The Killing Season

The Killing Season

I

The Shadow of Schlieffen

Prologue

August 20, 1914
Near Charleroi, Belgium

“There was a moment in the experience of every man in the war, when he realized suddenly the magnitude of the forces he was pitted against. It might come soon or it might come late, it might be screamed out with the distraught voice of a frenzied imagination, or whispered with the ashen lips of fear, but inevitably the time came when a cold hand gripped each man’s heart.”

For Edward L. Spears, a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant in the 11th Hussars, that moment came early, on a summer evening in 1914. Spears was something of an exotic bird in his own army: He spoke fluent French. He had been born in France and had lived there until his Anglo-Irish parents divorced. He was then raised in Ireland; at sixteen and a half, he joined the British cavalry. Army intelligence made use of the young officer’s language skills. He devised and compiled an Anglo-French codebook and translated French tactical handbooks. His fellow officers regarded him as too brainy for his own good—and, indeed, as Max Egremont, his biographer, writes, Spears was “an outsider in both countries: not quite English and certainly not French.” Late in the spring of 1914, the British War Office sent him to Paris to work with the French in the Ministry of War, posing as a civilian; he also ran agents in Belgium. He packed a uniform, just in case.

By the beginning of August, Great Britain found itself swept up in a continental war, which soon became a world one. London chose Spears to serve as a liaison officer with Gen. Charles Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. Spears’s appointment was crucial because he would also act as the principal connection with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that would take up position to the left of the Fifth. Soon he was on his way to Rethel, Lanrezac’s headquarters in the forest of the Ardennes. Spears always claimed that he was the first British officer to reach the Western Front and to see action of any kind. During one of his first days at Rethel, German cavalry scouts chased, and nearly caught, the car in which he was riding. Only a chauffeur’s quick-thinking U-turn and a high-speed dash away from the galloping horsemen saved him from capture.

On the evening of August 20, a Thursday, Spears sat with a French officer on a grassy hillside just below the River Sambre. The two looked north across the dark, polluted stream to the sprawling grid that defined the mining center of Charleroi. Streetlights were coming on. Beyond, the plain of Belgium widened into a gray distance in which mist and fumes from collieries and the home-fire smoke of miners’ rude villages seemed to merge in a featureless, darkening blemish. This was the region known locally as the “Borinage” (coal country) or “Le Pays Noir” (the black land). In his late twenties, Vincent van Gogh had spent time here as a Protestant missionary—miners seemed to belong to another race—and also worked in the mines.

Spears and his companion speculated about “how great armies could possibly fight amid those streets, those endless houses,” as though the mazes of the Industrial Revolution could confound and defy the massed thousands of approaching invaders. By what sign could they recognize that the Germans had actually arrived? “We imagined the endless columns of grey-clad men with spiked helmets, rolling forward, flattening out poor little Belgium in their overwhelming advance.”

The Germans were, in fact, already deploying their vaunted artillery siege train in the fields opposite Namur, that fortress on the long buttelike rock overlooking the confluence of the Sambre and the Meuse, just twenty-odd miles to the east. And that same evening, not many more miles away, up to 300,000 men of Generaloberst Alexander von Kluck’s German First Army had begun their passage down the broad avenues of Brussels, Belgium’s capital, bands playing martial anthems and marchers’ voices raised in patriotic song. The procession of conquerors would continue into that night and through the next two.

Spears, meanwhile, would remember those last minutes of twilight as “still and wonderfully peaceful. The ominous rumble of guns from the direction of Namur, which had been going on all afternoon, had ceased. A dog was barking at some sheep. A girl was singing as she walked down the lane behind us. From a little farm away on the right came the voices and laughter of some soldiers cooking their evening meal.”

How many of them would still be alive a couple of nights later?

The light began to fail. Then it happened. They had their sign, their premonition.

Without a moment’s warning, with a suddenness that made us start and strain our eyes to see what our minds could not realize, we saw the whole horizon burst into flames. To the north, outlined against the sky, countless fires were burning. It was as if hordes of fiends had suddenly been released, and dropping on the distant plain, were burning every town and every village. A chill of horror came over us.

To Spears, the meaning of that aurora-like vision, sinister and man-made, was inescapable:

It suddenly became clear that to survive it would be necessary to go on beyond exhaustion, to march when the body clamored to be allowed to drop and die, to shoot when eyes were too tired to see, to remain awake when a man would have given his salvation to sleep. And we realized also that to drive the body beyond physical powers, to force the mind to act long after it had surrendered its power of thought, only despair and the strength of despair could furnish the motive force.

“The strength of despair.” That was the essence of what was to come. “It was quite dark now. The distant fires glowed red against a violet black sky.”

1

“The Virtuosity of Sheer Audacity”
December 1905—August 1914

“No strategic plan goes with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main forces,” warned Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Germany’s greatest military leader of the nineteenth century, victor over Denmark, Austria-Hungary, and France. “Only the layman believes he can see in the course of a campaign the carrying through of an initial idea, thought out in advance, considered in every detail, and adhered to right to the end.” Wars have a way of taking unlikely turns. Single seasons lengthen into years. Evasions don’t evade. Destinations come as a surprise; armies collide in the least convenient of places. Early losers mature into late winners. Beginnings may be predictable; endings are invariably unexpected. Lofty intentions sink into the mud.

Despite Moltke’s epigrammatic caution, no group in Europe was more proficient at plan-making than the German military. The nation it served felt hemmed in and pressured by the competitors who surrounded it—by a surging Russia, which had, since 1894, a secret mutual defensive agreement with France, by Great Britain and its mighty fleet, and by France, still bitter from defeat in 1871 and a never-quenched desire to regain the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. At the same time Germany’s strident push for supremacy on the Continent was beginning to frighten those same neighbors. And there were, of course, increasingly bitter rivalries over markets and colonies, the trophies that established a nation as a great power. The ingredients for a European civil war were brewing. The lid was ready to blow on the overheated boiler that was the Continent: the animosities, the frustrations, the pent-up rage, the societal dissatisfactions, the unresolved bondage of class, the ennui, and the suppressed longings of an entire century were about to explode beyond repair or peaceful resolution.

Of all the German planning documents of the time, none is more legendary than the December 1905 Denkschrift—memorandum—of the retiring chief of the general staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, to his successor, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. Those few pages would shape the course of the as-yet-unfought war and, indeed, of a century that was still young.

Schlieffen had commanded the German Army for fourteen years. Almost from the beginning of his tenure, he had faced the prospect of a two-front war, the French menacing Germany from one direction, the Russians from the other. But by the time he set down his thoughts as he prepared to retire, the threat from Russia had, for the moment, diminished. The Japanese had defeated Russia on land in the Far East, had sunk most of its navy, and, to further neutralize its potential for war, revolution, barely suppressed, had swept the nation. For the first time in years, Germany would not have to watch its back. It could concentrate almost all of its army in the west, against France.