THE MARNE HALTS THE KAISER'S ARMIES

The first campaign of the war was fought on railway timetables, and it was won or lost before a shot was fired. Germany and France both ordered general mobilization on Saturday 1 August 1914, and 2 August was the first day on which reservists reported. Church bells rang in French villages, the tocsin that had once warned of fire or flood. In Germany men found their orders on posters nailed to walls; each reservist already carried a mobilization card that told him where to report, what to bring and which train to catch. A French reservist held a similar booklet, with a page of instructions for the very day the war began.

What followed was the greatest controlled movement of human beings in history up to that time. By the commonly cited count, the German railways ran something like 11,000 trains to deliver the army to its frontiers, and in the first fortnight the great bridges over the Rhine, above all at Cologne, carried a train every few minutes day and night. The plan was the work of the General Staff's railway section, whose chief, Wilhelm Groener, would one day inherit Ludendorff's place in the army. France moved perhaps 4,000 trains. Roughly 3.8 million Germans and 3.7 million Frenchmen were in uniform within weeks (round figures; sources differ), and Russia, with the largest reservoir of manpower, was preparing to put several million under arms, though more slowly. The French hoped the "Russian steamroller" would draw German strength east. The Germans bet that it would take the tsar's army weeks to be ready, and that France could be beaten first.

The army that walked and the army that rode

The railways stopped at the railhead. Beyond it, in 1914, everything moved at the pace of a man or a horse. A German infantryman marched with a pack of roughly 60 pounds; a corps stretched along 20 miles of road. Armies of this size ate a staggering quantity of fodder: the German field army went to war with several hundred thousand horses, requisitioned from farms under a registry that listed every animal fit for service, and the British Expeditionary Force bought or impressed horses from farms, breweries and omnibus companies within days of the order. In the great outflanking march through Belgium, Alexander von Kluck's First Army would cover some 300 miles in a month, with men dropping asleep in the ditches and horses collapsing from hunger and bad shoeing. The campaign of 1914 was fought at the speed of Napoleon, with the casualty rates of the machine age.

The uniforms told their own story. The Germans had adopted field-gray (Feldgrau) in 1910, and the British khaki after the Boer War. But French infantry marched to the frontier in blue greatcoats and bright red trousers (pantalons rouges), a color chosen partly out of political stubbornness; when one minister proposed a drabber trouser, a predecessor is said to have replied that red trousers were France. By the end of August the army would be paying for its pride in the blood of thousands of men who were easily visible at a mile.

Plans and the men who made them

Every army carried a plan. The German one, a modified version of Alfred von Schlieffen's scheme, sent the five armies of its right wing through Belgium and Luxembourg in a vast right-handed wheel designed to bring France to a quick surrender before Russia could mobilize. The younger Moltke, who inherited it in 1906, had weakened the right wing in favor of the left and had decided to respect Dutch neutrality, which squeezed the army through the narrow Liège gap. The French answer, Plan XVII, drawn up by General Joseph Joffre's staff, did not even anticipate a large German march through Belgium; it threw five armies forward into Alsace, Lorraine and the Ardennes. It rested on a doctrine of attack at all costs, l'offensive à outrance, preached before the war by Colonel Loyzeau de Grandmaison, which held that the French soldier's élan would defeat machine guns and rapid-firing artillery.

The British army was the smallest of the great armies and the best trained. Its regulars could fire 15 aimed rounds a minute from the short Lee-Enfield, a rate that would later astonish the Germans. But there were only about 250,000 regulars in the whole empire, and on 6 August Parliament authorized an army of half a million. The new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, appealed for volunteers, and by the end of the year more than a million had enlisted. They would not be ready for fighting until 1915 and 1916; the men who met the first shock were the regulars.

The German ultimatum reached Brussels on the evening of 2 August with a twelve-hour deadline: let German troops cross Belgium to attack France, or be treated as an enemy. King Albert I and his government refused. German troops crossed the frontier on the morning of 4 August, and the first obstacle on their road was the fortress city of Liège (Luik), where the Meuse valley and the main railways to Brussels and Paris run through a narrow corridor. The Schlieffen Plan could not work unless that gate was open within days.

Liège was ringed by twelve forts, built between 1888 and 1892 to the designs of the Belgian engineer Henri Alexis Brialmont: six large triangular ones and six smaller ones, sunk in concrete and steel, on a circle of about 32 miles, each roughly three miles from the next. They were the pride of European military engineering. Their weakness was that nobody had built the trenches and infantry works in the gaps that the forts were supposed to cover, and the garrison of General Gérard Leman, the 3rd Division and the 15th Brigade with the fort gunners, amounted to a few tens of thousands of men. The Germans, who knew the weakness, had decided on a gamble: not a siege but a coup de main. Six brigades under General Otto von Emmich would slip through the gaps in the night, seize the city and the bridges, and take the forts from behind.

The night of 5 to 6 August

The attacks went in through the night of 5 to 6 August, in rain and darkness, and they went badly. Belgian fire cut down the columns as they marched in close order, and the brigades lost their way and, in places, their commanders. Several senior officers fell, among them General von Wussow of the 14th Brigade, who was killed. A staff officer from the Second Army, Major General Erich Ludendorff, who had come along as an observer, took over the brigade. He was not yet famous, though he had spent years on the General Staff planning this very deployment. On 6 August he rallied what was left of the 14th Brigade and fought through to the heights above the city, and by his own account on the morning of 7 August drove up to the citadel and hammered on the gate, which opened to let him take the surrender of the garrison. It was a piece of luck and nerve, and it earned him the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest decoration, and a reputation that would take him to the East within a fortnight.

But the city was not the fortress. The forts still stood and still fired, commanding the roads and railways, and Leman, who had moved his headquarters into the fort at Loncin, was refusing to give in. Germany's other tool, the airship, had been tried on the first night: a Zeppelin dropped bombs on Liège on 6 August, killing civilians, an ominous early signal of what the airship was for. It did not break the forts.

Loncin and the end of the forts

On the afternoon of 15 August a shell from one of the heavy howitzers pierced the roof of Fort Loncin and detonated the main magazine. The fort was torn open; more than 300 of its defenders were killed or buried, and Leman was dragged out unconscious from the rubble and taken prisoner. The last forts surrendered on 16 August. The Belgians had delayed the German advance, but not by as much as legend has it: the German armies were not ready to march until about 17 or 18 August anyway, and part of the army could pass through the city gap after 7 August. The better estimate is that Liège cost the Germans two to four days of their schedule, and put the Belgian field army and the British on notice.

The Belgian field army fell back to Antwerp on 18 August, and the Germans entered Brussels on 20 August. The forts at Namur fell in about five days the following week. The lesson of those few days was one that every army took away: the great fortress, the pride of 30 years of engineering, was obsolete against a new class of heavy artillery. France would draw the same conclusion about its own forts, with consequences at Verdun in 1916 (see chapter V). Belgium's stand had another effect, one that Berlin had not planned for: it made the war a crusade. "Gallant little Belgium" became a slogan in Britain within days.

As the German armies pushed through Belgium and northern France in August and September 1914, they killed several thousand civilians. By the careful count of the historians John Horne and Alan Kramer, who spent years in the German and Belgian archives, about 6,500 Belgian and French civilians died at German hands in the invasion, in well over a hundred separate incidents in which ten or more people were killed. The numbers are small by the standards of what came later in the century, but they shocked a continent that believed itself civilized, and they set the moral tone of the conflict. Within weeks, "the Rape of Belgium" was the most powerful phrase in the Allied vocabulary.

The pattern was grimly consistent. A column halts; a shot is heard, or believed to have been heard; officers conclude that civilians are firing on the army; hostages are seized; houses are burned; men are shot, sometimes in dozens and sometimes in hundreds. At Aarschot on 19 August about 150 civilians were killed. At Andenne, the next day, over 200. At Tamines on 22 August, 383 people, almost all of them men, were killed, most of them shot in the square before the church. At Dinant, on the Meuse, on 23 August, Saxon troops shot 674 inhabitants, including women and children, in the streets and against the wall of a factory; hundreds more were deported to Germany. Many of the towns were burned: Visé, Dinant, Aarschot, Leuven. Villages across the Ardennes and northern France suffered the same fate.

The burning of Leuven

The deed that stunned the world was the destruction of Leuven (Louvain), a university town of about 40,000 people with a great Gothic town hall and one of the finest libraries in northern Europe. On the evening of 25 August a German garrison, mostly men of reserve formations that had just fallen back before a sortie by the Belgian army from Antwerp, was thrown into confusion in the dark; a German unit fired on another, and a cry went up that civilians were shooting from the windows. For the next three days soldiers burned the town street by street and shot civilians; about 250 inhabitants died, some 1,500 were deported to Germany, and thousands of others were driven out. More than a thousand buildings were destroyed. On the night of 25 August the university library, with some 230,000 volumes and hundreds of medieval manuscripts and early printed books, went up in flames. The Gothic church of St. Peter was badly damaged, and the town hall survived, by most accounts because the Germans were using it as a headquarters.

Reaction, denial and propaganda

Germany did not apologize. On 4 October 1914, 93 of its best-known scholars, artists and scientists, among them Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen and the composer Engelbert Humperdinck, signed a "Manifesto to the Civilized World" that denied everything: Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality, its soldiers had not harmed Belgian civilians, Leuven had been punished only after a treacherous attack. A German government White Book of 1915 repeated the claim. Across the neutral world, and especially in the United States, readers reached their own conclusions. The sinking of the Lusitania the following spring (see chapter IV) hardened American opinion further.

The Allies, for their part, made the most of it. A British committee under the former ambassador Viscount Bryce published a report in May 1915 which collected hundreds of depositions; it was translated into dozens of languages and widely believed. Its more sensational claims, such as the story of babies bayoneted or Belgian children with their hands cut off, were never proved, and after the war the revelations about propaganda made many people doubt all atrocity stories, including the true ones. The consequence was grim: a later generation, remembering the exaggerations, forgot how much of the core was true. The modern scholarly verdict is that the killings were real, were carried out by regular German units, usually on the orders of officers on the spot, and rested on a collective delusion.

Under the German occupation the next four years brought forced labor, requisitions, deportations and the near-starvation of the cities, kept at bay only by the Commission for Relief in Belgium organized by the American engineer Herbert Hoover (see chapter XII). Belgium's small army, meanwhile, held on to a sliver of its soil behind the Yser. King Albert, who lived through the war at the front, became the symbol of what the Allies were fighting for.

Joffre's offensive began before Germany's great wheel had properly started to turn, and it was a disaster. On 7 August French troops entered Alsace and briefly took Mulhouse, to ringing headlines, only to be pulled back within days. The main blow came on 14 August: the French First Army (Dubail) and Second Army (Castelnau) marched into German-held Lorraine toward Sarrebourg and Morhange. The German Sixth and Seventh Armies, under Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria and Josias von Heeringen, fell back as planned, drawing the French onto their guns. On 20 August they counterattacked. The French infantry, advancing in the open behind their 75s, ran into machine guns and heavy howitzers firing from prepared positions, and in two days the Second Army was reeling back toward Nancy. Rupprecht, against the original plan, pressed on; the French held the high ground of the Grand Couronné outside Nancy, and the fighting in Lorraine settled into a bloody stalemate.

Farther north, the French Third and Fourth Armies (Ruffey and Langle de Cary) attacked into the Ardennes on 21 and 22 August, a country of dense woods and valleys that Joffre had assumed was empty. It was full of Germans: the Fourth and Fifth Armies, under Duke Albrecht of Württemberg and Crown Prince Wilhelm, were marching the other way. Thick morning fog hid the columns from each other until they were a few hundred yards apart. At Rossignol the 3rd Colonial Division, made up of French regular infantry, was cut to pieces; across the whole front, 22 August 1914 cost the French army about 27,000 dead, the bloodiest single day in its history.

Charleroi and the Sambre

On the left of the French line the decisive battle began on 21 August, when Karl von Bülow's Second Army crossed the Sambre at Charleroi against General Charles Lanrezac's Fifth Army. Lanrezac, a gifted and acid-tongued professor who had warned Joffre for days that the Germans were coming through Belgium in strength, was proved right and was not thanked for it. Two days later Max von Hausen's Third Army pressed across the Meuse near Dinant on his right flank, and Lanrezac, in danger of encirclement, ordered a retreat on the evening of 23 August. Joffre, who had wanted the Fifth Army to counterattack, ended by sanctioning it.

Over 24 and 25 August, Joffre drew the conclusion that Plan XVII had failed and ordered a general withdrawal to the south, with the aim of keeping the army intact and building a new striking force on the left, the Sixth Army of General Michel Maunoury, from troops drawn from Alsace and the right wing. He combined cool nerve with ruthlessness. In the next two weeks he removed two army commanders, ten corps commanders and several dozen divisional generals; Lanrezac himself was relieved on 3 September and replaced by Louis Franchet d'Espèrey.

Mons: the army that was small and good

The British Expeditionary Force had meanwhile assembled around Le Cateau and was marching north to take its place on Lanrezac's left. Its commander, Field Marshal Sir John French, a cavalryman of great courage and uncertain judgment, had been told by Kitchener to cooperate with the French without taking orders from them. On Sunday 23 August II Corps, under Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, stood along the Mons-Condé canal, with I Corps under Sir Douglas Haig on its right, and met the leading corps of Alexander von Kluck's First Army. About 70,000 British infantry and cavalry faced a German force that outnumbered them roughly two to one.

The Germans attacked in dense columns and were cut down by rifle fire so fast that they believed the British had many machine guns, each battalion having only two. The BEF's regulars, who had been trained to fire 15 aimed rounds a minute, stopped them for the day at a cost of about 1,600 British casualties, with German losses probably heavier. But Lanrezac's retreat had left the BEF's right flank exposed, and a withdrawal began before dawn on 24 August.

Le Cateau and the retreat

The retreat of the next two weeks was one of the toughest marches in British military history. Heat, dust and lack of sleep wore down the troops; some men fell asleep on their feet; boots gave out on the cobbled roads of northern France. The two corps were separated by the great Forest of Mormal and became increasingly out of touch. On the evening of 25 August the Guards fought off a German attack at Landrecies. On 26 August Smith-Dorrien, finding that his exhausted II Corps could not break away from the pursuit without being caught on the march, ignored the order to continue retreating and turned to fight at Le Cateau. For most of a day his divisions, with the cavalry, held off three German corps, and then slipped away in the night, leaving 38 guns and about 7,800 casualties behind. The stand saved the BEF from being overrun, though it strained relations with Sir John French, who had wanted the retreat to go on.

French, shaken, now wanted to take his army out of the line to rest and refit, perhaps behind the Seine, and even talked of withdrawing to the coast. Joffre could not afford the loss of the British on his left. On 1 September Kitchener himself crossed the Channel, met French at the British embassy in Paris, and made it clear that the BEF would stay in the line and cooperate. In under two weeks the BEF had marched some 200 miles from Mons to a line southeast of Paris, and on 5 September it was told that the retreat was over.

By the first days of September the German army had a good claim to be winning the war. It had broken the Belgians and thrown back the French and British; Kluck's First Army had marched some 300 miles in a month, and German aircraft were already dropping bombs on Paris. The French government left Paris for Bordeaux on the night of 2 to 3 September. But the German machine was close to the end of its strength. Men and horses were exhausted, the supply lines stretched back across a wasteland of broken railways, and the armies were far ahead of their heavy guns and their ammunition columns. Above all, they were no longer following the plan.

The Schlieffen Plan called for the right wing to sweep west of Paris. By the end of August it was already a dead letter. Moltke had weakened the wing by sending two corps east after the Russian invasion and by leaving others to watch Antwerp and Maubeuge. Kluck's First Army, chasing the BEF, had turned southeast, passing east of Paris instead of around it, and on 2 September Moltke's headquarters ratified the change, ordering the First Army to follow behind Bülow's Second Army and guard the flank toward Paris. It was a task for which one tired army was too thin. Kluck crossed the Marne on 3 September with his right flank open to the garrison of Paris.

Gallieni and Joffre

The man who saw the opportunity was Joseph Gallieni, the 65-year-old military governor of Paris, a veteran of colonial wars who had been recalled from retirement. On 3 September French aviators reported that Kluck's columns had turned southeast of the capital. Gallieni proposed that Maunoury's new Sixth Army, assembling around Paris, should strike eastward at the exposed flank, and he pressed Joffre to turn and fight. Joffre, who had planned to continue the retreat for several more days, was persuaded on 4 September. The next day, the 5th, the Sixth Army ran into the German IV Reserve Corps (Gronau) on the Ourcq river, northeast of Paris, and the battle began. On 6 September Joffre issued an order to all armies: the time for looking backward was over, and a unit that could not advance must hold the ground it had taken and die where it stood rather than retreat. The poet Charles Péguy, a lieutenant in the infantry, was killed leading his men at Villeroy on the first day.

The gap

Kluck now had to answer Maunoury. On 7 and 8 September he pulled two corps back from the Marne to the Ourcq, and the Sixth Army was held. But that left a gap of about 30 miles between the First and Second Armies, covered only by cavalry and a few battalions of light infantry. Into it moved, slowly and cautiously, the BEF, and on its right Franchet d'Espèrey's Fifth Army, which was attacking Bülow's flank at the same time. Sir John French, who had been reluctant to turn about, was won over by a personal appeal from Joffre at Melun on 5 September, and the British columns went forward slowly, hampered by rain, caution and fatigue; they crossed the Marne on 9 September.

In the center, around the marshes of Saint-Gond, Foch's new Ninth Army was struggling against heavy attacks by Bülow and Hausen. At some point in the battle Foch is said to have sent a message to Joffre in terms that became famous: pressed on the right, giving way in the center, situation excellent, I am attacking. The words are probably apocryphal, but the spirit was real: on 9 September, in what looked like a lost position, the Ninth Army counterattacked.

Hentsch's mission

The German high command (OHL), at Luxembourg, more than 100 miles from the front, had no communications with its armies that worked reliably and almost no idea what was happening. On 8 September Moltke sent his intelligence chief, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, to visit the armies of the right wing with verbal authority to coordinate a retreat if necessary. When Hentsch reached the Second Army on the evening of 8 September, Bülow was already preparing to pull back, and next morning, after air reports of the British crossing the Marne, he ordered a further withdrawal. Hentsch then went to Kluck's headquarters at Mareuil, where Kluck's chief of staff argued, with some reason, that the First Army was winning on the Ourcq. Hentsch, convinced that the gap could not be closed, told them the First Army must retreat. They obeyed. The next day, 10 September, the whole German right wing was in retreat.

Moltke, who had been physically unwell and nervously exhausted for days, collapsed. The Kaiser replaced him on 14 September with the Prussian War Minister, Erich von Falkenhayn, though this was concealed from the public until November. Moltke is said to have told the Kaiser that the war was lost; whether or not those words were spoken, he was right in one sense. A short war was now impossible.

Russia entered the war before it was ready. Its mobilization was still unfinished when, at the urgent request of France, two armies marched into East Prussia in mid-August: Pavel Rennenkampf's First Army from the east, across the Neman, and Alexander Samsonov's Second Army from the south, out of Poland. They were to close like pincers on the German Eighth Army, which was left behind in the east with only about 150,000 men to hold a province that was the cradle of the Prussian aristocracy. Together the Russians outnumbered the Germans by about two to one, and the Eighth Army's commander, General Maximilian von Prittwitz, was a nervous man.

The first contacts went to the Russians. On 20 August, at Gumbinnen (Gusev), the German I Corps under Hermann von François, a general with a habit of fighting on his own initiative, attacked Rennenkampf's army and was thrown back by Russian artillery. That evening Prittwitz telephoned Moltke and talked of withdrawing behind the Vistula, abandoning East Prussia, while Samsonov's army was marching up from the south against his rear. Moltke dismissed him on 22 August. In his place the high command sent two men who met for the first time aboard a special train heading east that night: the 66-year-old Paul von Hindenburg, retired since 1911, called back from his villa, and Erich Ludendorff, newly decorated for Liège, as chief of staff. Hindenburg provided the calm, Ludendorff the nervous drive, and between them stood the real planner of the battle, the Eighth Army's operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann.

Hoffmann's plan

Hoffmann had already worked out what to do. Rennenkampf's army had stopped after Gumbinnen; Samsonov's was advancing across a land of sand, forests and lakes with little more than country roads. Hoffmann proposed to leave only a thin cavalry screen in front of Rennenkampf, put the bulk of the Eighth Army onto trains, and shift it south by rail to meet Samsonov. It was a monstrous gamble: if Rennenkampf pressed on, the Germans would be taken in the rear. But Hoffmann knew something that made the gamble acceptable. The Russians, short of codes and cipher clerks, were sending their orders by wireless in plain text, and German listening posts were copying them down. On 25 August the Germans intercepted Rennenkampf's orders, which showed that he was not hurrying to support Samsonov, and Samsonov's own orders, which showed exactly where he was going. They fought the battle knowing the enemy's plans.

The pocket in the forests

The battle was fought between 26 and 30 August over an area of several hundred square miles around Allenstein (Olsztyn), Hohenstein (Olsztynek), Neidenburg (Nidzica) and Soldau (Działdowo). In the center Samsonov's XIII and XV Corps pushed forward against the German XX Corps, which gave ground but held. On the German left François's I Corps, by rail from the east, and on the right Mackensen's XVII Corps and Below's I Reserve Corps struck at the Russian flanks. By 28 August the Russian center had advanced into the open mouth of a trap that was closing behind it; on the 29th the two German wings met near Willenberg (Wielbark). Several Russian corps, trapped in forest and swamp without supplies, tried to break out in small groups and were shot down or surrendered.

By the traditional German count, Russian losses were about 50,000 killed and wounded and some 92,000 prisoners, with hundreds of guns taken; recent estimates are lower, roughly 70,000 to 120,000 in all, since only part of Samsonov's army was encircled. Samsonov, who had not slept for days, rode out with his staff into the night; in the dark he separated from them and, it is generally agreed, shot himself in the woods. German casualties were about 14,000 by the official count (some later estimates are higher). While the battle was still in the balance, Ludendorff's nerve wavered more than once at reports of Rennenkampf's advance, and the calm of Hindenburg and Hoffmann kept the plan on course. The German command chose the name "Tannenberg" for the victory, after the village where in 1410 the Teutonic Knights had been crushed by the Poles and Lithuanians: the defeat, in German eyes, was now avenged.

The Masurian Lakes

The Russians were not finished. Rennenkampf's First Army, still large and confident, had been advancing slowly through the north of East Prussia. Reinforced with two corps transferred from the west, which had arrived too late for Tannenberg, the Eighth Army, still under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, wheeled north against him. From 9 to 14 September, in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the Germans drove the First Army out of East Prussia. Rennenkampf escaped encirclement by retreating fast, but he left many guns behind, and his army lost somewhere between 60,000 and 125,000 men in the fighting and the retreat (estimates vary widely). The commander of the Russian Northwest Front, Yakov Zhilinsky, was dismissed, and Rennenkampf himself was removed after the Battle of Łódź two months later.

Tannenberg did not break Russia. The Russian army had ample reserves, and in Galicia it was winning decisively against Austria-Hungary (see the next section). But it showed that the German army could beat the Russians in the open, gave Germany an exaggerated confidence in its superiority over the Russian army that would shape strategy for the next three years, and ended any Russian hope of a quick march on Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of East Prussians fled westward during the invasion; many returned only to flee again in 1945.

Austria-Hungary went to war with a large army, a poor railway network and a chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who was a brilliant theorist of the offensive and a reckless practitioner. Conrad had two plans: Plan B, against Serbia, and Plan R, against Russia. He did not know until the last moment which one he would need, and the answer cost his army dearly. The Second Army, a whole army, was first sent by rail toward Serbia; when it became clear that Russia had to be faced, it was ordered back north in the middle of mobilization, and its trains criss-crossed the empire for days. It missed the opening battles in Galicia and did no good in Serbia either.

The Galician battles

Conrad's plan was to strike north from Galicia, the Habsburg province now in southern Poland and western Ukraine, into Russian Poland, and cut off the Russian forces in the great salient around Warsaw. In the last week of August he got what he wanted, up to a point. At Kraśnik (23 to 25 August) Viktor Dankl's First Army beat the Russian Fourth Army; at Komarów (26 August to 2 September) Moritz von Auffenberg's Fourth Army defeated the Russian Fifth Army and partly enveloped it, taking many thousands of prisoners.

But Conrad had pushed his weight north and left his eastern flank thin, and there the Russian Southwest Front, under Nikolai Ivanov with the capable Mikhail Alekseyev as his chief of staff, was advancing on Lemberg (Lviv) with the Third Army (Nikolai Ruzsky) and the Eighth (Aleksei Brusilov). Between 26 and 30 August, at the Gnila Lipa, they smashed the Austro-Hungarian Third Army of General Rudolf von Brudermann, and Lemberg fell on 3 September. Conrad, having won two battles in the north, now had a Russian army in his rear. He broke off the offensive and, after the Battle of Rawa Ruska, ordered a general retreat on 11 September, and the Habsburg army fell back over 100 miles to the Carpathians and the line of the Dunajec, leaving the fortress of Przemyśl and its garrison behind.

The damage went far beyond the numbers. The Habsburg army never really recovered its quality; the sergeants and junior officers who held its multinational regiments together were the ones who had fallen. From the winter of 1914 Austria-Hungary would depend on German help in almost every serious operation. Przemyśl was relieved in October and besieged again from the second week of November, and its fate in 1915 is told in chapter IV. The Russian occupation of Galicia brought the arrest of the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and the expulsion of Jews from a number of towns, and a Russian governor-general, Georgy Bobrinsky, set about "Russifying" the province.

Serbia: the Cer and the Kolubara

The country that started the war won its first battles with a smaller army than anyone expected. Serbia had a field army of perhaps 200,000 to 250,000 men, veterans of two Balkan wars, short of artillery, of rifles and above all of shells. Its commander, Voivode (Field Marshal) Radomir Putnik, a sick old man who had been holidaying in Austria when war was declared and was released from internment on the personal order of Emperor Franz Joseph, had planned a flexible defense. The Austro-Hungarian commander, General Oskar Potiorek, the governor of Bosnia, who had been in the car at Sarajevo on 28 June, was eager to avenge the archduke, and crossed the Drina and Sava on 12 August with the Fifth and Sixth Armies. In the Jadar valley his troops killed civilians in villages, atrocities that were documented by the Swiss forensic scientist Rodolphe Archibald Reiss.

On the slopes of Mount Cer, from the night of 15 August, the Serbs struck back in a series of fierce counterattacks, many of them at night and at close quarters. The Austro-Hungarian troops, tired, over-extended and badly led, fell back across the river, the rout beginning on 19 August, with perhaps 25,000 to 40,000 casualties (estimates vary widely); the Serbs lost roughly 18,000. It was the first Allied victory of the war, days before Mons, and it was celebrated in the capitals of the Entente. A second invasion in September stalled in the trenches of the Mačkov Kamen. Putnik's armies, increasingly short of everything, struggled on.

Potiorek tried a third time in November, pushing into Serbia with a rested army. This time the Serbs were pushed back; their guns were rationed to a handful of rounds a day, and on 30 November the army abandoned Belgrade, which the Austro-Hungarians entered on 2 December, the anniversary of Franz Joseph's accession. Potiorek presented the city to his emperor as an anniversary gift. But the Serbian army was not beaten. Fresh ammunition arrived from France and Russia by way of the Danube and Salonika, and the First Army, under Živojin Mišić, took the offensive on 3 December from the heights of Suvobor, above the Kolubara river, the day after Belgrade fell. Over the next two weeks the Habsburg army was thrown back; on 15 December the Serbs retook Belgrade, and the Austro-Hungarian army was driven out of Serbia. Potiorek was dismissed within days.

It was a stunning victory, and it would not last. Serbia had lost heavily, its people were starving, and an epidemic of typhus, spreading from the prisoners and the wounded, was about to begin; the story of the Serbian collapse in the autumn of 1915 is told in chapter IV.

After the Marne the Germans fell back about 40 miles and stopped on the high ground north of the Aisne river, around the ridge of the Chemin des Dames. They had expected to continue the retreat. Instead, on 13 September, the British and French found their pursuit halted by German machine guns and artillery on the heights, and the first real trenches of the Western Front were dug. Men who had marched hundreds of miles with their rifles found, to their surprise, that they were digging in with entrenching tools and whatever else came to hand. The Battle of the Aisne (13 to 28 September) produced no breakthrough, only casualties. The mobile war was ending, though no one yet said so.

The Race to the Sea

Both sides now looked for the open flank. The German general staff, under its new chief Falkenhayn, and Joffre both tried to turn the other's northern end, and each move was answered by a counter-move a little farther north, so that between mid-September and the middle of October the front lengthened northward through the battles of Picardy, Albert, Arras and La Bassée, until it ran out of France altogether. The phrase "Race to the Sea" is misleading, for neither side was racing to the coast; each was trying to get around the other, and the sea was simply where the land ran out. Foch, whom Joffre appointed to coordinate the northern armies in early October, conducted the French end of the effort. The BEF, pulled out of the Aisne by rail and road in the first days of October, was moved north to the left of the line, near the Channel ports it needed to keep its supply lines short.

One more prize lay to the north: Antwerp, the Belgian army's fortress, where the government had taken refuge. The Germans' siege corps under Hans von Beseler opened fire on its forts with the same giant howitzers used at Liège on 28 September, and within days the outer ring of forts had fallen. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, came to the city on 3 October with a brigade of Royal Marines and two brigades of the improvised Royal Naval Division, men with only weeks of training, to help the Belgians hold on. It was too little, too late. Antwerp surrendered on 10 October; most of the Belgian field army escaped westward along the coast, while some 1,500 men of the naval division crossed into the neutral Netherlands and were interned. The Germans took Ghent on 12 October and Ostend on 15 October.

The Yser and the flood

The Belgian army made its last stand on the Yser, a small river and canal that runs to the sea at Nieuwpoort (Nieuport). King Albert, in command himself, held the line from the coast to Diksmuide (Dixmude) with what remained of his army, perhaps 60,000 men, battered and short of shells and rifles, and a French naval brigade under Admiral Ronarc'h held Dixmude itself. Duke Albrecht of Württemberg's Fourth Army, with fresh reserve corps, attacked from 16 October. By the 25th the Germans had crossed the river and the Belgian line was about to break. Over the nights of 26 to 30 October the Belgians opened the sluice gates of the canal at Nieuwpoort at high tide to let the North Sea into the low-lying fields behind the embankment, and over the following days the plain between the river and the railway embankment turned into a belt of water and mud some 10 miles long. The Germans, flooded out of the fields they had won, withdrew by 3 November, leaving the Belgians, who had lost many thousands of men, the last strip of their kingdom. The flood line held until 1918.

The old army dies at Ypres

Immediately south, from 19 October to 22 November, the BEF fought the most desperate battle in its history. Ypres was a medieval cloth town that stood at the center of a shallow, flat plain; the low ridges around it, rising at most a hundred feet or so above the plain, gave their owners a sweeping view of everything beneath them, and Sir John French was determined to hold it because it blocked the way to the Channel ports. Sir John French's battalions were now a fraction of their August strength, and he held a line of some 35 miles, from La Bassée to the Ypres salient, with Haig's I Corps, the newly landed 7th Division, cavalry fighting dismounted and, soon, the Indian Corps. Against them Falkenhayn threw the Fourth Army and Rupprecht's Sixth, with several new reserve corps made up partly of volunteers.

The crisis came on 31 October. At Gheluvelt, on the Menin road, the Germans broke through and took the chateau, and a shell hit the chateau at Hooge, killing or wounding most of the staff of the 1st and 2nd Divisions. The line was open. Then a single battalion, the 2nd Worcestershire, counterattacked through the wreckage and retook the village, in a stroke that is remembered as the one that saved the line. The same day, the first Indian soldier to win the Victoria Cross, Sepoy Khudadad Khan, held his machine gun at Hollebeke after his comrades were killed. Elsewhere on that day the London Scottish became the first Territorial battalion in action. On 11 November the elite Prussian Guard attacked at the Nonne Bosschen (Nun's Wood) and were beaten off by a thin line of exhausted British troops, though a few Guard platoons broke into the wood. By 22 November, snow and fatigue ended the fighting. The 7th Division, which had landed with some 12,000 men, was reduced to a few thousand.

The First Battle of Ypres cost the British tens of thousands of casualties, and the French and Germans many more. It also finished off the peacetime BEF. In the following weeks the few remaining regulars were mixed with Territorials, Indian troops, and the first drafts of reservists, and by Christmas the army that had crossed the Channel in August survived only in fragments and in legend. The line from the North Sea to the Swiss border, about 450 miles long, was now continuous.

By November 1914 the European war had become a world war. Within a few months, fleets fought off Chile and the Falkland Islands, Japanese and British troops besieged a German port in China, Australian and New Zealand troops landed in the South Pacific, and the Ottoman Empire had joined the Central Powers.

The Ottomans choose a side

The Ottoman government had declared neutrality on 3 August, while Enver Pasha, the Minister of War and the strongest man in the ruling triumvirate, had already signed a secret alliance with Germany on 2 August. The empire was weak: it had lost most of its European territory in the Balkan Wars two years earlier, and its army was short of everything. What tipped the balance was a pair of German warships. The battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, under Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, bombarded the Algerian ports of Philippeville and Bône on 4 August and then slipped away from the British Mediterranean Fleet; the British admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge, who might have stopped them, decided not to engage a ship that outgunned his four armored cruisers. On 10 August they steamed into the Dardanelles. The Ottomans, who had just seen Britain seize two battleships built for them in British yards and paid for in part by public subscription, "bought" both ships on 11 August, renamed them Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli and put fezzes on the German crews. Souchon became commander of the Ottoman fleet.

The decision to fight was made by a few men. On 29 October 1914 Souchon led the Ottoman fleet into the Black Sea and bombarded Odessa, Sevastopol, Feodosia and Novorossiysk, sinking a Russian minelayer and a gunboat and setting oil tanks on fire. Several ministers in Constantinople (Istanbul), who had not been told, protested or offered to resign. It made no difference. Russia declared war on 2 November, Britain and France on 5 November (Britain also annexed Cyprus that day), and in mid-November the Sultan's religious authorities proclaimed a holy war (a jihad) against the Allies, a call that Germany hoped would raise the Muslims of the British, French and Russian empires. It did not. The Ottoman closure of the Dardanelles in late September had already cut Russia off from its allies by sea, and a British Indian force landed at Fao on 6 November and took Basra by 22 November, opening the Mesopotamian campaign.

Sarikamish

Enver's first campaign was a catastrophe. He planned to encircle the Russian Caucasus Army around the town of Sarikamish (Sarıkamış) in the mountains of northeast Anatolia with a winter march by the Third Army, about 90,000 men, over high passes more than 7,000 feet up. Enver took personal command at the front in late December. The soldiers, many in summer uniform, with rope sandals and little food, marched into snow and temperatures far below freezing; whole units froze where they halted. The offensive reached the outskirts of Sarikamish and was then destroyed by a Russian counterattack under Nikolai Yudenich in early January 1915. Estimates of Ottoman losses vary widely, from about 30,000 to more than 60,000 men, many of them lost to frostbite and typhus. Enver blamed local Armenians for the defeat, a charge that fed the persecution described in chapter IV.

The war at sea

In the North Sea the opening naval actions went to the Royal Navy. On 28 August a British force of light cruisers, destroyers and Beatty's battlecruisers sank three German light cruisers and a torpedo boat in the Battle of Heligoland Bight, with about 700 German dead and no British ship lost. The Kaiser ordered the High Seas Fleet to avoid risks. But the submarine had made its first great kill on 22 September, when Otto Weddigen's U-9 sank the old armored cruisers Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy within an hour, killing nearly 1,500 men; on 16 December German battlecruisers bombarded Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, killing more than 100 civilians.

Far away, Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron, the best-trained German force at sea, had crossed the Pacific. On 1 November, off Coronel in Chile, it met the weaker squadron of Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock; at dusk, with the setting sun silhouetting the British ships, the Germans sank both armored cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth with all hands, about 1,600 men, and lost almost nobody. It was Britain's first naval defeat in a century. The new First Sea Lord, the 73-year-old Admiral Lord Fisher, immediately sent two battlecruisers, Invincible and Inflexible under Vice Admiral Doveton Sturdee, to the South Atlantic. Spee, heading for the Falkland Islands to raid the coaling station at Port Stanley on 8 December, found the tall tripod masts of the battlecruisers in the harbor. In the chase that followed, the Germans lost the armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and two light cruisers; about 1,870 Germans died, Spee and his two sons among them. Only the Dresden got away, to be hunted down in 1915.

The colonies

Germany's overseas empire, defended by a few hundred police and local troops, fell almost at once. The first Allied conquest was Togoland, which surrendered on 26 August after a short campaign by the British Gold Coast and French forces; a Gold Coast sergeant, Alhaji Grunshi, is traditionally credited with firing the first British shot of the war. New Zealand took German Samoa on 29 August without a fight. Australia seized German New Guinea in September, and Japan, which had declared war on 23 August, occupied Germany's Micronesian islands in October. In Africa, Allied forces took the Cameroons port of Duala in September; in South West Africa a rebellion of Boers who were reluctant to fight Germany was put down over the winter.

The largest operation was the siege of Tsingtao (Qingdao), Germany's naval base in China. About 23,000 Japanese and 1,500 British troops besieged a garrison of roughly 4,000 from September; the port fell on 7 November. The prisoners, some 4,700 by most counts, were held in Japan until 1920, and in 1918 the camp at Bando gave the first Japanese performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

In East Africa the British went wrong at once. On 2 to 5 November an Indian expeditionary force of about 8,000 men under Major General Arthur Aitken tried to land at Tanga, and ran into Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who had about 1,000 men and used them well. After a confused fight in the town and a swarm of bees that scattered troops on both sides, the British re-embarked with roughly 800 casualties and left many rifles and rounds of ammunition behind. Lettow-Vorbeck would fight on until 25 November 1918, two weeks after the Armistice.

By December the front in the west was a ragged double line of ditches stretching about 450 miles from the Channel to the Swiss border, and in many places the opposing trenches were only 30 to 100 yards apart. The ground was flooded or frozen, the dead of the autumn battles lay unburied between the lines, and the men in the trenches, many of them reservists and Territorials who had been civilians in August, had no clear idea how it would end. On 7 December Pope Benedict XV proposed a truce for Christmas, so that the guns could be silent on the night the angels sang. No government accepted. At least one senior British commander, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, ordered his corps to forbid any friendly contact with the enemy.

Christmas Eve

Along parts of the line, the soldiers had other ideas. On a cold, clear Christmas Eve, with a hard frost, German soldiers in several sectors, particularly in front of the British lines in Flanders, set candles and small Christmas trees along their parapets and began to sing carols, among them "Stille Nacht." British soldiers answered with carols of their own. Shouted greetings crossed no man's land, and men began, cautiously and then in numbers, to climb out of their trenches. On Christmas morning they met between the lines, exchanged cigarettes, food, buttons and badges, showed each other photographs, and, above all, buried their dead. In some places they kicked a football about; there are several accounts of informal games, a few even giving scores, but none that can be confirmed as an organized match. In others the truce lasted until New Year.

The extent of the truce is still debated. It was not a general armistice; it was a patchwork. It was strongest where British troops faced Saxons and other southern Germans in the Ploegsteert and Messines sector of Flanders, and weaker or absent where the French and Belgians faced the invaders of their own country, or where Prussian units held the line. Where shelling continued, men were killed on Christmas Day. Estimates of the number involved run up to about 100,000 British and German soldiers. Letters home, many printed in local newspapers, give a vivid picture; the British army eventually stopped the practice, and no truce of such size was ever seen again, though small local ones persisted in quiet sectors, part of what historians call the "live and let live" system (see chapter IX).

The reckoning

Five months had cost the combatants on the order of four to five million casualties in dead, wounded and prisoners, by the most commonly used estimates. France had lost around 300,000 dead and, with the wounded and prisoners, close to a million men, including a large share of her professional officers, who had led the attacks of August from the front. Germany had suffered some 800,000 casualties, among them a large proportion of its peacetime officers and sergeants and thousands of volunteers in the new reserve corps. Russia and Austria-Hungary each lost more than a million. The British Expeditionary Force, which had landed about 80,000 men in August, had suffered roughly as many casualties again by the end of the year, and the peacetime army was gone. Belgium had lost nearly all of its territory.

The strategic consequences were plain to a few. Falkenhayn, after the failure at Ypres, told Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg on 18 November that Germany could not win the war by military means alone and urged him to look for a separate peace, first with Russia and then, if possible, with France; the advice was not taken. In every capital, the generals discovered that they had no plan for a long war. Stocks of artillery shells built for a campaign of weeks were running out, and the factories of every country would have to be rebuilt in 1915 (see chapters IV and X). The soldiers who had expected to be home by Christmas were instead to spend another three of them at the front.