Cheshire Regiment troops in a trench on the Somme, 1916. Imperial War Museum.↗
In September 1914, six weeks into the war, the German army was within 30 miles of Paris and the French government had fled to Bordeaux. What happened next—the Miracle of the Marne—stopped the war from ending in German victory.
The Schlieffen Plan was working. Germany's opening gambit—a massive wheeling attack through Belgium to envelop France from the north—had driven through Belgium, shattered the British Expeditionary Force at Mons, routed French armies at the frontiers, and was now pushing south toward Paris at a pace that Allied commanders found almost incomprehensible. By September 1, the French government had decamped to Bordeaux. Military Governor of Paris Joseph Gallieni was preparing to defend the city in street fighting. Then the Germans made a mistake.
First Army commander General Alexander von Kluck, pursuing retreating French forces, turned his army southeast of Paris instead of west of it—swinging inside the city rather than enveloping it. This shortened his supply lines and maintained pursuit pressure, but it exposed his right flank to the Paris garrison and created a gap between his army and the Second Army to his east. French aerial reconnaissance spotted the gap on September 3. Gallieni urged immediate counterattack; Joffre, the French commander, took until September 6 to commit.
To rush the French Sixth Army reserves into position for the counterattack, Gallieni commandeered approximately 600 Paris taxicabs—and subsequently every other vehicle available—to transport troops to the front 30 miles away. The taxis made two or three runs each, carrying five soldiers per cab, delivering perhaps 6,000 men total. It was militarily marginal—6,000 reinforcements in a battle involving millions. But the image of civilian taxis mobilized for national defense captured something essential about what the French were fighting for, and the story has never lost its power.
The German retreat from the Marne was orderly and disciplined—it was not a rout. But the armies dug in north of the river, and when they finished digging, the Western Front existed. Both sides began extending their trenches north and south in the 'Race to the Sea,' trying to outflank each other, until the line ran from the Swiss border to the English Channel. The movement stopped. The war that was supposed to end in six weeks would last four years.
Random House, 2009
Macmillan, 1962
HarperCollins, 2014
On November 20, 1917, 476 British tanks rolled forward at Cambrai without a preliminary bombardment and punched a six-mile hole in the German line. Within two days, a German counterattack had taken most of it back.
From August 8 to November 11, 1918, the Allied armies conducted 100 days of continuous offensive operations that shattered the German army. This period—not the trench years—represents the zenith of WWI military art.
On July 1, 1916, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties—the worst single day in its history. The Battle of the Somme would continue for four more months. Understanding why requires understanding what the generals actually knew.
