The Battle of the Marne

by G. H. Perris

Every part of the French line had contributed to this result, every other army had been cut or kept down to serve the major opportunity. And, if it stood relatively immobile, no less heroism and resource were shown on the eastern than on the western wing of the Allied crescent. Sarrail and de Langle were able to keep a rectangular disposition like that of Maunoury and the B.E.F., forcing the Crown Prince to fight on a double front; but they had not even a numerical equality of force with which to exploit it. The 4th Army, in holding foot by foot the Ornain-Saulx valley from Vitry to Sermaize, and the 3rd in its defence of the long salient of the Meuse, were also weighed upon by this peculiar anxiety: a comparatively small force might pierce their frail river guard, or the wall of the Lorraine armies might collapse beside them. They were helped to success by three errors of omission on the part of the German armies concerned: (1) Verdun was not directly attacked, the Crown Prince being confident that it would fall automatically while his cavalry were reaching Dijon; (2) the attempt to force the Meuse at Troyon was feeble and tardy; (3) the thinly-covered gap on Langle’s left was not discovered until the 21st Corps had been brought up. All along the line, the fighting was of a sustained violence. The 15th Corps arrived from Lorraine on September 8 just in time to save the junction of the 3rd and 4th Armies. It was, however, not till noon on the 11th that the Duke of Würtemberg abandoned Vitry; and only on the night of the 12th did the Prince Imperial order a retreat which definitely relieved Verdun, and reopened the Châlons road and railway.

In resting his plan upon a defence of the eastern pivot of the retreat and the recoil, Joffre was accepting an accomplished fact. The great attack upon the Couronné of Nancy began on the evening of September 4, thirty-six hours before the Allied offensive. It may be supposed, therefore, that the German Staff had decided to get the Bavarian Army into a position in which it could co-operate effectively with the Imperial Crown Prince when he came up level on the west. Heeringen’s push from the St. Dié region toward Epinal, and the attack on the Mortagne, were probably intended to hide this design, and to pin down Dubail’s forces. The promptitude with which Heeringen was sent off to the Aisne, on the night of September 6, that is, as soon as the danger of Kluck’s position was realised, is significant. In itself, the presence of the Kaiser during the Bavarian attack on the Grand Couronné proves nothing. His ceremonial entry into Nancy would have grievously hurt French pride; but the sacrifice of the city had always been contemplated, Toul being the real redoubt of the Moselle defences. The prize was to be larger; the prestige of three royal personages was to be satisfied. The Crown Princes of Prussia and Bavaria, ingeniously linked, had been so directed that in the crisis they had the whole Verdun–Toul system between them, and apparently at their mercy. The assault of the Amezule defile and Mount Amance was reciprocal to the adventure which Sarrail arrested 50 miles farther west.

For five days and nights the battle raged about the entrenched crescent of the Nancy hills, with fiery wings outspread to Gerbéviller on the south-east, and Rozières on the north-west. No more dreadful struggle can be recorded. The German effort ceased on the night of September 9; and on the 11th the general withdrawal to the old frontier began. Like Foch, Langle, and Sarrail, Castlenau had won through by the narrowest of margins; but his, pre-eminently, was a victory of foresight and preparation. With all their power of heavy artillery (and here the resources of Metz and Strasbourg were at hand), it is remarkable that the German Staff never attempted to repeat in Lorraine the coup of Liège. As the French respected Metz, they respected Verdun; and the manœuvre of the double approach to Toul, from east and west, proves their fears. These were, as we now know, well justified. “It is certain,” says Freytag-Loringhoven, “that the old-fashioned fortresses are worthless, and, moreover, that the earlier notion, handed down from the Middle Ages, that positions have to be secured by means of fortresses, must be discarded.... But it will not be possible to dispense with certain previously prepared fortified points at places where only defensive tactics can be employed. The fortifications of the French eastern frontier, above all Verdun and the Moselle defences, have demonstrated how valuable these may be.... It is a question of constructing not a continuous system of fortifications, but a succession of central points of defence, and this not in the shape of fortified towns, but of entrenchment of important areas” (pp. 64–6). And again: “The intention was to effect an envelopment from two sides. The envelopment by the left wing was, however, brought to a standstill before the fortifications of the French eastern frontier, which, in view of the prompt successes in Belgium, it had been hoped to overcome.... The defensive tactics of the chiefs of the French Army were rendered very much easier by the support these fortifications gave to their wing, as well as by the possibility of effecting rapid transfers of troops afforded by a very convenient network of railways, and a very large number of motor-wagons upon good roads (pp. 79–80)..... The war has proved that the assertion often made in time of peace, that the spade digs the grave of the offensive, is not correct” (p. [97]).

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One day, toward the end of the battle, I came upon a ring of peasants digging a pit for the carcasses of two horses that lay near by. They had already buried fourteen others, but seemed happy at their gruesome task—just such sententious fellows as the master took for his models in a famous scene. One of them guided me uphill to a small chalk-pit, at the bottom of which a mound of fresh earth, surmounted by a couple of sticks tied crosswise with string, marked the grave of two English lads unnamed. A thicket shaded the hollow; but all around the sunshine played over rolling stubble-fields. Ere the grave-diggers had finished, a threshing-machine was working at the farm across the highway. Some men were ploughing the upper ridge of the battlefield; and, as I left, a procession of high-prowed carts, full of women and children sitting atop their household goods, brought back home a first party of refugees. The harvest of death seemed already to give way to the harvest of life.

First of many still-born hopes. The Christmas that was to be the festival of peace passed, and another, and another. Interminably, the war prolonged itself through new scenes, more ingenious forms of slaughter, new abysms of pain, till the armies had fallen into a temper of iron endurance. But, even in such extremities, the heart will seek its food. Month after month, by day and night, coming from beleaguered Verdun or the gateways of Alsace to reach the Oise and Flanders, I passed down the long sparkling valleys of the Marne; every turn grew familiar, and their green folds whispered of the gain in loss and the quiet within the storm. Like all religion, patriotism, for the many, speaks in symbols; what symbol more eloquent than the strong stream, endlessly renewed to cleanse, to nourish, and to heal? Through those stony years, most of the convoys crossed the Marne at some point—lumbering carts, succeeded by wagons white with a slime of dust and petrol; fussy Staff cars and hurried ambulances; gun-trains, their helmeted riders swaying spectrally in the misty air of dawn; columns of heavy-packed infantry, dreaming of their loves left in trembling cities far behind. In turn, all the armies of France, and some of those of Britain, America, and Italy, came this way; and into their minds, unconsciously, must have fallen something of the spirit of the Marne, and of those frightened apprentices of the war who first saved France, and dammed an infamous aggression.

So much the poilus knew; that comfort supported them. Most of the high company of Joffre’s captains were still with them, winning fresh laurels—Foch, Petain, and Haig, Castlenau, Humbert, Langle, Sarrail, Franchet d’Espérey, Mangin, Guillaumat, Pulteney, Nivelle, Maud’huy, Micheler, and many another. Soon the world at large understood that this strange overturn of fortune was the base of all subsequent victories in the same good cause. More than this—that a man had conceived, designed, organised, and controlled it, and so earned enduring fame—might be vaguely felt, but could not be certainly known until the passage of time allowed it to be said that, as surely as there were warts on Cromwell’s nose, there were shadows to the lights of the record of victory. At length, a true picture is possible; and instead of a play of blind forces, or a senseless “miracle,” we see a supremely dramatic revolt of outraged reason, nobly led, and justly triumphing.

The German conspiracy failed on the Marne not by any partial fault or executive error, but by the logic of its most essential characteristics. It was a masterpiece of diabolical preparation: it failed, when the quickly-awakened French mind grappled with it, from dependence upon a rigid mechanism, and the inability of its authors to adjust it to unexpected circumstances. It was a wager on speed—for the enveloping movement bore in it the germs of the ultimate disturbance; that is to say, it presumed the stupidity or pusillanimity of the Republican Command, and this presumption proved fatal. These faults were aggravated by disunion among the army leaders and disillusion among the men, while the Allies were inspired to an almost perfect co-operation. Already delayed and weakened in Belgium, the invading armies saw their surplus strength evaporating in the long pursuit, their dislocated line caught in a sudden recoil, and to be saved from being rent asunder only by closing the adventure. In the disastrous moment when Kluck and Bülow turned in opposite directions, the proudest war school in the world was beaten, and humiliated, by a stout burgess of Rivesaltes. Long before the war itself became hateful, this thought worked bitterly. Criminals do not make the best soldiers. Moltke was cashiered, with him Kluck and Hausen, and we know not how many more. It was the twilight of the heathen gods.

In the long run, mankind cherishes the reasonable, in faith or action; and, of the barbarous trial of war, this is all that remains in the memory of future ages. The Marne was a signal triumph for Right, won, not by weight of force or by accident, but by superior intelligence and will. That is its essential title to our attention, and its most pregnant meaning for posterity. So immense a trial was it, and a triumph so vitally necessary to civilisation, that all the heroic episodes of our Western history pale before it, to serve henceforth for little, faint, but comprehensible analogies; in the French mind even the epopée of the great Emperor is at last eclipsed. The combatants themselves could not see it thus. Afterwards, the war and those doomed to continue it became sophisticated—governments and the press told them what to expect, and followed them with praise and some care. In this first phase, there is a strange naïveté; it is nearly all headlong extemporisation; masses of men constantly plunged from one into another term of the unknown. The “front” was never fixed; there were few of the features of combat later most characteristic—no trenches or dugouts, no bombs or helmets, no poison-gas, no mines, no Stokes guns, no swarm of buzzing ’planes across the sky, no field railways, few hot meals, and fewer ambulance cars. The armies did not come up to their tasks through zones devastated by the enemy, and then reorganised by engineers into so many monstrous war-factories. The forests they crossed were undisturbed, the orchards blossoming, the towns intact. They knew nothing of “camouflage”: on the contrary, they saw and sought the individual foe, and by him were seen individually. Very often, and quickly, they came to bodily grips; commonly, the conflict ceased, or slackened, at sunset. What would afterward have seemed a moderate bombardment terrorised them, for it was worse than anything they had heard of.

In sum, with less of horror and less of protection, they felt as much as, and more freshly than, those who followed. War had not yet become habitual—there was neither the half-sceptical stoicism nor the profound comradeship of later days. Only a month had passed since this first million lads had left home. Every hour had brought some new shock. Resentment was fresh and fierce in them. No romantic illusion fed it; but deep offence called to the depths of dignity of an aged nation for answer, and the answer came. There stood the Boche, arrogant and formidable, polluting the soil of Brie and Champagne, the heart of France—what argument could there be? They did not think of one spot as more sacred than another, as, afterwards, thousands fell to hold Ypres and Arras, Soissons, Rheims, and Verdun. Like the process, the inspiration was simpler. The fields of the Marne were France, the land that had nurtured them, its freedom and grace of life and thought, the long Latin heritage, the virtues that a new Barbarism had dared to dispute and outrage. For this great all, they gave straightway their little all.