End of the Battle of the Marne

On 10 September 1914 the British Expeditionary Force and the neighbouring French armies advanced north behind the retreating Germans. The fighting was now only with the rearguards covering the retreat of the German 1st and 2nd Armies. The British chronology of the war regards this day as the end of the Battle of the Marne, the largest and most important battle of 1914.

The pursuit

The day before, after consultations with the envoy of the Supreme Command, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, Generals Karl von Bülow and Alexander von Kluck had ordered their armies to retreat. The British, who for several days had been entering the gap between these armies, crossed the Marne and moved north. On 10 September the commander-in-chief of the French army, General Joseph Joffre, ordered a general pursuit.

The pursuit was not fast. The Allied soldiers, who had been marching and fighting almost without a break for nearly three weeks, were exhausted. Around 10 September the weather broke, the roads turned to mud, and the bridges over the many rivers and streams had to be rebuilt or captured. Along the way stragglers, wounded men and small German detachments were taken prisoner, and abandoned wagons and guns were captured. Everywhere there were signs of a hasty retreat, but not of a rout. The German armies were falling back in good order.

End of the battle: 10, 12 or 13 September?

The Battle of the Marne has no single, generally accepted end date. The British fought on the Marne for a shorter time than the French and measure the battle by their own part in it. The British official history and the British nomenclature of battles close it on 10 September, the day on which the Expeditionary Force passed from fighting to pursuit. According to that history, the fighting from 6 to 10 September cost the Expeditionary Force about 1,700 killed, wounded and missing. Other studies, counting a longer period, give much higher figures.

French tradition measures the battle by the operations of the whole front, from Paris to Verdun. On 11 September the Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, toured the headquarters of his armies in the centre and in the east and ordered the 3rd, 4th and 5th Armies to retreat as well. By 12–13 September the Germans had withdrawn to the heights north of the river Aisne and begun to dig in there. That is why in France the end of the battle is most often set at 12 or 13 September. The British count the next battle, on the Aisne, from 12 September.

The Miracle of the Marne

The French called the victory the “Miracle of the Marne”. Only a few days earlier German cavalry patrols had been appearing a few dozen kilometres from Paris, and the government had left the capital. Now the German armies were falling back several dozen kilometres to the north. The word “miracle” expressed relief, but it obscured the real causes of the victory: Joffre’s calm and determination, the efficient movement of troops by rail, the exhaustion of the German soldiers and the gaps in German command.

The collapse of the Schlieffen Plan

The significance of the battle went far beyond the ground gained. The Germans had entered the war with the Schlieffen Plan, which assumed the defeat of France within a few weeks and only then a turn against Russia. On the Marne this plan collapsed. France had not been defeated, and Germany had to wage a long war on two fronts, the thing its staff officers had feared most. Moltke is credited with the words addressed to the Kaiser: “Majestät, wir haben den Krieg verloren” (“Your Majesty, we have lost the war”), although it is not certain that he really said them.

Moltke, broken by the failure, lost effective command a few days later. Once the Germans had dug in on the Aisne, both sides began trying to outflank each other to the north. By the end of 1914 an unbroken line of trenches stretched from the North Sea coast to the Swiss border, and the war in the west had become trench warfare.