Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (36 page)

The BEF’s Sir Henry Wilson wrote home that day: ‘It is at once a glorious and melancholy thought, that by this day week the greatest action that the world has ever heard of will have been fought.’ GQG told Third and Fourth Armies’ commanders to expect no serious opposition; in truth, however, they were advancing against ten German corps, commanded by the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. ‘Little Willy’ and his chief of staff were bent upon glory. Reconnaissance clearly revealed French intentions. Heedless of Moltke’s injunctions to adopt a defensive posture, the Germans had no intention of playing a passive role while others won the critical victories in accordance with Schlieffen. Thus, they unleashed their own men to advance to meet the French, precipitating a series of murderous encounter battles.

On the morning of the 22nd, in thick mist, French columns marched north through Virton, just inside Belgium. Cavalry trotting ahead approached Belle Vue farm, atop a steep hill, and met heavy fire. A wire fence prevented the horsemen from attempting a flank movement. A day of chaos and blood ensued. The streets of Virton became jammed with French infantry, cavalry and guns – the latter impotent in the fog. The Germans sought to advance, ordered by their officers to identify themselves to each other by singing. Their opponents likewise struck up the
Marseillaise
, the last tune many of the choristers ever sang. As one French infantry unit took up position, its men seemed gloomy. An officer named Capt. Kerquence ordered them to run through their drill movements under fire, which the regimental history claimed unconvincingly ‘brought back snap and spirit into the battalion’.

A subordinate general expressed concern to his divisional commander about continuing to push forward blindly. A young officer who heard their conversation said later: ‘I can still hear Trentinian, very haughty, looking down from his horse and saying, “You are being extremely cautious, general!” So we went on.’ Suddenly, the fog cleared. The French infantry, cavalry and artillery batteries found themselves exposed in full view of German gunners on the hilltop. When the ‘
soixante-quinze
’ 75mm gun was first introduced, some officers opposed the introduction of a shield screening its crew, saying that ‘Frenchmen must look the enemy in the face.’ Fortunately for the gunners, such imbecile bravado was overcome. But shields were of little service when, as at Virton, crews found themselves under shattering high-angle howitzer fire. Cavalry of the 12th Hussars were likewise shot down wholesale.

The infantry tried to renew their advance uphill in short rushes. French Field Service Regulations assumed that in twenty seconds an assault line could move fifty yards before an enemy could reload. A survivor of Virton observed bitterly: ‘the people who wrote those regulations had simply forgotten the existence of such things as machine-guns. We could distinctly hear two of those “coffee-grinders” at work; every time our men got up to advance, the line got thinner. Finally our captain gave the order: “Fix bayonets and charge!” It was midday by now, and … devilish hot. Our men, in full kit, started running heavily up that grassy slope, drums beating, bugles sounding the charge. We didn’t even reach those Württembergers. We were all shot down before we got to them. I was hit and lay there until I was picked up later.’ Gen. Edgard de Trentinian, who had orchestrated the disaster, later faced an inquiry. He was acquitted, and received a decoration for his morning of madness.

‘The battle was lost. I knew neither why nor how,’ wrote gunner Paul Lintier, whose battery limbered up and retreated soon after noon. ‘… I now noticed shells bursting over some woods a long way off to the south-west. It looked as though our flank must have been completely turned … The drivers urged on their horses, while the rest of us jumped down off the limbers to lighten the load and ran along in extended order on either flank of the column. Halfway up the steep hillside a broken-down infantry wagon was straddled right across the way. A wretched white horse was straining in the shafts while the driver shouted and pushed at one of the wheels. One of our corporals hailed the infantryman: “Get on, you there!” … He turned a pitiful face to us and I could see the tears in his eyes. “Get on? Tell me how!”’ Lintier and his comrades helped to push the wagon
back on the road. ‘It was nearly two o’clock. The air was hot and oppressive.’

The Germans lost 283 killed and 1,187 wounded in the action at Virton, but French casualties were many times heavier. On two occasions, entire formations broke and ran; the dead lay stacked like folding chairs, overlapping each other where they fell. As always, the mounted men were slaughtered: two brigade commanders fell, along with every officer of one regiment; another lost a third of its strength. That evening, Third Army’s commanders at first harboured delusions about renewing the attack next day; their men were ordered to entrench, employing their only tools to hand – mess tins. But it was soon recognised that regiments almost bereft of leaders were unfit to fight again. A survivor, stunned by his experiences, stood muttering again and again, ‘Mown down! Ah … Mown down!’ The broken units evacuated Virton, whose inhabitants afterwards suffered severely at the hands of the Germans, who accused them of signalling to French artillery. The Kaiser gave both his son and Prince Rupprecht the Iron Cross First and Second Class.

Further north on that same dreadful 22nd, the French Fourth Army advanced up a forest road through the Ardennes which led through the village of Bellefontaine. One regiment, led by Charles Mangin, headed onwards until, as they approached Tertigny, the Germans opened fire from neighbouring woodland. Bitter fighting followed; Mangin led a bayonet charge, while street fighting developed in Bellefontaine, which came under heavy shellfire. That evening, French survivors retired to the edge of the forest, having lost eight company commanders and more than a third of the regiment. France had always planned to exploit its colonial mercenaries to make good its shortfall of white manpower. Mangin wrote in a deplorable book he published in 1910,
La Force noir
: ‘In future battles these primitives, for whom life counts so little and whose young blood flows so ardently, as if eager to be shed, will certainly display the old “French fury” and will reinvigorate it if necessary.’ Now that war had come, Moroccans, Senegalese and Algerians were indeed hurled foremost into its flames. By 1918, France’s black soldiers had suffered a death rate three times higher than that of their white comrades, because they were so often selected for suicidal tasks.

One of the first of these fell to the 3rd Colonial Infantry Division. On 22 August its units advanced in column through the village of Rossignol, and thence up a narrow road into the Forêt d’Anlier. The French had made no attempt to reconnoitre: horse, foot and guns merely marched into the
midst of the woodland, led by the Chasseurs d’Afrique, nicknamed ‘
les marsouins
’ – ‘porpoises’, because of an old naval connection. Germans already deployed among the trees waited patiently until the entire division was committed, then unleashed a torment of fire which, within the space of a few minutes, shattered the formation. Trapped on the narrow road, horses, men, carts and guns milled in chaos, until the fortunate contrived to surrender. The division lost 228 officers and 10,272 other ranks, including 3,800 men taken prisoner; two generals were killed, one wounded and captured. Indeed, almost all the French commanders perished: among the divisional artillery, only a single officer survived.

This massacre was achieved solely by rifle and machine-gun fire, for artillery was useless in the dense woodland. After the war, a memorial was erected by the father of one of the dead, Lt. Paul Feunette. The grieving parent never forgave himself, because he had responded to his son’s pre-war sowing of wild oats by insisting that he should join the Chasseurs d’Afrique ‘to sort him out’. After the French retreated, the Germans conducted another orgy of violence against civilians, murdering 122 people in Rossignol on 26 August.

The fighting on this one day, the 22nd, cost the French army 27,000 men killed, in addition to wounded and missing in proportion. This was a much larger loss than the British suffered on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, which is often wrongly cited as the First World War’s high-blood-mark. Other advances upon Longwy and Neufchâteau were shattered in similar fashion to those further south. The casualties in August 1914 were not merely statistically more terrible, but dealt the French army a blow from which it never fully recovered – it is remarkable that it recovered at all. Fourth Army commander Langle de Cary observed laconically to Joffre: ‘On the whole, results hardly satisfactory.’ More than a few senior officers lost offspring: both Foch’s only son and his son-in-law perished. The C-in-C urged a renewal of the assault, but Langle ignored him and withdrew.

Further south, French fortunes briefly improved. Edouard Cœurdevey wrote on 23 August: ‘Exhausting week. We have followed the rapid advance of our troops and here we are in Alsace. Received fresh supplies on the field of battle. Trenches, burned houses, sacked station, shelled-out church, houses with bullet-holes, crosses in the corner of a wood, a convoy of prisoners. So many sad things, especially the prisoners: this troop of haggard-looking, filthy, exhausted men with their heads hung down, without any arms or equipment, dressed any old how.’ But after
this brief spasm of optimism, French tribulations were renewed. When Castelnau fell back from Lorraine, his neighbours in Alsace had no choice but to do likewise, or face being outflanked. ‘5 a.m. movement order – retire to the rear,’ Cœurdevey recorded on 24 August. ‘No other explanation. It seems that we are in the light. The Alsatians who had welcomed us without enthusiasm see us leave without regret. Alsace has been denationalised during these past forty-five years. France seemed to have forgotten it and accepted the mutilation, Germany maltreated it so it lacks a fatherland. Poor things! The example of Belgium must make them understand that there are not three solutions, but two: either France or Germany.’

Paul Deschanel, president of France’s Chamber of Deputies, later told Sir Francis Bertie that the entire incursion into Alsace-Lorraine had been ‘theatrical and a great error’. André Gide scribbled in his diary: ‘The Mulhouse business; any other nation would have avoided that … Mistakes made in France are due to love of the dramatic remark or gesture.’ There was never a realistic prospect that the southern assaults could achieve useful success; they were undertaken – as the Germans had coldly anticipated – merely to restore the glory of France, an objective better postponed unless or until her armies had prevailed elsewhere.

Moltke’s armies had also been shaken by the severity of the fighting among the woods and vineyards of Alsace. In the Vosges French
chasseurs-alpins
, specialist mountain troops, inflicted severe casualties. The German recapture of Mulhouse was a shambles, undertaken without reconnaissance. One officer, a Maj. Leist, deplored his difficulties in stemming panic when cut off from effective higher command: ‘There can be no talk of a connection with the regiment. Not a single regimental order was passed down during the entire battle.’ Sgt. Otto Breinlinger wrote that after the Mulhouse fighting, his company was reduced from 250 men to sixteen.

It was nonetheless unequivocally Joffre’s forces which suffered most disastrously from the mid-August battles. Jacques Rivière’s regiment fought its first action – or rather, joined the roll of victims – with Third Army north of Nancy. He and his comrades of a reserve unit were awaiting an order to move when suddenly their captain cried, ‘Get down! Get down!’ with an urgency he had never displayed on exercises. Rivière heard a ‘silky, tearing sound’ as the first of scores of incoming shells tore through the air overhead. There was a moment of panic as violent noises among the trees of a nearby wood suggested that the enemy was approaching. Then they saw that it was their officer’s horse, which had broken loose and
bolted. Shells began falling in fours among the Frenchmen, raising plumes of smoke in neat diamond pattern.

At daybreak on 24 August, the advancing Germans took Rivière prisoner. He marvelled at the fact that when the enemy overran the trenches from which he and his comrades had been shooting for hours, their conquerors displayed no ill-will: ‘It was finished, and that was that.’ German methods, he thought, were coolly clinical. They kept firing only until their enemy was overcome, then, when they had gained the desired result, they concluded the business with no more emotion than an accountant aligned pens and paper on his desk. ‘From that comes their success in war,’ reflected Rivière. ‘Military operations as practised today seem made for them … They do what is necessary, taking the job to its conclusion (in a fashion impossible for a Frenchman) … They plunder and set fire to places in just the same (methodical) way.’ André Gide wrote likewise: ‘With us, the army remained an instrument; with [the Germans] it is an organ; so that, without much exaggeration, it could be said that, for that organ, war was the necessary function.’

President Poincaré’s military liaison officer, Col. Marie-Jean Pénelon, was prone to display absurd optimism. But now, when the politician asked, ‘Is it defeat?’ Pénelon answered succinctly: ‘
Oui, M. le Président
.’ Beyond lives, the loss of terrain deprived France of much of its capacity for producing coal, iron and steel. Poincaré wrote bleakly on 24 August: ‘Where now are the illusions on which we have been feeding for the last fortnight? From now on, salvation can lie only in the strength of our resistance.’ Many French soldiers recognised that the Kaiser’s host had shown itself a more formidable fighting machine than their own. Jacques Rivière, in captivity, gazed with respect on German troops detraining at a railhead, then marching off towards the battlefield in ‘an unending and well-ordered procession’. This was, he thought, ‘an army made for war, and not an army making war because such a fate fell upon it’, such as that of France.

Yet Rivière and many of his compatriots conferred excessive respect on the enemy. There was no doubt of the energy, efficiency and motivation of Moltke’s NCOs and soldiers, but few officers revealed evidence of tactical genius. When German infantry attacked, their huddled formations suffered as grievously as did the French. The shells of ‘
soixante-quinzes
’, together with machine-gun and rifle fire, fell with deadly effect upon enemy advances. On both sides, the futility of many officers’ displays of courage evoked astonishment and even revulsion among those they led. A German spectator wrote of a scene on 18 August when the Kaiser’s
Grenadiers first marched into battle: ‘Even before the fight had started, his Royal Highness Prince Joachim Albrecht [of Prussia] and the head of the machine-gun company rode ahead on reconnaissance, bafflingly exposing themselves to the enemy’s fire without dismounting.’ The entire regimental staff stood among the forward troops throughout the subsequent battle. On the 22nd, another German regimental history recorded: ‘The crude assaults by the 131st Infantry have cut deeply into its ranks.’ Karl Gruber, a Freiburg architect now serving as a company commander, found his men pestering him insistently, demanding, ‘Lieutenant, will we be in Paris soon?’ ‘Lieutenant, won’t the murdering soon stop?’ In August the Duke of Württemberg’s Fourth Army admitted 20,000 casualties, the Crown Prince’s Fifth almost as many.