The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (16 page)

Just to be on the safe side, Krafft on 18 August telephoned the OHL to make known his intentions to attack. Deputy Chief of Staff von Stein cagily replied: “No, I will not prevent you from doing this by ordering a stop to it. You will have to bear the responsibility. Make your decision as your conscience dictates.” Krafft did not hesitate for a moment. “It has been made.”
⁶⁶
Both he and Rupprecht would later be accused of having placed Bavarian dynastic interests above German national strategy.

The charge does not sit well. For, while refusing to issue Rupprecht direct orders, the OHL continued to second-guess his intentions. “One assumes here,” Bavarian military plenipotentiary Karl von Wenninger reported from the OHL, “that the Crown Pr[ince] will solve his task offensively, but at the same time one hopes—albeit in silence—that [his] commander’s nerves will allow him to draw the enemy onto Saarburg in order then to crush him between two fronts.”
⁶⁷
The Younger Moltke’s copying of his great-uncle’s loose command style was beginning to show cracks. While it had been relatively easy for the Elder Moltke to decentralize command and to have divisions and even corps “march to the sound of the guns”
(Auftragstaktik)
over relatively narrow fronts in 1870, the Younger Moltke was beginning to realize that this was not the case with what amounted to small army groups of four to five hundred thousand men extended over more than a hundred kilometers of front.

Dawn on 20 August broke gray and foggy, prohibiting aerial reconnaissance by either side. At 4:30
AM
, a blood-red sun—“the sun of Austerlitz,”
^*
Rupprecht and Krafft giddily noted—broke through the mist. For a sixth day, Joffre’s armies in Lorraine renewed the attack. Conneau’s cavalry corps debouched into the rear of German Sixth Army to roll up its flank. On this day, however, the French were met by a withering hail of artillery fire—and by a spirited counterattack.
⁶⁸
In fact, like the classical charges of Athenians and Spartans, Romans and Carthaginians, the two forces, quite unaware of the fact, had each mounted separate attacks that morning and crashed head-on along a hundred-kilometer-wide front.

The men of Bavarian Sixth Army had leaped out of their defensive positions at 3:30
AM
“with flags unfurled” and pressed their concentrated attack all along the line. The battle almost immediately disintegrated into a series of isolated and uncoordinated engagements. Clumps of soldiers rushed wildly across the hills and valleys of the Vosges, and through the fences and hedges of its quaint villages. Foch’s XX Corps alone made progress at Morhange. At one point, his forces stormed two lines of German trenches—only to discover that they were being “held” by field-gray straw figures.
⁶⁹
Foch had undertaken this deep penetration of the enemy lines against Castelnau’s express orders, and in the process had exposed the left flank of Second Army’s two center corps. Bavarian Sixth Army counterattacked that exposed flank of Castelli’s VIII Corps with wave after wave of infantry supported by heavy artillery. Enfilading machine-gun fire from Gebsattel’s III Corps caused what Foch called “gruesome” losses for his XX Corps. In the heated melee, it was often difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Near Bisping, for example, Bavarian 1st IB was nearly annihilated by a withering barrage of artillery shells from its own 9th Field Artillery Regiment.
⁷⁰
“Unfortunately,” Krafft noted in his diary, he had not been able “to move” Heeringen’s Seventh Army “to attack before 11
AM
.”
⁷¹
In Paris, President Raymond Poincaré quietly marked his fifty-fourth birthday.

In fact, Carl von Clausewitz’s “fog of uncertainty” had bedeviled the French at Morhange. On the evening of 19 August, two contradictory orders were issued: While Castelnau instructed Foch to hold the line where he stood, Foch ordered his troops to renew the attack the next morning. Foch informed Castelnau of his decision forty-five minutes before that attack, set for 6
AM
on 20 August, and the commander of Second Army replied by repeating his earlier order to stand pat and to guard against a possible German counteroffensive—by telephone as well as by sending a staff officer to XX Corps. Foch in his memoirs claimed that he received no instruction on the night of the nineteenth and that Castelnau’s order to halt on the morning of the twentieth reached him too late, for the Germans had preempted his own attack by launching their offensive around 5
AM
(French time). Joffre was content to note in his report to Paris only that XX Corps had “advanced perhaps a little too quickly.”
⁷²
He was not about to cashier one of his most energetic corps commanders.

A disaster ensued for the French—despite the fact that they had captured the war diary of a fallen German officer detailing Rupprecht’s plan of attack. German heavy artillery arrayed on the Morhange Ridge and ranged by means of pre selected aiming points decimated first French artillery and then the enemy infantry marching through the valleys below it. By late afternoon, as the broiling heat of the first two weeks of the campaign returned, Castelnau had lost not only his son in battle but much of his field artillery as well. Espinasse’s XV Corps and Taverna’s XVI Corps were in full retreat. French 68th ID and 70th ID had been severely mauled. Foch’s XX Corps had taken a bad knock. In the words of one officer, “a sublime chaos, infantrymen, gunners with their clumsy wagons, combat supplies, regimental stores, brilliant motor cars of our brilliant staffs all meeting, criss-crossing, not knowing what to do or where to go.”
⁷³
Still seething over Foch’s unauthorized advance, Castelnau had no choice but to order a retreat to the original starting line of the offensive on 14 August—the Meurthe River and the Grand Couronné de Nancy, the long chain of fortified ridges that shielded the city against attack. Believing the situation to be “very grave” and his army desperately in need of at least forty-eight hours’ rest, he entertained thoughts of further withdrawals behind the Upper Moselle and perhaps as far as Toul and Épinal. Joffre refused even to consider the suggestion. “Speak no more of retiring beyond the Moselle.”
⁷⁴
Instead, he rushed 64th RID and 74th RID to buttress Second Army and halted the shunting of Dubois’s IX Corps to the north, already in progress. And he sent a number of “defensive-minded” brigade and division commanders into “retirement” at Limoges.

Castelnau’s retreat also sealed the fate of Dubail’s advance. Initially, and without contacting Castelnau, the fiery Dubail was determined to continue the attack. General de Maud’huy’s 16th ID was engaged in bitter house-to-house fighting in Sarrebourg. A relief attempt by Léon Bajolle’s 15th ID was repulsed with heavy losses by Xylander’s Bavarian I Corps. Maud’huy had no choice but to abandon Sarrebourg. He did so with a defiant last gesture: Amid a storm of shrapnel, he and his staff stood at attention at the southern end of the city while 16th Division’s massed bands played the “Marche Lorraine” as the troops marched out of Sarrebourg.
⁷⁵

It was heroic, but it was not war. Late in the day, a telephone call from Joffre apprised Dubail that Second Army’s retreat threatened to turn into a rout. Foch’s XX Corps alone remained combat-effective and was doing its best to cover the hasty withdrawal of Espinasse’s XV Corps and Taverna’s XVI Corps. Still, its 39th ID and 11th ID took a terrible pounding and were driven back from one defensive position to another. Dubail was left no option but to withdraw VIII and XIII corps to cover Castelnau’s exposed flanks. Pau’s Army of Alsace still was nowhere in sight.

French losses on 20 August were appalling: Bavarian III Corps registered thirteen hundred enemy prisoners of war; Bavarian II Corps, eight hundred; and Bavarian I Corps, nineteen hundred. Special burial details took care of twelve hundred dead
poilus
.
⁷⁶
The Great Retreat in the south was in full swing by the evening of 20 August. The French army admitted five thousand casualties; historians have put that figure at ten thousand. Friedrich von Graevenitz, Württemberg’s plenipotentiary to the OHL, reported “total victory” against “at least nine active corps,” and the capture of fourteen thousand prisoners of war and thirteen artillery batteries.
⁷⁷
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been roused from bed by his senior military entourage to receive the news, celebrated “the greatest victory in the history of warfare.”
⁷⁸

At daybreak on 21 August, the gunners of Sixth Army showered Castelnau’s battered formations with another withering artillery barrage. As the early-morning mists evaporated, Foch’s 39th ID was hurled back north of Château-Salins, and his 11th ID likewise was forced to retreat. As Rupprecht’s Bavarians began a sweep around Castelnau’s Second Army, the previously shattered XV Corps and XVI Corps disintegrated. By 10
AM
, the little “monk in boots” ordered the first general retreat of the day. As his officers in vain tried to rally the troops to defend scattered hills and ridges, the German pursuit continued. Some four thousand shells pulverized the small town of Sainte-Geneviève over seventy-five hours. Castelnau’s men, morally and physically shaken, abandoned carts and wagons, guns and horses. At 6
PM
, the commander ordered another general retreat—under cover of darkness. Dubail’s First Army, with its western flank left in the air by Castelnau’s precipitous retreat, was forced to fall back to the line of the Meurthe River. He never forgave Castelnau.

Despite Joffre’s attempts to isolate the
zone des armées
from the home front, word of the disaster that had befallen Espinasse’s XV Corps at Morhange spread fast. The endless wagons filled with the wounded bore witness to what had taken place. On 24 August,
Le Matin
at Paris reported:

Companies, battalions passed in indescribable disorder. Mixed in with the soldiers were women carrying children on their arms … girls in their Sunday best, old people, carrying or dragging a bizarre mixture of objects. Entire regiments were falling back in disorder. One had the impression that discipline had completely collapsed.
⁷⁹

At the front near Rambervillers, northeast of Épinal, Lieutenant Henri Desagneaux was amazed by the seemingly endless columns of French refugees: “the peasant carrying his little bundle; the worker with a few old clothes; small farmers, shopkeepers and their cases, finally the bourgeois, dragging along a dog or a trunk.” He was shocked by what came next: “whole trains” bringing back the two thousand wounded at Rambervillers. “Their limbs shot off, their heads a pulpy mess; all these bandages, spattered with blood mingle with the civilian population.”
⁸⁰
Marcel Papillon with 356th RIR wrote home of the “awful weather—cold with a fine rain” that plagued the men for four days as they fell back to the Grand Couronné de Nancy. “War is sad,” he allowed, especially on the local population living amid the mounds of gray corpses
(des grises)
. “I saw villages burned up by bombardments. It is cruel. The infantry of French XX Corps has suffered
very heavy
losses.”
⁸¹
Not even the canteens offering
vin ordinaire
at the exorbitant rate of three francs per bottle offered relief.

Through it all, Joffre at Vitry-le-François maintained his clockwork regimen of eating regularly and well, sleeping undisturbed and long, and weeding out what he considered to be “weak” or “defensive” commanders. Minister of War Messimy tried to put the best spin on the debacle in the Vosges: “The day before yesterday, a success; today, a defeat.
C’est la guerre.”
Joffre dismissed the comment as “lapidary.”
⁸²

THE VIOLENT ENGAGEMENT AROUND
Sarrebourg shocked even its victor in terms of the human toll.
⁸³
Annual staff rides and field maneuvers had not prepared commanders for the true face of battle. On 21 August, Crown Prince Rupprecht inspected the previous days’ battlefields. In Serres Forest and in the region around Château-Brehain, he noted, the enemy had “left behind masses of dead and wounded.” But his own troops had also suffered grievously: At Eschen, one of the battalions of 9th Regiment, 4th ID, had been nearly annihilated and henceforward could only be deployed as a single company. Elsewhere, 18th IR had sustained 45 percent casualties; 70th IR had lost twelve hundred men. Especially the cavalry had suffered from both the heat and the steep climbs up the slopes of the Vosges. It had been forced to race back and forth on reconnaissance missions and then to deploy dismounted. One cavalry division had lost 213 riders over seventeen days of continuous patrol, and many of its mounts had no shoes; another reported that its horses were utterly worn out, and that seventy had died of exhaustion.

As Rupprecht rode toward his new headquarters at Dieuze, he came across more scenes of carnage. At Conthil, the fields were studded with mass graves, for both men and horses. Houses were burned out, shot to pieces by the artillery. Cows not milked for days, their udders nearly bursting, roamed about “bellowing in pain.” At Morhange, artillery shells had hit the gasworks, and fires ravaged the city. On a nearby hillside, where an enemy unit had been caught in the flank, French dead, recognizable by their red pants, “lay in rows and looked like a field of poppies.” The corpses presented an eerie sight. “They lie man to man. Some still hold their rifles at the ready. Due to the intense heat, most of the men’s faces have already turned a bluish black.” Yet again, the crown prince witnessed the effects of “friendly fire”: Bavarian artillery had mistakenly fired on its own advancing infantry.