The Guns of August, Chapters 10 – 14

My thoughts: This section was a bit difficult to get through, to be honest. Chapter 10 starts off discussing Turkey (who ended up taking sides with Germany), then segues into a naval battle (which involved Turkey) between Britain and Germany. The section about the naval battle was cumbersome for me—I suppose that means I wouldn’t make a good sailor. One notable thing about this chapter is that Tuchman mentions that passengers on an Italian steamer witnessed part of this naval battle. Among these passengers, writes Tuchman, were “the daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau.” Barbara Tuchman, our esteemed author, was one of those grandchildren of Henry Morgenthau! But she was only two years old at the time, so I’m pretty sure she remembered nothing.

These chapters also mention the German invasion of Belgium. Perhaps I should back up and explain why the Germans decided to invade Belgium in the first place. The Germans wanted to stick to the Schlieffen Plan, which decreed that Germany would invade and defeat France, then focus on Russia. This was designed to prevent Germany from fighting a two-front war (because those are NEVER a good idea). And the way to France was through Belgium.

Chapter 11 documents the battle at Liège in Belguim, about which Tuchman writes, “The prodigal spending of lives by all the belligerents that was to mount and mount in senseless excess to hundreds of thousands at the Somme, to over a million at Verdun began on that second day of the war at Liège.” In other words, the prototype for how brutal World War I was to become began in that Belgian city. Although the city’s citizens had some fight in them, they eventually fell to the Germans, who mercilessly shelled the city. Their defense of the city reminds me of the poem “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay (which was written in 1919). The last lines of the poem are “Like men, we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” The brutal treatment of the Belgians by the German army did not stop at Liège, and the invaders cut a deadly path across the country.

Chapter 14 documents the Battle of the Frontiers, which was when things got really ugly. The French were slaughtered by the Germans in the Ardennes forest (which, because I’m a huge fan of Band of Brothers, I know was the sight of The Battle of the Bulge thirty years later during World War II). We see that the desire to stick to military plans by both the Germans and the French led to really bad consequences. The French’s military plans did not include plans for defense—they were really big fans of offense. So they didn’t plan on how to respond to German attacks. The Battle of the Frontiers was the moment, perhaps, that everyone realized that it would not be a quick war. It was when a war of movement became a war of attrition. The French, at least, realized at this moment what happens to the best laid plans of mice and men. Tuchman writes, “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers—danger, death, and live ammunition.” That is a very hard and age-old lesson. But, unfortunately, no one knew how long the war would be or how many lives it would cost.

This part of the book, while interesting, was not as engaging to me as the first ten chapters. I think that’s maybe because the beginning of the book was more history related, whereas Chapters 10 – 14 are more about military strategy. But Tuchman proves time and again that she was a wonderful writer. And because of this, I kept reading. The most striking thing about this book is that Tuchman wrote with her eye to the future—she constantly reminds us why the first month of the war is so relevant to how the rest of the war, which in turn influenced the entire 20th century, played out.

Great passage: The German march through Belgium, like the march of predator ants who periodically emerge from the South American jungle to carve a swath of death across the land, was cutting its way across the field, road, village, and town, like the ants unstopped by rivers or any obstacle.