Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (58 page)

But for all Moltke’s excuses, overwhelming blame for the chaos lay with himself. He vacillated constantly: at first he endorsed Rupprecht’s thrust, but then two days later declared that he wished only to ‘fix’ the French on the Lorraine front. Rupprecht pushed forward anyway, bent upon storming the heavily fortified three-hundred-foot ridge known as the Grand Couronné de Nancy. Throughout early September, the Prince’s offensive caused the French much concern. North of the city the Germans pressed forward to the long, low ridge protecting Verdun, creating what later became known as the Saint-Mihiel salient. But on the high ground of the Couronné itself Castelnau – ‘the rock’, as he became known – conducted a superbly dogged defence.

The main assault there began on the night of 3 September, and provoked savage fighting as swarms of field-grey figures strove to reach the high ground. Key positions were taken and retaken, so that the dead of the rival armies lay mingled among a chaos of abandoned weapons, loose ammunition and equipment. German officer casualties were especially heavy. The defence hung by a thread, and on the afternoon of the 5th Castelnau urged a strategic withdrawal. Joffre rejected his plea, insisting that Second Army must hold. Committed to his grand counter-offensive in the north, he continued to strip divisions from Castelnau, even while the outcome around Nancy was still undecided. On 7 September the Germans captured the key village of Sainte-Geneviève. Then the French retook it, in a struggle that continued into darkness.

On the same day, the 450-strong garrison of the fort of Troyon fought off a massive German onslaught. In these clashes the Baden corps suffered 10,000 casualties – German frontal assaults were as costly of lives as French ones. On 10 September Castelnau counter-attacked, pushing back the Germans several miles and capturing huge supply dumps in Lunéville. The line of the Meurthe was secured, Nancy saved. Rupprecht’s men blew the river bridges, knowing they would not be needing them again in a hurry. One Bavarian regiment lost a thousand men as it fell back on 11 September. Rupprecht’s chief of staff blamed failure at Nancy upon Moltke’s repeated changes of heart. In truth, the latter should never have
acquiesced in the attempt. While the French were obliged to fight desperately on several fronts simultaneously, so were the Germans, and the division of effort contributed to their looming strategic failure.

Joffre’s armies holding the line in the centre and south made a critical commitment to France’s northern offensive. The defiant phrase ‘
Ils ne passeront pas
’ was applied to Verdun only in 1916, but it could as well have been coined in September 1914, when the Germans first hammered at the gates of the great fortress network. If the armies of Castelnau and his northerly neighbour had cracked, everything done on the Marne would have been in vain. Rupprecht’s repulse on the Grand Couronné was as serious for Germany as had been the Morhange disaster for France. It has received less notice from posterity than it deserves, because in those same days much more celebrated events were taking place further north.

In early September, failures of intelligence once again exercised a critical influence on events – and they were German failures. Kluck’s army was marching south, its right flank bypassing Paris which lay thirty miles to the west. His scouting aircraft reported great columns of enemy retreating south. The Germans did not look – or anyway, not hard enough – towards the west. Commanders ignored some pilots’ reports of French concentrations in front of Paris and behind Kluck’s flank. There Manoury’s Sixth Army was massing, 150,000 strong. The general was a sixty-six-year-old gunner, recalled from retirement in 1914, and now leading seven reserve divisions. The German commanders, fixated with their belief that the French, and less importantly the British, were beaten enemies, remained heedless. They merely wrangled among themselves about how best to seal their triumph. Kluck pressed on in pursuit of the BEF and Fifth Army, and continued to fail to catch them.

Even while Joffre was still cajoling Sir John French to fight, Manoury began to push eastward, crowding Kluck’s right flank along the river Ourcq, a tributary of the Marne. Many French officers were sceptical about their orders for the offensive. Seeing the exhaustion and demoralisation of the men, not to mention their own towering sense of defeat, they found it hard to believe that the army was capable of a big attack; a few formally protested to their commanders. Such appeals were dismissed. On 6 September Fifth and Sixth Armies began their advance.

The first hero of the Marne battles – for there were scores, along a hundred miles of front – was a German. Kluck had left a single weak corps of 22,800 reservists commanded by Gen. Hans von Gronau to screen his rear, facing Paris in positions centred upon the heights of Monthyon, north-west of Meaux. When Manoury’s vanguards met the Germans, their advance was blunted by a superbly energetic display of generalship by Gronau, though much outnumbered. German artillery checked Sixth Army’s momentum; surprise was lost. Gronau then pulled back six miles, and just before midnight on the 6th informed army headquarters that Manoury was coming. His own corps suffered 4,200 casualties, but made a critical contribution to averting any risk of outright German collapse. Kluck made an immediate, drastic, momentous decision: to swing his entire command to face the new threat, then counter-attack.

Meanwhile Franchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army was marching against Bülow, some of its officers still imbued with the reckless spirit of August. Gen. Philippe Pétain rode forward personally to address his regiments. He declared the retreat at an end: they were to attack. He broadcast these as glad tidings, and some of his listeners seemed willing to believe him. But on the morning of the 6th, when the men were ordered to advance upon their first objective, the village of Saint-Bon, they baulked. Pétain dismounted from his horse, walked quickly to join the infantry on the start line, then personally led them forward – and defied probability by surviving. Saint-Bon was taken; French guns dashed forward and redeployed. Soon the infantry were pushing on. Pétain’s division enjoyed the small advantage of possessing a private spotter aircraft. His artillery commander, Col. Estienne, had secured this by barter for an ammunition wagon, and now exploited it to identify targets for his guns.

Corps commander Gen. Comte Louis de Maud’huy was a native of Metz who quit the city when it became a Prussian possession in 1870. A devout Catholic, he then took a vow, which he had kept, that he would never enter a place of entertainment – café, concert hall or theatre – until the tricolour flew once more over Alsace-Lorraine. Douglas Haig described Maud’huy with the condescension he displayed towards almost all Frenchmen as ‘a small active man: about 58, sandy coloured hair, probably dye! Quite the old type of French man seen on the stage of the Louis XIV period.’ Maud’huy had survived the bloodbath at Morhange two weeks earlier, and was now bent upon leading his divisions to victory at any price. This proved high: on the first day of the Marne, one brigade lost six hundred killed.

After Fifth Army’s torrid experiences the previous month, it was a miracle that Franchet d’Espèrey persuaded its men to advance at all, and in just sufficient cases to display the energy which proved vital to success.
Afterwards Kluck wonderingly observed: ‘That men who have had to retreat for fifteen days, having had to sleep on the ground, half dead from fatigue, could at the sound of the bugle pick up their rifles and attack, was something we Germans had never appreciated, this was a possibility that no one had ever considered in our military colleges’.

But 6 September became a day of renewed carnage, and of mortal fears for the Joffre offensive. One regiment, ordered to take the village of Vareddes, reprised the tactics of August by advancing behind its colours with drums beating. Twenty officers fell in the first half-hour; Col. Chaulet, their commander, was hit in the arm and shoulder, but removed the bloody rags of his tunic and bare-breasted led a bayonet charge across fifteen hundred yards of open ground. The village of Chambry changed hands three times before at nightfall Zouave attackers finally held it securely, the churchyard strewn with their richly-attired dead. A Moroccan brigade is alleged to have decapitated German corpses, and the record of France’s colonial troops makes this as believable as similar stories about Britain’s Gurkhas. Twenty-seven-year-old reserve officer Lt. Paul Tuffnau, scion of a Bordeaux wine family, watched the French advance across a beetroot field:

Their march forward is magnificent but too fast, too close together … We advance with them, but my machine-gunners are way behind. Finally here comes Chamoutin, all upset: ‘Poor Maire … A bullet in the heart’ … Some men try to crawl to the rear, hiding in the beetroot. I go over and threaten them with my pistol. They claim they are wounded or helping a casualty. Bullets whistle by non-stop, from all directions. It is quite a job to get the men to stand up.

Tuffnau’s machine-gunners refused his repeated imprecations to advance.

The charge falters, stops. Mulleret, the colour-bearer, lies on his back on the other side of the road, his head on a sack. Behind a haystack, I see the colours, a few men and a colonel, shaking like a leaf, his tunic undone, his right arm in a sling, shirt covered in blood.

I am bandaging Mulleret, who is wounded below the left shoulder. His eyes are closed, his face still has some colour. ‘Is that you Tuffra?’ He takes my hand, squeezes it tightly. ‘You won’t leave me? … Unfasten my belt, under the shirt … I have some gold in my belt. Leave that. But take my pistol.’

Soon afterwards the regiment launched another charge into a storm of musketry and shellfire. Once again Tuffnau found himself struggling to stop his men fleeing:

‘Halt! Turn around! Forward!’ I keep shouting, and these brave soldiers do turn around. I notice Dumesnil who is holding the flag. A sergeant close to me breaks into the
Marseillaise
and everyone joins in. But amid the incredible din Valmy’s song is drowned out.

One by one they crawled to the rear. Tuffnau fell asleep in a trench as the sun set behind the French line. By nightfall of 6 September, on the French left wing Sixth Army had advanced between two and three miles. Far across the front, darkness was broken by the glare from burning villages, set ablaze during the day’s fighting. Further east, Fifth Army was struggling to hold modest gains under German bombardment: each day of the Marne, Moltke’s guns expended more ammunition than the Prussians had used in the entire 1870 war. Charles Mangin, one of Franchet d’Espèrey’s divisional commanders, ran forward to the village of Courgivaux to check French soldiers fleeing under shellfire, and to persuade them to hold on. His men complained that they had not eaten for two days.

And even as the forces of Manoury and Franchet d’Espèrey gained some ground, elsewhere French affairs remained unpromising. Foch’s newly formed Ninth Army held a ridge line sixty miles south-east of Paris behind a poplar-lined stream named Le Petit Morin, in the marshes of Saint-Gond. It was a desolate, uninviting region, offering attackers only a few causeway crossing places. Foot soldiers could wade through waist-deep, but the marshes were impassable for vehicles. Foch, a civil servant’s son from Tarbes, sixty-three in 1914, was famously clever, authoritarian, decisive and monosyllabic – though he was also one of the few French officers who spoke fluent English. Fortunately for those who needed to understand his wishes, he acquired as chief of staff Col. Maxime Weygand, whom he soon nicknamed ‘my encyclopedia’. Weygand brilliantly interpreted Foch’s clipped phrases and orders, and the two formed a historic partnership. The Ninth Army’s left wing was committed to a night attack through the marshes in the early hours of 6 September, led by a Moroccan brigade. Just before dawn, as they marched up the causeway towards Congy, the darkness was pierced by a blaze of German searchlights and a torrent of fire. The French advance was halted in its tracks.

The Germans, meanwhile, were attacking elsewhere on their own account, pushing up the hillside south of the marshes. At daybreak, a divisional headquarters in the Château de Mondement came under heavy artillery fire. While the local French commander, the magnificently mon-ocled Gen. Humbert, watched the fighting’s progress through his field glasses from a window, the château’s owner, a certain M. Jacob, periodically raised the trapdoor of the cellar, where he and his family had taken refuge, to enquire about the state of the battle. Jacob, who had a weak heart, died a few days later from the strain of the unwelcome excitements he had suffered.

Further north, Foch’s infantry floundered all day in the swamp: whenever they attempted to emerge on the eastern side, German machine-gunners harrowed them. At 4 p.m., the attacking regiment was ordered to withdraw, having lost a third of its numbers. Another unit in front of Villeneuve fled under fire. Its men were reassembled, given a ferocious dressing-down, and sent back to the battle. One difficulty common to all Joffre’s soldiers was that
poilus
were still culturally resistant to using their spades – and paid the price. ‘The French soldier knew nothing of the trench,’ Weygand said later. ‘No one had taught him how to dig in, at least not systematically. When it had to be done you had to assume his disgust.’ Maurice Gamelin agreed: ‘The idea of organising any kind of defence aroused an almost innate repugnance; digging into the earth was believed to be a dishonourable gesture for loyal fighters who in their heart of hearts wanted to offer themselves up to danger with their chests exposed. It was an instinctive thing, which seemed to have passed down into our age of machines and merciless economic warfare from the reckless chivalry of Agincourt or the elaborate graces of Fontenoy.’ The Germans, by contrast, were never embarrassed to use entrenching tools whenever they halted. As they continued to press forward strongly on the road to Sézanne, at the western end of the Saint-Gond marshes, no one doubted that on Foch’s front the battle was going their way.