advance units of Bülow’s Second Army coming out of the east. The striking fact here is that Lanrezac, at the far left end of the French line, had met not the end of the German right wing under Kluck but the army on Kluck’s left. Important as Lanrezac’s move to the north was, it had not reached far enough to intercept the outer edge of the German right. All five French armies were now locked in combat, but this was true of only six
of Germany’s. Kluck’s army was out somewhere to the north and west, beyond Lanrezac’s reach and meeting no serious resistance as it plowed its way forward.

  By this point all of Joffre’s offensives had been beaten back, several of them ending in severe disorder. French casualties for the war’s first month are believed to have totaled two hundred sixty thousand, of whom seventy-five thousand were killed (twenty-seven thousand on August 22 alone).* Among the dead were more than ten percent of France’s regular and reserve officers. The cult of the offensive was not delivering its promised results. As a young French captain named Charles De Gaulle would say of the fight in which he was wounded and had his eyes opened, “In a moment it is clear that all the courage in the world cannot prevail against gunfire.”

  The Germans, except on their right where continued movement was essential, tended to rely on their artillery and let the French attack first. In this way they held their own at worst and took significantly fewer casualties overall: eighteen thousand of their troops were killed on the Western Front in August, a fraction of the French and British total.

  And Kluck, with Bülow keeping pace on his left and the German line unbroken all the way to Switzerland, was pounding to the southwest on schedule. The Schlieffen Plan was being achieved. It was actually happening. The stage was set for Kluck to swing around Lanrezac and continue on to Paris.

  Or so it seemed until Sunday, August 23. Then, suddenly, Kluck crashed into a mass of dug-in riflemen freshly arrived from England. It must have been a shock. Kluck hadn’t known that British troops were in the neighborhood. He hadn’t even known, until the day before, that they were in France in sufficient numbers to take the field.

  Background: London in 1914

  LONDON IN 1914

  FOR ALEXANDER VON KLUCK, THE UNEXPECTED COLLISION with British troops on August 23 was not a great deal more than a serious inconvenience. The men of the British Expeditionary Force were some of the world’s best soldiers, hardened in their empire’s colonial wars, but there were simply not enough of them to stop the avalanchelike advance of Kluck’s First Army.

  For the French, politicians and generals alike, the very fact that Britain was in the war was a dream come true, something toward which they had been bending national policy for years. It meant that, if the war turned out to be a long one, they would have on their side the richest nation in Europe and the world’s greatest navy.

  For the British themselves, both those in favor of war and those opposed, the whole thing must have seemed strangely improbable. Nothing had been less inevitable, as Berlin and Paris and St. Petersburg and Vienna stumbled toward catastrophe in July 1914, than that London would be drawn in as well.

  Though Sir Edward Grey’s foreign office had involved itself in the crisis from the start, its efforts had been directed at preserving the peace. To that end it had maintained a posture of almost excessive impartiality, doing nothing to inflame public opinion. The attention of the public, and of most of the government in London, had been focused meanwhile on a crisis closer to home—one that involved Ireland, the nearest and most troublesome part of the British Empire.

  Legally, officially, Ireland was no longer a British possession at all, no longer a colony but rather as integral a part of the United Kingdom as Scotland and Wales. Its elected representatives sat in Parliament. They were numerous enough not only to influence policy but, when the House of Commons was narrowly divided, to cause governments to rise and fall. For the mainly Catholic nationalists of Ireland, such power was not nearly enough. They argued, and not implausibly, that in reality their homeland was still what it had been for centuries: conquered and oppressed. They wanted their own parliament and government—Home Rule. But for the Ulstermen of northern Ireland, descendants of the Protestants transplanted from Scotland by Oliver Cromwell two and a half centuries earlier when to be a Catholic was a crime, Home Rule meant subjection to the pope in Rome. They—the Unionists—were prepared to fight Home Rule to the death.

  By the summer of 1914 the Liberal Party had been in power in London for more than eight years. Its popularity had, inevitably, been worn down by year after year of struggle and crisis and controversy, by the things it had done as well as by those it had failed to do. It was, compared with its Conservative or Tory rivals, a reformist government, the champion of such things as national health insurance and a government system of old age pensions. Governments in Britain fall and are replaced when they can no longer command a majority of the votes in Commons, and by 1914 the Liberals were dependent for their majority on a bloc of thirty Irish nationalists.

  The price for this support was Home Rule, and the nationalists, aware of how essential they had become to the government, were demanding to be paid now. Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith and his cabinet knew that they had to deliver or be replaced. Thus they were moving a Home Rule bill through Parliament. This bill was passionately opposed by the Conservatives, who were passionately supported by the Unionists. Compromise seemed impossible, so that the struggle became increasingly dangerous. Weapons were being smuggled into northern Ireland, where the Unionists were organizing a hundred thousand Ulstermen into militias with the threat that they would rise in armed rebellion rather than become an impotent minority in an autonomous Ireland.

  Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith

  “How one loathes such levity.”

  Tensions rose as the Home Rule bill moved toward passage, and the dangers of the situation were multiplied by the fact that much of the army’s leadership was Anglo-Irish, Unionist, and implacably opposed to the Asquith government. As it became clear that implementation of Home Rule was likely to require military suppression of a Unionist rebellion, the crisis began to boil over. In the spring the war office had announced that no British officers whose family homes were in Ireland would be required to participate in putting down a Protestant rebellion. All others would be expected to follow whatever orders they were given. Any who found this policy unacceptable were to state their objections and expect to be discharged.

  This sparked what was called the Curragh Mutiny. A number of the army’s senior officers openly declared that they supported the Unionists, that the Unionists’ only crime was their loyalty to the United Kingdom, and that portraying the Unionists as disloyal was an outrage. Fifty-seven of the seventy officers of a cavalry brigade based at Curragh in Ireland, their commanding general among them, announced that they would prefer dismissal to waging war against Ulster.

  Things rapidly went from bad to worse. The secretary of state for war attempted to defuse the situation by offering assurances that there would be no armed suppression of the Protestants. When the prime minister repudiated these assurances, Field Marshal Sir John French resigned as chief of the imperial general staff. Other senior officers resigned also. The king found it necessary to intervene, and leaders on both sides began to step back gingerly from the edge of chaos. By the end of May it was widely accepted that, in spite of the objections of the nationalists, Ireland was going to have to be partitioned. Some part of the North would be retained as part of the U.K. This situation continued to absorb the government in the weeks following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. The day when Vienna delivered its ultimatum to Serbia was also the day when a Buckingham Palace conference on how to partition Ireland—a conference called by King George himself—ended in failure. On Sunday, July 26, six days before the French and Germans mobilized, British troops fired on a crowd of demonstrators in Dublin. Civil war seemed imminent.

  Meanwhile, and with the public barely noticing, Britain was slowly being drawn into the European crisis. London had long based its foreign policy on maintenance of a balance of power on the continent, its aim being to ensure that no country or alliance could become dominant enough to threaten British security. Throughout all the generations when France was the most powerful nation in Europe, it was also, almost automatically, Britain’s enemy. After the fall of Napoleon, when Russia rose for a time to preeminence, relati
ons between it and Britain became so badly strained that in the 1850s the two went to war against each other in the Crimea—with France now on Britain’s side. Prussia had often been England’s ally, but after 1870 the emergence of the German Empire and the corresponding decline of France changed that too. Suddenly the Germans, who for centuries had been too fragmented and backward to threaten anyone, appeared to have become the leading threat to an evenly divided and therefore (from the British perspective) safe Europe. London’s concerns were intensified when Kaiser Wilhelm II made it his goal to build a High Seas Fleet big and modern enough to challenge the Royal Navy. This more than any other factor implanted in many British minds the belief that the next war was likely to be with Germany, and that, in order to keep the Germans from ruling Europe, it was going to be necessary to keep them from overwhelming France.