A General Sketch of the European War Part 14

The whole process may be compared to the flood of a very rapid tide, which, after the first few hours, is seen to relax its speed considerably, and to promise in the immediate future an ebb.

In order to appreciate how this was, let us next consider what the larger French forces to the east of the British had been doing. There are no details available, very few published records, and it will not be possible until an official history of the war appears to give more than the most general sketch of the French movements in this retreat; but the largest lines are sufficient for our judgment of the result.

It will be remembered that what I have called "the operative corner"

of the Allied army had stood in the angle between the Sambre and the Meuse. It had consisted in the British contingent upon the left, or west, in front of Mons; the 5th French Army, composed of three army corps, under Lanrezac, to the east of it, along the Sambre, past Charleroi; and the 4th French Army, also of three army corps, under Langle, along the Middle Meuse, being in general disposition what we have upon the accompanying sketch. It had been attacked upon Sat.u.r.day, the 22nd August, by seventeen German army corps--that is, by forces double its own. On that same day Namur, at the corner, had fallen into complete possession of the Germans, the French retreat had begun, and on the following day the English force had, after the regrettable delay of half a day, also begun its retirement.

We have seen that the British retirement (following the dotted lines upon Sketch 60) had reached, upon the Friday night, the position from Noyon to La Fere, marked also in dots upon the sketch.

What had happened meanwhile to their French colleagues upon the east?

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 60.]

The first thing to note is that the fortress of Maubeuge, with its garrison of reserve and second line men, had, of course, been at once invested by the Germans when the British and French line had fallen behind it and left it isolated. The imperfection of this fortress I have already described, and the causes of that imperfection. Maubeuge commanded the great railway line leading from Belgium to Paris, which is the main avenue of supply for an invasion or for a retreat, running north-east to south-west on the Belgian frontier upon the capital.

The 5th French Army retired parallel to the British along the belt marked in Sketch Map 60 by diagonal lines. At first, as its retirement had begun earlier, it was behind, or to the south of, the British, who were thus left almost unsupported. It lay, for instance, on Monday, the 24th, much along the position 1, at which moment the British Army was lying along the position 2. That was the day on which the Germans attempted to drive the British into Maubeuge.

But during the succeeding two days the French 5th Army (to which the five corps, including the Prussian Guard, under Buelow, were opposed) held the enemy fairly well. They were losing, of course, heavily in stragglers, in abandoned wounded, and in guns; but their retreat was sufficiently strongly organized to keep this section of the line well bent up northwards, and just before the British halted for their first breathing s.p.a.ce along the line La Fere and Noyon, the French 5th Army attempted, and succeeded in, a sharp local attack against the superior forces that were pursuing them. This local attack was undertaken from about the position marked 3 on Sketch 60, and was directed against Guise. It was undertaken by the 1st and 3rd French Corps, under General Maunoury. He, acting under Lanrezac, gave such a blow to the Prussian Guard that he here bent the Prussian line right in.

Meanwhile the 4th French Army, which had also been retiring rapidly parallel to the 5th French Army, lay in line with it to the east along that continuation of 3 which I have marked with a 4 upon the sketch.

Farther east the French armies, linking up the operative corner with the Alsace-Lorraine frontier, had also been driven back from the Upper Meuse, and upon Friday, the 28th of August, when the British halt had come between La Fere and Noyon (a line largely protected by the Oise), the whole disposition of the Allied forces between the neighbourhood of Verdun and Noyon was much what is laid down in the accompanying sketch. At A were the British; at B the successful counter-offensive of the French 5th Army had checked and bent back the Prussian centre under von Buelow; at C, the last section of what had been the old operative corner, the army under Langle was thrust back to the position here shown, and pressed there by the Wurtembergers and the Saxons opposed to it. Meanwhile further French forces, D and E, had also been driven back from the Upper Meuse, and were retiring with Verdun as a pivot, leaving isolated the little frontier town of Longwy. This was not seriously fortified, had held out with only infantry work and small pieces, and had not been thought worthy of attack by a siege train. It surrendered to the Crown Prince upon Friday, 28th August.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 61.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 62.]

On that date, then, the two opposing lines might be compared, the one to a great encircling arm AA, the elbow of which was bent at Guise, the other to a power BB which had struck into the hollow of the elbow, and might expect, with further success, to bend the arm so much more at that point as to embarra.s.s its general sweep.

Those who saw the position as a whole on this Friday, the 28th of August, wondered whether or not the French Commander-in-chief would order the continuation of the successful local attack at Guise, and so attempt to break the whole German line. He did not give this order, and his reasons for retiring in the face of such an opportunity may be briefly stated thus:--

1. The French forces in line from Verdun to La Fere, and continued by the British contingent to the neighbourhood of Noyon, were still gravely inferior to the German forces opposed to them. Even, therefore, if the French success at Guise had been pushed farther, and had actually broken the German line, either half of the French line upon either side of the forward angle would have been heavily outnumbered by the two limbs of the enemy opposed to each, and that enemy might perfectly well have defeated, though separated, each portion of the force opposed to it.

2. To the west, at the position FF on Sketch 62, were acting large bodies of the enemy, which had swept, almost without meeting resistance, through Arras to Amiens. Against that advance there was nothing but small garrisons of French Territorials, which were brushed aside without difficulty.

Now these bodies, though they were mainly of cavalry which were operating thus to the west, had already cut the main line of communications from Boulogne, upon which the British had hitherto depended, and were close enough to the Allied left flank to threaten it with envelopment, or, rather, to come up in aid of von Kluck at A, and make certain what he already could regard as probable--his power to get round the British, and turn the whole left of the Allied line.

3. More important even than these two first conclusive considerations was the fact that the French Commander-in-chief, had he proposed to follow up this success of his subordinate at Guise, would have had to change the whole of his general plan, and to waste, or at best to delay, the action of his chief factor in that plan. This chief factor was the great manoeuvring ma.s.s behind the French line which had not yet come into play, and the advent of which, at a chosen moment, was the very soul of the French strategy.

It is so essential to the comprehension of the campaign to seize this last point that, at the risk of repet.i.tion, I will restate for the reader the main elements of that strategy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 63.]

I have called it in the earlier pages of this book "the open strategic square," and I have shown how this theoretical arrangement was in practice complicated and modified so that it came to mean, under the existing circ.u.mstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger ma.s.ses, "the ma.s.s of manoeuvre," were to come up in aid and a.s.sume the general counter-offensive when the operative corner should have drawn the enemy down to that position in which such a general counter-offensive would be most efficacious.

To concentrate the great ma.s.s of manoeuvre was a business of some days, and having ordered its concentration in one district, it would be impossible to change the plan at a moment's notice. The district into which a great part of this ma.s.s of manoeuvre had been concentrated--or, rather, was in course of concentration at this moment, the 28th August--was the district behind and in the neighbourhood of Paris. It lay far from the scene of operation at Guise. It was intended to come into play only when the general retreat should have reached a line stretching from Verdun to the neighbourhood of Paris itself. To have pursued the success at Guise, therefore, would have been to waste all this great concentration of the ma.s.s of manoeuvre which lay some days behind the existing line, and in particular to waste the large body which was being gathered behind and in the neighbourhood of Paris.

With these three main considerations in mind, and in particular the third, which was far the most important, General Joffre determined to give up the advantage obtained at Guise, to order the two successful army corps under Maunoury, who had knocked the Prussian Guard at that point, to retire, and to continue the general retreat until the Allied line should be evenly stretched from Paris to Verdun. The whole situation may be put in a diagram as follows: You have the Allied line in an angle, ABC. You have opposed to it the much larger German forces in a corresponding angle, DEF. Farther east you have a continuation of the French line, more or less immovable, on the fortified frontier of Alsace-Lorraine at M, opposed by a greater immovable German force at N. At P you have coming up as far as Amiens large German bodies operating in the west, and at Q a small newly-formed French body, the 6th French Army, supporting the exposed flank of the British contingent at A, near Noyon. Meanwhile you have directed towards S, behind Paris, and coming up at sundry other points, a concentration of the ma.s.s of manoeuvre.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 64.]

It is evident that if the French offensive at B which has successfully pushed in the German elbow at E round Guise is still sent forward, and even succeeds in breaking the German line at E, "the elbow," the two limbs into which the Germans will be divided, DE and EF, are each superior in number to the forces opposed to them, and that DE in particular, with the help of P, may very probably turn AB and its new small supporter at Q, roll it up, and begin a decisive victory, while the other large German force, EF, may press back or pierce the smaller opposed French force, BC.

Meanwhile you would not only be risking this peril, but you would also be wasting your great ma.s.s of manoeuvre, SS, which is still in process of concentration, most of it behind Paris, and which could not possibly come into play in useful time at E.

It is far better to pursue the original plan to continue the retreat as far as the dotted line from Paris to Verdun, where you will have the whole German force at its farthest limit of effort and corresponding exhaustion, and where you will have, after the salutary delay of the few intervening days, your large ma.s.s of manoeuvre, SS, close by to Paris and ready to strike.

From such a diagram we see the wisdom of the decision that was taken to continue the retirement, and the fruits which that decision was to bear.

The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the single object of victory in foreign war.

It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is a.s.sured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise, the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient, tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and salutary exception to the rule--their failure against Caesar; from which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition--still vigorous.

The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel, the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Chalons, while the British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day, 2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its end.

The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to the German commanders a further French defeat. Those commanders knew their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the Allied forces--a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fort.i.tude which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.

Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great effort in the West was already achieved.

They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and had been marked by a bewildering series of incessant victories. They were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the insufficient line opposed to them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 65.]

They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th French Army was forced back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or west of the Allies--the German right--stood the main army of von Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne, the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the first days of that bombardment from the new German siege train which had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chapter in the Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of Paris.

With this position, of what it meant in immediate alternatives to the enemy, I will deal a few pages on at the close of this book, when I will also consider in one conspectus on the map the whole of that ten days' sweep down from the north, and summarize its effect upon the Allied att.i.tude towards the next phase of the war.

But to understand a campaign, one must seize not only the topographical positions of troops, nor only their number: one must also gauge the temper of their commanders and of the political opinion at home behind them, for upon this moral factor everything ultimately depends. The men that fight are living men, and the motive power is the soul.

It is, therefore, necessary for the reader to appreciate at this terminal date, September 2-4, the moral strength of the enemy, and to comprehend in what mood of confidence the Germans now lay. With this object we must add to the story of the advance on Paris the subsidiary events which had accompanied that great sweep into the West. We must turn to the "holding up of Russia" upon the East by the Austrian forces, and see how the partial failure of this effort (news of which was just reaching the Western armies) was quite eclipsed by the splendid tidings of Tannenberg. We must see with German eyes the secondary but brilliant victory in front of Metz; we must stand in their shoes to feel as they did the clearing of Alsace, and to comprehend with what contempt they must have watched the false picture of the war which the governments and the press of the Allies, particularly in Britain, presented to public opinion in their doomed territories; and we must, in general, grasp the now apocalyptic temper of the nervous, over-strained industrialized population which is the tissue of modern Germany.

Not until we have a good general aspect of that mood can we understand either the war at this turning-point in its fortunes, or the future developments which will be traced in the succeeding volumes of this series.

I will, therefore, now turn to the three main elements productive of that mood in their historical order: the Battle of Metz, the Austrian operations against Russia, and, lastly, the great victory of Tannenberg in East Prussia, before concluding this volume with a summary of the whole situation in those first days of September, just before the tide turned.

THE BATTLE OF METZ.

The Battle of Metz, though quite subsidiary to the general operations of the war, and upon a scale which later operations have dwarfed, will be mentioned with special emphasis in any just account of the great war on account of its moral significance.

It took place before the main shock of the armies; it had no decisive effect upon the future of the campaign; but it was of the very highest weight, informing the German mind, and leading it into that att.i.tude of violent exaltation on which I shall later insist in these pages, and which largely determined all the first months of the war, with their enormous consequences for the future. For the action in front of Metz was the first pitched battle fought in Western Europe during our generation, and to an unexpected degree it fulfilled in its narrow area all the dreams upon which military Germany had been nourished for forty years. It thrilled the whole nation with the news, at the very outset of hostilities, of a sharp and glorious victory; it seemed a presage of far more to come. The Battle of Metz was the limited foundation upon which was rapidly erected that triumphant mood that lasted long after the tide had turned, and that matured, when bad blundering had lost the victory in the West, into the unsoldierly, muddled hope that could fail to win, and yet somehow not lose, a campaign.

We have seen that the disposition of the French armies at the moment when the shock was being delivered through Belgium involved along the frontiers of Alsace-Lorraine the presence of considerable forces.

These, once the operative corner had taken the shock, formed part of the ma.s.s of manoeuvre, and were destined in large part to swing up in aid of the men retreating from the Sambre.

But in the very first days of the war, before the main blow had fallen, and when the French General Staff were still in doubt as to precisely where the blow _would_ fall, considerable bodies had been operating in Alsace and over the Lorraine frontier. The whole range of the Vosges was carried in the second week after the British declaration of war--that is, between 10th August and 15th August.

Mulhouse was occupied; upon Monday, the 17th of August, Saarburg, the most important railway junction between Stra.s.sburg and Metz, was in French hands. Up to that date, though such comparatively small forces were involved, the French had possessed a very decisive numerical superiority. It was not destined to last, for there was moving down from the north the now mobilized strength of Germany in this region; and a blow struck against the French left, with no less than four army corps, was speedily to decide the issue upon this subsidiary front.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch 66.]