Battle of the Ardennes

The Battle of the Ardennes took place during the First World War fought on the frontiers of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg from 21 to 23 August 1914. The German armies defeated the French and forced their retreat. The battle was part of the larger Battle of the Frontiers, the first battle of the Western Front.

Background

Belgium

Belgian military planning was based on an assumption that other powers would expel an invader but the likelihood of a German invasion did not lead to France and Britain being seen as allies or for the Belgian government intending to do more than protect its independence. The Anglo-French Entente (1904) had led the Belgian government to think that the British attitude to Belgium was that it had come to be seen as a protectorate. A Belgian General Staff was formed in 1910 but the , Lieutenant-Général Harry Jungbluth was retired on 30 June 1912 and only replaced in May 1914 by Lieutenant-General Chevalier Antonin de Selliers de Moranville, who began work on a contingency plan for the concentration of the army and also met railway officials on 29 July.

Belgian troops were to be massed in central Belgium, in front of the National redoubt of Belgium ready to face any border, while the Fortified Position of Liège and Fortified Position of Namur were left to secure the frontiers. On mobilisation, the King became Commander-in-Chief and chose where the army was to concentrate. Amid the disruption of the new rearmament plan the disorganised and poorly trained Belgian soldiers would benefit from a central position to delay contact with an invader but it would also need fortifications for defence, which were on the frontier. A school of thought wanted a return to a frontier deployment in line with French theories of the offensive. Belgian plans became a compromise in which the field army concentrated behind the river Gete with two divisions forward at Liège and Namur.

Schlieffen–Moltke Plan

Field marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen was Chief of the German General Staff (, OHL) from 1891 until his retirement in 1906. A student of Carl von Clausewitz, like other Prussian officers, he had been taught that "the heart of France lies between Paris and Brussels". In 1839, the Treaty of London masterminded by the British diplomat Lord Palmerston was signed by France, Prussia, Russia, Austria and the United Kingdom creating the independent Kingdom of Belgium. France and Russia joined in a military alliance in 1892, which threatened Germany with the possibility of a war on two fronts. German strategy gave priority to an offensive operation against France and a strategic defensive against Russia. Planning would be determined by numerical inferiority, speed of mobilisation, concentration and the effect of modern weaponry. The Germans expected frontal attacks to be costly and protracted, leading to limited success, particularly after the French and Russians modernised the fortifications on their frontiers with Germany. To evade the fortified frontier with France, Schlieffen devised a plan that by 1898–99 envisioned German forces rapidly passing between Antwerp and Namur to take Paris from the north, inflicting a quick and decisive defeat on France.

The German left flank in occupied Alsace would tempt the French into attacking there, drawing the French forces away from Paris and the German right. In its 1906 version, the Schlieffen Plan allocated six weeks and seven eighths of the Imperial German Army (a force of 1.5 million men) to overwhelm France while the remainder fought against the Russian Army in East Prussia. Helmuth von Moltke the Younger succeeded Schlieffen in 1906 and was less certain that the French would conform to German assumptions. Moltke adapted the deployment and concentration plan to accommodate an attack in the centre or an enveloping attack from both flanks as variants to the plan, by adding divisions to the left flank opposite the French frontier, from the expected to be mobilised in the (western army). The main German force would still advance through Belgium and attack southwards into France, the French armies would be enveloped on the left and pressed back over the Meuse, Aisne

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