"My center is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking."
– Attributed to Ferdinand Foch, First Battle of the Marne
The American Monument in Meaux, France commemorates the 1914 Battle of the Marne (Tom Douglas photo)
On the morning of August 26 the British troops prepared for battle near the French town of Le Cateau, hastily digging rifle trenches and setting up their field artillery.
During the clash that followed – the biggest battle on European soil for British forces since Waterloo – they inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans, but nearly 8000 of their own men were killed, wounded, missing, or taken prisoner. Outnumbered as always and under constant pressure from German artillery, the British flanks began to break by mid-afternoon, when a French cavalry unit arrived in time to support their withdrawal to the town of Saint- Quentin. They had to leave thirty-eight artillery pieces behind but the gunners managed to disable them before their retreat along roads clogged with refugees fleeing the oncoming Germans.
On August 29, on orders from Commander-in-Chief Joffre, a corps of the French Fifth Army launched a counter-attack against the Germans in the area around Saint-Quentin and Guise to cover the BEF withdrawal and hold a line north of the Oise River. Led by General Louis Franchet d’Esperey (nicknamed “Desperate Frankie” by the always-irreverent Brits) they stopped the Germans temporarily and were preparing another assault, but Joffre was unaware of this success and ordered the French troops to continue falling back. They crossed the Oise and then destroyed its bridges behind them, and Saint-Quentin joined the ranks of towns occupied by the Germans for the next four years.
The Allies kept retreating, and as they made their way through the towns and villages of Picardy the people cheered them on. A short while later, however, the soldiers could look back in despair at where they’d just been and see smoke rising from those same communities, and soon the roads around them would be clogged with more refugees.
The BEF retreat continued until the troops had made it to the south bank of the River Marne just east of Paris, positioned between two French armies.
All seemed lost. Parisians were fleeing in droves, terrified that the horrors of the 1870 German takeover of their city were about to be repeated. The enemy was closing in on Paris along a line stretching from Verdun to Amiens and had reached the city gates of Meaux on the outskirts of the capital.
As clerks in government offices frantically burned documents, the ministers withdrew to Bordeaux and a retired general named Joseph Gallieni was recalled to act as military governor of Paris.
General Joffre had come to realize belatedly how wrong he’d been to discount the possibility of a German attack through Belgium, and although he was tired and very much aware of how close the Allies were to defeat, he remained calm and composed as he drafted new plans.
He created two new armies by moving units around and placing them where he felt they were needed most. He gave one of the new armies the responsibility for defending Paris, and the other was sent to back up the exhausted Fourth and Fifth Armies along the line of the Marne.
At General Gallieni’s suggestion, Joffre decided on a counter-attack against the German right flank, and when the Germans turned to meet it a wide gap appeared in their lines. Allied reconnaissance planes, spotting the breach, reported it to the commanders on the ground. French and British forces jumped at the chance to pour through the opening and attack the German lines, widening the gap and hampering German communications.
The Allies, so thoroughly worn out they were at risk of losing the advantage, desperately needed fresh troops. Six thousand reserves were waiting in Paris to join the battle but with the railways congested and not enough military vehicles available to transport them there seemed to be no way to get these soldiers to the front.
General Gallieni came up with a quintessentially Parisian solution. He hired taxis. In fact, he hired not a dozen or even a score of these jaunty little vehicles but 600 of them, which ferried the troops to the battle lines as soon as their canny drivers had negotiated a fair but discounted price for their services.
The question of whether the reserves made an important military difference is yet another World War One matter often debated, but the boost to the morale of soldiers and civilians alike was undeniable.
As the German First and Second Armies began to look as if they might be surrounded and destroyed, Chief of Staff Moltke suffered a nervous breakdown. His subordinates immediately ordered a retreat and the armies dropped back to set themselves up in a defensive position on the north side of the River Aisne, where they began digging protective trenches. After just over six weeks of seemingly unstoppable German advances, the Allies were doing the chasing, and The First Battle of the Marne passed into French military lore as The Miracle of the Marne.
The Schlieffen Plan had failed and Germany’s quick victory over France was no longer an option. Russia had mobilized as early as August 17 when they launched attacks on Germany’s eastern border. The dreaded two-front war was a reality.
At this point a series of movements started that came to be called “The Race To The Sea,” but it wasn’t so much a deliberate race as a matter of each of the opposing forces trying get around the other, attempting one outflanking tactic after another until they reached all the way north to the Flanders coastal area around the town of Ypres. There the French and British finally linked up with King Albert and his Belgian forces, which had been holding out in the small coastal town of Nieuport since the destruction of the fortifications at Antwerp by heavy German artillery.
The lines of deep channels that stretched from the border of Switzerland to the North Sea came to be known as the Western Front.
To the troops, these trenches would mean a war of attrition, an ugly, muddy stalemate punctuated by even uglier battles with an unthinkable number of casualties, where whichever side killed more men than the other could emerge the winner. In late 1914 The Battles of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Belleau Wood, and innumerable other terrible engagements were still ahead, waiting in the wings to put an end to countless young lives.
And to the people who had lived in these lands for generations, the trenches and battlefields of the Western Front meant that their cities were reduced to smoking ruins, from Arras to Peronne, Amiens to Saint-Quentin, Neuve Chapelle to Verdun. It meant roads clogged with hopeless refugees, farmlands torn up, and crops trampled into the dirt. It meant enemy soldiers looting and taking over their homes, requisitioning their food and leaving them to starve.
And it meant four years of occupation in which the people of Northern France and Belgium were systematically robbed, exploited and humiliated, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Auguste Brouet engraving of refugees from Princeton University Library
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