596. The First World War: The Miracle on the Marne (Part 3)

Summary

The Rest Is History Episode 596: The First World War – The Miracle on the Marne (Part 3) Release Date: August 31, 2025
Hosts: Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook

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Episode Overview

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook dissect the pivotal turning point of World War I: the Miracle on the Marne. In this third installment of their deep-dive into 1914, they reconstruct the dramatic reversal that saved Paris and arguably changed the fate of the 20th century. With characteristic wit and forensic detail, the hosts explore the high stakes, the flawed German advance, the interplay of Allied leadership, and the legendary tales—some true and some mythologized—that surrounded the battle. Their narrative moves beyond battlefield tactics to the psychological warfare, myths, and seeds of future legends and traumas.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Crisis Facing the Allies (04:05–06:40)

• Backdrop: By early September 1914, German forces have swept through Belgium, devastated northern France, and are closing in on Paris.
• Panic in Paris: The French government prepares to decamp to Bordeaux, a million refugees flee, and British commander Sir John French requests permission to abandon the city.
• Significance: The Allied position is so precarious that, had Paris fallen, “the story of the First World War and indeed of the 20th century... is completely different.” (Dominic, 05:42)

2. British Resolve & Kitchener’s Intervention (06:19–09:12)

• After the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) signals possible withdrawal, the British Cabinet doubles down: Kitchener is sent to "steady Sir John French's nerve."
• Key Moment: Kitchener, in military uniform to intimidate, commands French to remain in line and coordinate with the French army.
• “Kitchener is a walking recruitment poster. So Kitchener left overnight... and he says to Sir John French, none of this talk about withdrawal.” (Dominic, 07:27)

3. French Leadership: Joffre, Gallieni, Rivalries & Resilience

(09:12–13:16)

• General Joseph Gallieni becomes military governor of Paris despite illness and deep personal losses (“sallow, shrunken and haunted,” per contemporary accounts).
• Much of the French high command is riven by personal animosities; both Gallieni and Joffre, though initially underestimated, prove unflappable at the crucial moment.
• Joffre’s Decisiveness: Sacks officers tainted by failure; brings in new energetic blood.
• “His unbelievable calm is about to transfer him from, quote, abattoir superintendent to Allied savior.” (Dominic quoting Max Hastings, 12:23)

4. German Overextension & Allied Stroke of Luck (13:16–19:32)

• The German advance is hampered by logistical strain (“half of their lorries have broken down... horses dropping dead with exhaustion... men carrying heavy packs with ill-fitting boots”).
• An intercepted, blood-soaked backpack provides the Allies with detailed plans of the German First Army—a critical intelligence coup.
• “It shows... Kluck is turning away from the French capital... exposing himself to an Allied counterattack.” (Dominic, 19:23)
• The Eiffel Tower is also employed for intercepting German signals. (Tom, 19:32)

5. The Eve and Genesis of the Marne Counterattack (21:01–24:54)

• On September 4, Joffre issues General Order No. 6, “It’s now or never. It’s victory or death, gentlemen. We shall fight on the Marne.”
• Enlists British forces for pivotal wedge between German armies—out of necessity more than “fighting spirit.”
• Emotional scene as Joffre pleads, “On your decision now rests the fate of Europe... The honour of England is at stake,” prompting Sir John French to tearfully consent. (Dominic/Tom, 23:19–24:54)
• Quote: “Damn it, I can't explain. Tell him that all that men can do, our fellows will do.” (Sir John French, 24:42)

6. The Battle is Joined: French Spirit & British Cohesion (25:49–32:23)

• Dawn, Sept 6: An unprecedented artillery barrage signals the Allied advance.
• “Thousands and thousands of guns. And I guess this is... a noise like has never been heard before. It’s the greatest man made storm in history.” (Tom, 25:49)
• The Allies, though battered, have kept discipline in retreat, unlike the German assumption of their total breakdown.

7. The Taxis of the Marne: Legend and Reality

(32:23–39:12)

• In a famous episode, Parisian taxis are requisitioned to move troops to the front: an iconic scene of national unity.
• The legend is later amplified for patriotic morale, especially post-1940s, but in reality, only 4,000 of a million men are transported—symbolically potent, militarily negligible.
• “The idea that it's this sort of hurrah, hurrah... is not really right. The drivers spent the entire time complaining... are we going to be paid for this? Of course they kept the meters running.” (Dominic, 38:53)
• The government compensates the drivers—“better than being shot,” quips Tom (39:08).

8. Epic Scale, Myth, and the Stalemate to Come (39:28–44:00)

• The Marne’s scale is huge; the battlefront stretches 150 miles.
• Patriotic mythmakers liken the victory to "the miracle of Joan of Arc," setting the narrative for generations.
• The real military challenge begins: exhausted armies, supply strains, and the psychological turning point for both sides.

9. German Panic and the ‘Stab-in-the-Back’ Legend in Embryo (44:00–54:14)

• Breakdown of German command: poor communications, panic, and emotional collapse among generals (notably von Bulow, bursting into tears).
• Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hensch’s critical intervention: permits German retreat, shocking many front-line officers who believed victory was still possible (48:16–48:52).
• The myth that “We should have won; we've been cheated” takes root, foreshadowing the toxic political narratives of post-war Germany.
• “Here, a month into the war... you have in embryo the origin of a very poisonous political meme... the idea we've been betrayed, we've been cheated.” (Dominic, 53:54)

10. Aftermath: The Road to Trench Warfare & the Aisne (54:14–61:53)

• Helmuth von Moltke is sacked for his breakdown and replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, who “always thought it was going to be a long war” (56:57).
• Germans establish defensive positions above the Aisne; Allies pursue but cannot break through.
• The stalemate hardens: armies dig in (“The Germans actually have better trenching tools... been practicing digging trenches for the last 10 years.” Dominic, 59:55), foreshadowing years of static warfare.
• The hosts highlight the psychological toll and drudgery, quoting a German soldier:
  “We all know we're on our way into the jaws of hell. We aren't ourselves, we're hardly human any longer. At most, we're well drilled. Automatons. God, if only we could become human again.” (Dominic reads, 61:53)

11. Race to the Sea and Next Episode Tease

(63:34–66:28)

• The stalemate spurs both sides into a northward “Race to the Sea,” seeking an elusive breakthrough, with legendary names like Ypres soon to enter the war’s grim lexicon.
• Tease for the next episode: the struggle for Ypres and the infamous “Kindermord” (Massacre of the Innocents).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the High Stakes
  “If the Germans win and if they take Paris, the story of the First World War and indeed of the 20th century... is completely different.”
  — Dominic Sandbrook (05:42)

• Kitchener’s Theatrics
  “Kitchener is a walking recruitment poster... None of this talk about withdrawal.”
  — Dominic Sandbrook (07:27)

• On French Commanders
  “His unbelievable calm is about to transfer him from, quote, abattoir superintendent to Allied savior.”
  — Max Hastings, quoted by Dominic (12:23)

• British Attitude
  “They’re doing a lot of fighting, but not too much. You know, they're also strolling around kind of inspecting pheasants and whatever and underwear.”
  — Dominic Sandbrook (41:44)

• Foch’s Legendary Dispatch
  “Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j’attaque.”
  (My center is giving way, my right is retreating. Situation excellent. I’m going to attack.)
  — General Foch (42:50)

• French Soldier’s Euphoria
  "The news, as it passed from mouth to mouth, shook us with joy. Victory. Victory, when we were so far from expecting it."
  — Paul Lantier (48:16)

• On the Taxi Legend
  “The idea that it’s this sort of hurrah, hurrah, very Hollywood kind of rousing music... not really right. The drivers... kept saying, are we going to be paid for this? Of course they kept the meters running.”
  — Dominic Sandbrook (38:53)

• German Psychological Collapse
  “The appalling difficulties of our present situation hang before my eyes like a dark curtain through which I can see nothing. The whole world is in league against us.”
  — Moltke’s letter (54:14)

• Enduring Futility
  “We all know we’re on our way into the jaws of hell. We aren’t ourselves, we’re hardly human any longer.”
  — German soldier Kresten Anderson (61:53)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Setting the Stage: Allied Peril – 04:05
• Kitchener arrives in Paris – 06:19
• Rivalries in French High Command – 09:12
• Joffre reorganizes and sees German overstretch – 13:16
• French capture German plans – 19:32
• Paris prepares for a stand; Joffre’s grand order – 21:01
• Joffre’s emotional plea to Sir John French – 23:19–24:54
• Battle of the Marne begins – 25:49
• The Taxis of the Marne – 32:23–39:12
• Legend versus reality of the taxi story – 38:53
• Turning tide: German command collapse – 44:00–54:14
• Moltke’s dismissal and Falkenhayn’s plans – 54:14–56:57
• Birth of trench warfare on the Aisne – 59:55
• Quote: ‘Jaws of hell’ diary entry – 61:53
• Race to the Sea and lead-up to Ypres – 63:34–66:28

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Tone and Style

Wry, lively, and deeply informed, Tom and Dominic balance the gravity of world-shaping events with British humor, tangential asides (including a running joke about British generals and moustaches), and relatable analogies—maintaining their trademark blend of drama and accessible erudition.

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For Next Time

Stay tuned as the hosts turn to the legendary slaughter at Ypres, the “Race to the Sea,” and dark myths that echo into the Nazi era—with exclusive content available for members of The Rest Is History Club.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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[Tom Holland]

General Joffre was now developing his plan. We hung on his every word. We saw as he evoked it, the immense battlefield over which the core, drawn by the magnet of his will, were moving like pieces of intricate machinery until they clicked into their appointed places. We saw trains in long processions, laboring under the weight of their human freight, great piles of shells mounting up by the sides of the ready and silent guns. And all this was taking place behind a veil so thin and tenuous that none could perceive it, but through which no German appeared able to see. Yet Joffre seemed to be pointing the Germans out to us, blundering blindly on, hastening to their fate, their huge, massive dusty columns rushing towards the precipice over which they would soon be rolling As a prophet, he was heard with absolute faith. We were listening to the story of the victory of the man, and we absolutely believed. Reminiscences there of a crucial exchange on 5 September 1914 from Edward Spears, who was a British liaison officer with the French army, and I suppose specifically with General Joffre, the commander of the French army. And this is a decisive moment in the history of the First World War and therefore of the entire 20th century, because it is when Joseph Joffre is outlining his plan to save Paris, to save France and to save the entire Allied war project in the face of what many of the Allies had come to fear was an irresistible German onslaught.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it's an incredible scene, Tom, and actually we'll come back to it a bit later this, this exchange when Joffre outlines his plan. So we're into the third episode of this epic series and maybe we should remind ourselves and our listeners where we've got to and the terrible danger in which the Allies now find themselves. So the war has been going, depending when you date it from, for exactly a month. I know you use the Austrian dating time, but let's keep you on your toes. And on the Western Front, the Germans have swept through Belgium and they've swept through northern France, they've taken Brussels, they've absolutely obliterated the French in the Battle of the Frontiers. They've driven the British back at Mons and at le Cateau on 30 August, with the Germans closing in on Paris and the city preparing for a siege. A million refugees on the move. The French had announced that the government was going to abandon Paris for Bordeaux the next day. We talked about this at the end of the last episode. Sir John French, the British commander, telegraphs London asking for permission to abandon Paris and to fall back west of the River Seine. And what follows is one of the great turnarounds, one of the great comebacks in modern history. So it's gone down in legend, I suppose, as the miracle on the Marne. And the numbers alone are mind boggling. We've done a lot of battles on our show, you know, the Battle of Canai or the Battle of Agincourt or whatever, but the Marne, you know, it defies the imagination. You're talking about a million Germans, a million Frenchmen, a slightly smaller, I have to say, contingent of Britain, so about 125,000, but still very important.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, we want that put on the record.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Transformational, I think, Thomas, it's quality, not quantity. Exactly. And the future of Europe is at stake. Right. Because if the Germans win and if they take Paris, the story of the First World War and indeed of the 20th century, not just in. In Europe but around the world, is completely different.

[Tom Holland]

Absolutely. Because, of course, there is a sense in which this is a dress rehearsal. What will happen in 1940. And that perhaps is the measure of the miracle of the Marne. Imagine the Blitzkrieg, the British withdrawing to Dunkirk, the French government fleeing to Bordeaux, and then it is stopped.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

That is the. The scale of what happens here.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is exactly. So actually, you mentioned that it's quality, not quantity, that matters. So why don't we start with the British? Yeah. Clearly the most important players in this story with their minuscule numbers. So Sir John French had sent that telegram to London to Herbert Henry Asquith's Cabinet, and they gathered to discuss it at midnight on the 31st of August. They were really.

[Tom Holland]

So Asquith, he's not out playing bridge.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Or he's probably played bridge earlier in.

[Tom Holland]

The evening, writing letters, love letters or anything.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I like to think he's done that early in the evening. He's probably had a few. A few drinks, a few sharpeners before the meeting. Anyway, they're really shocked to get this message. And now they could have agreed with Sir John French. The Cabinet had already talked kind of hypothetically about how they could withdraw the British Expeditionary Force, the bef, via the Channel ports. Instead, at this meeting, they say, no, we will stand by the French. We'll basically double down on our strategy and we're actually going to send the Secretary of State for War, who we've talked about a little bit earlier on, Field Marshal Kitchener, to steady Sir John French's nerve.

[Tom Holland]

The most British military moustache of all time.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. Your country needs you, you know. Kitchener is a. Is a walking poster, a walking recruitment poster. So Kitchener left overnight. He reached Paris the next day. He went to the British Embassy and basically summoned Sir John French to meet him. And he says to Sir John French, none of this talk about withdrawal. You will stay in the line and you will work with your French comrades.

[Tom Holland]

And French hates him, doesn't he? French hates Kitchener and vice versa.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He hates various groups of people. Kitchener is one of them and the French are another.

[Tom Holland]

And he' very resentful this time because Kitchener is wearing his. His uniform of, Of a field marshal.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

And French feels that this is poor form for reasons I'm not. I don't entirely understand.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's poor form, I think, because Kitchener is there in a civilian capacity.

[Tom Holland]

Yes, because he's the Secretary of State for Defense.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So he's wearing his uniform performatively in order to intimidate Sir John French. And Sir John French knows exactly what he's doing and is. He's always enraged, isn't he? Sir John French, he's very florid. About to explode.

[Tom Holland]

Well, he's got this tight cavalryman's kind of stock around his neck, hasn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. So he's constantly being str.

[Tom Holland]

Folds of purple flesh quivering with rage.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Do you know what? And later in this series we have some more excellent generals on the Eastern Front with enormous moustaches and one of them's got emphysema and another one has got asthma. So basically assume at any point that none of the generals can breathe. Right? So that's what's happened to the British. Now, what about the French? The French government had basically appointed a veteran general called Joseph Gagliani as the military governor of Paris. So Gallieni, like every single commander in this story, that would be ill. Yeah, really ill. And he just seems like the wrong person. So he's 66 years old, his wife has just died and he's severely ill with prostate cancer. Lloyd George, the British Chancellor, met him around this time and said he looked, quote, sallow, shrunken and haunted. Death seemed to be chasing the particles of life out of his veins.

[Tom Holland]

That's not what you want, a man charged with the defence of Paris, but.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You know, he does, he's. He's amazing. So he absolutely throws himself into this. He says, this is going to be my last mission for my country.

[Tom Holland]

Well, Dominic, he had fought at Sudan, hadn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He'd.

[Tom Holland]

And he'd been a German prisoner of war, so he, he kind of knows what the stakes are in a visceral manner.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This is personal for him, right? And he says, let's turn Paris into an armed camp. We will mobilize every last resource. We will fight to the last man. And he issues this brilliantly terse proclamation to the people of Paris which reads as follows. Residents of Paris, I have received the mandate to defend Paris against the invader. This mandate I shall carry out to the end.

[Tom Holland]

So it's not exactly Danton.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, but I like that. I think the very conciseness of it is actually quite reassuring. This is what we're going to do. I'm going to do it. End of story. Now, the slight misfortune is that like all commanders in the First World War, he and Joff have a very tense relationship.

[Tom Holland]

Are there any generals who like each other.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The great bromance that we'll be covering in a future episode. Very. You know, I think there's a good. There's a scope. I'd like to see a detective series.

[Tom Holland]

Solving crimes in East Prussia.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, Hindi.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What are you doing? There's been a murder in a. In a country house in Allenstein in East Prussia. Well, actually.

[Tom Holland]

But is it a murder? Is it a slapstick comedy?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's like Bergerac, I think. I think it's like Bergerac or something like that.

[Tom Holland]

I was thinking Dumb and Dumber.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, I'm doing counterintuitive casting. You see, I'm thinking a cozy Sunday night. The BBC has spent a lot of money bringing in Hollywood stars. Come on, we've got to get back to the story. Tom, this is mad.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, okay.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All right. Galiani and Joffre. Before the war, Galliani had been offered the job. Joff's job, supreme commander of the French army. And because of his health, he turned it down. And it went to Joff, who'd once been one of his officers. Gallieni. Even though Joffre had been kind of one of his proteges, he now has a very low opinion of Joffre. He saw him out walking or something in the Bois de Boulogne, and he wrote in his diary how fat and heavy Joffre is. He will hardly last out his three years. I mean, there's rich coming from him.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Meanwhile, Joff knows this, and he refuses to have Galliani at his headquarters. He says to his aides, I can't stand him. He's always wound me up.

[Tom Holland]

I suppose Galliani could say in reply that Joffre so far has had a.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Shocker of a war.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, he's basically wiped out half the French army, he has, for nothing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Joffre's had a very poor start to the war. He's basically killed all his men with this mad plan. Max Hastings points out, quite rightly, he says, that if Joffre basically died of a heart attack on the 1st of September, which is what Galliani expects at any moment, then history would remember him only as a bungler and a butcher. However, Joffre has one big thing in his favor. He never, ever loses his cool because he's so. So large. And he's always eating these enormous lunches. He's very relaxed. So everybody else is completely panicking. And he's actually just been sitting in silence, thinking. And to quote Max Hastings, as An excellent line. His unbelievable calm is about to transfer him from, quote, abattoir superintendent to Allied savior.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, amazing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So, so first of all, he says, right, I'm going to sack all my officers. Like it's basically their fault. So among them, he sacks that guy Laurensac who we talked about last time, the man from Guadeloupe.

[Tom Holland]

So his crime is to have been right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, exactly. He's been right about everything. But Schroff says basically, you lot are all tainted by failure. You've got to go. And actually I think that's, as it turns out, a good call. So he brings in a lot of new blood who are basically very energetic and desperate to prove themselves. But also, Joffre sees something that most people have completely missed. Most people at this point assume the Germans are going to win. The Germans themselves now think they're going to win. So one of their Chief strategists on 25 August, a guy called Colonel Gerhard Tappen tells his colleagues, he says, in six weeks we shall finish the job.

[Tom Holland]

And that was the target, wasn't it, of the Schiefenpain, that it had to be done within six weeks.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, we will finish the French off and then we'll use the trains to get all our troops back to East Prussia, to Galicia, whatever, to deal with the Russians. But Joffre, as he looks at these maps, he can see that the German offensive is now very, very stretched. So they have come an incredibly long way in a very short time. In three weeks, they've traveled 200 miles and they've thrust deep into France. But that's a problem for them. Half of their lorries have broken down. They're using thousands and thousands of horses to transport their supplies, or they're carrying their supplies, you know, physically carrying them themselves. Their horses are dropping dead with exhaustion. Their men, who are not rested and rotated at all, there's no system for doing that, are carrying massively heavy packs. They've all got, I'm very familiar with this issue. They've got new ill fitting footwear that means they've got horrendous blisters. It's very hot. And so they have begun to A, to slow down and B, to become very ragged and disorganized. So the further they go, the more mistakes they make. They get lost, they get jumbled up. They're basically making map reading errors.

[Tom Holland]

That's not very German, is it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, this is the thing. They're behaving in a very un German way. You could argue this was the Fundamental weakness of the whole Schlieffen plan. That looks great on paper, but in reality, your lorries are gonna break down, your men are gonna get blisters, and the Schieffen plan made no allowance for basically, you know, natural human failings.

[Tom Holland]

So, I mean, this is a key element of war, isn't it, Dominic? You mustn't overextend your supply lines. And you have spotted this, whereas Schlieffen hadn't.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You and I and Joffre are clearly cut from the similar. We're unflappable in that way, but we're not histrionic like a German general having our lunch. Right, Exactly. A rest is history. Scheduling meeting, I think, is the technical term for a lunch. Right now, the Germans are about to make a massive, massive misjudgment. So Moltke's original plan was for them to go over the top of Paris and to encircle it, to go all the way around it and circle it from the west. But in the last days of August, the top German field commander, who's a man called Karl von Bulow, he decides, let's change the plan. We probably don't even need to bother encircling Paris. And he says to the topmost bit of the army, so the. The right wing of the German army, which is under Alexander von Kluck, he says, don't bother going around Paris, turn inwards before you get to Paris, kind of turn down towards the flank of the retreating British and French.

[Tom Holland]

Can I ask a question? Is this because genuinely, he thinks they don't need to bother enveloping Paris, or is it because they're all so tired and knackered that they think, oh, we'll just cut a corner?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think it may be a tiny element of both. They are very tired by this point. They are exhausted and they are very worried about their supply lines. But as well, they think, they assume the British and French, because they've been retreating so far, are beaten and they can just turn, sort of envelop them, squeeze them against their borders, and we're talking about enormous armies and enormous distances and crush them between them.

[Tom Holland]

The Battle of Cannae.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. Instead of doing the whole plan, they will basically use eastern France as their battlefield and they will envelop the Allied armies and crush them.

[Tom Holland]

So they crush the armies? They crush the armies and then Paris surrenders. That's the plan.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And then the French will have no one left and they'll have to surrender. They won't even need to take Paris. I have to Say I am massively, massively simplifying this, because to emphasize we are not, the rest is military history. But the key point is that the German commanders have abandoned their original blueprint. They think the British and French armies are so broken they just need to pursue and annihilate them. So now they are not following a sort of plan, they are basically making it up as they go along. And the key thing about this is that they are massively underestimating the Allies.

[Tom Holland]

And the reason for that, presumably is the sheer number of people that you were talking about. We're talking about hundreds of thousands, millions of people. So even if you wipe out, you inflict what seems countless numbers of casualties, you aren't necessarily breaking the capacity of an industrial nation to continue the fight. I mean, is that essentially the misjudgment?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think exactly. I think especially a country like France, which is very highly militarized, which has basically now gone to honor to a total war footing, is mobilizing all its manpower. There are a lot of Frenchmen left and France is a very serious country. And you know, you can win these enormous battles in the battle of the frontiers, but there's still a long way to go. And I think the Germans don't realize.

[Tom Holland]

That actually, because I guess the only war fought previously in history that would have taught that lesson would have been the American Civil War.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

War. Yes, I guess so, maybe. Because the Franco Prussian War is done and dusted pretty quickly. Yeah, you know, they, they, they encircle and capture the, they capture the Emperor Napoleon iii and then it's pretty much done. Whereas with this, you know, the, the canvas is so much.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Bigger and the numbers are so much bigger, I guess the American.

[Tom Holland]

But also the industrial capacity is, is so great and the supplies and everything.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, Railways, all of that stuff. Factories. Yeah, exactly.

[Tom Holland]

And this is something that nobody really understands I guess, at this point.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And it's also testament actually to the French. And the British have retreated 200 miles, but they have actually kept their discipline. They haven't fallen apart in a complete chaotic sort of shambles. They are very well trained armies by and large and very cohesive. So they've actually managed to pull it off, as we will see now. Then there's a, a big stroke of luck. On the 1st of September, one of the staff officers of the French 5th army is handed a gift from the front. And it is a blood drenched backpack taken from the body of a German cavalry officer. And he opens it and inside is some food and some papers and clothes. But above all there is a map, and the map is marked. And the map shows the deployment of every corps in Alexander von Kluck's first army, with pencil markings even showing where they're going to be sleeping. And it shows, without doubt, that this bloke, Kluck is turning away from the French capital. He's going inwards. And he's actually, without realising it, he's exposing himself to an Allied counterattack and isn't there.

[Tom Holland]

Also, the French are getting information from the Eiffel Tower, which kind of serves as an eavesdropping device.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, that's a good fact. I didn't know that.

[Tom Holland]

To intercept German signals, I gather.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So the biz. So the Eiffel Tower is an important military installation. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

It's not completely useless.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No. So let's move forward three days to Friday the 4th of September. The allies have fallen back to the Valley of the Marne. So you have a million French and British soldiers stretched across this front. And to get this into people's minds, the front is 150 miles long. It goes from the suburbs of Paris all the way east to the great eastern fortress of Verdun. And advancing towards them are a million Germans, just under a million, really. They're very confident, the Germans. They think they're going to win, but they are sore and hungry and ragged and very tired. We did the Battle of Mons. In the last episode, we quoted a bloke called Walter Blohm and he describes his own troops. He says, we looked unshaved, unwashed, like prehistoric savages, covered with dust and spattered with blood, blackened with powder smoke and torn threadbare by thorns and barbed wire. So although there is this image of the Germans as sort of invincible and invisible, indomitable and whatnot, they are at the absolute limit of their endurance. They're wearing this. We'll see this again and again in this story. Actually, they're wearing the same clothes, by and large, they set out in, and they haven't washed for weeks. So they really are, you know, in a terrible state.

[Tom Holland]

So a pungent, pungent smell descending on Paris.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's exactly so. That very day, actually, the 4th of September, General von Kluck sent a signal to German Supreme Command and he said, we are at the limit. My men cannot really go on. They are exhausted and we need reinforcements. And at his headquarters, as he's polishing off his long lunch, General Joff thinks to himself, this is the moment. And that evening, the 4th of September, he issues general order number six. And he says now that the German First army has turned inwards to finish us off. We'll concentrate all our forces against this army will strike when they're least expecting it. We will thrust a wedge between the German first and second armies, so that's on their sort of western flank, and we will drive them from our sacred soil. Great stuff. But he actually, for this to work, the wedge that he wants to drive between the two German armies is going to be the British Expeditionary Force. Our own dear countrymen, is that because.

[Tom Holland]

They'Re position that, that where they happen to have ended up? I mean, it's not a kind of our fighting spirit.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, no, he's not saying the only people who can do this are the British. He's actually looking at his map and saying, well, the British are the people in the right place, so they're gonna have to do it.

[Tom Holland]

I just wondered if perhaps there was a kind of political dimension to it as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's just that they're in.

[Tom Holland]

The right place to do the right job, maybe.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, I know this. The trouble during the First World War is there are a load of people there who literally know, like the details of everybody's backpack. And so they're almost certainly going to be flooding the rest of the forensic account. Yeah. So that bloke who wrote like a 40,000 word essay about the bows that people used, Ashen corps or something. Remember that when you did dash and do. Yes, I did. Anyway, I don't want to. I don't want to open old wounds, Tom. So the 5th of September, we began with this. This is the scene we began with, is the crucial moments, and I have to say is an absolutely, unbelievably melodramatic scene. Geoffreu, as we said before, loves a drive. He puts on his massive cape and he drives 100 miles to this chateau.

[Tom Holland]

He doesn't drive, Dominic.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, of course he doesn't.

[Tom Holland]

Formula one winning.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, that's right. He is driven, I should say, to the chateau of Vaux le Penil. So that's where Sir John French is staying. And he begins by telling Sir John, he says, on your decision now rests the fate of Europe. And then he sets out his plan as you described. The sweep of the battlefield, all these intricate bits of machinery, the Germans blundering on towards the precipice, all this. And then he turns to Sir John French and his voice is throbbing with passion. He barely ever speaks. So this is a really remarkable moment. And he says, the lives of All French people, the soil of France, the future of Europe, depends on you joining this battle. I cannot believe the British army will refuse to do its share in this supreme crisis. Then he looks at Sir John in the eyes and he says, monsieur le Marechale, c' est la France qui vous s', pli, Field Marshal, or whatever, It's France who is begging you. The honour of England is at stake. And he's been thumping the table while he's doing that. And then there's this long silence and everybody looks at Sir John, French, with great red face, bright redder than ever, and there are tears trickling down his cheeks. And he tries to say something in French but he can't. He stumbles on his words. And eventually he just turns to one of his officers and he says, damn it, I can't explain. Tell him that all that men can do, our fellows will do. And the officer says in French to Joffre, the Field Marshal says, yes.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Oui.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So Joffre drives back to his headquarters where his junior officers are waiting. Now, he knows that some of them are very skeptical about this. They worry that their men have been retreating for so long they're too tired or they're too demoralized. But Joffre gathers them and he says, it's now or never. It's victory or death, gentlemen. We shall fight on the Marne. And that night, he gives the final order to his million men. Troops who can no longer advance must keep the ground that has been worn at any cost. They must die where they stand, rather than give way. Now, that same day in Paris, his old boss, General Gaglieni, dying, has been talking to his subordinates. And one of these guys says to Galieni, well, what happens if it goes battling? What happens if we're overwhelmed? Where should be the point that we retreat to? And Galieni says to him, nowhere. We fight to the death. Great stuff.

[Tom Holland]

So, Dominic, this is. I mean, this is thrilling, isn't it? Because dawn on the 6th of September, the artillery barrage begins. Thousands and thousands of guns. And I guess this is, I mean, a noise like it has never been heard before. It's the greatest man made storm in history. And then, for fans of French military bugles, the exciting moment comes when they sound. Tens of thousands of Frenchmen begin to pour forward. The French elain combined with French industrial might and the Battle of the Marne begins. And the excitement is so intense that I can't really cope with it. I doubt you can cope. I can see seeing you on the. On the video you can't possibly cope with it. So we are going to take a break, have a breather and we will be back in a few minutes. This episode is brought to you by surfshark. Now, had Mary Queen of Scots been just a little bit more careful with her correspondence, then she might well have avoided becoming a cautionary tale of treason. So she slipped her ciphered letters into beer barrels. Methods today have changed, but the risk of interception, of course, always remains. Your information is more vulnerable than ever, and perhaps especially when it's online trackers and advertisers and apps collecting your data all the time. And if you're using public wi fi, then your activity can be monitored by anyone who is sharing the network that you are on. And this is where Surfshark comes in. It's a VPN that encrypts your Internet connection, thereby keeps your personal data secure. So you can also change your digital location, giving you access to your favorite sites and streaming services wherever you are. So protect your data. Browse securely from anywhere. No cipher, no courier, certainly no beer barrel required. Go to surfshark.com trih or you can use the code trih at the checkout to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN plus a 30 day money back guarantee.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right now at the Home Depot, you'll find storage solutions made to fit your needs. Grab an HDX Tuff tote to protect your tools, or keep your sports equipment contained with reinforced snap fit lids. Or stack up and make better use of your space with bins and totes. Built to last. Whatever your story, we've got the gear to keep it organized and protected at the Home Depot. How doers get more done. Hi everybody, it is Dominic here. Now I have been working on something incredibly exciting. A special treat for the members of the Rest Is History Club. Every Friday for the next few weeks, I will be joined by our regular Rest is History producer, Tabby Syrett. And we will be discussing a different great book from history, from J.R.R. tolkien's fantasy classic the Hobbit to Bram Stoker's horror horror novel Dracula, to Margaret Atwood's dystopian fable, the Handmaid's Tale. And we will be exploring the lives of authors from Albert Camus to Truman Capote. And we'll be looking at the history behind their great books, the worlds they inhabited, the social and cultural context and the secrets that their books hold. So if you want to hear Tabby and me delving into the these great books, then all you have to do is to go to thereestishory.com to join the rest Is History Club and you will get our thrilling books episodes every Friday. You'll get the regular bonus episodes of the Rest Is History Club that everybody loves so much. You'll get all the other amazing benefits. You'll get early access to episodes. You'll get ad free listening. Unbelievable benefits. So that is thereestishistory.com this thrilling new content will be starting on Friday the 5th of September. Bye bye. Hello.

[Tom Holland]

Welcome back to the Rest Is History. Dominic, The Battle of the Marne has begun. Just how exciting is it, Tom?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's unbelievably exciting. So where are we? We're in Paris. We're on the night of the 7th of September, 1914. So the battle of the Marne has now been raging for two days. But at his headquarters, General Gagliani, he's got a dilemma on the front. You know, it's all kicked off and Joffre needs every man that he can get and they have commandeered every train and every truck in the city to get men to the front. However, the railway network is so clogged with trains of wounded, with supply trains, with refugees and whatnot, that basically the whole system is close to breaking down. The Army's 7th Division have been on trains for 24 hours. They are now stuck in a place called Pontin, which is a suburb of northern Paris. Now, Galiani wants to get these men to the front. You know, the front, Tom, you may be wondering how far the front is.

[Tom Holland]

I'm wondering that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's miles away. It's some miles, I'll put it that way, some distance. So they can't walk. Anyway, how are they going to get there? There's talk of using army lorries, but there's basically none left. And then somebody at Galliani's headquarters, maybe Galieni himself, says, yeah, I know this sounds mad, but could they not take taxes to the front? Now, Paris normally has 10,000 taxis and only 3,000 of them are operating, basically because so many drivers have gone to join the army. But 3,000 taxes is not nothing. And so Galliani says, great, let's do it. So one of his officers rings the central police station and says, I want all taxes, every single tax in the city sent to the Esplanade des Invalides. So this big, you know, the Invalides, the big military complex where Napoleon is buried in every street in Paris, the police go out and they flag down these taxes. They basically kick the passengers out and they say to the drivers, go to the military College at Les Invalides. Now, most of these taxes are Renault taxes, so I have to say I'm not a massive fan of a Renault car, but there you go. They've got about five, room for about five people each, and they can go no faster than 25 miles an hour. But by the standards of the day, that's not bad.

[Tom Holland]

It's quicker than walking, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's a lot quicker than walking, considering.

[Tom Holland]

How many miles they've got to go.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, exactly. And we don't want to really, you know, we don't want to pin down exactly how many miles because we don't want to give everything away.

[Tom Holland]

It's quite a distance.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think that's a detail for our subscribers. No, but it is a distance.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, we're just.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. So about 10 o', clock, the first convoy of taxis heads out, about 250 cars. They're led by this officer called Lieutenant Lefasse, and only he knows where they're going because it's a secret. And he says to the drivers, right, you stay in single file, you turn your headlights off. You can use your sort of real, your kind of tail lights, but not your headlights. The drivers, I have to say, are very, very unhappy about this. They're unhappy about losing their fares. They're also unhappy about driving with their lights off, because they say, well, we're just going to drive into each other. Which, indeed, a lot of them do. Anyway, after an awful lot of kind of getting lost and faffing around, by 4 o' clock the next morning, these empty taxis reach a place called Damattin, which is northeast of Paris. There's nothing there, there's nobody there to meet them, so the drivers just get out and lounge around in the sunshine because it's a sunny day and a nice detail. Past them go loads of blokes on bicycles heading to the front. And the drivers all shout, vive les cyclistes. Vive les cyclistes. Whatever. That must have been inspiring to see. Taxi driver shouting, that's at you. As he's lying there with, like, a bottle of wine on the. On the verge of the road, eating his cheese. Anyway, they're eventually redirected to a railway siding near a village called La Barriere. And here they find their men, their passengers, and these are the men of the 103rd and 104th Infantry Brigades and the soldiers. The men cannot believe it when the taxis turn up, because in 1914 you only took a taxi if you were rich. Taxis are a luxury, and what is more of course, most of these men have never been in a car of any kind, so it's very exciting. They get into these cars. The convoy is swollen to about 400 vehicles. This is the first installment of the taxis and there's other vehicles too. So they've managed to rope in some buses, they've got some limousines and they've even got a couple of racing cars. I mean, imagine going to the front of the racing car.

[Tom Holland]

I love the contribution of. Of the Grand Prix to the war effort. So there's the guy who's driving Joffre around and now they're driving soldiers up to the front.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This magnificent reflection on French sport and cyclists.

[Tom Holland]

Right, yeah, them as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Vive Lesly. Great stuff. So the soldiers have been on the road, you know, on the train for ages, so they're knackered. Most of them try to sleep in the cars. It's very difficult, actually, because it's an incredibly unrelaxing journey. The cars, because they've got the headlights off, they keep bumping into each other, they keep getting flat tires, they keep getting lost and breaking down. Anyway, you asked how long it was, Tom, and actually I'm going to give you the detail now. I'm not going to make you join the rest is history club. It's 30 miles, I read in my notes, 30 miles. They've gone 30 miles. So as dawn is breaking on the 8th of September, they reach this village called Nontoi, which you'll be pleased to hear because I know you're a big fan of this organization, is near Disneyland Paris today, but presumably not then they should have a ride. It'd be a brilliant ride. The Taxes of the man ride, wouldn't it? First World War theme park. Actually, they have that theme park, Piju Fu, you know, that place where they. You can go and do. There's like Verdun and stuff.

[Tom Holland]

Yes. And gladiators and things.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it's run by. It's run by like monarchists, French monarchists or something.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, Dominic, if only you knew someone at Disney and you could get them to do a Miracle of the man ride.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Bob, if you're listening, you know, you know what to do, where to call us. Exactly. Right. Anyway, so basically they've reached Disneyland. They decant the soldiers and now the soldiers can take their place on the front line to defend their homeland. And the reason we've spent so much time on this story is that this, in France becomes probably the great legend of the First World War, a symbol of patriotic solidarity, a sign of the determination of the French people to drive the invaders from their sacred homeland, all of this kind of stuff. And the story kind of spread in the years after the war, but it really was turbocharged in the 1950s. There's a writer called Jean Dutor who wrote a book called the Taxis of the Marne. And he said, and I quote, that this was the single greatest event of the 20th century, which is a big claim.

[Tom Holland]

Greater than the Angels of Mons, surely.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Not even greater, I think, than the angels of Mons, Tom. And I think it's interesting because he wrote that in 1956, and the context of that was that France had just been kicked out of Vietnam. They'd lost at Dien Bien Phu. Things had just kicked off in Algeria. They're obviously still very bruised after the Second World War and the humiliation in 1940, and people were desperate for kind of patriotic consolation. So the story of the taxes of the marm became incredibly important to them. And if you go to the army museum at Les Invalides, I'm sure Theo is there all the time. Time. They have a very handsome old Renault taxi with. I almost said that in a French way. That was weird.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, you did, yeah. Getting more of a phone as you go on.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Inspector Cluso joins us now. And the rest is History. It's got a red body and yellow wheels. And its registration. Do you want to know its registration? Of course you do. It's 2862 G7.

[Tom Holland]

Is that significant?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, it's just an interesting fact.

[Tom Holland]

You just knew that. I think that's the single most boring fact we've ever had on. The Rest is History.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, no, I'll tell you the worst fact. The fact that you wanted to cut out general custody. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Now this is even more boring than that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Tom Holland]

But the whole story is incredible. Right. And I'm wondering if, as with the Angels of Mons, whether there have been skeptics and people who've doubted its veracity and whether it actually mattered at all.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, well, hold on. Nobody doubts its veracity. So this is the difference to the angels and moles. It definitely happened. There's no question about that. However, did it make any difference at all? None whatsoever to the story. It's completely inconsequential. So basically, the taxes transported about 4,000 men out of a million. And the idea that it's this sort of hurrah, hurrah, Very Hollywood kind of rousing music. Everybody's shaking hands and saying vive la France is not really right. The drivers spent the entire Time complaining. They basically kept saying, are we going to be paid for this? I'm not doing this for free.

[Tom Holland]

So are the meters on?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They kept the meters running. Of course they kept the meters running. And the French government eventually agreed that they would pay them a quarter of the amount on the meter. They were paid 130 francs, which is the equivalent of a fortnight's wages, which is not bad.

[Tom Holland]

And it's better than being shot, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is better.

[Tom Holland]

Getting horrible blisters.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And the thing about the First World War is everybody thinks of it as it's all about. It's all very boring and it's about munitions and barbed wire and trenches. In reality, the First World War is an absolute kind of. It's fertile territory for myths, for legends, for patriotic inventions, all of this stuff.

[Tom Holland]

This is what we'll be exploring in our bonus on the Angels of Mons.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The supernatural stuff plays a big part in the way people think about the First World War, for example, because the age of spiritualism. Anyway, let's get back to planet Earth. What has been happening at the front you described at the end of the first half, how the storm had broken at the beginning of the 6th of September, all of these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and more than 100,000 Britons armed with 3,000 heavy guns, charging forward on this vast front line that goes from Paris all the way to Verdun in the east. And actually, the person who probably incarnates the spirit of that day is a man who's not well regarded in France these days, who is the future top collaborator, Philippe Petain, who is a great star, actually, of the Great War. Petain, at dawn on the 6th, told his men, he said, right, we're going to advance on this village, St. Bon. And his men, they're tired, they're anxious, they hesitated. Petain got off his horse, he went up to the front line, joined his infantry and he said, I will lead you personally. And he personally led them towards the front. So in other circumstances, it would be a very inspiring story and everybody in France would know about it. But unfortunately, Petain rather let himself down in 1940, so he's not as celebrated as he might be in 1914.

[Tom Holland]

Napoleonic helain.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, totally is what you want, but is it enough? You know, we've surely the lesson of the battle for the frontiers is that patriotic elan is not, you know, you have to. There's a lot of industrial might that is required alongside sort of fighting spirits.

[Tom Holland]

Well, presumably that you need. You need good A good strategy. And you need good timing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You do indeed. Now, the thing with the Battle of the Marne is it is so vast that it actually isn't really one battle, it's several battles going on simultaneously. And the interesting thing is that officers in one part of the front generally have no idea what's going on elsewhere. So in some places, the French actually do very well. So, for example, if you imagine on the west side, the French 5th army absolutely batters Carl von Bulow's German 2nd Army. At the same time, the British are advancing actually almost unchallenged into this crucial gap between the German 2nd and 1st armies. That's von Bulow and von Kluck.

[Tom Holland]

So there's a brilliant detail in. In Max Hastings book, he records Lt. Lionel Tennyson, who was not only the grandson of the poet Tennyson, but also becomes England cricket captain. And he says that while the French are furiously fighting the Germans, we passed Jimmy Rothschild's beautiful house and saw masses of pheasants running about everywhere and long to be able to stop and get some. And then another detail that this is reported by some other guy quoting Max Hastings again, seeing the road littered with weapons and equipment. Eggington. So this is the guy who sees it, was fascinated and rather shocked that one of the abandoned German vehicles proved to be laden with women's underwear.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Wow. See, I think the British have the right attitude. They're doing a lot of fighting, but not too much. You know, they're also strolling around kind of inspecting pheasants and whatever and underwear. But actually, the Allies don't have things all their own way, because in the east they do quite badly. The Germans are quite close to breaking through at Nancy and at Verdun. And in the centre, things are very, very tight. So there, Ferdinand Foch, who is commanding the 9th army of the French, is taking on the German 3rd Army. It's very dicey. It's when Foch sends Joffre one of the most famous messages in French history. Moncentre saiduation. Excellent. J'. Attac. My center is giving way, my right is retreating. Situation excellent. I'm going to attack. And that sort of, you know, the sort of combination of like you're going backwards and going forwards at the same time, is the whole battle in microcosm. Because on the morning of 8 September, the Germans launched this massive bayonet charge against Foch's right and they pushed them about eight miles back. But the Germans were so tired that after eight miles it just stopped. And most of them just sat down and went to sleep. They stopped for a second and they were so exhausted they just fell asleep. But Foch's men, who you would think would now seize the advantage, they are equally shattered. And also by now, the weather has changed, which is actually a crucial part of this story. The weather changes, it starts raining, it becomes very foggy, so the French have no idea actually where they are.

[Tom Holland]

Literally, the fog of war.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The fog of war, exactly. So really, the story of the man is not. It's the victory is not one so much on the battlefield as in the head. It's basically a test of nerve. You know, do you think you're winning or not, or you're going to give way? And the problem for the Germans is their communications are terrible. So on the western side, these two really important armies, von Kluck's first army and von Bulof's Second army, there's no direct cable link between the two until late on the 9th of September. So the two commanders have no idea where the other one is and what he's doing. And they're sort of fighting separate battles. And the supreme commander, Helmut von Moltke, formerly Spa Habitua, very depressed, thinking about reincarnation. He's 150 miles away in Luxembourg, and he has no idea really what's going on. Sort of studying, you know, wire reports and getting very anxious. And he sends West a really, really important figure who's an obscure lieutenant colonel called Richard Hench. And after the war, the American Chief of Staff said that the Allies should build a hall of fame and build a statue to Hench and give it pride of place, which seems very peculiar, but I'll explain exactly why that is. Hench is a very smart guy. He's an intelligence officer who works for the German General Staff. And Moltke has been using him as an emissary to all his generals. And by the 8th of September, so a couple of days, two or three days into the fighting, Molk has got in a massive panic, and he says, I'm going to send Hench to the front to talk to Kluck and Bulow. Hench goes to the headquarters of the German Second army, and there he finds this bloke Bulow in a massive funk. So the 2nd army is in real trouble. Budolov says, my troops are exhausted. The Allies are in danger of breaking through the gaps. Budolph himself is in a terrible state. Like all First World war generals, he's 68, he's got massive thyroid problems, and he's Got severe arteriosclerosis.

[Tom Holland]

Is there any. He doesn't have a kind of fatal illness?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't think so. I think because the nature of it is you don't become a sort of supreme commander type person until you're in your late 60s. And at that point people are quite. They've had a very unhealthy lifestyle. I think probably there's been drinking a lot of fine wines and it hasn't done them any good. Late on the 8th, while he's talking to Hench, Belof starts to get these more reports in the front, the Allies are breaking through. And he says to Hench, my arm is being reduced to cinders. We're facing total catastrophe. And Hench says to him, well, look, Molka has given me authority to say to you, if you want to retreat, it's your call. And this is the first time that anybody in the German army has really talked about retreating. So this is a kind of landmark moment. They don't make the decision straight away, but overnight the mood gets bleaker and bleaker. Three times. Bulow breaks down in floods of tears, says, you know, I can't cope with this. Like, I'm too stressed. We're going to lose, my men are all going to die, all this kind of thing. And at five o' clock in the morning, they get reports from air reconnaissance that the French are coming ever closer. And so at 9:00 clock in the morning, at 9:02 in fact, we love a forensic fact. Hensch says to, okay, fine, make the call. Retreat. So Buelov, whose nerve is basically snapped, now issues the order for his Second army to retreat. So now Hench continues his driving tour of the front, the most disastrous drive in German military history. He drives 50 miles west to the headquarters of Alexander von Kluck's first army. It's a terrible journey. The roads are clogged with terrified refugees. There are exhausted and wounded soldiers everywhere. There's loads of artillery, there are wounded. You know, there's kind of men lying in the. In the ditches, whatnot. It's a complete war zone. And at various points, his car actually comes under attack from his own side because it's so. It's so confused and every order has broken down. He arrives at 1st army headquarters. When he gets there, the 1st army officers are actually quite confident. They say, yeah, the British are coming, but we reckon we can handle the British. We've handled them before. And Hench says, no, no, no, the second army is already retreating, so you probably need to fall Back too. And the first army officers are stunned.

[Tom Holland]

They're like, what?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

We think we can win this? He says, no, no, no. Molke has told me, I've got authority to make these decisions. You know, you should, you should pull back. So by the time he goes back to Luxembourg, the decision has actually been made. And later that day, the French advanced on where the 2nd army had been, a place called Montmirail. And they're astounded when they get there because there's nothing there. Von Bulow's Second army has vanished in their wake. They've left fields strewn with rubbish, including an unbelievable quantity of empty wine bottles, which probably tells its own story. The Germans have had a final time in the back of the battle. The next day, the 10th is the same story further west. So Max Hastings quotes a gunner called Paul Lantier who had survived the slaughter at Verton in the Ardennes that we talked about last time. This bloke Lantier's unit, they wake up and they just find it's really weird. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, there's no guns and a load of French infantry march past. And the colonel of this unit marching past shouts, you know, we've won. The Germans are retreating all across the line. Nantier said afterwards, the news, as it passed from mouth to mouth, shook us with joy. Victory. Victory. When we were so far from expecting it. So the Germans have cracked, the French have won. And for the French, this becomes an absolutely legendary moment. It achieves a kind of sacred status as the, the miracle on the Marne. And the guy who actually coined that expression, unfortunately at the end of the year, was an ultra nationalist, anti Semitic writer called Maurice Bares. And he basically said, the miracle on the Marne. This element that you talked about in the Angels of Mons Bonus, the supernatural, very important to very right wing, ultra nationalist writers in France. And he said, this is. I associate the miracle in the Marne with, and I quote, the eternal French miracle, the miracle of Joan of Arc. The idea that, you know, in extremis, somehow God will intervene and he will save France from the invaders. I mean, actually, of course, the people who really deserve the credit are, A, the French soldiers and B, Galleni and Joffre, who in the crucial moment had not panicked as their successors panicked in 1940, and Joffre in particular, when he's sitting there eating his enormous lunches, he has chosen the right moment to strike back. I mean, his grasp of timing was perfect. But if you read most accounts of the Marne, actually most historians are less interested in what the French got right and more interested in what the Germans got wrong. You could blame the individual generals for changing their plan. But I think most historians would say the real problem is actually with the whole concept, the Schlieffen Plan or the Schlieffen Moltke plan. This idea of the six week timetable was so unrealistic that there's probably no way that it could have worked unless the Allies panicked and lost their nerve. That basically if the Allies kept their cool, the wheels were always going to come off the German juggernaut.

[Tom Holland]

So can I ask, is there a sense perhaps that the commitment on the German part to this plan means that they are less able to kind of think on their feet than they would otherwise have been?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's interesting question because of course when they do think on their feet, it goes wrong when they start to, when they start to change the plan. I think that the truth of the matter is that the German plan is born of a really poor strategic position, which is your sandwich between France and Russia. And so they're probably right that the, I mean, I suppose they could have just sat and done a defensive war and waited to be attacked by the Allies. But I mean, who wants to be attacked on two fronts? I think they were probably right that in an offensive war this was the only way they could win. But it's just a massive, massive gamble. I mean, if they, you know, would they, would it have worked better if they'd stuck to the original and not.

[Tom Holland]

Improvised, but the improvisations are forced on them by the fact that the plan is simply impossible to stick to?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, I get, I think to some extent, I think to some extent you're absolutely right that they have to start improvising. And I think as well, maybe there is a psychological element. To go back to your question, I think if you have been told we have to do this in six weeks and this is the only plan that will do it, when the plan starts.

[Tom Holland]

To go wrong, massive panic.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, well, this is exactly what happens. So I think the Germans are probably psychologically much more shaken by their retreat from the Battle of the Marne than the Allies were by their retreat from the Battle of the Frontiers.

[Tom Holland]

Well, the British love a retreat, don't they?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They like going backwards because you know you're going to win that way.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, well, you lose first and then you, then you retreat and then you win.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. That's the story of all British history, because all the accounts that you have, the sort of diaries and letters, German officers are talking, they say, you know, people are crying, they're devastated. They confused all of this kind of thing. I mean, here's a key thing and I think it's really, really important in the long run in German history at this point they didn't think they were losing. A lot of people in the battle of the month thought they were winning or that at least they were holding their own. They didn't feel like a beaten army when they got the orders to go backwards. So I think it's actually here, a month into the war that you have in embryo the origin of a very poisonous political meme, I suppose, which is the idea we've been betrayed, we've been cheated.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, so stab in the back.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

We've been stabbed in the back by defeatists in high places. Now at this point they're not talking in such explicit terms and they're obviously not talking about communists, Jews, all the rest they blame at the end of the First World War. But there is this sense we should have won, we deserved victory and for some reason it has been denied us.

[Tom Holland]

And Dominic, where is the Kaiser in all this? Is he hanging out with Molker?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The Kaiser's hanging around at the back. Obviously he's as baffled and as confused and as angry as anybody. Although he's not quite as devastated as von Moltke is because von Moltke, who as we've said, is sickly and depressive and basically always on the brink of a breakdown. I mean, he's really taken this whole business incredibly badly. And in fact, during the battle, during this period, he's been writing these extraordinary letters to his wife. I cannot find the words to describe the crushing burden of responsibility that's weighed on my shoulders in the last few days. The appalling difficulties of our present situation hang before my eyes like a dark curtain through which I can see nothing. The whole world is in league against us. It would seem that every country is bent on destroying Germany once and for all. They're very self pitying, but also there's a lot of guilt actually. He says, I feel sick to think of how many Germans have died. Often terror overcomes me when I think of this. And I have the feeling that I must answer for this horror. I mean, this is very sub ideal from your supreme commander.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, that's not great, is it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And when people go to his headquarters in Luxembourg, they're horrified by what they find. I mean, again and again people say, God, he's a wreck, he's a broken man. There's one general who turns up called Carl Einem and Molke Just says to him, my God, you know, how could this have happened? And Einem loses his temper with him and says, well, if you don't know, who knows? You should know better than anybody. How could you have remained in Luxembourg and allowed the reins of leadership to slip from your hands? So a few days after the Battle of the Marne, 14th of September, Moltke really starts to lose it. He's sort of pacing up and down the room in a very agitated way, whistling through his teeth. And basically, word gets back to Berlin. People say to the Kaiser, you've got to fire him. He's got to go. He's lost it completely. So on the Evening of the 14th, the Kaiser appoints a new supreme commander, a new chief of the General Staff. And he is a much chillier character. He is the Prussian War Minister, Erich von Falkenhayn.

[Tom Holland]

That's a good name. I mean, we've mentioned this, like the falcon swooping down, but exactly.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Now, he is a. He's a. From a Prussian landowning family, which means he's a Junker. But actually, unusually, he's quite young for a. For a top general, so he's only 53 and he is greatly disliked by everybody else. It will amaze people to hear he's a lonely kind of saturnine kind of.

[Tom Holland]

Man, Very death in his eyes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He almost certainly does. Cold eyes.

[Tom Holland]

Churchill thinks he's brilliant, though, doesn't he? Churchill rates him as the best of the. The best of the German generals.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think he probably is, actually. I think Falkenhayn makes a series of pretty decent calls. I think he knows what he's doing. The other generals don't like him for what they call his mocking superiority, so he thinks he's better than they are. The Kaiser likes him, though. I mean, he spent a lot of time sucking up to the Kaiser and Falkenhayn. He's smart, he thinks. I always thought it was going to be a long war. He thinks our priority for Germany is what we have. We hold. We're probably not going to win this on the battlefield, if we win this at all, we'll win it politically. Ideally, we're probably going to have to strike a bit, deal with one of our adversaries, probably Russia. We'll have to fight the Russians to a standstill and then strike a deal with them. But in the short term, obviously the priority is to find a new defensive position. Now, the Germans, like the British and the French before them, have not lost their cohesion. They retreat in very good order and they're nowhere near giving up. They're still inside French territory. Remember, they still control the industrial northeast of France. They still control the iron ore field of Lorraine, for example. They don't want to give that up. So on the 12th of September, they call a halt just above the River Aisne in the northeast of France, on a long kind of chalk ridge north of the river. Now, the next day, the French and the British in pursuit, cross the river after them. And it's a very cinematic opening to the Battle of the Aisne. The British troops are kind of crossing on these pontoon, improvised pontoon bridges in dense fog. It's like the. The attack by the orcs on Osgiliath in the Return of the King film.

[Tom Holland]

I hope you're not comparing the British to orcs.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I'm comparing the use of pontoon bridges and fog.

[Tom Holland]

Important to put that on the record.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But at this point, it has started to rain, so the weather has broken. The summer is over. Now, both sides at this point in previous wars, with it pouring with rain, they're absolutely exhausted. They'd be going back and forth across France in the Great Northern War, which we did recently on the show, they would have gone to winter quarters. Even Charles XII would have gone to winter quarters. But these days, people don't go to winter quarters. They keep going. And one reason for that is basically they don't need supplies. In the same way they have tinned food, they have bully beef and stuff like that. So they can just stay out there for as long as, you know, throughout the duration. And so it's at the ain this point in mid September 1914, that three key features of the First World War really become apparent. So first of all, both sides now are relying very heavily on their artillery. The days of cavalry charges are over. They are pounding each other with shells for hours on end. In some places, a shell will be landing every few seconds. That's number one.

[Tom Holland]

And Dominic, the other thing, I'm guessing you mentioned that this is chalkland and chalk is very easy to dig. So do the spades come out at this point and the picks.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So digging. And it's raining, right? So it's not. It's wet, wet chalk. You can dig it quickly. And if you're a German infantryman holding your position under attack from the Allies, the obvious thing to do is to take out your trenching tools. The Germans actually have better trenching tools than the Allies do. They've been practicing digging trenches for the last 10 years. And of course they want to hold their positions. They're not anticipating moving, so they dig very deep. And this is one reason why, for the whole of the First World War, the German trenches are usually better than the British ones. The Germans don't want to leave their trenches, whereas, for example, the British or the French, their expectation is that they will advance and move on to new positions.

[Tom Holland]

I've never really thought of that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I've learned something, so. Oh, wow, that's. You've actually.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

God, Tom, you've actually. You actually gained something from the podcast. I have. That's lovely. That's lovely. First time in 700 episodes or whatever you've.

[Tom Holland]

That's been occasional a few times before this, but that's a very good insight. That's a top insight.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So. Well, I mean, it's not my own. It's in every single book about the First World War.

[Tom Holland]

I know, but it just never really registered until I heard it from your lips.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay. Oh, that's lovely. So that means that the character of the fighting now has fundamentally changed. Waterloo 100 years before, done and dusted pretty much in a day. But there's no way that's going to happen again. These battles are going to take weeks or months, and a lot of the time they will involve men cowering in their trenches from shellfire before the whistle or the bugle goes and they have to go over the top. So this is actually the third element of the First World War that is different from other wars, maybe not the American Civil War. And it's a sense that this will never, ever end. It's a sense of interminable hopelessness. So now you have men. The scenes for the first time, it pouring with rain. Men are knee deep in mud. They're covered in dirt. They're hungry, they're exhausted. The British, we mentioned what they're wearing. The British have been wearing the same clothes since the Battle of Mons. They haven't changed in all that time.

[Tom Holland]

It's a lot of pubic lice, almost certainly.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And the weird thing is, even though they're not moving, they're still losing 2,000 men a day, killed and wounded. So they're just sitting there and they're just being pummeled by shell fire. And of course, it's the same for all sides. There's a quote. I can't remember which book this was in. Maybe Max Hastings Kresten Anderson, a German soldier, he writes in his diary on 28th September. We all know we're on our way into the jaws of hell. We aren't ourselves, we're hardly human any longer. At most, we're well drilled. Automatons. God, if only we could become human again. And he never did. He was killed two years later at the Battle of the Somme. And that's the kind of sentiment I think you see a lot in the First World War, but you didn't see it so much in other wars where every day is different. There's a tremendous variety. You're kind of riding or marching about. And there's a sense that, who knows, the war could end next week. This time I think everybody knows this is not going to be over anytime soon. So the issue for both sides is how on earth do you break this deadlock now, now that you've started digging in? And this is the one thing that Schlieffen had feared. It was the reason he had. He dreamed up his plan. And from this point onwards, I think the story of the war is both sides would come at various wheezes, gas, massive kind of frontal attacks, tanks, all of these different things to try to break the deadlock. But there is just one last chance that the Germans could snatch victory before Christmas. Because by mid September, the trenches stretch all the way southeast to the border with Switzerland.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, and they stop there, do they?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, yes.

[Tom Holland]

So why don't the Germans do what they've done to Belgium and go through Switzerland?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The Swiss, you can't underestimate the Swiss.

[Tom Holland]

I think, have a crack at the Swiss.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

A crack at the Swiss. That's the great question of history. Why has nobody ever had a crack at the Swiss? I don't know. Maybe a Swiss listeners. If we've got any Swiss listeners, they'll be able to explain why. Don't they all do military service? Yeah, they do.

[Tom Holland]

But I'm just thinking, you know, they could. The Germans could just say, you know, like they did with Belgium. We're really sorry, we've just got to go around the corner.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But I think it's actually hard to go through Switzerland, isn't it? I mean, it's not like flat with loads of railways. I mean, although they have very good railways in Switzerland. But I think they're built for tourists rather than built for kind of a million men.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Well, I just.

[Tom Holland]

I just throw it out as a. An interesting question.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Crikey. That's just not an angle I've ever so in all those books on the First World War, I've never seen anybody, you know, Max Hastings, all these great scholars.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, well, they haven't got my grasp on the operational level. That's what it is clearly not.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, anyway, the trenches stretch all the way to the first board and you can't go beyond that. It's off limits, out of bounds.

[Tom Holland]

That's the rule.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, but above the riverine, right, There is a 170 mile space to the Channel. If, if you could reach that, if you could go up around the trenches through this space, you could outflank your opponents and then maybe, who knows, you could get into their rear and cause all kinds of carnage. So for two months, for the next two months, there is what is called the Race to the Sea. And the Germans are launching assault after assault, going over further and further north, trying to break through. And the Allies are kind of catching up with them. They're kind of keeping pace with each other as they're going further north and they're sort of pushing them back. And so some of these battlefields, Albert, Arras, Thiepval, Messines, they become very famous kind of First World War names. And by mid October, this race to the sea has come down to the last bit of open territory. And these are the fields, the flat fields of Flanders just south of the Channel. And there's one town in particular that represents the last hope of a German breakthrough. It's a medieval town. It's just inside the Belgian border. It's just 20 miles from the sea. And its name, Tom, will become synonymous with the First World War, because this town is Ypres.

[Tom Holland]

Okay, so in our next episode, we will turn to the struggle for Ypres. Extraordinary story of. Of heroism, but also of horror. And we will also be exploring one of the most controversial stories of the entire First World War. It reverberates into the Nazi period, the Kindermort, the Massacre of the Innocents. And members of the rest of History club, of course, can hear that episode, as well as the next two episodes of this series, the concluding episodes right now. And if you're not a member, of course, you can sign [e-mail] Goodbye.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Au revoir.