A Famous Week In History 1914 -- September 5 -12, 1914

There’s a kind of scheduled ritual I find myself settling into each year during the summer. The days are longer and even after a day’s work there is time in the evening to look back. June 28 was the terrible day in 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, Bosnia, killing both of them. Years ago I had to make an effort to remember the day as it approached, but now there is no escaping it. The assassination set in motion a crisis that simmered all through July, ending in mobilization and the clash of arms in the first days of August, 1914. Toward the end of June I usually pick up one of the memorable histories of those days. This year it is Max Hastings’ Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War. Knopf published it in 2013. In these pages one finds great drama, desperate struggles, villains, heroes and sometimes brilliance.

Battle of the Frontiers 

I start to read about the diplomatic crisis and the cables and responses that went back and forth between emperors and the Tsar and presidents and prime ministers and foreign secretaries. We have near-perfect knowledge now of just how the calamity developed in the heat of that summer. Europe had been an armed camp for many years by the time the Archduke went to visit Bosnia to show the flag of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. When a Serb fanatic touched a spark to the tinder, the alliance system crafted to keep the balance of power in Europe provided a straight road to war. Millions on all sides joined the fray.

The Austrians and Russians and Germans and the French and then Britain mobilized their forces in the first days of August 1914, then secret plans many years in the making were put into play. Austria focused on the Serbs and the Russians moved toward Austria and the German lands in East Prussia. The French moved into Lorraine because it was the shortest way to get to Germany. Britain moved her small army across the Channel to stand with the French. The Germans moved north and then west, attacking Belgium and violating her neutrality before turning west and then southwest into the Battle of the Frontiers and a full-blown invasion of France from the northeast. Along the Belgian frontier and then in northern France, the French and British resisted when possible but soon found it necessary to fall back before the massive German attack. They retreated, but always maintained good order. During the last three weeks of August both sides fought hard, trading occasional maulings with terrible casualty rates, but still moving. August 22 was the worst day of the war for the French, a single day when 27,000 French soldiers died in German attacks.

The Battle of the Marne

The German plan made many years before and refined annually called for German forces to carry out a huge sweeping attack from Belgium across northern France, pushing around Paris on the west side, then turning east to defeat the French army in its traditional operation area in the east. The Germans followed this plan carefully, forcing the French and British to fall back steadily, retreating closer and closer to Paris. It appeared that nothing could stop the German onslaught as it approached the French capital.

With the rapid German advance came growing confidence that it would soon be over. The French armies would be boxed into their eastern trap where they could be destroyed or forced to surrender, as had been done in 1870. But the Germans were getting tired, too. They had been on the attack almost every day for nearly a month. The French and British had retreated two hundred miles from the Belgian border to the Marne. The Germans had pushed them back that far. With the final defeat of the French so close at hand, why not skip driving around the west side of Paris to encircle it, then just turn south and southeast to finish off the French forces and be done with it?

On August 25, in a fit of confidence, top German officers began to seriously consider turning directly south to finish the campaign, and by August 27^th had decided to go ahead with it. A series of miscommunications and false reports gave them even more confidence that it would work and save time, too. The turn began as French and British forces continued falling back to the banks of the Marne. On August 30 Joffre, the French commander in chief, looked at his intelligence reports and immediately saw the turn for what it was. Thinking the war was about over, the Germans had turned south, exposing the right flank of an entire German army to attack from the vicinity of Paris. If French forces could be pulled from the east and moved around to Paris without alerting the Germans, and if the Germans kept moving, a great opportunity would be handed to the French.

The dramatic reversal became known as the Miracle of the Marne

The French mounted a herculean effort to move forces from south and east of the advancing Germans and back toward Paris, where they formed an entirely new army, the French 6^th. The Germans kept moving southward for several days, exposing more and more of their flank to the French massing in the capital. By now everyone was exhausted, but French troops were force marched and driven and marshalled even in taxicabs to be in position by September 5 and 6.

In the middle of continuing euphoria over the anticipated French defeat, the German armies pushed forward. When the French launched their attacks on the 5^th and 6^th, they were barely noticed. More French troops flowed into the attack. The British forces hesitated, then joined the push forward. By the time the Germans realized what they had done, it was too late. The French Sixth Army smashed the German flank and kept going. With great alarm and near panic, the Germans halted their attacks and immediately began a hurried retreat in the direction they had just come while at the same time trying to keep the French from encircling them. In less than a week the great victory had been snatched from the German generals. They fled. The other German armies also turned around to make it a general retreat. The dramatic reversal became known as the Miracle of the Marne. It was a miracle made of German hubris countered with French grit and skilled military dexterity. It was an immortal moment.

So the great German attack fell apart. Because the exposed flank was so long when the French attacks began, the Germans had to withdraw hastily. When they were finally out of danger of being catastrophically defeated, the German withdrawal slowed. French and British troops were so exhausted that they could not pursue as fast as their enemies were withdrawing because the Germans outran them.

In other times in other wars, the attackers might have gone home, but not this time. The Germans withdrew far enough to be out of reach of their pursuers, then looked for a place to stop. They found a high ridge stretching across northeast France near the Belgian border in Artois and Picardy with the line finally stretched across the flat north European plain into Belgian territory ending at the North Sea. It was a line that could be defended reasonably well, the Germans decided, until they could catch their breath and prepare to resume an attack against France.

This temporary defensive line stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea became the near-permanent line of the Western Front. For all of 1915, 1916, 1917, and until March 1918, the line moved very little. What had from the start been a war of movement suddenly became until March 1918 a static war in which huge armies fought over tortured ground for little or no gain.

Some key features made a perfect setup for a nightmare conflict. With the Germans still occupying territory in France and Belgium, it became necessary for France and Britain to try to push them back into Germany. This meant that the Allies would have to attack strong German positions on high ground, and they did so at great cost for more than three years, but with little to show for it.

It was the first large scale war in which all sides had fully industrialized economic capabilities for armament and food production. Ammunition and artillery shell production skyrocketed along with weapons like machine guns and aircraft. Eventually, to try to deal with the stalemate, weapons like poison gas and tanks would be introduced. It became a catastrophe, indeed.

But in the last days of August and the first days of September, 1914, in the initial throes of a monumental conflict, the French noticed an opportunity which postponed a German victory in front of Paris for long enough to move it to the margins of France. Although neither side could move it far from the new line of the Western Front for more than three years, in time the Germans became so exhausted and depleted that their final effort to resume the attack in 1918 was stopped for good. When the Allies began to push them back steadily toward Belgium and Germany itself, the Germans decided they had better opt for an armistice. After unspeakable bloodshed and horror, the war ended on French terms.

Every year in these warm days of late summer, I take time to ponder the deepening crisis, the mobilizations, and the Miracle of the Marne.