The Guns of August Read online

  Family and work dominated Barbara Tuchman’s life. What gave her the most pleasure was to sit at a table, writing. She permitted no distractions. Once, after she was famous, her daughter Alma told her that Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand wanted her to write a movie script. She shook her head. “But, Ma,” said Alma, “don’t you even want to meet Jane Fonda?” “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Tuchman. “I don’t have time. I’m working.” She wrote her first drafts in longhand on a yellow legal pad with “everything messed up and x’d out and inserted.” She followed with drafts on the typewriter, triple-spaced, ready to be scissored apart and Scotch-taped back together in a different sequence. Customarily, she worked for four or five hours at a stretch, without interruption. “The summer she was finishing The Guns of August,” her daughter Jessica remembers, “she was behind schedule and desperate to catch up … To get away from the telephone she set up a card table and a chair in an old dairy attached to the stables—a room that was cold even in summer. She would go to work at 7:30 A.M. My job was to bring her lunch on a tray at 12:30 P.M.—a sandwich, V-8 juice, a piece of fruit. Every day, approaching silently on the pine needles that surrounded the stables, I’d find her in the same position, always engrossed. At 5 P.M. or so she stopped.”

  One of the paragraphs Barbara Tuchman wrote that summer took her eight hours to complete and became the most famous passage in all her work. It is the opening paragraph of The Guns of August which begins “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 …” By turning the page, the fortunate person who has not yet encountered this book can begin to read.

  —Robert K. Massie

  Preface

  THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK lies in two earlier books I wrote, of which the First World War was the focal point of both. The first was Bible and Sword, about the origins of the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917 in anticipation of the British entry into Jerusalem in the course of the war against Turkey in the Middle East. As the center and source of the Judaeo-Christian religion, and incidentally of the Moslem as well, although that was a matter of lesser concern at the time, the taking of the sacred city was felt to be an awesome moment requiring some major gesture to accompany it and provide a fitting moral foundation. An official statement recognizing Palestine as the national homeland of the original inhabitants was conceived to fulfill the need, not in consequence of any philo-Semitism but in consequence rather of two other factors: the influence in British culture of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and a twin influence in that year of what the Manchester Guardian called “the insistent logic of the military situation on the banks of the Suez Canal,” in short, Bible and Sword.

  The second of the two books preceding The Guns was The Zimmermann Telegram, a proposal by the then German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to induce Mexico together with Japan to make war as an ally of Germany on the United States with the promise of regaining her lost territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Zimmermann’s clever idea was to keep the United States busy on her own continent so as to prevent her entering the war in Europe. However, it accomplished the reverse, when in the form of a wireless telegram to the president of Mexico, it was decoded by the British and made available to and published by the American government. Zimmermann’s proposal aroused the anger of the public and helped to precipitate the United States into the war.

  I had always thought in my acquaintance with history up to that point, that 1914 was the hour when the clock struck, so to speak, the date that ended the nineteenth century and began our own age, “the Terrible Twentieth” as Churchill called it. In seeking the subject for a book, I felt that 1914 was it. But I did not know what should be the gateway or the framework. Just at the moment when I was floundering in search of the right approach, a small miracle dropped in my lap when my agent called to ask, “Would you like to talk to a publisher who wants you to do a book on 1914?” I was struck, as the phrase goes, all of a heap, but not to the extent that I couldn’t say, “Well, yes I would,” even if rather perturbed that someone else had my idea, although happy he had it with regard to the right person.

  He was a Britisher, Cecil Scott of the Macmillan Company, now regretfully deceased, and what he wanted as he told me later when we met, was a book about what really happened at the Battle of Mons, the first encounter overseas of the BEF (the British Expeditionary Force) in 1914, which had been such an extraordinary survival and check to the Germans that legends grew of supernatural intervention. I was going skiing that week after the meeting with Mr. Scott and took along a suitcase of books to Vermont.

  I came home with the proposal to do a book on the escape of the Goeben, the German battleship, which, by eluding a pursuit by British cruisers in the Mediterranean, had reached Constantinople and brought Turkey and with it the whole Ottoman Empire of the Middle East into the war, determining the course of the history of that area from that day to this. The Goeben seemed a natural for me for it had become family history which we had witnessed, including myself at the age of two. That happened when we, too, were crossing the Mediterranean en route to Constantinople to visit my grandfather, who was then American ambassador to the Porte. It was an often-told story in the family circle how the puffs of gunsmoke from the pursuing British cruisers were seen from our ship, and how the Goeben put on speed and got away, and how on arriving at Constantinople we were the first to bring news to officials and diplomats of the capital of the drama at sea that we had seen. My mother’s account of her heavy questioning by the German ambassador before she could even debark or had a chance to greet her father was my first impression, almost at firsthand, of the German manner.

  Almost thirty years later when I returned from my skiing week in Vermont and told Mr. Scott that this was the story of 1914 that I wanted to write, he said No, that was not what he wanted. He was still fixed on Mons. How had the BEF thrown back the Germans? Had they really seen the vision of an angel over the battlefield? And what was the basis of the legend of the Angel of Mons, afterward so important on the Western Front? Frankly, I was still more interested in the Goeben than in the Angel of Mons, but the fact of a publisher ready for a book on 1914 was more important than either.

  The war as a whole seemed too large and beyond my capacity. But Mr. Scott kept telling me I could do it, and when I formed the plan of keeping to the war’s first month, which contained all the roots, including the Goeben and the Battle of Mons, to make us both happy, the project began to seem feasible.

  When mired among all those Roman-numeraled corps and left and right flanks, I soon felt out of my depth and felt I should have gone to Staff and Command School for ten years before undertaking a book of this kind, especially when trying to tell how the French on the defensive managed to regain Alsace at the very beginning, which I never did understand but I managed to weave my way in and around it, a maneuver one learns in the process of writing history—to muffle the facts a bit when one can’t understand everything—watch Gibbon do it in those sonorous balanced sentences which, if you analyze them, often turn out to make little sense, but you forget that in the marvel of their structure. I am no Gibbon, but I have learned the value of venturing into the unfamiliar instead of returning to a field of previous study where one already knows the source material and all the persons and circumstances. To do the latter makes the work certainly easier, but removes any sense of discovery and surprise, which is why I like moving to a new subject for a new book. Though it may distress the critics, it pleases me. Since I was hardly known to the critics when The Guns was published, with no reputation for them to enjoy smashing, the book received instead the warmest reception. Clifton Fadiman wrote in the Book-of-the-Month Club bulletin: “One must be careful with the big words. Still, there is a fair chance that The Guns of August may turn out to be a historical classic. Its virtues are almost Thucydidean: intelligence, concision, weight detachment. Dealing with the days preceding and following the outbreak of the First World War, its subject like that of Thucydides goes beyond the limited s
cope and reach of the mere narrative. For in hard, sculptured prose this book fixes the moments that have led inexorably to our own time. It places our dread day in long perspective, arguing that if most of the world’s men, women and children are soon to be burned to atoms, the annihilation would seem to proceed directly out of the mouths of the guns that spoke in August 1914. This may be an oversimplification but it describes the author’s thesis which she presents with deadly quiet. It is her conviction that the deadlock of the terrible month of August determined the future course of the war and the terms of the peace, the shape of the inter-war period and the conditions of the Second Round.”

  He then went on to describe the main actors in the narrative, saying that “one of the marks of the superior historian is the ability to project human beings as well as events,” and he picked out the salient characters—the Kaiser, King Albert, generals Joffre and Foch, among others, just as I had tried to convey them, which made me feel I had succeeded in what I intended. I was so moved by Fadiman’s understanding, not to mention being compared to Thucydides, that I found myself in tears, a reaction that I have never known again. To elicit perfect comprehension is perhaps to be expected only once.

  I suppose the important thing to say in introducing an anniversary edition is whether the significance given to it historically holds up. I think it does. There are no passages I would wish to change.

  While the best-known part is the opening scene on the funeral of Edward VII, the closing paragraph of the Afterword expresses for the book, or rather for its subject, the meaning in our history of the Great War. Though it may be presumptuous of me to say so, I think this is as well stated as any summary of World War I that I know.

  On top of Fadiman’s praise came a startling prediction by Publishers Weekly, the bible of the book trade. “The Guns of August,” it declared, “will be the biggest new nonfiction seller in your winter season.” Carried away by its own superlative, PW was led to some rather eccentric prose stating that the book “will grip the American reading public with a new enthusiasm for the electric moments of this hitherto neglected chapter of history …” I did not think that “enthusiasm” for the Great War was quite the noun I would have chosen, or that one could feel “enthusiasm” for “electric moments” or that one could justly call World War I, which had the longest list of titles in the New York Public Library, a “neglected chapter” in history, nevertheless I was pleased by PW’s hearty welcome. Given the fact that in moments of depression during the course of writing, I had said to Mr. Scott, “Who is going to read this?” and he had replied, “Two people: you will and I will.” That was hardly encouraging, which made PW’s pronouncement all the more astonishing to me. As it turned out, they were right. The Guns took off like a runaway horse, and my children, to whom I assigned the royalties and foreign rights, have been receiving nice little checks ever since. When divided among three, the amount may be small, but it is good to know that after twenty-six years the book is still making its way to new readers.

  With this new edition I am happy that the book [is being introduced] to a new generation, and I hope that in middle age it will not have lost its charm or, to put it more appropriately, its interest.

  —Barbara W. Tuchman

  Author’s Note

  THIS BOOK owes a primary debt to Mr. Cecil Scott of The Macmillan Company whose advice and encouragement and knowledge of the subject were an essential element and a firm support from beginning to end. I have also been fortunate in the critical collaboration of Mr. Denning Miller who in clarifying many problems of writing and interpretation made this a better book than it would otherwise have been. For his help I am permanently grateful.

  I should like to express my appreciation of the unsurpassed resources of the New York Public Library and, at the same time, a hope that somehow, someday in my native city a way will be found to make the Library’s facilities for scholars match its incomparable material. My thanks go also to the New York Society Library for the continuing hospitality of its stacks and the haven of a place to write; to Mrs. Agnes F. Peterson of the Hoover Library at Stanford for the loan of the Briey Procés-Verbaux and for running to earth the answers to many queries; to Miss R. E. B. Coombe of the Imperial War Museum, London, for many of the illustrations; to the staff of the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine Paris, for source material and to Mr. Henry Sachs of the American Ordnance Association for technical advice and for supplementing my inadequate German.

  To the reader I must explain that the omission of Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and the Russo-Austrian and Serbo-Austrian fronts was not entirely arbitrary. The inexhaustible problem of the Balkans divides itself naturally from the rest of the war. Moreover, operations on the Austrian front during the first thirty-one days were purely preliminary and did not reach a climax, with effect on the war as a whole, until the Battle of Lemberg against the Russians and the Battle of the Drina against the Serbs. These took place between September 8 and 17, outside my chronological limits, and it seemed to me there was unity without it and the prospect of tiresome length if it were included.

  After a period of total immersion in military memoirs, I had hoped to dispense with Roman-numeraled corps, but convention proved stronger than good intentions. I can do nothing about the Roman numerals which, it seems, are inseparably riveted to army corps, but I can offer the reader a helpful RULE ON LEFT AND RIGHT: rivers face downstream and armies, even when turned around and retreating, are considered to face the direction in which they started; that is, their left and right remain the same as when they were advancing.

  Sources for the narrative and for all quoted remarks are given in the Notes at the end of the book. I have tried to avoid spontaneous attribution or the “he must have” style of historical writing: “As he watched the coastline of France disappear, Napoleon must have thought back over the long …” All conditions of weather, thoughts or feelings, and states of mind public or private, in the following pages have documentary support. Where it seems called for, the evidence appears in the Notes.

  Contents

  Foreword by Robert K. Massie

  Preface

  Author’s Note

  Illustrations

  Maps

  1 A Funeral

  PLANS

  2 “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve”

  3 The Shadow of Sedan

  4 “A Single British Soldier …”

  5 The Russian Steam Roller

  OUTBREAK

  Outbreak

  6 August 1: Berlin

  7 August 1: Paris and London

  8 Ultimatum in Brussels

  9 “Home Before the Leaves Fall”

  BATTLE

  10 “Goeben … An Enemy Then Flying”

  11 Liège and Alsace

  12 BEF to the Continent

  13 Sambre et Meuse

  14 Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons

  15 “The Cossacks Are Coming!”

  16 Tannenberg

  17 The Flames of Louvain

  18 Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral

  19 Retreat

  20 The Front Is Paris

  21 Von Kluck’s Turn

  22 “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne”

  Afterword

  Sources

  Notes

  Illustrations

  General Joffre with General de Castelnau (left) and General Pau

  Sir Henry Wilson talking with Foch and Colonel Huguet

  General Sukhomlinov with staff officers

  The Czar and Grand Duke Nicholas

  The Kaiser and von Moltke

  The Goeben

  Admiral Souchon

  King Albert

  Field Marshal Sir John French

  Prince Rupprecht and the Kaiser

  General von François

  Colonel Max Hoffmann

  German cavalry officers in Brussels

  Joffre, Poincaré, King George
V, Foch, and Haig

  General Gallieni

  General von Kluck

  Maps

  Maps by William A. Pieper

  Western Front

  Eastern Front

  The Mediterranean

  The Assault on Liège

  Battle of the Frontiers, August 20–23

  Battle of Gumbinnen and Transfer of the Eighth Army

  Battle of Tannenberg, August 25–30

  The Retreat, August 25–September 1

  Von Kluck’s Turn

  Eve of the Marne, September 5

  1

  A Funeral

  So GORGEOUS was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

  In the center of the front row rode the new king, George V, flanked on his left by the Duke of Connaught, the late king’s only surviving brother, and on his right by a personage to whom, acknowledged The Times, “belongs the first place among all the foreign mourners,” who “even when relations are most strained has never lost his popularity amongst us”—William II, the German Emperor. Mounted on a gray horse, wearing the scarlet uniform of a British Field Marshal, carrying the baton of that rank, the Kaiser had composed his features behind the famous upturned mustache in an expression “grave even to severity.” Of the several emotions churning his susceptible breast, some hints exist in his letters. “I am proud to call this place my home and to be a member of this royal family,” he wrote home after spending the night in Windsor Castle in the former apartments of his mother. Sentiment and nostalgia induced by these melancholy occasions with his English relatives jostled with pride in his supremacy among the assembled potentates and with a fierce relish in the disappearance of his uncle from the European scene. He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany’s encirclement; Edward his mother’s brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun. “He is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is!”