The Battle of the Marne

The battle of the Marne closed a definite phase of the Great War, and perhaps——in so far as it was marked by open and rapid movement, and as it finally exposed certain gross mil...

“Errors,” “vanities”? These words must be justified, however gently, however briefly. To regard the battle of the Marne without reference to the grievous beginnings that led to...

The unescapable dilemma of the Joffrean strategy had developed into a second and peremptory phase. In deciding to withdraw from the Brie plateau and the Marne, rather than risk...

France, land of swift action and swifter wit, was the last one would expect to take kindly to the new warfare. She looked then, as her elders had always looked, for a Man. And s...

Exactly at noon on Saturday, September 5, the divisions of General Lamaze, constituting the right (save for elements connecting it with the British) of the French 6th Army, came...

It was in the early hours of September 3 that the first definite evidence of Kluck’s divergence south-eastward was reported to the Military Government of Paris; but the officers...

General Joffre’s Instruction of September 1 had prescribed that the whole offensive should pivot upon the right. The defence of the eastern front, as a wall protecting the weste...

Retreat to the Somme was much, to the Marne so much more as was to be appreciated only in the after-years of the war. Retreat to the Seine, besides endangering the venerable for...

In the original design of the whole battle, the action of the right or eastern half of the Allied crescent was to be reciprocal to that of the left——while the centre held, Sarra...

It is now apparent that a record of the battle covering the whole front day by day would give no clear view of its development. The climax came not everywhere at the same hour,...

August 25, 1914: three weeks after Von Emmich opened the war before Liège; five days after the French Army of Lorraine was trapped at Sarrebourg and Morhange; two days after Nam...

The German Objective (p. 239); The Opposed Forces (p. 240); De Bloch’s Prophecy and French’s Confession (p. 242); Criticisms and Defence of the French Staff (p. 244); The Surpri...