The Race to the Sea left both German and Allied forces exhausted. For
the balance of 1914, both sides could do little more than replenish their
losses and fortify the continuous lines that now covered the Western Front from
the Swiss border to the English Channel. The elaborate trench systems that
developed would not be breached until 1918.
Start Date: September
1914
End Date: November
1914
Series of battles in northern France and Belgium in the
autumn of 1914. Following the Anglo-French counteroffensive of the First Battle
of the Marne (September 5–12, 1914), stalemate emerged along the Aisne River
Valley. Consequently, in the area from the Aisne north to the English Channel
both Allied and German forces initiated a series of attempts to outflank the
other.
This maneuvering, known as the Race to the Sea, was in fact
a race to find an open flank on which to resume mobile operations with the intent
of bringing the war to a decisive conclusion. From late September until
mid-November, however, neither side was able to reach open territory in advance
of the other. The result was a series of violent collisions that ended with
Belgian, French, and British forces facing their German adversaries in static
positions extending from the English Channel to the Swiss border.
On September 14 with the German defeat in the Battle of the
Marne, General of Infantry Erich van Falkenhayn replaced Colonel General Helmuth
von Moltke as chief of the German General Staff. Falkenhayn decided to revive
the failed Schlieffen Plan by sending German forces around the French left
flank on the Aisne. Simultaneously, French Army commander General of Division
Joseph J. C. Joffre resolved to outflank the German right at Noyon.
Consequently, in the second half of September, units of French general of
division Noël de Castelnau’s Second Army collided with those of Bavarian crown
prince Rupprecht’s German Sixth Army as both formations stretched to the
northwest in an effort to find open territory.
Fighting intensified in early October as the two forces
clashed around Arras, an important transportation hub in northeastern France.
On October 1, two French infantry corps and one cavalry corps under General of
Division Louis Ernest de Maud’huy began pushing toward Arras from the west. At
the same time, units of the German Sixth Army were approaching the city from
the east. Rupprecht intended to hold the French at Arras while wheeling forces
to the north of the city, thereby outflanking the French wing. By the evening
of October 4, Maud’huy’s force was in danger of being encircled. German units
had occupied the city of Lens to the north, while French Territorial units
south of Arras were giving way under heavy German pressure.
Both Castelnau and Maud’huy suggested retreat. Unwilling to
concede Arras, Joffre quickly reorganized the French forces in the vicinity.
Detaching Maud’huy’s force from the Second Army, Joffre designated it the Tenth
Army and placed both formations under General of Division Ferdinand Foch. From
October 5, Foch forbade retirement fromArras.
Despite heavy losses, French forces held their positions. By
the evening of October 6, German pressure had diminished as Falkenhayn decided
to cease attacks in the vicinity. Both he and Joffre subsequently turned their
attention northward.
While Rupprecht’s German Sixth Army attempted to turn the
Allied flank in northern France in late September, Falkenhayn had directed the
III Reserve Corps, commanded by General of Infantry Hans von Beseler, to
besiege the fortified Belgian port city of Antwerp. The capture of Antwerp and
destruction of the Belgian Army, which was using the city as a base, would
ensure the safety of German lines of communication west. It would also remove
any impetus for the dispatch of British forces to Belgium. Falkenhayn hoped
that this, combined with the operations of the Sixth Army to the south, would
leave the Germans in control of French and Belgian territory from the Somme
River north to the English Channel, enabling their forces to outflank the
Anglo-French armies and march on Paris.
Beseler’s forces opened the siege of Antwerp on September
28. After subjecting the city to an intense artillery bombardment, on October 1
Beseler initiated infantry attacks. With only limited French and British
assistance forthcoming, Antwerp capitulated on October 10. Most of the Belgian
Army, however, escaped and retired behind the Yser River. This development
presented a problem for Falkenhayn. In early October he had assembled in
Belgium the Fourth Army under Colonel General Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg.
Falkenhayn intended to send the Fourth Army south into France in an attempt to
outflank the Allied left wing, but the presence of 53,000 Belgian troops at the
Yser inhibited Albrecht’s freedom of movement.
Consequently, on October 18 the German Fourth Army attacked
Belgian positions along the Yser. Although they were supported by French forces
and British naval guns in the English Channel, the Belgians were slowly forced
to give ground. In desperation, King Albert on October 27 ordered the locks at
Nieuport opened, inundating the countryside. By October 31 the rising water
level had created an impassable barrier for the Germans, thereby securing the
Allied left flank.
By this point German and Allied efforts were concentrated
around the Belgian town of Ypres. In early October the British Expeditionary
Force (BEF) had begun transferring from positions on the Aisne to northern France
and Flanders. As elements of the BEF arrived in the area between La Bassée and
Ypres, British commander Sir John French directed them to advance. By
mid-October, however, they faced increasing resistance from German cavalry,
which preceded the arrival of more substantial forces. By October 19, elements
of Albrecht’s Fourth Army and Rupprecht’s Sixth Army had assembled and began
advancing westward north and south of Ypres, respectively. The BEF was forced
onto the defensive, but the timely arrival of French and Indian reinforcements
prevented a German breakthrough.
By late October, Falkenhayn’s search for open ground was
increasingly desperate. In an effort to resume mobile operations before the
arrival of additional Allied troops, he quickly assembled a new force between
the Fourth and Sixth Armies. It consisted of six divisions and more than 250
heavy guns formed into Army Group Fabeck, under General of Infantry Max von
Fabeck. Falkenhayn directed Fabeck to punch through the fragile British line
south of Ypres, resulting in the First Battle of Ypres (October 19–November
22).
British units at Ypres weathered fierce German attacks
during October 29–31. On the afternoon of October 31, German forces nearly
broke through at Gheluvelt. In early November, however, pressure on the BEF
subsided, as French reinforcements launched counterattacks around Ypres and
mounting German losses diminished the intensity of their offensive. Falkenhayn
made a final effort on November 10–11. On November 11 the Prussian Guards managed
to crack the British line south of Ypres, but the British were able to blunt
it. By November 13 the fighting around Ypres had largely subsided, and the Race
to the Sea was over.
THE RACE TO THE SEA; AND WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
The counter-attack on the Marne was indeed the end of the
Schlieffen Plan; but it was also the beginning of Churchill’s ‘desperate and
vain appeals against the decision of fate’ – appeals that on the Western Front
would ultimately cost the lives of over half a million men of the British army.
On the Aisne, meanwhile, the armies began digging in. At
first they dug simple, shallow rifle-pits, but as more and heavier artillery
was brought up, the trenches were dug deeper and became more elaborate, the
Germans generally with the advantage of the better ground. Both sides began
‘feeling for the flank’ again – trying to find the end of the opponent’s line,
to force the defender to fall back so as not to be enveloped. At first it was
local, the French on the left attacking with troops already in the line and the
Germans likewise, before becoming more deliberate, with both Joffre and
Falkenhayn trying to find ‘fresh’ troops for the task. For whatever the dashed
hopes of the Schlieffen Plan, Moltke’s successor had first to make sure the
situation did not, at the very least, get any worse. Surmising that the
British, having been thoroughly blooded, would now reinforce the BEF, he
thought it well to capture the Channel ports and cut their supply lines –
except that the lines of communication did not run through the northern Channel
ports. Besides, the Grosser Generalstab was still hankering after its Cannae:
opportunities might be created from unexpected tactical success. After all, a
fortnight earlier, General Paul von Hindenburg’s 8th Army had destroyed the
better part of the Russian 2nd Army at Tannenberg, which for a while at least
took the pressure off the Oberste Heeresleitung. For the time being, the flanks
of both sides hung tantalizingly in the air, with 200 miles of open country to
the west: perhaps there was still time to knock out France (and now the
British) and then turn east with all the efficiency of the Prussian (and, they
must hope, the French and Belgian) railway system to defeat the Russian bear?
During late September and early October there was a
continuous series of battles in Picardy, Artois and Flanders, Joffre having
matched the efficiency of the Eisenbahnamt by moving General Noel de
Castelnau’s 2nd Army from Lorraine to Amiens, while Falkenhayn moved Crown
Prince Rupprecht’s (Bavarian) 6th Army opposite him to St Quentin in a
remarkable but little-known railway race (through Luxembourg). On 17 and 18
September the French attacked at Noyon; the Germans countered by attacking on
the French flank towards Montdidier. On the twenty-second the French attacked
north of Roye; and again the Germans countered by attacking on the flank. On 27
and 28 September Rupprecht struck near Albert, but Castelnau managed once more
to halt them. With each attempt the line was prolonged west and north, in what
would become known as ‘the Race for the Sea’, though the object was not so much
reaching the coast as re-establishing a war of manoeuvre.
The search for the open flank now moved even further north,
towards Arras. Two infantry corps and one of cavalry from Castelnau’s 2nd Army,
under General Louis de Maud’huy, advanced up the River Scarpe towards Vimy.
Rupprecht tried to outflank him and on 3 October sent his reserve corps north
of Arras and the IV Cavalry Corps further north towards Lille. By the evening
of the 4th Maud’huy was in serious danger of being cut off, having lost contact
with his cavalry to the north, and a gap having opened on his southern flank.
He told Joffre he would have to withdraw, and asked in which direction. Joffre,
desperate to protect the industrial areas of Artois, ordered Maud’huy to hold
his ground, and at once set about reorganizing the northern armies. Maud’huy’s
detachment became yet another new army, the 10th (remarkable promotion for a
man who in July had been commanding a brigade), and the 2nd and 10th, along
with any other troops in the area, mainly Territorials, were grouped together
under the command of Ferdinand Foch, as Joffre’s deputy. The front held; for
the moment the crisis was over.
Sir John French, and Kitchener, watching this slow-motion
race for the sea, had been getting anxious, and had decided that the BEF must
shorten its lines of communication as soon as possible, not least by resuming
its place on the left flank of the French, rather than remaining sandwiched
between armies. It were better, in any case, that Calais, Boulogne, Dunkirk or
Dieppe (perhaps even Ostend and Zeebrugge) replace St Nazaire as the port of
entry – or ‘base’, as it was called in Field Service Regulations. Besides, if
the Channel ports fell into German hands, the Channel itself would soon be full
of mines and U-Boats. Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, was only too
well aware of the threat, and was already preparing to send a Royal Marines
Brigade and two more of the Royal Naval Division – reservist sailors not
required for ships’ crews, half-retrained as infantry (among them, hastily
commissioned, Rupert Brooke – ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His
hour, / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping …’). With aircraft
of the Royal Naval Air Service and an improvised force of armoured cars, as
well as his own (personally chosen) Yeomanry regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars,
they were to screen the northern ports – and later, at the beginning of
October, would sprint to Antwerp to stiffen the resolve of the Belgian
garrison.
On 29 September Sir John French sent a note to Joffre:
Ever since our
position in the French line was altered by the advance of General Manoury’s 6th
Army to the River Ourcq, I have been anxious to regain my original position on
the left flank of the French Armies. On several occasions I have thought of
suggesting this move, but the strategical and tactical situation from day to
day has made the proposal inopportune. Now, however, that the position of
affairs has become clearly defined, and that the immediate future can be
forecasted with some confidence, I wish to press the proposal with all the
power and insistence which are at my disposal. The moment for the execution of
such a move appears to me to be singularly opportune.
The opportuneness lay
in part with the imminent arrival of significant reinforcements, including the
newly formed 7th and 8th Divisions (both almost exclusively regular) and the
leading elements of the Indian Corps and the Indian Cavalry Corps (via
Marseilles, as Churchill’s 1911 memorandum had suggested). ‘In other words,’
Sir John French explained, ‘my present force of six Divisions and two Cavalry
Divisions will, within three or four weeks from now, be increased by four
Divisions and two Cavalry Divisions, making a total British force of ten
Divisions (five Corps) and four Cavalry Divisions.’
Joffre agreed at once, and the BEF began its move west.
At the same time, French began preparing to send an infantry
and a cavalry division to Antwerp, but on 8 October King Albert was forced to
abandon the city, leading the Belgian army west and south along the coast until
they could take up a coherent line of defence on the River Yser. A week later,
in yet another attempt to outflank the German line, the BEF crossed into
Belgium, to Ypres, to attack east along the Menin Road. As they did so, the
Duke (Albrecht) of Württemberg’s 4th Army, which had been railed from the Upper
Aisne and reinforced by fresh troops from Germany, and from the siege of
Antwerp after its surrender on 10 October, attacked the Belgians on the Yser.
They were eventually halted when on the twenty-first the King ordered the
sea-locks at Nieuport to be opened, flooding the surrounding country.
By now Sir John French had some 250,000 men at his command.
Urged on by Foch, he went onto the offensive along the Menin Road on 21 October.
His forces soon ran into trouble, however, the speed of the redeployment of
Rupprecht’s Bavarians and Albrecht’s 6th Army taking both GQG and GHQ by
surprise. A month’s hard – at times, desperate – fighting would follow. Many of
the newly formed Cavalry Corps went into action for the first time –
dismounted, the horses being sent to the rear and the men taking up their
rifles to hold Messines Ridge south of Ypres. The first regiments of the
Territorial Force would be blooded too (those that had volunteered in
sufficient numbers for service overseas) – the London Scottish, the first
Territorials to go into action, losing half their strength in the process. And
the Germans would have their first sight of the turbans, pugarees and Gurkha
pill-boxes of the Indian Corps. At Hollebeke on 31 October Sepoy Khudadad Khan
of the Duke of Connaught’s Own Baluchi Regiment won the first ever Indian VC,
when it looked as if the Germans might break the line: ‘The British Officer in
charge of the [machine-gun] detachment having been wounded,’ ran the citation,
‘and the other gun put out of action by a shell, Sepoy Khudadad, though himself
wounded, remained working his gun until all the other five men of the gun
detachment had been killed.’ He would later receive a Viceroy’s Commission as
subedar.
That last day of October was indeed a desperate time, the
moment when it looked as if the dyke would rupture, a day when individual
soldiers in individual regiments made a difference. If there were to be an
accolade of saver of that dyke it would almost certainly go to the 2nd
Worcesters, the only troops left in front of Ypres that morning as the Germans
managed to capture Gheluvelt, key to the Ypres–Menin gap and therefore to the
open country beyond. The battalion had already been reduced to 400 (less than
half its embarkation strength in August), and they would lose another 200
recapturing this vital ground. Major Edward Hankey, who had taken command a
month before when the battalion’s lieutenant-colonel was promoted to command the
brigade, led what remained of the Worcesters across 1,000 yards of open fields,
under artillery fire, to drive the Germans from the grounds of the Chateau
Gheluvelt, managing then to hold on against the inevitable counter-attacks just
long enough for reinforcements to be cobbled together from the rest of the
brigade to plug the hole.
On 11 November there was another crisis astride the Menin
road, when the 1st and 4th Brigades of the Prussian Guard attacked, breaking
through the defence line and getting to within 2 miles of Ypres. Only the
bayonets of the 2nd Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and a scratch
force of Grenadiers, Irish Guards and the Royal Munster Fusiliers were able to
restore the situation – but at shattering cost, including the loss of the
brigadier, Charles FitzClarence, who had won the VC at Mafeking.
The attack of the Prussian Guard, however, like that of the
Garde Impériale at Waterloo, was the high-water mark of the German offensive at
Ypres, and in the days that followed the fighting slackened. The BEF dug in –
just as they had on the Aisne – but deep, and the Western Front began its
consolidation into a continuous line of trenches that would eventually stretch
from the North Sea coast to the Swiss frontier. But the fighting in October and
November, on top of the August retreat and the counter-attack on the Marne, was
the end of the old BEF – the four divisions that had marched up to Mons, and
the fifth and sixth that had joined them thereafter. The casualties for the six
weeks of the First Battle of Ypres, as it became known, were 58,155 (7,960
dead, 29,562 wounded, 17,873 missing, the remainder classified ‘sick’); the BEF
had arrived in France with around 80,000 infantry, which by the end of October
had increased to 130,000, and which on paper stood at about 150,000 by the
close of First Ypres. On 30 November the officially recorded figure for
casualties of all kinds since the beginning of hostilities was 86,237. Most of
these were in the infantry, where the officers and NCOs led from the front. The
conclusions hardly need spelling out. The 1915 edition of Debrett’s Peerage was
delayed for many months until the editors had been able to revise the entries
for almost every blue-blooded family in the kingdom.
Regulars from all over the empire would now be recalled and
fed piecemeal into Flanders, reinforced in equally piecemeal fashion by the
Territorials once the necessary legislation had been enacted, and then from the
summer of 1915 by the men of Kitchener’s ‘New Armies’, the volunteers who were
flocking in their many tens of thousands to answer the secretary for war’s
famous poster-call ‘Your Country Needs YOU!’, until in January 1916
conscription was introduced.
Need so many – the core of the professional army – have died
in those first two months? In his memoir of the BEF’s opening battles, Forty
Days in 1914, Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, Henry Wilson’s
successor-but-one as DMO (1916–18), writes plainly of the missed opportunities:
‘We have in the end gained complete victory [his book was published in 1919],
but we could have gained it more quickly had our Governments been organized for
war.’ This is the point at which, therefore, while recognizing that the BEF was
standing (with the French) in the path of the greatest military juggernaut the
world has ever seen, we must scotch any idea that what happened in the ‘Battle
of the Frontiers’ was inevitable. Actions have consequences; and inaction has
consequences too. Quoting the historian E. H. Carr is a perilous business, but
in this he is worth the risk: ‘Nothing in history is inevitable, except in the
formal sense that, for it to have happened otherwise, the antecedent causes
would have had to be different.’
The futile encounter-battle on the Mons–Condé canal, the
ensuing battle at Le Cateau and the subsequent retreat – these need not have
happened if the BEF had concentrated at Amiens rather than Maubeuge, as both
Sir John French and Kitchener had wanted at the 5 August war council (at which
Churchill had suggested they should concentrate well to the rear of the French
army to form a strategic reserve) – and as Lanrezac himself had suggested to
Joffre as late as 15 August. On 21 September, Haig – whose handling of I Corps
in the fighting at Ypres was to earn him considerable acclaim – wrote in
unequivocal terms to the King’s assistant private secretary, Major Clive
Wigram, whom he had known in India: ‘I am glad you already realize how wrong it
was to have rushed the Army north to Mons by forced marches before our reservists
had got their legs. GHQ had the wildest ideas at this time of the nature of the
war and the rôle of the British Force.’
Had this alternative plan been adopted, though, would it
have meant that the Germans would have been able to turn the flank of
Lanrezac’s 5th Army?
No. From 20 August, when Moltke told Kluck that ‘a landing
of British troops is reported at Boulogne: their advance from about Lille must
be reckoned with’, both the OHL and Bülow, commanding (ineffectively) the 1st
and 2nd Armies as an army group, were acutely conscious of the danger to the
1st Army’s (Kluck’s) flank. Two days later, the 1st Army halted for two
critical hours to realign west in order to meet what Kluck believed was the BEF
detraining at Tournai but turned out to be French Territorials. By 24 August –
the date Sir John French had originally given to President Poincaré and Joffre
before agreeing to bring it forward to the twenty-first – the BEF would have
been ready at Amiens to take the offensive. Its divisions could then have been
transported via the excellent French railway system the 50 miles to St Quentin,
whence it would have posed too great a threat to the 1st Army’s right for Kluck
to have risked trying to envelop Lanrezac’s 5th Army south of Maubeuge. In the meantime,
Lanrezac would have had to shift for his own left flank; but this was, in
essence, what he was doing anyway in the withdrawal on 22 August. Without the
BEF on the Mons–Condé canal, Kluck would of course have had a free run south
through Mons, but he could not have presented a flank to the fortress of
Maubeuge without impunity, nor could he have made any real turning movement
north of Le Cateau because of the Forêt de Mormal – and, anyway, Lanrezac was
already taking precautions by withdrawing to the Sambre. Lanrezac’s position
would have been little different from the actual situation on 26 August since
the BEF had by then been driven away to the south and west, and the gap was
opening up – except, of course, that Kluck’s 1st Army would have been in
greater strength and better shape without the encounters with British rifle
fire. From 27 August the course of events would, at worst, have been no
different from actual events, the BEF retreating from St Quentin on the same
line – but without the losses incurred at Mons and Le Cateau, with greater
cohesion between its two corps, and perhaps with much better cooperation and
contact with the French. Its subsequent performance in the Marne
counter-offensive might then have been more spirited, with a chance of
‘bouncing’ the Aisne heights and preventing the Germans from consolidating.
