"The Guns of August"

[fiefoe]

One of the many pleasures of this book is all those deft character sketches it serves us.

• Gluttony for work and a granite character had overcome lack of a “von” to win for Captain Erich Ludendorff the right to wear the coveted red stripes of the General Staff... None of the usual reminiscences of friends and family or personal stories or sayings accumulated around him; even as he grew in eminence he moved without attendant anecdotes, a man without a shadow.
• The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke’s plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson’s nor Lanrezac alter Joffre’s.
• The will to defend the country outran the means. Of machine guns, the essential weapon for defense, the Belgian Army’s proportion per man was half that of the German Army.
• Cheers greeted the machine guns pulled, like the milk carts of Flanders, by dogs.
• Such was the perfection of the equipment and the precision of the marching that the invaders appeared to be on parade.
• leather-bound maps covering the particular regiment’s designated line of march so that no German would ever be in the predicament of the British officer who complained that battle is a process which always takes place at the junction of two maps.
• The prodigal spending of lives by all the belligerents that was to mount and mount in senseless excess to hundreds of thousands at the Somme, to over a million at Verdun began on that second day of the war at Liège. In their furious frustration at the first check, the Germans threw men recklessly against the forts in whatever numbers would be necessary to take the objective on schedule.
• Lanrezac put his objections in a letter to Joffre which was to become a primary document in the mountain of criticism and controversy that after the war rose over the grave of Plan 17. Lanrezac’s tone in the letter, as a fellow officer said, was less a bold challenge of a dominant plan than a professor’s critique of a pupil’s thesis.
• GQG adopted a principle from the Japanese, to wage war “silently and anonymously.”... Ministers protested that they knew more of the movements of the German armies than of the French.
• General Gallieni was one. “What is happening behind the German front?” he worried. “What massive concentration is gathering behind Liège? With the Germans one must always expect the gigantic.”
• Sir Ian Hamilton, reported that the only thing the cavalry could do in the face of entrenched machine guns was to cook rice for the infantry, causing the War Office to wonder if his months in the Orient had not affected his mind.
• Lack of conscription was the most striking of all differences between the British and continental armies.
• In fact, like King Albert, Kitchener saw the assault on Liège casting ahead of it the shadow of Schlieffen’s right-wing envelopment. He did not think Germany had violated Belgium and brought England in against her in order to make what Lloyd George had called “just a little violation” through the Ardennes.
• The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages. On the road east from Nancy the French passed a stone marker inscribed, HERE IN THE YEAR 362 JOVINUS DEFEATED THE TEUTONIC HORDES.
• He was scraping the bottom of the barrel for a makeshift defense against the German right wing rather than subtract a single division from his cherished offensive. Not yet was he ready to acknowledge that the enemy’s will was being imposed on him.
• all the Lanrezacs, Gallienis, and reconnaissance reports in the world could shake GQG’s central conviction that the greater the German right wing, the more promising the prospects for the French seizure of initiative through the center.
• The wickedly unobliging resistance of the Belgians and visions of the Russian “steam roller” crashing through East Prussia further harassed OHL.
• That vexing problem of war presented by the refusal of the enemy to behave as expected in his own best interest beset them.
• But once divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith. From then on, OHL was lured by opportunity on the left wing.
• von Stein replied with something less than the authority of a modern Alexander. “You must take the responsibility. Make your decision as your conscience tells you.” “It is already made. We attack!” “Na!” answered von Stein, using a vernacular expression implying a shrug, “then strike and God be with you!” Thus the sack maneuver was abandoned.
• During the day of August 18 the King’s decision was changed several times in the agony of indecision between desire to save the Belgian Army from annihilation and reluctance to give up good positions just when French help might be arriving.
• King Albert’s withdrawal saved his army and kept it in being to become a menace to von Kluck’s rear when later he turned south for the march on Paris.
• von Kluck’s cavalry reconnaissance, with that marvelous human capacity to see what you expect to see even if it is not there, duly reported the British to be disembarking at Ostend, Calais, and Dunkirk on August 13.
• In Belgium there are many towns whose cemeteries today have rows and rows of memorial stones inscribed with a name, the date 1914, and the legend, repeated over and over: “Fusillé par les Allemands” (Shot by the Germans). In many are newer and longer rows with the same legend and the date 1944.
• Villages where acts of “hostility” were committed against German soldiers “will be burned.” If such an act took place “on the road between two villages, the same methods will be applied to the inhabitants of both.”
• The exhibition of equipment designed to awe the onlookers accomplished its object. Drawn by four horses, the kitchen wagons with fires lighted and chimneys smoking were no less astonishing than the trucks fitted out as cobblers’ shops with cobblers standing at their benches hammering at bootsoles, and soldiers whose boots were being repaired standing on the running boards.
• All these “gymnastics so painfully practised at maneuvers,” as a French soldier said bitterly afterward, proved grim folly on the battlefield. With machine guns the enemy needed only 8 seconds to fire, not 20.
• It died on a field in Lorraine where at the end of the day nothing was visible but corpses strewn in rows and sprawled in the awkward attitudes of sudden death as if the place had been swept by a malignant hurricane. It was one of those lessons, a survivor realized afterward, “by which God teaches the law to kings.”
• The power of the defense that was to transform the initial war of movement into a four-year war of position and eat up a generation of European lives revealed itself at Morhange.
• For four more years of relentless, merciless, useless killing the belligerents beat their heads against it. In the end it was Foch who presided over victory. By then the lesson learned proved wrong for the next war.
• Like him a poseur, fond of striking attitudes, he suffered from the compulsory filial antagonism usual to the eldest sons of kings, and expressed it in the usual manner: political rivalry and private dissipation.
• 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°.”
• OHL’s notion of British whereabouts was even dimmer than the Allies’ notion of the whereabouts of the German right wing. “It appears from here that no landings of great importance have taken place,” said OHL,
• A delay that was to cost lives was due to the strange choice of location for Smith-Dorrien’s corps headquarters. They were in a modest private country house called rather grandly the Château de la Roche at Sars-la-Bruyère, a hamlet without telegraph or telephone communication on a back country road difficult enough to find in the daytime, much more so in the middle of the night. Even Marlborough and Wellington had not disdained more convenient if less gentlemanly headquarters on the main road, one in an abbey and the other in a tavern.
• French casualties during those four days amounted to more than 140,000, or twice the number of the whole British Expeditionary Force in France at the time.
• No one could realize that for numbers engaged and for rate and number of losses suffered over a comparable period of combat, the greatest battle of the war had already been fought.

• Meeting his commissariat staff for the first time as Commander in Chief, the Grand Duke said to them, “Gentlemen, no stealing.”
• with that characteristic touch of late-Romanov rashness, the government, by ukase of August 22, extended prohibition for the duration of the war. As the sale of vodka was a state monopoly, this act at one stroke cut off a third of the government’s income. It was well known, commented a bewildered member of the Duma, that governments waging war seek by a variety of taxes and levies to increase income, “but never since the dawn of history has a country in time of war renounced the principal source of its revenue.”
• German soldiers, posted as informers, were found dressed as peasants, even as peasant women.
• the Russians were dependent on German telegraph lines and offices, and when these were found destroyed they resorted to sending messages by wireless, in clear, because their divisional staffs lacked codes and cryptographers.
• Little reconnaissance or artillery spotting was accomplished by airplane, most of the Air Force having been sent to the Austrian front. At sight of an airplane, the first they had ever seen, Russian soldiers, regardless of its identity, blazed away with their rifles, convinced that such a clever invention as a flying machine could only be German.
• on August 15 Japan declared for the Allies, freeing large numbers of Russian forces. In making or keeping friends, a task that forever eluded it, German diplomacy had failed again. Japan had her own ideas of her best interests in a European war, and these were well understood by their intended victim. “Japan is going to take advantage of this war to gain control of China,” foretold President Yuan Shi-kai.
• As morning broke, combat spread like a licking fire over the front. Russian field batteries poured shells on the advancing gray lines and saw the white road ahead suddenly turn gray with the bodies of the fallen.
• François’ two divisions cut up the Russian 28th Division, inflicting a casualty rate of 60 per cent, virtual annihilation.
• Clausewitz. “The whole weight of all that is sensuous in an army,” he wrote in discussing the problem of pursuit, “presses for rest and refreshment. It requires exceptional vigor on the part of a commander to see and feel beyond the present moment and to act at once to attain those results which at the time seem to be the mere embellishments of victory—the luxury of triumph.”
• The orders he issued, besides directing Hoffmann and Grünert to meet him at Marienburg, were for François’ Corps to be sent by train to support Scholtz’s XXth Corps on the southern front. Mackensen’s and von Below’s two corps were to complete their disengagement and rest and refit through August 23. These were the same as Hoffmann’s orders, thus realizing the ideal of the German War College in which all students, given a problem, come up with the identical solution. It is also possible that Ludendorff saw a telegraphed copy of Hoffmann’s orders.
• Almost the worst confusion was in the signal corps. At the telegraph office in Warsaw a staff officer discovered to his horror a pile of telegrams addressed to the Second Army lying unopened and unforwarded because no communication had been established with field headquarters.
• revealed that he had misinterpreted Scholtz’s backward wheel as full retreat and gave exact directions and times of movement for the pursuit of what he believed was a defeated foe. No such boon had been granted a commander since a Greek traitor guided the Persians around the pass at Thermopylae. The very completeness of the messages made Major General Grünert, Hoffmann’s immediate superior, suspicious.
• as Rennenkampf had kept no contact with the Germans after the Battle of Gumbinnen his reports of their movements were an amiable fantasy.
• With a rear commander’s contempt for a front commander’s caution, Jilinsky took this to be a desire to go on the defensive, and “rudely” replied to the officer: “To see the enemy where he does not exist is cowardice. I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward. I insist that he continue the offensive.” His strategy, according to a colleague, seemed designed for Poddavki, a Russian form of checkers in which the object is to lose all one’s men.
• The German High Command, with Hindenburg ponderously calm, Ludendorff grim and tense, and Hoffmann behind them, a mocking shadow,
• The battle was in its third day. Two armies, now totally committed, surged and gripped and broke apart and clashed again in confused and separate combats over a front of forty miles. A regiment advanced, its neighbor was thrown back, gaps appeared, the enemy thrust through or, unaccountably, did not. Artillery roared, cavalry squadrons, infantry units, heavy horse-drawn field-gun batteries moved and floundered through villages and forests, between lakes, across fields and roads. Shells smashed into farmhouses and village streets. A battalion advancing under cover of shellfire disappeared behind a curtain of smoke and mist to some unknown fate. Columns of prisoners herded to the rear blocked the advancing troops. Brigades took ground or yielded it, crossed each other’s lines of communication, became tangled up with the wrong division. Field commanders lost track of their units, staff cars sped about, German scout planes flew overhead trying to gather information, army commanders struggled to find out what was happening, and issued orders which might not be received or carried out or conform to realities by the time they reached the front. Three hundred thousand men flailed at each other, marched and tiredly countermarched, fired their guns, got drunk if they were lucky enough to occupy a village or sat on the ground in the forest with a few companions while night came; and the next day the struggle went on and the great battle of the Eastern Front was fought out.