Battle of the Ardennes ends

On 24 August 1914 the French armies beaten in the Ardennes received orders to retreat behind the Meuse. So ended the battle that included 22 August, the bloodiest day in the history of the French army.

After the defeat

The French Fourth Army of General Fernand de Langle de Cary and the Third Army of General Pierre Ruffey had attacked through the Ardennes on 21 and 22 August, convinced that they faced weak German forces. They ran into two strong armies: the Fourth Army of Duke Albrecht of Württemberg and the Fifth Army of Crown Prince Wilhelm. After heavy losses, on 23 August they began to fall back, fighting delaying actions on the Semois and Chiers rivers.

On 24 August the Commander-in-Chief, Joseph Joffre, ordered the Fourth Army to withdraw behind the Meuse, to the sector between Mézières and Stenay. Langle de Cary’s troops pulled back over the next two days, destroying the bridges behind them. Ruffey’s army still tried to counter-attack with its right wing on 24 and 25 August, but the withdrawal of its left wing forced it to halt the attack and fall back towards the Meuse and Verdun. A French garrison remained in the encircled fortress of Longwy and held out for another two days.

When did the battle end?

In English-language literature the Battle of the Ardennes is usually dated to 21–23 August, because on 23 August the French began to withdraw. French regimental histories compiled after the war, however, often include the fighting of 24 August under the name of the battle, and the historian Gabriel Hanotaux, in a work published in 1917, extended it as far as 25 August, when the French completed their crossing behind the Meuse. The British chronology of the war gives 24 August as the day the battle ended, and we adopt this date on the Battle of the Ardennes page as well.

Significance

The battle cost the French very dearly. The losses of the two armies are estimated at tens of thousands killed, wounded and taken prisoner, although the exact figures differ from source to source. The defeat in the Ardennes, together with the defeats on the Sambre and at Mons, put an end to the French plan for an offensive war. Only a few days later, however, both armies went into battle again. On the left bank of the Meuse the Fourth Army halted the Germans in the Battle of the Meuse, giving the rest of the French forces time for an orderly retreat.