MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · September 12 · 1914
ON THIS DAY · 12 SEPTEMBER 1914
The Marne
5-12 Sep 1914 — Joffre’s counterstroke catches the German First and Second Armies 40 km from Paris with a gap between them. Six hundred Paris taxis carry one brigade to the front; the whole German line falls back to the Aisne — and digs in.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
The three charcoal arrows sweeping through Belgium are the Schlieffen Plan: hold in the east, put seven-eighths of the army in the west, and swing the massive right wing through neutral Belgium to envelop Paris from behind — France beaten in six weeks, then everyone east by rail to meet Russia. It almost describes what happened. Liège’s forts cost ten days and were smashed by 420mm siege guns; the army that marched past them burned Louvain and shot some 6,500 civilians against imagined snipers — the “Rape of Belgium” was real, and it armed Allied propaganda for four years. Meanwhile France bled itself in Lorraine: on 22 August alone — the war’s single deadliest day for any army — 27,000 French soldiers died attacking into machine guns in wool coats and red trousers.
From Chapter 2 — The Guns of August of The Great War, 1914–1918 (AUG 1914).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — The two-front arithmetic. Germany’s core problem since 1894: France and Russia together outnumbered it, but Russia mobilized slowly. Schlieffen’s answer was sequence —…
- The turn — The Marne, 5–12 September. A German staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Hentsch, sent forward with authority to coordinate a retreat, found the gap between First and Second…
- What it changed — The race to the sea — and the wall. Each side tries to turn the other’s open flank northward until there are no flanks left, only a fortified line from Switzerland to the Channel.…
Then ask the room: The Schlieffen Plan came within 50 km of Paris. Was it a near-run gamble, or never really possible? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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