The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

For in hard sculptured prose this book fixes the moments that have led inexorably to our own time. It places our dread day in long perspective, arguing that if most of the world’s men, women and children are soon to be burned to atoms, the annihilation would seem to proceed directly out of the mouths of the guns that spoke in August 1914.

but it is perhaps the saddest story of the fate of kings that the Kaiser lived to be eighty-two and died without seeing Paris.

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 new book, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war had become vain. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one. Already translated into eleven languages, The Great Illusion had become a cult.

Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

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.

Their new Secretary for War was a barrister with a passion for German philosophy, Richard Haldane, who, when asked by the soldiers in Council what kind of army he had in mind, replied, “A Hegelian army.” “The conversation then fell off,” he recorded.

A question that Wilson asked of Foch during his second visit in January 1910, evoked an answer which expressed in one sentence the problem of the alliance with England, as the French saw it. “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Wilson asked. Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”

They felt, as did many Germans, including the Kaiser in alternate hours, that the common interests of autocracies, formerly linked in the Drei-Kaiser Bund, made Germany a more natural ally of Russia than the democracies of the West. Regarding the liberals within Russia as their first enemy, the Russian reactionaries preferred the Kaiser to the Duma, as the French Right of a later day were to prefer Hitler to Léon Blum. Only the growing threat of Germany itself in the last twenty years before the war induced Czarist Russia against her natural inclination to make alliance with republican France.

Though indolent, he was resourceful; though a poor rider, worse swordsman, and gluttonous eater and drinker, he was quick-thinking and rapid in judgment. He was amiable, lucky, astute, and respected no one. In intervals of regimental duty before the war he drank wine and consumed sausages all night at the officers’ club until 7:00 A.M., when he took his company out on parade and returned for a snack of more sausages and two quarts of Moselle before breakfast.

Instantly converted from Marx to Mars, people cheered wildly and rushed off to vent their feelings on suspected Russian spies, several of whom were pummeled or trampled to death in the course of the next few days.

“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.

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.”

The American Minister, describing the scene in his diary, tells how he watched the King’s twelve-year-old heir in his sailor suit, listening with an absorbed face and eyes fixed on his father, and how he wondered, “What are the thoughts in that boy’s mind?” Almost as if he had been granted a glimpse into the future, Mr. Whitlock asked himself, “Will this scene ever come back to him in after years? And how? When? Under what circumstances?” The boy in the sailor suit, as Leopold III, was to surrender in 1940 to another German invasion.

Hastily summoned, the Cabinet debated whether to declare war as of that moment or wait for the time limit set by the ultimatum to expire. They decided to wait. In silence, each encased in his private thoughts, they sat around the green table in the ill-lit Cabinet room, conscious of the shadows of those who at other fateful moments had sat there before them. Eyes watched the clock ticking away the time limit. “Boom!” Big Ben struck the first note of eleven, and each note thereafter sounded to Lloyd George, who had a Celtic ear for melodrama, like “Doom, doom, doom!” Twenty minutes later the War Telegram,

Driving his ship to its utmost, Souchon brought it up to 24 knots. Stokers who ordinarily could not work in the heat and coal dust for longer than two hours at a time were kept shoveling at an increased pace while bursting tubes scalded them with steam. Four died between morning and evening while the pace was maintained.

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben. Other sequels

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.

Early on August 4, a quiet, clear, luminous morning, seventy miles to the east of Brussels, the first invaders, units of von Marwitz’s Cavalry, crossed into Belgium. Coming at a steady purposeful trot, they carried twelve-foot steel-headed lances and were otherwise hung about with an arsenal of sabers, pistols, and rifles. Harvesters looking up from the roadside fields, villagers peering from their windows, whispered, “Uhlans!” The outlandish name, with its overtones of the savage Tartar horsemen from whom it derived, evoked Europe’s ancestral memory of barbarian invasion. The Germans, when engaged in their historic mission of bringing Kultur to their neighbors, showed a preference, as in the Kaiser’s use of the word “Huns,” for fearful models.

Many who lived through the next thirty days of mounting combat, agony, and terror were to remember the sound of endless, repetitious masculine singing as the worst torment of the invasion.

He complained continuously of being kept in the dark by his staff. When an officer referred to an article in the latest issue of l’Illustration which Joffre had not seen he cried angrily, “You see, they hide everything from me!” He used to rub his forehead, murmuring “Poor Joffre!” which his staff came to recognize as his way of refusing to do something that was being urged upon him. He was angered by anyone who tried too openly to make him change his mind.

The momentum of predetermined plans had scored another victory.

“The special motive of the Force under your control,” he wrote, “is to support and cooperate with the French Army … and to assist the French in preventing or repelling the invasion by Germany of French or Belgian territory.” With a certain optimism, he added, “and eventually to restore the neutrality of Belgium”—a project comparable to restoring virginity.

ON THE WESTERN FRONT the fifteenth day brought an end to the period of concentration and preliminary attacks. The period of offensive battle began. The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages. On the road east from Nancy the French passed a stone marker inscribed, HERE IN THE YEAR 362 JOVINUS DEFEATED THE TEUTONIC HORDES.

Exasperated, like all men of rapid mind at the blindness of others and accustomed to respect as a strategist, Lanrezac continued to hector GQG. Joffre grew irritated at his constant criticism and contentiousness. He conceived the whole duty of generals was to be lions in action and dogs in obedience, an ideal to which Lanrezac, with a mind of his own and an urgent sense of danger, found it impossible to conform. “My inquietude,” he wrote later, “increased from hour to hour.” On August 14, the last day before the opening of the offensive, he went in person to Vitry.

General von Stein, Deputy Chief of Staff, though admittedly intelligent, conscientious, and hard-working, was described by the Austrian liaison officer at OHL as rude, tactless, disputatious, and given to the sneering, domineering manner known as the “Berlin Guards’ tone.”

It was explained to Lanrezac that the British Commander in Chief wished to know if he thought the Germans would cross the Meuse at Huy. “Tell the Marshal,” replied Lanrezac, “I think the Germans have come to the Meuse to fish.” His tone, which he might have applied to some particularly dimwitted question at one of his famous lectures, was not one customarily used toward the Field Marshal of a friendly army.

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 same legend and the date 1944.

On August 21 General de Castelnau heard that his son had been killed in the battle. To his staff who tried to express their sympathy, he said after a moment’s silence, in a phrase that was to become something of a slogan for France, “We will continue, gentlemen.”

The terrain of the Ardennes is not suitable for the offensive. It is wooded, hilly, and irregular, with the slope running generally uphill from the French side and with the declivities between the hills cut by many streams. Caesar, who took ten days to march across it, described the secret, dark forest as a “place full of terrors,” with muddy paths and a perpetual mist rising from the peat bogs. Much of it had since been cleared and cultivated; roads, villages, and two or three large towns had replaced Caesar’s terrors, but large sections were still covered with thick leafy woods where roads were few and ambush easy.

Had all six been present, he said with that marvelous incapacity to admit error that was to make him ultimately a Field Marshal, “this retreat would have been an advance and defeat would have been a victory.”

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers—danger, death, and live ammunition.

In 1914, except for Balkan wars on the fringe, there had been no war on the European continent for more than a generation, and in the opinion of one observer the welcoming attitude toward war owed something to the “unconscious boredom of peace.”

In August, sitting at a café in Aachen, a German scientist said to the American journalist Irwin Cobb: “We Germans are the most industrious, the most earnest, the best educated race in Europe. Russia stands for reaction, England for selfishness and perfidy, France for decadence, Germany for progress. German Kultur will enlighten the world and after this war there will never be another.”

Neutrality, on which his efforts depended, was helped by a strong current of Irish or what might be called anti–George III sentiment and by the vociferous pro-German groups from Professor Hugo Münsterberg of Harvard down to the beerhalls of Milwaukee. It might have prevailed had it not been for a factor before which Wilson was helpless, which in shaping American sentiment was the greatest Allied asset—not the British fleet but German folly.

For one August in its history Paris was French—and silent.

When OHL had learned of General von Prittwitz’s intention to retire behind the Vistula, he was instantly dismissed; but when Sir John French proposed to give up not a province but an ally, the same solution was not applied. The reason may have been that, owing to the ravages left by the Ulster quarrel, there was no replacement upon whom government and army could agree. The government may have regarded dismissal of the Commander in Chief at such a moment as too great a shock for the public. In any event, inspired by Sir John’s aura of irritability, everyone—French as well as British—continued to treat him with the utmost tact while in fact retaining very little confidence in him. “Joffre and he have never yet been within a mile of the heart of each other,” wrote Sir William Robertson, the British Quartermaster General, to the King’s secretary a year later. “He has never really, sincerely and honestly concerted with the French and they consider him as by no means a man of ability or a faithful friend and therefore do not confide in him.” This was not a situation propitious for the Allied war effort. Kitchener, whose relations with Sir John had not been cordial since the Boer War, never regained confidence in him after August 31, but it was not until December 1915 that Sir John’s own machinations against Kitchener, conducted in a manner, as Lord Birkenhead was to say, “neither decorous, fastidious nor loyal,” finally nerved the British government to remove him.

Whether Lanrezac’s withdrawal came from fear or from wisdom is immaterial, for fear sometimes is wisdom and in this case had made possible the renewed effort Joffre was now preparing. All this was to be recognized long afterward when the French government, in a belated gesture of amends, awarded Lanrezac the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor. But in the bitter failure of the first month Lanrezac’s lèse majesté made him intolerable to GQG. On the day he brought his army across the Marne, he was marked for the Tarpeian Rock.

Encouraged by the “intelligent audacity” of d’Esperey’s reply, Joffre told the Operations Staff to make the battle orders conform to his conditions of place, although retaining September 7 as the date. He received an equally affirmative reply from Foch who announced himself simply as “ready to attack.”