Re: Χωρίς τις ΗΠΑ η Γερμανία θα είχε επικρατήσει ολοκληρωτικά τόσο στον Α όσο και τον Β παγκόσμιο πόλεμο
Δημοσιεύτηκε: 08 Μάιος 2023, 19:30
από Antipnevma
Τα μυστικά της επιτυχίας της Γερμανίας κατά τον Α παγκόσμιο πόλεμο
Because of Germany’s traditional prominence in science and engineering, the nation could provide its military with high-tech weaponry. Its well-educated officers quickly learned how to use these weapons (and when to demand new ones). The prestige of the military meant that educated young men found it attractive and wanted to be associated with it. Educated soldiers who understand how to use the sophisticated weapons they have been given are clearly going to be much more successful on the battlefield than their opponents.
But the key was the ability of the army to attract the educated and intelligent and put their talents to work. In 1900, Germany hardly had a monopoly on education and intelligence. What it did have was a society in which young men wanted to be officers.
The distinguished British travel writer William Harbutt Dawson summed up the situation perfectly: “The institution which, next to the throne, is the most popular in Germany, is the army. Its popularity runs through all classes of the population, and so does the popularity of what in England is wrongly called conscription.”2
The reason why was simple. Before 1871, there was no Germany. The state had been created by the army. Although one could say this was true of most states, for the Germans the birth had occurred recently. In 1914, men were still alive who remembered 1871, who had defeated the enemy. Moreover, even before 1871, the military’s record of success enhanced its prestige. The institutional tradition of the German military was victory, from the triumphs of Frederick the Great on. By 1900, they included decisive wins in wars with Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870).
These victories did not come about by chance. The chief factor was the general staff system that had been evolving in the Prussian army since the start of the nineteenth century. By 1914, all armies had general staffs of some sort, but the German system differed from the others in fundamental ways. In other armies, staff officers were simply the eyes and ears and messengers of the commanding general. In the German army, they were empowered to give orders and even assume command. Staff officers of relatively junior rank continuously moved up and down the system, from central headquarters to units in the field.
When the Germans mounted the initial siege of the Liège fortresses in August 1914, a chance Belgian shell killed the senior field commanders. Command passed to the senior staff officer, Erich Ludendorff, a mere colonel, who then directed the successful attack. That the same officer who had planned the Liège offensive and then became its commander was later dispatched by Helmuth von Moltke to take over as chief of staff of the forces fighting the Russians gives an idea of the importance of staff positions.3
In this system, junior officers, who were relatively young, were entrusted with significant responsibilities. In 1916 the head of operations—Abteilung I, the most prominent general staff department—was only a major. The head of the second department, in charge of heavy weapons and munitions, was a lieutenant colonel, and the director of the Abteilung IIIb (military intelligence) was another major. Of the twelve men listed in the organizational chart as being directly below the supreme commanders, only three were generals. The other nine were either majors or lieutenant colonels.4
The employment of junior officers in positions of authority was widespread. The chief of staff for Army Group A was a major. The officer the high command brought in to reorganize the defensive positions on the Somme in 1916, and who assumed the position of chief of staff for the First Army, was Colonel Lossberg. The manual on defensive tactics that enabled the army to withstand repeated attacks with such success was written by Captain Geyer. When, at the end of 1914, the army decided to develop new assault tactics, it turned first to an engineering officer, Major Kaslow, who was then replaced by Captain Rohr.5
So one reason the military attracted talent was that it promised responsibility for relatively young men in a way unique among armies.
France had bright young officers as well, but the French system, like the Russian and the British (and the American), gave them little to do.
The practical result was that Germany entered the war with many more officers than any other combatant. The French general Maxime Weygand estimated that, in 1913, Germany had 42,000 officers and 112,000 noncommissioned officers, while the French army had only 29,000 officers and 48,000 noncommissioned officers.6 The imbalance is dramatic. Both countries had peacetime armies of about the same size, and planned to expand them enormously in the event of war. By today’s standards, these armies consisted essentially of reservists; only between one-fifth and one-third of the soldiery would be made up of what we would call regulars, or active-duty troops.
Clearly, the country with the biggest leadership cadre would have an enormous advantage in war, because it would have an impressive ratio of officers to soldiers. As the French figures indicate, Germany had a quantitative advantage. Whether or not German officers were better educated than their future opponents, the nation had created a substantially larger corps of leaders. In fact, the Weygand estimate seriously understates the case.
In France the prestige of the army was declining. Fewer young men wanted to be officers. In 1894, there were 2,079 candidates for Saint-Cyr, France’s school for future officers. In 1906, there were 1,046 candidates. Six years later, the number had dwindled to 880.7 Ironically, the Germans and Austrians had the opposite problem: they had more young men seeking to be officers than they had room for in their armies, or money to pay them.
In response, an important alternative means of military service was established. Provided he had the proper background and education, a young man could fulfill his military obligation by a year of voluntary service, ultimately emerging with a commission as a reserve officer. The catch was that the future reserve officer was eligible only if he had obtained his Abitur, or diploma, from an advanced secondary school, known as a Gymnasium in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Reserve officers thus represented an elite not only socially but educationally, and not simply within their countries. By 1913, there were 120,000 men with reserve commissions in Germany, or over three times as many reserve officers as regular officers. The German superiority over France was not four to three, as Weygand’s figures suggest, but about six to one.
Both classes of officers were highly educated. The excellence of the German school system before 1914 is notable; less remarked upon is the extent to which the numerous military academies emulated the rigors of the Gymnasium. They were first-rate schools, a fact admitted during the war even by the British: “Of the general education provided by the college, apart from its system, I have nothing but praise,” wrote one disaffected Englishman who had gone through the system, going on to provide a brief description of a course of study in which “a love of literature and the drama, and of the fine arts generally, was fostered; and if any cadet showed a strong musical or artistic proclivity, he was encouraged and allowed to practice these pursuits.” In addition, students were expected to know either French or English, as well as Latin, and although advanced mathematics was not obligatory, it was offered in the curriculum and students were encouraged to take it.
The military schools provided a stepping stone for young men whose family finances would not allow them to attend a Gymnasium. The youthful Heinz Guderian, future creator of the German armored divisions, was one of them. His father wanted him to become an officer, but he was a man of “limited means,” Guderian reveals in his autobiography, explaining that for those two reasons he went to the cadet school at Karlsruhe.
Our course of studies was based on the up-to-date civilian schools, the Realgymnasium, the main emphasis being on modern languages, mathematics and history. This provided a good preparation for life, and the standards reached by the cadets were in no way inferior to those of similar civilian institutions.
Although both Britain and France had schools as good as any Gymnasium, they had no equivalent system for future officers. Nor did they feel one was required. There was one other crucial difference. In the United States, West Point provided an excellent education for men of modest means. Ulysses S. Grant and John J. Pershing went there not because they wanted to become professional officers but because it gave them an education they could not otherwise have obtained. But there was only one West Point, while in Germany and Austria-Hungary, there were a dozen.
Although officers passed into the ranks of the elite in civilian life, the best career officers were expected to continue their education in military affairs. The early experiences of Werner von Blomberg, later a field marshal and minister of defense during the early Hitler years, is typical. He entered Gross-Lichterfelde, the most famous of the cadet schools, at the age of sixteen, and was commissioned a Leutnant (what Americans would call a second lieutenant) three years later. Despite having an army officer for a father, von Blomberg was not rapidly promoted.
He didn’t become an Oberleutnant (first lieutenant) until 1907. He then attended the three-year course at the War College, was promoted to Hauptmann (captain), and spent the next three years in the topographical section of the general staff. Like von Blomberg, Guderian did advanced studies—in his case, the War School at Metz in 1907–08.
The great advantage in the sheer numbers of educated officers explains why the Germans were better at training soldiers than anyone else and why they were so adept at developing tactics that made full use of the revolutionary technology with which the country supplied its army. Before 1914, British experts reckoned that the Germans could train soldiers in about one-third of the time that the British could. Once the war started, however, it was assumed that this advantage would quickly be overcome. As one respected British officer remarked ruefully: “When the war began we were all prepared for the Germans to be successful at first . . . but we argued that very soon we should become better than they. . . . The exact contrary has been the case.” Or as the talented French general Emile Fayolle wrote gloomily in his secret diary: “The great superiority of the German army lies in its organization and methods of instruction.”11
As Fayolle realized, the increasing complexity of the tools of modern warfare demanded a high level of education and an effective training system. Germany, as a technologically advanced nation, was able to give its soldiers sophisticated weaponry. The army’s advantage in education, training, and leadership meant that it could use the new weapons effectively. A lead in technology does not automatically guarantee superiority, though, and in matters military, it is often exaggerated. But the German army in the First World War was a unique case: it had both the technology and the human resources to use properly on the battlefield.
The new weapons demanded a shift in the perception of warfare, both tactically and strategically, and in both cases the German army was far ahead of its opponents. The successful offensives and the casualty imbalance were not the result of Allied ineptitude or of chance. They were the logical outcome of fielding an army that, quite simply, outperformed those of its foes.
Of the two broad areas—tactics and strategy, on the one hand, technology on the other—the first was of greater importance, but the Germans had a substantial advantage in both, particularly in heavy artillery. In wars fought before 1914, most casualties—about nine out of every ten—were inflicted by rifles. In the First World War, the figures were reversed: about eight out of every ten casualties resulted from artillery fire.
Although the French had invented the first modern artillery piece, the famous 75-millimeter field gun, it was the only long-recoil weapon they had in service in 1914. Artillery would prove crucial on the battlefield, but most French weapons were obsolete mechanical-recoil weapons that dated from the 1870s. Not only were they inaccurate, but they were also heavy. While the British had up-to-date guns, they were even heavier, and required days to assemble on site.
The Germans, for their part, systematically developed a family of mobile long-recoil weapons designed for indirect fire at high angles. German gunners could rain shells down onto infantry hiding behind walls and houses and in trenches. The Allies had only a handful of weapons capable of such precision, and those few were so heavy that they had to be transported in sections.
Assembly took several days. By contrast, the German 21-centimeter howitzer could be towed behind a transporter and put into action immediately. The Austrian 30.5-centimeter howitzer used by the Germans on the Western Front could be transported by road and deployed within six hours—not surprising, considering that the inventor was Dr. Ferdinand Porsche.12 The Allies had nothing comparable until late in the war.
The Germans not only entered the war with better weapons; they had more of them—an advantage of three or four to one in the number of long-recoil heavy artillery, road-transportable heavy weapons, and motorized gun transporters. They had mastered the production of gas shells for their guns—and were firing the shells onto the battlefield—while the British were still relying on the wind to disperse gases. It was the Germans who figured out how to synchronize the rate of fire of a machine gun with the revolutions of the propellers of their airplanes, so that pilots could fire directly ahead in their line of sight.
This superiority extended all the way down to the way the ordinary soldier was equipped, starting with the fact that his steel helmet (introduced in late 1915) was infinitely better than that of his opponents. Even a shell’s near miss could generate a shock wave that would throw the soldier through the air, turning him into an unwilling missile in which his all too vulnerable head and neck were at risk. Flat helmets were of no use. But the German coal-scuttle helmet protected the back of the neck; moreover, the flared edges transmitted the shock to the shoulders and thus the rest of the body, reducing traumatic head injuries.
German soldiers were the first to have reliable hand grenades (or hand grenades at all), their own transportable artillery (infantry mortars), flamethrowers, and armor-piercing ammunition for their machine guns.
The ability to manufacture sophisticated weapons was rooted in Germany’s highly developed industries, while their skill in deploying the armaments in the field was an attribute of the educational achievement of the soldiery. And the realization that such equipment was needed was a function of an educated officer corps, men who approached warfare rationally, as a business or a scientific enterprise. But it was the combination of these factors that gave the German army its decisive edge in combat and resulted in tactical innovations that formed the basis for its success in both wars.
In the First World War, the Germans had three tactical challenges and one strategic issue to confront. The army identified the problems correctly, and had made reasonable progress toward solving them. Indeed, in my view, they had solved them. In the next war, German offensive doctrine would rely on these principles; only the hardware would change.
The three tactical questions were these: First, in an age where weaponry was making frontal attacks by massed infantry a recipe for suicide, how could local offensives succeed without massive casualties? Second, given the calamitous, unprecedented effect of heavy artillery on the battlefield, how could the defenders survive such bombardments and repel an opponent who was willing to let his infantry be massacred in order to seize territory? Third, in light of the increasing depth of the battlefield and the enormous armies involved, how could local offensive successes be translated into breakthroughs that would either force the enemy into a disastrous retreat or surround and capture its forces?
The Germans had been worrying about the first problem since before World War I, and with particular urgency, since any offensive through Belgium into France would have to deal with the massive belt of fortifications both of these countries had built. It was this situation that provided the army with the motivation to develop heavy mortars as well as road-transportable heavy guns. Organizationally, it stimulated the formation of combat engineer units, the Pioniere.14 These soldiers, organized in companies and doled out to infantry divisions, one or two per division, were unique—combat infantry with engineering training. They were also unique in having their own organic heavy weapons. At first these consisted of 17.5- and 25-centimeter mortars, but as the war progressed, other weapons were added, notably flamethrowers.
Once the Germans broke through the Belgian forts and penetrated the French fortification line, the Pioniere were employed in both an offensive and a defensive role. German doctrine blended the two concepts in the following way. On the attack, the officers preferred to seize a position and force the enemy to attack it frontally in an attempt to regain it. On the defense, the Germans, after letting the enemy attack a frontal position that had been largely abandoned, would mount counterattacks from positions behind that line, outside the immediate zone of attack. Either way, the German practice involved a lot of engineering, but the Pioniere units had been designed for offensive operations, and within the first six months of the war, a mixed unit of combat engineers and elite infantry had been assembled to develop small-unit assault tactics.
The infantry was drawn from the Jäger battalions.15 Although often thought of as light infantry, Jäger battalions had, by 1914, more machine guns than regular infantry regiments, and during peacetime they were at nearly full strength, while the regular infantry regiments operated with a greatly reduced number of men. So these combined units, which would eventually become known as Sturmabteilungen, or storm troops, were initially drawn from the units where the concept of firepower generated by mixed weapons had replaced the traditional idea of infantry units as men firing only rifles.
By January 1915, the commander of the first Sturmabteilungen unit, Captain Rohr, had his men in action in the Vosges Mountains. Instead of the massed infantry assaults of the Allies, Rohr’s men relied on their artillery (the mortars of the Pioniere) to pulverize a small section of trench, which they then attacked from the ends. Instead of rifles, they relied heavily on hand grenades and machine guns manhandled into position. Enemy strong points were bypassed rather than assaulted, to be dealt with by artillery fire called in by forward observers. As the war progressed, more weapons were added: flamethrowers in early 1915, and the portable 7.5-centimeter mortar by the end of 1916.
The German tactics were successful, and by February 1916 were in widespread use. The method of teaching the new techniques was simple.
Units were formed, and the men in Rohr’s unit began instructing them. As these units mastered the skills, they in turn taught others, spreading the tactics throughout the army. The Allies eventually noticed the existence of these units, but they failed to understand how they functioned.
According to the British high command, the Germans had skimmed off the cream of their infantry and put them into special units, the famous storm troopers, thus fatally weakening the rest of their army.16 On the contrary, their primary role was educational, and as the war continued, most German soldiers in active (as opposed to reserve) units became storm troopers. By 1918, the army was closing down the separate detachments, so that only about one-third of them were in operation at the end of the war.
The emphasis on combined arms extended beyond the creation of combat units with organic heavy firepower. Allied doctrine meted out heavy artillery at the army group level, where it was centrally controlled.
The Germans, by contrast, parceled out their heavy artillery regiments to the combat units that needed them, thus giving divisional commanders authority over their use.
The Germans believed that offensive operations incurred fewer casualties than defensive ones. Since they were fighting on three fronts, however, they had to pick and choose their operations carefully. As a result, the army became expert at defensive warfare. A significant part of the German success on the defense came from superior engineering. They did not simply dig trenches. They constructed field fortifications in depth, so that their defensive positions consisted of three separate lines, with the rear ones anchored by formidable strongpoints made of stone, concrete, and earth.
When the Allies began their preparatory shelling, the German defenders withdrew into their shelters, which, when properly constructed, were basically impervious to even the heaviest shells. The Allies had to stop the bombardment once their infantry started the assault. The resulting massacre of the attacking infantry was based on a simple calculation: the defenders could emerge from their shelters and set up their machine guns faster than their opponents could cross no-man’s-land. Sometimes the remnants of the Allied infantry were able to get into the first line of the German trenches, but at that point, the new offensive tactics would promptly drive them out.
One key reason for the German success on both offense and defense was that company, battalion, and regimental commanders had the authority both to withdraw from areas threatened with attack and to order counterattacks to contain any potential local breakthroughs. By contrast, their Allied counterparts were invariably forced to wait for orders from the divisional or even corps command. Given the primitive nature of communications during the war, these delays were fatal, because the German movements were always within the Allied decision cycle: by the time orders came back down the chain of command, it was too late.17
The Germans knew that success at the small-unit level on offense and defense would not win the war. The traditional idea was that the only way to defeat the enemy was to engage it in a massive battle, or series of battles, in which its forces would be destroyed. Once both sides had fixed defensive positions, however, this idea became problematic.
But the British and the Italians persisted in it throughout the conflict.
Joffre, the supreme French commander until late 1916, saw correctly that what was required was an offensive that would rupture the defensive lines on such a scale that the Germans would not be able to contain it, particularly if the rupture created a big enough hole. Although Joffre was replaced midway through the war, his notion lived on, and on the German side, Ludendorff had essentially the same opinion.
The problem with the idea was set forth by General Fayolle, who observed succinctly that it wasn’t easy to pass an army through an army.18 His remark reflects the inherent limitation of Allied tactics. If you were willing to lose one army in the initial mass attack, you might succeed. But how would you then move the next army through the debris left by the first attacking force and across the cratered battlefield your artillery had produced?
Since the Allies never solved this problem, a generation of analysts were led to conclude that a large-scale breakthrough could not be staged on a broad front, because of the rudimentary communications between the units doing the attacking and the commanders behind them. German achievements to the contrary were either ignored or explained away by the inferiority of the Russian, Italian, and Romanian armies. But in March 1918, with breakthroughs of fifty and sixty kilometers on broad fronts, the Germans obviously had figured out a solution, and they promptly repeated the feat, in April, and then again in May.
The key lay in the application of the small-unit tactics developed early on. Instead of bombardments that went on for days and massed infantry attacks, the Germans favored short, intensive assaults that caught the defenders unawares. The initial assault used relatively small numbers of men who worked their way through the rubble. The solution to Fayolle’s question, then, lay in his precise formulation: since it was basically impossible to pass an army through the remains of an army, don’t deploy the first army at all, thus avoiding the logistical problems that the Allies were never able to solve. So at the level of the battle, the Germans had figured out how to mount successful breakthrough operations; the successes of the spring of 1918 were simply the latest examples.
But at the strategic level, the idea didn’t work. In modern warfare the opposing sides were simply too big and too powerful. Each side could absorb a horrifying number of defeats and still keep fighting. The British solution was a war of attrition: we have more men than they have, so if losses are roughly equal, we will finally prevail. That was why the Allies kept insisting that German losses were either worse than theirs or the same, and why there was consternation in the French government in late 1916, when shrewd observers began to argue that such was not the case.
Leaving aside the willingness to slaughter one’s citizenry, the idea seems logical, but it is seriously flawed. By early 1916, French troops moving up to the front were bleating like sheep in protest, and local commanders were delaying attacks in every way they could.19 Moreover, the idea could succeed only if there was an equal exchange of casualties. It is hard enough for an army to get accurate information as to its own losses; having solid data about your enemy is even more difficult, and figuring out whether it still has soldiers left is more challenging still. During the First World War, the Allies failed totally in both areas. Their notion of German losses were fantasies, and their calculations of the available manpower pool were simply wrong. Although the whole idea exuded scientific precision, it was junk science: there was no way to determine the precise figures required in evaluating the chances that the strategy would work.
The second and most successful German presiding general, Erich von Falkenhayn, understood this dilemma and had argued for a much different strategy, which he outlined in a letter to Kaiser Wilhelm II in December 1915. You can’t destroy the enemy’s armies; they are too big and powerful. Nor do you need to. The real objective is not to win some great battle but to make France quit the war, to make “clear to the eyes of her people, that militarily they have nothing to hope for”; and to do this, there’s no need to rely on “the uncertainty of a breakthrough.” Not only was this “beyond our strength,” but it “is not necessary. The objective can be satisfied with limited forces.”20
The objective is to achieve a sort of systemic shock of your opponent.
In July 1916, when the Germans stopped the Verdun offensive, the French positions on the ridge above Verdun consisted of isolated soldiers crouching in piles of rubble. That the victory was fatally incomplete resulted primarily from the lack of overall control of the various theaters by von Falkenhayn, with the commander of the Eastern Front, von Hindenburg (and his chief of staff, Ludendorff), doing everything possible to undercut him, to the extent of withholding troops as the twin battles of Verdun and the Somme came to a climax.
Von Falkenhayn was aiming at a blow that would shock France into quitting the war. The idea was profound. At lower levels the Germans had gotten around what was regarded as the great checkmate of modern firepower, had overcome their numerical inferiority, had learned how to smash through the enemy’s defensive positions. Now, at the higher level, that of strategy, they had figured out how to bring wars to speedy conclusions without the problematic battle of annihilation.
So in the First World War, the German army was successful because it had managed to attract the country’s best and brightest, men who were constantly astonishing their opponents (or at least those who fought and died on the battlefield) by their resourcefulness and ingenuity.21 In the war that followed the army was successful because it did pretty much what it had already learned how to do. The men of Hitler’s military, the commanders of the Wehrmacht, really contributed nothing new to warfare. On the tactical level, they were content to do what they (or their fathers) had done in the last war. On the strategic level, as we shall see, they mostly proved the old saw that terrific captains don’t necessarily make great generals.
Re: Χωρίς τις ΗΠΑ η Γερμανία θα είχε επικρατήσει ολοκληρωτικά τόσο στον Α όσο και τον Β παγκόσμιο πόλεμο
Δημοσιεύτηκε: 15 Μάιος 2023, 11:49
από Antipnevma
Τα μνημεία λένε την αλήθεια για το ποιός νίκησε στον Α παγκόσμιο πόλεμο.
As France, so Belgium: the Liège fortifications were expanded by the addition of a great new fort, which commanded the Meuse crossing just three kilometers to the north of where the Germans had crossed in 1914. Eben Emael, completed in 1935, was the most modern fortification in the world. The Belgians had corrected their mistakes as thoroughly as had the French. Belgian officers who went through the newly completed fort were convinced it was invulnerable.
At dawn on 11 May 1940, seventy-eight Ploniere from the German Seventh Airborne Division landed on the fort by glider. They were armed with a fearsome new weapon, shaped charge explosives in fifty-kilogram bundles, and promptly blew enormous holes in the turrets. The fort was out of commission in twenty-eight hours. When the commandant tried to organize a defense, the garrison bolted.
Eleven years later, in 1951, France inaugurated the formal opening of the Marne Monument. Designed by Marshal Foch himself, it is a thirty-three-meter red sandstone column designed to resemble a menhir of the ancient Gauls, with an art deco ensemble of harps, trumpets, thunderbolts, and the angel of victory growing out of the top. Quotations from Marshal Joffre chiseled in faux-runic lettering are scattered over the column, and at its base is an impressive greater than life-sized bas-relief that shows the men responsible for the victory of the Marne.
The bas-relief violates perspective: Joffre, who stands in the center, clasping the arm of a French soldier, is twice the size of the real man. The soldier is markedly smaller, the seven generals responsible for the triumph smaller still (although still life-sized). Foch is at Joffre’s right hand, while Gallieni, the general most responsible for seizing the moment, is off at far left. The spurious historicity and lack of perspective combine to suggest something empty and lifeless, a forced celebration of an event long forgotten. And indeed the history of the monument is not without its own symbolism. Work wasn’t begun until 1931, well after Foch’s death, the monument wasn’t completed until 1939, and not dedicated until 1951.
The Marne Monument is about thirty kilometers south of Épernay, France, about eight kilometers north of Sezannes. Three thousand five hundred meters to the northwest of it is the French military cemetery of Soizy-aux-Bois, where 1,692 French soldiers—the poilus the monument supposedly celebrates—were hastily thrown into two communal graves and then forgotten. The two graves are not identified as such—they appear to be simply two raised embankments of hard earth with masonry around them. Whatever plaque was once erected has largely been obliterated by time, and the small cross in the center is in even worse shape. The cemetery at Soizy, barren, exposed at the side of the road, reeks of neglect and abandonment, even by the relaxed standards of French cemeteries.
Seventy-eight hundred meters to the southeast is another cemetery. It is named after the village of Connantre, but it stands distant from the hamlet, out in the middle of one of those enormous fields that characterize the flat landscape of Haut Marne. It is a consolidated cemetery in which the remains of 8,896 German soldiers are buried. Like all German cemeteries of this war, it is beautifully landscaped and meticulously maintained. The cemetery is surrounded on all sides by a thick row of trees, making it a place of obvious repose and meditation. The names of the men who died in 1914 in this area, and who were collected from various points and placed in a common grave here, are engraved on massive brass tablets facing the entrance. Behind the tablets is a more intimate monument, an austere and surprisingly minimalist Pietà in a soft rose stone. Behind the monument are crosses marking where 1,298 German soldiers who died in the Second Battle of the Marne lie buried. There are always flowers on at least one grave, or a wreath beneath the sculpture. Like the perfectly manicured lawns, the massive plaques and markers, the flowers signify that these men are remembered.
No greater contrast could be imagined: between the meticulous German commemoration of its sons who rest in foreign soil, and France’s neglect of its own children who fought to save it; between the funereal pomposity of Foch’s monument and the melancholy intimacy of these cemeteries.
If an anthropologist from Mars were to visit here and study these cemeteries carefully, he would conclude that a great war had been fought here, and that clearly one side had been victorious. He would be right.
Ονόματα δεν λέμε. ο νοών νοείτω κι ο ανοών ανοείτω και αγνοείτω.! 