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Updated: June 2, 2025
Through the passes in the Vosges mountains they poured, horse, artillery, foot all branches of the service. Strasburg was to fall and so swift was the French movement that lines of communication were not guarded. "Then the German general staff struck. Their troops from Saarburg, from Strasburg and from Metz, under the command of General von Heeringen, attacked the French all along the line.
Subordinate to this contemplated attack by the crown prince, yet forming a part of it, and, in a measure, a fourth element in the campaign, was the double effort from the garrisons of Metz and Saarbrucken, combining with the armies of the Bavarian Crown Prince and the forces of General von Heeringen.
Not one of these officials of the empire is of the old nobility! Of the 11 ministers of the kingdom of Prussia, the minister for agriculture, von Schorlemer; for war, von Heeringen; for education, von Trott zu Solz; and for the interior, von Dallwitz, are of the old nobility; but the other 7 ministers are not.
Physically the two men Kitchener of Khartoum and Von Heeringen, the Gray Ghost of Metz had nothing in common; mentally I conceived them to be unlike. Except that both of them held the rank of field marshal, I could put my finger on no point of similarity, either in personality or in record, which these men shared between them.
Here is another instance: When the feeling and stress over the Moroccan question was at its height General von Heeringen on leaving his quarters for his usual drive in the Thiergarten was eagerly questioned by a score of officers, awaiting his exit. "Excellency! Geht's los?"
He knew, as well as did General von Heeringen, the strategic value of Rheims as railroad center, and accepted the issue of battle. In the falling back of the several German armies from the Marne to the Aisne, the Germans had kept possession of the chief forts of the district around Rheims.
But, to be perfectly impartial, it must be admitted that the second phase of the battle of the Aisne made the bombardment of Rheims a military necessity. To make this clear requires a setting forth of the new strategical plan developed by Field Marshal von Heeringen upon the collapse of the plan for the drive on Paris, which was foiled by the battles of the Marne.
Alsace was almost denuded; the Bavarians were moved from Lorraine towards Lille and Arras, and the Duke of Württemberg into Belgian Flanders. Von Bulow was sent to face Castelnau and Maud'huy between the Oise and the Somme, and only Von Kluck and the Crown Prince with a new general, Von Heeringen, from Alsace were left to hold the line of the Aisne.
He was younger by ten years, I should say, than either Von Heeringen or Von Zwehl; too young, I judged, to have got his training in the blood- and-iron school of Bismarck and Von Moltke of which the other two must have been brag-scholars. Both of them, I think, were Prussians, but this general was a Saxon from the South. Indeed, as I now recall, he said his home in peace times was in Dresden.
There is no man alive who knows one-half as much about the strategical position of Metz and the surrounding country as General von Heeringen. Often on stormy, bitter cold winter nights, sentries on outposts stationed and guarding the approaches of Metz are startled to find a gaunt, limping figure, covered in a gray army greatcoat with no distinguishing marks, stalking along.
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