The role of the Crown Prince’s Fifth Army, together with the Fourth Army under the Duke of Württemberg, was to be the pivot of the right wing, moving slowly forward at the center as the right wing swung out and down in its great enveloping sweep. The Fourth Army was to advance through the northern Ardennes against Neufchâteau while the Fifth Army advanced through the southern Ardennes against Virton and the two French fortress towns, Longwy and Montmédy. The Crown Prince’s headquarters were at Thionville—called Diedenhofen by the Germans—where he dined on a manly soldier’s fare of cabbage soup, potatoes, and boiled beef with horseradish, eked out, as concession to a prince, by wild duck, salad, fruit, wine, coffee, and cigars. Surrounded by the “grave and gloomy” faces of the native population and envying the glory won at Liège and the progress of the right wing, the Crown Prince and his staff waited feverishly for action. At last marching orders came for August 19.
Opposite the Crown Prince’s Army was the French Third Army under General Ruffey. A lone apostle of heavy artillery, Ruffey was known, because of his eloquence on behalf of the big guns, as “le poète du canon.” He had dared not only to question the omnipotence of the 75s but also to propose the use of airplanes as an offensive arm and the creation of an airforce of 3,000 planes. The idea was not admired. “Tout ça, c’est du sport!” exclaimed General Foch in 1910. For use by the army, he had added, “l’avion c’est zéro!” Next year at maneuvers General Gallieni by using airplane reconnaissance captured a colonel of the Supreme War Council with all his staff. By 1914 the French Army was using airplanes, but General Ruffey was still regarded as having “too much imagination.” Besides, as he showed a disinclination to allow Staff officers to tell him what to do, he had made enemies at GQG before he ever entered the Ardennes. His headquarters were at Verdun, and his task was to throw the enemy back on Metz-Thionville and invest them there, retaking the Briey region in the course of his advance. While he folded back the enemy on the right of the German center his neighbor, the Fourth Army under General de Langle de Cary, would fold them back on the left. The two French armies would cleave their way through the middle and lop off the arm of the German right wing at the shoulder.
General de Langle, a veteran of 1870, had been retained in command despite his having reached the French age limit of sixty-four a month before the war. In appearance a sharp, alert bantam, alive with energy, he resembled Foch, and like him, always looked in photographs as if about to leap into action. General de Langle was ready, indeed aching, to leap now, and refused to be discouraged by disquieting news. His cavalry, in combat near Neufchâteau, had run into heavy opposition and had been forced to retire. A reconnaissance tour by a staff officer in an automobile had brought further warning. The officer had talked at Arlon to a worried official of the Luxembourg government who said the Germans were in the nearby forests “in strength.” On the way back the officer’s car was fired on but his reports to Fourth Army Headquarters were judged “pessimistic.” The mood was one of valor, not discretion. The moment had come to move fast, not hesitate. It was only after the battle that General de Langle remembered that he had disapproved of Joffre’s order to attack “without allowing me to take soundings first”; only afterward that he wrote, “GQG wanted surprise but it was we who were surprised.”
General Ruffey was more troubled than his neighbor. He took more seriously the reports brought in by Belgian peasants of Germans lodged among the woods and cornfields. When he told GQG his estimate of enemy strength opposing him, they paid no attention to him and did not, or so he was to claim, even read his reports.
Fog was thick from the ground up everywhere in the Ardennes on the morning of August 21. The German Fourth and Fifth Armies had been moving forward on the 19th and 20th, entrenching their positions as they advanced. A French attack was expected, although they did not know when or where. In the dense fog the French cavalry patrols sent ahead to scout the ground “might as well have been blindfolded.” The opposing armies, moving forward through the woods and between the hills, unable to see ahead more than a few paces, stumbled into each other before they knew what was in front of them. As soon as the first units established contact and commanders became aware that battle was erupting all around them, the Germans dug in. The French, whose officers in prewar training disdained to give the troops entrenching practice for fear of making them “sticky” and who carried as few picks and shovels as possible, threw themselves into attaque brusquée with the bayonet. They were mown down by machine guns. In some encounters the French 75s slaughtered German units who had likewise been taken by surprise.
On the first day the encounters were scattered and preliminary; on the 22nd the lower Ardennes was engulfed in full-scale battle. In separate combats at Virton and Tintigny and Rossignol and Neufchâteau guns roared and flared, men flung themselves at each other, the wounded fell, and the dead piled up. At Rossignol, Algerians of the French 3rd Colonial Division were surrounded by the VIth Corps of the Crown Prince’s Army and fought for six hours until the survivors were but a remnant. Their divisional commander, General Raffenel, and a brigade commander, General Rondoney, were both killed. In August 1914 general officers were casualties like ordinary soldiers.
At Virton the French VIth Corps under General Sarrail took a German corps in the flank with fire from its 75s. “The battlefield afterwards was an unbelievable spectacle,” reported a French officer dazed with horror. “Thousands of dead were still standing, supported as if by a flying buttress made of bodies lying in rows on top of each other in an ascending arc from the horizontal to an angle of 60°.” Officers from St. Cyr went into battle wearing white-plumed shakos and white gloves; it was considered “chic” to die in white gloves. An unidentified French sergeant kept a diary: “the guns recoil at each shot. Night is falling and they look like old men sticking out their tongues and spitting fire. Heaps of corpses, French and German, are lying every which way, rifles in hand. Rain is falling, shells are screaming and bursting—shells all the time. Artillery fire is the worst. I lay all night listening to the wounded groaning—some were German. The cannonading goes on. Whenever it stops we hear the wounded crying from all over the woods. Two or three men go mad every day.”
At Tintigny a German officer also kept a diary. “Nothing more terrible could be imagined,” he wrote. “We advanced much too fast—a civilian fired at us—he was immediately shot—we were ordered to attack the enemy flank in a forest of beeches—we lost our direction—the men were done for—the enemy opened fire—shells came down on us like hail.”
The Crown Prince, not to be outdone by Rupprecht whose victories at Sarrebourg and Morhange were now known, urged his forces to match “the prodigies of valor and sacrifice” of their comrades. He had moved his headquarters to Esch in Luxembourg just across the river from Longwy and followed the battle on huge maps pinned to the walls. The suspense was torture; telephone communications with Coblenz were awful; OHL was “much too far back”; the struggle was frightful, the losses terrible; Longwy is not yet taken, he said, but “we feel we have checked the enemy’s offensive”; French units were reported retreating in disorder, not in planned retreat.
This was so. At the last moment before the battle General Ruffey was enraged to discover that three reserve divisions, altogether about 50,000 men, which formed part of his army were no longer part of it. Joffre had sequestered them, in response to the threat of Rupprecht’s offensive, to form a special Army of Lorraine made up of these three divisions and four reserve divisions which he collected elsewhere. The Army of Lorraine under General Maunoury began to take form on August 21 between Verdun and Nancy to back up Castelnau’s army and protect the right flank of the advance through the Ardennes. It was one of the last minute rearrangements which proved the saving flexibility of the French Army but at the moment had a negative result. It cut into Ruffey’s strength and kept seven divisions immobile at a vital time. Ruffey always claimed afterward that if he had had the extra 50,000 men to whom he had already
issued orders he could have won the Battle of Virton. At the time his anger proved too much for tact. When a staff officer from GQG came to his headquarters during the battle, Ruffey exploded: “You people at GQG never read the reports we send you. You are as ignorant as an oyster of all that the enemy has in his bag .… Tell the Generalissimo his operations are worse than 1870—he sees absolutely nothing—incapacity everywhere.” This was not a message to be welcomed upon Olympus where Joffre and his attendant deities were more inclined to lay the blame on the incapacity of commanders and troops—Ruffey among them.
On the same day, August 22, General de Langle was experiencing a commander’s most agonizing moments—waiting for news from the front. Chaining himself “in anguish” to his headquarters at Stenay on the Meuse, twenty miles from Sedan, he received bad reports coming hard upon each other. The instinct to rush to the scene of combat could only be checked by reminding himself that a general must not lose himself among his units but can only direct their movements at a distance. To maintain sangfroid before his staff and “that mastery of himself indispensable to a chief at critical moments” was as difficult.
As the day ended, the terrible casualties of the Colonial Corps became known. Another corps, through mishandling by its commander, as De Langle believed, was in retreat, endangering its neighbors. “Serious check at Tintigny; all troops engaged with unsatisfactory results,” he had to report to Joffre, adding that losses and disorganization of his units made it impossible to carry out his orders for August 23. Joffre simply refused to believe it. With serene complacence he reported to Messimy, even after receiving De Langle’s report, that the armies had been placed “where the enemy is most vulnerable and so as to assure ourselves of numerical superiority.” GQG’s work was done. Now it was up to the troops and their commanders “who have the advantage of that superiority.” He repeated the assurance to De Langle, insisting that as he had no more than three enemy corps in front of him, he must resume the offensive.
In fact the French Armies in the Ardennes enjoyed no superiority, but the reverse. The Crown Prince’s Army included, besides the three corps which the French had identified, two reserve corps with the same numerals as the active corps, as did the Duke of Württemberg’s Army. Together they massed a greater number of men and guns than the French Third and Fourth Armies.
Fighting continued during August 23, but by the end of the day it was known the French arrow had broken against its target. The enemy had not been “vulnerable” in the Ardennes after all. Despite the massive strength of his right wing his center had not been weak. The French had not “cut them in half.” With the cry of “En avant!” with waving sword, with all the ardor on which the French Army prided itself, officers led their companies to the attack—against an enemy who dug in and used his field guns. Field gray merging into the fog and shadows had beaten the too visible pantalon rouge; steady, solid methodical training had beaten cran. Both French Armies in the Ardennes were in retreat, the Third falling back on Verdun and the Fourth on Stenay and Sedan. Briey’s iron ore was not regained and for four more years would serve to forge German munitions for the long war which, without that iron, Germany could not have fought.
As yet on the evening of August 23 Joffre did not realize the full extent of the defeat in the Ardennes. The offensive had been “momentarily checked,” he telegraphed to Messimy, but “I will make every effort to renew the offensive.”
The Crown Prince’s Army on that day passed Longwy, leaving its fortress to be taken by siege troops, and was advancing with orders to head off the French Third Army from Verdun. The Prince who less than a month ago had been cautioned by his father to obey his Chief of Staff in everything and “do as he tells you” was “deeply moved” on this day of triumph to receive a telegram from “Papa William” awarding him, like Rupprecht, the Iron Cross, First and Second Class. The telegram was handed around among the staff to be read by all. Soon the Prince would be handing out medals himself, in a “dazzling white tunic,” as an admirer describes him later in the war, walking between two lines of soldiers distributing Iron Crosses from a basket carried by an aide. By that time, an Austrian ally would report, the Iron Cross, Second Class, could only be avoided by committing suicide. Today the “hero of Longwy,” as he was soon to be acclaimed, had won glory equal to Rupprecht’s; and if, amid the adulation, the ghost of Schlieffen grumbled at “ordinary frontal victories” without envelopment or annihilation or muttered scornful references to a “wild hunt for medals,” no one heard him.
Meanwhile on the Sambre, Lanrezac’s Fifth Army had been ordered to attack across the river and, “resting on the fortress of Namur,” with its left passing by Charleroi, was to take as its objective the enemy “northern group.” One corps of the Fifth Army was to be held in the angle of the rivers to protect the line of the Meuse against a German attack from the east. Although Joffre had no authority to command the British, his order requested Sir John French “to cooperate in this action” by advancing “in the general direction of Soignies,” that is, across the Mons Canal. The canal is an extension of the Sambre which carries navigation to the Channel by way of the Scheldt. It formed part of a continuous waterway, made by the Sambre from Namur to Charleroi and by the canal from Charleroi to the Scheldt, which lay across the path of the German right wing.
According to the German timetable, von Kluck’s Army was to reach the water barrier by August 23, while Bülow’s Army, which would have to reduce Namur on the way, would reach it earlier and be across it at about the same time.
According to the British timetable laid down by Sir John French’s marching orders, the BEF would also reach the canal on the 23rd, the same day as the Germans. Neither army was yet aware of the coincidence. The heads of the British columns were scheduled to reach the line earlier, that is, by the night of the 22nd. On the 21st, the day Lanrezac was ordered to cross the Sambre, the BEF, which had been expected to “cooperate in the action,” was a full day’s march behind the French. Instead of fighting together as planned, the two armies, because of the late British start and poor liaison resulting from the unhappy relations of their commanders, were to fight two separate battles, Charleroi and Mons, while their headquarters were only thirty-five miles apart.
In General Lanrezac’s heart the doctrine of the offensive was already dead. He could not see the whole picture, so clear now, of three German armies converging upon his front but he could feel their presence. Hausen’s Third Army was coming at him from the east, Bülow’s Second Army from the north, and Kluck’s First Army was advancing against the half-size British Army on his left. He did not know their names or numbers but he knew they were there. He knew or deduced from reconnaissance that greater numbers were coming at him than he could dispose of. Evaluation of enemy strength is not an absolute, but a matter of piecing together scraps of reconnaissance and intelligence to form a picture, if possible a picture to fit preconceived theories or to suit the demands of a particular strategy. What a staff makes out of the available evidence depends upon the degree of optimism or pessimism prevailing among them, on what they want to believe or fear to believe, and sometimes upon the sensitivity or intuition of an individual.
To Lanrezac and to GQG the same reports of German strength west of the Meuse conveyed different pictures. GQG saw a weak German center in the Ardennes. Lanrezac saw a great wave rolling down with the Fifth Army directly in its path. GQG estimated German strength west of the Meuse at 17 or 18 divisions. Opposed they counted Lanrezac’s 13 divisions, a separate group of two reserve divisions, 5 British divisions, and 1 Belgian division at Namur, a total of 21 giving what they believed a comfortable superiority in numbers. Joffre’s plan was for this force to hold the Germans behind the Sambre until the French Third and Fourth Armies should break through the German center in the Ardennes and then for all together to advance northward and throw the Germans out of Belgium.
The British Staff, dominated in fact if not in rank by Henry Wilson, agreed with GQG’s es
timate. In his diary for August 20, Wilson put down the same figure of 17 or 18 divisions for the Germans west of the Meuse, and happily concluded, “The more the better, as it will weaken their center.” Back in England, far from the front, Lord Kitchener felt anxiety and foreboding. On August 19 he telegraphed Sir John French that the German sweep north and west of the Meuse, about which he had warned him, “seems definitely to be developing.” He asked to be kept informed of all reports, and next day repeated the request. In truth, at that moment German strength west of the Meuse was not 17 or 18 divisions but 30: 7 active and 5 reserve corps, 5 cavalry divisions and other units. Von Hausen’s Army, which at this time had not yet crossed the Meuse but which formed part of the right wing, was to add another 4 corps or 8 divisions. While for the Battle of the Frontiers as a whole, German numerical superiority was one and a half to one, the right wing’s preponderance was nearer two to one.
The focus of this force was Lanrezac’s Army, and he knew it. He believed the British, after his disastrous interview with their commander, to be both unready and unreliable. He knew the Belgian defense to be cracking at Namur. One of the new corps assigned to him in the recent exchange of units which was to hold his left flank west of Charleroi had not yet come into position on August 21. If he attacked across the Sambre as ordered, he believed he would be outflanked by the German forces pouring down on his left who would then have nothing between them and Paris. The guiding principle of all that he had ever taught at St. Cyr and the Ecole Supérieure, the principle that trained the French Army, was to “attack the enemy wherever met.” He looked at it now, and saw the face of a skeleton.