Roger Evans; A Descent into Hell - A History of The World War: Penguin Publishing
September on the Western Front
Since the victory of the combined German armies in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, German planning and thoughts on how a future war with France should proceed underwent various shifts. In the decades that followed the war, Helmuth von Moltke, who had led the Germans in their victorious war with France, believed that another rapid victory over France was not possible, and his subsequent operational plans for a war against France displayed a great deal more caution. Some of these plans also incorporated the possibility of fighting a two-front war with Russia, which was a somewhat unrealistic fear amongst the German army chiefs and envisioned not the quick “knock-out blows” that had characterized the German Wars of Unification, but rather grinding attritional affairs in which Germany would use her interior position to wear down her opponents. Any future war would be costly even to the victor. This pessimistic view of Germany’s prospects in a future war had, to some extent, made Moltke a voice for peace rather than war.
Helmuth Von Moltke was replaced by Alfred von Waldersee upon his retirement, but the new Chief of General Staff would not last in his position for long. When Kaiser Wilhelm I was replaced by his son Friedrich, von Waldersee was replaced by the new Kaiser. Kaiser Friedrich believed that von Waldersee was reactionary and ill-suited for the role owing to his apparently mentally unstable state, a judgement that the Kaiser had formed largely because of von Waldersee’s rabidly anti-Semitic and reactionary worldview. During Friedrich’s time as Kaiser, the German Army was generally discouraged from drawing up detailed war plans aimed at France and Britain, unwilling as he was to alienate the two liberal powers to his west. Planning tended to be aimed at Russia instead, though Germany’s general staff continued to draw up less-publicized plans against France, and there continued to be paranoia surrounding a possible Franco-Russian alliance. The opinion amongst much of the Junker class of Germany was that Kaiser Friedrich was allowing the strength of the German army to atrophy, and his own personal preference for the emerging German middle classes over the Junkers did little to endear him to them. There were some figures who approved of his attempts to establish closer relations with the British however, who were felt to be a natural partner to Germany.
This began to change after Friedrich’s death in 1901. Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed most of the men favoured by his father and appointed Colmar von der Goltz as the new German chief of General Staff. Colmar von der Goltz had been a prominent military theorist as far back as the 1880s, and his efforts in reforming the Ottoman army had not gone unnoticed despite the defeat of the Ottomans in the Great Balkan War. Previously his argument that any future war against France would be a
Volkskrieg, a more extreme version of the resistance that the French had offered toward the end of the Franco-Prussian War had made him unpopular, but he had caught the attention of Crown Prince Wilhelm, as well as the admiration of military thinkers such as Friedrich von Bernhardi Once he had become Field Marshall, von der Goltz had successfully lobbied for greater funds to be directed toward the army rather than the German navy, and on several occasions managed to persuade the Kaiser, who was inclined to all things naval to support the former over the latter. The German Army was able to retain its status as Europe’s largest, despite the rapid growth of Russia’s population and the heroic efforts of the French to increase the size of their army as much as possible.
Despite his success as a peacetime Chief of General Staff, von der Goltz was not sanguine about the prospect of war. His advice to the Kaiser at the beginning of the World War was sober. “I can give your majesty a victory, though not an easy one. It will cost us vast amounts of treasure, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men. And it may take years to crush the spirit of France. If we go to war, it will be a war of national annihilation”. Although he envisioned a great attritional struggle like von Moltke had done, von der Goltz nevertheless had planned for a more offensive war. Based on his observations of the Great Balkan War, he had identified artillery as the key in any modern offensive and had taken measures to ensure that the German army would have enough artillery to counter the formidable French 75mm field gun. The German army also possessed more howitzers, which would prove to be important when it came to indirect fire.
Even if the spirit of the general staff was decidedly gloomy when it came to war, the spirit of the army as a whole was confident. Von der Goltz and the general staff had planned an invasion through Belgium, reasoning that an offensive from Alsace-Lorraine would almost certainly become bogged down along a narrow front that was covered by extensive French fortifications, costing the Germans a higher price than was acceptable. In this, he adapted part of a proposal made by General Alfred von Schlieffen, though the strategic goal differed somewhat.[1] Von der Goltz reasoned that an invasion of Belgium would allow the Germans to lengthen the front by almost four hundred miles, enabling the full use of Germany’s superior numbers to achieve decisive battlefield victories for the German army and to capture Paris. This latter objective was envisaged as being the key to winning any long war of attrition, as Paris was key to France’s economy, infrastructure, and self-image. The fact that this violated the neutrality of Belgium, which had been guaranteed by German’s predecessor Prussia back in 1839, mattered little to men who saw the war as a war of national annihilation.
Though Belgium was only a small country, it was nevertheless determined to protect its own neutrality. Belgium had rejected a German request for military access, and when German soldiers began entering the country on the 19th of September, the country made a formal appeal to France and Britain to protect its independence. This was a de facto request to join the Entente, though a formal declaration of an alliance would not come until later. The Belgian field army had begun to amass behind the Meuse River, hoping that the modern fortifications of Liège would buy them time. While the fortresses there were among the most modern in the world, they were manned only by the garrison due to the speed of the German advance toward it. The concrete fortresses held well against the initial assaults of the Germans, as the Germans were only able to employ lighter field artillery and howitzers during the first day. However, by the 21st of September, the Germans had brought up their heavy siege artillery, which was able to reduce the forts one by one. The final Belgian garrison surrendered on the 24th of September, and the great fortress of Liège had barely slowed the German army at all.[2]
The Belgians fought more fiercely than the Germans had anticipated, but bravery was not enough to overcome the strength of modern firepower
As von der Goltz put it following the fall of Liège, the Germans now had a window of a few weeks to sweep down on the northern flank of the French and crush as much of her war-making capacity as she could before the weather worsened and the war became one of attrition. Whether the German high command truly envisioned what was to come is still a matter of debate, with von der Goltz’s defenders insisting that he was a visionary, and his detractors claiming that the vision he had outlined of the “peoples war” would little resemble the attritional warfare that was to come. But that would be later. Already on the 24th of September advance units of the German army entered the almost-undefended city of Brussels. The Belgian army had pulled back to Antwerp to join the British army there, but they had not reckoned with the speed of the German advance. There was now a worry that the British and Belgians would be cut off from the French entirely, allowing the Germans to defeat all the Entente armies in detail.
Retreat would be a bitter pill to swallow for the Belgians. Already much of the country was under German occupation, and the few reports that were filtering out of occupied Belgium contained lurid details of German atrocities against civilians. In a number of villages, the male inhabitants were gathered and summarily shot by German troops. A story in which German soldiers broke into a nunnery and raped the nuns there infuriated not only Belgians, Frenchmen and the British, but even circulated in the United States, where President Theodore Roosevelt claimed that this was evidence of the inhumanity of the “Krauts”.[3] Initially dismissed as Entente Propaganda, reports of atrocities in Belgium by the German occupiers were later proved to have a great deal of veracity, even if some details were exaggerated by propagandists in Entente Nations. For their part the Germans claimed that the actions were in response to Belgian “Franc-Tireurs”, and this remained a contentious point of debate for decades afterwards.[4] However, even King Albert reluctantly accepted the merits of Sarrail’s argument that it was better to lose ground to the Germans than lose valuable men, and on the 28th of September, the Belgians began to conduct a fighting retreat through the part of the country they still held.
Further to the east, the war seemed to be going scarcely any better for the French. An attempt to counterattack the German forces coming through the Ardennes was shattered both by the superior number of Germany’s 4th and 5th armies, as well as by the more numerous howitzers of the German forces, which were better suited to the hilly terrain of the Ardennes. The French commanders sent their men on frontal assaults, trumpets blaring and red pants often revealing their position to German soldiers in the woods, and the result was carnage. On one sunny September day, the French army lost over 20,000 men killed, and 40,000 more wounded. Both armies were commanded to halt the counter-offensive and instead conduct a fighting retreat instead. Aware of his numerical inferiority, Sarrail wanted to avoid the loss of manpower and instead coax the Germans into advancing into France, where he hoped a combination of logistical difficulties and German exhaustion would allow him to launch a decisive blow against the invaders.
Elsewhere in the front, the situation had already become more static. In Alsace-Lorraine, both sides had constructed great fortifications, which now served only to discourage offensives on their common border. While both sides had learned from the Battle of Liège that even the most well-built modern fortresses could be pulverized by heavy artillery in a matter of days, they had also come to learn that simple trenches built into the earth could offer good protection against modern artillery, and in the first weeks of the war, both armies in the area began to build trench systems to enhance their defensive capabilities and allow for reinforcements in the more decisive arena of the war.
As September ended, it appeared that the position of the Entente in the West was perilous. The Germans maintained a clear numerical superiority in both men and machines, and there was an optimistic spirit to be found from the generals to the common soldiery. Entente soldiers, by contrast, understood their seemingly constant retreating boded poorly for their prospects in the war. It seemed likely that the Germans would be able to overwhelm the Entente forces, possibly getting as far as Paris and crippling France’s ability to make war. The picture was complicated by several key German failures, however. The Germans were failing to capture or destroy Entente military formations. Once the Entente forces along the front had stopped counterattacking and began conducting retreats instead, the casualty ratio was beginning to favour the Entente. The Germans were also confronted by mounting logistical difficulties. Wherever possible, Entente forces were sabotaging roads and railroads, blowing up bridges and collapsing tunnels. Already there were concerns on the part of the Germans about conscripts “blowing through their ammunition far more swiftly than we can hope to resupply them". Though many did not speak it out just yet, there were growing worries that the German army may exhaust itself before it achieved a swift victory.
The situation on the Western Front at the end of September
[1] – Just think of it guys, a timeline in which Terence Zuber was right!
[2] – In OTL the Germans were slowed down by a few days, which probably was not decisive in the campaign itself, but may have allowed the Belgians to wreck more of their infrastructure and hamper the German advance. In TTL, the Germans have invested more into their heavy artillery though.
[3] – It’s worth noting that without the international response to the Boxer Rebellion, there is no precedent for calling the Germans “Huns” in TTL.
[4] – As it was in our own timeline, though apparently there is some evidence that Belgian Franc- Tireurs really did operate against German soldiers occupying Belgium. Of course, this does nothing to excuse German atrocities against the Belgians during their occupation of the country.
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Author's Notes - Military history isn't quite my forte, and I hope that at least most of this is plausible. The Germans have a more overwhelming superiority than the Entente compared to OTL, even with a somewhat larger British expeditionary force, and this may give TTL's Schlieffen Plan which isn't quite a Schlieffen plan more scope to succeed compared to OTL's. Considering that Germany doesn't have to worry about an Eastern Front or propping up Austria-Hungary, this may be enough for them to win. The question is whether they can reach Paris and whether this will be enough to make France capitulate.
Apologies also for the rather shit quality of my war map.
