World War One: A Short History (5 page)

The German army was able to concentrate more on training and equipment, as its general officers simply did not want to expand too far and have to use, as officers, men who would ‘water down’ the qualities of Prussia. They spent proportionately less on feeding conscripts; they had three times as many NCOs as the French, and far more than the Russians, where NCOs were hardly distinguished from ordinary soldiers. The French also lacked the heavy artillery of the Germans, their own having been stuffed into fortresses, and they lacked two other weapons that the Germans understood. The first was a light mortar, able to throw a shell on a high trajectory (45°) and thus place it behind fortifications, or among trees, whereas a flat-trajectory gun (16°) would not have touched the defenders. The other weapon was the spade, otherwise known as an entrenching tool. Soldiers in a hole in the ground were very difficult to spot, and were almost invulnerable except to heavy shelling. The Germans had spades, the French did not. Why, is a good question: the answer is probably that the
Germans, training their fewer men more intensively, could rely upon them not to panic, whereas the French, training more men with fewer NCOs, meant to keep them moving forward in simple, even crude, large formations (similar to the columns of the Revolutionary Wars a century before, which had also been far more costly in lives than the eighteenth-century linear formations). That the men were clothed in red and blue made them very conspicuous as well, whereas all other armies had gone over to dull-coloured uniforms; even the Scottish regiments’ kilts were khaki.

Off the armies went, and the first move was German. The great fortress of Liège had to be taken if the Germans were to pass through Belgium easily – they needed the railways, and Liège was the key. On 7 August they took the central citadel by a ruse, and the outer forts then fell to Austrian heavy guns that had been specially brought in. By 18 August the German concentration was complete, and a huge force entered the Belgian plains. There were three armies – three quarters of a million men, in fifty-two divisions – their left flank fixed in the Lorraine fortifications around Metz and Thionville. There were weaker forces further south, along the Franco-German border.

In effect the three German armies were moving into undefended space, and they marched fast – twenty miles a day, an extraordinary achievement. The Belgians just withdrew to their other two fortresses – the Antwerp complex, on the sea, and Namur. There was a French army (Lanrezac’s Fifth) south of that area, and the British Expeditionary Force was forming up to its left, but there were no engagements for some time. The French commander, Joseph Joffre, was not as concerned as he might have been, because he was staging what he regarded as a gigantic counter-offensive over the German border – Plan XVII, by which the Germans were supposed to be driven back to the Rhine, over Alsace and Lorraine. This was a disaster. On 20 August, at Morhange-Sarrebourg, French troops were
shattered as they charged uphill into machine guns; then they were attacked, and lost 150 guns and 20,000 men as prisoners. On 21 August Joffre tried again, this time in the Ardennes, the hilly and wooded area of north-eastern France and southeastern Belgium. It was the German centre, and since there had been such evidence of strength on the German right and left, the centre was supposed to be weak. There was another disaster, as the French ran into a force of their own size, but one equipped with the sort of artillery that could deal with fighting in woods, whereas the French standard gun, the 75 mm, was ineffective in that terrain. Further to the north-west Lanrezac’s army also did badly, and began to retreat away from Namur. It lost touch with the British, whose commander, Sir John French, waxed irascible. On 23 August the right-hand German army, Kluck’s First, ran into the British on the Mons–Conde canal, and British regulars, firing one round every four seconds, held off considerably superior numbers, inflicting three times the 1,850 losses they themselves suffered. In the afternoon, German howitzers arrived to deal with the difficult situation and the British retreated, parallel with Lanrezac’s army. The French had lost heavily – 75,000 killed by the end of August, with a further 200,000 losses in wounded and prisoners. The Germans had lost far fewer, and they were coming in fast from the north, without much opposing them. A great Franco-British retreat started, with a view to a regrouping around Paris.

It was well-managed: at no stage were guns captured, and no German encirclement threatened. Losses were at once made up, and the French had a huge advantage, in that the railways behind their lines could shuttle troops from the south-east to the north-west far faster than the Germans could follow on foot. The Germans had had only 4,000 lorries, and two thirds of them broke down before the retreat ended; besides, the Meuse bridges had been destroyed, and the Belgians had sabotaged their railways and most of the tunnels: only 400 miles
of the 2,500-mile network were back in operation by early September. Ammunition was a priority for the horse-transport, and the horses themselves could only be fed on green corn, which made them sick. Kluck’s army had 84,000 horses, and the beasts dropped dead at the side of the road, so there were delays in the hauling of heavy guns. What with the troops’ exhaustion in the August heat, some units were down to half their nominal strength. There was a further headache with communications. Moltke, back in Koblenz, was too far away, and wireless worked very clumsily as well as openly: the French could listen in. There was a system of limited decentralization in the German army which enabled what seems in retrospect to have been an almost miraculous advance, but generals quite often did not really know what their neighbours were doing. Between 5 and 9 September, as the battle of the Marne was being fought, the German High Command issued no orders at all, and on the last two days received no reports. There were other problems, of troops being taken away from the decisive front for purposes that also seemed essential – two corps for Antwerp and Maubeuge, and two further ones for East Prussia; Namur also occupied troops. Moltke wasted effort by ordering his left-wing armies to attack, which they ineffectually did towards Nancy, rather than shifting them to the right. On 27 August he ordered a more-or-less general advance, with the two right-wing armies moving towards the lower Seine and Paris, and then on 2 September altered this so that they moved east of Paris, the right-hand one, Kluck’s First, crossing to the south-east, across the northern side of the city. This change happened in part because Kluck’s neighbour to the east, Bülow’s Second Army, had been checked by the French Fifth at Guise, and Kluck himself had run into quite serious British resistance at Le Câteau (26 August), and so the German right was bunched closer together and the sweep west of Paris was abandoned.

Joffre at this moment was keeping his nerve better than Moltke. He meant to raise fresh troops and to shift others from the eastern side to the west, where a new army could attack Kluck’s open right-hand flank. These movements started on 25 August. There were initial problems with the British: Sir John French proposed more or less to withdraw from the battle and prepare for return to England, if necessary. French was browbeaten only when Lord Kitchener arrived in full-dress Field Marshal’s uniform to order him to conform with the French plans. Meanwhile, a new French coalition government insisted on defence of the capital, and it was strengthened by troops intended for the new army to the north-west. When on 3 September Kluck turned east from Paris to keep his links to Bülow’s army, the way was open for a stroke against his western flank. Between the capital and Verdun, there was a further German advance, over the river Marne, though it did not lead anywhere: attacks were exchanged by the German Second Army and Foch’s new Ninth, in the marshes of St Gond. On 4 September Joffre ordered an attack on the 6th from the Paris and Verdun sides, but fighting started the day before, when the new French army on the western side (Sixth) clashed on the river Ourcq with part of Kluck’s forces: it was then that troops were ferried from Paris by taxi – a great patriotic legend, though the taxis kept their meters running. With some difficulty this attack was held, but Kluck marched two of his corps from his own left wing back towards the right, and this meant that a gap opened up between his and Bülow’s armies, roughly between the Grand and Petit Morin rivers, tributaries that flowed from the south into the Marne.

Just before the gap, by chance, stood the British Expeditionary Force, and it moved forward, cautiously, into almost empty space, driving a wedge between the two armies of the German right. In general, the German armies on the right were now considerably inferior to the forces that the Allies now had –
twenty divisions to thirty – and, besides, the Germans were running out of ammunition, whereas the French were learning to use their field guns more sensibly. On 8 September there was a staff conference at Moltke’s headquarters and an Intelligence colonel went off by motor-car to interview Kluck and Bülow. He discovered that Bülow had decided to withdraw if the British crossed the Marne, which, on the 9th, fliers reported had happened. Kluck would have to retreat accordingly, though he did not wish to. Moltke, his courage failing, visited other army commanders on 11 September and ordered the Third, Fourth and Fifth Armies, to the east, also to withdraw. Between 9 and 14 September the Germans fell back to a chalk ridge rising 500 feet above the river Aisne, and the infantry were ordered to fortify the position. Troops dug in, with barbed wire defences, could not easily be spotted by artillery and were invulnerable to rifles; they could only be dislodged by hand-grenades, and these had to be thrown from close to. Joffre supposed that the Germans were on the run, and his men were made to attack, despite exhaustion, bad weather and lack of munitions. Allied attacks on the Aisne positions therefore got nowhere, and by the end of September that part of the front was fixed – a stalemate.

The French had had great hopes of Russian victory; money had been invested in strategic railways, the doubling of tracks and the lengthening of platforms. One outcome was that Russian mobilization did proceed as the Germans had feared, and there were large numbers of soldiers on the East Prussian border by mid-August, though all sorts of ancillary services were not yet available to back them up. As they had promised, the Russians invaded East Prussia with some thirty divisions, in two armies, the First, moving west, and the Second, some way to the southwest, moving north from Warsaw. In theory, they should have been able to trap the single German army, the Eighth, as it
concentrated on the eastern border and the fortress of Königsberg, but the theory was difficult to realize. The two Russian armies were separated by a region of lakes and forest, where troops would not be easy to spot, and the Russian cavalry was quite ineffective, for lack of supplies, almost as soon as it crossed the border. Besides, there were railways available to the Germans, running east–west, whereas the Russians could only march forward from Grodno or Warsaw, shuffling through the dust of August roads. The Russian situation was difficult again, because communications were exceedingly poor, such that telegrams had to be brought up from Warsaw by motor-car, in bundles. Samsonov, commanding the Russian Second Army, had nearly twenty divisions, infantry and cavalry, and it was difficult for these even to keep in communication with each other, let alone with another army; Russian orders were broadcast over the radio without even being encoded, since that took too long, and there were not the non-commissioned officers who could be trusted with the task. German Intelligence therefore knew everything that was going on.

Still, the Germans began badly. Their Eighth Army had thirteen divisions, and its obvious tactic was to strike at one of the two Russian armies before the other could join up with it. On 20 August the Germans staged a frontal attack on the eastern invaders – the First Army – and lost 8,000 men (of 30,000 attackers) in an afternoon. On 22 August the commander, von Prittwitz, panicked, gabbling out to Moltke on the telephone that he would have to give up East Prussia and fall back on the great river Vistula. He was dismissed, and a retired general, Paul von Hindenburg, took over, with, as chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, known before the war as an energetic organizer; he had also shown panache at Liège. They were a good team. Ludendorff was very competent, but praise went to his head, and he could lose a sense of proportion. Hindenburg was the foot on the brake, though he sometimes referred to himself
ironically as ‘the shop sign’. The important thing was for the new commanders to keep their heads, as the Russian Second Army struggled northwards in the rear of their own forces, worsted in the frontier battle to the east. These forces were pulled back – part by rail, transferred to the western side of the Russian Second Army, and part by foot along paths that led straight towards the eastern flank of that same army. It, meanwhile, plodded forward without any idea of what was happening. The First Army was told to busy itself with the fortress city of Königsberg, on the Baltic shores, and therefore subtracted itself altogether from proceedings concerning the Second Army. On 24 August the Second Army collided with the Germans, and for a time its centre made progress – illusory progress, as the further it moved north the more of it would be caught in the two arms of the German flank attacks. On the 26th, the western one moved, striking through a disordered and bewildered Russian left, and cutting its communications. Next day, the eastern one caught the Russian right, and its advance-guards met up with the other enveloping troops from the west. In the middle of the entrapment were four Russian army corps, the troops running short of everything, their commanders quite baffled as to what was happening. In packets, they surrendered on 28 August – almost 100,000 men (with 50,000 killed and wounded) and 500 guns – and their commander shot himself. It was an enormous defeat, the most spectacular of the war, and it became a legend. There was a village not far off, Tannenberg, where in the Middle Ages the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by Slavs. That village gave its name to the battle, and ‘Tannenberg’ became a symbol of Germanic pride. It also gave Hindenburg and Ludendorff a reputation that lasted to the very end of the war, and even beyond. The Tannenberg monument was quite close to Hitler’s wartime headquarters at Rastenburg, both of them later blown up by Russians or Poles.