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

What extraordinary events saw the French - already on the brink of defeat - take on the formerly formidable German army in a remarkable counter-offensive on the 4th of September, in France, in a clash that would later become known as the Miracle on the Marne? Why was this such a decisive moment in the events of the First World War How did it relate to the famous Schlieffen plan? Did it really see the French charging into battle in Renault taxis? And, why did it become one of the most legendary moments in all of French history? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss one of the most astounding clashes of the First World War: the Battle of the Marne. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at therestishistory.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Go to https://www.surfshark.com/TRIH or use code TRIH at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. Try Adobe Express for free now at https://www.adobe.com/uk/express/spotlight/designwithexpress?sdid=HM85WZZV&mv=display&mv2=ctv or by searching in the app store. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.

• 0:16Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 0:42Tom Holland?

  So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.

• 0:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working. And in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland, who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.

• 1:09Tom Holland?

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• 1:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/history. That's ziprecruiter.com/history. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:54Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 2:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 2:36Tom Holland?

  So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 2:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ask yours at claude.ai/restershistory and keep thinking.

• 3:07Tom 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 corps, 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 labouring 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,

• 3:52Tom Holland?

  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.

• 4:15Tom Holland?

  Reminiscences there of a crucial exchange on the 5th of 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

• 4:58Tom Holland?

  was an irresistible German onslaught.

• 5:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's an incredible scene, Tom. And actually, we'll come back to it a bit later, this, this exchange when Joff 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 Cato. On the 30th of 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

• 5:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  they were going to, 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 Canay, or the Battle of Agincourt, or whatever.

• 6:22Tom Holland?

  But the Maaan, 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.

• 6:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  But still very important. I mean, we want that put on the record. Transformational, I think, Tom.

• 6:39Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's quality, not quantity.

• 6:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 6:54Tom 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 Maaan. Imagine the Blitzkrieg, the British withdrawing to Dunkirk, the French government fleeing to Bordeaux, and then it is stopped.

• 7:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 7:12Tom Holland?

  That is the the scale of what happens here.

• 7:14Dominic 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?

• 7:21Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, really.

• 7:36Tom Holland?

  So Asquith, he's not out playing bridge or?

• 7:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's probably played bridge earlier in the evening.

• 7:40Tom Holland?

  Writing letters, love letters or anything.

• 7:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I like to think he's done that early in the evening. He's probably had a few, a few drink, 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.

• 8:20Tom Holland?

  The most British military moustache of all time.

• 8:23Dominic 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."

• 8:44Tom Holland?

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

• 8:48Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 8:52Tom Holland?

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

• 8:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 8:58Tom Holland?

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

• 9:02Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 9:06Tom Holland?

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

• 9:08Dominic 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 he's, he's always enraged, isn't he, Sir John French? He's very florid, about to explode.

• 9:19Tom Holland?

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

• 9:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So it's constantly being strangled.

• 9:25Tom Holland?

  Folds of purple flesh, quivering with rage.

• 9:28Dominic 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's 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, the French? The French government had basically appointed a veteran general called Joseph Galliani as the military governor of Paris. So Galliani, like every single commander in this story.

• 9:55Tom Holland?

  That would be ill.

• 9:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's 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."

• 10:14Tom Holland?

  God, that's not what you want. A man charged with defence of Paris.

• 10:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  But, 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."

• 10:26Tom Holland?

  Well, Dominic, he had fought at Sedan, hadn't he? He'd, and he'd been a German prisoner of war. So he, he kind of knows what the stakes are in a visceral manner.

• 10:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is personal for him, right? And he says, "Let's turn Paris into an armed camp. We will mobilise 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." So it's not exactly Danton? No, but I like that. I think the very, the conciseness of it is actually quite reassuring. This is what we're gonna do. I'm gonna do it. End of story. Now, the slight misfortune is that, like all commanders in the first world, he and Joff have a very tense relationship. Are there any generals who like each other? Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

• 11:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. Solving crimes in East Prussia. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

• 11:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Hindi! What are you doing? Um, there's been a murder in a, in a country house in Allenstein in East Prussia. Well, actually, but is it a murder? Is it a slapstick comedy? It's like Bergerac, I think. I think it's like Bergerac or something like that. I'm thinking Dumb and Dumber. No, I'm doing character intuitive casting, you see. I think it's cozy Sunday nights. 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. Okay, okay. All right. Galliani and Joff. 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 you, who'd once been one of his officers. Galliani, even though Joff had been kind of one of his proteges, he now has a very low opinion of Joff.

• 12:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  He saw him out walking or something in the Bois de Boulogne. And he wrote in his diary how fat and heavy Joff is. He will hardly last out his three years. I mean, there's rich coming from him. Yeah. 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. I suppose Galliani could say, in reply, that Joffre so far has had a shocker of a war. I mean, he's basically wiped out half the French army. He has. For nothing. 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, if Joffre basically died of a heart attack on the first of September,

• 12:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  which is what Galliani expects at any moment, then history would remember him only as a bungler and a butcher. However, Joff has one big thing in his favour. 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, that's an excellent line. His unbelievable calm is about to transfer him from, quote, abattoir superintendent to allied saviour.

• 13:29Tom Holland?

  Yeah, amazing.

• 13:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Longzac, who we talked about last time, the man from Guadeloupe.

• 13:39Tom Holland?

  So his crime is to have been right?

• 13:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. He's been right about everything, but Joff 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, Joff 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 the 25th of August, the guy Colonel Gerhard Tappen, tells his colleagues, he says, in six weeks, we shall finish the job.

• 14:12Tom Holland?

  And that was the target, wasn't it? This, of the Schlieffen Plan, that it had to be done within six weeks?

• 14:17Dominic 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 Joff, 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 travelled 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.

• 15:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  They've all got, I'm very familiar with this issue. They've got new, ill-fitting footwear.

• 15:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 disorganised. So the further they go, the more mistakes they make, they get lost, they get jumbled up. They're basically making map reading errors.

• 15:24Tom Holland?

  That's not very German, is it?

• 15:26Dominic 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, you're going to, your lorries are going to break down. Your men are going to get blisters and the Schlieffen Plan made no allowance for basically, you know, natural human failings.

• 15:44Tom Holland?

  So, I mean, this is a, 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.

• 15:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  You and I and Joff are clearly cut from the similar. We're, we're unflappable in that way, but we're not histrionic like a German general.

• 16:02Tom Holland?

  Having our lunch.

• 16:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, exactly. A rest is history scheduling meeting, I think is the technical term for lunch. Right, now the Germans are about to make a massive, massive misjudgment. So Molkha'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 encircle it from the west. But in the last days of August, the, the top German field commander, who's a man called Karl von Bülow, he decides, let's change the plan. We probably don't even need to bother encircling Paris. And he says to the, the topmost bit of his, 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.

• 16:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Turn inwards before you get to Paris, kind of turn down towards the flank of the retreating British and French.

• 16:49Tom 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?

• 16:59Dominic 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.

• 17:22Tom Holland?

  The Battle of Cana.

• 17:23Dominic 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.

• 17:30Tom Holland?

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

• 17:34Dominic 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 emphasise, 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.

• 18:06Tom Holland?

  And the reason for that presumably is, is the sheer number of people that you were talking about. Kind of, 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?

• 18:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think exactly. I think especially a country like France, which is very highly militarised, which has basically now gone to a, on a total war footing, is mobilising 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 realise that, actually.

• 18:51Tom Holland?

  Because I guess the only war fought previously in history that would have taught that lesson would have been the American Civil War.

• 18:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, I guess so. Maybe because the Franco-Prussian War is done and dusted pretty quickly.

• 19:01Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 19:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, they, they, they encircle and capture, they captured the Emperor, Napoleon III. And then it's pretty much done. Whereas with this, you know. The canvas is so much bigger and the numbers are so much bigger. I guess the Americans.

• 19:17Tom Holland?

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

• 19:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, railways, all of that stuff, the factories. Yeah, exactly.

• 19:25Tom Holland?

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

• 19:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's also a 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 big stroke of luck. On the 1st of September, one of the staff officers of the French Fifth 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

• 20:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 counter-attack.

• 20:27Tom Holland?

  And isn't there also, the French are getting information from the Eiffel Tower, which kind of serves as an eavesdropping device?

• 20:34Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 20:36Tom Holland?

  To intercept German signals, I gather.

• 20:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Eiffel Tower is an important military installation.

• 20:41Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's not completely useless.

• 20:43Dominic 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.

• 21:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Monts in the last episode, we quoted a bloke called Walter Blum, 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 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 that they set out in, and they haven't washed for

• 21:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  weeks. So they really are, you know, in a terrible state. So a pungent, pungent smell descending on Paris. 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're at the limit. My men are, cannot really go on, they are exhausted and we need reinforcements." And at his headquarters, you know, 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, we'll strike when they're least expecting it, we will

• 22:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. Right. Our own dear countrymen. Is that because their position, that, where they happen to have ended up? I mean, it's not a kind of, our fighting spirit. No, 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." I just wondered if perhaps there was a kind of political dimension to it as well.

• 23:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's just that they're in the right place to do the right job. Maybe, 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 stuff. So they're almost certainly going to be flooding the rest of history. They'll be enjoying our forensic account.

• 23:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's like that bloke who wrote like a 40,000 word essay about the bows that people used to Ashen Call or something. Remember that when you did that? Yes, I do. 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. This is the crucial moment. And I have to say is an absolutely unbelievably melodramatic scene. Geoff, as we said before, loves a, loves a drive. He puts on his massive cape and he drives 100 miles to the chateau. Well, he doesn't drive, Dominic. No, of course he doesn't. Formula One winning. Yeah. Yes, that's right. He is driven, I should say, to the chateau of Voule Penil. So that's where Sir John French is staying. And he begins by telling Sir John, he says,

• 24:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  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." And he looks at Sir John in the eyes and he says, "Monsieur le Marshal, c'est la France qui vous supplie." Field Marshal or whatever, "It's France who

• 25:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, brighter 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 Geoff. The Field Marshal says, "Yes."

• 25:49Tom Holland?

  C'est oui.

• 25:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Geoff drives back to his headquarters, where his junior officers are waiting. Now, he knows that some of them are very sceptical about this. They worry that their men have been retreating for so long, they're too tired or they're too demoralised. But Geoff gathers them, and he says, "It's now or never. It's victory or death. Gentlemen, we shall fight on the man." 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 won at any cost. They must die where they stand, rather than give way." Now, that same day in Paris, his old boss, General Galliani, dying, has been talking to his subordinates. And one of these guys says to Galliani, "Well,

• 26:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  what happens if it goes battling? What happens if we're overwhelmed? Where should be the point that we retreat to?" And Galliani says to him, "Nowhere. We fight to the death." Great stuff.

• 26:44Tom 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 élan, 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,

• 27:28Tom Holland?

  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.

• 27:37Tom Holland?

  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 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 wifi, then your activity can be monitored by anyone who is sharing the network that you are on. And this is where Surfshark comes

• 28:19Tom Holland?

  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 favourite 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.

• 29:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.

• 29:10Tom Holland?

  Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee, you make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more, except...

• 29:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Except, when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino, you can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.

• 29:36Tom Holland?

  And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder, what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing, and find yourself somewhere completely different.

• 29:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 30:03Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 30:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 30:44Tom Holland?

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

• 30:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tom, 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 Galliani, he's got a dilemma. On the front, you know, it's all kicked off and Geoff 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 are 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.

• 31:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are now stuck in a place called Pont-à, which is a suburb of northern Paris. Now, Galliani wants to get these men to the front. You know, the front, Tom, you may be wondering how far the front is.

• 31:46Tom Holland?

  I'm wondering that.

• 31:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's miles away. It's some miles, I'll put it that way.

• 31:51Tom Holland?

  Some distance.

• 31:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Galliani himself, says, you know, I know this sounds mad.

• 32:05Tom Holland?

  Let's feel.

• 32:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  But could they not take taxes to the front? Now, Paris normally has 10,000 taxes and only 3,000 of them are operating, basically because so many drivers have gone to join the army. But 3,000 taxis 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 taxis, every single taxi in the city, sent to the Esplanade des Anvilles. So this big, you know, the Anvilles, the big military complex where Napoleon is buried. And every street in Paris, the police go out and they flag down these taxis. They basically kick the passengers out and they say to the drivers, go to the military college, Les Anvilles. Now, most of these taxis are Renault taxis. So I have to say, I'm not a massive fan of

• 32:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. It's quicker than walking, isn't it? It's a lot quicker than walking. Considering how many miles they've got to go. 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. But it's quite a distance. I think that's a detail for our subscribers, no?

• 33:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  But it is a distance. I mean, we're just. Yeah. So about 10 o'clock, the first convoy of taxis heads out, about 250 cars. They're led by this officer called Lieutenant Leface, 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 reel, your kind of taillights, 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 four o'clock the next morning, these empty taxis reach a place called D'Amata,

• 33:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 goes 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 taxis shouting that to you. Well, as he's lying there with like a bottle of wine on the verge of the road, eating his cheese. Anyway, they're eventually redirected to a railway siding near a village called La Barrière. And here they find their men, their passengers. And these are the men of the 103rd and 104th

• 34:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. You know, 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. There's now, the convoy is swollen to about 400 vehicles. This is the first instalment 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 a racing car.

• 35:16Tom Holland?

  I love the contribution of, um, of the Grand Prix to the war effort. So there's the guy who's, um, driving Joff around and now they're driving soldiers up to the front. There's magnificent reflection on French sport.

• 35:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  And cyclists, right?

• 35:28Tom Holland?

  Yeah, them as well.

• 35:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Vifely ciclist, 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, the cars, because they've got the headlights off, they keep bumping into each other. They keep getting flat tyres, 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.

• 35:56Tom Holland?

  30 miles.

• 35:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  They've gone 30 miles. So as dawn is breaking on the 8th of September, they reach this village called Nontoy, which you'll be pleased to hear, because I know you're a big fan of this organisation, is near Disneyland Paris today.

• 36:09Tom Holland?

  But presumably not then.

• 36:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  They should have a ride. It'd be a brilliant ride, the Taxis of the Marne ride, wouldn't it? First World War theme park. Actually, they have that theme park, Prie du Fou. You know, that place where you can go and do, there's like Verdun and stuff.

• 36:23Tom Holland?

  Yes, and gladiators and things.

• 36:25Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 36:29Tom Holland?

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

• 36:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bob, if you're listening, you know, you know what to do.

• 36:38Tom Holland?

  They're to call us.

• 36:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, you know, 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 Monde.

• 37:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he said, and I quote that this was the single greatest event of the 20th century, which is a big claim.

• 37:26Tom Holland?

  Greater than the Angels of Mons, surely not.

• 37:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 DnB and Foo. Things had just kicked off in Algeria. They're obviously still very bruised after Second World War and the humiliation in 1940. And they were, people were desperate for kind of patriotic consolation. So the story of the taxes of the man 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. They have a very handsome old Renault taxi with, I almost said that in a French way. That was weird.

• 38:05Tom Holland?

  Yeah, you did.

• 38:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Tom Holland?

  Getting more of a, more of a francophone as you go on.

• 38:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Inspector Clouseau joins us now and the rest is history. It's got a red body and yellow wheels and it's registration. Do you know its registration? Of course you do. It's 2862G7.

• 38:22Tom Holland?

  Is that significant?

• 38:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, it's just an interesting fact.

• 38:26Tom Holland?

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

• 38:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, I'll tell you the worst fact, the fact that you wanted to cut out General Cuss's father's beard.

• 38:39Tom Holland?

  Yeah, this is even more boring than that.

• 38:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 38:42Tom 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.

• 38:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, well, hold on. Nobody doubts its veracity. So this is different to the Angels of Mons. 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 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. So are the meters on? They kept the meters running. Of course, they kept the meters running. And the French

• 39:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. And it's better than being shot, isn't it? It is better. Getting horrible blisters. And the thing about the First World War is everybody thinks of it as it's all very boring and it's about munitions and barbed wire and trenches. In reality, the First World War is an absolute, it's fertile territory for myths, for legends, for patriotic inventions, all of this stuff. This is what we'll be exploring in our bonus on the Age of the Monks. The supernatural stuff plays a big part in the way people think about the First World War, for example, because it's 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

• 40:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 a future top collaborator Philippe Pétain, who is a great star, actually, of the Great War. Pétain, at dawn on the 6th, told his men, he said, right, we're going to advance on this village, Saint-Bon. And his men, yeah, they're tired, they're anxious, they hesitated. Pétain got

• 41:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, Patahn rather let himself down in 1940. So he's not as celebrated as he might be.

• 41:24Tom Holland?

  In 1914, Napoleonic Élan.

• 41:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, totally, is what you want. But is it enough? You know, we've surely the lesson of the Battle of the Frontiers is that patriotic Élan is not, you know, you have to, there's a lot of industrial might that is required alongside sort of fighting spirits.

• 41:43Tom Holland?

  Well, presumably that you need, you need good, a good strategy and you need good timing.

• 41:46Dominic 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, on the, if you imagine on the west side, the French Fifth Army absolutely batters Karl von Bülow's German Second Army. At the same time, the British are advancing actually almost unchallenged into this crucial gap between this German Second and First Armies. That's von Bülow and von Kluck.

• 42:21Tom Holland?

  So there's a brilliant detail in, in Max Hastings' book. He records Lieutenant Lionel Tennyson, who was not only the grandson of the poet Tennyson, but also becomes some 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 longed to be able to stop and get some."

• 42:49Tom Holland?

  And then another detail that, this is reported by some other guy, quoting Max Hastings again, "Seeing the road littered with weapons and equipment, Eginton," 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."

• 43:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow. See, I think the British are the right attitude. They're doing a lot of fighting, but not too much. You know, they're also strolling around kind of expecting 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 Verdun. And in the centre, things are very, very tight. So there Ferdinand Foch, who is commanding the ninth army of the French, is taking on the German third army. It's very dicey. It's when Foch sends off one of the most famous messages in French history. Mon centre c'est ma droite recule, situation excellente, j'attaque. My centre is giving way, my right is retreating.

• 43:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 the eighth of 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 started, went to sleep.

• 44:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, literally the fog of war, the fog of war, exactly. So really, the story of the man is not, it's, the victory is not won so much on the battlefield as in the head. It's, it's basically a test of nerve. You know, do you think you're winning or not? Or are you 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 Bulow's second army.

• 45:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  There is no direct cable link between the two until late on the ninth 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, you know, formerly spa, obitua, 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 to the wire reports and getting very anxious.

• 45:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Molka 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, Molka 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.

• 46:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Second Army's in a real trouble. Bulow says, my troops are exhausted, the Allies are in danger of breaking through the gaps. Bulow himself is in a terrible state, like all First World generals. He's got, he's 68, he's got massive thyroid problems and he's got severe arteriosclerosis. Is there any who doesn't have a kind of fatal illness? I don't think so. I think because the nature of it is you don't become a sort of supreme commander type person till you're in your late 60s. And at that point, people are quite, they've had a very unhealthy lifestyle, I think, probably. They've 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, Bulow starts to get these more reports in the front, the Allies are breaking through.

• 47:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he says to Hench, my army's 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 nine o'clock in the morning, at nine oh two, in fact, we love a forensic fact,

• 47:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hench says to Bulow, okay, fine, make the call, retreat. So Bulow, who's nervous 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 fifty 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 is broken down.

• 48:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  He arrives at First Army Headquarters. When he gets there, the First 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, the second army is already retreating. So you probably need to fall back too. And the First Army officers are stunned. They're like, what? We think we can win this. He says, no, no, no, Molkha 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 second army had been, a place called Montréal. And they're astounded when they get there because there's nothing there. Von Bulow's second army has vanished.

• 49:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, you know, a fine old time in the, in the back of the battle. The next day, the 10th, it's the same story further west. Sir Max Hastings quotes a gunner called Paul Lantier, who had survived the slaughter at Vertonghen 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 marched past and the colonel of this unit marching past shouts, "We've, you know, we've won. The Germans are retreating all across the line."

• 50:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lantier 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 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 Barrez. And he invented, he basically said that the miracle on the Marne, you know, that this element that you talked about in The Angels of Mont's Bonus,

• 50:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  the supernatural, very important to sort of very right wing ultra nationalist writers in France. And he said, this is, I associate the miracle on the Marne with, kind of 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, Galliani and Geoffre, who in the crucial moment had not panicked as their successors panicked in 1940. And Geoffre 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.

• 51:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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-Molka 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. But basically, if the Allies kept their cool. That the wheels were always going to come off the German juggernaut.

• 52:07Tom 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?

• 52:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Um, it's an 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 improvised?

• 52:59Tom Holland?

  But the improvisations are forced on them by the fact that the, the plan is simply impossible to stick to.

• 53:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I get, I think to something, 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, um, to, 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 to go wrong.

• 53:23Tom Holland?

  Massive panic, yeah.

• 53:24Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 53:37Tom Holland?

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

• 53:39Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 53:43Tom Holland?

  Well, you lose first and then you, then you retreat and then you win.

• 53:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. That's the story of all British history.

• 53:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because all the accounts that you have, the sort of diaries and letters, German officers are talking, they say, you know, people are crying, um, 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. You know, 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. Okay, so stab in the back.

• 54:33Dominic 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, you know, communists, Jews, or the rest, they blame at the end of the First World War. But there is this sense, we should have won. You know, we deserved victory, and for some reason it has been denied us. And Dominic, where is the Kaiser in all this? Is he hanging out with Molkha? 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 Molkha is. Because von Molkha, 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.

• 55:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 subideal from your Supreme Commander. Yeah, it's not great, is it?

• 56:02Dominic 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 Karl Einem, and Molkha 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, Molka 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

• 56:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, Eric von Falkenhayne.

• 57:00Tom Holland?

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

• 57:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. 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 man, very assertive.

• 57:26Tom Holland?

  Death in his eyes.

• 57:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  He almost certainly does, cold eyes.

• 57:29Tom Holland?

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

• 57:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think he probably is, actually. I think Falkenhayne 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's spent a lot of time sucking up to the Kaiser. And Falkenhayne, he's smart. He thinks it's always, I always thought it was going to be a long war. He thinks our priority, you know, for Germany is we, 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 deal with one of our adversaries, probably

• 58:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Russia. You know, 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, you know, 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 Aine in the northeast of France, on the 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

• 59:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  a very cinematic opening to the Battle of the Aine. The British troops are kind of crossing on these pontoon, improvised pontoon bridges in dense fog. It's like the, it's like the attack by the orcs on Gileath in the Return of the King film. I hope you're not comparing the British to orcs. I'm comparing the use of pontoon bridges and fog. Important to put that on the record. 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're beginning 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 the 12th would have gone to winter quarters. But these days, people don't

• 59:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Aine, 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, you know, a shell will be landing every few seconds. So that's number one. And Dominic, the other thing, I'm guessing, you mentioned that this is chalkland, and chalk is very easy to dig.

• 1:00:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  So do the spades come out at this point and the picks? So digging and it's raining, right? So it's not, it's wet, wet soil, 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.

• 1:01:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'd never really thought of that. I've learnt something. So, oh, wow, that's, you've actually, God, Tom, you've, you've actually, you've actually gained something from the podcast. I have. That's lovely. That's lovely. First time in 700 episodes or whatever, you've, it's a wonderful moment. A few times before this, but that's a very good insight. That's a top insight. So, well, I mean, it's not my own, it's in every single book about the First World War. I know, I know. It just never really registered until I heard it from your lips. Okay. Oh, that's lovely. So, 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.

• 1:01:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  These battles are going to take weeks or months, and a lot of the time, they will involve men cowering in their trenches from shell fire 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, there's 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, you 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. It's a lot of pubic lice.

• 1:02:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Almost certainly. 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 pam pummed 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, Creston Anderson, a German soldier, he writes in his diary on the 28th of 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

• 1:03:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  different. There's a trend, there's 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 dreamed up his plan. And from this point onwards, I think the story of the war is both sides would come out of 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

• 1:03:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Germans could, could snatch victory before Christmas. Because by mid-September, the trenches stretch all the way southeast to the border with Switzerland.

• 1:04:11Tom Holland?

  Okay, and they stop there, do they?

• 1:04:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:15Tom Holland?

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

• 1:04:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Swiss, you can't underestimate the Swiss, I think.

• 1:04:23Tom Holland?

  Have a crack at the Swiss?

• 1:04:24Dominic 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?

• 1:04:36Tom Holland?

  Yeah, they do, but I'm just thinking, you know, 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."

• 1:04:42Dominic 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.

• 1:04:52Tom Holland?

  Well, I just throw it out as an interesting question.

• 1:04:55Dominic 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.

• 1:05:05Tom Holland?

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

• 1:05:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Clearly not. Well, anyway, the trenches stretch all the way to the border. You can't go beyond that. It's off limits, out of bounds.

• 1:05:15Tom Holland?

  That's the rule.

• 1:05:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. But above the river Aine, right, there is a 170 mile space to the Channel. If you could reach that, if you could go up around the trenches through this space, you could outflank your opponents. And then maybe, you know, 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, Tietzval, Messine, they become very famous kind of First World War names.

• 1:06:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:06:28Tom Holland?

  Okay, so in our next episode, we will turn to the struggle for Ypres. Extraordinary story 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 Kindermord, the massacre of the innocents. And members of the Rest is 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 up at therestishistory.com. Goodbye.

• 1:07:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Au revoir.

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