The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

The Kaiser, possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe, had worked himself into a frenzy ending in another of those comments that had periodically over the past twenty years of his reign shattered the nerves of diplomats.

Bismarck had warned Germany to be content with land power, but his successors were neither separately nor collectively Bismarcks. He had pursued clearly seen goals unswervingly; they groped for larger horizons with no clear idea of what they wanted. Holstein was a Machiavelli without a policy who operated on only one principle: suspect everyone. Bülow had no principles; he was so slippery, lamented his colleague Admiral Tirpitz, that compared to him an eel was a leech. The flashing, inconstant, always freshly inspired Kaiser had a different goal every hour, and practiced diplomacy as an exercise in perpetual motion.

Prussia “was hatched from a cannon ball,”

the Czar governed Russia in a working sense, he ruled as an autocrat and was in turn ruled by his strong-willed if weak-witted wife. Beautiful, hysterical, and morbidly suspicious, she hated everyone but her immediate family and a series of fanatic or lunatic charlatans who offered comfort to her desperate soul. The Czar, neither well endowed mentally nor very well educated, was, in the Kaiser’s opinion, “only fit to live in a country house and grow turnips.”

A neutral and independent Belgium was the creation of England or rather of England’s ablest Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston. Belgium’s coast was England’s frontier; on the plains of Belgium, Wellington had defeated the greatest threat to England since the Armada. Thereafter England was determined to make that patch of open, easily traversible territory a neutral zone

some military strategists in other countries glimpsed the possibility of prolonged war, but all preferred to believe, along with the bankers and industrialists, that because of the dislocation of economic life a general European war could not last longer than three or four months. One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

Schlieffen wanted his right wing to reach as far west as Lille in order to make the envelopment of the French complete. “When you march into France,” he said, “let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve.”

While French history and development after the turn of the century fixed her mind upon the offensive, her geography still required a strategy of the defensive.

The British minister, making his own inquiries, was told that if British troops landed before a German invasion or without a formal Belgian request, the Belgians would open fire. Belgium’s rigid purity confirmed what the British never tired of repeating to the French—that everything depended upon the Germans violating Belgian neutrality first.

Equal speed in mobilization was obviously impossible; but even if only half the 800,000 Russian troops promised for the German front could be put in position by the fifteenth day for a lunge into East Prussia, however faulty their military organization, the effect of their invasion of German territory was expected to be momentous.

Face to face no longer with the specter but the reality of a two-front war, the Kaiser was as close to the “sick Tom-cat” mood as he thought the Russians were. More cosmopolitan and more timid than the archetype Prussian, he had never actually wanted a general war. He wanted greater power, greater prestige, above all more authority in the world’s affairs for Germany but he preferred to obtain them by frightening rather than by fighting other nations. He wanted the gladiator’s rewards without the battle,

The Anglo-French war plans, worked out in detail over a period of nine years, were not a game, or an exercise in fantasy or a paper practice to keep military minds out of other mischief. They were a continuation of policy or they were nothing. They were no different from France’s arrangements with Russia or Germany’s with Austria except for the final legal fiction that they did not “commit” Britain to action. Members of the government and Parliament who disliked the policy simply shut their eyes and mesmerized themselves into believing the fiction.

“If we are to be crushed,” Bassompierre recorded their sentiment, “let us be crushed gloriously.” In 1914 “glory” was a word spoken without embarrassment, and honor a familiar concept that people believed in.

The Belgian Army consisted of six divisions of infantry plus a cavalry division. These would have to face the thirty-four divisions scheduled by the Germans to march through Belgium.

In Whitehall that evening, Sir Edward Grey, standing with a friend at the window as the street lamps below were being lit, made the remark that has since epitomized the hour: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

At 9:30 that morning the Indomitable and Indefatigable, which had been steaming west all during the night, encountered the Goeben and Breslau off Bône as the German ships were heading east back to Messina. If Grey had sent his ultimatum to Germany the night before, immediately following his speech to Parliament, Britain and Germany would then have been at war and the cruisers’ guns would have spoken. As it was, the ships passed each other in silence at 8,000 yards, well within range, and had to be content with training their guns and omitting the customary exchange of salutes. Admiral Souchon, bent on putting as much distance between himself and the British as he could before hostilities opened, sped off, straining his ship to the last ounce of speed his boilers could attain. The Indomitable and Indefatigable turned around and made after him, determined to keep in range until war should be declared.

The will to defend the country outran the means. Of machine guns, the essential weapon for defense, the Belgian Army’s proportion per man was half that of the German Army. Of heavy field artillery, needed for the defensive positions between the forts, it had none at all. The planned increase in military service which was intended to bring the Field Army up to 150,000 with 70,000 reserves and the fortress troops to 130,000 by the year 1926, had hardly got under way. In August 1914 the Field Army mustered 117,000 with no trained reserves, all the remaining reserves being used to man the forts. The Civic Guard, a gentlemanly gendarmerie in top hats and bright green uniforms, were pressed into active service; many of its duties were taken over by Boy Scouts. The active army had had no practice in entrenching and hardly any tools to dig with. Transport was lacking as were tents and field kitchens; cooking utensils had to be collected from farms and villages; telephone equipment was negligible. The army marched in a chaos of improvisation.

Riding up, the squadron’s officer with a polite smile handed him a printed proclamation which expressed Germany’s “regret” at being “compelled by necessity” to enter Belgium. Though wishing to avoid combat, it said, “We must have a free road. Destruction of bridges, tunnels and railroads will be regarded as hostile acts.” In village squares all along the border from Holland to Luxembourg the Uhlans scattered the proclamations, hauled down the Belgian flag from the town halls, raised the black eagle of the German Empire, and moved on, confident in the assurance given them by their commanders that the Belgians would not fight. Behind them, filling the roads that converged on Liège came the infantry of Emmich’s assault force, rank after rank. Only the red regimental number painted on helmet fronts broke the monotony of field-gray Horse-drawn field artillery followed. The new leather of boots and harness creaked. Companies of cyclists sped ahead to seize road crossings and farmhouses and lay telephone wires. Automobiles honked their way through, carrying monocled Staff officers with orderlies holding drawn pistols sitting up front and trunks strapped on behind.

This “extremely aggressive guerrilla warfare,” as von Kluck called it, and especially the sniping by franc-tireurs at German soldiers, exasperated him and his fellow commanders. From the moment his army entered Belgium he found it necessary to take, in his own words, “severe and inexorable reprisals” such as “the shooting of individuals and the burning of homes” against the “treacherous” attacks of the civil population. Burned villages and dead hostages marked the path of the First Army. On August 19 after the Germans had crossed the Gette and found the Belgian Army withdrawn during the night, they vented their fury on Aerschot, a small town between the Gette and Brussels, the first to suffer a mass execution. In Aerschot 150 civilians were shot. The numbers were to grow larger as the process was repeated by von Bülow’s army at Ardennes and Tamines, by von Hausen’s in the culminating massacre of 664 at Dinant. The method was to assemble the inhabitants in the main square, women usually on one side and men on the other, select every tenth man or every second man or all on one side, according to the whim of the individual officer, march them to a nearby field or empty lot behind the railroad station and shoot them. In Belgium there are many towns whose cemeteries today have rows and rows of memorial stones inscribed with a name, the date 1914, and the legend, repeated over and over: “Fusillé par les Allemands” (Shot by the Germans). In many are newer and longer rows with the...

Although the French did not yet know it, the slaughter at Morhange snuffed out the bright flame of the doctrine of the offensive. It died on a field in Lorraine where at the end of the day nothing was visible but corpses strewn in rows and sprawled in the awkward attitudes of sudden death as if the place had been swept by a malignant hurricane. It was one of those lessons, a survivor realized afterward, “by which God teaches the law to kings.”

France was committed to Plan 17 as her only design for decisive victory, and Plan 17 demanded the offensive—now and no later. The only alternative would have been to change at once to defense of the frontiers. In terms of the training, the planning, the thinking, the spirit of the French military organism, this was unthinkable.

At Charleroi the “Turcos” of the two Algerian divisions, recruited by voluntary enlistment, fought as valiantly as had their fathers at Sedan. One battalion charged a German gun battery, bayoneting the gunners, and returned with two men unwounded out of the battalion’s complement of 1,030.

Lanrezac finally spoke. He gave the order for a general retreat. He knew he would be taken for a “catastrophard” who must be got rid of—as indeed he was. His own account tells that he said to one of his officers: “We have been beaten but the evil is reparable. As long as the Fifth Army lives, France is not lost.” Although the remark has the ring of memoirs written after the event, it may well have been spoken. Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Before that time a drastic change of plan forced itself upon the British. Henry Wilson was mentally still charging forward with medieval ardor in Plan 17, unaware that it was now about as applicable to the situation as the longbow.

After the Marne the war grew and spread until it drew in the nations of both hemispheres and entangled them in a pattern of world conflict no peace treaty could dissolve. The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.