Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (61 page)

First Army’s officers replied that they refused to worry about any threat from the BEF. One said later: ‘we knew from previous experience how slowly the British operated’. Hentsch disagreed. Though Joffre had not as yet grasped the extent of the thirty-mile gap between the two German armies, the German staff officer judged that it posed a mortal threat. He invoked Moltke’s authority to insist that First Army must disengage from its battle with Manoury, and start falling back towards the river Aisne, between Soissons and Compiègne. Kluck’s chief of staff, Hermann von Kuhl, assented. A corps was dispatched to screen the retreat from the BEF and Franchet d’Espèrey. Hentsch set off on his return journey to Luxembourg, which he reached at 12.40 p.m. on 10 September. Moltke had meanwhile issued his own order for a general retreat, on the grounds that the British were on the brink of effecting an irretrievable severance between the armies of Bülow and Kluck, merely by marching into the yawning space between them.

Historians have puzzled interminably over the fact that the momentous conversation between Hentsch and the staff of First Army, and the subsequent decision, took place in the absence of Kluck, who was a mere three hundred yards away, at his command post. No sense of panic or desperation seems to have afflicted the parties to the debate. They – though not
Moltke – were still convinced of their overwhelmingly advantageous strategic situation. The prospect of a grand envelopment in the north had obviously faded, but hopes persisted of a decisive breakthrough further south, at Verdun. On 9 September in Luxembourg the Kaiser initially expressed violent dissent when informed of Moltke’s decision – or rather, perhaps, acquiescence in Hentsch’s decision – that the German armies of the right wing must withdraw to the Aisne. ‘No, no, no! It is out of the question!’ said the ‘All Highest’. But after a stormy meeting, Moltke departed to dictate a formal instruction for the retreat. He wrote resignedly to his wife: ‘Whatever happens, I must take the consequences, and share my country’s fate.’

Even as the German withdrawal began, on Foch’s front bitter fighting continued on the high ground above the marshes, where the Germans had pushed towards the plateau and held the Château de Mondement against repeated counter-attacks – its approaches were heaped with French dead. But then on the morning of 10 September, one of Foch’s divisions spearheaded an attack across the Saint-Gond marshes at La Fère-Champenoise, and encountered no resistance. The Germans had gone. Mondement was reoccupied after gunners manhandled forward two artillery pieces which blasted breaches in the park walls from a range of three hundred yards. When sufficient masonry crumbled to allow the attackers to swarm in, they were amazed to find only dead Germans; there too, the living ones had decamped.

It was the same on Manoury’s Sixth Army front, to the north-west: Paul Lintier’s battery near Nanteuil awoke on the sunlit morning of the 10th, and found that silence had descended: not a shot was to be heard. ‘The enemy has cleared off in the night,’ a passing infantry colonel told the gunners’ commander. ‘What’s that?’ expostulated the disbelieving major. ‘Yes. We’ve got orders to move forward … The Germans are retreating all along the line.’ The two officers grinned at each other. ‘That means –’ ‘Yes, it’s a victory.’ Lintier wrote: ‘The news, as it passed from mouth to mouth, shook us with joy. Victory, victory … when we were so far from expecting it!’

Many of Germany’s soldiers were as bewildered and angered by their retreat from the Marne as had been their British counterparts retiring from Mons less than three weeks earlier. Tappen, linchpin of Moltke’s staff, had declared that ‘whoever now perseveres is the victor’ – yet here was the German army breaking off its offensive. Cavalryman Gen. George Wichura was ‘decimated’, his men’s morale ‘terrible, everywhere confused
looks’. One regiment of Third Army called the order to retire ‘a thunderbolt’, its colonel writing, ‘I saw many men cry, the tears rolling down their cheeks.’ Gen. Oskar von Hutier of 1st Guards Division demanded, ‘Have they all gone crazy?’ Gen. Paul Flack wrote in disbelief: ‘This could not be … Victory was ours.’ Here was an early manifestation of a deep, passionate, almost hysterical sense of betrayal, a belief that dark forces had robbed the nation of a triumph that should justly have been Germany’s, which would loom large in its descent into trauma and fantasy after 1918. ‘They have totally lost control of their nerves at OHL,’ Prince Rupprecht wrote contemptuously in his war diary. The Bavarian Karl Wenninger wrote of the mood at Moltke’s headquarters on the 10th as ‘quiet as a mortuary. One tiptoes around … best not to address [the staff] – not to ask.’

On 11 September, Moltke left his headquarters in Luxembourg with Tappen to pay personal visits to the field commanders. A significant encounter took place later that day, when he met Hausen at Third Army’s headquarters. From there, he spoke by telephone to Bülow. All the news was bad, he said: Hausen himself was sick; his army had suffered 15,000 casualties in the first ten days of September, and the troops who remained were exhausted. The French were thrusting forward with a momentum which threatened Third Army with outflanking. On Hausen’s left, Duke Albrecht was demanding assistance to cope with his own difficulties, which the Saxon felt obliged to provide.

Lionel Tennyson of the BEF wrote in his diary that ‘rumours have reached us of the Russians coming to relieve us through England, tho it sounds hardly credible’. Amazingly, Moltke allowed himself to be impressed and alarmed by the same fantasy. He had always feared a British amphibious descent on Schleswig-Holstein. In Belgium, there were reports of British troops landing behind the front. In truth, four battalions which had been put ashore at Ostend almost immediately re-embarked, leaving behind only a trainload of dead horses, shot by their owners for lack of shipping to evacuate them. But Moltke did not yet know this. His appetite for risk, never large, was sated. He determined to dispatch ten divisions from the French front to Belgium; and to maintain his commitment to a general retreat in the west.

That day, Gen. Karl Einem was driving to Third Army to relieve the ailing Hausen. Passing through Reims, by chance he met Moltke, whom he found to be ‘a totally broken … man’. The chief of staff rambled: ‘My God, how could this possibly have happened?’ Einem exploded: ‘You
yourself ought to know the answer to that best of all! How could you ever have remained at Luxembourg and allowed the reins of leadership totally to slip from your hands?’ Moltke protested feebly that he could not have dragged the Kaiser halfway around France in the wake of the army. Einem said: ‘if your great-uncle could take his King … to Sedan, you and the Kaiser could at least have come close enough to the front to keep the reins in your hands’.

What followed was not a rout. The German armies fell back eastwards, leaving behind in scores of French towns and villages scenes of sack and squalor that much dismayed Joffre’s advancing troops. But there was no great allied haul of prisoners and captured guns. The Germans quickly selected the positions at which they would halt and fight again – on high ground behind the Aisne, whither pioneers were dispatched to start digging. By the evening of 13 September, the crisis threatening the armies of Kluck and Bülow had passed: they were safely back across the river, occupying the ridge of the Chemin des Dames. Franchet d’Espèrey on the 14th rejected Joffre’s urging to hasten forward, saying, ‘it is not rearguards that are in front of us, but an organised position’. The pursuit by the allies, and especially by the BEF, was painfully slow. French ammunition stocks were almost exhausted. The troops were too tired, and had suffered too much, to move with the speed that would have been necessary to seize any chance of transforming a French triumph into a German catastrophe.

But the high-water-mark of Moltke’s assault in the west had passed. ‘
La bataille de la Marne s’achève une victoire incontestable
,’ declared Joffre. Gen. Moriz Lyncker, chief of the Kaiser’s military cabinet, agreed: ‘in sum one must appreciate that [our] entire operation … has been utterly unsuccessful … Moltke is totally crushed by events; his nerves are not up to the situation.’ A staff officer wrote: ‘The nervousness of the general was displayed outwardly, particularly in that he walked ceaselessly up and down the room and exhaled with a whistling sound through his teeth … There was a general view that General von Moltke was unequal to his great task on account of his physical condition, and that he let the heads of departments do as they pleased.’ Lyncker told the Kaiser on the 14th that Moltke must go. The chief of staff became the foremost of thirty-three German generals dismissed, though his removal was not publicly acknowledged for several months. He received little sympathy from his peers, and deserves none from history. No man had done more to precipitate the calamity of European war; yet, having got his way, Moltke proved
incapable of effectively conducting his nation’s armies. He died in 1916, aged sixty-eight.

While the Kaiser was never allowed to influence battlefield operations, until late 1916 he retained one critical power, that of appointing and dismissing the army chief of staff. In September 1914 he chose his own man, Prussian war minister Erich von Falkenhayn, to assume control of Germany’s war machine. Falkenhayn noted laconically on taking over command: ‘Schlieffen’s notes are at an end and therewith also Moltke’s wits.’ At this critical moment, it seemed to the leaders of Germany preferable to apportion to individuals responsibility for detailed failures, rather than to acknowledge that the nation’s entire programme for waging war, so confidently set in motion less than two months earlier, had proved a catastrophe for their country and for the world. Hew Strachan has written: ‘The army blamed Kluck for having disobeyed orders and created the gap [between his own army and Bülow’s], Bülow for having been the first to decide to retreat, Hentsch for having ordered the First Army to conform, Hausen and Crown Prince Rupprecht for not having achieved the breakthroughs that would have retrieved the situation, and Moltke for having failed to prove himself a true
Feldherr
.’

An eternity past, on 24 August, the local school administration for Hanover province adopted a custom which had since been emulated all over Germany. Following a report of any major victory on land or at sea, teachers delivered a patriotic homily to their pupils, then gave them a celebratory holiday for the rest of the day. No one, however, had decided how to respond when instead a battle was lost. The German government’s answer was to decline to admit the fact. It said nothing to its Austrian allies about the Marne; it also lied to its own people, though the deceit was not much believed. Even amid a torrent of newspaper propaganda, asserting that the battle left Germany in a favourable position, intelligent civilians understood that their nation had suffered a serious setback. Anna Treplin wrote to her husband at the front: ‘This much is certain, that you have retreated an enormous distance.’

Gertrud Schädla described the ‘agony’ of awaiting news of her three brothers, all serving with the army in Belgium. She worried about the impact upon them of the experience of war: ‘How will the sight of a battlefield cut into the hearts of those who survive?’ At last, on 13 September, she received a letter from her youngest brother Gottfried, nicknamed ‘Friedel’. He was writing, he said grimly, on notepaper taken from the pack
of a dead Frenchman; he could scarcely understand how he had survived the ‘hundreds of perils’ he encountered every day: ‘You can’t imagine how horrible it is to face furious artillery fire, able only to lie motionless, calling upon God.’

The decision to withdraw to the Aisne remains intensely controversial. Some historians, not all of them German, believe that Moltke’s collapse of nerve, Hentsch’s almost casual nod to Bülow’s and Kluck’s retreat, denied the Kaiser a victory that was within his reach; that the Germans retained the balance of advantage on the Marne front, had their commanders displayed the resolution and united purpose to exploit this. It is certainly true that mystery, unlikely ever to be resolved, shrouds important details of German decision-making between 8 and 12 September. Some formations were performing much more effectively than their French opponents; both Foch and Manoury stood perilously close to defeat.

But there is overwhelming evidence that the French had fought the Germans to a standstill. Some of Kluck’s men had marched four hundred miles between 17 August and 12 September, and been in continuous action for nine days. Kluck and Bülow had contrived for themselves untenable positions. Franchet d’Espèrey’s Fifth Army, well-led and in formidable strength, was pressing upon them. Joffre, by notable generalship and iron will, had contrived a superiority of mass against the German right wing which his subordinates ably exploited. The French armies further south played their part nobly, by holding the line under savage pressure while those in the north secured the victory.

The final German folly of early September was a night bayonet assault on the 10th by almost 100,000 reservists of the Crown Prince’s Fifth Army at Vaux-Marie, north of Sainte-Menehould. Moltke first approved the operation, then – becoming alarmed about casualties among the besiegers of Nancy – recanted. Wilhelm threatened the chief of staff with an appeal to his father the Kaiser, and Moltke grudgingly agreed. The consequence was a disaster. The attackers failed to achieve a breakthrough, and French artillery, the ‘black butchers’, punished the packed ranks of infantry mercilessly. At 7.45 a.m. the French counter-attacked, driving back the milling, panic-stricken Germans. Some units lost as many as 40 per cent of their officers. That night Gen. Maurice Sarrail tersely messaged Joffre: ‘Situation satisfactory.’ Much has been said above about bloody French blunders in the first weeks of war, but the Germans did not long lag behind in follies, this one notable among them. The limitations of Germany’s royal army commanders were emphasised by the fact that Crown Prince Wilhelm
buoyantly assured Moltke that his 10 September operation had been ‘a great success’.

Contrary to the view of the German army’s apologists, the Marne represented not merely a failure by Moltke – who had to acquiesce in reality – but a historic victory for the French army, which imposed due punishment upon German hubris. The French were able to exploit some advantages: as defenders of their native soil they had better communications and much shorter supply lines than the Germans, who were playing away. The French command system worked incomparably better than the German one. If Joffre had been sacked on 25 August – which the disastrous failure of his Plan XVII and consequent casualties merited – he would be remembered as one of history’s military embarrassments. But thereafter he proved, like the hedgehog, that he knew one big thing. The Marne concentration represented a gamble by the commander-in-chief, which worked. It is hard to overstate the significance of Joffre’s triumph of the will over Moltke in determining the fate of Europe in 1914. Moreover, the C-in-C’s personal contribution was matched by that of the men of his armies, who revealed fortitude at a moment when they might have been forgiven for succumbing to despair.