The army of General von Hausen had been compelled to fight its way across the Meuse in the face of fierce opposition. At Charleville, the centre of this great combat, its losses, too, were severe. Again, at Rethel, on the line of the Aisne, there was a furious six days' battle.
The army of Duke Albert of Wurtemberg had twice been driven back over the Meuse into Belgian Luxemburg.
The army of the Crown Prince of Germany, notwithstanding its initial success at Château Malins, had been defeated at Spincourt.
The army of the Crown Prince of Bavaria had been defeated with heavy loss at Luneville.
Divisions of the German army operating in Alsace had been worsted, first at Altkirch, and again at Mulhausen.
Taking these events together, the fact stands out that the first aim in the strategy of General Joffre was, as far as possible, to defeat the German armies in detail, and thus to hinder and delay their co-operation. He was enabled to carry out that object because the French mobilisation had been completed without disturbance.
These two facts—completion of the French mobilisation and the throwing back of the German plan by the defeat of the several armies in detail—are facts of the first importance.
The aggregate losses sustained by the Germans were already huge. If, up to September 3, we put the total wastage of war from the outset at 500,000, remembering that the fatigues of a campaign conducted in a hurry mean a wastage from exhaustion equal at least to the losses in action, we shall, great as such a total may appear, still be within the truth.
But more serious even than the losses was the dislocation of the plan. The army of the Crown Prince of Germany, which was to have advanced by rapid marches through the defiles of the Argonne, to have invested Verdun, and to have taken the fortified frontier in the rear, found itself unable to effect that object. It was held up in the hills. That meant that the armies of the Crown Prince of Bavaria and the army of General von Heeringen were kept out of the main scheme of operations.
Consider what this meant. It meant that the freedom of movement of the whole chain of armies was for the time being gone. It meant further that, so long as that state of things continued, the primary condition on which the whole German scheme depended—a superiority of military strength—could not be realised. Not only were the German armies no longer, in a military sense, homogeneous, but a considerable part of the force, being on the wrong side of the fortified frontier, could not be brought to bear, and another considerable part of the force, the army of the Crown Prince of Germany, had fallen into an entanglement. Were the armies of von Kluck, von Bülow, von Hausen, and Duke Albert, the latter already badly mauled, sufficient to carry out the scheme laid down? Quite obviously not.