World Wars Part 3: The Schlieffen Plan, the Marne and the Race to the Sea, 1914

This is Part 3 of World Wars, our series on the First and Second World Wars, from the July Crisis of 1914 to the world that emerged in 1945. New parts appear every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

In Part 2 we followed the five and a half weeks from the Sarajevo assassination to Britain's declaration of war on 4 August 1914. This part covers the next five months in the west: Germany's gamble on a quick victory through Belgium, the Allied stand on the Marne, the scramble north to the Channel coast, and the first Christmas of a war many had expected to be over by then.

The plan: Schlieffen, Moltke and Belgium

Germany and Austria-Hungary faced France in the west and Russia in the east, and in a long war the Entente had more men and money. As Part 1 showed, German planners had dreaded this two-front war for years.

The answer associated with Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, was to knock out France first. Because France had fortified its border with Germany, the main blow would swing through neutral Belgium, with a strong right wing sweeping west of Paris to trap the French armies. Russia, it was assumed, would need about six weeks to mobilise; by then France would be beaten and the army could move east by rail.

His successor, Helmuth von Moltke (the Younger), changed the plan. According to the Imperial War Museums (IWM), he left the Netherlands out of the advance and strengthened the forces guarding Alsace-Lorraine and East Prussia: sensible insurance for a long war, but it made a quick victory harder. Whether the result deserves the name "Schlieffen Plan" at all is still debated (see below).

The invasion of Belgium

German troops crossed the Belgian border on 4 August. The fortress city of Liège held them up until super-heavy siege howitzers smashed its ring of forts; the last fell on 16 August. The Belgian army withdrew to Antwerp, and Brussels was occupied on 20 August.

Civilians suffered badly. Convinced that civilian snipers (francs-tireurs) were firing on them, a threat historians now regard as largely imaginary, German troops carried out mass reprisals. According to figures cited by the IWM (from historians John Horne and Alan Kramer), the German army deliberately killed about 5,521 civilians in Belgium and 906 in France between August and October 1914. Several hundred people were shot at Dinant on 23 August, and the university library at Louvain (Leuven) was burned on 25 August. Allied propaganda later added invented stories, but the core events were real.

The Battle of the Frontiers and the Great Retreat

France's own Plan XVII, under its commander-in-chief General Joseph Joffre, sent armies into Lorraine and the Ardennes. French infantry, many still in red trousers, attacked straight into machine guns and artillery. These August clashes, from Lorraine to Charleroi on the Sambre, are called the Battle of the Frontiers. According to IWM historian Bryn Hammond, 21,035 French soldiers died on 22 August 1914 alone; some estimates are higher, around 27,000.

The small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under Field Marshal Sir John French, about 90,000 men according to the National Army Museum, stood on the French left at Mons on 23 August and checked the German First Army with rapid rifle fire. With the French retreating beside it, it too had to fall back. The Great Retreat that followed covered about 200 miles (320 km) in summer heat, with costly rearguard fights such as Le Cateau on 26 August.

Russia, meanwhile, mobilised faster than expected and invaded East Prussia, so on 25 August Moltke sent two corps east. They arrived after the German victory at Tannenberg (26-30 August) and were missed in France.

The Marne: 5-12 September

By early September the Germans were about 30 miles (48 km) from Paris. But the German armies were exhausted, ahead of their supplies and poorly coordinated by Moltke's distant headquarters in Luxembourg. General Alexander von Kluck, commanding the First Army on the vital right wing, turned to chase the retreating French and passed east of Paris instead of round it, exposing his flank.

The military governor of Paris, General Joseph Gallieni, saw the chance. Joffre, who had used the railways to build a new Sixth Army near the capital, ordered a general counter-attack. When Kluck swung west to meet the Sixth Army, a gap of some 30 miles opened between him and General Karl von Bülow's Second Army. The BEF and the French Fifth Army under General Louis Franchet d'Espèrey pushed slowly into it, while General Ferdinand Foch's Ninth Army held on in the marshes of Saint-Gond. On 9 September, after a visit from Moltke's envoy Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Hentsch, Bülow and then Kluck ordered a retreat. The Germans fell back about 40 miles to the heights north of the River Aisne and dug in. On 14 September Moltke was replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn.

Marne casualty figures are uncertain. Commonly cited estimates put French and German losses at roughly 250,000-300,000 each (killed, wounded, missing and captured) and the BEF's at about 13,000. The "miracle of the Marne" saved Paris and ended Germany's hope of a quick win, though Germany kept most of Belgium and much of France's industrial north.

The race to the sea

The Allies could not break the entrenched German line on the Aisne. From mid-September each side tried to get round the other's open northern flank, and the front crept north through Picardy and Artois. This is called the "race to the sea", though both sides were really racing for the enemy's flank, not the coast.

Antwerp fell on 10 October and the Belgian army withdrew to the River Yser, where at the end of October it opened the sluices at Nieuwpoort and flooded the low ground. That left one gap where the Germans might still break through to the Channel ports: the Flemish town of Ypres (Ieper).

First Ypres and the Indian Corps

The First Battle of Ypres lasted from about 19 October to 22 November. The BEF, moved north and reinforced with Territorial and Indian divisions, held a salient (a bulge in the line) east of the town against repeated German attacks. The worst crisis came at Gheluvelt on 31 October, when the line broke and was restored by a counter-attack; the Prussian Guard was thrown back on 11 November.

Indian soldiers were in this battle from its early weeks. The Indian Corps had sailed from Karachi and Bombay (Mumbai), landing at Marseilles from late September, and units such as the 129th Duke of Connaught's Own Baluchis were rushed into the line. On 31 October at Hollebeke, according to his Victoria Cross citation (London Gazette, 7 December 1914), Sepoy Khudadad Khan, though wounded, kept his machine gun firing after the British officer had been wounded and the other five men of the gun team killed. He survived to become the first Indian Army soldier awarded the VC. Part 5 tells the Indian soldiers' story in full.

Estimates of losses at First Ypres usually run to about 55,000-58,000 British, 50,000-85,000 French and over 20,000 Belgian, with German figures from about 80,000 to over 130,000 depending on the period counted. By the end of 1914, says the National Army Museum, the BEF had suffered over 90,000 casualties, and the original professional army was almost wiped out.

Why "over by Christmas" failed

The phrase "over by Christmas" captures a popular mood of August 1914, though not every leader shared it: Britain's war minister Lord Kitchener warned that the war could last years and began raising a mass volunteer army. Several things turned a short war into a long one:

• Firepower favoured defence. Rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery made attacks in the open ruinous. IWM notes that losses on all fronts in 1914 topped five million, with about a million killed.
• Railways beat marching feet. Defenders could move reserves by train faster than attackers could advance on foot.
• Supply and command broke down. German armies far ahead of their railheads could not exploit their early victories.
• The war spread. Russia's early offensive, Belgian resistance and the BEF's arrival upset Germany's timetable.

By late November a trench line about 466 miles (750 km) long, by the National Army Museum's figure, ran from the Belgian coast to Switzerland. It would barely move for over three years.

Christmas 1914: the truce

On Christmas Eve, along parts of the British front in Flanders, German soldiers put candles and small Christmas trees on their parapets and sang carols, and British troops answered. On Christmas Day men from both sides met in no man's land (the ground between the trenches), shook hands, swapped cigarettes and souvenirs, took photographs and buried their dead. According to IWM, some impromptu football was played, and in places the truce lasted into Boxing Day.

Myth vs evidence: what historians debate

• Was there a "Schlieffen Plan"? In 1999 the historian Terence Zuber argued in War in History that Schlieffen's famous 1905-06 memorandum was not a real war plan, and that the "Schlieffen Plan" was largely a post-war creation by German officers who blamed Moltke for the defeat. Terence Holmes, Annika Mombauer and others challenged him. Most historians still accept that Germany went to war with a plan for a rapid offensive through Belgium inspired by Schlieffen's ideas; they disagree on how fixed a blueprint it was.
• The taxis of the Marne. Around 600 Paris taxis did carry troops to the front on 7-8 September (about 3,000 men, according to Britannica). Historians such as Hew Strachan and Holger Herwig see their military effect as small; their real power was as a morale story.
• The Christmas truce. It was real but not universal. IWM stresses that it was not observed everywhere and that fighting and deaths continued in some sectors on Christmas Day. The often-quoted figure of up to about 100,000 participants is hard to verify. Letters describe kickabouts, and The Times printed one on 1 January 1915 mentioning a match, but well-known claims of a formal game with a score, such as a 3-2 German win, come from later retellings, including a 1962 story by Robert Graves. Both high commands made sure nothing on that scale happened again.

For a shorter overview of how the war started, see our explainer on how World War I began, or browse our World War I tag page.

At a glance: the war in the west, 1914

Next in the series

Part 4: SMS Emden and the Shelling of Madras, 1914. While the armies dug in on the Western Front, a lone German cruiser was raiding shipping in the Indian Ocean. On the night of 22 September 1914 it shelled Madras (Chennai), and its name entered everyday Tamil speech.

Sources

• The Schlieffen Plan, Imperial War Museums
• First World War key battles, Imperial War Museums
• The real story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, Imperial War Museums
• 1914: Mons to Christmas, National Army Museum
• First Battle of the Marne, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Battle of the Marne: 6-10 September 1914, BBC History
• WW1 VC recipient Khudadad Khan, UK Government (includes his London Gazette citation)
• Terence Zuber, 'The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered', War in History 6:3 (1999)
• Strachan, H. (2001), The First World War, Vol. I: To Arms; Herwig, H. (2009), The Marne, 1914; Horne, J. and Kramer, A. (2001), German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial; Weintraub, S. (2001), Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce