The Summer of 1914

IN HIS little-known but classic work, Liaison 1914, the Englishman E. L. Spears ends the story as he reaches the banks of the Aisne one week after the victory of the First Marne. His closing words are, “I am deeply thankful that none who gazed across the river had the faintest glimmering of what awaited them. There was nothing to show that the most dramatic period of the war was over,”

This is understatement. Spears had sweated at ringside during the most agonizing, suspensefilled month in history. August, 1914, was exactly that to every person old enough to understand the headlines. Other wars have come and gone, but the torment and high excitement of the time have not been matched since.

In the forty-eight years since Spears completed his field notes, historians innumerable have sought to penetrate the mystery and recapture the drama of the First Marne. As a British lieutenant doingliaison with General Lanrezac’s Fifth French Army, and being a writer born, Spears was ideally seated to do the “little picture.”For it was Lanrezac who directly opposed General von Kluck’s First German Army, the sledgehammer of the Schlieffen Plan, and it was Spears in person who shuttled between Lanrezac and that irascible irresolute, Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the BEF.

Though there are enough books on the First Marne battle, and the events and decisions of August, to dam that river, nothing in literature approached what Spears did at close range until Barbara W. Tuchman, New York novelist turned historian, sat down to write the big picture. We have here a prodigy. This modest woman, in an epilogue wherein she discusses her sources (it is the most eloquent portion of the book and will be overlooked by most readers), denies that she has written good history. Her point is that the materials are all subjective, that every witness has an ax to grind, that the historian is bound to be influenced by one line of pleading or another. Agreed. So long as people are human and truth is distilled out of archives, the seeker thereof must exercise arbitrary judgment and cannot escape his own emotions. The fact remains that Mrs. Tuchman’s lights burn exceedingly bright. Leave to the historians the argument about whether she has written good history. In The Guns of August she has written a book which makes the reader tingle, and it is so thoroughly in the mood of that August that oldsters will know the nightmare all over again.

The Marne is celebrated for its idols and bums, their champions and accusers. The genius of Marshal Gallieni won it; no, it was the phlegm and steadiness of Marshal Joffre and the fire of General Foch. The ill-timed inward wheel of Kluck lost it; no, it was the wavering of Marshal von Moltke, his hedging of the Schlieffen Plan, his dispatch of two German corps from the western force to the eastern front. So have gone the arguments for one half century.

They are not for Mrs. Tuchman. There is no one hero, no one scapegoat. German failure came of numerous slippages at various points, none in itself decisive. Allied success was woven almost accidentally of the influence here and there of Joffre’s impeccable calm, Gallieni’s inspirations, War Minister Messimy’s interventions, Lanrezac’s Stubborn resistance to Joffre’s optimisms, and possibly even Sir John’s running away, which saved his army for a better day. But the book says not one kind word of the sour old field marshal. Whether Joffre was an opaque bumbler or Mr. Iron Man who saw much but felt nothing is a timeworn argument. Tuchman takes neither side of it. Thoroughly exposing Old Papa in his strength and weakness, it is enough for her that he had what France needed at the time. That is as Solomonlike as her judgment that the Marne had the inevitability of Greek tragedy.

Once Tuchman determined to write of guns in August, she became steeped in military thoughts at dazzling speed. But some values escape her because of the limitations of prior service, and they are here mentioned apologetically, the general merit of her work being beyond fault.

The book has no exposition of the militaryterrain features of western Europe, and without such the movements of armies stay unclarified. While operations are controlled by a variety of factors, their ultimate basis is the physical features of the region involved. As D. W. Johnson wrote years ago, “With a little change in topography, Germany would not have been tempted to commit one of the blackest crimes in history.”

There is too much of Alfred von Schlieffen, who is the only mortal to win a niche in history by writing a plan that failed. Yet no battle plan is ever expected to work in entirety, owing to war’s friction. Unfortunately, the German failure is ever discussed in terms of digression from the plan, though there can be no proof that the plan was omnipotent. The battle is the thing. It is wasted research to proliferate deviations from plan; combat historians are so instructed. What happened, not what might have been, is the question.

The reason for the deadlock after the Marne was that all general staffs misunderstood the weapons balance of their day. Railway systems made it possible to field armies numbering in millions. The gun invented by Maxim made it impossible for superior numbers alone to ensure success. The dominant power of that weapon was the shocker in the Battle of the Frontier; it produced the entrenched stalemate and superinduced the massive artillery buildup.

Last, troops backpedaling from a fight retain more energy than troops prodded to attack, meaning that pursuit is always more wearing than retreat, though the latter sounds more grim. Few generals understand this, so why shouldn’t Tuchinan miss it? The rebound at the Marne is explained as the product of superior French élan (Moltke’s alibi), whereas the epitome of German failure was that a ruthless command had utterly exhausted its soldiery. The Marne, like Stalingrad and Alamein, is a monument to the supreme folly of overextension.

Tuchman draws more heavily from personal war journals and self-pleading VIP memoirs, published long after the event, than from official archives and press dispatches of the hour. Since memoirs are notoriously unreliable sources, wherein lie the original power and enchantment of this work?

Tuchman’s gifts are the beauty and vigor of her expression, a sixth sense for distinguishing between essential truth and its cloak of falsehood, and a forthrightness in delivering her own convictions while not seeming to do so. The book moves at a phenomenal pace, and there is enough of the frontline soldier’s ordeal for balance, much of it drawn from the fighters’ personal diaries or letters home. As a maker of trenchant military phrases, she will be quoted in the war colleges for years to come:

“Von Kluck’s cavalry reconnaissance, with that marvelous human capacity to see what you expect to see, even if it is not there. . . .”

“He [joffre] conceived the whole duty of generals was to be lions in action and dogs in obedience.”

“Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; the economic impossibility of a long war was everybody’s orthodoxy.”

There are some technical and anachronistic flaws in the writing. The 105-millimeter howitzer is not heavy artillery; barbed wire and earth trendies came later in the war; barrage fire is not identical with bombardment and had its genesis in the period of the flankless front, and so on. The work does not cover all the guns of August. What happened out of Serbia and the first shock collision between the armies of the Czar and Franz Josef are ignored. Tuchman’s theme is how the Germans challenged in the west and why they failed. But the treatment is elastic enough to include the related battle of Tannetiberg, which, unlike that of the Marne, is described with exquisite detail. No action in the west, except the attack on Liége, gets such rapt attention.

Finally, Tuchman is a powerful advocate relighting an ancient torch. Her Kaiser, hall buffoo, half demon, wears horns. Her King Albert is a white knight in shining armor. The German rape of Belgium was inexcusably evil, and the march of the Hun into that land and France was made more hideous by bestial, wanton atrocities. Kluck was a monster, the Crown Prince a silly swashbuckler, Ludendorff a villain. The Germans behaved like savages; they coldly planned their excesses to terrorize innocent people. “As soon as someone raised the cry of ‘franc-tireurs!’ they engaged in a frenzy of looting, shooting and burning.”

That was how we heard it in 1914 and while the war lasted. The passion of this book is the passion of those hours. It is not moderated by the 1930 vaporings of Arthur Ponsonby or the sophistries of Alfred von Wegerer. What we read is as we then hoped, feared, and thought. Reviving painful memories, it will not silence controversy