The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (42 page)

Hausen justified his actions in his unpublished memoirs. Orders were orders. He could not disobey a direct command from Bülow, or from Duke Albrecht, or from Moltke, even if it meant splitting his army into three separate entities.
¹⁰³
For a third time since Fumay and Sommesous–Sompuis–Vitry-le-François, Hausen lost a splendid opportunity to drive an attack through the French line. The day of rest he had generously given his troops on 5 September now came home to roost: He was too far behind Second and Fourth armies on his flanks to rush to the immediate aid of either, and he was too far from the fighting front to penetrate Foch’s weak spot. By dividing his forces, he forwent any attempt to envelop French Ninth Army. By having halted on 5 September, he had given away the chance to break through the fifteen-kilometer-wide gap between Foch’s Ninth Army and Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army.
¹⁰⁴
One can only imagine what Hans von Gronau would have done under the circumstances.

None of Third Army’s three groups made progress on 7 September, violently battered by Foch’s 75s, the “black butchers” that often fired a thousand rounds each per day. In many places, officers had to rush to the front to get the men moving again.
¹⁰⁵
Bülow announced that Second Army was pulling III and IX corps as well as X Reserve Corps behind the Petit Morin. At five o’clock that night Hausen, out of character and perhaps recognizing the lost opportunity of the previous day, reached a bold decision: He would assume the role of army-group commander. Until now, he confessed, Third Army had been little more than a “quarry of reserves” for Second and Fourth armies.
¹⁰⁶
He determined to correct that situation.
^*

Knowing that the French had launched a major offensive between Verdun and Paris, Hausen reasoned that “the enemy cannot be strong and superior everywhere.” Hence, the trick was to find the place where it was weakest. With Bülow being driven behind the Petit Morin by French Fifth Army and with Kluck fully engaged along the Ourcq by French Sixth Army, Hausen deduced that the weak spot had to be along the front of his army. And since his troops were being hammered by the French
les 75s
, he decided to “storm the enemy’s artillery positions at dawn with the bayonet.”
¹⁰⁷
Such a ferocious charge would fortify the resolve of his Saxons for hand-to-hand combat. As well, he was concerned that inadvertent gunfire might alert the sleeping French soldiers. General d’Elsa was given overall command with his own XII Corps, Laffert’s XIX Corps, and 23d ID. Kirchbach’s XII Reserve Corps was to advance with 32d ID and 23d RID. Duke Albrecht agreed to attach Schenk’s VIII Corps to d’Elsa’s left wing; Bülow promised 2d GD (later also 1st GD) for Kirchbach’s right wing. Hausen now commanded six and one-half army corps. He enjoyed a one-third numerical superiority over Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army. At 9:15
PM
, he informed the OHL of his plans; Moltke and Tappen radioed their approval shortly before midnight.
¹⁰⁸

At 2:45
AM
on 8 September, Horst von der Planitz’s 32d ID was ready. It was clear and dry.
“Seitengewehr aufgepflanzt! Sprung auf, marsch, marsch!
”
^†
Orders had arrived at unit levels only thirty minutes before jump-off. The men advanced against Joseph Pambet’s 22d ID and parts of Maurice Joppé’s 60th RID between Sompuis and Vitryle-François with bayonets fixed, rifles unloaded, and breechblocks secured in their bread pouches. At 3
AM
Arnold von Winckler’s 2d GD followed against René Radiguet’s 21st ID, despite Winckler’s initial grave concern that Hausen’s gamble could cost him his division. Larisch’s 23d RID followed at 3:30
AM
. A pale moon shone as the men silently moved through “glorious vineyards” and marshes and over chalky plains. As soon as they collided with the enemy, bugles and drums called out the
attaque brutale
.

The 2d Guard waded across the Somme at Normée, and then charged the French lines with “shouts of Hurrah, bugles blaring and drums beating.”
¹⁰⁹
Concurrently, Planitz’s Saxon 32d ID crossed the Somme at Lenharrée. Despite the staggered starts, surprise was with the Germans. Lenharrée fell by 4:45
AM
, its defenders “exhausted, wounded, taken prisoner, or fleeing.”
¹¹⁰
The first light of dawn revealed the grisly sight of “green hillsides dotted as if with red and blue flowers”—the tunics of dead French infantrymen.
¹¹¹

It was a “disastrous day” for Foch.
¹¹²
One French artillery battery after another fled the German cold steel. Radiguet’s 21st ID and Pambet’s 22d ID were driven back by the furious assault, crashing into Justinien Lefèvre’s recently arrived 18th ID. Next, Jules Battesti’s 52d RID had to fall back and d’Espée’s 9th CD was forced to abandon Sommesous. The marshes were effectively outflanked, their southern exists uncovered. In short order, Mont Août, guarding the southern Saint-Gond Marshes, fell. Foch rushed Paul Grossetti’s 42d ID from the left to the right flank to stanch the German advance. His entire right wing seemed to have collapsed, Eydoux’s XI Corps routed. Already at 6:15
AM
, Eydoux ordered the four divisions of XI Corps to fall back ten kilometers. Foch deemed its situation “critical.” But, as historian Hew Strachan has put it, he “doggedly refused to admit it.”
¹¹³
The front held, battered but unbroken as it withdrew.

Around 9
PM
, Foch and his chief of staff, Colonel Maxime Wey-gand, appealed to Fifth Army to send a division to replace Grossetti’s shattered 42d ID on the right flank. Franchet d’Espèrey did better: He sent Foch two infantry divisions and the artillery of Defforges’s X Corps.
¹¹⁴
As well, Joffre dispatched Antoine de Mitry’s 6th CD to Ninth Army; Legrand-Girarde’s XXI Corps was expected any hour up from Épinal. Therewith, Ninth Army’s “broken” right wing could be repaired and the gap between it and Fourth Army reduced to ten kilometers.
¹¹⁵
Interestingly, Foch’s putative comment, “Hard pressed on my right, my center is falling back, impossible to move, situation excellent. I attack,” is yet another legend of the Battle of the Marne. But as President Poincaré noted in a reply to Foch’s address to the French Academy in February 1920, while some authorities treated the text as “authentic, I have not the courage to disillusion them.” After all, “if you never actually wrote this optimistic message it was anyhow in your thoughts.”
¹¹⁶

As dawn broke, Saxon 103d RIR entered Sommesous “at a magnificent run and with shouts of Hurrah.”
¹¹⁷
Then reality hit. The men were hungry, as they had left their knapsacks behind to lighten the load. A hot sun began to beat down on them, and there was little water on the chalky Catalaunic plain to sustain an army. Foch ordered Dubois’s IX Corps and Eydoux’s XI Corps furiously to counterattack, even as they retreated.
¹¹⁸
The Germans had no artillery with which to subdue the flanking fire. During the nighttime crossing of the Somme, units had lost their way and tumbled chaotically together. The regiment lost 104 dead or missing and 224 wounded at Sommesous. By nightfall, it had not reached any of its goals for the day.

Hausen that night judged the attack to have gone “generally satisfactorily.” Indeed, he had scored what seemed a stunning victory in one of the classic bayonet charges of the entire war.
¹¹⁹
Group Kirchbach’s three divisions had pushed Foch’s right wing back ten to thirteen kilometers along a twenty-kilometer front, and his center away from the southern exits of the Marais de Saint-Gond. Such a feat would not be repeated until the great German spring offensives of 1918. But privately, Hausen noted that the advance had been “a difficult and slow forward movement from one stand of woods to another, from farm to farm, from one hillock to another.”
¹²⁰
It was the sort of “siege-style” warfare that Deputy Chief of Staff Martin Köpke had warned Alfred von Schlieffen about in 1895.

Group d’Elsa’s left wing also had made little progress. Winckler reported his 2d GD utterly “exhausted” after the “enormous tension” of the bayonet attack. “Officers and men fell asleep wherever they had stopped marching.” The terrain had been too rugged for a coordinated assault; infantry units had lost their way in the dark and stumbled into other, unfamiliar units. The loss of officers had been “exceptionally high.”
¹²¹
Hausen’s spirited attack ground to a halt on the outskirts of Montépreux. The men were physically drained. There were no reinforcements to exploit the initial advance. An evening rain turned the fields into gray ooze and flooded the marshes. By next morning, Hausen’s forces had lost contact with the French.

Traugott Leuckart von Weißdort, the Saxon military plenipotentiary to the OHL, just happened to be with Third Army at Châlonssur-Marne during the bayonet attack. He reported to War Minister Adolph von Carlowitz at Dresden that Hausen “considered his situation to be very serious, since [Third] Army had been pulled apart by having to rush to the aid of both 2. and 4. Army.” The danger of French forces breaking through Third Army’s thinly manned front was “serious.” Specifically, well-emplaced French artillery had mauled Planitz’s 32d ID. Shaken by what he had witnessed, Leuckart von Weißdort conferred with Chief of Staff von Hoeppner and General von Kirchbach, commanding XII Reserve Corps. Both agreed with the Saxon military envoy. “[They] complain bitterly about heavy losses, exhaustion of the troops due to daily battles and long marches, and the fear that not enough artillery shells can be brought up to the front.”
¹²²
It was a sobering document.

While Third Army released no casualty figures for that night’s assault, overall losses were roughly 20 percent. The 2d GD recorded 179 officers and 5,748 men killed or wounded. Each regiment of 1st GD lost about a thousand; many companies were down to just fifty men.
¹²³
For the period from 1 to 10 September, d’Elsa’s XII Corps reported 3,621 killed and 3,950 wounded; Laffert’s XIX Corps, 2,197 killed and 2,982 wounded; and Kirchbach’s XII Reserve Corps, 766 killed and 1,502 wounded.
¹²⁴
The most recent research gives only broad figures: 4,500 casualties for Group Kirchbach and 6,500 for Group d’Elsa.
¹²⁵

General von Hausen’s supporters have depicted him as a “gifted army commander” who sought to bring about a small Cannae at the eleventh hour, and they have seen in his night attack an example of operational art to be emulated by the rest of the German army.
¹²⁶
Yet even at the tactical level, its wisdom remains questionable in light of the fact that it was carried out across a river at night, without reconnaissance of enemy positions, without prior shelling, without artillery support during the advance, and with unloaded rifles. At the operational level, it was even less spectacular. The staggered start had resulted in an uneven advance. By 10
AM
, Planitz’s 32d ID lagged four kilometers behind Plettenberg’s Guard Corps, marching on Connantray-Vaurefroy. Hour after hour, Plettenberg waited for Planitz to close ranks—in vain. When 2d GD took Fère-Champenoise at 4:30
PM
, Saxon 32d ID was nowhere to be seen. Plettenberg was forced to halt his advance at Corroy for fear of exposing his left flank.
¹²⁷
In fact, for reasons that neither Planitz, nor Kirchbach, nor Hausen explained after the war,
^*
for eight hours Planitz had “regrouped” 32d Division, echeloned in depth! It was the second major mistake in two days, following closely on the heels of Hausen’s earlier splitting of his army. And like that earlier decision, it denied the Saxons the chance to exploit the gap between French Third and Fourth armies still guarded by only d’Espée’s 9th Cavalry Division.
¹²⁸

Nor had the advance of Larisch’s 23d ID been a model of operational effectiveness.
¹²⁹
After jumping off late at 6
AM
, it had advanced on Sommesous. At 1:30
PM
, Kirchbach ordered it to point southeastward toward Montépreux. Larisch did not execute this order until 2:45
PM
, and then marched through woods northeast of Montépreux. Kirchbach re-sent his order. Larisch advanced at 4:45
PM
, but again toward the northeast. When he finally arrived at his designated rendezvous with Planitz, 32d ID was nowhere in sight. As a result, the Saxons missed an opportunity to break through the gap between Pambet’s 22d ID and 23d RID and turn Foch’s right flank. Hausen and Third Army, to stay with Winston Churchill’s term, thus missed their third “climacteric.”

ON THE OURCQ
, two events straight from the pages of a Hollywood movie script took place during the night of 7–8 September. First, the French retreat to Nanteuil-le-Haudouin created a fascinating “what if?” scenario. Sordet’s cavalry corps, battered and beaten, had joined Déprez’s 61st RID in abandoning Sixth Army’s left wing. Maunoury was furious. He ordered the cavalry corps back into line by way of a forced night march—and then relieved Sordet of command. The latter had failed to carry out Maunoury’s explicit order to mount a raid into Kluck’s rear around La Ferté-Milon. Gustave de Cornulier-Lucinière’s 5th CD, with sixteen hundred sabers, ten guns, and 357 troops riding bicycles, was then sent on that mission, the only one of its kind in the war. For two daring days, 5th Cavalry rode around the Forest of Viller-Cotterêts behind German lines. At 6
PM
on 8 September, under “a dark red, cloudy sky,” it attacked a German airfield near Troësnes. At that very moment, a cavalcade of cars arrived with First Army’s staff. Kluck, Kuhl, and their aides “seized rifles, carbines and revolvers,” flung themselves on the ground, and formed a broad firing line. The situation was cleared by the arrival of Arnold von Bauer’s 17th ID, which “violently” dispatched the French riders, reducing 5th CD to half its original strength. General de Cornulier-Lucinière’s “brave riders,” in Kluck’s words, had “missed a good prize!”
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