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A Short History of the Great War

A >> A.F. Pollard >> A Short History of the Great War




Fighting began at 12.40 p.m. on Sunday the 23rd with a bombardment
from between five and six hundred German guns along the whole
twenty-five miles of front. It did surprisingly little damage in spite
of the spotting by German aeroplanes; and when the German infantry
came forward in massed formation, they discovered that their shelling
had had no effect upon the moral of our troops or the accuracy of
their rifle-fire. The Germans fought, of course, with obstinate
courage and advanced again and again into the murderous fire of our
rifles and machine guns and against occasional bayonet charges. But
their own shooting went to pieces under the stress, and the frontal
attack was a failure. Success there could not, however, ward off Von
Buelow's threat to our right flank, and under the converging pressure
Binche and then Mons itself had to be evacuated. But it was the
long-delayed news of the French defeat and withdrawal on the whole of
the rest of the line, coupled with more accurate information about the
size of the German force, that determined the abandonment of the
British position. Sir John French had to hold on till nightfall, but
orders were given to prepare the way for retreat. The weary troops
were to have a few hours' rest and start at daybreak. Their retreat
was covered by a counter-attack soon after dawn by the First Division
on the right which suggested to the Germans that we had been strongly
reinforced and intended an offensive. Meanwhile Smith-Dorrien moved
back five miles from the Canal, and then stood to protect the
withdrawal of the First Division after its feint attack. It was a
heavy task, and the 9th Lancers suffered severely in an attempt to
hold up the Germans at Audregnies. But by Monday afternoon Haig's
First Army Corps was back on the line between Maubeuge and Bavai, and
Smith-Dorrien fell into line from Bavai westwards to Bry.

The design was to offer a second battle in this position, and
entrenchments were begun. The fortress of Maubeuge and the Sambre gave
some protection to the British right, but the Sambre was only of use
in front if the Meuse was held by the French on the right and Von
Kluck could not outflank on the left. Neither of these conditions was
fulfilled: Von Kluck had seized Tournai and captured the whole of the
French Territorial brigade which attempted to defend it, while the
Meuse had been forced and the three French armies were in full
retreat. A battle on the Maubeuge-Bry line would invite an
encirclement from which the British had barely escaped at Mons, and
the retreat was reluctantly continued to Le Cateau. Marching, the
First Army Corps along the east of the Forest of Mormal and the Second
along the west, our troops reached at nightfall on the 25th a line
running from Maroilles through Landrecies and Le Cateau to
Serainvilliers near Cambrai; but they had little rest. About 10 p.m.,
amid rain and darkness, the Germans got into Landrecies. In the fierce
hand-to-hand struggle which ensued, the individual resourcefulness of
our men gave them the advantage, and the Germans were driven out by
detachments of the Grenadier, Coldstream, and 1st Irish Guards. They
were simultaneously repulsed at Maroilles with some French assistance;
but daybreak saw a third and more powerful attack delivered on Le
Cateau. Sir John French had told Smith-Dorrien the night before that
he was risking a second Sedan by a stand. But Smith-Dorrien thought he
had no option. For eight hours on the 26th his men, reinforced by
Snow's Division, but outnumbered in guns by nearly four to one, held
their own, until another envelopment was threatened by Von Kluck.
Fortunately the struggle had apparently exhausted the Germans;
Sordet's cavalry had ridden across Smith-Dorrien's front and protected
his left from envelopment; and the remnants of the three divisions
were able to withdraw. The retreat was harrowing enough, and the 1st
Gordons, missing their way in the dark, fell into the hands of the
Germans and were all killed, wounded, or taken prisoners. But Le
Cateau had taken the sting out of the German pursuit, and touch was at
last regained with French forces to the east, with a newly-formed
corps under D'Amade to the west, and with a Sixth French army which
Maunoury was collecting on the Somme. On the evening of Friday the
28th Smith-Dorrien reached the Oise between Chauny and Noyon and Haig
at La Fère. The First Army Corps had marched by Guise; the loss of a
detachment of Munsters by misadventure early on the 27th was redeemed
by the defeat on the 28th of two German columns by two brigades of
Allenby's cavalry led by Gough and Chetwode. That night the
Expeditionary Force had its first real sleep since Sunday, and next
day there were no marching orders.

The British Army had saved itself and a good deal else by its courage,
skill, and, above all, its endurance. But there was much that was lost
in men, material, and ground. The fortification of the French frontier
south and west of Mons was obsolete, and the country had been denuded
of troops save a few Territorials in the process of mobilization.
Maubeuge was the only fortress that made a stand, and Uhlans swept
across Belgium as far as the Lys and down upon Lille and Arras with
the object of cutting communications between the British Army and its
bases at Boulogne and Dieppe. Some resistance was offered at Bapaume,
where the arrival of a British detachment delayed the German advance
until Amiens had been evacuated and the rolling stock removed. But the
threat was sufficiently serious to induce Sir John French to move his
base as far south as St. Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, and the
Germans could, had they been so minded, have occupied the Channel
ports as far as the Seine. But they were not calculating on a long war
or a serious contest with British forces for the control of Flanders,
and their object was to destroy the French armies and dictate a peace
at Paris before the autumn leaves began to fall.

They seemed to be making excellent progress towards that end. Sir J.
French, indeed, took a sombre view of our losses at Le Cateau, and
apparently it needed a visitation from Lord Kitchener on 1st September
to retain the British Army in co-operation with the French. The fall
of Namur, the battles of Charleroi and Mons, and the defeat of the
French on the Semois were followed by the rout of Ruffey's and
Langle's armies on the Meuse. They stretched north-westwards from
Montmédy by way of Sedan and Mezières down the Meuse towards Dinant
and Namur. But their left flank had been turned by Von Hausen's
victory and the fall of Namur; and on the 27th Von Hausen, wheeling to
his left, rolled up the French left wing while the Duke of Württemberg
and the Crown Prince attacked all along the front. Ruffey had to seek
safety in the Argonne, while Langle's army made for Rethel on the
Aisne. On the 28th Longwy, the last French fortress north of Verdun,
capitulated after a stout resistance. The defence of the frontier had
collapsed, and the hopes that were entertained of resistance along the
upper Aisne and thence by Laon and La Fère towards St. Quentin, proved
delusive. Lanrezac's Fifth army turned on the 29th between Vervins and
Ribemont, and near Guise inflicted on the Germans the most serious
check to their advance. This reaction was not helped by the British
retreat on Lanrezac's left, and its principal value was to protect
that withdrawal. Nor was it better supported on the right. The Third
and Fourth French armies were too severely hustled in their retreat to
make a stand, and the reserves were still far away to the south. On
the 28th-29th the Aisne was forced at Rethel, and Reims and Chalons
were abandoned to the enemy; and La Fère and Laon followed on the
30th.

The British fell back from the Aisne and the Oise through the forests
of Villers-Cotterets and Compiègne towards the Marne. At Néry on 1
September a battery of Royal Horse Artillery was almost wiped out, and
the guns were only saved by a gallant cavalry charge of the 1st
Brigade; and on the same day a hard rearguard defence had to be fought
by the 4th Guards Brigade. On the 3rd they reached the Marne, but it
too was abandoned farther east without resistance, and on the 5th the
Expeditionary Force was concentrated behind the Grand Morin. A
retreat, upon the successful conduct of which depended the existence
of the Force, the security of France, and the cause of the Entente,
had been successfully accomplished by the skill of its commanders and
still more by the fortitude and unquenchable spirit of the men. The
French, too, showed a steadiness in misfortune for which their enemies
had not looked; their reverses had been more severe, and their
preparation less complete than our own, and a high morale was required
for armies to react against such a run of ill-success with the
effectiveness that was presently displayed upon the Marne.

A public on both sides of the Channel which was unfamiliar with the
elements of military science and history, looked, as soon as it was
allowed to learn the facts about the German advance, for the
investment of Paris and regarded the French capital as the objective
of the German invasion. But Napoleon's maxim that fortresses are
captured on the field of battle was even truer in 1914 than it was a
century earlier; for only the dispersal of the enemy enables an army
to bring up the heavy artillery needed to batter down modern
fortifications, and the great war saw no sieges worth the name
because, the armies being once driven off, no forts could stand
prolonged bombardment by the artillery which followed in the victor's
train. The cities that suffered were not isolated units, they were
merely knotty points in the lines of battle, and there could be no
siege of Paris so long as Joffre's armies kept in line along the Marne
or anywhere in contact with the capital. There was therefore no change
of plan and no mystery when Von Kluck's right veered in the direction
of its advance from south-west to south and then south-east. It was
both avoiding an obstacle and pursuing its original design of
outflanking the Entente's left. Not that Paris was without its
strategic value. It and the line of the Seine impeded the
encirclement, offered a nucleus of resistance, and provided a screen
behind which could be organized a blow against the right flank of the
deflected German march. Still, there was no certainty that Joffre
could hold the Marne, and the French Government took the somewhat
alarming precaution of removing to Bordeaux.

The presence of the British on the French left, the spectacular threat
to Paris, and the comparative proximity of these operations to our own
shores have possibly led to too great an emphasis being placed upon
Von Kluck's attempt to outflank the left, or at least to too little
weight being attached to the German effort to turn the right in
Lorraine. The Crown Prince was in front of Verdun and the Kaiser
himself went to stimulate the Bavarians at Lunéville and Nancy, and it
was not the imperial habit to bestow the light of the imperial
countenance upon scenes of secondary importance. Lunéville had been
occupied on the 22nd after the French failure on the Saar, and on the
23rd fighting began for the Grand Couronné de Nancy defended by
Castelnau. The line of battle stretched from St. Dié to
Pont-á-Mousson; but although the fiercest attack was still to come,
the German thrust had been decisively checked at Mirecourt before
Joffre determined to stand on the Marne. At last the French seemed to
have a security on their right flank, the lack of which had proved
fatal at Charleroi and on the Meuse. Paris on the one wing and Nancy
on the other forbade the threat of encirclement which had hitherto
compelled retreat; and the French armies were also at last in touch
with their reserves.

There were other elements in the situation to encourage resistance The
momentum of the German rush was somewhat spent in its rapidity, and
the Germans were to illustrate the defect in their own maxim that the
essence of war is violence; for violence is not the same as force and
often wastes it. Moreover, the Russian invasion of East Prussia, if it
did not actually compel the transference of divisions from France to
the Eastern front, diverted thither reserves which might otherwise
have appeared on the Marne or released the troops detained until 7
September by the siege of Maubeuge. Assuredly Joffre seized the right
moment when on the 4th he decided to strike his blow. Two new armies
of reserves had come into line, Foch's Ninth and Maunoury's Sixth; and
two old armies had new commanders, the Third with Sarrail instead of
Ruffey and the Fifth with Franchet d'Esperey instead of Lanrezac. In
the east Castelnau and Sarrail stood almost back to back along the
eastern and western heights of the Meuse above Verdun. On Sarrail's
left was Langle's Fourth army behind Vitry, and the line was continued
westwards by Foch behind Sezanne and the marshes of St. Gond. Next
came D'Esperey's Fifth at La Ferté-Gaucher, and cavalry linked his
left with the British guarded by the Crecy forest. Thence
north-westward stretched across the Paris front the new Sixth army of
Maunoury.

As early as 31 August Von Kluck had turned south-east at a right angle
to his south-western march from Brussels to Amiens; but he had not
thereby replaced his enveloping design by a stroke at Joffre's centre.
For he thought he had disposed of the British at Le Cateau and of
Maunoury on the Somme, and that D'Esperey's Fifth had thus become the
flank of Joffre's forces. He was merely curving his claws to grip, and
by the night of the 5th he had crossed the Marne, the Petit Morin, and
the Grand Morin, and his patrols had reached the Seine. It was a brief
and solitary glimpse of the river on which stood the capital of
France. The battle began, like that of Mons, on a Sunday, the 6th of
September reached its climax on the 9th, and was over by the 12th, The
fighting extended in a curved line from Meaux, which is almost a
suburb of Paris, to Lunéville, which is almost on the German frontier;
and Joffre hoped that this line was too strong to be broken, and could
be gradually drawn tighter until the head of the German invasion was
squeezed out of the cul-de-sac into which, in the German anxiety for a
prompt decision, it had been thrust. The German object, of course,
was, as soon as Von Kluck discovered that Maunoury's new and the
British returning armies forbade the enveloping plan, to break the
line where it bent the most, that is, towards the south-east, and the
weight of attack was thrown against Foch and Langle in Champagne. The
business of those two generals was to stand fast while the right flank
of the Germans was exposed to the counter-offensive of Maunoury and
the British.

Von Kluck had committed the error of underrating his foes, and
assuming that they had been broken beyond the chance of reaction; for
to march across the front of an army that is still able to strike is
inviting disaster, and Joffre had at last been able to shift his
weight from east to west to cope with Von Kluck's unexpected attack
through Belgium. Maunoury's army debouched from Meaux and began
fighting its way to the Ourcq, a little river which runs southwards
into the Marne at Lizy, while the British emerged from the Crecy
forest and drove the Germans back to the Grand Morin. D'Esperey made
headway against the bulk of Von Kluck's army between La Ferté-Gaucher
and Esternay, while Foch held his own against Von Buelow and Von
Hausen's right, and Langle against the Duke of Württemberg. Sarrail's
Third army had, however, to give a little ground along the Meuse. The
morrow's tale was similar: most progress was made by the British, who
drove the Germans across the Grand Morin at Coulommiers, and thus
enabled D'Esperey to do the like with Von Kluck's centre. On the 8th,
however, Maunoury was hard pressed by Von Kluck's desperate efforts to
deal with this sudden danger; but reinforcements poured out from
Paris, the British gained the Petit Morin from Trilport to La
Trétoire, while D'Esperey carried victory farther east and captured
Montmirail. By 11 a.m. on the 9th Von Kluck's army was ordered to
retreat, thus exposing Von Buelow's right, and giving Foch his
opportunity for the decisive stroke of the battle.

It consisted of two blows, right and left, and both came off late on
the 9th. Maunoury's counter-attack on the left had compelled the
Germans to weaken their centre. Not only was Von Buelow's right
exposed, but a gap had been left between his left and Von Hausen's
right, possibly for troops which were detained at Maubeuge or had been
diverted to East Prussia. Nor was this all, for his centre was bogged
in the famous marshes of St. Gond. Foch struck hard at Von Buelow's
centre, right, and left, and by the morning of the 10th he had smashed
the keystone of the German arch. Meanwhile, on the 9th Maunoury had
cleared the Germans from the Ourcq, the British had crossed the Marne
at Chângis, and reached it at Château-Thierry, and D'Esperey farther
east. Von Kluck now received considerable reinforcements which Von
Buelow needed more, and the latter's rapid retreat made even
reinforcements useless for holding the Ourcq. It was equally fatal to
success against Langle and Sarrail, and on the 10th the German retreat
became general. By the end of the week the Germans were back on a line
running nearly due east from a point on the Oise behind Compiègne to
the Aisne, along it to Berry-au-Bac, and thence across Champagne and
the Argonne to Verdun. They had failed in Lorraine as well, where the
climax of their attack was from the 6th to the 9th. Castelnau then
took the offensive, and by the 12th had driven the Bavarians from
before Nancy beyond the Meurthe, and out of Lunéville and St. Dié.

The German right had fallen back thirty-five miles and the centre
nearly fifty; but the retreat was not a rout, and the losses in guns
and prisoners were meagre. The first battle of the Marne was important
by reason of what it prevented the Germans from doing, rather than by
reason of what the Allies achieved, and they had to wait nearly four
years for that precipitate evacuation of France which it was hoped
would follow upon the German repulse from the Marne in September 1914.
Nevertheless it was one of the decisive battles and turning-points of
the war. The German surprise, so long and so carefully prepared, had
failed, and the knockout blow had been parried. The Allied victory had
not decided how the war would end, but it had decided that the war
would be long--a test of endurance rather than of generalship, a
struggle of peoples and a conflict of principles rather than duel
between professional armies. There would be time for peaceful and even
unarmed nations to gird themselves in defence; and the cause of
democracy would not go down because military autocrats had thought to
dispose of France before her allies could effectively intervene.


CHAPTER III

RUSSIA MOVES

The first month of the war in the West had coincided more nearly with
German plans than with Entente hopes, but both Germany and the Western
Allies agreed in miscalculating Russia. The great Moltke had remarked
early in his career that Russia had a habit of appearing too late on
the field and then coming too strong. The war was to prove that to be
a fault of democracy rather than of autocrats, and Russia intervened
with an unexpected promptitude which was to be followed in time by an
equally unexpected collapse. The forecasting of the course of wars is
commonly left to military experts, and military experts commonly err
through ignoring the moral and political factors which determine the
weight and distribution of military forces. The soldier, so far as he
looks behind armies at all, only looks to the numbers from which those
armies may be recruited, and pays scant regard to the political,
moral, social, and economic conditions which may make havoc of armies,
evoke them where they do not exist, or transfer them to unforeseen
scales in the military balance. Russia appeared to the strategist as a
vast reservoir of food for powder which would take time to mobilize,
but prove almost irresistible if it were given time. Both these
calculations proved fallacious, and still less was it foreseen that
the reservoir would revolt. The first misjudgment deranged the German
plans, the second those of the Allies, while the third upset the minds
of the world.

The outbreak of war found Russia with a peace-strength of over a
million men, a war-strength of four millions, and reserves which were
limited not by her population but by her capacity for transport,
organization, and production of munitions. Her Prussian frontiers were
guarded by no natural defences, but neither were Prussia's. Nature, it
has been said, did not foresee Prussia; Prussia is the work of men's
hands. Nor had Nature foreseen Russia, and men's hands had not made up
the deficiency. Mechanical means had remedied the natural defects of
Prussia's frontier, but not those of the Russian; and Russia's defence
consisted mainly in distance, mud, and lack of communications. The
value of these varied, of course, with the seasons, and the
motor-transport, which atoned to some extent for the lack of railways,
told in favour of German science and industry, and against the
backward Russians. Apart from the absence of natural defences, the
Russian frontier had been artificially drawn so as to make her Polish
province an indefensible salient, though properly organized it would
have been an almost intolerable threat alike to East Prussia and to
Austrian Galicia. But for her preoccupation in the West, Germany could
have conquered Poland in a fortnight, and Russian plans, indeed,
contemplated a withdrawal as far as the line of Brest-Litovsk. As it
was, the German offensive in Belgium and France left the defence of
Prussia to the chances of an Austrian offensive against Lublin, a
containing army of some 200,000 first-line and 300,000 second-line
troops, and the delays in Russian mobilization.

Two of these proved to be broken reeds. Russian troops were almost as
prompt in invading East Prussia as German troops in crossing the
frontiers of France and Belgium, and by the end of the first week in
August a flight to Berlin had begun. The shortest way from the Russian
frontier to Berlin was by Posen, and it lay through a country peopled
with Poles who were bitterly hostile to their German masters. But it
was impossible to exploit these advantages at the expense of deepening
the Polish salient with its already too narrow base, and the flanks in
East Prussia and Galicia had first to be cleared. Under the supreme
command of the Grand Duke Nicholas, who in spite of his rank was a
competent professional soldier, and the more immediate direction of
Rennenkampf, one of the few Russian officers to emerge with enchanced
reputation from the Japanese War, the Russians proceed to concentrate
on East Prussia (see Map). On the east Gumbinnen was captured after a
battle on the 20th, and the important junction of Insterburg occupied
by Rennenkampf, while on the south Samsonov on the 21st turned the
German right, threatened Allenstein and drove the fugitives, as
Rennenkampf had done, into the lines of Königsberg. East Prussia lay
at Russia's feet, and something like a panic alarmed Berlin. The
Teutonic cause was faring even worse in Galicia and Poland. Austria
had a million troops in Galicia, but her offensive under Dankl towards
Lublin only produced a strategic Russia retirement, while Ruszky and
Brussilov overran the eastern borders and menaced Lemberg.

Fortunately for the Germans their own right hand proved a stronger
defence. The incompetent General von François, who had been driven
into Königsberg, was superseded by Hindenburg, a retired veteran of
nearly seventy, whose military career had made so slight an impression
on the German mind that his name was not even included in the German
"Who's Who." Nevertheless he had commanded corps on the Prussian
frontier, and even after his retirement made the study of its defence
his hobby. He knew every yard of the intricate mixture of land and
water which made up the district of the Masurian Lakes, and had,
unfortunately for Russia, defeated a German financial scheme for
draining the country and turning it into land over which an invader
could safely march. Within five days of Samsonov's victory,
Hindenburg, taking advantage of the magnificent system of German
strategic railways, had collected some 150,000 men from the fortresses
on the Vistula and concentrated them on a strong position stretching
from near Allenstein south-west towards Soldau, his left resting on
the railway from Eylau to Insterburg and his right on that from Eylau
to Warsaw. In front of him were marshes with the ways through which he
was, but Samsonov was not, familiar; and the railways enabled him to
threaten either of the enemy's flanks.

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