Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (57 page)

On 4 September Franchet d’Espèrey left his headquarters – where, heavens knows, he had enough to occupy him – to drive to Bray for a first meeting with Sir John French. On arrival, to his fury he found no sign of the British. At last Henry Wilson appeared, making excuses for his chief’s absence. Franchet d’Espèrey explained that his own army would attack next day. Would the British be marching on his left flank? Wilson said he could make no commitment on his chief’s behalf. The Frenchman departed in a sulphurous humour, as well he might. Murray, the BEF’s chief of staff, was already involved in tense discussions with Gallieni and Manoury about exactly when and where Sixth Army would attack, not assisted by having himself taken a violent dislike to the governor of Paris. On the 4th, they eventually evolved a plan which required a day’s delay – until the 6th – to enable the British to withdraw a few miles further, clearing space for Sixth Army to deploy a little more eastward and attack south of the river Marne. Joffre and Franchet d’Espèrey had anticipated advancing on 5 September across a much wider front, from roughly where the armies stood, north of the Marne.

Fortuitously, in London on the 4th representatives of the British, French and Russian governments sought to emphasise their solidarity by signing an agreement, which became known as the Declaration of London, whereby each pledged not to conclude a separate peace with Germany. This had been prompted in considerable degree by Russian fears that France’s dire predicament might prompt its government to throw in the towel. But the French had their own concerns, about the sorry British showing. That same evening on the battlefield, Col. Huguet reported to GQG that Sir John French had decided to continue the BEF’s retreat on 5 and 6 September, professing a need to give further consideration to his ally’s attack plan. Joffre, Franchet d’Espèrey, Manoury and Gallieni could have been forgiven for wishing the British C-in-C at the bottom of the sea; and must privately have said as much to each other.

At 8 o’clock that evening of the 4th, at Bar-sur-Aube Joffre was dining off his favourite dish, a
gigot à la Bretonne
, in an atmosphere of acute strain, depression and gloom which oppressed his staff. Suddenly, a staff officer burst in: ‘his black uniform was grey with dust, so was his face and beard. It filled his eyes which were sore with it, and made him blink in the light. He took a step forward, saluted and said, “
Mon général
, General Franchet d’Espèrey has asked me to tell you that the English are prepared to assume the offensive.”’ Sir John French had grudgingly and belatedly agreed to conform to the instructions of his government. The
commander-in-chief lifted both arms to heaven. ‘Then we can march!’ he exclaimed. Even if Spears’ account above is exaggeratedly theatrical, its sense is valid. Somehow Murray and Wilson had persuaded the little field-marshal that the British must at least present an appearance of cooperation with the French offensive. Joffre decreed that the allies’ Marne operations should commence on 6 September. At 9.15 p.m., Sir John French telegraphed formal assent for the BEF’s participation.

That same day, Kluck had signalled to the German Supreme Command: ‘As a consequence of difficult and incessant fighting,’ he said, his army ‘had reached the limits of its strength … Prompt reinforcements are urgently desired.’ Here was Kluck’s almost explicit admission that the triumphalism of his own words and actions of the past week had been misplaced. Walter Bloem described the state of his company: ‘Unshaved, and scarcely washed at all for days … faces covered with stubbly beard, they looked like prehistoric savages. Their coats were covered with dust and spattered with blood from bandaging the wounded, blackened with powder-smoke, and torn threadbare by thorns and barbed wire.’

On the evening of 4 September, Moltke had finally and explicitly abandoned the Schlieffen concept: he acknowledged a French threat to his right wing, if not yet its gravity. He decreed that the final big attacks of the war would be made in the centre and on the left of the German line, to achieve a closure around Verdun. He urged Kluck and Bülow to cooperate closely with each other, and ordered First Army to turn to face Paris, in case the allies launched a counter-attack from that direction. Kluck ignored the chief of staff’s admittedly vague directive: he blundered on, in pursuit of Lanrezac. Hausen, commanding Third Army, on that evening of the 4th reported that he had given his army a rest day for the morrow, which meant that he could not cooperate with Bülow’s planned attack. Moltke raised no objection, but once again German sluggishness cost an important opportunity: if Hausen had kept going, he might have pushed into a gap between the opposing forces of Ferdinand Foch – now commanding the newly-created Ninth Army – and Langle de Cary; but he did not. Thus did the invaders of France win themselves to death.

The war did not stop while the allies prepared to launch their offensive. The dying continued on almost every front, through almost every hour: the French were obliged to fight hard to resist a major German attack on the Couronné de Nancy, even as Sixth Army was massing in the north. Charles Péguy – celebrated poet, socialist and publisher – was shot in the head at Villeroy on 4 September at the age of forty-one, and his death became a
symbol of France’s sacrifice, just as the stolid image of ‘Papa’ Joffre was soon elevated as the embodiment of his nation’s determination to prevail.

It was known to no one on either side, of course, that the Germans had now attained the extreme limit of their advance across France. Old Mme Lemaire, intimate of Proust and ‘The Mistress’ of one of Paris’s great artistic salons, was at her château at Reveillon, Seine-et-Marne, on 5 September when the enemy’s vanguard reached the area. She was walking in the garden with her daughter Suzette when a German cavalry officer jumped the boundary hedge and checked his horse at their feet. Clapping a mon-ocle to his eye, the intruder cried: ‘I wanted to see Madeleine Lemaire, and now I have!’ Then he tugged his reins and galloped away. Here was a vivid manifestation of the freemasonry of Europe’s cultured classes; that night a German unit occupied the house.

Even as troops poured out of Paris towards the front and Manoury’s men took up their new positions, uncertainty persisted about the exact deployments of Fifth and Sixth Armies and the BEF. Early next afternoon, Joffre drove to the château of Vaux-le-Pénil, at Melun, where Sir John French was billeted. The story of what followed, brilliantly if histrionically recounted by Spears, has often been told but remains indispensable to any narrative of 1914. Entering the hall, Joffre exchanged greetings with the small group of French and British officers present, all the men still standing. ‘At once,’ wrote Spears, ‘he began to speak in that low, toneless, albino voice of his, saying that he had felt it his duty to come to thank Sir John personally for having taken a decision on which the fate of Europe might well depend.’ The British field-marshal bowed.

Then Joffre expounded his plan.

We hung on his every word. We saw as he evoked it the immense battlefield over which the corps, drawn by the magnet of his will, were moving like pieces of intricate machinery until they clicked into their appointed places. We saw trains in long processions labouring under the weight of their human freight, great piles of shells mounting up by the sides of the ready and silent guns … Joffre seemed to be pointing the Germans out to us – blundering blindly on, hastening to their fate, their huge, massive, dusty columns rushing towards the precipice over which they would soon be rolling. As a prophet he was heard with absolute faith. We were listening to the story of the victory of the Marne, and we absolutely believed … Then, turning full on Sir John, with an appeal so intense as to be irresistible, clasping both his own hands so as to hurt them, General Joffre said:
‘Monsieur le Maréchal, c’est la France qui vous supplie.’
His hands fell to his sides wearily. The effort he had made had exhausted him.

French witnesses attributed different words to Joffre: ‘
Il y a de l’honneur de l’Angleterre, Monsieur le Maréchal!
’ This phrase, warning that Britain’s honour was at stake, would have been less pleading, and thus seems more credible. What is beyond doubt is that Joffre appealed passionately to Sir John. The British C-in-C struggled to say something in response in the Frenchman’s own language. Then, abandoning the attempt, he turned to a staff officer: ‘Damn it, I can’t explain. Tell him that all that men can do our fellows will do.’ On that note, the two commanders-in-chief parted.

While this narrative of the encounter makes irresistible reading, and the outcome recorded by Spears represented an appropriately moving fulfilment, reality was harsher. British participation in the Marne offensive would be very slight, very slow, and embarrassingly half-hearted even according to the testimony of British participants. The best that could be said was that Sir John French’s troops took their place in the line while the neighbouring formations of Manoury and Franchet d’Espèrey, together with the new Ninth Army of Foch, did the fighting. In those days, and especially between 1 and 5 September, the personality of Joffre sustained a calm resolution which alone made it possible to arrest and then partially to reverse the huge, cruel defeats of August. Whatever further failures and disappointments lay ahead, as the allies commenced what would become known as the Battle of the Marne, Joffre showed himself a great commander of armies. Late on 5 September, Gallieni telegraphed his forces with untrammelled exuberance: ‘
Demain, en avant!
’

10

The Nemesis of Moltke

1 THE MARNE

Before embarking upon their great western offensive, or indeed upon the war, the Germans should have pondered the fact that throughout history, swift outcomes of conflicts between approximate equals have been rarities. Even Marlborough’s battlefield triumphs over the French, and those of Bonaparte over his many enemies, proved inconclusive. Wellington’s victory at Waterloo and the elder Moltke’s at Sedan were exceptions to the more general course of warfare. The armies of 1914 were equipped to inflict appalling human and material destruction upon their enemies, but the technology of movement lagged. Worse, the vast mobilised masses had outgrown the ability of their commanders quickly to communicate with them.

Wirelesses, less than a generation old, were few and heavy, available only to higher headquarters; they lacked range and reliability. The ‘spark’ sets of 1914 were also incapable of fine-tuning, so that signals were dispersed across all known long-wave frequencies, and were thus readily susceptible to interception. Valve technology, which made possible transmissions on a narrow band, was invented in the United States only in 1913, and was not widely used in Europe until two years later. Furthermore, many of the ciphers employed by the belligerents were broken by their enemies. In static positions, formations were accessible by telegraph or telephone, but once in motion they could receive messages only from couriers, some using motor cars, but many still horsed.

The more ambitious a general’s objectives – and those of the German army in 1914 were supremely ambitious – the harder it became to control his men’s movements. A delay was inevitable of hours, sometimes extending to days, between the issue of orders across thousands of square miles of operational activity and their implementation. Once a formation was
committed to a given course of action, it was often as hard to change this as to steer a dreadnought from the bridge by dispatching hands below to manhandle its rudders. The reversal of German fortunes that took place in early September was principally influenced by the vast fallacy of Schlieffen, in lesser degree by Moltke’s infirmity of leadership, but also by the technical difficulties of directing the motions of six German armies, fighting on foreign soil. French defeats and retreats had at least the compensating merit that they enabled Joffre to exploit the communications systems of his own country, much to his advantage.

It is characteristic of war, however, that commanders see all the difficulties on their own side. The British especially, in the mood of the moment, failed to grasp the fact that their opponents were in deepening trouble. Germany’s war plan required millions of men, many of them newly recalled from soft civilian life, to march vast distances across western Europe carrying heavy loads in summer heat. By early September, the invaders of France found their columns losing cohesion, as weaker soldiers marched more slowly, and stragglers dropped out altogether. Time and energy were wasted by map-reading errors, misplaced orders and changes of objective. Units overtaking each other on the road lost coherence. Lack of sleep and denial of regular halts imposed an ever heavier toll. The historian of one German reserve regiment deplored command confusion which caused its lines of march to meander and diverge, adding to men’s exhaustion.

The first two days of September passed without a single message from the German First or Second Armies reaching Moltke’s headquarters, the
Oberste Heeresleitung
– OHL. On the evening of the 1st, Moltke signalled Kluck: ‘What is your situation? Request immediate reply,’ and received none. On the 4th, an angry message from Kluck to Moltke was delayed in transmission by sixteen hours. And all through this critical period, Joffre’s forces were massing in the north. On 23 August, the day of Mons, the three armies of the German right wing comprised 24.5 divisions, facing 17.5 allied formations. By the time Joffre completed his redeployment on 6 September, he was able to commit forty-one divisions to his Marne offensive. To achieve this, he drastically weakened his front in the south; but strong pre-war French frontier fortifications compensated for inferiority of manpower. In Alsace-Lorraine the onus was now on the Germans to attack. A month of twentieth-century war had already demonstrated the advantages enjoyed by defenders, especially where they held prepared positions.

One of Moltke’s more serious errors was to accede to Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s demand to exploit westwards his army’s success at
Morhange. Moltke cursed the ruling dynasty, which burdened him not merely with the Kaiser, but also with two princelings and a grand duke as army commanders: ‘Joffre is a lucky man,’ he growled. ‘In France a prince means nothing.’ He claimed to feel unable to post liaison officers to report directly to OHL from the armies’ headquarters, because their presence would be resented.