The Guns of August (63 page)

Because of darkness, the fatigue of forced marches, their own heavy losses, and the confusing British habit of “slipping away unseen” in the darkness, the Germans did not immediately pursue. Kluck gave orders to halt until next day, when he expected the enveloping maneuver of his right-wing corps to take effect. For that day Smith-Dorrien’s decision to turn and face a superior enemy in a pitched battle had succeeded in preventing the planned envelopment and destruction of the BEF.

On reaching St. Quentin, Smith-Dorrien found GHQ had left there at midday while the battle for the life or annihilation of the BEF was still in progress and had moved to Noyon, twenty miles farther to the rear. Troops in the town were not encouraged to see the army’s chiefs depart in automobiles headed south while the guns were firing in the north. In that inevitable judgment of a countryman, “The truth is that on the 26th Lord French and his staff completely lost their heads.” Sir Douglas Haig, who had by now recovered his, queried, “No news of II Corps except sound of guns from direction of Le Cateau. Can I Corps be of any assistance?” GHQ was too paralyzed to give him any answer. Failing to
hear from Headquarters, Haig tried to reach Smith-Dorrien directly, saying he could hear the sound of battle but, as a consequence of the separation of the two corps, “we could form no idea of how we could assist you.” By the time he sent the message the battle was over. Meanwhile GHQ had given up the IInd Corps for lost. Colonel Huguet, still attached as liaison officer, reflected their mood in a telegram he dispatched to Joffre at 8:00
P.M.
, “Battle lost by the English Army which appears to have lost cohesion.”

At 1:00
A.M.
Smith-Dorrien, having been in combat for the last four of the six days he had been in France, reached Noyon and found everyone at GHQ in bed asleep. Routed out, Sir John French appeared in his nightshirt and, seeing Smith-Dorrien turn up alive with a report that the IInd Corps was not lost but saved, rebuked him for taking too cheerful a view of the situation. Having had a bad fright, Sir John now gave way to furious anger, the more easily as he had resented Smith-Dorrien’s appointment, in place of his own choice, from the beginning. The man did not even belong to the cavalry and had taken it upon himself at Le Cateau to override Staff orders. Although Sir John was forced to acknowledge in his official dispatch
*
that this had resulted in the “saving of the left wing,” he did not soon recover from his fright. The losses of Le Cateau seemed even higher than they were until several thousand of the missing men who had merged with the trudging lines of French refugees and followed the retreat, or had made their way through German lines to Antwerp, thence to England, and back to France, eventually rejoined the army. Total casualties for the BEF’s first five days in action proved to be just short of 15,000. They intensified
the Commander in Chief’s anxiety to bring his army out of the fight, out of danger, out of France.

While the Battle of Le Cateau was in progress, Joffre summoned a meeting at St. Quentin of Sir John French, Lanrezac, and their staffs to explain the instructions of General Order No. 2. When he began with a polite inquiry as to the situation of the British Army, he evoked a tirade from Sir John who said that he had been violently attacked by superior numbers, that he was threatened by envelopment on his left, that his right was uncovered by Lanrezac’s headlong retreat, and that his troops were too exhausted to resume the offensive. Joffre, who believed above all in maintaining an appearance of calm before the Staff, was shocked by the Field Marshal’s “excited tone.” Lanrezac, after hearing Henry Wilson’s somewhat softened translation of his chief’s remarks, merely shrugged. Unable to issue an order, Joffre expressed the hope that the British Commander would conform to the plan contained in the new General Order of the day before.

Sir John looked blank and said he knew nothing of any such Order. Murray, suffering from his collapse of the night before, was absent. A variety of astonished and quizzical French gazes were turned on Wilson who explained that the Order had been received during the night but not yet “studied.” Joffre explained its provisions but with obviously failing confidence. Discussion faltered, pauses grew longer, the embarrassment became painful, and the meeting broke up without having achieved any agreement from the British for combined action. With an impression of the “fragility” of his left wing, Joffre returned to GQG where he was met by fresh news of weakness on all fronts, discouragement in every grade of the army, including the Staff, and finally, at the end of the day, by Huguet’s black telegram reporting the English Army as having “lost cohesion.”

Von Kluck was under the same impression. His orders for the 27th were to “cut off the British who were in full flight westwards,” and he reported to OHL that he was about to round up “all six” British divisions (only five were in France)
and “if the English stand on the 27th the double envelopment may yet bring a great success.” This brilliant prospect, coming the day after the fall of Namur and coinciding with Bülow’s report that his opponent, the French Fifth Army, was also a “beaten enemy,” confirmed OHL in the impression of imminent victory. “The German Armies have entered France from Cambrai to the Vosges after a series of continually victorious combats,” announced OHL’s official communiqué on August 27. “The enemy, beaten all along the line, is in full retreat … and is not capable of offering serious resistance to the German advance.”

Amid the general enthusiasm von Kluck received his reward. When he rebelled furiously at an order of von Bülow’s to invest Maubeuge, which he claimed was von Bülow’s duty, and demanded to know if he was to remain subordinate, OHL on August 27 restored his independence. The attempt to keep the three armies of the right wing under one command, which had caused so much friction, was abandoned; but as the rest of the way to victory seemed easy, this did not appear important at the moment.

Von Bülow, however, was exceedingly annoyed. In the center of the right wing, he was constantly bedeviled by his neighbors’ refusal to keep in step. Already, he warned OHL, Hausen’s delays had caused a “regrettable gap” between the Third and Second Armies. Hausen himself, whose chief concern, second only to his reverence for titles, was a passionate attention to the amenities offered by each night’s billets, was equally annoyed. On August 27, his first night in France, no château was available for himself and the Crown Prince of Saxony who accompanied him. They had to sleep in the house of a
sous-préfet
which had been left in complete disorder; “even the beds had not been made!” The following night was worse: he had to endure quarters in the house of a M. Chopin, a peasant! The dinner was meager, the lodgings “not spacious,” and the staff had to accommodate itself in the nearby rectory whose curé had gone to war. His old mother, who looked like a witch, hung around and “wished us all at the devil.” Red streaks in the sky showed that Rocroi, through
which his troops had just passed, was in flames. Happily the following night was spent in the beautifully furnished home of a wealthy French industrialist who was “absent.” Here the only discomfort suffered by Hausen was the sight of a wall covered by espaliered pear trees heavy with fruit that was “unfortunately not completely ripe.” However, he enjoyed a delightful reunion with Count Munster, Major Count Kilmansegg, Prince Schoenburg-Waldenburg of the Hussars, and Prince Max, Duke of Saxe, acting as Catholic chaplain, to whom Hausen was able to convey the gratifying news that he had just received by telephone the best wishes for success of the Third Army from his sister, the Princess Mathilda.

Hausen complained that his Saxons had been on the march for ten days through hostile country, in the heat and often in battle. Supplies were not keeping up with the advance, bread and meat were lacking, troops had to live off the local livestock, horses had not had enough fodder, and yet he had managed an average march of 23 kilometers a day. In fact, this was the least required of the German armies. Kluck’s Army on the rim of the wheel covered 30 kilometers or more a day and in some forced marches 40. He managed this by having the men sleep along the roadside instead of spreading out to left and right, and thus saved 6 or 7 kilometers a day. As German lines of communication stretched out and troops advanced farther from the railheads, food supplies often failed. Horses ate grain directly from unharvested fields and men marched a whole day on nothing but raw carrots and cabbages. As hot, as tired, and with feet as sore as their enemies, the Germans were increasingly hungry but on schedule.

Halfway between Brussels and Paris on August 28, von Kluck was gratified to receive a telegram from the Kaiser expressing “my imperial gratitude” for the First Army’s “decisive victories” and his congratulations upon its approach to the “heart of France.” That night by the light of bivouac fires regimental bands played the victory song “Heil dir im Siegeskranz” and, as one of Kluck’s officers wrote in his diary, “the sound was taken up by thousands of voices. Next
morning we resumed our march in the hope of celebrating the anniversary of Sedan before Paris.”

On the same day a new and tempting idea presented itself to von Kluck which before the week was over was to leave its mark on history. Reconnaissance showed that the French Fifth Army, retreating in front of Bülow, was moving in a southwesterly direction which would bring it across his line of march. He saw a chance to “find the flank of this army … force it away from Paris and outflank it,” an objective that now seemed to him of more importance than cutting the British off from the coast. He proposed to Bülow that a “wheel inwards” should be made by their two armies. Before anything could be decided, an officer from OHL arrived with a new General Order to all seven armies.

Inspired by a “universal sense of victory,” according to the Crown Prince, OHL nevertheless had become aware of the transfer of French forces from Lorraine and now called for a “rapid advance to prevent assembly of fresh bodies of troops and to take from the country as much as possible of its means of continuing the struggle.” Kluck’s Army was to advance to the Seine southwest of Paris. Bülow’s was to move directly upon Paris. Hausen, the Duke of Württemberg, and the Crown Prince were to bring their armies down to the Marne east of Paris, to Château-Thierry, Epernay, and Vitry-le-François respectively. The breakthrough of the French fortress line by the Sixth and Seventh Armies under Prince Rupprecht was left a little vague but they were expected to cross the Moselle between Toul and Epinal, “if the enemy retires.” Speed was “urgently desirable” to leave France no time to regroup and organize resistance. With memories of 1870, OHL ordered “severe measures against the population to break any resistance of
franc-tireurs
as quickly as possible” and to prevent a “national rising.” Strong resistance by the enemy was expected on the Aisne and then, falling back, on the Marne. Here OHL, echoing Kluck’s newborn idea, concluded, “This may necessitate a wheel of the armies from a southwesterly to a southerly direction.”

Apart from this suggestion the Order of August 28 followed
the original war plan. However, the German Armies who were to carry it out were no longer the same. They were diminished by five corps, the equivalent of a full field army. Kluck had left behind two reserve corps to invest Antwerp and hold Brussels and other parts of Belgium. Bülow and Hausen had each lost one corps to the Russian front: brigades and divisions equal to another had been left to invest Givet and Maubeuge. In order to cover the same ground as originally planned, with the First Army passing west of Paris, the right wing would have to be stretched more thinly or allow gaps to appear between its component armies. Already this was happening: on August 28 Hausen, pulled to his left by the Duke of Württemberg’s Army which was in serious combat south of Sedan and demanding “immediate assistance,” could not keep up with Bülow on his right and demanded instead that Bülow cover his right flank. The two corps which should have been at the junction of these two armies were on their way to Tannenberg.

OHL began on August 28 to feel its first twinges of concern. Moltke, Stein, and Tappen discussed anxiously whether to send reinforcements from Rupprecht’s armies to the right wing, but could not bring themselves to give up their attempt to smash through the French fortress line. The perfect Cannae that Schlieffen had dreamed of and renounced, the double envelopment by the left wing through Lorraine simultaneously with the right wing around Paris, now seemed possible of achievement. Rupprecht’s hammer blows fell on Epinal; his armies stood at the gates of Nancy and pounded on the walls of Toul. Since the reduction of Liège, fortified places had “lost their prestige,” as Colonel Tappen said, and every day seemed to be the one that would see Rupprecht break through. Destruction of the Belgian railways made a transfer of divisions impractical anyway, and OHL had convinced itself that a forcing of the Charmes Gap between Toul and Epinal was feasible and would obtain, in Tappen’s words, “encirclement of the enemy armies in grand style and in the event of success, an end to the war.” In consequence, the left wing under Rupprecht was retained in its full strength of
twenty-six divisions, about equal to the diminished numbers of the three armies of the right wing. This was not the proportion Schlieffen had in mind when he muttered as he died, “Only make the right wing strong.”

Following the drama in Belgium, the eyes of the world were fixed on the course of the war between Brussels and Paris. The public was hardly aware that all this time a fiercer, longer, more sustained battle to force the eastern doors of France raged in Lorraine. Along eighty miles of front from Epinal to Nancy two German armies swayed against the armies of Castelnau and Dubail in locked and nearly static struggle.

On August 24, having massed 400 guns with additions brought from the arsenal at Metz, Rupprecht launched a series of murderous attacks. The French, now turning all their skills to the defense, had dug themselves in and prepared a variety of improvised and ingenious shelters against shellfire. Rupprecht’s attacks failed to dislodge Foch’s XXth Corps in front of Nancy but farther south succeeded in flinging a salient across the Mortagne, the last river before the gap at Charmes. At once the French saw the opportunity for a flank attack, this time with artillery preparation. Field guns were brought up during the night. On the morning of the 25th Castelnau’s order,
“En avant! partout! à fond!”
launched his troops on the offensive. The XXth Corps bounded down from the crest of the Grand Couronné and retook three towns and ten miles of territory. On the right Dubail’s Army gained an equal advance in a day of furious combat. General Maud’huy, divisional commander of the
chasseurs alpins,
reviewing his troops before the battle, had them sing the lionhearted chorus of “La Sidi Brahim,”