Western Front, winter 1914 (© SZ Photo/Scherl/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Dorothie Feilding (Warwickshire County Record Office collections: CR2017/F246/326); Edouard Cœurdevey (Personal archives of Jean Cœurdevey); Jacques Rivière (All rights reserved. Private collection); Richard Hentsch (bpk/Studio Niermann/Emil Bieber); Paul Lintier (From Avec une batterie de 75. Le Tube 1233. Souvenirs d’un chef de pièce (1915–1916) by Paul Lintier, Paris 1917); Vladimir Littauer (From Russian Hussar by Vladimir S. Littauer, J.A. Allen & Co., London, 1965); Constantin Schneider (Constantin Schneider als Oberleutnant; Foto: Privatbesitz; Reproduktion: Salzburger Landesarchiv; aus: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Neuere Geschichte Österreichs, Bd. 95, Wien [u.a.] Böhlau, 2003); Lionel Tennyson (Tennyson Research Centre, Lincolnshire County Council); Venetia Stanley (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans); Louis Spears (Patrick Aylmer); Helene Schweida and Wilhelm Kaisen (State Archive of Bremen); Louis Barthas (From Les Carnets de guerre de Louis Barthas, tonnelier, 1914–1918 © Editions de la Découverte. Paris. English edition to be published in 2013 by Yale University Press); François Mayer (© IWM Q 111149)
A family flees a battlefield (Mirrorpix)
British soldiers in Belgium, winter 1914 (K.W. Brewster/The Liddle Collection/Leeds University Library. Photograph LC GS 0195)
While every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of photographs, in some cases this has not proved possible. The author and publishers would welcome any information that would enable such omissions to be rectified in future editions.
Author’s note: The movements of the vast armies in 1914 were so complex that it is almost impossible to depict them cartographically in detail. In these maps I have striven for clarity for non-specialist readers, for instance by omitting divisional numbers except where essential. They are generally based upon the maps in Arthur Banks’s A Military Atlas of the First World War (Heinemann, 1975).
Rival concentrations on the Western Front, August 1914
Frontier battles in Lorraine, 10–28 August 1914
The German advance through Belgium, August 1914
The Battle of Mons, 23 August 1914
The British at Le Cateau, 26 August 1914
The allied retirement, 23 August–6 September 1914
The Russian advance into East Prussia
The Battle of Tannenberg, 24–29 August 1914: the pre-battle situation
The Battle of Tannenberg: the final act
German advance, 17 August–5 September 1914
The Battle of the Marne, 5–6 September 1914
The Battle of the Marne, 7–8 September 1914
The Battle of the Marne, 9 September 1914
The German armies in retreat towards the Aisne
The allied withdrawal to the Yser–Lys position, 9–15 October 1914
The First Battle of Ypres: the first moves
The First Battle of Ypres: final positions
Approximate positions on the Eastern and Western Fronts, December 1914
As commandant of the British Army’s staff college in 1910, Brigadier-General Henry Wilson asserted the likelihood of a European war, and argued that Britain’s only prudent option was to ally itself with France against the Germans. A student ventured to argue, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could precipitate a general conflagration. This provoked Wilson’s derision: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw!!! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you’re going to get.’
‘We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness’ ANDRÉ GIDE, 28 July 1914
A bantering Russian foreign ministry official said to the British military attaché on 16 August: ‘You soldiers ought to be very pleased that we have arranged such a nice war for you.’ The officer answered: ‘We must wait and see whether it will be such a nice war after all.’
Winston Churchill wrote afterwards: ‘No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening. The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed. Nor was there any other period in the War when the general battle was waged on so great a scale, when the slaughter was so swift or the stakes so high. Moreover, in the beginning our faculties of wonder, horror and excitement had not been cauterized and deadened by the furnace fires of years.’ All this was so, though few of Churchill’s fellow participants in those vast events embraced them with such eager appetite.
In our own twenty-first century, the popular vision of the war is dominated by images of trenches, mud, wire and poets. It is widely supposed that the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest of the entire conflict. This is not so. In August 1914 the French army, advancing under brilliant sunshine across a virgin pastoral landscape, in dense masses clad in blue overcoats and red trousers, led by officers riding chargers, with colours flying and bands playing, fought battles utterly unlike those that came later, and at even more terrible daily cost. Though French losses are disputed, the best estimates suggest that they suffered well over a million casualtiesfn1 in 1914’s five months of war, including 329,000 dead. One soldier whose company entered its first battle with eighty-two men had just three left alive and unwounded by the end of August.
The Germans suffered 800,000 casualties in the same period, including three times as many dead as during the entire Franco-Prussian War. This also represented a higher rate of loss than at any later period of the war. The British in August fought two actions, at Mons and Le Cateau, which entered their national legend. In October their small force was plunged into the three-week nightmare of the First Battle of Ypres. The line was narrowly held, with a larger French and Belgian contribution than chauvinists acknowledge, but much of the old British Army reposes forever in the region’s cemeteries: four times as many soldiers of the King perished in 1914 as during the three years of the Boer War. Meanwhile