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To this officer belongs the credit of drawing up the plan of attack, in which he was assisted by General Pétain, at that time his superior officer. The assault proper was left to General Mangin. The four divisions engaged were commanded by such leaders as General de Maud'huy and General du Passage.
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.
From south to north the allied front was commanded by General Maud'huy from Albert to Vermelles; General Smith-Dorrien from Vermelles to Laventie, opposite Lille; General Poultney, from Laventie to Messines; General Haig from Messines to Bixschoote; General de Mitry had French and Belgian mixed troops defending the line from Bixschoote to Nieuport and the sea, supported by an English and French fleet.
On October 4, 1914, he called on General Foch in the north and charged him with the duty of coordinating the action of all the armies in that region: those of De Castelnau, Maud'huy, and the territorial divisions. At the beginning of October the British army, which was posted on the Aisne, was transferred to the left of the French armies and replaced by the armies of Manoury and d'Espérey.
The German ambition was to push their right as far south as the mouth of the Seine, while the Allies hoped to thrust their left to the north until it joined the Belgian Army at Antwerp. Maud'huy had entered Arras on 30 September, and some of his Territorials pushed forward to Lille and Douai.
The Electeur Libre gives the following account of it. On the previous evening 8,000 Prussians had taken the redoubt of Villejuif. At one in the morning some regiments advanced from there towards Vitry, and occupied the mill of Saqui, while on the left about 5,000 established themselves on the plateau of Hautes-Bruyères. The division of General Maud'huy re-took these positions.
Von Kluck had been reinforced, and a desperate battle ensued from the 25th to the 28th, in which Castelnau was driven back from Noyon and Lassigny. This counter-attack was repulsed with great losses at Quesnoy and Lihons a little farther north, but Maud'huy was not less heavily engaged north of the Somme in a several days' struggle for the Albert plateau.
This bird's-eye view and lack of information about the details do less than justice to the crucial battle, which Maud'huy under Foch's general direction waged against the Germans round Arras and both they and the French regard as one of the decisive incidents in the war.
The passages at Arras and La Bassée were held by General Maud'huy and General Smith-Dorrien respectively. The former defended his position for the first three weeks in October when the German attacks weakened; the latter, with the British Second Corps, had reached the farthest point in the La Bassée position by October 19, 1914.
Castlenau gave up his command of the 2nd to Dubail in Lorraine and took over the new 7th, and a 10th was entrusted to Maud'huy, another of the professors of military history to whom the French and the Russian armies owed so much of their generalship. By the 20th Maunoury had swung his left round until it stretched at a right angle from Compiègne north to the west of Lassigny.
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