by John Keegan
Not just the heat of battle. The cool appraisal of a military technician had decided that the position of First, Second and Third German Armies was untenable. The technician was a middle-ranking officer of the General Staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Hentsch, the peacetime head of the Operations Section of the Great General Staff, since mobilisation the head of the Intelligence Section at Supreme Headquarters. In the war’s aftermath Allied historians expressed surprise that an officer of such junior rank should have been devolved the authority to nullify Schlieffen’s great plan. The German high command itself, at Hentsch’s request, held an official inquiry in 1917 to examine the probity of his intervention. Even today the scope of the powers delegated to him seems remarkably wide, and all the more so because Hentsch was a Saxon, not a Prussian officer, in an army the Prussians dominated. Moreover, he was an intelligence, not an operations, officer, on a general staff whose operations section treated the intelligence section as a handmaiden. Nevertheless, Hentsch was a considerable figure. He had shone as a student at the War Academy, won the high opinion of his contemporaries and superiors and was on intimate terms with both Moltke and Bülow.105 He was therefore an obvious person to choose as an intermediary between Supreme Headquarters and the right wing, at a moment when the distance separating them had increased to 150 miles. Moltke felt unable to make what would be a time-consuming journey himself. He judged signal communications to be both unsatisfactory and insecure. His well-informed intelligence section chief was perfectly qualified to bridge the gap. It was unfortunate, and would continue to appear so, that Moltke wrote nothing down but despatched Hentsch on his mission with nothing more substantial to validate his plenipotentiary authority than a verbal instruction.106
Hentsch set off by motor car from Luxembourg at eleven o’clock on the morning of 8 September. He was accompanied by two captains, Köppen and Kochip, and visited in succession the headquarters of Fifth, Fourth and Third Armies. With each he discussed its situation and concluded that no withdrawal from its front was necessary, with the possible exception of Third Army’s right wing; he nevertheless radioed Luxembourg that the “situation and outlook entirely favourable at Third Army.”107 In the evening he arrived at Second Army’s headquarters, from which Bülow was temporarily absent. When Bülow returned, he, his two principal staff officers and the Hentsch party settled to survey the situation. The result of their discussion was to be decisive for the outcome of the campaign in the west. Bülow dominated. He represented his army’s predicament as one the enemy might exploit in two ways, either by turning the right wing of his own army or by massing against the left wing of First Army. Since the gap between the two was in the hands of the French and British, they enjoyed freedom of action and could use it with “catastrophic” results. Bülow proposed to avert disaster by a “voluntary concentric retreat.”108 That meant a withdrawal from the positions from which the German offensive threatened Paris to safer but defensive lines beyond the Marne. On that note, towards midnight, the meeting dispersed. Next morning, 9 September, Hentsch conferred again with Bülow’s staff officers, though not the General himself, and agreed that he would visit Kluck at First Army to advise a retirement, which would close the menacing gap. He left at once. While he was covering the fifty miles to First Army headquarters, Bülow decided to act on the conclusions arrived at by his juniors. He signalled Kluck and Hausen that “aviator reports four long columns marching towards the Marne” (the aviator was Lieutenant Berthold, the columns those of the BEF) and that consequently, “Second Army is beginning retreat.”109
The retreat that followed was orderly but precipitate. Once Second moved, First and Third were obliged to conform, as by the working of interlocking parts. Mechanistically, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth fell in with the retrogression. Along a front of nearly 250 miles, the German infantry faced about and began to retrace its steps over the ground won in bitter combat during the last two weeks. Moltke gave the orders himself for the retreat of the left wing, and in person. When Hentsch at last returned to Supreme Headquarters at two in the afternoon of 10 September, bringing the first comprehensive account of the situation at the front to amplify the few brief signals Moltke had received from him and Bülow in the previous two days, the Chief of Staff decided that he must do what he might have done in the first place and visit his subordinate army commanders himself. On the morning of 11 September he departed by road from Luxembourg, first for the headquarters of Fifth Army, where he saw the Crown Prince, next to Third Army, where he found Hausen stricken with dysentery, then to Fourth Army. While there he received a message from Bülow warning of a new danger to Third Army, posed by a fresh French attack, and decided that Fourth and Fifth must follow Third, Second and First in retirement. The positions to which he directed them were those on the river system next above the Marne, that of the Aisne and its tributaries. “The lines so reached,” he stipulated, “will be fortified and defended.”110
Those were the last general orders he issued to the German armies; on 14 September he was relieved of command and replaced by General Erich von Falkenhayn, the Minister of War. They were also the most crucial orders to be given since those for general mobilisation and until those initiating the armistice four years and two months later. For the “fortification and defence” of the Aisne, which the German First and Second Armies reached on 14 September, initiated trench warfare. Whatever the technical factors limiting the German army’s capability to manoeuvre with flexibility and at long range from railhead in 1914—lack of mechanical transport, rigidity of signal networks working along telephone and telegraph lines—none constrained its power to dig. It was better provided with field engineer units than any army in Europe—thirty-six battalions, against twenty-six French—and better trained in rapid entrenchment.111 The entrenching tool had become, by 1914, part of the equipment of the infantryman in every army. However, while the British cavalry took pride in avoiding entrenchment exercises, and the French disregarded “the most demanding notions of cover,” the German soldier had been obliged to use the spade on manoeuvre since at least 1904. “From 1906 onward, foreign observers [of German manoeuvres] noted that German defensive positions frequently consisted of several successive trench lines linked by communication saps, often with barbed wire entanglements strung in front of them.” The Germans had not only noted the significance of entrenchments in the Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars but, unlike others, had drawn the lesson.112
When, at the end of the second week of September, therefore, the French and British troops pursuing the enemy came up against the positions on which the Germans had halted, they found their counteroffensive halted by entrenchments which ran in a continuous line along the crest of the high ground behind the Aisne, and its tributary the Vesle, between Noyon and Rheims. The line ran on beyond, turning south-west at Verdun and following the River Meurthe until it climbed away through the precipitate Vosges to reach the Swiss frontier near Basle. Beyond Rheims, however, the opposing armies—the German Fifth and Sixth, the French First and Second—had been so weakened by combat and by withdrawals to reinforce the crucial western sector that active operations had attenuated. The Aisne had now become the critical front and there, between 13 and 27 September, both sides mounted a succession of attacks, as troops became available, the Allies in the hope of pressing their pursuit further, the Germans with that of holding their line or even going over again to the offensive. The Allies began in optimistic mood. Wilson, British Deputy Chief of Staff, had discussed with Berthelot, his French equivalent, during the advance to the Aisne how soon their armies would be on the Belgian frontier with Germany. He thought a month, Berthelot three weeks. They were shortly to discover that the days of “open warfare” were over.113
The Aisne is a deep, wide river, passable only by bridging. At the outset of the battle not all the bridges had been destroyed, while others were improvised; none was safe while within range of German artillery fire. Beyond the Aisne the ground rises some 500 feet above the valley to for
m a long massif, indented by re-entrants between bluffs and in places heavily wooded. The feature, some twenty-five miles long, affords excellent points of observation and dominating fire positions, while the road that traverses it, the Chemin des Dames, laid out for the daughters of Louis XV, provides easy lateral communication from left to right.114 A British formation, the 11th Infantry Brigade, was the first to attempt an assault. It had found an unbroken bridge at Venizel and managed to establish itself on the crest on 12 September, after a thirty-mile approach march in pouring rain.115 Thereafter the difficulties increased. The French Sixth Army tried on 13 September to get round the flank of the Chemin des Dames ridge near Compiègne but met German resistance across its whole front. The BEF was also held up under the centre of the Chemin des Dames that day and the only success was achieved on the right where the French Fifth Army found the gap that still existed between von Kluck’s and von Bülow’s armies and reached Berry-au-Bac on the Aisne’s north bank.
The Western Front in outline, 1914–18
The gap was rapidly being filled, however, by troops hurrying down from Maubeuge, where the valiant French garrison had at last been compelled to surrender the fortress on 8 September, and by others brought from Alsace and Lorraine to form a new German Seventh Army between First and Second. Moreover, with the Germans digging furiously—the first load of “trench stores” to reach what was becoming the Western Front arrived from Germany on 14 September—the enemy line thickened almost by the hour.116 The French ability to find reserves was meanwhile hindered by their need to hold Rheims, recaptured on 12 September, but subjected to devastating bombardment in the days that followed; the damage done to its famous cathedral, outside which stands the statue of Joan of Arc, would cause as much discredit to the invaders as the sack of Louvain a month earlier. What troops were available Joffre was forming into a new Second Army on his outer wing, under the fiery General de Castelnau. It was composed at the outset of corps taken from the Sixth, First and former Second Armies, most released by the stabilisation of the front in Lorraine and Alsace.
Joffre’s object, not yet fully formulated, was to deploy across the rear of the Germans’ thickening front on the Chemin des Dames and so to regain possession of the northern departments, rich in agriculture and industry, lost to France during August. While from 14 September Sir John French was ordering his troops to entrench wherever they occupied ground on or above the Aisne, Joffre was seeking means for this new manoeuvre. On 17 September he instructed his armies to “keep the enemy under threat of attack and thus prevent him from disengaging and transferring portions of his forces from one point to another.”117 Three days earlier, Falkenhayn, the new German Chief of Staff, had likewise ordered counter-attacks along the whole front with a similar object. Both commanders had grasped that opportunity in the campaign in the west now lay north of the active battlefront, in the hundred-mile sweep of territory standing, denuded of troops, between the Aisne and the sea. Whoever could find an army to operate there, without weakening his grip on the entrenched zone, might still outflank the enemy and so triumph.
There was an army in the region. It was the Belgian, hanging grimly on to the “national redoubt” in the entrenched camp at Antwerp, to which it had retreated in the third week of August. King Albert, acting as Commander-in-Chief, was keenly aware of the damage he might do to the invader’s strategic position by operating against his rear and on 24 August had mounted a large-scale sortie from Antwerp towards Malines. The scratch force, III Reserve Corps and the Naval Division, left by German Supreme Command to contain the Belgians, proved just strong enough to block their advance and turn them back on the third day. On 9 September Albert tried again and his men advanced as far as Vilvoorde, ten miles from the outer lines of the fortresses, before being halted.118 There was a third, equally fruitless, attempt at an offensive on 27 September, which was also the last day of active operations between the Allies and Germans on the Aisne. Thereafter the German besiegers of Antwerp, who had been reinforced, were able to begin a deliberate reduction of the fortress, while the campaign between the Aisne and the sea took on the character of a frenzied search for the “open flank” by the Allies and Germans in succession.
This passage has come to be called “the Race for the Sea.” A race it was; not for the sea, however, but to find a gap between the sea and the Aisne position before it was exploited by the other side. Both sides, with the line stabilising along its whole length, could economise force in the burgeoning entrenchments to send formations northward. The largest was the new French Tenth Army, commanded by General de Maud’huy and comprising the X and XVI Corps, which from 25 September onwards began to deploy beyond the River Somme on the great stretch of open chalk downland that sweeps northward above the steeper countryside of the Aisne. The army arrived in the nick of time, for the only French troops thereabouts were a scattering of Territorials and cavalry. Even as it began to deploy, however, with the object of pushing south-eastward behind the German front, an equivalent German mass was marching forward to oppose it. It consisted of three corps, the IV, the Guard and the I Bavarian Reserve, which together were to compose a new Sixth Army, some of which had marched cross-country from the Aisne, other parts having been transferred by rail to Belgium first.119 Falkenhayn’s plan, agreed with Bülow, was to use Sixth Army to mount an offensive westward towards the Channel, while eight of the eleven German cavalry divisions swept the Flanders coast and the besiegers of Antwerp brought Belgian resistance to a peremptory end. The outcome Falkenhayn intended was a new drive through northern France, leaving the Germans in possession of all the territory above the Somme and thus positioned to march down towards Paris from lines that outflanked the French entrenched zone between the Aisne and Switzerland.
Part of the Falkenhayn plan succeeded. At Antwerp, General von Beseler, an engineer by training, had by 27 September devised an effective scheme to crack the entrenched camp’s three lines of defences. The siege train of super-heavy guns that had reduced Liège and Namur having been transferred to his command, he began by bombarding the outermost and newest ring and then launched his infantry through the breach gained on 3 October. A British intervention temporarily stayed the crisis. On 4 October an advance guard of the Royal Naval Division, which had landed at Dunkirk on 19 September and had meanwhile roamed western Belgium, arrived in Antwerp by train.120 In its wake appeared the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, thirsting for action and glory. The Royal Marines and sailors who composed the division temporarily halted the German advance. On the night of 5 October, however, Beseler’s men managed to penetrate the second ring of forts at an unguarded point and advance to the first, a cordon of obsolete redoubts erected in 1859. The German artillery quickly began to break up their antiquated masonry, forcing the Royal Naval Division and what remained of the Belgian field army to evacuate towards the westernmost corner of Belgium on the River Yser. On 10 October General Deguise, the heroic Belgian commander of Antwerp, delivered up his sword to a German colonel. He was accompanied by a sergeant and a private soldier, all that remained of the garrison still under his command.121
The two other elements of Falkenhayn’s plan foundered. Between 1 and 6 October the offensive of the new Sixth Army, whose mission was to “break down the weakening resistance of the enemy” between the Somme and Flanders, was checked and defeated by the French Tenth Army; it was then and there that Foch, acting as Joffre’s deputy on the critical front, issued the celebrated order, “No retirement. Every man to the battle.”122 Finally, the great sweep of the eight German cavalry divisions, the largest body of horsemen ever to be collected in Western Europe before or since, was rapidly blunted by the appearance, west of Lille, of the French XXI Corps and its own supporting cavalry.
THE FIRST BATTLE OF YPRES
Thus, by the end of the second week of October, the gap in the Western Front through which a decisive thrust might be launched by one side or the other had been reduced to a narrow corridor in Belgian Fland
ers. There is one of the dreariest landscapes in Western Europe, a sodden plain of wide, unfenced fields, pasture and plough intermixed, overlying a water table that floods on excavation more than a few spadefuls deep. There are patches of woodland scattered between the villages and isolated farmsteads and a few points of high ground that loom in the distance behind the ancient walled city of Ypres. The pervading impression, however, is of long unimpeded fields of view, too mournful to be called vistas, interrupted only by the occasional church steeple and leading in all directions to distant, hazy horizons which promise nothing but the region’s copious and frequent rainfall.
It was here, between 8 and 19 October, that the five corps now comprising the British Expeditionary Force arrived by train and road to sustain the Allied defence. To the BEF’s north the remnants of the Belgian army, which had managed to escape from Antwerp, had made their way along the coast to Nieuport, the town at the mouth of the Yser river that there flows into the sea; most of the marines and sailors of the Royal Naval Division had already got away to Ostend, where the British 7th Division, landed earlier, held a bridgehead until it joined the main body of the BEF near Ypres on 14 October.123 On the Yser, a narrow but embanked river that forms a major military obstacle in the waterlogged coastal zone, the Belgians quickly erected barricades and laid plans to inundate the surrounding countryside if the river line were breached. Though they had arrived from Antwerp a broken army, their recovery was quick and their resistance on the Yser was to win the admiration of their Allies and the respect of the Germans. Their six divisions had been reduced in strength to 60,000 men, but they succeeded in garrisoning ten miles of utterly flat and featureless terrain and in holding most of their positions until, after the loss of another 20,000 men, King Albert decided, on 27 October, to open the sluices at the mouth of the Yser and let in the sea and flood the area. The resulting inundation created an impassable zone ten miles long between Nieuport and Dixmude.124