Sketch 55Sketch 55.
Sketch 55.
This line from Landrecies towards Cambrai had already been in part prepared in the course of that day—Tuesday—and entrenched, and it maybe imagined what inclination affected commanders and men towards a halt upon that position. The pressure had been continuous and heavy, the work of detraining and setting in line the newly arrived division had added to the anxieties of the day, and an occupation of the prepared line seemed to impose itself. Luckily, the unwisdom of such a stand in the retirement was perceived in time, and the British Commander decided not to give his forces rest until some considerable natural object superior to imperfect and hurriedly constructed trenches could be depended upon to check the enemy's advance. The threat of being outflanked was still very grave, and the few hours' halt which would have been involved in the alternative decision might, or rather would, have been fatal.
The consequences, however, to the men of this decision in favour of continual retirement were severe. The 1st Corps did not reach Landrecies till ten o'clock at night. They had been upon the move for eighteen hours; but even so, the enemy, in that avalanche of advance (which was possible to him, as we nowknow, by the organization of mechanical transport), was well in touch. The Guards in Landrecies itself (the 4th Brigade) were attacked by the advance body of the 9th German Army Corps, which came on in overwhelming numbers right into the buildings of the town, debouching from the wood to the north under cover of the darkness. Their effort was unsuccessful. They did not succeed in piercing or even in decisively confusing the British line at this point; and, packed in the rather narrow street of Landrecies, the enemy suffered losses equivalent to a battalion in that desperate night fighting. But though the enemy here failed to achieve his purpose, his action compelled the continued retreat of men who were almost at the limit of exhaustion, and who had now been marching and fighting for the better part of twenty-four hours.
In that same darkness the 1st Division, under Sir Douglas Haig, was heavily engaged south-east of Maroilles. They obtained ultimately the aid of two French reserve divisions which lay upon the right of the British line, and extricatedthemselves from the peril they were in before dawn. By daylight this 1st Corps was still continuing its retirement in the direction of Wassigny, with Guise as its objective.
Sketch 56Sketch 56.
Sketch 56.
Meanwhile the 2nd Corps, which had not been so heavily attacked, and which lay to the west—that is, still upon the extreme of the line—had come, before the sunset of that Tuesday, the 25th, intoa line stretching from Le Cateau to near Caudry, and thence prolonged by the 4th Division towards Seranvillers.
Sketch 57Sketch 57.
Sketch 57.
It will be seen that this line was bent—its left refused. This disposition was, of course, designed to meet the ceaseless German attempt to outflank on the west; and with the dawn of Wednesday, the 26th, it was already apparent how serious would be the task before this 2nd Corps, which covered all the rest of the army,and, in a sense, the whole of the Anglo-French retirement. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who was here in command, was threatened with a disaster that might carry in its train disaster to the whole British contingent, and ultimately, perhaps, to the whole Franco-British line.
Although the German bodies which were attempting the outflanking had not yet all come up, the field artillery of no less than four German corps was already at work against this one body, and a general action was developing upon which might very well depend the fate of the campaign. Indeed, the reader will do well to fix his attention upon this day, Wednesday, the 26th August, as the key to all that followed. There are always to be found, in the history of war, places and times which are of this character—nuclei, as it were, round which the business of all that comes before and after seems to congregate. Of such, for instance, was the Friday before Waterloo, when Erlon's counter-orders ultimately decided the fate of Napoleon; and of such was Carnot's night march on October 15, 1793, which largely decided the fate of the revolutionary army.
The obvious action to take in such a position as that in which the 2nd Corps found themselves was to break contact with the enemy, to call for support from the 1st Corps, and to maintain the retreat as indefatigably as it had already been maintained in the preceding twenty-four hours.
But men have limits to their physical powers, which limits commonly appear sharply, not gradually, at the end of a great movement. The 1st Corps had been marching and fighting a day and a night, and that after a preceding whole day of retirement from before Mons. It was unable to execute a further effort. Further, the general in command of the 2nd Corps reported that the German pressure had advanced too far to permit of breaking contact in the face of such an attack.
It would have been of the utmost use if at this moment a large body of French cavalry—no less than three divisions—under General Sordet, could have intervened upon that critical moment, the morning of Wednesday, the 26th, to have covered the retirement of the 1st Corps.They were in the neighbourhood; the British commander had seen their commander in the course of the 25th, and had represented his need. Through some error or misfortune in the previous movement of this corps—such that its horses were incapable of further action through fatigue—it failed to appear upon the field in this all-important juncture, and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was left facing overwhelming odds, which in artillery—the arm that was doing all the heavy work of that morning—were not less than four to one.
The fact that the retirement was at last made possible was due more than anything else to the handling of the British guns upon this day, and to the devotion with which the batteries sacrificed themselves to the covering of that movement; while the cavalry, as in the preceding two days, co-operated in forming a screen for the retreat.
It was about half-past three in the afternoon when the general in command of this exposed left flank judged it possible to break contact, and to give the order for falling back. Theexperiment—for it seems to have been no more secure than such a word suggests—was perilous in the extreme. It was not known whether the consequences of this fierce artillery duel against an enemy of four-fold superiority had been sufficient to forbid that enemy to make good the pursuit. Luckily, as the operation developed, it was apparent that the check inflicted upon such enormous odds by the British guns was sufficient for its purpose. The enemy had received losses that forbade him to move with the rapidity necessary to him if he was to decide the matter. He failed to press the retiring 2nd British Corps in any conclusive fashion: this 2nd Corps, the left wing, was saved; and with it the whole army, and perhaps the whole line.
The retreat of this body, which had thus covered all its comrades, continued under terrible conditions of strain (and after so heavy an action) right through the afternoon, and on hour after hour through the darkness; but though such an effort meant the loss of stragglers and of wounded, of guns whose teams had been destroyed, of material, and of allthat accompanies a perilous retreat, one may justly say that well before midnight of that Wednesday, the 26th, the operation had proved successful and its purpose was accomplished.
Two more days of almost equal strain were, as we shall see, to be suffered by the whole army before it had reached a natural obstacle behind which it could draw breath (the river Oise), and might fairly be regarded as no longer in peril of destruction; but the breaking point that had come on that Wednesday, the 26th, had been successfully passed without disaster, and had been so passed, in the main, by virtue of the guns.
This critical day, upon which depended the fortunes certainly of the British contingent, and in some degree of all the "operative corner" of the French plan, turned in favour of the Allies, not only through the military excellence of the action which was broken off by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien during the afternoon, but also through the vigour and tenacity of the retreat.
I must here beg the reader's leave for a short digression in connection withthose two phrases—"in favour of," and "vigour." History in general treats a retirement, particularly a rapid retirement accompanied by heavy losses, as a disaster; and the conception that such a movement may seem to the military historian a success, and that the energy of its conduct is just as important as the energy of an assault, is unfamiliar to most students of civilian record. But I am writing here, though an elementary, yet a military history; and to the military historian a retreat may be just as much a factor in victory as an advance; while the energy and tenacity required for its carriage are, if anything, more important than the corresponding qualities required for an advance. And in the case of this critical day and a half, the Wednesday, August 26th, and the Wednesday and Thursday night, August 26th-27th, the preservation of the British forces, and to some extent of all that lay east of them, was made possible by the very fact that the retirement was prosecuted with the utmost rapidity and without a halt. Had the retreat been interrupted in the hope of making a stand,or in the hope of repose, the whole army would have gone.
Throughout the night, then, with heavy losses from stragglers, and in one case with the surrounding and annihilation by wounds and capture of nearly a whole battalion (the Gordons), the retreat of the 2nd Corps proceeded, and, in line with it, the retreat of the 1st Corps to the east.
But this 1st Corps, though set an easier task than the 2nd (which, at the extreme of the line, was under the perpetual menace of development), did not retire without losses of a serious character. It was marching on Guise, just as the 2nd Corps to the west of it was marching across the watershed to St. Quentin. The Munster Fusiliers, who were on its extreme right, had halted for the night on that same evening of the 26th; for the 1st Corps, being less hard pressed, had more leisure for such repose. During the night a messenger was sent to this body with orders for the resumption of the march next morning. He was taken prisoner, and never reached his goal. The Munsters were attacked atdawn by the German pursuit in greatly superior numbers, surrounded and destroyed, as the Gordons of the 2nd Corps had been; the unwounded remnant was compelled to surrender.
Sketch 58Sketch 58.
Sketch 58.
The whole of Thursday, the 27th, and Friday, the 28th of August, the British retreat continued, the 1st Corps following on at the valley of the Oise towards La Fère, while the 2nd Corps to the west passed St. Quentin, and made for Noyon, in the neighbourhood of the same river farther down; and on the night of that Friday the Expeditionary Force was atlast in line, and in some kind of order, organized for the first breathing space possible after so terrible an ordeal.
Sketch 59Sketch 59.
Sketch 59.
It is clear from the accompanying sketch map that the position the British had now reached gave to the whole Allied force a bent contour. The French armies to the east lay along line AB, which, had it been directly prolonged, would have stretched towards C; but the British contingent, which, on account of its extreme position, had suffered most heavily, was turned right back on thescheme AD, and even so, was still in some peril of being outflanked by the German forces along the arrow (1) to the west of it. At this moment the French, whose fortunes we shall next describe, found it possible to check the fury of the pursuit. The drive of the German masses, which had so nearly annihilated the British end of the line, was blocked, and the remainder of the great retreat followed a more orderly fashion, proceeded at a much slower rate, and approached that term at which a counter-offensive might be attempted.
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 Saturday, 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 LaFère, marked also in dots upon the sketch.
What had happened meanwhile to their French colleagues upon the east?
Sketch 60Sketch 60.
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. Theimperfection 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 wassufficiently strongly organized to keep this section of the line well bent up northwards, and just before the British halted for their first breathing space along the line La Fère 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 Fère and Noyon (a line largely protected by theOise), 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.
Sketch 61Sketch 61.
Sketch 61.
Sketch 62Sketch 62.
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 embarrass 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 Fère, 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, almostwithout 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 manœuvring mass 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 repetition, I will restate for the reader the main elements of that strategy.
Sketch 63Sketch 63.
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 complicatedand modified so that it came to mean, under the existing circumstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger masses, "the mass of manœuvre," were to come up in aid and assume 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 mass of manœuvre 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 mass of manœuvre 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 wasteall this great concentration of the mass of manœuvre 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 FrenchArmy, 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 mass of manœuvre.
Sketch 64Sketch 64.
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 eachsuperior 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 mass of manœuvre, 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 mass of manœuvre, 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 assured, 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 therequisite 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 Cæsar; 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 Châlons, 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 fortitude 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 bewilderingseries 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.
Sketch 65Sketch 65.
Sketch 65.
They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6thFrench 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 fromthe 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 attitude 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 thismoral 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 intheir 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, 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 accountof 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 attitude 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 theunsoldierly, 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 mass of manœuvre, 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 blowwouldfall, 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 Strassburg and Metz, was in French hands. Up to that date, though suchcomparatively 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 blowstruck against the French left, with no less than four army corps, was speedily to decide the issue upon this subsidiary front.
Sketch 66Sketch 66.
Sketch 66.
This great force was based upon Metz, from which fortress the action will presumably take its name in history. It stretched upon the 20th of August from the north of Pont-à -Mousson to beyond Château Salins. Before this overwhelming advance the French left rapidly retired. It did not retire quickly enough, and one portion of the French force—it is believed the 15th Division (that is, the first division of the 15th Army Corps)—failed in its task of supporting the shock.
Details of the action are wholly lacking. We depend even for what may be said at this date upon little more than rumour. The Germans claimed a capture of ten batteries and of the equivalent of as many battalions, and many colours. Upon the 21st the whole French left fell back, carrying with them as a necessary consequence the centre in the Vosges Mountains and the right upon the plains of Alsace. So rapid was the retreat thatupon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at Lunéville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put Nancy in peril.
Nancy itself was saved. The French counter-offensive was organized on the 23rd of August, at a moment when the German line lay from St. Dié northwards and westwards up to positions just in front of Nancy. It was delivered about a week later. That counter-offensive which ultimately saved Nancy belongs to the next volume, for it did not develop its strength until after Sedan Day, and after the end of the great sweep on Paris.
The situation, then, in this field (the very names of which have such great moral effects upon the French and theGerman minds) was, by the 2nd of September, as follows:—
The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news.
The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke was delivered in the West.
That is the largest view of the matter.
In more detail, we know that the main part of this task was entrusted to the Austro-Hungarian forces. The German forces had indeed entered and occupiedthe west fringe of Russian Poland, seizing the small industrial belt which lies immediately east of Silesia, and the two towns of Czestochowa and Kalish—the latter, in the very centre of the bend of the frontier, because it was a big railway depot, and, as it were, a gage of invasion; the former, both because the holding of one line demanded it (if Kalish and the industrial portion were held), and becauseCzestochowa being the principal shrine of the Poles, some strange notion may have passed through the German mind that the presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization to which it is a stranger.
Sketch 67Sketch 67.
Sketch 67.
This local German move was almost entirely political. The main task, as I have said, was left to the Austrians farther south; and, proceeding to further detail, we must see the Austrians stretched in a line from near the middle Carpathians past the neighbourhood of Tomasow towards Tarnow, and this line distinctly divided into two armies, a northern and a southern. The two met in an angle in front of the great fortress of Przemysl. The northern, or first, army faced, as will be seen, directly towards the Russian frontier. It was the operative wing; upon its immediate action and on the rapidity of the blow itwas to deliver depended the success of this first chapter in the Eastern war.
Sketch 68Sketch 68.
Sketch 68.
The southern, or second, army, which stretched all along the Galician plain at the foot of the Carpathians to the town of Halicz, had for its mission the protection of the first army from the south. It was known, or expected, that the first army would advance right into RussianPoland, with but inferior forces in front of it. It was feared, however, that the main Russian concentration to the south-east of it might turn its right flank. The business of the second army was to prevent this. The first army (I), being the operative body, was more homogeneous in race, more picked in material than the second (II), the latter containing many elements from the southern parts of the empire, including perhaps not a few disaffected contingents, such as certain regiments of Italian origin from the Adriatic border.
So far as we can judge, perhaps—and it is a very rough estimate—we may put the whole body which Austria-Hungary was thus moving in the first phase of the war beyond the Carpathians at more than 750,000, but less than 1,000,000 men. Call the mass 800,000, and one would not be far wrong. Of this mass quite a quarter lay in reserve near the mountains behind the first army. The remaining three-quarters, or 600,000 men, were fairly evenly divided between the two groups of the first and of the second army—the first, or northern, one being under thecommand of Dankl, the second under that of von Auffenberg. Each of these forces was based upon one group of depots of particular importance, the northern operative army (I) relying upon Przemysl, and the southern one (II) upon Lemberg.
It was less than a week after the first German advance bodies had taken the outer forts of Liége when Dankl crossed the frontier, heading, with his centre, towards Krosnik and farther towards Lublin. His troops were in Russian territory upon the Monday evening or the Tuesday, 10th-11th August.
The second army meanwhile stood fulfilling its rôle of awaiting and containing any Russians that might strike in upon the south. It had advanced no more than watching bodies towards the frontier, such as the 35th Regiment of the Austrian Landwehr, which occupied Sokal, and smaller units cordonned out southward between that town and Brody. Here, at the outset of the large operations that were to follow, it is important for the reader to note that everything depended upon the resisting power of the second, or southern, army.
Observe the problem. Two men, aleft-hand man and a right-hand man, go out to engage two other men whom they hope and believe to be unready. The left-hand man is particularly confident of being able to drive back his opponent, but he knows that sooner or later upon his right the second enemy, a stronger man, may come in and disturb his action. He says therefore to his right-hand companion: "Stand firm and engage and contain the energy of your opponent until I have finished with mine. When I have done that, I shall turn round towards you, and between us we will finish the second man."
Seeing the paucity of Russian communications, and the physical necessity under which the Russians were, on account of the position of their depots and centres of mobilization, of first putting the mass of their men on the south, the physical impossibility under which they lay of putting the mass of their men in the north for the moment, the plan was a sound one;butits success depended entirely upon the tenacity of the second Austrian army, which would have to meet large, and might have to meet superior, numbers.
The first army went forward with verylittle loss and against very little resistance. The Russian forces which were against it, which we may call the first Russian army, were inferior in number, and fell back, though not rapidly, towards the Bug. It relied to some extent in this movement upon the protection afforded by the forts of Zamosc, but it was never in any serious danger until, or unless, things went wrong in the south. The Austrians remained in contact (but no more), turned somewhat eastward in order to keep hold of the foe, when their advance was checked by the news, first of unexpected Russian strength, later of overwhelming Russian advances towards the south. Long before the third week in August, the first Austrian army was compelled to check its advance upon the news reaching it from the second, and its fortunes, in what it had intended to be a successful invasion of Russian Poland, had ended. For the whole meaning of the first Galician campaign turns after the 14th of August upon the great Russian advance in the south.
It was upon that day, August 14, that the Russian force, under General Russky (which we will call the second army),crossed the frontier. Its right occupied Sokal, its centre left moved in line with the right upon von Auffenberg's force directly before it.
The Russian mobilization had proceeded at a greater pace than the enemy had allowed for. The Russian numbers expected in this field appeared in far greater strength than this expectation had allowed for, and it was soon apparent that von Auffenberg's command would have to resist very heavy pressure.
But it would be an error to imagine, as was too hastily concluded in the press of Western Europe at the time, that this pressure upon the front of the second Austrian army, with its dogged day after day fighting and mile by mile advance, was the principal deciding factor in the issue. That deciding factor was, in fact, the appearance upon the right flank of von Auffenberg of yet another Russian army (which we will call the third) under Brussilov. It was the menace of this force, unexpected, or at least unexpected in its great strength, which really determined the issue, though this was again affected by the tardiness of the Austrianretirement. Russky's direct advance upon the front of his enemy extended for a week. It had begun when it had destroyed the frontier posts upon Friday, the 14th. It was continued until the evening of the succeeding Thursday, regularly, slowly, but without intermission. It stood upon the Friday, the 21st—the day on which the first shots were fired at the main Franco-British forces in the West, and the day on which the first shell fell into Charleroi station—not more than one day's cavalry advance from the outer works of Lemberg, but it was just in that week-end that the pressure of Brussilov began to be felt.
This third Russian army had come up from the south-east, supplied by the main Odessa railway through Tarnopol. It was manifestly threatening the right flank of von Auffenberg, and if a guess may be hazarded upon operations on which we have so little detail as yet, and which took place so far from our own standpoint, the error of the Austrian general seems to have consisted in believing that he could maintain himself against this flank attack. If this were the case (and itis the most probable explanation of what followed), the error would have been due to the same cause which affected all Austrian plans in these first days of the war—the mistake as to the rapidity with which Russia would complete her preparations.