Mark Osborne Humphries (editor) - Germanys Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War, 1914, Part 1. The Battle of the Frontiers and Pursuit to the Marne

GERMANYS WESTERN FRONT

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GERMAN OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR

1914

PART 1
THE BATTLE OF THE FRONTIERS AND PURSUIT TO THE MARNE

MARK OSBORNE HUMPHRIES AND JOHN MAKER,
EDITORS

TRANSLATIONS BY
WILHELM J. KIESSELBACH AND THE U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

FOREWORD BY HEW STRACHAN

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Germanys Western Front : translations from the German official history of the Great War / Mark Osborne Humphries and John Maker, editors.

Translation of: Der Weltkrieg.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: V. 1. 1914,

Also issued in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-373-7 (V. 1, )

1. World War, 19141918Germany. 2. World War, 19141918CampaignsWestern Front. I. Humphries, Mark Osborne, 1981 II. Maker, John, 1974

D531.G47 2013 940.4144 C2012-904306-0

Electronic monograph issued in multiple formats.

Also issued in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-394-2 (V. 1, EPUB)

1. World War, 19141918Germany. 2. World War, 19141918CampaignsWestern Front. I. Humphries, Mark Osborne, 1981 II. Maker, John, 1974

D531.G47 2013 940.4144 C2012-904307-9

Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Cover photograph by Heinrich Hoffman/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor.

2013 Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies and
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publishers attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

All maps and sketches have been translated and prepared by Mark Humphries from the original German maps and sketches provided with Der Weltkrieg volumes I and III.

WAR IS A REACTIVE BUSINESS, A COMPETITION WHOSE OUTCOME IS DEPENDENT not on some sort of absolute standard of excellence on the part of one side, but on the relative superiority of one side over another. It is this relationshipthe dynamic between two opponents as each struggles to impose its will on the otherthat should be at the heart of operational military history. But it rarely is. Military history, for all its massive progress in the past two or three decades, particularly in the English-speaking world, remains far too nationaland even nationalisticin its approach. If the serious study of military history as a self-contained subject has a significant agenda for the future, it is thisto be comparative.

For no war and no front is this injunction more important or more pressing than for the First World War and its Western Front. The cycle of action and reaction between two coalitions, which were remarkably similar in their military organizations and in the technologies they employed, produced a conflict that was not as static as suggested by the immobility of the trenches that dominated the character of the fighting. It has now become axiomatic that modern war was conceived and developed through the experience of this titanic fight and the lessons it bequeathed. But the military history on which such arguments rest continues to be lopsided. English-language historians, not just Britons but also Americans, Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, have done more than those writing in French and German to deepen our understanding of the conduct of operations on the Western Front. However, their research is too often written from the perspective of one side. It pays little or no attention to the sources available to the Germans, for what those tell us about German intentions, German reactions, or even German perspectives on British and French efforts.

This gap is all the more extraordinary because the German official history of the war on land, Der Weltkrieg, is not a rare set of volumes, at least for the war up to the spring of 1917a point it had reached with Volume XII, published in 1939. By then the pace of its authors was quickening: the events of 1914 had taken six volumes, those of 1915 three, and those of 1916 two. Two more volumes appeared to take the story to November 1918. Being completed during the Second World War, Volumes XIII and XIV never gained wide circulation. Five hundred copies of each were reprinted in 1956 but did not sell out until 1975.

Such disappointing sales were indicative of two phenomena. First, the Second World War had made the study of the First World War deeply unfashionable throughout Europea trend that changed in Britain only after 1964, with the fiftieth anniversary of the wars outbreak, and in Germany (if at all) only after 2004, with the ninetieth anniversary. Second, German military history after 1945, insofar as it survived at all, stepped away from the operational focus embraced by the General Staff historians of the Wilhelmine period, of which Der Weltkrieg was the final manifestation. This condition still pertains: operational military history struggles to acquire the respectability in German academic circles that it has now attained in the English-speaking world. The British official history has been reprinted; the German one has not been, despite the scarcity of Volumes XIII and XIV.

These two arguments may be sufficient explanations for the neglect of Der Weltkrieg by German historians in Germany, but they do not apply to English-speaking historians. Their reasons for not consulting Der Weltkrieg more frequently are, presumably, linguistic. For monoglot scholars, this translation will be a boon beyond measure. It has been fashionable to rubbish the work of the official historians of the First World War, whatever language they wrote in. Sir James Edmonds, whose labours on behalf of Britain were not completed until 1948, and who has been criticized by David French, Tim Travers, and Denis Winterto cite three historians with very different perspectivespresided over an enterprise that may not conform to current expectations of historians but that nonetheless strove hard for objectivity. As Stephen Green has shown in