The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (86 page)

Five days later another member of the club suffered a similar shock. That Saturday afternoon F. E. Smith, the official press censor, was handed a dispatch from Arthur Moore, the war correspondent of
The Times.
Moore had written that the Allied forces had virtually disintegrated under an “immediate, relentless, unresting” enemy advance. He was awed by the “irresistible vehemence” of the Germans, whose numerical superiority was so great that “they could no more be stopped than the waves of the sea.” The BEF, a “retreating, broken army,” was being “forced backwards, ever backwards,” suffering “very great losses” reducing it to “bits of broken regiments” that were “grievously injured” and some divisions which had “lost nearly all their officers.” F.E. suspected that the correspondent was simply windy. Nevertheless, he passed what became known as “the Amiens dispatch” in the shrewd belief that it would make excellent recruiting propaganda. Thus it was that members of the English establishment sat down to breakfast Sunday morning and found themselves confronting a front-page headline,
FIERCEST FIGHT IN HISTORY
, followed by the subheads
Heavy Losses of British Troops—Mons and Cambrai—Fight Against Severe Odds—Need for Reinforcements.
In a box the editor explained that the story was being run to alert the country to the “extreme gravity of the task before us.” H. G. Wells thought: “It was as if David had flung his pebble—and missed!” Asquith indignantly scolded the paper, but F.E. had been right; Monday morning recruiting posts were packed with young men eager to rescue their brothers in France. “Kitchener’s Army” had begun to form.
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F. E. Smith

What had happened? Part of the explanation is Gallic stupidity. There is a theory that the last competent French general lies in Napoleon’s tomb, and nothing that happened on the fluid front that summer refutes it. Ever since Louis Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Prussians a generation earlier, cadets at Saint-Cyr-l’École had been imbued with the belief that, as General Ferdinand Foch put it, “There is only one way to defend ourselves—to attack as soon as we are ready.” This was the doctrine of the
offensive à outrance,
of
cran,
of charging mindlessly while shouting:
“Vite, vite! Allez, allez!”
Field regulations stipulated that “the French Army henceforth admits no law but the offensive… the offensive alone leads to positive results.” The bible of this faith was the general staff’s Plan XVII, its blueprint for an irresistible march to the Rhine. The instant war was declared, they would invade German-occupied Lorraine with their right wing and advance through Alsace. As the Germans met the threat by transferring troops from their center, the French would hit the center with everything they had.
Voilà:
a quick, decisive victory.
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Plan XVII was hopelessly flawed. It assumed parity in the populations of the two countries, and there was none. Since 1871 German Fraus had been conceiving far more frequently than Frenchwomen; despite the Reich’s commitment in the east, against Russia, the kaiser had mobilized over 1.5 million men in the west, enough to guarantee superiority in the first clash. The French plan’s total commitment to massed attacks overlooked the changes in warfare wrought by modern technology—the machine gun, heavy artillery, barbed wire—all of which had been obvious to European observers of the Russo-Japanese War ten years earlier. Most grievous of all, the French generals were guilty of what Napoleon had called the cardinal sin of commanders: “forming a picture”—assuming that the enemy will act in a certain way in a given situation when in fact his behavior may be very different. It seems never to have occurred to them that the Germans, too, might have a plan. But they did. It was the Schlieffen Plan, completed in 1906 by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, then the kaiser’s chief of staff. The count had anticipated Plan XVII. He intended to draw the French right into Lorraine in a “sack maneuver” while his own right wing, a million
Soldaten,
swept down through Belgium like a swinging scythe, cutting a swath seventy-five miles wide and enveloping France’s extreme left flank.

Germany’s enemies should have been aware of this. In 1912 Henry Wilson, cycling through the Low Countries, saw that all new German railroad construction in the area converged on Aachen and the Belgian frontier. But Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, constable of France and the French commander in chief, was blind to it. Immediately after the declaration of war he marched triumphantly into Lorraine, not suspecting that the slowly retreating enemy was luring him into a trap. Meanwhile, Alexander von Kluck, commanding the German right, wheeled down through Belgium, overwhelming the fortresses of Liège and Namur. His men, their
feldgrau
uniforms coated with white dust from shattered buildings, advanced across Belgium almost unopposed, burning villages and shooting hostages as they went. General Charles Lanrezac commanded the French left wing, lying in Kluck’s path. As early as August 8 Lanrezac warned Joffre’s headquarters,
Grand Quartier Général
(GQG), that he might be flanked. His concern, he was told, was “premature.” GQG informed him that a flanking maneuver was “out of proportion to the means at the enemy’s disposal,” that the enemy columns his scouts had sighted must be on some “special mission,” probably serving as a screen. As evidence of their strength accumulated, Joffre actually rejoiced. It meant, he said, that they were thinning their ranks in the center, where he was about to strike.
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He struck on August 21 in the wilderness of the Ardennes. As American GIs discovered thirty years later, the Ardennes is ill-suited to fighting. Thickly forested, slashed with deep ravines, and fogged with mists rising from peat bogs, it resembles a scene in a Hans Christian Andersen tale. Caesar, who took ten days to cross it, called it a “place of terrors.” Moreover, its slopes were such that the French would be charging uphill. They found the Germans dug in and ready. Bayonets fixed, Joffre’s men lunged upward in an
attaque brusque.
Machine gunners slaughtered them. During the four-day battle of the Frontiers, of which this was a part, 140,000 Frenchmen fell. Yet even this massacre failed to discourage Joffre. The British, who had lost only 1,600 at Mons, were defeatist, but the word from GQG was that although Joffre’s drive in the center had been “momentarily checked,” he would “make every effort to renew the offensive.”
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That was fantasy. The German right, outnumbering the defenders two to one, was about to roll up Joffre’s left, and if he didn’t know it, Lanrezac did. Learning that the French attackers in the Ardennes not only had failed but were actually retreating, Lanrezac saw himself facing encirclement. On the evening of August 23 he ordered a general retreat. It spread along the entire Allied line. Plan XVII had crumbled. The last chance for a short, victorious war had vanished. Urgency, even panic, was in the air. The French fell back and back. The German advance was relentless. The Allies would be lucky to save Paris. Actually, they didn’t; it was Kluck who saved it for them. He blundered, swinging east of the capital on September 3 and thereby offering his flank to Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the retired officer charged with the city’s defense. After the first skirmishes there the exhausted German infantrymen gave ground. The French rallied on the Marne, and after a seven-day battle involving more than 2,000,000 men, Kluck recoiled and dug in. Then the sidestepping began, the lines of the opposing armies extending westward and then northward as each tried to outflank the other in a “race to the sea.” The possibility that eventually they might run out of land seems never to have occurred to them. The sacrifices in the opening battles had been so great on both sides—in August the French alone had lost 206,515 men—that the thought of stalemate was unbearable.

The Germans were masters of northern France, but the Belgians still held out. In Brussels on August 17 their premier, Count de Broqueville, had reported to King Albert that the enemy, outnumbering his forces four or five to one, were attacking across the Gette River, fifteen miles away. Liège had fallen; Namur was doomed. During the night of August 18 the king, executing a skillful disengagement maneuver, withdrew his five divisions from Brussels and the Gette and retreated into the great port of Antwerp, Belgium’s strongest fortress. They reached there, intact, two days later. The disappointed Kluck reported to
Oberste Heeresleitung
, the kaiser’s headquarters, that Albert’s army had “managed to escape our grasp.” He was forced to leave two corps—60,000 men, badly needed on the Marne—to invest Antwerp. Even so, on August 25 the Belgians sortied and fell on the rear of Kluck’s army, driving it back on Louvain. Shots were fired, and Kluck’s men shouted:
“Die Engländer sind da!” “Die Franzosen sind da!”
General von Luttwitz, the military governor of Brussels, summoned the American minister and told him that Louvain civilians had either fired on the Reich’s troops or signaled the attackers. “And now of course,” he explained, “we have to destroy the city.” It was burned to the ground as an example for those who felt tempted to defy German might.
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Zeppelins bombed Antwerp, but until the second month of the war the fortified city faced no serious threat. On September 5, however, de Broqueville warned the British Foreign Office that the enemy troops besieging the port were being heavily reinforced. He asked for weightier artillery, aircraft, and antiaircraft guns. Four days later the kaiser ordered the capture of the city whatever the cost, and on September 28, 420-millimeter Krupp howitzers began pounding the outworks with 2,000-pound shells. The question of Antwerp’s value to the Allies now arose. Was its defense vital? The cabinet was indecisive. In 1911 Fisher, then in full possession of his faculties, had written that in the event of war between Germany and an Anglo-French alliance, the “overwhelming superiority” of the British navy, not Britain’s army, would “keep the German Army out of Paris…. It is Antwerp we shall seize,” he concluded, “and not go fooling on the Vosges frontier.” But provisioning Antwerp was a logistical nightmare. The port’s link with the North Sea was the Scheldt River, which belonged to the Netherlands, and the frightened Dutch, determined to remain neutral, were turning back all incoming ships except those bearing food and medicine. With Antwerp’s sea approach barred, the only other route open was a thin, exposed, fifty-mile-long land corridor. Kitchener, replying to the September 5 note, said he had no munitions to spare and even doubted the port was in danger. “I expect they will hang on to Antwerp,” he wrote. On the second day of the war Churchill had vetoed sending an expeditionary force there on the ground that while he could guarantee a safe passage across the Strait of Dover, he couldn’t protect troop transports taking the longer route across the North Sea to the Scheldt, then still open.
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Winston had not yet grasped the connection between Antwerp’s resistance and holding the Channel ports—Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne—but he was alert to the necessity of denying the ports to Kluck. So was Joffre. Early in September the constable had asked that British infantry be landed at Dunkirk, to make a demonstration on the Germans’ right flank. Churchill’s naval fliers were already based there, and Kitchener asked him to supervise the landing party. His departure was kept secret; even the cabinet wasn’t told. Asquith wrote Venetia on September 9: “Winston is just off to Dunkirk… he will be back by lunch tomorrow. Don’t say anything of this, as he doesn’t want the colleagues to know.” He commanded a detachment of marines and the Oxfordshire Hussars, his reserve regiment, of which Sunny was colonel in chief. The episode reflects little credit on Churchill. He requisitioned several naval vehicles and eight three-ton trucks to provide Sunny and his officers with all the comforts of their Blenheim maneuvers. “Probably no other regiment,” wrote Adrian Keith-Falconer in
The Oxfordshire Hussars in the Great War,
“went to France accompanied by such a fleet of motor transport solely for its own personal use.” Winston’s orders were: “Select your point and hit hard.” His men were joyously received by villagers, but their feint left no impression on the enemy; Kluck wasn’t even aware of their existence. The Tommies called them the “Dunkirk Circus.” And Churchill, with his incorrigible love of panoply, lent the ineffective foray a touch of opéra bouffe by appearing in the full-dress regalia of an Elder Brother of Trinity House. A French officer asked him what uniform he wore.
“Je suis un Frère Aîné de la Trinité,”
he replied.
“Mon dieu!”
gasped the Frenchman.
“La Trinité!”
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