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On September 13, 1914, General d'Espérey's Fifth Army crossed the Aisne east of Bourg, and on the following day commenced the assault on the Craonne plateau. The next day, Tuesday, September 15, 1914, was a day of several small victories for the Germans. General von Zwehl was a hard hitter and a quick hitter.
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.
Von Zwehl held off the enemy until a strengthening force reached him, and then for three days, with his face to the river and his back to the hill, he fought. Out of a total force of forty thousand men he lost eight thousand and more in killed and wounded, but he saved the German Army from being split asunder between its shoulder-blades.
The story of General von Zwehl and his guns is essential to an understanding of the causes that rendered the British victory of the Aisne a barren and a fruitless victory at best.
This was not the only factor that was framing up to give the German armies a decided advantage. The essential factor of the Aisne was the arrival of General von Zwehl and his guns. On September 13, 1914, at 6 a. m., Zwehl arrived in Laon, and in less than an hour he was in action on the Aisne front.
The French infantry of General Manoury's army, far less exhausted than the harassed regiments of General von Kluck's forces, found little difficulty in forcing the Germans back from Autreches, but, no sooner were they well established, than the roar of the combined guns of General von Kluck and General von Zwehl would make the position untenable, and under cover of that appalling rain of death, the German infantry would creep back to reoccupy the positions from which they had been ousted by the bayonets only a few hours before.
As rapidly as he could, to General von Zwehl, meant but one thing to get there! He collected 9,000 reserve troops, which was almost immediately swelled by another 9,000, and with a total of 18,000 troops he started his siege trains for the town of Laon, where Field Marshal von Heeringen had taken up his headquarters.
It is going too far to say as several military writers have done that General von Zwehl saved Germany, and that unless he had arrived as opportunely as he did the "German retreat to the Aisne valley would have been changed into a disastrous and overwhelming rout." But it is not going too far to say that the successful holding of the Aisne line was due to the victor of Maubeuge.
The weather turned bad, rendering the heavy guns extremely difficult to handle, but there could be no delay, no explanations, to General von Zwehl. If a gun was to be brought it was to be brought and that was all about it! Four days and three nights of almost continuous marching is killing. The German commander cared nothing for that. The guns must be kept moving. Could he get them there on time?
Since then the groundswell of battle had swept forward, then backward, until now, as chance would have it, General von Zwehl once more had his headquarters on the identical spot where he had them four weeks before during his struggle to keep the German center from being pierced.
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