Home Before the Leaves Fall: A New History of the German Invasion of 1914

by Ian Senior

The German invasion of France and Belgium in August 1914 came within an ace of defeating the French armies, capturing Paris, and ending the First World War before the autumn leaves had fallen. But the German armies failed to score the knock-out blow they had planned. The war would drag on for four years of unprecedented slaughter.

There are many accounts of 1914 from the British point of view. The achievements of the British Expeditionary Force were the stuff of legend, but in reality there were only four divisions in the field; the French and Germans had more than 60 each. The real story of the battle can only be told by an author with the skill to mine the extensive German and French archives. Ian Senior does this with consummate skill, weaving together strategic analysis with diary entries and interview transcripts from the soldiers on the ground to create a remarkable new history. In addition, all previous classic histories on the subject either focus virtually exclusively on the British experiences or are now very out-of-date such as Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August (1962) or Sewell Tyng's Campaign of the Marne (1935).

Supported by up numerous sketch maps, extensive archival research and poignant first-hand accounts, Home before the leaves fall is an accessible, narrative account of the German invasion that came within an ace of victory, that long hot summer.

Genres: History, World War I, Nonfiction, Military History, Military Fiction, War

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Ian Senior has taught at Dulwich College, a boarding and day school for boys, in Dulwich in southeast London, England. He is also Associate Lecturer in the History of Art for the Open University, a public distance learning and research university, and one of the biggest universities in the UK for undergraduate education. He first became interested in the battlefields of 1914 when visiting his wife's family in her native Belgium.

Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Steve]

After reading Maurice Genevoix' Sous Verdun, Août - Octobre 1914, the first of five volumes of the literary re-working of his war journal written during the first nine months of World War I, in which the reader is given a soldier's eye view of the first months of the war and in which nobody, especially this reader, has any inkling of the big picture,(*) I decided I had to read Ian Senior's Home Before the Leaves Fall: A New History of the German Invasion of 1914 (2012) before proceeding with Genevoix' gripping and harrowing journal. Senior's book is a military history focused on the period covered in Sous Verdun.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the French lost large portions of their country to the newly united Germany, they built a series of massive fortresses along their new border with Germany. These fortresses and the mountain ranges running northwest to southeast in the border region offered serious obstacles to the free maneuvering of large bodies of men which was essential to the strategy of both the German and the French General Staffs. Both had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to strike the other first with everything they had, since it had become the received wisdom that it was impossible to maintain a long term conflict with modern weapons - the losses would be unsustainable.(**) So both handed Luxembourg and Belgium the kewpie doll - the main thrust of both armies would go through those countries.

On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia; August 3 on France; August 4 on Belgium and Great Britain. Not worrying much about niceties, German armies were in Belgium early on the morning of August 4 and the French were scrambling to catch up. The Belgians succeeded in slowing the Germans down, and the leading units of the German and French armies met in Belgium at Dinant on August 14. The first major engagement took place on August 22-24 to the east and south of the Belgian city of Charleroi, where the combatants threw themselves at each other like famished vampires. As if there weren't enough soldiers to kill, units of the German army massacred Belgian civilians, including women and children;(***) they also used civilians as human shields.

In the exchange of first blows, that of the Germans was more powerful - the French were forced back into their own country. The rather small British army - only two corps - which was fighting on the extreme left of the allied lines, was forced out of Belgium as well. The French commander-in-chief, Joffre, called upon his retreating left wing to delay the Germans while he transferred troops from the less active center and right wing in northeastern France all the way to the left of the British with the intent of outflanking the German right wing.

But the Germans had two fronts. The battle with the Russians was originally intended to be essentially a holding action until the victory in the west was assured. Because the German right and center were reporting great successes and the fight against the Russians was not going well, the German commander-in-chief, Moltke, began the transfer of six corps - one-fifth of the western army - out of the western front to the eastern. This was a mistake, though the underlying mistake was the belief that they could carry out a two front war. In the event, Moltke halted some of the transfers, but three corps were by then already out of the line.

After a week of deadly delaying actions carried out by reluctant and feuding French and British commanders (the British Minister of War, Kitchener, had to come to France personally to get the British Field Marshall French to stop retreating and to participate in Joffre's counterattack, and Joffre had to relieve the commanding general of the French Fifth Army), Joffre had his troops in position. (This was when the transferred troops were brought to the front with everything in Paris which had wheels, including famously 1,050 Parisian taxis!) The original left wing of the allied armies had managed to withdraw to the Marne, narrowly avoiding envelopment on two occasions, and the transferred troops were now to the northwest and southwest of the unsuspecting Germans. The German right wing was flanked and chewed up in the first Battle of the Marne, September 5-12. Simply said, but not at all simply done; Senior gives a detailed, engagement-by-engagement description of the Battle of the Marne, taking up one-third of the main text.

Crude estimates of total casualties have been made: Senior writes 750,000; others say 500,000. Whatever may be true, the bleeding was incredible and continued as the belligerents moved their maneuvers back to Belgium, but Senior leaves the story at the German withdrawal from the Marne on September 9.

Though this is Senior's first book and there are many gaps (he focuses solely on the activities of the allies' far left wing/German right wing), he writes clearly enough and liberally salts his text with eyewitness accounts. But, since Genevoix was not on the far left wing, my original purpose was not served after all.


(*) The "fog of war" is extremely thick in Sous Verdun. The section of (initially) seventy-odd men under Second Lieutenant Genevoix' command is moved from place to place with no explanation, running into Germans in what seems to be a completely random manner with little or no forewarning, enduring now and again horrendous bombardments, miserable weather, filth, thirst, hunger, mass murder - war, in other words.

(**) The losses were, as predicted, unspeakably high (after three weeks Genevoix' section was down to 22 men), but modern centralized states and their propaganda machines were able to keep pumping (at least) two generations of men into the meat grinder for more than four years... In Genevoix' section was a man over 60 years of age, and this in the first weeks of the war. If "non" was not in the vocabulary of the recruiters at the beginning of the war, one can well imagine the recruiting situation late in the war.

(***) For example, no fewer than 674 persons in Dinant on August 23. In Leffe and Les Rivages there were 15 children under the age of 14 among the executed. Noch eine Sternstunde der deutschen Wehrmacht!

Rating

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[Leif Bodnarchuk · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't finish it. I wouldn't finish it. It's just not a book you read, it's a study aid. Very thorough, but confusing due to the exhausting density. Kudos to Ian Senior for his tireless devotion to the subject matter, but it wasn't for me. The minutiae of politics and military planning don't interest me as much as commentary, summation, and narrative streams. More of an academic work, it's too dry for my taste.

[Ian Gillibrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well argued description of events in August and September 1914 as the German Imperial Army swept through Belgium and northern France and almost succeeded in taking Paris.

The terrible slaughter as early 20th Century weaponry met late 19th century tactics is not glossed over, but the critical failure of the German logistics to keep up with the lightening advance of Von Kluck and Von Bulow's 1st and 2nd Armies on the German right wing is given its due weight too.

The overall Allied Commander French General Joffre is shown as unexpectedly competent and calm under the most intense pressure and as the architect of the vital counter attack plan that resulted in in the First Battle of the Marne which saved Paris.

Lucidly written though the reader needs to be interested in the individual movements of different military units and sometimes the maps included do not always show all the places referred to in the text which for someone unfamiliar with the geography of the region can have you frantically googling other sources.

Overall a really well written account.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Summary: This is a new account of Germany’s invasion of France at the beginning of World War I, describing how it almost succeeded and why it ultimately ended in stalemate.

German, French and British forces all thought the conflict that became World War I would be a brief one, resulting either in victory for the Germans or a decisive repulsing of the German threat. The boys were promised they would be “home before the leaves fall.”

Ian Senior’s account of the German invasion of France through Belgium describes how this nearly came true, and why the Germans failed in their aims at the beginning of the war. The book begins with accounts of the battle plans developed by the Germans and the French. In the German case we learn of the Schlieffen plan, as further elaborated by Moltke the younger, which depended on a wheeling turn through Belgium of the German right that turned the flank of the French-English forces, leading to envelopment and the conquest of Paris. What Moltke had to contend with were the challenges of the possibility of a two front war which would lessen the forces he could work with, and the challenges of transport and communication in making this wheeling move. Ultimately it would prove too much, while nearly succeeding.

The book proceeds with a day by day account of the battles, from the initial defeat of the French at Charleroi, the retreat, including the unsteady performance of the British on the French left. It traces the the initial French failure to anticipate the strength of the German attack through Belgium, and Joffre’s skillful shifting of forces to his left after retreating, to stop the German advances. In the end, he mounts a counter-offensive on the German right, exploiting a gap between the First and Second German armies, leading to their eventual retreat and the transition from a war of maneuver to the deadly stalemate of trench warfare.

What I’ve just outlined in broad detail, Senior elaborates minutely with battle by battle accounts across the front. The book includes maps in every chapter of the changing battlefield and also diary and action reports that help one understand vividly the realities troops faced of marches, attacks into blistering artillery fire, and retreat, often going for days with little sleep, covering, in some cases, hundreds of miles, mostly on foot.

What Senior develops is an understanding of how close the Germans came to success and that it was a combination of the inadequacies of communication, transport, and supply, plus the shifting of some troops to the eastern front from Moltke’s right wing that may have cost him victory. Likewise, we see Joffre, not considered a terribly brilliant officer, come into his own as he sacks incompetents, promotes the effective, and recovers from a French battle plan that failed to anticipate Germany’s strategic surprise on their left.

The book reminds me that beyond strategic concepts and careful planning, there are still the variables of logistics and the character of battlefield leaders. When forces are closely matched, as were the two sides going into this conflict, it is often factors that don’t show up in plans that make the difference. Also, many accounts look at the battle from the perspective of the British Expeditionary Force, which was only four divisions strong at this point. The Germans and French each had over sixty divisions and Senior’s account focuses much more closely on what happened from the perspective of these troops in battle. In particular, Joffre and the French come out looking better than what I’ve read in other accounts.

I’d recommend this book for those who already having a working understanding of the battles and troop movements of World War I rather than as a first book on this subject, because of the level of detail the author goes into. But if one wants to go more deeply, and perhaps more from the French and German perspectives, this is a valuable addition to World War I scholarship.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A balanced, well-written history of the German invasion of France and Belgium, told from the German perspective. Senior tells the story of the beginning of the war, the role played by France in defeating German aspirations, the blunders of the Germans, and the ultimate defeat of the flawed Schlieffen Plan.

Senior’s coverage of the German and French commanders is mostly good although it seems a bit superficial at times. He clearly shows how Joffre managed to retain a degree of control over the battlefield, something Moltke was utterly incapable of doing due to inferior communication.The maps are helpful, and in all the narrative is very engaging and Senior’s points insightful. Senior does a fine job using firsthand accounts to bring home the soldiers’ experience.

However, some parts are underdeveloped: some points are noted in the conclusion but not really present in the narrative, for example, and Senior never covers the effect that the Russian invasion of East Prussia had on the Germans’ psyche. Also, it seems like Senior really wanted to cover events at the tactical level; some more on strategic developments would have helped. And, on a whole, it doesn’t really add anything new.

Still, a smooth and readable work.

[Brendan Hodge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Home Before the Leaves Fall is a solid contribution to the crowded field of books covering the Western Front in the fall of 1914. While many books in English focus heavily on a British/German point of view while leaving the French mostly on the sidelines (despite the fact there were about ten times as many French soldiers participating in the early battles as English), Ian Senior leans heavily towards the German/French conflict and touches only very briefly on the battles of Mons and Le Cateau. He's also very heavily focused on the German right flank (first and second armies) and thus spends fairly little time on the fighting in Alsace Lorraine and on the Battle of the Frontiers.

This focus is helpful in providing a narrative which covers what it does more deeply than many other accounts, and this is helped further by the inclusion of a lot of compelling primary source material from letters and diaries.

This would not make a good first book on the opening days of the war, it's too focused, but if you already have read an overview of the whole war, or perhaps a general history of the opening of the war such as Catastrophe, 1914, this would make an excellent second read.

[JW · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author makes good use of first person accounts by combatants to show that the massive slaughter of this war was there from the very beginning. The first two chapters describe the German Schlieffen Plan and the French Plan 17. Then we are shown how the plans collided. Both failed. The point was to win a quick victory, for it was acknowledged that war between major powers would be extremely bloody and expensive. In error, it was therefore believed that such a war would not last long. They were wrong.
The book concentrates on the period from August 20 until September 9: from the Battle of Charleroi to the conclusion of the Battle of the Marne. There’s very little on the invasion of Belgium and the fighting in Lorraine, and nothing on the race to the sea. The battles are covered on the regimental level. Unlike other accounts, there isn’t much on the high command. The focus is on the French and Germans, with very little on the British. The BEF is only mentioned when the French needed their support. The war with Russia is only noticed when it affected troop distribution in the west.

[Andreas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ian Senior does a good job describing the opening month of the Great War. I especially liked the way he intertwined the description of an event followed by a personal letter or note of one of the combatants. Furthermore the analysis at the end of the book provides great insight into the authors point of view and how and why certain facts were twisted after the war. I really enjoyed the maps which not only contained the needed detail to get a better understanding of the depicted battles, but were always close to the described battles throughout the book. This made reading and looking at the maps for better comprehension much easier. Ian Senior manages to keep a neutral point of view throughout most of the book, which is expected by a historian but not always warranted.

[Tres Herndon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too technical for me. A very precise accounting of the first few weeks of the German invasion of Belgium and France in WW1. The most interesting parts for me were the beginning and the end. It began with the history and the evolution of the French and German battle plans, particularly the Schlieffen Plan. It ended with an analysis of why the Germans failed. Logistics, of course (it's usually logistics), but also a poor communications plan based on decisions made well before von Moltke took command. Worth the slog through the middle for that.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed account of the events leading to and during the battle of the Marne. It helps to have a separate map with all the small villages and rivers name, otherwise like many similar campaign histories, it is easy to lose your orientation.