Sketch 21Sketch 21.
Sketch 21.
he would be outflanked and beaten; or, in the alternative, Black might mass men against White's centre and pierce it, for Black is vastly superior to White in numbers. White, therefore, must adopt some special disposition in order to avoid immediate defeat.
Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open Strategic Square.
This disposition is as follows:—
White arranges his twelve units into four quarters of three each, and places one quarter at each corner of a square thus:—
Sketch 22Sketch 22.
Sketch 22.
We will give them titles, and call them A, B, C, and D.
If, as is most generally the case in a defensive campaign at its opening, White cannot be certain from which exact direction the main blow is coming, he may yet know that it is coming from some one general direction, from one sector of the compass at least, and he arranges his square to face towards that sector.
For instance, in the above diagram, he may not know whether the blow is comingfrom the precise direction 1, or 2, or 3, but he knows that it is coming somewhere within the sector XY.
Then he will draw up his square so that its various bodies all face towards the average direction from which the blow may come.
TheSIZEof his square—which is of great importance to the result—he makes as restricted as possible,subject to two prime conditions. These conditions are:—
First, that there shall be room for the troops composing each corner to be deployed—that is, spread out for fighting. Secondly, that there shall be room between any two corners (A and C, for instance) for a third corner (D, for instance) to move in between them and spread out for fighting in support of them. He makes his square as close and restricted as possible, because his success depends—as will be seen in a moment—upon the rapidity with which any one corner can come up in support of the others. But he leaves enough room for the full numbers to spread out for fighting, because otherwise he loses in efficiency; and he leaves room enough between any two squares for a third one to come in,because the whole point of the formation is the aid each corner can bring to the others.
In this posture he awaits the enemy.
That enemy will necessarily come on in a lengthy line, lengthy in proportion to the number of his units. For it is essential to the general commandingsuperiornumbers to make thewholeof the superior numbers tell, and this can only be done if they march along parallel roads, and these roads are sufficiently wide apart for the various columns to have plenty of room to deploy—that is, to spread out into a fighting line—when the shock comes.
Sketch 23Sketch 23.
Sketch 23.
This extended line of Black marching thus against White strikes White first upon some one corner of his square. Suppose that corner to be corner A. Then the position when contact is established andthe first serious fighting begins is what you will observe in the above diagram. A is the corner (now spread out for fighting) which gets the first shock.
Note you (for this is the crucial point of the whole business) that upon the exposed corner A will fall a very dangerous task indeed. A will certainly be attacked by forces superior to itself. Normally forces more than half as large again as A will be near enough to A to concentrate upon him in the first shock. The odds will be at least as much as five to three, the Black units, 4, 5, and 6, will be right on A, and 3 and 7 will be near enough to come in as well in the first day or two of the combat, while possibly 2 may have a look in as well.
A, thus tackled, has become what may be called "theoperative cornerof the square." It is his task "to retreat and hold the enemy" while B, C, and D, "the masses of manœuvre," swing up. But under that simple phrase "operative corner" is hidden all the awful business of a fighting retreat: it means leaving your wounded behind you, marching night and day, with your men under the impressionof defeat; leaving your disabled guns behind you, keeping up liaison between all your hurrying, retreating units, with a vast force pressing forward to your destruction. A's entire force is deliberately imperilled in order to achieve the success of the plan as a whole, and upon A's tenacity, as will be seen in what follows, the success of that plan entirely depends.
Sketch 24Sketch 24.
Sketch 24.
Well, while A is thus retreating—say, from his old position at A_1 on the foregoing diagram to such a position as A_2, with Black swarming up to crush him—the other corners of the square, B, C, and D, receive the order to "swing"—that is, to go forward inclining to the left or the right according to the command given.
Mark clearly that, until the order is given, the general commanding Blackcannot possibly tell whether the "swing" will be directed to the left or to the right. Either B will close up against A, C spread out farther to the left, and D come in between A and C (which is a "swing" to the left) as in Sketch 25, or C will close up against A, B will spread well out to the right, and D come up between A and B, as in Sketch 26 (which is a "swing" to the right).
Sketch 25Sketch 25.
Sketch 25.
Until the "swing" actually begins, Black, the enemy, cannot possibly tell whether it is his left-hand units (1 to 8) or his right-hand units (9 to 16) which will be affected. One of the two ends of his line will have to meet White's concentrated effort; the other will be left out in the cold. Black cannot makedispositions on the one hypothesis or on the other. Whichever he chose, White would, of course, swing the other way and disconcert him.
Black, therefore, has to keep his line even until he knows which way White is going to swing.
Sketch 26Sketch 26.
Sketch 26.
Let us suppose that White swings to the left.
Mark what follows. The distances which White's units have got to go are comparatively small. B will be up at A's side, and so will D in a short time after the swing is over, and when the swing is completed, the position is after this fashion. Black's numbers, 1 to 9 inclusive, find themselves tackled by all Black's twelve. There is a superiority of number againstBlack on his right, White's left, and the remaining part of Black's line (10 to 16 inclusive), is out in the cold.
If it were a tactical problem, and all this were taking place in a small field, Black's left wing, 10-16, would, of course, come up at once and redress the balance. But being a strategical problem, and involving very large numbers and very great distances, Black's left wing, 10-16, can do nothing of the kind. For Black's left wing, 10-16,cannot possibly get up in time. Long before it has arrived on the scene, White's 12 will have broken Black's 9 along Black's right wing.
Sketch 27Sketch 27.
Sketch 27.
There are three elements which impose this delay upon Black's left wing.
First, to come round in aid of the right wing means the marching forward of one unit after another, so that each shalloverlap the last, and so allow the whole lot to come up freely. This means that the last unit will have to go forward six places before turning, and that means several days' marching. For with very large bodies, and with a matter of 100 miles to come up, all in one column, it would be an endless business (Sketch 28).
Sketch 28Sketch 28.
Sketch 28.
Next you have the delay caused by theconversion of directionthrough a whole right angle. That cause of delay is serious. For when you are dealing with very large bodies of men, such as half a dozen army corps, to change suddenly from the direction S (see Sketch 29) for which your Staff work was planned, and to break off at a moment's notice in direction E, while you are on the march towards S, is impossible.You have to think out a whole new set of dispositions, and to re-order all your great body of men. White was under no such compulsion, for though he had to swing, the swing faced the same general direction as his original dispositions. And the size of the units and the distances to be traversed—the fact that the problem is strategical and not tactical—is the essence of the whole thing. If, for instance, you have (as in Sketch 30) half a dozen, not army corps, but mere battalions of 1,000 men, deployed over half a dozen miles of ground, AB, and advancing in the direction SS, and they are suddenly sent for in the direction E, it is simple enough. You form your 6,000 men into column; in a few hours' delay they go off in the direction E,and when they get to the place where they are wanted, the column can spread out quickly again on the front CD, and soon begin to take part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army corps—240,000 men—it is quite another matter. The turning of any one of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one column—they would take ages to deploy—so you must, as we have seen, make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin.
Sketch 29Sketch 29.
Sketch 29.
Sketch 30Sketch 30.
Sketch 30.
Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10, 11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got up abreast of them—and that is the third cause of delay.
Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated, have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine.
If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to 16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and pursuing sixteen.
That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of manœuvre" behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the retirement of the whole was the Battle of the Marne.
Sketch 31Sketch 31.
Sketch 31.
Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the tenacity and military value of the operative corner, whichis exposed and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work.
If that operative corner is destroyed as a force—is overwhelmed or dispersed or surrounded—while it is fighting its great odds, the whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy, and the army is in a far worse plight than if recourse had never been had to the open strategic square at all. For if the operative corner, A, is out of existence before the various bodies forming the "manœuvring mass" behind it have had time to "swing," then the enemy will be right in their midst, and destroying, in overwhelming force, these remainingseparatedbodies in detail.
It was here that the German strategic theory contrasted so violently with the French. The Germans maintained that an ordeal which Napoleon might have been able to live through with his veterans and after fifteen years of successful war, a modern conscript army, most of its men just taken from civilian life and all of short service, would never endure. They believed the operative corner would go to pieces and either be pounded to disintegration, or outflanked, turned, and caught inthe first days of the shock before the rest of the square had time to "work." The French believed the operative corner would stand the shock, and, though losing heavily, would remain in being. They believed that the operative corner of the square would, even under modern short service and large quasi-civilian reserve conditions, remain an army. They staked their whole campaign upon that thesis, and they turned out to be right. But they only just barely won through, and by the very narrowest margin. Proving right as they did, however, the success of their strategical theory changed the whole course of the war.
With this contrast of the great opposing theories considered, I come to the conclusion of my Second Part, which examines the forces opposed. I will now turn to the Third Part of my book, which concerns the first actual operations from the Austrian note to the Battle of the Marne.
[1]Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion inLand and Waterto estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the figures were known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense was the known perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I determined that a minimum of not less than 100,000 men would capitulate. I further conceived that the total losses could hardly be less than 40,000, and I arrived at an original force of between three and four corps.
[1]Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion inLand and Waterto estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the figures were known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense was the known perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I determined that a minimum of not less than 100,000 men would capitulate. I further conceived that the total losses could hardly be less than 40,000, and I arrived at an original force of between three and four corps.
Sketch 32Sketch 32.
Sketch 32.
In any general view of the great war which aims both at preserving proportion between its parts, and at presenting especially the main lines in relief, the three weeks between the German sudden forcing of war and the seventeen or eighteen days between the English declaration and the main operations upon the Sambre, will have but a subsidiary importance. They were occupied for at least half the period in the mobilization of the great armies. They were occupied for the second half of the period in the advance across the Rhine of German numbers greatly superior to the Allies, and also through the plain of Northern Belgium. The operation, as calculated by the German General Staff, was delayed by but a very few days—one might almost sayhours—by the hastily improvised resistance of Liége, and the imperfect defence of their country which was all the Belgian forces, largely untrained, could offer.
We must, therefore, pass briefly enough over that preliminary period, though the duty may be distasteful to the reader, on account of the very exaggerated importance which its operations took, especially in British eyes.
For this false perspective there were several reasons, which it is worth while to enumerate, as they will aid our judgment in obtaining a true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts to which they were no more than an introduction.
1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace, during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.
2. The first shock, falling as it did uponthe ring fortress of Liége, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of stronghold.
3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe. Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great, had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline ofinternational morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the moral chaos accompanying that loss.
4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which the blow was awaited.
To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.
The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the Belgian Plain.
This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.
It has been represented too often as asort of meeting-place, where must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered themwith the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Trèves or Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom, was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. Cæsar's adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was hoped—thedefeat of Napoleon at Waterloo—again showed what this territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French and the British, but also by the Prussian Government, with what results we know.
The entries into this plain are very clearly defined by natural limits. It is barred a few hours' march beyond the German frontier by the broad and deep river Meuse, which here runs from the rough and difficult Ardennes country up to the Dutch frontier. The whole passage is no more than twelve miles across, and at the corner of it, where the Meuse bends, is the fortress of Liége. West of this fortress the upper reaches of the river run, roughly east and west upon Namur, and after Namur turn south again, passing through a very deep ravine that extends roughly from the French town of Mezières to Namur through the Ardennes country. The Belgian Plain is therefore like a bottlewith a narrow neck, a bottle defined by the Dutch frontier and the Middle Meuse on either side, and a neck extending only from the Ardennes country to the Dutch frontier, with the fortress of Liége barring the way. Now the main blow was to be delivered ultimately upon the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons. That is, the situation was roughly that of the accompanying diagram: by the bottle neck at D the whole mass of troops must pass—or most of them—which are later to strike on the front AB. To reach that front was available to the invader the vast network of Belgian railways RRR crammed with rolling stock, and provided suchopportunities for rapid advance as no other district in Europe could show. But all this system converged upon the main line which ran through the ring of forts round Liége, L, and so passed through Aix-la-Chapelle, A, and to Germany.
Sketch 33Sketch 33.
Sketch 33.
The German Government, therefore, could not be secure of its intention to pass great bodies through the Belgian Plain until Liége was grasped, and it was determined to grasp Liége long before the mobilization of the German forces was completed. For this purpose only a comparatively small force, rapidly gathered, was available. It was placed under the command of General von Emmerich, and its first bodies exchanged shots with the Belgian outposts early in the afternoon of Tuesday, August 4, 1914.
The hour and date should always be remembered for the solemnity which attaches to the beginning of any great thing; and the full observer of European affairs, who understands what part religion or superstition plays in the story of Europe, will note this enormously significant detail. The first Germans to cross the violated frontier accomplished that act uponthe same day and at the same hour as that in which their forerunners had crossed the French frontier forty-four years before.
The afternoon wore on to night, with no more than a conflict between outposts. Just before midnight the cannonade was first heard. It also was the moment in which the ultimatum delivered to Germany by this country, by a coincidence, expired.[2]
This night attack with guns was only delivered against one sector of the Liége forts, and only with field-pieces.
As to the first of these points, it will be found repeated throughout the whole of the campaign wherever German forces attack a ring of permanent works. For the German theory in this matter (which experience has now amply supported) is that since modern permanent worksof known and restricted positiongo under to a modern siege train if the fire of the latter be fully concentrated and the largest pieces available, everything should be sacrificed to the putting into the narrowestarea of all the projectiles available. The ring once broken on a sufficient single sector point is broken altogether.
The second point, that only field-pieces as yet were used (which was due to the fact that the siege train was not yet come up), is an important indication of the weakness of the defence—on all of which the enemy were, of course, thoroughly informed.
There were perhaps 20,000 men in and upon the whole periphery of Liége, a matter of over thirty miles, and what was most serious, no sufficient equipment or preparation of the forts, or, what was more serious still, no sufficient trained body of gunners.
It is almost true to say that the resistance of Liége, such as it was, was effected by rifle fire.
With the dawn of August 5th, and in the first four hours of daylight, a German infantry attack upon the same south-eastern forts which had been subjected to the first artillery fire in the night developed, and after some loss withdrew, but shortly after the first of the forts, that of Fléron, was silenced. The accompanying sketch map will show how wide a gap was lefthenceforward in the defences. Further, Fléron was the strongest of the works upon this side of the river. Seeing that, in any case, even if there had been a sufficient number of trained gunners in the forts, and a sufficient equipment and full preparation of the works for a siege (bothof which were lacking), the absence of sufficient men to hold the gaps between would in any case have been fatal to the defence. With such a new gap as this open by the fall of Fléron, the defence was hopeless, even if it were only to be counted in hours.
Sketch 34Sketch 34.
Sketch 34.
It is high praise of the Belgian people and character to point out that, after the fall of Fléron, for forty-eight full hours such a gap was still contested by men, a great part of whom were little better than civilian in training, and who, had they been all tried regulars, would have been far too few for their task. General Leman, who commanded them, knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th, that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and insufficient troops.
During those forty-eight hours, the bighowitzer, which is the type of the heavy German siege train—the 225 mm.—was brought up, and it is possible that a couple of the still larger Austrian pieces of 280 mm. (what we call in this country the 11-inch), which are constructed with flat treadles to their wheels to fire from mats laid on any reasonably hard surface (such as a roadway), had been brought up as well. At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next westward from Fléron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the city. The incident has been reported as acoup de main, with the object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the military story is simply that it proved the way to be open. In the afternoon and evening of the day, the Belgians were retiring into the heart of the city, and it is typical of the whole business that the great railway bridge upon which the main communications depended was left intact for the Germans to use.
With the morning of Friday, the 7th August, the first bodies of German infantry entered the town. The forts onthe north and two remaining western forts upon the south of the river were still untaken, and until a large breach should be made in the northern forts at least, the railway communication of the German advance into the Belgian plain was still impeded. Great masses of the enemy, and, in proportion to those masses, still greater masses of advance stores were brought in.
In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid. And my reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary events in the south will appear in the sequel.
This reservation made—an important one in the scheme of this book—I return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through Belgium.
We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Liége was the prime necessity to that advance.
We have also seen that meanwhile it waspossible and advisable to accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed, and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain bodies—not the bulk of the army—forward through the Ardennes, to command the passages of the Meuse above Liége, between that fortress and Namur.
This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.
Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance when the northern forts of Liége should be dominated; and on this same Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along the Gethe and thence towards Huy.
Of the outrages committed upon the civilian inhabitants in all these country-sides, the Government of which was neutral, and the territory of which was by the public law of Europe free not onlyfrom such novel crimes but from legitimate acts of war, I shall not speak, just as I shall not allude, save where they happen to have military importance, to the future increase of similar abominations which marked the progress of the campaign. For my only object in these pages is to lay before the reader a commentary which will explain the general strategy of the war.
Sketch 35Sketch 35.
Sketch 35.
While this advance line of cavalry was engaging in unimportant minor actions, or rather skirmishes (grossly exaggerated in the news of those days), the attack on the northern forts of Liége, upon which everything now depended, was opened. It was upon Thursday, August 13th, that the280 mm. howitzers opened upon Loncin. Other of the remaining forts were bombarded; but, as in the case of Fléron a week before, we need not consider the subsidiary operations, because everything depended upon the fort of Loncin, which, as the accompanying diagram shows, commanded the railway line westward from Liége. General Leman himself was within that work, the batteries against which were now operating fromwithinthe ring—that is, from the city itself, or in what soldiers technically call "reverse"—that is, from the side upon which no fort is expected to stand, the side which isexpected to defend and not to be attacked from. Whether Loncin held out the full forty-eight hours, or only forty, or only thirty-six, we do not know; but that moral factor to which I have already alluded, and which must be fully weighed in war, was again strengthened by the nature of such a resistance. For nearly all that garrison was dead and its commander found unconscious when the complete destruction of the work by the high explosive shells permitted the enemy to enter.
Sketch 36Sketch 36.
Sketch 36.
It was upon Saturday, the 15th of August, that the great bulk of the two main German armies set aside for passage through the Belgian Plain began to use the now liberated railway, and the week between that date and the first great shock upon the Sambre is merely a record of the almost uninterrupted advance, concentration, and supply of something not far short of half a million men coming forward in a huge tide over, above, and round on to, the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons, which was their ultimate objective, and upon which the Anglo-French body—perhaps half as numerous—had determined to stand.
Sketch 37Sketch 37.
Sketch 37.
The story of that very rapid advance is merely one of succeeding dates. By the 17th the front was at Tirlemont, by the 19th it was across the Dyle and running thence south to Wavre (the first army), the second army continuing south of this with a little east in it to a point in front of Namur. On the 20th there was enacted a scene of no military importance (save that it cost the invaders about a day), but of some moral value, because it strongly impressed the opinion in this country and powerfully affected the imagination ofEurope as a whole: I mean the triumphal march through Brussels.
Far more important than this display was the opening on the evening of the same day, Thursday, August 20th, of the first fire against the eastern defences of Namur. This fire was directed upon that evening against the two and a half miles of trench between the forts of Cognelée and Marchovelette, and in the morning of Friday, the 21st, the trenches were given up, and the German infantry was within the ring of forts north of the city. The point of Namur, as we shall see in a moment, was twofold. First, its fortifications, so long as they held out, commanded the crossings both of the Sambre and of the Meuse within the angle of which the French defensive lay; secondly, its fortified zone formed the support whereupon the whole French right reposed. It was this unexpected collapse of the Belgian defence of Namur which, coupled with the unexpected magnitude of the forces Germany had been able to bring through the Belgian plain, determined what was to follow.
Once Namur was entered, the reductionof the forts was not of immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Liége, to grasp a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position, and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two rivers Sambre and Meuse at their junction.
With this entry of the Germans into Namur, their passage of the lines upon Friday, August 21st, their capture of the bridgeheads on Saturday, August 22nd, we reach the beginning of those great operations which threatened for a moment to decide the war in the West, and to establish the German Empire in that position to attain which it had planned and forced the war upon its appointed day.
It behoves us before entering into the detail of this large affair to see the plan of it clearly before our eyes.
I have already described that general conception underlying the whole modern French school of strategy for which the best title (though one liable to abuse bytoo mechanical an interpretation) is "the open strategic square."
I have further warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice those lines remain only in the idea of the scheme of the whole, and are not to be discovered save in the loosest way from the actual positions of men upon the map.
We have seen that this "open strategic square" involved essentially two conceptions—the fixed "operative corner" and the swinging "manœuvring masses."
The manœuvring masses, at this moment when the great German blow fell upon the Sambre and the Meuse, and when Namur went down immediately before it, were (a) upon the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine, (b) in the centre of the country, (c) near the capital and to the west of it, and even, some of them, upon the sea.
The operative corner was this group ofarmies before Namur on the Sambre and Meuse, the 4th French Army under Langle, the 5th French Army under Lanrezac, the British contingent under French.
We know from what has been written above in this book that it is the whole business of an operative corner to "take on" superior numbers, and to hold them as well as possible, even though compelled to retreat, until the manœuvring masses can swing and come up in aid, and so pin the enemy.
We further know from what has gone before that the whole crux of this manœuvre lies in the power of the operative corner to stand the shock.
It was the business of the French in this operative corner before Namur and of their British Allies there to await and, if possible, to withstand by a careful choice of position the first shock of enemies who would certainly be numerically superior. It was the whole business of the German commanders to make the shock overwhelming, in order that the operative corner should be pounded to pieces, or should be surrounded and annihilated before the manœuvring masses could swingup in aid. Should this destruction of the operative corner take place before the manœuvring masses behind it could swing, the campaign in the West was lost to the Allies, and the Germans pouring in between the still separated corners of the square were the masters for good.
It behoves us, therefore, if we desire to understand the campaign, to grasp how this operative corner stood, upon what defences it relied, in what force it was, what numbers it thought were coming against it, and what numbers were, as a fact, coming against it.
To get all this clear, it is best to begin with a diagram.
Suppose two lines perpendicular one to the other, and therefore forming a right angle, AB and BC. Suppose at their junction, B, a considerable zone or segment, SSS, of a circle, as shaded in the following diagram. Supposing the line AB to be protected along the outer half of it, AK, by no natural obstacle—the state of affairs which I have represented by a dotted line αγ; but suppose the second half of it, KB, should be protected by a natural obstacle, though not a very formidableone—such as I have represented by the continuous line γβ. Supposing the perpendicular line BC to be protected by a really formidable natural obstacle βδ, and supposing the shaded segment of the circle at B to represent a fortified zone (1) accessible to any one within the angle KBC, as from the arrow M; (2) inaccessible (until it was captured or forced) to any one coming from outside the angle, as from the arrows NNN; (3) containing within itself, protected by its ring of fortifications, passages, PP, for traversing the two natural obstacles, γβ and βδ, which meet at the point β.
Sketch 38Sketch 38.
Sketch 38.
There you have the elements of the position in which the advance corner of the great French square was situated just before it took the shock of the main German armies. The two lines AB and BC are the French and British armies lying behind the Sambre, γβ, and the Middle Meuse, βδ, respectively; but the line of the Sambre ceases to protect eastward along the dotted line αγ beyond the point up to which the river forms a natural obstacle, while from K to B the line is protected by the river Sambre itself. The more formidable obstacle, βδ, represents the great trench or ravine of the Meuse which stretches south from Namur. The town of Namur itself is at B, the junction of the two rivers; and the fortified zone, SSS, is the ring of forts lying far out all round Namur; while the passages, PP, over the obstacles contained within that fortified zone, and accessible to the peopleinsidethe angle from M, but not to the peopleoutsidethe angle from NNN, are the bridges across both the Sambre and the Meuse at Namur.
All this is, of course, put merely diagrammatically, and a diagram is something very distant from reality. The "openstrategic square" in practice comes to mean little more than two main elements—one the operative corner, the other a number of separate units disposed in all sorts of different places behind, and generally denominated "the manœuvring mass." If you had looked down from above at all the French armies towards the end of August, when the first great shock came, you would have seen nothing remotely resembling a square.