by Hew Strachan
The only other force available was Sordet’s cavalry corps. Theoretically the open flank to the north was exactly the strategic opportunity which justified the maintenance of large formations of horsemen in modern war. But France’s cavalry was deficient in a number of respects. As in Germany, the corps organization was improvised on mobilization. French cavalry corps had no artillery, and their divisions lacked firepower and efficient radios. Because prewar remount policy had been driven by the commercial needs of the ministry of agriculture, rather than by the likely demands of the army in war, Anglo-Norman breeds designed for traction were preferred to hardier saddle horses. Accustomed to exercising on soft soils in peacetime, they had been worn out by the constant road-work in August. In the opening month of the war Sordet’s cavalry had covered 1,000 kilometres, and by 10 August the corps had already needed 15,000 new shoes. In the retreat pauses to water were proscribed for fear of lengthening the columns of march. Nor did French cavalrymen—unlike the British—see the need to dismount to save their horses. Too many of them, Foch fulminated, have ‘their brains in their legs’.144 Sore backs devastated the cavalry’s fighting power: 90 per cent of French horse losses in 1914 were due to sickness rather than combat, and by the end of 1914 a quarter of France’s total horse strength on mobilization had died.
The substantive criticism against cavalry in 1914, therefore, was that the horse could not sustain continuous operations characteristic of modern war. France’s other cavalry corps, commanded by Conneau, had been shifted from Lorraine to support the 5th army at the beginning of September. Although it had done far less than Sordet’s corps, by 8 September it was already incapable of sustaining the advance. Sordet’s corps was moved by rail to the left of the 6th army on 7 September, but it could only deploy one out of three divisions, a total of 1,300 horsemen. This raided in the direction of Soissons, between the Ourcq and the Oise, and returned exhausted on 13 September.
The British cavalry was entirely out of the equation. In front of it were six river lines and thick woods. It had been divided into two divisions on 5 September and given tasks that were defensive. Collectively both were to guard the front and flanks of the infantry, but in addition the 1st cavalry division under Allenby was to maintain contact with the French 5th army on the right and the 2nd under Gough with Maunoury’s 6th army on the left. Given their own losses (their regiments averaged 250 men each) and the assumption of the German cavalry’s numerical superiority, more aggressive tactics were ruled out.145
The Marne is remembered as a great manoeuvre battle—rightly, as it was the manoeuvres which made it decisive. Moreover, both sides were on the attack. But in reality most of the battle was characterized by fighting that was static. On 6 September 280 kilometres of the line, from Switzerland to Verdun, were already stable. By the 9th a further 100 kilometres, from Verdun to Mailly, was also fixed. The movement on that day was confined to 105 kilometres between Mailly and La Ferte-sous-Jouarre.146
On the Aisne this process was taken one stage further. Moltke had ordered the positions of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th armies from Reims to north of Verdun to be built ‘as fortresses’. The allied commanders renounced the resumption of an immediate general offensive. Orders were for local attacks only; positions were to be consolidated. The ease with which the soil was worked hastened the construction of positions, despite the relative lack of tools. The trenches themselves were narrow and rarely continuous. They were not yet ends in themselves, but means to an end. Tactically, they were sited to provide protection from artillery fire. Operationally, they enabled ground to be defended with fewer troops, so allowing tired men a chance to recuperate and—above all—permitting the creation of new formations for mobile operations elsewhere. Bitterest of ironies, trench warfare was adopted to enable mobile warfare to take place.147
Much of the combat on the Marne was, therefore, tactically indecisive. The soldiers who took part in it only knew its outcome from the direction in which they marched when they had ceased fighting. And yet strategically and operationally the Marne was a truly decisive battle in the Napoleonic sense. It was exactly the sort of battle which generals in 1914 had been educated to expect. The French had ‘fixed’ the Germans in the east and manoeuvred to strike against them in the west; the Germans’ initial victories had been valueless because they had neither fixed nor destroyed their opponents, but left them free to manoeuvre and to fight again. The immediate consequences were political. France and the French army were saved: without that the Entente would have had no base for continuing operations in western Europe. Italy was confirmed in its decision to be neutral, in the unwisdom of honouring its commitment to the Triple Alliance. The longer-term effects were strategic. Germany had failed to secure the quick victory on which its war plan rested. From now on it was committed to a war on two fronts. With hindsight, some would say that Germany had already lost the war.
In Germany, however, the truth about the Marne was never fully divulged. The press releases between 6 and 16 September presented the withdrawal around Paris as tactical, a regrouping preliminary to a fresh attack on the French capital, and set it in the context of victories elsewhere, especially on the eastern front. Thus, an essentially false picture of the military prospects was allowed to develop, one which was embraced not only by the press but also by many of the main power groups in Germany. Above all, the army could not recognize that it had been defeated, that its position at the heart of German society had been implicitly challenged by its failure to succeed in its prime role. Thirty-three generals were dismissed after the battle,148 but rather than acknowledge a collective responsibility, the army blamed Kluck for having disobeyed orders and created the gap, Bülow for having been the first to decide to retreat, Hentsch for having ordered the 1st army to conform, Hausen and Crown Prince Rupprecht for not having achieved the breakthroughs that would have retrieved the situation, and Moltke for having failed to prove himself a true Feldherr. By seeking explanations in the shortcomings of individuals, and by arguing that a particular error was decisive, the German army could conclude that the Marne was really a battle which it had effectively won. Thus, the Marne did not form the basis for a strategic reassessment of Germany’s objectives in the war, or for self-appraisal by the German army as an institution. Because the truth was never simultaneously and wholeheartedly grasped, what followed was muddle and compromise. In the immediate aftermath of the Marne some at general headquarters accused Moltke of following the prescriptions of Schlieffen too closely;149 by 1919 it would be widely held that Moltke’s failure was not to follow Schlieffen closely enough. Thus, the debate was about operational ideas, not about grand strategy; it continued to reflect the belief that ideal intellectual solutions could be imposed on the conduct of war; and it showed that even at this most basic level of generalship the German army had not found consensus.
FROM THE AISNE TO THE YSER
On the evening of 14 September von Lyncker called on Moltke and conveyed to him the Kaiser’s command that he report himself sick. The confidence between the emperor and his chief of the general staff had never recovered from the interview on 1 August. But Moltke himself—although genuinely ailing—was anxious to continue. Because he was not formally relieved until 3 November, he remained at general headquarters, a sad if still occasionally perceptive man.
Wilhelm’s choice as Moltke’s successor was the Prussian minister of war, Erich von Falkenhayn. The decision was a personal one, albeit adumbrated by von Lyncker and the Kaiser’s military entourage for some time past. Falkenhayn—tall, good-looking, relatively youthful by the standards of the German generals (he was now 53, and younger than all the army commanders)—was a Prussian junker who had commanded a guards regiment. To these qualifications for imperial favour he added his record as war minister, having proved a doughty defender in the Reichstag of the army and of its more questionable practices. Over the long term Wilhelm’s support was to prove a major factor in Falkenhayn’s survival in office. In the short term the ap
pointment, although not perhaps the one which either the chancellor or the army itself might have made, seemed sensible enough. Falkenhayn was cold and aloof, not good at getting alongside his new colleagues at OHL. But he had a political breadth and flexibility, attributed to his decade of service as a military adviser in China and German chief of staff in the Boxer rebellion, which his Germany-bound professional colleagues could not match. His reputation was for energy, shrewdness, and decision. Above all, he was on the spot. By employing somebody already at general headquarters to hold two offices, not one, Moltke’s supercession could be concealed and the fiction of military invincibility sustained.150
Falkenhayn’s appointment confirmed the idea that if any accusation was to be levelled at Moltke it was that of following Schlieffen too closely, not of departing from his prescriptions. For Falkenhayn himself seemed to represent not a reassertion of Schlieffen’s influence but a further shift away from it. The period of the latter’s domination of the general staff coincided with Falken-hayn’s Far Eastern service. The new chief of the general staff described himself as an ‘autodidact’.151 Furthermore, the pivot of operational decision-making in the Marne battle was Tappen, a strong advocate of the breakthrough, not of envelopment. Yet Tappen was retained as head of operations. Indeed, his role—for the moment, at any rate—waxed stronger. Falkenhayn had been able, by virtue of his post as war minister and his presence in general headquarters, to keep abreast of the general situation. From 12 September he was actively involved in operations. But inevitably he was dependent on Tappen to help guide him in his new office. The qualities which Falkenhayn was expected to bring to OHL were administrative—to centralize command, to move OHL forward to Charleville-Mézières, to bring the army commanders to heel; the ideas would be Tappen’s, and even Moltke’s.
For ten days past Moltke had been anxiously looking to Belgium and had been preparing to move thither the 7th and then the 6th armies from Alsace-Lorraine. Others, including Falkenhayn, had wanted to employ the 6th and 7th armies alongside the 4th and 5th, either as part of the attempt to break through or as a counter to an anticipated French attack northwards on the front Verdun-Toul. By 14 September, the opposing lines on France’s eastern frontier were up to a kilometre apart and the French were showing no indication that they would attack. The stabilization of the line in Champagne and the Argonne lessened the fear of a French thrust northwards from Verdun and also argued against the idea of trying to push the French 3rd and the 4th armies to the south-east. The 7th army had been used to plug the gap between the 1st and 2nd. But the 6th army was still available as a strategic reserve.
During the night of 14/15 September Falkenhayn weighed a number of options. The Germans’ overall frontier in the west was stabilizing, but the open flank of the 1st army, guarded by a single reserve corps, and the latent threat from Antwerp meant that this next move must be at least in part defensive. And this was the heart of the dilemma. The Germans had to secure their position in France, but simultaneously they had to regain the moral ascendancy they had enjoyed before the Marne and go on to achieve a quick victory in the west. The pressure of time, particularly given the insistent appeals to reinforce the eastern front, was no less than it had been at the start of the war.152 Falkenhayn’s inclination, therefore, already evident in late August before he became chief of the general staff,153 was now no longer to use the 6th army to achieve a breakthrough round Verdun but to resurrect Schlieffen’s plan for envelopment by pushing it wide, to the right wing.
However, Falkenhayn had not resolved Schlieffen’s original dilemma, that of numbers in relation to space. The right wing ran from Compiegne to Antwerp, and he had a single army to cover the entire area. He could use it cautiously, to thicken the 1st army and secure the flank. He could push it wide, to help mop up Antwerp, and then to secure the Channel coast and its ports as far as the mouth of the Somme. Thirdly, he could allocate less substantial reinforcements to both the 1st army and the Antwerp besiegers, and give the 6th army a more independent role between the two geographical extremes of Compiègne and Antwerp.
The third option was the one which Falkenhayn favoured. In an operation which would both defend the open flank and resume the offensive, he planned to concentrate the 6th army around Maubeuge and then use it to envelop the Entente’s left wing. The movement of the 6th army could not be completed until 21 September, and to cover the intervening days Falkenhayn intended to authorize the 1st, 7th, and 2nd armies to fall back to the line La Fère-Laon— Reims. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th armies were to hold if they were attacked, and if they were not, were to attack—beginning on the left with the 5th on 18 September, and moving in a south-westerly direction.
The ‘autodidact’, for all his criticism of Moltke’s dependence on Schlieffen, had embraced the idea of strategic envelopment. However, while Falkenhayn was forming his plan the two key exponents of breakthrough—Tappen and Bülow—had devised a totally different scheme. They wanted to use the left wing of the 1st army, the 7th army, and three corps which had been drawn off from each of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th armies to attack on the front Soissons-Fismes-Reims. Tappen’s criticism of Falkenhayns’s plan was comprehensive. Three points proved particularly telling. First, Falkenhayn’s proposal involved a delay in which the French would be given the chance to regain the operational freedom which they seemed to be losing by 14 September. They had the advantage in the use of railways (a point reinforced by Groener), and could regroup faster than could the Germans. Secondly, stretching the line to the right might reopen the gap between the 1st and 2nd armies. Finally, and most importantly for the new chief of the general staff, his first manoeuvre involved a retreat, which, however sound strategically, was not sensible in the immediate aftermath of defeat. The effect on Germany’s putative allies, Italy and Romania, would be no less than the further damage to the morale of the German soldier.
Falkenhayn was convinced, at least in part. He determined that there would be no further retreat on the right wing or in the centre. But he did not think a decision could be reached between Noyon and Verdun. He therefore persevered with the idea of moving the 6th army, ostensibly to protect the 1st army’s flank in the area of St Quentin, although privately nursing the hope of envelopment. And on the left he decided to renew the attack on the Meuse forts, just south of Verdun, reckoning that the French forces in this sector were now weak, and hoping to be able to encircle the city itself. The purpose of the Soissons/Reims attack was therefore to fix the French in the centre and prevent the reinforcement of their wings. Once again, however, the overall effect was to create a plan with too many options, and that was too ambitious, given the resources available.154
Germany’s hopes of a decisive victory between September and November 1914 came to rest on the right wing. But never did its army regain the initiative which it had enjoyed in August. Falkenhayn has taken the brunt of the criticism for this: he has been blamed for a reluctance to strip the rest of his line and to lose ground in order to create a strong right wing.155 But in truth the causes were in large part outside Falkenhayn’s immediate control. Troops were fed into the right wing in penny packets and were never in sufficient depth. This was as much a product of the transport problems as of the needs of the rest of the front. Much of the railway line in German-occupied Belgium and northern France was still not fully operational. Until the fall of Maubeuge only one line, that from Trier to Liège, Brussels, Valenciennes, and Cambrai linked Germany to Belgium and northern France. This single line had simultaneously to carry supplies for the right-wing armies in one direction and enable the regrouping of the 6th army in the other. At the most forty trains per day could run, and thus the movement of a single corps took four days. Even after Maubeuge fell, the second line—that from Diedenhofen to Luxembourg— was disrupted until the bridge over the Meuse at Namur was restored. In late October the German corps operating round Ypres went days without food, and were reduced to taking the turnips from the fields where they fought. Joffre knew this, and
made the harassing of German communications around Péronne and St Quentin a focus of his operations.156 His flow of intelligence, through wireless intercepts, was sufficient to enable him to anticipate German movements. The Germans, on the other hand, had to rely much more on agents’ reports, and were often remarkably vague and even far-fetched in their estimates of Entente movements and intentions. Tactically the German inferiority persisted, the French proving far more canny in their use of ground and far more economical in their expenditure of men.157 And, finally, for all the expectations vested in him, Falkenhayn did not manage to bring his army commanders to heel. His approval of Bülow’s attack on the Soissons-Reims front on 16 September—against his own judgement—was a dangerous concession to Moltkean precedent. Bülow asked Kluck for his support but did not get it, and the attack made little progress. The consequence of their continuing problems—of command, tactics, communications, transport, and manpower—was that Falkenhayn’s defensive needs, the protection of his exposed flank and his lines of communication, could never be entirely subordinated to his need to regain the initiative.