The Second Battle of the Marne

TWO Marching toward the Marne

t w o Marching toward the Marne In 1914 and 1915, few generals expected the trenches to become a fixed condition of war. As a means of prosecuting war, trench warfare suited neither side particularly well. The Allies knew that they would have to restore mobility to the battlefield if they hoped to force the Germans out of the parts of France and Belgium that they occupied; sitting in trenches would not accomplish that essential prerequisite of victory. Allied generals thus faced what came to seem like an insoluble dilemma: attacking was extremely costly, but only attacking could force the Germans out of the excellent defensive positions they had selected and developed since the “race to the sea” of 1914. The Germans may have had the luxury of choosing their ground and waiting for the Allies to attack, but trench warfare did not suit their needs, either. For decades, German war planning had presumed as an article of faith that the worst-case scenario involved fighting a war on multiple static fronts while simultaneously facing a British naval blockade. To make matters worse, the Germans were fettered to an Austro-Hungarian ally that had performed abysmally in the 1914 and 1915 campaigns, absorbing needed German resources and requiring German rescue from several disastrous operations. Not for nothing did several senior German officers claim that because of the alliance with Austria, Germany was “shackled to a corpse.”1 Marching toward the Marne  27 German planning had centered on defeating one opponent quickly in order to be able to redirect resources against the other. Few Germans expected a quick victory against the Russians, given Russia’s vast expanses of land and seemingly inexhaustible pools of manpower. Thus the focus in German planning on defeating France first, despite the risks of bringing Britain into the war by doing so. In any case, the Germans expected to win the war before the British could effectively deploy either their army or their navy. France, German planners believed, might collapse upon the fall of Paris, although several generations of German general staff officers doubted that the German army could cause the fall of Paris in the six weeks the staff had predicted. Memories of the long, difficult siege of Paris in 1871 still lingered in the minds of many senior German officers. Nevertheless, if Paris would be difficult to seize in six weeks, Moscow would be absolutely impossible to seize in so short a time. Nor did Moscow’s seizure necessarily guarantee victory, as the capture of Paris presumably would. The Napoleonic experience haunted those German planners with a sense of history. Thus German planners gambled everything on a six-week victory over the French, the Belgians, and whatever resistance the British could mass. A rapid defeat of the Allies in the west, moreover, would allow German diplomats to write peace terms that would neutralize the Royal Navy and negate its chances to put an effective blockade in place. The German failure on the Marne in 1914, however, made it impossible for Germany to defeat France and Britain on the unrealistically rapid timetable called for in prewar German planning. The gamble had failed. The Marne setback stood in contrast to several titanic German victories in the east, holding out the tantalizing prospect of bringing the Russians to a quick and favorable peace. Doing so would free up tens of thousands of German and Austrian soldiers to go to other fronts. The Germans soon discovered that they could soundly defeat larger Russian armies almost at will. Unfortunately, even lopsided battlefield victories had virtually no impact on German fortunes in the larger war. In the war’s opening weeks, the Germans destroyed two entire Russian field armies at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, but were no closer to concluding the war on favorable terms.2 As they had done against Napoleon, and would do to a future generation of German soldiers, the Russians took enormous casualties, but they fell back, 28 The Second Battle of the Marne simplifying their supply system while complicating their enemy’s. They soon reformed their lines farther east, replaced their losses with seemingly endless drafts of Russian peasants, and lived to fight another day. The Russians took a severe beating from the Germans in the first few months, but they recovered effectively enough to wake the Germans from their dreams of an easy victory. Tannenberg especially had been...