Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open Strategic Square.

This disposition is as follows:—

White arranges his twelve units into four quarters of three each, and places one quarter at each corner of a square thus:—



We will give them titles, and call them A, B, C, and D.

If, as is most generally the case in a defensive campaign at its opening, White cannot be certain from which exact direction the main blow is coming, he may yet know that it is coming from some one general direction, from one sector of the compass at least, and he arranges his square to face towards that sector.

For instance, in the above diagram, he may not know whether the blow is coming from the precise direction 1, or 2, or 3, but he knows that it is coming somewhere within the sector XY.

Then he will draw up his square so that its various bodies all face towards the average direction from which the blow may come.

The SIZE of his square—which is of great importance to the result—he makes as restricted as possible, subject to two prime conditions. These conditions are:—

First, that there shall be room for the troops composing each corner to be deployed—that is, spread out for fighting. Secondly, that there shall be room between any two corners (A and C, for instance) for a third corner (D, for instance) to move in between them and spread out for fighting in support of them. He makes his square as close and restricted as possible, because his success depends—as will be seen in a moment—upon the rapidity with which any one corner can come up in support of the others. But he leaves enough room for the full numbers to spread out for fighting, because otherwise he loses in efficiency; and he leaves room enough between any two squares for a third one to come in, because the whole point of the formation is the aid each corner can bring to the others.

In this posture he awaits the enemy.

That enemy will necessarily come on in a lengthy line, lengthy in proportion to the number of his units. For it is essential to the general commanding superior numbers to make the whole of the superior numbers tell, and this can only be done if they march along parallel roads, and these roads are sufficiently wide apart for the various columns to have plenty of room to deploy—that is, to spread out into a fighting line—when the shock comes.



This extended line of Black marching thus against White strikes White first upon some one corner of his square. Suppose that corner to be corner A. Then the position when contact is established and the first serious fighting begins is what you will observe in the above diagram. A is the corner (now spread out for fighting) which gets the first shock.

Note you (for this is the crucial point of the whole business) that upon the exposed corner A will fall a very dangerous task indeed. A will certainly be attacked by forces superior to itself. Normally forces more than half as large again as A will be near enough to A to concentrate upon him in the first shock. The odds will be at least as much as five to three, the Black units, 4, 5, and 6, will be right on A, and 3 and 7 will be near enough to come in as well in the first day or two of the combat, while possibly 2 may have a look in as well.

A, thus tackled, has become what may be called "the operative corner of the square." It is his task "to retreat and hold the enemy" while B, C, and D, "the masses of manoeuvre," swing up. But under that simple phrase "operative corner" is hidden all the awful business of a fighting retreat: it means leaving your wounded behind you, marching night and day, with your men under the impression of defeat; leaving your disabled guns behind you, keeping up liaison between all your hurrying, retreating units, with a vast force pressing forward to your destruction. A's entire force is deliberately imperilled in order to achieve the success of the plan as a whole, and upon A's tenacity, as will be seen in what follows, the success of that plan entirely depends.



Well, while A is thus retreating—say, from his old position at A1 on the foregoing diagram to such a position as A2, with Black swarming up to crush him—the other corners of the square, B, C, and D, receive the order to "swing"—that is, to go forward inclining to the left or the right according to the command given.

Mark clearly that, until the order is given, the general commanding Black cannot possibly tell whether the "swing" will be directed to the left or to the right. Either B will close up against A, C spread out farther to the left, and D come in between A and C (which is a "swing" to the left) as in Sketch 25, or C will close up against A, B will spread well out to the right, and D come up between A and B, as in Sketch 26 (which is a "swing" to the right).



Until the "swing" actually begins, Black, the enemy, cannot possibly tell whether it is his left-hand units (1 to 8) or his right-hand units (9 to 16) which will be affected. One of the two ends of his line will have to meet White's concentrated effort; the other will be left out in the cold. Black cannot make dispositions on the one hypothesis or on the other. Whichever he chose, White would, of course, swing the other way and disconcert him.

Black, therefore, has to keep his line even until he knows which way White is going to swing.



Let us suppose that White swings to the left.

Mark what follows. The distances which White's units have got to go are comparatively small. B will be up at A's side, and so will D in a short time after the swing is over, and when the swing is completed, the position is after this fashion. Black's numbers, 1 to 9 inclusive, find themselves tackled by all Black's twelve. There is a superiority of number against Black on his right, White's left, and the remaining part of Black's line (10 to 16 inclusive), is out in the cold.

If it were a tactical problem, and all this were taking place in a small field, Black's left wing, 10-16, would, of course, come up at once and redress the balance. But being a strategical problem, and involving very large numbers and very great distances, Black's left wing, 10-16, can do nothing of the kind. For Black's left wing, 10-16, cannot possibly get up in time. Long before it has arrived on the scene, White's 12 will have broken Black's 9 along Black's right wing.



There are three elements which impose this delay upon Black's left wing.

First, to come round in aid of the right wing means the marching forward of one unit after another, so that each shall overlap the last, and so allow the whole lot to come up freely. This means that the last unit will have to go forward six places before turning, and that means several days' marching. For with very large bodies, and with a matter of 100 miles to come up, all in one column, it would be an endless business (Sketch 28).



Next you have the delay caused by the conversion of direction through a whole right angle. That cause of delay is serious. For when you are dealing with very large bodies of men, such as half a dozen army corps, to change suddenly from the direction S (see Sketch 29) for which your Staff work was planned, and to break off at a moment's notice in direction E, while you are on the march towards S, is impossible. You have to think out a whole new set of dispositions, and to re-order all your great body of men. White was under no such compulsion, for though he had to swing, the swing faced the same general direction as his original dispositions. And the size of the units and the distances to be traversed—the fact that the problem is strategical and not tactical—is the essence of the whole thing. If, for instance, you have (as in Sketch 30) half a dozen, not army corps, but mere battalions of 1,000 men, deployed over half a dozen miles of ground, AB, and advancing in the direction SS, and they are suddenly sent for in the direction E, it is simple enough. You form your 6,000 men into column; in a few hours' delay they go off in the direction E, and when they get to the place where they are wanted, the column can spread out quickly again on the front CD, and soon begin to take part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army corps—240,000 men—it is quite another matter. The turning of any one of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one column—they would take ages to deploy—so you must, as we have seen, make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin.



Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10, 11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got up abreast of them—and that is the third cause of delay.

Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated, have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine.

If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to 16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and pursuing sixteen.

That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of manoeuvre" behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the retirement of the whole was the Battle of the Marne.



Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the tenacity and military value of the operative corner, which is exposed and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work.

If that operative corner is destroyed as a force—is overwhelmed or dispersed or surrounded—while it is fighting its great odds, the whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy, and the army is in a far worse plight than if recourse had never been had to the open strategic square at all. For if the operative corner, A, is out of existence before the various bodies forming the "manoeuvring mass" behind it have had time to "swing," then the enemy will be right in their midst, and destroying, in overwhelming force, these remaining separated bodies in detail.

It was here that the German strategic theory contrasted so violently with the French. The Germans maintained that an ordeal which Napoleon might have been able to live through with his veterans and after fifteen years of successful war, a modern conscript army, most of its men just taken from civilian life and all of short service, would never endure. They believed the operative corner would go to pieces and either be pounded to disintegration, or outflanked, turned, and caught in the first days of the shock before the rest of the square had time to "work." The French believed the operative corner would stand the shock, and, though losing heavily, would remain in being. They believed that the operative corner of the square would, even under modern short service and large quasi-civilian reserve conditions, remain an army. They staked their whole campaign upon that thesis, and they turned out to be right. But they only just barely won through, and by the very narrowest margin. Proving right as they did, however, the success of their strategical theory changed the whole course of the war.

With this contrast of the great opposing theories considered, I come to the conclusion of my Second Part, which examines the forces opposed. I will now turn to the Third Part of my book, which concerns the first actual operations from the Austrian note to the Battle of the Marne.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Thus, after these lines were written, I had occasion in Land and Water to estimate the garrison of Przemysl before the figures were known. The element wherewith to guide one's common sense was the known perimeter to be defended; and arguing from this, I determined that a minimum of not less than 100,000 men would capitulate. I further conceived that the total losses could hardly be less than 40,000, and I arrived at an original force of between three and four corps.



PART III.

THE FIRST OPERATIONS.

In any general view of the great war which aims both at preserving proportion between its parts, and at presenting especially the main lines in relief, the three weeks between the German sudden forcing of war and the seventeen or eighteen days between the English declaration and the main operations upon the Sambre, will have but a subsidiary importance. They were occupied for at least half the period in the mobilization of the great armies. They were occupied for the second half of the period in the advance across the Rhine of German numbers greatly superior to the Allies, and also through the plain of Northern Belgium. The operation, as calculated by the German General Staff, was delayed by but a very few days—one might almost say hours—by the hastily improvised resistance of Liege, and the imperfect defence of their country which was all the Belgian forces, largely untrained, could offer.

We must, therefore, pass briefly enough over that preliminary period, though the duty may be distasteful to the reader, on account of the very exaggerated importance which its operations took, especially in British eyes.

For this false perspective there were several reasons, which it is worth while to enumerate, as they will aid our judgment in obtaining a true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts to which they were no more than an introduction.

1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace, during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.

2. The first shock, falling as it did upon the ring fortress of Liege, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of stronghold.

3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe. Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great, had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the moral chaos accompanying that loss.

4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which the blow was awaited.

To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.

* * * * *

The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the Belgian Plain.

This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.

It has been represented too often as a sort of meeting-place, where must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered them with the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Treves or Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom, was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. Caesar's adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was hoped—the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo—again showed what this territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French and the British, but also by the Prussian Government, with what results we know.

The entries into this plain are very clearly defined by natural limits. It is barred a few hours' march beyond the German frontier by the broad and deep river Meuse, which here runs from the rough and difficult Ardennes country up to the Dutch frontier. The whole passage is no more than twelve miles across, and at the corner of it, where the Meuse bends, is the fortress of Liege. West of this fortress the upper reaches of the river run, roughly east and west upon Namur, and after Namur turn south again, passing through a very deep ravine that extends roughly from the French town of Mezieres to Namur through the Ardennes country. The Belgian Plain is therefore like a bottle with a narrow neck, a bottle defined by the Dutch frontier and the Middle Meuse on either side, and a neck extending only from the Ardennes country to the Dutch frontier, with the fortress of Liege barring the way. Now the main blow was to be delivered ultimately upon the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons. That is, the situation was roughly that of the accompanying diagram: by the bottle neck at D the whole mass of troops must pass—or most of them—which are later to strike on the front AB. To reach that front was available to the invader the vast network of Belgian railways RRR crammed with rolling stock, and provided such opportunities for rapid advance as no other district in Europe could show. But all this system converged upon the main line which ran through the ring of forts round Liege, L, and so passed through Aix-la-Chapelle, A, and to Germany.



The German Government, therefore, could not be secure of its intention to pass great bodies through the Belgian Plain until Liege was grasped, and it was determined to grasp Liege long before the mobilization of the German forces was completed. For this purpose only a comparatively small force, rapidly gathered, was available. It was placed under the command of General von Emmerich, and its first bodies exchanged shots with the Belgian outposts early in the afternoon of Tuesday, August 4, 1914.

The hour and date should always be remembered for the solemnity which attaches to the beginning of any great thing; and the full observer of European affairs, who understands what part religion or superstition plays in the story of Europe, will note this enormously significant detail. The first Germans to cross the violated frontier accomplished that act upon the same day and at the same hour as that in which their forerunners had crossed the French frontier forty-four years before.

The afternoon wore on to night, with no more than a conflict between outposts. Just before midnight the cannonade was first heard. It also was the moment in which the ultimatum delivered to Germany by this country, by a coincidence, expired.[2]

This night attack with guns was only delivered against one sector of the Liege forts, and only with field-pieces.

As to the first of these points, it will be found repeated throughout the whole of the campaign wherever German forces attack a ring of permanent works. For the German theory in this matter (which experience has now amply supported) is that since modern permanent works of known and restricted position go under to a modern siege train if the fire of the latter be fully concentrated and the largest pieces available, everything should be sacrificed to the putting into the narrowest area of all the projectiles available. The ring once broken on a sufficient single sector point is broken altogether.

The second point, that only field-pieces as yet were used (which was due to the fact that the siege train was not yet come up), is an important indication of the weakness of the defence—on all of which the enemy were, of course, thoroughly informed.

There were perhaps 20,000 men in and upon the whole periphery of Liege, a matter of over thirty miles, and what was most serious, no sufficient equipment or preparation of the forts, or, what was more serious still, no sufficient trained body of gunners.

It is almost true to say that the resistance of Liege, such as it was, was effected by rifle fire.

With the dawn of August 5th, and in the first four hours of daylight, a German infantry attack upon the same south-eastern forts which had been subjected to the first artillery fire in the night developed, and after some loss withdrew, but shortly after the first of the forts, that of Fleron, was silenced. The accompanying sketch map will show how wide a gap was left henceforward in the defences. Further, Fleron was the strongest of the works upon this side of the river. Seeing that, in any case, even if there had been a sufficient number of trained gunners in the forts, and a sufficient equipment and full preparation of the works for a siege (both of which were lacking), the absence of sufficient men to hold the gaps between would in any case have been fatal to the defence. With such a new gap as this open by the fall of Fleron, the defence was hopeless, even if it were only to be counted in hours.



It is high praise of the Belgian people and character to point out that, after the fall of Fleron, for forty-eight full hours such a gap was still contested by men, a great part of whom were little better than civilian in training, and who, had they been all tried regulars, would have been far too few for their task. General Leman, who commanded them, knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th, that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and insufficient troops.

During those forty-eight hours, the big howitzer, which is the type of the heavy German siege train—the 225 mm.—was brought up, and it is possible that a couple of the still larger Austrian pieces of 280 mm. (what we call in this country the 11-inch), which are constructed with flat treadles to their wheels to fire from mats laid on any reasonably hard surface (such as a roadway), had been brought up as well. At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next westward from Fleron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the city. The incident has been reported as a coup de main, with the object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the military story is simply that it proved the way to be open. In the afternoon and evening of the day, the Belgians were retiring into the heart of the city, and it is typical of the whole business that the great railway bridge upon which the main communications depended was left intact for the Germans to use.

With the morning of Friday, the 7th August, the first bodies of German infantry entered the town. The forts on the north and two remaining western forts upon the south of the river were still untaken, and until a large breach should be made in the northern forts at least, the railway communication of the German advance into the Belgian plain was still impeded. Great masses of the enemy, and, in proportion to those masses, still greater masses of advance stores were brought in.

In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid. And my reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary events in the south will appear in the sequel.

This reservation made—an important one in the scheme of this book—I return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through Belgium.

We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Liege was the prime necessity to that advance.

We have also seen that meanwhile it was possible and advisable to accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed, and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain bodies—not the bulk of the army—forward through the Ardennes, to command the passages of the Meuse above Liege, between that fortress and Namur.

This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.

Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance when the northern forts of Liege should be dominated; and on this same Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along the Gethe and thence towards Huy.

Of the outrages committed upon the civilian inhabitants in all these country-sides, the Government of which was neutral, and the territory of which was by the public law of Europe free not only from such novel crimes but from legitimate acts of war, I shall not speak, just as I shall not allude, save where they happen to have military importance, to the future increase of similar abominations which marked the progress of the campaign. For my only object in these pages is to lay before the reader a commentary which will explain the general strategy of the war.



While this advance line of cavalry was engaging in unimportant minor actions, or rather skirmishes (grossly exaggerated in the news of those days), the attack on the northern forts of Liege, upon which everything now depended, was opened. It was upon Thursday, August 13th, that the 280 mm. howitzers opened upon Loncin. Other of the remaining forts were bombarded; but, as in the case of Fleron a week before, we need not consider the subsidiary operations, because everything depended upon the fort of Loncin, which, as the accompanying diagram shows, commanded the railway line westward from Liege. General Leman himself was within that work, the batteries against which were now operating from within the ring—that is, from the city itself, or in what soldiers technically call "reverse"—that is, from the side upon which no fort is expected to stand, the side which is expected to defend and not to be attacked from. Whether Loncin held out the full forty-eight hours, or only forty, or only thirty-six, we do not know; but that moral factor to which I have already alluded, and which must be fully weighed in war, was again strengthened by the nature of such a resistance. For nearly all that garrison was dead and its commander found unconscious when the complete destruction of the work by the high explosive shells permitted the enemy to enter.



It was upon Saturday, the 15th of August, that the great bulk of the two main German armies set aside for passage through the Belgian Plain began to use the now liberated railway, and the week between that date and the first great shock upon the Sambre is merely a record of the almost uninterrupted advance, concentration, and supply of something not far short of half a million men coming forward in a huge tide over, above, and round on to, the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons, which was their ultimate objective, and upon which the Anglo-French body—perhaps half as numerous—had determined to stand.



The story of that very rapid advance is merely one of succeeding dates. By the 17th the front was at Tirlemont, by the 19th it was across the Dyle and running thence south to Wavre (the first army), the second army continuing south of this with a little east in it to a point in front of Namur. On the 20th there was enacted a scene of no military importance (save that it cost the invaders about a day), but of some moral value, because it strongly impressed the opinion in this country and powerfully affected the imagination of Europe as a whole: I mean the triumphal march through Brussels.

Far more important than this display was the opening on the evening of the same day, Thursday, August 20th, of the first fire against the eastern defences of Namur. This fire was directed upon that evening against the two and a half miles of trench between the forts of Cognelee and Marchovelette, and in the morning of Friday, the 21st, the trenches were given up, and the German infantry was within the ring of forts north of the city. The point of Namur, as we shall see in a moment, was twofold. First, its fortifications, so long as they held out, commanded the crossings both of the Sambre and of the Meuse within the angle of which the French defensive lay; secondly, its fortified zone formed the support whereupon the whole French right reposed. It was this unexpected collapse of the Belgian defence of Namur which, coupled with the unexpected magnitude of the forces Germany had been able to bring through the Belgian plain, determined what was to follow.

Once Namur was entered, the reduction of the forts was not of immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Liege, to grasp a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position, and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two rivers Sambre and Meuse at their junction.

With this entry of the Germans into Namur, their passage of the lines upon Friday, August 21st, their capture of the bridgeheads on Saturday, August 22nd, we reach the beginning of those great operations which threatened for a moment to decide the war in the West, and to establish the German Empire in that position to attain which it had planned and forced the war upon its appointed day.

It behoves us before entering into the detail of this large affair to see the plan of it clearly before our eyes.

* * * * *

I have already described that general conception underlying the whole modern French school of strategy for which the best title (though one liable to abuse by too mechanical an interpretation) is "the open strategic square."

I have further warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice those lines remain only in the idea of the scheme of the whole, and are not to be discovered save in the loosest way from the actual positions of men upon the map.

We have seen that this "open strategic square" involved essentially two conceptions—the fixed "operative corner" and the swinging "manoeuvring masses."

The manoeuvring masses, at this moment when the great German blow fell upon the Sambre and the Meuse, and when Namur went down immediately before it, were (a) upon the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine, (b) in the centre of the country, (c) near the capital and to the west of it, and even, some of them, upon the sea.

The operative corner was this group of armies before Namur on the Sambre and Meuse, the 4th French Army under Langle, the 5th French Army under Lanrezac, the British contingent under French.

We know from what has been written above in this book that it is the whole business of an operative corner to "take on" superior numbers, and to hold them as well as possible, even though compelled to retreat, until the manoeuvring masses can swing and come up in aid, and so pin the enemy.

We further know from what has gone before that the whole crux of this manoeuvre lies in the power of the operative corner to stand the shock.

It was the business of the French in this operative corner before Namur and of their British Allies there to await and, if possible, to withstand by a careful choice of position the first shock of enemies who would certainly be numerically superior. It was the whole business of the German commanders to make the shock overwhelming, in order that the operative corner should be pounded to pieces, or should be surrounded and annihilated before the manoeuvring masses could swing up in aid. Should this destruction of the operative corner take place before the manoeuvring masses behind it could swing, the campaign in the West was lost to the Allies, and the Germans pouring in between the still separated corners of the square were the masters for good.

It behoves us, therefore, if we desire to understand the campaign, to grasp how this operative corner stood, upon what defences it relied, in what force it was, what numbers it thought were coming against it, and what numbers were, as a fact, coming against it.

To get all this clear, it is best to begin with a diagram.

Suppose two lines perpendicular one to the other, and therefore forming a right angle, AB and BC. Suppose at their junction, B, a considerable zone or segment, SSS, of a circle, as shaded in the following diagram. Supposing the line AB to be protected along the outer half of it, AK, by no natural obstacle—the state of affairs which I have represented by a dotted line αγ; but suppose the second half of it, KB, should be protected by a natural obstacle, though not a very formidable one—such as I have represented by the continuous line γβ. Supposing the perpendicular line BC to be protected by a really formidable natural obstacle βδ, and supposing the shaded segment of the circle at B to represent a fortified zone (1) accessible to any one within the angle KBC, as from the arrow M; (2) inaccessible (until it was captured or forced) to any one coming from outside the angle, as from the arrows NNN; (3) containing within itself, protected by its ring of fortifications, passages, PP, for traversing the two natural obstacles, γβ and βδ, which meet at the point β.



There you have the elements of the position in which the advance corner of the great French square was situated just before it took the shock of the main German armies. The two lines AB and BC are the French and British armies lying behind the Sambre, γβ, and the Middle Meuse, βδ, respectively; but the line of the Sambre ceases to protect eastward along the dotted line αγ beyond the point up to which the river forms a natural obstacle, while from K to B the line is protected by the river Sambre itself. The more formidable obstacle, βδ, represents the great trench or ravine of the Meuse which stretches south from Namur. The town of Namur itself is at B, the junction of the two rivers; and the fortified zone, SSS, is the ring of forts lying far out all round Namur; while the passages, PP, over the obstacles contained within that fortified zone, and accessible to the people inside the angle from M, but not to the people outside the angle from NNN, are the bridges across both the Sambre and the Meuse at Namur.

All this is, of course, put merely diagrammatically, and a diagram is something very distant from reality. The "open strategic square" in practice comes to mean little more than two main elements—one the operative corner, the other a number of separate units disposed in all sorts of different places behind, and generally denominated "the manoeuvring mass." If you had looked down from above at all the French armies towards the end of August, when the first great shock came, you would have seen nothing remotely resembling a square.



You would have seen something like Sketch 31 where the bodies enclosed under the title A were the operative corner; various garrisons and armies in the field, enclosed under the title B, were the manoeuvring mass. But it is only by putting the matter quite clearly in the abstract diagrammatic form that its principle can be grasped.

With this digression I will return and conclude with the main points of debate in the use of the open strategic square.

We have seen that the operative corner is in this scheme deliberately imperilled at the outset.

The following is a sketch map of the actual position, and it will be seen that the topographical features of this countryside are fairly represented by Sketch 39; while this other sketch shows how these troops that were about to take the shock stood to the general mass of the armies.

But to return to the diagram (which I repeat and amplify as Sketch 41), let us see how the Allied force in the operative corner before Namur stood with relation to this angle of natural obstacles, the two rivers Sambre and Meuse, and the fortified zone round the point where they met.



The situation of that force was as follows:—



Along and behind βγ stretched the 5th Army of the French, prolonged on its left by the British contingent. I have marked the first in the diagram with the figure 5, the second with the letters Br, and the latter portion I have also shaded. At right angles to the French 5th Army stretched the French 4th Army, which I have marked with the figure 4. It depended upon the obstacle of the Meuse βδ for its defence, just as the French 5th Army depended upon the Sambre, γβ. It must, of course, be understood that when one says these forces "lay along" the aforesaid lines, one does not mean that they merely lay behind them. One means that they held the bridges and prepared to dispute the crossing of them.

Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer under these disadvantages:—

"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act in co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because Y and Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by the fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect in a long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z, could only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle—that is, by stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the ring of forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the arrow X) will further be used up in trying to break down the resistance of SSS. That will take a good deal of time. If our horizontal line AB holds its own, naturally defended as it is, against the attack from V and W, while our perpendicular line BC holds its own still more firmly (relying on its much better natural obstacle) against YZ, we shall have ample time to break the first and worst shock of the enemy's attack, and to allow, once we have concentrated that attack upon ourselves, the rest of our forces, the masses of manoeuvre, or at any rate a sufficient portion of them, to come up and give us a majority in this part of the field. We shall still be badly outnumbered on the line as a whole; but the resistance of our operative corner, relying on the Sambre and Meuse and the fortress of Namur, will gather much of the enemy unto itself. It will thus make of this part of the field the critical district of the whole campaign. Our masses, arriving while we resist, will give us a local superiority here which will hold up the whole German line. We may even by great good luck so break the shock of the attack as ourselves to begin taking the counter-offensive after a little while, and to roll back either Y and Z or V and W by the advance of our forces across the rivers when the enemy has exhausted himself."

It will be clear that this calculation (whether of the expected and probable least favourable issue—a lengthy defence followed by an orderly and slow retreat designed to allow the rest of the armies to come up—or of the improbable and more favourable issue—the taking of the counter-offensive) depended upon two presumptions which the commander of the Allies had taken for granted: (1) that the German shock would not come in more than a certain admitted maximum, say thirty per cent. superiority at the most over the Allied forces at this particular point; (2) that the ring of forts round Namur would be able to hold out for at least three or four days, and thus absorb the efforts of part of the enemy as well as awkwardly divide his forces, while that enemy's attack was being delivered.

Both these presumptions were erroneous. The enemy, as we shall see in a moment, came on in much larger numbers than had been allowed for. Namur, as we have already seen, fell, not in three or four days, but instantly—the moment it was attacked. And the result was that, instead of an orderly and slow retirement, sufficiently tardy to permit of the swinging up of the rest of the French "square"—that is, of the arrival of the other armies or manoeuvring masses—there came as a fact the necessity for very rapid retirement of the operative corner over more than one hundred miles and the immediate peril for days of total disaster to it.

To appreciate how superior the enemy proved to be in number, and how heavy the miscalculation here was, we must first see what the numbers of this Allied operative corner were.

I have in Sketch 42 indicated the approximate positions and relative sizes of the three parts of the Allied forces.

Beginning from the left, we have barely two army corps actually present of the British contingent in the fighting line: for certain contingents of the outermost army corps had not yet arrived. We may perhaps call the numbers actually present at French's command when contact was taken 70,000 men, but that is probably beyond the mark. To the east lay the 5th French Army, three army corps amounting, say, to 120,000 men, and immediately south of this along the Meuse lay the 4th French Army, another three army corps amounting to at the most another 120,000 men.

We may then call the whole of the operative corner (if we exclude certain cavalry reserves far back, which never came into play) just over 300,000 men. That there were as many as 310,000 is improbable.

The French calculation was that against these 300,000 men there would arrive at the very most 400,000.

That, of course, meant a heavy superiority in number for the enemy; but, as we have seen, the scheme allowed for such an inconvenience at the first contact.

That more than 400,000 could strike in the region of Namur no one believed, for no one believed that the enemy could provision and organize transport for more than that number.

A very eminent English critic had allowed for seven army corps of first-line men as all that could be brought across the Belgian Plain. The French went so far as to allow for ten, a figure represented by the 400,000 men of the enemy they expected.

We had then the Allied forces expecting an attack in about the superiority indicated upon this diagram, where the British contingent and the two French armies are marked in full, and the supposed enemy in dotted lines.



Roughly speaking, the Allies were allowing for a thirty per cent. superiority.

Now, lying as they did behind the rivers, and with the ring of forts around Namur to shield their point of junction and to split the enemy's attack, this superiority, though heavy, was not crushing. The hopes of the defensive that it would stand firm, or at least retire slowly so as to give time for the manoeuvring masses to come up was, under this presumption, just. It was even thought possible that, if the enemy attacked too blindly and spent himself too much, the counter-offensive might be taken after the first two or three days.

As for the remainder of the German forces, it was believed that they were stretched out very much in even proportion, without any thin places, from the Meuse to Alsace.

Now, as a matter of fact, the German forces were in no such disposition. 1. The Germans had added to every army corps a reserve division. 2. They had brought through the Belgian plains a very much larger number than seven army corps: they had brought nine. 3. They had further brought against Namur yet another four army corps through the Ardennes, the woods of which helped to hide their progress from air reconnaissance. To all this mass of thirteen army corps, each army corps half as large again as the active or first line allowed for, add some imperfectly trained but certainly large bodies of independent cavalry. We cannot accurately say what the total numbers of this vast body were, but we can be perfectly certain that more than 700,000 men were massed in this region of Namur. The enemy was coming on, not four against three, but certainly seven against three, and perhaps eight or even nine against three.

The real situation was that given in the accompanying diagram (Sketch 43).

Five corps, each with its extra division, were massed under von Kluck, and called the 1st German Army. Four more, including the Guards, were present with von Buelow, and stretched up to and against the first defences of Namur. Now, around the corner of that fortress, two Saxon corps, a Wurtemberg corps, a Magdeburg corps, and a corps of reserve under the Duke of Wurtemberg formed the 3rd Army, the right wing of which opposed the forts of Namur, the rest of which stretched along the line of the Meuse.

Even if the forts of Namur had held out, the position of so hopelessly inferior a body as was the Franco-British force, in face of such overwhelming numbers, would have been perilous in the extreme. With the forts of Namur abandoned almost at the first blow, the peril was more than a peril. It had become almost certain disaster.



With the fall of Namur, the angle between the rivers—that is, the crossings of the rivers at their most difficult part where they were broadest—was in the hands of the enemy, and the whole French body, the 4th and 5th Armies, was at some time on that Saturday falling back.

The exact hour and the details of that movement we do not yet know. We do not know what loss the French sustained, we do not know whether any considerable bodies were cut off. We do not know even at what hour the French General Staff decided that the position was no longer tenable, and ordered the general retreat.

All we know is that, so far from being able to hold out two or three days against a numerical superiority of a third and under the buttress of Namur, the operative corner, with Namur fallen and, not 30 per cent., but something more like 130 per cent. superiority against it, began not the slow retreat that had been envisaged, but a retirement of the most rapid sort.

Such a retirement was essential if the cohesion of the Allied forces was to be maintained at all, and if the combined 4th and 5th French Armies and British contingent were to escape being surrounded or pierced.

By the Saturday night at latest the French retirement was ordered; by Sunday morning it was in full progress, and it was proceeding throughout the triangle of the Thierarche all that day.

But the rate of that retirement, corresponding to the pressure upon the French front, differed very much with varying sections of the line. It was heaviest, of course, in those advanced bodies which had lain just under Namur. It was least at the two ends of the bow, for the general movement was on to the line Maubeuge-Mezieres. The farther one went east towards Maubeuge, the slower was the necessary movement, and to this cause of delay must be added the fact that von Kluck, coming round by the extreme German line, had farthest to go, and arrived latest against the line of the Allies.

Therefore the British contingent at the western extreme of the Allied line felt the shock latest of all, and all that Sunday morning the British were still occupied in taking up their positions. They had arrived but just in time for what was to follow.

It was not till the early afternoon of the Sunday that contact was first taken seriously between Sir John French and von Kluck. At that moment the British commander believed, both from a general and erroneous judgment which the French command had tendered him and from his own air work, that he had in front of him one and a half or at the most two army corps; and though the force, as we shall see in a moment, was far larger, its magnitude did not appear as the afternoon wore on. Full contact was established perhaps between three and four, by which hour the pressure was beginning to be severely felt, and upon the extreme right of the line it had already been necessary to take up defensive positions a little behind those established in the morning. But by five o'clock, with more than two good hours of daylight before it, the British command, though perhaps already doubtful whether the advancing masses of the enemy did not stand for more men, and especially for more guns than had been expected, was well holding its own, when all its dispositions were abruptly changed by an unexpected piece of news.

It was at this moment in the afternoon—that is, about five o'clock—that the French General Staff communicated to Sir John French information bearing two widely different characteristics: the first that it came late; the second that had it not come when it did, the whole army, French as well as British, would have been turned.

The first piece of information, far too belated, was the news that Namur had fallen, and that the enemy had been in possession of the bridge-heads over the Sambre and the Meuse since the preceding day, Saturday. Consequent upon this, the enemy had been able to effect the passage of the Sambre, not only in Namur itself, but in its immediate neighbourhood, and, such passages once secured, it was but a question of time for the whole line to fall into the enemy's hands. When superior numbers have passed one end of an obstacle it is obvious that the rest of the obstacle gradually becomes useless.[3] At what hour the French knew that they had to retire, we have not been told. As we have seen, the enemy was right within Namur on the early afternoon of Saturday, the 22nd, and it is to be presumed that the French retirement was in full swing by the Sunday morning, in which case the British contingent, which this retirement left in peril upon the western extreme of the line, ought to have been warned many hours before five o'clock in the afternoon.

To what the delay was due we are again as yet in ignorance, but probably to the confusion into which the unexpected fall of Namur and the equally unexpected strength of the enemy beyond the Sambre and the Meuse had thrown the French General Staff.

At any rate, the news did come thus late, and its lateness was of serious consequence to the British contingent, and might have been disastrous to it.

The second piece of news, on the other hand, was the saving of it; and that second piece of news was the information that Sir John French had in front of him not one German army corps, and possibly part or even the whole of a second, but at least three. As the matter turned out, the British contingent was really dealing first and last with four army corps, and the essential part of the news conveyed was that the extreme western portion of this large German force was attempting to turn the flank of the whole army.

It was not only attempting to do so, it was in number sufficient to do so; and unless prompt measures were taken, what was now discovered to be the general German plan would succeed, and the campaign in the West would be in two days decided adversely to the Allies—the same space of time in which the campaign of 1815 was decided adversely to Napoleon in just these same country-sides.

It is here necessary to describe what this German plan was.

The reader has already seen, when the general principles of the open strategic square were described on a previous page, that everything depends upon the fate of the operative corner. This operative corner in the present campaign had turned out to be the two French armies, the 4th and the 5th, upon the Lower Sambre and the Meuse, and the British contingent lying to the left of the 5th on the Upper Sambre and by Mons.

If the operative corner of a strategic open square is annihilated as a military force, or so seriously defeated that it can offer no effective opposition for some days, then the whole plan of a strategic square breaks to pieces, and the last position of the inferior forces which have adopted it is worse than if they had not relied upon the manoeuvre at all, but had simply spread out in line to await defeat in bulk at the hands of their superior enemy.

Now there are two ways in which a military force can be disposed of by its opponent. There are two ways in which it can be—to use the rather exaggerated language of military history—"annihilated."

The first is this: You can break up its cohesion by a smashing blow delivered somewhere along its line, and preferably near its centre. But if you do that, the results will never be quite complete, and may be incomplete in any degree according to the violence and success of your blow.

The second way is to get round the enemy with your superior numbers, to get past his flank, to the back of him, and so envelop him. If that manoeuvre is carried out successfully, you bag his forces entire. It is to this second manoeuvre that modern Prussian strategy and tactics are particularly attached. It is obvious that its fruits are far more complete than those of the first manoeuvre, when, or if, it is wholly successful. For to get round your enemy and bag him whole is a larger result than merely to break him up and leave some of him able to re-form and perhaps fight again. Two things needful to such success are (a) superior numbers, save in case of gross error upon the part of the opponents; (b) great rapidity of action on the part of the outflanking body, coupled, if possible, with surprise. That rapidity of action is necessary is obvious; for the party on the flank has got to go much farther than the rest of the army. It has to go all the length of the arrow (1), and an element of surprise is usually necessary. For if the army AA which BB was trying to outflank learned of the manoeuvre in time he only has to retreat upon his left by the shorter arrow (2) to escape from the threatened clutch.



Now, von Kluck with his five army corps, four of which were in operation against Sir John French, was well able to count on all these elements. He had highly superior numbers, his superiority had not been discovered until it was almost too late, and for rapidity of action he had excellent railways and a vast equipment of petrol vehicles.

What he proposed to do was, while engaging the British contingent of less than two army corps with three full army corps of his own, to swing his extreme western army corps right round, west through Tournai, and so turn the British line. If he succeeded in doing that, he had at the same time succeeded in turning the whole of the Franco-British forces on the Sambre and Meuse. In other words, he was in a fair way to accomplishing the destruction of the operative corner of the great square, and consequently, as a last result, the destruction of the whole Allied force in the West.

The thing may be represented on a sketch map in this form.

Of von Kluck's five corps, 1 is operating against the junction of the English and French lines beyond Binche, 2, 3, and 4 are massing against the rather more than one and a half of Sir John French at AA, and 5, after the capture of Tournai, is going to take a big sweep round in the direction of the arrow towards Cambrai, and so to turn the whole line. Meanwhile, the cavalry, still farther west, acting independently, is to sweep the country right out to Arras and beyond.



The particular titles of corps are of no great value in following the leading main lines of a military movement; but it may be worth remembering that this "number 5," to which von Kluck had allotted the turning movement, was the Second German Corps. With its cavalry it numbered alone (and apart from all the other forces of von Kluck which were engaging the British line directly) quite three-quarters as many men as all that British line for the moment mustered.

It was not possible, from local circumstances which the full history of the war, when it is written, will explain, for the British contingent to fall back in the remaining hours of daylight upon that Sunday.

Belated by at the most twelve hours, as the news of the French retirement had been, the British retirement followed it fully twenty hours after. It was not until daylight of Monday, the 24th, that all the organizations for this retirement were completed, the plans drawn up, and the first retrograde movements made.

To permit a retirement before such a great superiority of the enemy to be made without disaster, it was necessary to counter-attack not only at this inception of the movement, but throughout all the terrible strain of the ensuing eight days.

Here it may be necessary to explain why, in any retirement, continual counter-attacks on the pursuing enemy are necessary.

It is obvious that, under equal conditions, the pursuing enemy can advance as fast as can your own troops which are retreating before him. If, therefore, a retreat, once contact has been established, consisted in merely walking away from the enemy, that enemy would be able to maintain a ceaseless activity against one portion of your united force—its rear—which activity would be exercised against bodies on the march, and incapable of defence. To take but one example out of a hundred: his guns would be always unlimbering, shooting at you, then limbering up again to continue the pursuit; unlimbering again, shooting again—and so forth; while your guns would never reply, being occupied in an unbroken retirement, and therefore continually limbered up and useless behind their teams.

A retiring force, therefore, of whatever size—from a company to an army—can only safely effect its retirement by detaching one fraction from its total which shall hold up the pursuit for a time while the main body gets away.

When this detached fraction is wearied or imperilled, another fraction relieves it, taking up the same task in its turn; the first fraction, which had hitherto been checking the pursuit, falls back rapidly on to the main body, under cover of the new rearguard's fire as it turns to face the enemy. And the process is kept up, first one, then another portion of the whole force being devoted to it, until the retirement of the whole body has been successfully effected, and it is well ahead of its pursuers and secure.



For example: two White army corps, I., II., as in the annexed diagram, each of two divisions, 1, 2, and 3, 4, have to retire before a greatly superior Black force, abcde. They succeed in retiring by the action expressed in the following diagram. White corps No. I. first undertakes to hold up the enemy while No. II. makes off. No. I. detaches one division for the work (Division 2), and for a short time it checks the movement of a, b, and c, at least, of the enemy. Now d and e press on. But they cannot press on at any pace they choose, for an army must keep together, and the check to a, b, and c somewhat retards d and e. They advance, say, to the positions δε.



Next, White corps No. II. stops, puts out one of its divisions (say 4) to check d and e, while its other division either helps or falls back, according to the severity of the pressure, and White corps No. I. makes off as fast as it can. a, b, c, no longer checked by a White rearguard, are nevertheless retarded from two causes—first, the delay already inflicted on them; secondly, that they must not, if the army is to keep together, get too far ahead of their colleagues, d and e, which White corps II. is holding up.



Thus, on the second or third day the retreat of White is being secured by an increasing gap between pursued and pursuers. The process is continued. Every succeeding day—if that process is successful—should further widen the gap until White can feel free from immediate pressure.

Such is the principle—modified indefinitely in practice by variations of ground and numbers—under which a retirement must be conducted if it is to have any hope of ultimate success in saving the pursued.

But it is clear that the process must always be a perilous one. Unless the most careful co-ordination is maintained between the moving parts of the retreat; unless the rearguard in each action falls back only just upon and not a little while after the precise moment when it can last safely do so; unless the new rearguard comes into play in time, etc., etc.—the pursuers may get right in among the pursued and break their cohesion; or they may get round them, cut them off, and compel them to surrender. In either case the retreating force ceases to exist as an army.

In proportion as the pursuers are numerous (mobility being equal) compared with the pursued, in that proportion is the peril. And with the best luck in the world some units are sure to be cut off, many guns lost, all stragglers and nearly all wounded abandoned in the course of a pressed retreat, and, above all, there will be the increasing discouragement and bewilderment of the men as the strain, the losses, and the ceaseless giving way before the enemy continue day after day with cumulative effect.

The accomplishment of such a task, the maintenance of the "operative corner" in being during its ordeal of retreat before vastly superior numbers, and in particular the exceedingly perilous retirement of the British contingent at what was, during the first part of the strain, the extreme of the line, are what we are now about to follow.

The initial counter-attack, then, on this Monday, the first day of the retreat, was undertaken by the 2nd British Division from the region of Harmignies, which advanced as though with the object of retaking Binche. The demonstration was supported by all the artillery of the 1st Army Corps, while the 1st Division, lying near Peissant, supported this action of the 2nd. While that demonstration was in full activity, the 2nd Corps to the west or left (not all of it was yet in the field) retired on to the line Dour-Frameries, passing through Quaregnon. It suffered some loss in this operation from the masses of the enemy, which were pressing forward from Mons. When the 2nd Corps had thus halted on the line Dour-Frameries, the 1st Corps, which had been making the demonstration, took the opportunity to retire in its turn, and fell back before the evening to a line stretching from Bavai to Maubeuge.



The 2nd Corps had entrenched itself, while the 1st Corps was thus falling back upon its right; and when it came to the turn of the 2nd Corps to play the part of rearguard in these alternate movements, the effort proved to be one of grave peril.



Since the whole movement of the enemy was an outflanking movement, the pressure upon this left and extreme end of the line was particularly severe. The German advance in such highly superior numbers overlapped the two British corps to their left or west, which was at this moment the extreme end of the Allied Franco-British line. They overlapped them as these pursuing Black units overlap the lesser retiring White units. It is evident that in such a case the last unit in the line at A will be suffering the chief burden of the attack. An attempt was made to relieve that burden by sending the and Cavalry Brigade in this direction to ride round the enemy's outlying body; but the move failed, with considerable loss to the 9th Lancers and the 18th Hussars, which came upon wire entanglements five hundred yards from the enemy's position. There did arrive in aid of the imperilled end of the line reinforcement in the shape of a new body. One infantry brigade, the 19th, which had hitherto been upon the line of communications, reached the army on this its central left near Quarouble and a little behind that village before the morning was spent. It was in line before evening. This reinforcement lent some strength to the sorely tried 2nd Corps, but it had against it still double its own strength in front, and half as much again upon its exposed left or western flank, and it suffered heavily.

By the night of that Monday, the 24th of August, however, the whole of the British Army was again in line, and stretched from Maubeuge, which protected its right, through Bavai, on to the fields between the villages of Jenlain and Bry, where the fresh 19th Infantry Brigade had newly arrived before the evening, while beyond this extreme left again was the cavalry.

The whole operation, then, of that perilous Monday, the first day of the retreat, may be planned in general as in Sketch 52. At the beginning, at daybreak, you have the three German army corps lying as the shaded bodies are given opposite to the unshaded, which represent the British contingent of not quite two full army corps. By nightfall the British contingent, including now the 19th Brigade of infantry, lay in the positions from Maubeuge westward, with the 1st Corps next to Maubeuge, the 2nd Corps beyond Bavai, the 1st being commanded by Sir Douglas Haig, the 2nd by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien; while the Germans lay more or less as the dotted shaded markings are.

The fortress of Maubeuge was, under these circumstances, clearly a lure. An army in the field in danger of envelopment will always be tempted to make for the nearest fortified zone in order to save itself. The British commander was well advised in his judgment to avoid this opportunity, and that for two reasons. First, that the locking up of any considerable portion of the Anglo-French force in its retirement would have jeopardized the chance of that counter-offensive which the French hoped sooner or later to initiate; secondly, that, as will be seen later, the works of Maubeuge were quite insufficient to resist for more than a few days a modern siege train.



This point of Maubeuge and of its fall must be discussed later; for the moment all we need note is that the fortress afforded for a few hours—that is, during the night of Monday to Tuesday, the 24th-25th August—support to the British line during its first halt upon the rapid and perilous retirement from Mons.

Meanwhile the whole of the French 5th Army had been falling back with equal rapidity, and upon its right the 4th Army had followed soon; and as this French retirement had preceded the retirement of the British, its general line lay farther south.

On the other hand, from the nature of the topography in this section of the Franco-Belgian border, the units of the French command had to fall back farther and more rapidly in proportion as they stretched eastward. The attack of the enemy in forces of rather more than two to one had come, as we have seen, not only from across the line of the Sambre, but, once Namur had fallen, from across the line of the Meuse at right angles to the line of the Sambre. Therefore the 5th and the 4th Armies, contained within the triangle bounded by the Sambre and Meuse, retiring from blows struck from the direction of the arrows 1-5 over all that hilly and wooded country known as the Thierache, were, as to the extreme salient of them at A, compelled to a very rapid retirement indeed; and on this Sunday night the French line was deflected southward, not without heavy losses, until either on that night or on the Monday morning it joined up with the forces which stretched northward through and from Mezieres. An attempt to counter-attack through the precipitous ravines and deep woods on to the valley of the Semois had failed, and the line as a whole ran, upon this night between the Sunday and the Monday, much as is indicated upon the accompanying sketch.



From this it will be seen that the British contingent away upon the extreme left was in very grave peril, not only because the turning movement was wholly directed round their exposed flank, but also because, their retirement having come late, they stood too far forward in the general scheme at this moment, and therefore more exposed to the enemy's blow than the rest of the line. With this it must be remembered Tournai had already fallen. It was very imperfectly held by a French Territorial brigade, accompanied by one battery of English guns; and the entering German force, in a superiority of anything you like—two, three, or four to one—easily swept away the resistance proffered in this quarter.

These German forces from Tournai had not yet, by the nightfall of Monday, come up eastward against the British, but they were on the way, and they might appear at any moment. The corps next to them, the 4th of von Kluck's five, was already operating upon that flank, and the next day, Wednesday, 26th of August, was to be the chief day of trial for this exposed British wing of the army.

So far the operations of the British Army had not differed greatly from the expected or at least one of the expected developments of the campaign.

The operative corner, if it should not have the luck, through losses or blunders on the part of the enemy, to take the counter-offensive after receiving the third shock, is intended to retire, and to draw upon itself a maximum of the enemy's efforts.

But between what had been intended as the most probable, and in any case perilous, task of this body (which comprised, it will be remembered, six French and ultimately two British army corps) turned out, within twenty-four hours of the retreat, and within forty-eight of the fall of Namur, to be an operation of a difficulty so extreme as to imperil the whole campaign, and in this operation it was the British force upon the outer left edge of the line—the unsupported extremity round which the enemy made every effort to get—which was bound to receive the severest treatment. This peculiar burden laid upon the Expeditionary Force from this country was, of course, gravely increased by the delay in beginning its retreat, which we have seen to be due to the delay in the communication to it by the French of the news of the fall of Namur. On account of this delay not only was the extreme of the line which the British held immediately threatened with outflanking, but it still lay somewhat forward of the rest of the force. It was in danger of being turned round its exposed edge C, not only because it lay on the extreme of the line, but also because, instead of occupying its normal position, AB, which it would have occupied had the retreat begun with all the rest, it actually occupied the position CD, which made it far more likely to be surrounded than if it had been a day's march farther back, as it would have been if the French Staff work had suffered no delays.



There lay in the gap formed by this untoward tardiness in the British retirement, at the point M, the fortress of Maubeuge. It was garrisoned by French reserves, or Territorial troops, not of the same quality as the active army, and its defensive power was, even if the old ring of fortress theory had proved sound, of very doubtful order.

The French 5th Army being no longer present to support the British right, but having fallen back behind the alignment of that right, General Sir John French had no support for what should have been his secure flank save this fortress of Maubeuge, and it will be evident from the above diagram that the enemy, should he succeed in outflanking the British line, would compel it to fall back within the ring of forts surrounding Maubeuge. To avoid destruction it would have no alternative but to do that. For, counting the forces in front of it and the forces trying to get round its back, it was fighting odds of two to one.

Maubeuge was a stronghold that had played a great part in the revolutionary war. Its resistance in the month of October 1793 had made possible the French victory of Wattigines, just outside its walls, and had, perhaps, done more than any other feat of arms in that year to save the French Revolution from the allied governments of Europe. It was, indeed, full of historic memories, from the moment when Caesar had defeated the Nervii upon the Sambre just to the west of the town (his camp can still be traced in an open field above the river bank) to the invasion of 1815.

But this role which it had played throughout French history had not led to any illusion with regard to the role it might play in any modern war; and at the best Maubeuge, in common with the other ill-fortified points of the Belgian frontier, suffered from the only error—and that a grave one—which their thorough unnational political system had imposed upon the military plan of the French. This error was the capital error of indecision. No consistent plan had been adopted with regard to the fortification of the Belgian frontier.

The French had begun, after the recuperation following upon the war of 1870, an elaborate and very perfect system of fortification along their German frontier—that is, along the new frontier which divided the annexed territory of Alsace-Lorraine from the rest of the country. They had taken it for granted that the next German attempt would be made somewhere between Longwy and Belfort. And they had spent in this scheme of fortification, first and last, the cost of a great campaign. They had spent some three hundred million pounds; and it will be possible for the reader to gauge the magnitude of this effort if he will consider that it was a military operation more costly than was the whole of the South African War to Great Britain, or of the Manchurian War to Russia. The French were wise to have undertaken this expense, because it had hitherto been an unheard-of offence against European morals that one nation in Christendom should violate the declared neutrality of another. And the attack upon Belgium as a means of invading France by Germany had not then crossed the mind of any but a few theorists who had, so to speak, "marched ahead" of the rapid decline in our common religion which had marked now three generations.

But when the French had completed this scheme of fortification, Europe heard it proposed by certain authorities in Prussia that, as the cost of invading France through the now fortified zone would be considerable, the German forces should not hesitate to originate yet another step in the breakdown of European morality, and to sacrifice in their attack upon France the neutrality of Belgium, of which Prussia was herself a guarantor.

Men have often talked during this war, especially in England, as though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were normal to warfare; and this error is probably due to the fact that war upon a large scale has never come home to the imagination of the country, and that it is without experience of invasion.

Yet it is of the very first importance to appreciate the truth that Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point after another new doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbours have held sacred from the time when a common Christianity first began to influence the states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian territory is on a par with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and after admission of their innocence, with the massacre of priests, and the sinking without warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and crews. To regard these things as something normal to warfare in the past is as monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the reign of terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes within the State. And to appreciate such a truth is, I repeat, of especial moment to the understanding of the mere military character of the campaign. For if the violation of Belgium in particular had not been the unheard of thing it was, the fortification of the Franco-Belgian frontier with which we are here concerned would have had a very different fortune.

As it was, the French could never quite make up their minds—or rather the French parliamentarians could never make up their minds—upon the amount of money that might wisely be expended in the defence of this neutral border. There were moments when the opinion that Prussia would be restrained by no fear of Europe prevailed among the professional politicians of Paris. The fortification of the Belgian frontier was undertaken in such moments; a full plan of it was drawn up. But again doubt would succeed, the very large sums involved would appal some new ministry, and the effort would be interrupted. To such uncertainty of aim characteristic of parliamentary government in a military nation was added, unfortunately, the consideration of the line of the Meuse. Liege and Namur were fortresses of peculiar strength, Antwerp was thought the strongest thing in Europe; and that triangle was conceived, even by many who believed that the violation of Belgian territory would take place, as affording a sufficient barrier against the immediate invasion of France from the north-east. Those who made this calculation did not forget that fortresses are nothing without their full complement of men, guns, and stores; but they could neither control, nor had they the elements properly to appreciate, the deficiency of organization in a foreign and not military country.

For all these causes Maubeuge, in common with other points along the Belgian frontier less important than itself, was left imperfect. Even if the ring fortress had remained after 1905 what it had been before that date, and even if modern howitzer fire and modern high explosives had not rendered its tenure one of days rather than months, Maubeuge was not a first-class fortress. As it was, with fortifications unrenewed, and with the ring fortress in any case doomed, Maubeuge was a death-trap.

The role assigned to the fortress in the original French plan was no more than the support of the retiring operative corner, as it "retreated, manoeuvred, and held the enemy." Maubeuge was considered as part of a line beyond which the operative corner would not have to fall before the rest of the square, the "manoeuvring mass," had swung up. Hence it was that the French General Staff and its Chief had put within the ring of its insufficient forts nothing more than a garrison of Territorials—that is, of the older classes of the reserve.

Had the British General accepted the lure of Maubeuge as Bazaine did the lure of Metz in 1870, the Expeditionary Force would have been destroyed. But it would have been destroyed, not after a long delay, as was the army at Metz, but immediately; for Maubeuge was not Metz, and the fortress power of resistance of to-day is not that of a generation ago. Maubeuge, as a fact, fell within a fortnight of the date when this temptation was offered to the sorely pressed British army, and had that temptation been yielded to, the whole force would have been, in a military sense, annihilated before the middle of September.

What preserved it was the immediate decision undertaken upon that Monday night to proceed, in spite of the fatigues that were already felt after the first day's retreat, with a retirement upon the south-west, and to proceed with it as vigorously as possible.

It was not yet daylight upon the morning of Tuesday, August 25th, when the move began. The Field-Marshal counted justly upon some exhaustion in his immensely superior enemy, especially in those troops of his upon the west (the 2nd German Corps) which had to perform the heavy marching task of getting round the end of the British line. This element, combined with the considerable distance which the British marched that morning, saved the army; though not until another week of almost intolerable suffering had passed, and not until very heavy losses indeed had been sustained. The great Maubeuge-Bavai road, which is prolonged to Eth, and which was, roughly, the British front of that night, was cleared shortly after sunrise. A couple of brigades of cavalry and the divisional cavalry of the 2nd Corps covered the operation on the centre of the right, in front of the main body of the 2nd Corps, while the rest of the cavalry similarly covered the exposed western edge and corner of the line.

Delays, with the criticism of which this short summary has no concern, had forbidden the whole force which should have been present with the British Army in Flanders at the outset of the campaign to arrive in time, and the contingents that had already come up had taken the shock, as we have already described, in the absence of the 4th Division. This 4th Division had only begun to detrain from the junction at Le Cateau at the same hour that General Sir John French was reading that Sunday message which prompted his immediate retirement from before Mons. When the full official history of the war comes to be written, few things will prove of more credit to the Expeditionary Force and its command than the way in which this belated division—belated through no fault of the soldiers—was incorporated with the already existing organization, in the very midst of its retreat, and helped to support the army. There are few parallels in history to the successful accomplishment of so delicate and perilous an operation.

At any rate, in less than forty-eight hours after its arrival, the 4th Division—eleven battalions and a brigade of artillery—were incorporated with the British line just as the whole force was falling back upon this Tuesday morning, the 25th; and the newly arrived division of fresh men did singular service in the further covering of the retirement. General Snow, who was in command of this division, was deployed upon a line running from just south of Solesmes, on the right, to a point just south of La Chatrie, upon the road from Cambrai to Le Cateau, upon his left; and, as will be seen by the accompanying sketch map, such a line effectually protected the falling back of the rest of the force. Behind it the 1st and the 2nd British Corps fell back upon the line Cambrai to Landrecies. The small inset map shows how the various points in this two days' retreat stood to one another.



This line from Landrecies towards Cambrai had already been in part prepared in the course of that day—Tuesday—and entrenched, and it may be imagined what inclination affected commanders and men towards a halt upon that position. The pressure had been continuous and heavy, the work of detraining and setting in line the newly arrived division had added to the anxieties of the day, and an occupation of the prepared line seemed to impose itself. Luckily, the unwisdom of such a stand in the retirement was perceived in time, and the British Commander decided not to give his forces rest until some considerable natural object superior to imperfect and hurriedly constructed trenches could be depended upon to check the enemy's advance. The threat of being outflanked was still very grave, and the few hours' halt which would have been involved in the alternative decision might, or rather would, have been fatal.

The consequences, however, to the men of this decision in favour of continual retirement were severe. The 1st Corps did not reach Landrecies till ten o'clock at night. They had been upon the move for eighteen hours; but even so, the enemy, in that avalanche of advance (which was possible to him, as we now know, by the organization of mechanical transport), was well in touch. The Guards in Landrecies itself (the 4th Brigade) were attacked by the advance body of the 9th German Army Corps, which came on in overwhelming numbers right into the buildings of the town, debouching from the wood to the north under cover of the darkness. Their effort was unsuccessful. They did not succeed in piercing or even in decisively confusing the British line at this point; and, packed in the rather narrow street of Landrecies, the enemy suffered losses equivalent to a battalion in that desperate night fighting. But though the enemy here failed to achieve his purpose, his action compelled the continued retreat of men who were almost at the limit of exhaustion, and who had now been marching and fighting for the better part of twenty-four hours.

In that same darkness the 1st Division, under Sir Douglas Haig, was heavily engaged south-east of Maroilles. They obtained ultimately the aid of two French reserve divisions which lay upon the right of the British line, and extricated themselves from the peril they were in before dawn. By daylight this 1st Corps was still continuing its retirement in the direction of Wassigny, with Guise as its objective.



Meanwhile the 2nd Corps, which had not been so heavily attacked, and which lay to the west—that is, still upon the extreme of the line—had come, before the sunset of that Tuesday, the 25th, into a line stretching from Le Cateau to near Caudry, and thence prolonged by the 4th Division towards Seranvillers.



It will be seen that this line was bent—its left refused. This disposition was, of course, designed to meet the ceaseless German attempt to outflank on the west; and with the dawn of Wednesday, the 26th, it was already apparent how serious would be the task before this 2nd Corps, which covered all the rest of the army, and, in a sense, the whole of the Anglo-French retirement. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who was here in command, was threatened with a disaster that might carry in its train disaster to the whole British contingent, and ultimately, perhaps, to the whole Franco-British line.

Although the German bodies which were attempting the outflanking had not yet all come up, the field artillery of no less than four German corps was already at work against this one body, and a general action was developing upon which might very well depend the fate of the campaign. Indeed, the reader will do well to fix his attention upon this day, Wednesday, the 26th August, as the key to all that followed. There are always to be found, in the history of war, places and times which are of this character—nuclei, as it were, round which the business of all that comes before and after seems to congregate. Of such, for instance, was the Friday before Waterloo, when Erlon's counter-orders ultimately decided the fate of Napoleon; and of such was Carnot's night march on October 15, 1793, which largely decided the fate of the revolutionary army.

The obvious action to take in such a position as that in which the 2nd Corps found themselves was to break contact with the enemy, to call for support from the 1st Corps, and to maintain the retreat as indefatigably as it had already been maintained in the preceding twenty-four hours.

But men have limits to their physical powers, which limits commonly appear sharply, not gradually, at the end of a great movement. The 1st Corps had been marching and fighting a day and a night, and that after a preceding whole day of retirement from before Mons. It was unable to execute a further effort. Further, the general in command of the 2nd Corps reported that the German pressure had advanced too far to permit of breaking contact in the face of such an attack.

It would have been of the utmost use if at this moment a large body of French cavalry—no less than three divisions—under General Sordet, could have intervened upon that critical moment, the morning of Wednesday, the 26th, to have covered the retirement of the 1st Corps. They were in the neighbourhood; the British commander had seen their commander in the course of the 25th, and had represented his need. Through some error or misfortune in the previous movement of this corps—such that its horses were incapable of further action through fatigue—it failed to appear upon the field in this all-important juncture, and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was left facing overwhelming odds, which in artillery—the arm that was doing all the heavy work of that morning—were not less than four to one.

The fact that the retirement was at last made possible was due more than anything else to the handling of the British guns upon this day, and to the devotion with which the batteries sacrificed themselves to the covering of that movement; while the cavalry, as in the preceding two days, co-operated in forming a screen for the retreat.

It was about half-past three in the afternoon when the general in command of this exposed left flank judged it possible to break contact, and to give the order for falling back. The experiment—for it seems to have been no more secure than such a word suggests—was perilous in the extreme. It was not known whether the consequences of this fierce artillery duel against an enemy of four-fold superiority had been sufficient to forbid that enemy to make good the pursuit. Luckily, as the operation developed, it was apparent that the check inflicted upon such enormous odds by the British guns was sufficient for its purpose. The enemy had received losses that forbade him to move with the rapidity necessary to him if he was to decide the matter. He failed to press the retiring 2nd British Corps in any conclusive fashion: this 2nd Corps, the left wing, was saved; and with it the whole army, and perhaps the whole line.

The retreat of this body, which had thus covered all its comrades, continued under terrible conditions of strain (and after so heavy an action) right through the afternoon, and on hour after hour through the darkness; but though such an effort meant the loss of stragglers and of wounded, of guns whose teams had been destroyed, of material, and of all that accompanies a perilous retreat, one may justly say that well before midnight of that Wednesday, the 26th, the operation had proved successful and its purpose was accomplished.

Two more days of almost equal strain were, as we shall see, to be suffered by the whole army before it had reached a natural obstacle behind which it could draw breath (the river Oise), and might fairly be regarded as no longer in peril of destruction; but the breaking point that had come on that Wednesday, the 26th, had been successfully passed without disaster, and had been so passed, in the main, by virtue of the guns.

This critical day, upon which depended the fortunes certainly of the British contingent, and in some degree of all the "operative corner" of the French plan, turned in favour of the Allies, not only through the military excellence of the action which was broken off by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien during the afternoon, but also through the vigour and tenacity of the retreat.

I must here beg the reader's leave for a short digression in connection with those two phrases—"in favour of," and "vigour." History in general treats a retirement, particularly a rapid retirement accompanied by heavy losses, as a disaster; and the conception that such a movement may seem to the military historian a success, and that the energy of its conduct is just as important as the energy of an assault, is unfamiliar to most students of civilian record. But I am writing here, though an elementary, yet a military history; and to the military historian a retreat may be just as much a factor in victory as an advance; while the energy and tenacity required for its carriage are, if anything, more important than the corresponding qualities required for an advance. And in the case of this critical day and a half, the Wednesday, August 26th, and the Wednesday and Thursday night, August 26th-27th, the preservation of the British forces, and to some extent of all that lay east of them, was made possible by the very fact that the retirement was prosecuted with the utmost rapidity and without a halt. Had the retreat been interrupted in the hope of making a stand, or in the hope of repose, the whole army would have gone.

Throughout the night, then, with heavy losses from stragglers, and in one case with the surrounding and annihilation by wounds and capture of nearly a whole battalion (the Gordons), the retreat of the 2nd Corps proceeded, and, in line with it, the retreat of the 1st Corps to the east.

But this 1st Corps, though set an easier task than the 2nd (which, at the extreme of the line, was under the perpetual menace of development), did not retire without losses of a serious character. It was marching on Guise, just as the 2nd Corps to the west of it was marching across the watershed to St. Quentin. The Munster Fusiliers, who were on its extreme right, had halted for the night on that same evening of the 26th; for the 1st Corps, being less hard pressed, had more leisure for such repose. During the night a messenger was sent to this body with orders for the resumption of the march next morning. He was taken prisoner, and never reached his goal. The Munsters were attacked at dawn by the German pursuit in greatly superior numbers, surrounded and destroyed, as the Gordons of the 2nd Corps had been; the unwounded remnant was compelled to surrender.



The whole of Thursday, the 27th, and Friday, the 28th of August, the British retreat continued, the 1st Corps following on at the valley of the Oise towards La Fere, while the 2nd Corps to the west passed St. Quentin, and made for Noyon, in the neighbourhood of the same river farther down; and on the night of that Friday the Expeditionary Force was at last in line, and in some kind of order, organized for the first breathing space possible after so terrible an ordeal.