"The Guns of August"

Tuchman wrote rather touchingly of this review "To elicit perfect comprehension is perhaps to be expected only once":
__ a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent, controlled and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgment—
__ For in hard sculptured prose this book fixes the moments that have led inexorably to our own time. It places our dread day in long perspective, arguing that if most of the world’s men, women and children are soon to be burned to atoms, the annihilation would seem to proceed directly out of the mouths of the guns that spoke in August 1914.

• The war was to be, wrote Thomas Mann, “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers. The German soul,” he explained, “is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization for is not peace an element of civil corruption?” This concept, a mirror image of the essential German militarist theory that war is ennobling, was not very far from the raptures of Rupert Brooke and was widely held at the time by numbers of respectable people, among them, Theodore Roosevelt.
• The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp, and decisive.
• Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it. As Shaw said, they were a people with a contempt for common sense.
• The Germans were obsessively concerned about violations of international law. They succeeded in overlooking the violation created by their presence in Belgium in favor of the violation committed, as they saw it, by Belgians resisting their presence.
• Together the two parts established the corollary: that German reprisals were righteous and legal, regardless of degree.
• Ludendorff called it “disgusting.” He whose name was soon to become a byword for trickery, violence, and cunning
• he said to them, “A dreadful thing has occurred at Louvain. Our General there has been shot by the son of the Burgomaster. The population has fired on our troops.” He paused, looked at his visitors, and finished, “And now of course we have to destroy the city.” Mr. Whitlock was to hear so often the story of one or another German general being shot by the son or sometimes the daughter of a burgomaster that it seemed to him the Belgians must have bred a special race of burgomasters’ children like the Assassins of Syria.
• Matthias Erzberger. Leader of the Catholic Centrum Party and rapporteur of the Military Affairs Committee, he was the Chancellor’s right-hand man and closest associate in the Reichstag. A shrewd and able opportunist who represented whatever opinion was dominant, he combined energy and intelligence with a political flexibility unseen in Europe since Talleyrand’s. It was said of him that he had “no convictions but only appetites.”
• “The whole principle of naval fighting,” Fisher said in the naval equivalent of a papal bull, “is to be free to go anywhere with every damned thing the Navy possesses.” Translated into practical terms this meant that the navy must be superior everywhere at once or wherever it was likely to encounter the enemy.
• If the Kaiser had confined his reading to The Golden Age, Kenneth Grahame’s dreamlike story of English boyhood in a world of cold adults,
• Bismarck had disapproved of adulterating power on land by a maritime adventure that would add an enemy upon the sea. Wilhelm would not listen. He was bewitched by Mahan and tangled in the private jealousies of his love and hate for seafaring England
• it was hoped to keep the German fleet intact as a bargaining factor to bring the English to terms, a theory which Bethmann strongly supported and the Kaiser was happy to embrace. As time went on and victory went glimmering, the desire to carry the fleet safe and sound through the war for bargaining purposes at the peace table became even more embedded.
• Britain as spokesman for the Allies on naval policy composed an affirmative reply which, by reserving certain rights “essential to the efficient conduct of their naval operations,” said Yes and meant No.
• Holding these views, Wilson nevertheless stood to the last, a Casablanca on the burning deck of neutrality.
• Raging, Messimy protested that, as Paris belonged to the Zone of the Interior rather than the Zone of the Armies, the 61st and 62nd were under his command, not Joffre’s, and could not be removed from the Paris garrison without his permission and that of the Premier and the President of the Republic.
• At 1:00 A.M. Smith-Dorrien, having been in combat for the last four of the six days he had been in France, reached Noyon and found everyone at GHQ in bed asleep.
• Kluck’s Army on the rim of the wheel covered 30 kilometers or more a day and in some forced marches 40.
• In Joffre’s opinion, a commander knowing his orders and his duty could have no further cause for disquiet, and he might have said to Lanrezac what he was one day to say to Pétain when giving him orders to hold Verdun under the heaviest bombardment in history, “Eh bien, mon ami, maintenant vous êtes tranquille.”
• Bridges wished desperately for a band to rouse the two hundred or three hundred dispirited men lying about in the square. “Why not? There was a toy shop handy which provided my trumpeter and myself with a tin whistle and a drum and we marched round and round the fountain where the men were lying like the dead playing the British Grenadiers and Tipperary and beating the drum like mad.” The men sat up, began to laugh, then cheer, then one by one stood up, fell in and “eventually we moved off slowly into the night to the music of our improvised band, now reinforced with a couple of mouth organs.”
• Having evidently written or signed this report in one of the extreme swings of his unreliable temperament, Sir John reverted to antipathy, did not rest until he succeeded in having Smith-Dorrien recalled in 1915,
• For one August in its history Paris was French—and silent. The sun shone, fountains sparkled in the Rond Point, trees were green, the quiet Seine flowed by unchanging, brilliant clusters of Allied flags enhanced the pale gray beauty of the world’s most beautiful city.
• Doubting Lanrezac’s mood, Joffre arrived early in the morning at Laon, now Lanrezac’s headquarters, to lend him sangfroid out of his own bottomless supply.
• Beneath them in the same silent calm, Joffre sat watching Lanrezac dictate orders and conduct the battle. He stayed for three hours without saying a word until, satisfied that Lanrezac was displaying “authority and method,” he felt able to leave for a good lunch at the station
• During this period, the “most tragic in all French history,” as its chief investigator was to call it, Joffre did not panic like Sir John French, or waver like Moltke or become momentarily unnerved like Haig or Ludendorff or succumb to pessimism like Prittwitz. What went on behind that opaque exterior he never showed. If he owed his composure to a failure of imagination, that was fortunate for France.
• If danger did not strengthen Joffre’s judgment in any way, it did call forth a certain strength of soul or of character.
• Joffre knew well enough that the German objective was the French Armies, not the government, but as the battlefield neared Paris, the presence of the government in the Zone of the Armies would tend to blur the lines of authority. Its withdrawal would remove a source of interference and leave GQG with enhanced power.
• “Paris cannot hold out and you should make ready to leave as soon as possible,” Gallieni replied. Desiring, no less than Joffre, to unsaddle himself of the government, he found the advice painless.
• Up to then the truth of the German advance was concealed by—to use Mr. Asquith’s exquisite phrase—“patriotic reticence.”
• In any event, inspired by Sir John’s aura of irritability, everyone—French as well as British—continued to treat him with the utmost tact while in fact retaining very little confidence in him.
• but it was not until December 1915 that Sir John’s own machinations against Kitchener, conducted in a manner, as Lord Birkenhead was to say, “neither decorous, fastidious nor loyal,” finally nerved the British government to remove him... book 1914 was published caused his countrymen to search helplessly for a polite equivalent of “lie” and moved even Mr. Asquith to use the phrase, “a travesty of the facts.”
• Toul and the Moselle line was “not without chances,” it required an extended effort that seemed “not justifiable” at this time. Moltke agreed—and did nothing. He could not nerve himself to call off the offensive that had already cost so much.
• After all, it had been proved in German war games that garrison forces inside an entrenched camp do not venture out until attacked,
• Ambassador Myron Herrick of the United States, his face all “puckered up,”... In later days, when friends who had lived through the first week of September in Paris used to count themselves a select number, Gallieni would say, “Don’t forget, there was also Herrick.”
• As once more the pins were moved, the track of Kluck’s turn appeared unmistakably on the map, and Clergerie and Girodon cried out together: “They offer us their flank! They offer us their flank!”
• Gallieni summoned his Chief of Staff, General Clergerie, to what Clergerie called “one of those long conferences he holds on grave issues—they usually last from two to five minutes.”
• In his fever to finish off the French, Kluck, besides wearing out his men, outstripped not only his supply trains but also his heavy artillery. His compatriot in East Prussia, General von François, would not budge until he had at hand all his artillery and ammunition wagons.
• Becoming angrier as he dictated, Kluck demanded to know how it was that “decisive victories” by the “other” armies—meaning Bülow—were always followed by “appeals for support.” Bülow was furious when his neighbor transformed “the echelon in rear of the Second Army prescribed by OHL into an echelon in advance.”
• Lanrezac’s sin was in having been right, all too vocally. He had been right from the beginning about the fatal underestimation of the German right wing as a result of which a fair part of France was now under the German boot. His decision to break off battle at Charleroi when threatened with double envelopment by Bülow’s and Hausen’s armies had saved the French left wing. As General von Hausen acknowledged after the war, this upset the whole German plan which had counted on enveloping the French left, and ultimately caused Kluck’s inward wheel in the effort to roll up the Fifth Army. Whether Lanrezac’s withdrawal came from fear or from wisdom is immaterial, for fear sometimes is wisdom.
• Moltke, unlike Joffre, may have had no confidence in his own star but neither did he have the veil that confidence can sometimes draw before the eyes, and so he saw things without illusion.
• After a thoughtful pause he went on: “We must not deceive ourselves. We have had success but not victory. Victory means annihilation of the enemy’s power of resistance. When a million men oppose each other in battle the victor has prisoners. Where are our prisoners?
• Dated September 4, a month from the day Belgium was invaded, it was an accurate appraisal of the situation. “The enemy,” it said, “has evaded the enveloping attack of the First and Second Armies and a part of his forces has joined up with the forces of Paris.” Enemy troops were being withdrawn from the Moselle front and moved westward “probably in order to concentrate superior forces in the region of Paris and threaten the right flank of the German Army.”
• As the only means of persuasion he could think of, Joffre sent a special copy of Order No. 6 by personal messenger to British Headquarters.
• Assuming that the German Armies “were everywhere advancing victoriously along the whole front”—it was the Germans’ habit to believe their own communiqués—he did not think
• Ordinarily the French language, especially in public pronouncements, requires an effort if it is not to sound splendid, but this time the words were flat, almost tired; the message hard and uncompromising:.. That was all; the time for splendor was past. It did not shout “Forward!” or summon men to glory. After the first thirty days of war in 1914, there was a premonition that little glory lay ahead.
• reinforced by the IVth Corps, of whom 6,000 detraining in Paris were rushed to the front by Gallieni in taxis, and managed to hold his ground.
• The enemy, suddenly halted as if by a stone wall springing up overnight, felt it too.
• Russia’s loyal launching of an unready offensive drew those troops away and was given tribute by Colonel Dupont, French Chief of Intelligence. “Let us render to our Allies,” he said, “the homage that is their due, for one of the elements of our victory was their debacle.”
• Ironically, both (Lanrezac's) decision at Charleroi and his replacement by Franchet d’Esperey were equally necessary to the counter-offensives.
• where at the given time all 600 were lined up in perfect order. Gallieni, called to inspect them, though rarely demonstrative, was enchanted.
• Running from Switzerland to the Channel like a gangrenous wound across French and Belgian territory, the trenches determined the war of position and attrition, the brutal, mud-filled, murderous insanity known as the Western Front that was to last for four more years.
• the mirage of a better world glimmered beyond the shell-pitted wastes and leafless stumps that had once been green fields and waving poplars.