by Hew Strachan
Part of Joffre’s purpose was moral rather than tactical—to shore up the shattered French infantry. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how quickly French fighting methods improved. One gunner subsequently described the battle in the Trouée de Charmes between 24 and 26 August, as ‘une petite victoire de la Marne, précédant la grande’,92 in its tactical and moral effects. Otto von Moser, commanding a Württemberg infantry brigade, found as the German 4th army cleared the Ardennes that the French infantry was already using trenches on 26 August, spurning an open fight in favour of the protection of buildings and folds in the ground. To his left, in Lorraine, the command of Ernst Röhm, a lieutenant in the Bavarian infantry, was overwhelmed by French firepower— rifle, machine-gun, and artillery—directed from behind impenetrable cover. In the fighting that followed the 75 mm gun became the hub of the French battle, and the Germans developed a respect for French field artillery fire which was to last throughout the war.93
Despite the tactical defeats which they had borne, the French armies were intact. True, some units in the battle of the frontiers suffered horrific casualties. Between 20 and 23 August 40,000 French soldiers died, 27,000 of them on the 22nd. By 29 August total French losses reached 260,000, including 75,000 dead. But the impact varied considerably according to regiment, division, and even army. The 1st and 2nd armies in Lorraine, and the 5th in the north, had suffered less than the 3rd and 4th in the Ardennes: the 3rd had 13,000 killed or wounded out of 80,000 infantry engaged. Furthermore, only forty-eight out of a total ninety-six allied divisions (or their equivalent) were involved in the fighting between 18 and 23 August. In the same period fifty-four of eighty-six German divisions were in action, including seventeen reserve divisions to only four French. France was able to make up its losses. By not having used all its reserves from the outset, and by falling back on to its lines of communications, it could bring over 100,000 men from the depots to fill its depleted ranks. By 6 September most French units were up to 80 or 85 per cent of their establishment. Moreover, Italy’s prompt declaration of neutrality enabled the dissolution of the army guarding the Alps, and the reallocation elsewhere of its five regular divisions and one territorial. Two more divisions arrived from North Africa. On 31 August a third British corps, albeit only of one division initially, was formed. The Entente armies grew stronger, not weaker, after the battle of the frontiers.94
Finally, although a series of defeats, the battle of the frontiers had conveyed a number of strategic advantages. To the east the engagements of Morhange and Sarrebourg had committed the German left wing and prevented it being used to reinforce the right. To the north Mons and Charleroi had pulled the Germans south, away from the Channel ports and the Belgian army, now ensconced in Antwerp. The fact that plan XVII had been a plan for the concentration of France’s armies, not a plan of campaign, gave Joffre a flexibility denied the Germans. Previous French war plans had emphasized the need to identify the direction of the enemy thrust, the role of manoeuvre before the counter-attack. This was the basic philosophy to which Joffre now returned. The battle of the frontiers had given Joffre an understanding of the general situation, which—although delayed—was now complete and wholly realistic. He had managed to break contact with the enemy: nowhere had the Germans fixed him and robbed him of his freedom of manoeuvre. On this basis a fresh plan of operations was possible.
By contrast, the mood in the German general headquarters on 25 August, although jubilant, was not grounded in reality. Tappen, Ludendorff’s successor as head of operations, was convinced that the major battles had now been fought, and that the campaign in the west was effectively over. But the information on which he based this conclusion was partial in both senses of the word. Army commanders, vying with each other for the laurels of victory, were sending back reports that exaggerated their own achievements. In truth, neither their headquarters nor that of Moltke had the means to gather sufficient intelligence to confirm or deny the claims.
In 1914 cavalry remained the most numerous and still the most effective means of gaining information, as well as of denying it to the enemy. The major obstacle to its effectiveness on the western front at this stage of the war was less firepower and more the intensively cultivated and semi-urbanized nature of the terrain, broken up by canals, fences, walls, slag-heaps, and railway lines. To these obstacles were added those of fortification: detours around Liège, Namur, and Maubeuge, and tracing paths between Brussels and Antwerp, and Lille and Condé, increased the distances that the advancing cavalry had to cover and lost time.
Man for man, as well as horse for horse, the best cavalry in 1914 were the British. The Boer War had dinned into them the need for effective horse management to avoid sore backs, colic, and other equine complaints. It had also caused them to accept with better grace than either the French or Germans that cavalry was as likely to fight dismounted as mounted. Of the three, they were the ones equipped with rifles rather than carbines, with the result that their musketry emulated that of the infantry.95 Nonetheless, the German cavalry division, because it contained its own integral infantry, could collectively match the British in terms of firepower. The inability of the French I cavalry corps to penetrate the protective screen of the German right wing was a tribute to the German cavalry’s defensive capabilities. But its qualities were less pronounced when its roles shifted from protection to tactical and strategic reconnaissance. Its bridging equipment proved unsuitable for the canalized and deep-banked rivers of north-western Europe, and the cyclist companies of its infantry battalions encourged it to follow the lines of the roads. The hard surfaces quickly wore out the horses’ shoes. Because of the nature of its line of march, it opted to advance in small, narrow, deep formations rather than in broad, strong ones. When it encountered the enemy’s cavalry, probably dismounted and using the defensive advantages vouchsafed by urbanization and agricultural development, it was forced to deploy to right and left, and also to wait for—or fall back to—its own infantry. Its tactical timidity was compounded by its lack of a body of trained senior cavalry commanders. Not until the 1913 manoeuvres was the cavalry exercised in divisions, and only one cavalry division had existed before mobilization.96
Schlieffen and Moltke had laid great store on the encounter battle: that depended on the cavalry. If they had been entirely confident of it occurring on their right flank, then the bulk of their cavalry should have been here, and Schlieffen had indeed allocated eight cavalry divisions to the right wing and three to Lorraine in his 1905 memorandum. In the event, however, although ten of the German army’s eleven cavalry divisions were assigned to the west, they were distributed evenly along the front—so confirming the evidence that suggests there was no predisposition to see the right wing as decisive in itself. As a result the right wing was woefully deficient in cavalry, and Kluck’s army in particular was unable to reconnoitre effectively. Kluck had failed to locate in advance the true positions of the BEF at Mons and Le Cateau: he was now to conclude—wrongly—that the BEF was out of the battle. The BEF itself had already shown the contribution which aircraft could make to intelligence. However, the German organization of its flying arm—one field flying section of six aircraft for each army headquarters and each active corps—left no aircraft directly subordinate to general headquarters and none to the reserve corps. Thus, detailed reports were presented to army and corps commanders who were not necessarily aware of the overall picture, while Moltke himself was not in a position to order his own reconnaissance. Again, Kluck in particular was the loser; his right flank was guarded by a reserve corps and so was deprived of the benefits of aerial observation.97 The Germans were guilty of seeing things as they wanted them to be, not as they were: it was the memory of 1870, the conviction of German military superiority, which buoyed their sense of victory. And yet this too was proving an illusion: the strain of the advance was revealing the imperfections of Germany’s military organization.
The failure in intelligence collection was associated, at least in part, with th
e problems of communication. The elder Moltke had offset the problems of co-ordinating mass armies on the move by making a virtue of self-reliance among his subordinate commanders. But the nature of Schlieffen’s planning, with its search for a complete solution to a single campaign, created a tension in German doctrine. Schlieffen’s opponents continued to preach the virtues of initiative and of commanding well forward.98 Schlieffen himself looked to new technology to confer on the desk-bound commander a degree of ubiquity. But the equipment available was still at an intermediate stage of development. The field telegraph, which could not keep pace with rapidly moving forces, was obsolescent. Its replacement by the telephone, begun in 1905, was incomplete by 1914. In any case, land lines were hard to set up and maintain in mobile warfare. Radios, recognized by both Schlieffen and the younger Moltke to be the optimum solution, were cumbersome and still at an early stage of development. Trials with light field radios were begun in the two years before the war.99 Von der Marwitz, commanding II cavalry corps in August 1914, used them to communicate with Bülow’s headquarters, and forward to his own reconnaissance squadrons. He was impressed, although frustrated by what they meant for traditional interpretations of cavalry generalship.100 Probably more representative of the responses of German generals was that of Erich von Falkenhayn. In 1912 he organized a corps exercise involving the whole range of the new technologies—telephones, wirelesses, motor cars: ‘When these inventions of the devil work, then what they achieve is more than amazing; when they do not work, then they achieve less than nothing.’ Falkenhayn concluded that for the moment all the old methods of communication had still to be retained as back-up.101 Most senior commanders in 1914 preferred to use dispatch riders and motor cars.
None of these factors is a wholly satisfactory explanation for the general staff’s neglect of communications in its pre-war planning. Neither intelligence nor signals specialists were part of the deployment plans.102 An exercise, fought out on the map with telephones in 1906, had shown some of the problems of communication within a single army command; what it had not attended to were the difficulties of communicating at a higher level, between the army and general headquarters, nor of employing radios, the only technology with the range and flexibility which the German war plan required. By 1914 wireless stations, equipped for cross-border signalling up to a range of 280 kilometres, had been established at Metz, Strasbourg, and Cologne in the west, but they were subordinated to local unit commanders with other priorities.103 On 16 August, with his headquarters at Coblenz, Moltke was already 219 kilometres from the frontier and 330 kilometres from Kluck. His move to Luxembourg on 29 August still meant that the distances were too great for road links to be sufficient. The French were not slow to profit from German transmissions. Able themselves to use the civilian telephone and telegraph links, they could observe radio silence, while intercepting the messages of the Germans. Some of these were sent in clear and others in codes which the French had broken. Moreover, Moltke’s headquarters had only one receiving set, and the relay stations at Luxembourg and Metz soon became overloaded. Transmissions were disrupted by summer storms and by French interference directed from the Eiffel Tower; the Kaiser did not help, taking up valuable air time with unnecessary messages. The result was that the information which Moltke did receive was frequently twenty-four hours old.104
Deprived of effective intelligence and efficient communications, Moltke was thus left to exercise command without its basic tools. But his problems did not end there. In 1870 the King and Bismarck had accompanied Moltke’s uncle into the field; the term ‘general headquarters’ denoted the fusion of political and military direction and referred to the location of Wilhelm, the supreme commander, not of Moltke. Moltke’s headquarters, Die oberste Heeresleitung (OHL), were thus a part, albeit the most important part, of a much larger imperial entourage. When he had become chief of the general staff, Moltke had shown that he—unlike Schlieffen—would not pander to Wilhelm’s military pretensions: in order to give greater reality to manoeuvres he had asked the Kaiser to cease taking an active role in them. But he did not enjoy in war the freedom which this independence deserved. Schlieffen had tried to minimize the potential problems consequent on imperial intervention by making command a matter of regulation and management. Moltke’s approach could ultimately have restored real responsibility to the centre. But the Kaiser, with war just declared, had suddenly abandoned his passivity when he had proposed on 1 August mobilization and concentration against the east alone. Although Wilhelm’s intervention had proved abortive, and ultimately—in the context of the war as a whole—isolated, its effect on Moltke was salutary. The management of his royal master became a major preoccupation, and a constant reminder of the limits of his own responsibility. Each day he reported to the Kaiser on the military situation; until 11 September he refused to leave Coblenz, and then Luxembourg, for fear that Wilhelm would take it into his head to exercise more than just the title of supreme command. Furthermore, with the Kaiser came the intrigues and jealousies of court. Moltke knew that his replacement as chief of the general staff, in the event of war, had been widely canvassed. Indeed, his own indifferent health (he had a heart complaint) made sense of such rumours. The chief of the Kaiser’s military cabinet, von Lyncker, on 10 August asked Falkenhayn, the minister of war, whether he was ready to succeed Moltke should the need arise. Falkenhayn was indeed ready: he was openly critical of Moltke’s command. In Luxembourg one hotel, the Kölner Hof, housed the general staff, and another, the Hotel Brasseur, the military cabinet and the war minister. The division was indicative of more than the conveniences of accommodation. Well might Moltke envy Joffre: Messimy gave the latter full support, and the political direction was far removed from GQG—first in Paris and then (from 2 September) in Bordeaux.105
The structure of OHL, the interpretation of its responsibilities, and its style of command could only deepen these problems. The choice of Coblenz and Luxembourg was determined not least by the need to maintain communications with the eastern front as well as the west; in criticizing Moltke’s performance in the west, it is as well to remember how much his attention was also taken up with the defence of East Prussia. However, given that his responsibilities embraced two fronts, he should perhaps have created an intermediate level of command between himself and the army commanders—what would later be called an army group. He tried to achieve something of the same effect by temporarily subordinating, on the right, Kluck to Bülow, and on the left, Heeringen (the 7th army) to Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria (the 6th). But, in the former case in particular, this arrangement simply served to exacerbate rivalries. Three of Moltke’s army commanders, Duke Albrecht of Württemburg (the 4th army), Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia (the 5th), and Crown Prince Rupprecht, were of royal blood and inherently difficult to dismiss; control was exercised through their chiefs of staff. In any case, Moltke’s chosen means of command reflected his reluctance to be dogmatic, leaving his army commanders a scope for individual initiative which ill-accorded with the tight control and determinism of his predecessor. ‘The plan of the supreme command’, Crown Prince Wilhelm later complained, ‘was simply to overrun the enemy’s country on as broad a front as possible. No definite detailed plan was held in view.’106 Aping what he construed to be his uncle’s style, but in the process distorting it, Moltke conveyed his wishes by directives rather than by orders. Victory would be the fruit of a series of independent actions which would ultimately give the result. Thus each army, and in particular at various points Kluck’s, Bülow’s, and Crown Prince Rupprecht’s, was left free to act in a way that did not conform with the general situation or with Moltke’s own intentions.
The German emphasis on independent leadership only made sense in the context of a common body of accepted operational doctrine. Thus, generals would be likely to take individual decisions whose effects would converge and support each other. The general staff was the agent for the transmission of doctrine, but the expansion of the army had diluted
its presence to the point where there were only three trained officers in each corps and one in each division.107 Even more serious was the fact that Schlieffen’s operational thought, his emphasis on seeking the flank and rear of the enemy, had not been fully assimilated. A number of independent critics, and most influentially Friedrich von Bernhardi in his book of 1912 Vom heutigen Kriege, had rejected Schlieffen’s insistence on envelopment and argued that in some circumstances frontal attacks and breakthrough battles would be more appropriate. Moltke’s own more sceptical approach acknowledged the wisdom of considering alternatives, and the possibility of tactical breakthrough battles was addressed in the 1912 and 1913 manoeuvres. If an enemy, threatened by a strategic movement to the flank, turned to meet that threat, the frontal battle that followed would in tactical terms aim for a breakthrough. Germany’s generals in 1914 had at best been battalion commanders in 1870: tactical immediacy outweighed strategic concepts in their priorities. Another of Schlieffen’s critics, Sigismund von Schlichting, concluded from his close study of infantry tactics that the increased ranges at which battles could now be fought extended fronts to the point where tactical envelopment would be very hard to achieve.108 The problems of mounting a frontal assault, the reinforcement of the firing line in order to achieve fire superiority, was the focus of the generals’ pre-war attention. Thus, operational thought grew from tactics. In late August 1914 army commanders followed their noses. Opportunities for envelopment went begging. Tappen emphasized the frontal attack. Bülow, also an advocate of breakthrough battles, insisted on keeping the right wing tightly dressed to eliminate any gap. Moreover, those who did think in Schlieffen’s terms, who did seek the flanks, tended to do exactly what the French hoped they might. They neglected frontal strength to such an extent that they failed to fix their opponent, and thus left the latter free to break contact and to address the threat from the flank.