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fell on the French along the Sambre, was drawing back through Fifth Army’s positions, its men exhausted and its horses worn out.
Lanrezac made no mention of the situation on his left, though there his British allies had also been locked in combat with the Germans throughout 23 August, showing considerably more effectiveness in defence of a water obstacle—the Mons-Condé Canal—
The British Expeditionary Force, of one cavalry and four infantry
divisions, had begun landing at Le Havre, Boulogne and Rouen eleven days before and had arrived on the canal on 22 August. By the morning of 23 August they were deployed on a front of twenty miles, II Corps to the west, I Corps, commanded by General Douglas Haig, to the east, with the whole of von Klu...
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Many of them had fought in the Boer War fifteen years earlier, against skilled marksmen who entrenched to defend their positions, and they had learnt from them the power of the magazine-rifle and the necessity of digging deep to escape its effects.
Ordered to hold the Mons-Condé Canal, they began to dig at once and by the morning of 23 August were firmly entrenched along its length. At the heart of a mining area, the canal offered excellent defensive positions, mine buildings and cottages providing strongpoints and the spoil heaps observation posts from which the supporting artillery could be directed onto the advancing enemy masses.
The Germans, who outnumbered them by six divisions to four, were unprepared for the storm of fire that would sweep their ranks.
The British Lee-Enfield rifle, with its ten-round magazine, was a superior weapon to the German Mauser, and the British soldier a superior shot. “Fifteen rounds a minute” has become a catchphrase, but it was the standard most British infantrymen met, encouraged by extra pay for marksmanship and an issue of free ammunition to win the badge in their spare time.
The results were the same in many other units, for every British battalion held its ground and the supporting artillery, including the 60-pounders of 48th and 108th Heavy Batteries, had kept up a steady supporting fire throughout the action. Total British casualties were 1,600 killed, wounded and missing. German casualties, never fully disclosed, must have reached nearly 5,000;
The great retreat had begun, a retreat which would carry the French armies, and the BEF on their left, back to the outskirts of Paris during the next fourteen days.
The great fortresses, Verdun foremost, were indeed still in French hands. The topography which defends France against Germany from the east, the mountains of the Vosges, the waterways of the Seine river system, were unviolated.
With every mile marched, the German army’s links with its base of support on and beyond the Rhine attenuated, while the French army’s were shortened and strengthened. “Future operations,” Joffre wrote in his General Instruction No. 2 of 25 August, “will have as their object to reform on our left a mass capable of resuming the offensive. This will consist of the Fourth, Fifth and British Armies, together with new forces drawn from the eastern front, while the other armies contain the enemy for as long as possible.”
British I Corps had to fight at Landrecies and Maroilles on 26 August but, since it had suffered very little at Mons, disengaged easily and resumed its retreat; II Corps, battered by Mons, was forced to fight at Le Cateau on the same day an even bigger battle in order to get away.
a total of eight against four. Such an inequality of force offered the Germans the opportunity to overlap the ends of the British line and that, as the day developed, was what they achieved.
At first the British infantry held the line by their usual outpouring of aimed and rapid rifle fire, supported by salvoes from the field artillery. Then, as enemy numbers mounted during the afternoon, the flanks began to crumble, units to break up and batteries to lose their gun crews under the weight of opposing bombardments. As evening approached, II Corps stared dismemberment in the face. It was saved partly by German mistakes but, as much as anything, by the intervention of Sordet’s Cavalry Corps, which at Le Cateau retrieved much of the reputation it had lost by its failure to find the
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The battle—known to the French as Guise, to the Germans as St. Quentin—opened on the morning of 29 August in thick mist.
They were surprised by the strength of X and III Corps’ opposition, against which they began to suffer heavy casualties.
The effect galvanised III and X Corps to join in and, as darkness fell, villages lost in the morning were retaken and the victorious French took up positions from which they intended to resume the counter-attack next day.
It would be a just reward, for his spectacular intervention had halted the Germans in their tracks and won an extra day and a half for the army to reposition itself for the counterstroke which Joffre remained determined to deliver.
This “problem of Paris” had driven Schlieffen to “the conclusion that we are too weak to continue operations in this direction.”81 The fault of conception Schlieffen had recognised in his study the German General Staff was now discovering in the field, as its troops marched southward, while their chiefs dithered about their eventual destination.
Moltke’s decision to allow von Bülow, of Second Army, to oversee the operations of First and Third,
understandable in the early stages of the campaign while the need to overwhelm Belgium was paramount, began to have unfortunate consequences soon after the move to Coblenz had been completed. Bülow’s anxiety to assure mutual support between the armies of the right wing deprived Hausen, Third Army, of the chance to strike into Lanrezac’s rear as he disengaged from the Sambre on 24 August.
Moltke allowed anxieties of his own about the predicament of the Eighth Army, defending East Prussia against the Russians, to distort his control of the larger and more critical operations in the west. Seeing in the fall of Namur a chance to economise force, he decided to redirect the troops thus rel...
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actually eased Moltke’s logistical difficulties, which grew as the armies drew further away from Germany but closer together as they approached Paris on the overcrowded road network. Nevertheless, preponderance of force at the decisive point is a key to victory and Moltke’s dispersions made preponderance less rather than more likely of achievement. On 27 August, moreover, he further diminished his chance to secure a concentration of superior force by ordering the outer armies, von Kluck’s First, von Bülow’s Second, to fan out.
There was a great deal of bridge-blowing and re-bridging, as the armies negotiated the many-branched river system of the Paris basin, of contested delays at obstacles, of artillery exchanges, of brief outbursts of rifle fire, as scouts ran into outposts or the tail of a retreating column was overtaken by pursuers. For the vast majority on both sides, however, the last week of August and the first of September was an ordeal of day-long marches, begun before the sun rose, ended in the twilight.
The Germans marched ahead of theirs and often went without food, though, like the British, their need was for rest rather than rations.
The truth is that he was being led by the nose. Every mile he marched in pursuit of the Fifth Army, once he had crossed the Oise and headed towards the Marne, served Joffre’s purpose. The line on which Joffre wished to fight may have receded southward from the Somme to the Oise to the Marne; as the situation map shifted and August drew into September, the
opportunity to deliver the disabling blow improved proportionately. For the further Kluck widened the gap between army and Paris to his right, without achieving the crucial overlap which would allow him to begin an encirclement of Lanrezac from the west, the more space he created for Joffre to position the “mass of manoeuvre” against the German flank. That mass, with the existing garrison of Paris, menaced a fiercer strike against Kluck than he could now hope to deliver at the enemy.
The political upheaval shook Joffre’s imperturbability no more than military setback. He adhered to his routine of the long lunch, of a solid dinner and regular hours of sleep. Nevertheless, unlike Moltke, who remained secluded in his Luxembourg headquarters far from
the scene of action, he also visited subordinate commanders and troops almost every day.
Yet the obstacle had already done its work. On 3 September Schlieffen’s “strong right wing,” represented by Kluck’s First Army, had drifted forty miles to the east of Paris and was aligned to the south, with the Sixth Army and the Paris garrison behind it, the BEF on its right flank, the Fifth Army to its front and Foch’s Ninth Army menacing its left and threatening an irruption into the gap which had opened between it and Bülow’s Second Army. It was the existence of Paris and Lanrezac’s evasive manoeuvring that had brought about this result.
Meanwhile the French railway system was hurrying to the front the forces with which Joffre planned to deliver his counterstroke.
Joffre therefore disposed, at the opening of the great battle named after the river, of thirty-six divisions, including the BEF, strengthened by the arrival of four fresh brigades from England, while the German First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Armies opposing totalled just under thirty. Schlieffen’s “strong right wing” was now outnumbered, the result of Moltke’s failure to control his subordinates and of Joffre’s refusal to be panicked by early defeat. Much else had contributed to the mismatch, notably the logistic difficulties imposed on the Germans as their lines of communication
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On 4 September, Joffre had issued General Instruction No. 6 which exactly anticipated Moltke’s recognition of his predicament and proposed means to exploit it.
effective date of the order, 6 September. The biter was to be bit. The German, not the French, army was to be the target of an encirclement.
On the morning of 5 September, as Maunoury’s Sixth Army probed forward to take up attacking positions for the following day, he was seized by disquiet at the reports sent back by his attached cavalry division. Its patrols found advancing French troops all across its front. As the IV Reserve Corps was aligned at right angles to and to the rear of von Kluck’s First Army, that meant that the enemy was manoeuvring to take First Army in flank and roll it up. His response was instantaneous and courageous. He decided to attack.
As darkness fell, von Gronau wisely judged he had won the time necessary to save First Army from surprise attack and disengaged his troops, who slipped away to the line the French had intended to assault on 6 September. In bright moonlight the French followed, launching attacks against positions the Germans had already abandoned. The battle of the Marne had therefore opened a day earlier than Joffre had intended, and on terms dictated by the enemy. Thanks to von Gronau’s independent action, the beckoning open flank which offered the opportunity for an encirclement had been covered and von
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What strategists call “interior lines” were now working in von Kluck’s favour, as they had worked for Joffre in the last week of August and first week of September, when he had brought the constituents of Sixth and Ninth Armies behind the fighting front from the armies that were holding their ground in Alsace and Lorraine.
There was this difference. It was critical. Joffre’s transfers had not altered the strategic situation on the Eastern Front, which had stabilised as soon as the French ceased to attack and found strong defensive positions behind the Meuse and Moselle. Kluck’s withdrawals, by contrast, weakened his principal front at the point where his mission was still to deliver a decisive, war-winning blow
Between the German First Army and Second an enormous gap had opened, thirty-five miles wide, which the Germans could disregard only because they believed that the enemy troops opposite, the British Expeditionary Force, lacked the strength and had demonstrated the disinclination to penetrate.
The battle of the Ourcq, between 5
and 8 September, nevertheless tended Kluck’s way. On the evening of 8 September, he felt confident enough to signal his subordinates that “the decision will be obtained tomorrow by an enveloping attack.”
The aggressiveness Kluck’s army had shown against Maunoury’s had actually worked to enlarge the gap that now loomed between it and Second Army, a gap too wide for the only German troops not engaged elsewhere, those of 2nd and 9th Cavalry Divisions, to fill. They were, moreover, too weak to oppose the force marching up to exploit the weakness in the German line the gap presented. True to his reluctant word, Field Marshal French started the whole of the BEF forward on 6 September and, though it had ten miles to make up before it reached Joffre’s intended point of departure, it soon covered the
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behind the Petit Morin river, for safety, a retreat of ten miles and more. Worse, under pressure during the day, he was obliged to swing his right wing northward, thereby further widening the gap between his army and von Kluck’s and leaving the way open for a full-scale Allied advance to the Marne.
The right wing of the German army was now divided effectively into three sections, with Kluck’s First Army north of the Marne, the right of von Bülow’s Second Army south of the Marne but falling back towards it across the waterways of the Grand and Petit Morin, and his left, which connected only weakly with von Hausen’s Third Army, pos...
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The Marshes of the St. Gond are a topographical exception, “a broad belt of swamp land … [extending] from east to west nineteen kilometres, with an average width of three kilometres … five lesser roads and three foot-paths cross [the marshes] from north to south, but they are otherwise impassable, forming a military obstacle of the
first importance.”
During 6 and 7 September they battled valiantly to work their way round the western end of the marshes, while the rest of Ninth Army and the Germans opposite conducted artillery duels over the sodden ground of the marshes themselves.
Persuading himself that the ferocity of the two previous days’ fighting had blunted the enemy’s alertness, he decided to launch a surprise night attack. In the moonlit early morning of 8 September, the Saxon 32nd and 23rd Reserve Divisions and the 1st and 2nd Guard Divisions advanced through the marshes and across the dry ground further east, fell on the French with the bayonet and drove them back three miles.
During 9 September, using reinforcements lent by Franchet d’Esperey, and in expectation of the arrival of XXI Corps from Lorraine, Foch succeeded in plugging every gap in the line opened by Hausen’s continuing offensive and did, at the day’s end, actually manage to organise a counter-attack at the right-hand extremity of his army’s position. Merely by holding his front, Foch achieved a sort of victory.
