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Updated: July 12, 2025
In addition to this, General von Zwehl also had the great siege train that had been prepared for the reduction of Paris. What chance had Maubeuge against such a potency? On September 8, 1914, word reached General von Zwehl that the forward drive had failed, that the main armies had been beaten back and that he was to bring up his guns as rapidly as possible to cover the retreat.
It was under their conductorship that about noon we aimed our automobiles for the spot where, in accordance with provisions worked out in advance, but until that moment unknown to us, we were to lunch with another general Von Zwehl, of the reserves.
To the mighty siege guns handled by General von Zwehl, these were no trouble, for Von Zwehl had not only the heavy batteries attached to the Seventh Army Reserve, but he also had a number of Von Kluck's guns and the majority of General von Bülow's, neither of whom was expected to need siege guns in the forward drive where mobility was an essential.
General von Zwehl was one of the iron-jawed battle-scarred warriors of 1870, a man with a will as metallic as his own siege guns, and a man who could no more be deflected from his purpose than a shell could be diverted in its flight. He had been set to reduce Maubeuge and he had done so with speed and with thoroughness.
No sooner did the French armies enter the little town, however, than Soissons, dominated by the twin towers of its ancient cathedral, became a target for the concentrated fire of the Germans, whose artillery, it will be remembered, had been supplemented that morning by the huge guns brought on from Maubeuge by the magnificent forced marches of General von Zwehl.
The history of the trenches that winter, of which more will be said later, reveals the extent to which the Germans succeeded, aided by the iron craft of the old Prussian fighter General von Zwehl. The other factor depended on the vexed question of means of communication. There was no cross-country railway linking the eastern German wing to the western German wing.
At his call they came Von Heeringen and Von Hindenberg and Von Zwehl, to mention three names that speedily became catchwords round the world with their gray heads full of Prussian war tactics; and very soon their works had justified the act of their imperial master in choosing them for leadership, and now they had new medals at their throats and on their breasts to overlay the old medals they won back in 1870-71.
On the following day, the eighth, Von Zwehl got word that a sudden forward thrust of the Allies threatened the German center at Laon. Without waiting for orders he started to the relief. He had available only nine thousand troops, all reserves. As many more shortly re-enforced him. He marched this small army small, that is, as armies go these Titan times for four days and three nights.
The whip, I believe, signifies dominion, and sometimes brute force. Beyond the tableland, and along the succession of gentle elevations which ringed it in to the south, the pounding of the field pieces went steadily on, while Von Zwehl lectured to us upon the congenial subject of what he here had done. Out yonder a matter of three or four English miles from us the big ones were busy for a fact.
It was Excellency von Zwehl, commander of the Seventh Reserve Corps of the Western Army, the man who took Maubeuge from the French and English, and the man who in the same week held the imperiled German center against the French and English.
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