First Battle of the Marne 1914: Kluck's Turn and Hentsch's Retreat Order

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Between September 5 and 12, 1914, the German advance through France under the Schlieffen Plan's 40-day timetable came apart east of Paris. After the Great Retreat had pushed the French and the British Expeditionary Force back more than 150 miles, German troops were exhausted, starving and outrunning their horse-drawn supply trains on wrecked railways. Helmuth von Moltke directed them from Luxembourg with slow, unreliable communications, while Joseph Joffre toured the front with a racing driver at the wheel and sacked more than 30 generals.

Alexander von Kluck's First Army ignored orders to shield Karl von Bülow's Second Army and swung southeast after the French, exposing its flank to Paris. When Joseph Gallieni attacked from the capital, Kluck turned west and opened a 30-mile gap that Joffre drove into on September 6. The decision was made not on the field but by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, a staff officer Moltke had empowered to order a general retreat. The Germans fell back to the Aisne, dug in, and the race to the sea produced a trench line from Switzerland to the Channel.

• Gallieni requisitioned about 600 Renault taxis at Les Invalides to carry roughly 6,000 troops to the front, and the state paid more than 70,000 francs in fares.
• Joffre is said to have spent an afternoon sitting silently under an ash tree before launching the counteroffensive.
• The British advanced only about 25 miles in three days through the gap, slowed by refugee-choked roads and fear of a trap after Mons.
• Hentsch found Bülow convinced his army was reduced to cinders, approved his retreat, then forced Kluck to withdraw as well.
• Combined casualties reached about 500,000, and Moltke reportedly told the Kaiser that Germany had lost the war.