Who won the First Battle of the Marne?
France and Britain won. The First Battle of the Marne, fought from 5 to 12 September 1914, halted the German drive on Paris. The counterattack stopped the German armies some 50 km (30 miles) from Paris and threw them back to the river Aisne; the French remember it as the Miracle of the Marne.1
In the first days of September 1914, German armies were barely 50 km (30 miles) from Paris and moving fast. Then, along the river Marne, a French and British counterattack stopped them cold. The victory saved the capital, wrecked Germany's plan for a swift war, and condemned Europe to four years in the trenches. The French remember it as the Miracle of the Marne.2
Why did Britain and France win the Battle of the Marne?
Britain and France won because the German right wing came apart at the decisive moment. Kluck swung his First Army southeast instead of passing west of Paris, opening a gap of some 48 km (30 miles) between it and Bülow's Second Army, and the British Expeditionary Force and the French Fifth Army advanced into it. Joffre, meanwhile, used France's railways to shift troops from his eastern armies to the Marne. The German right had also been thinned before the battle: Moltke sent two corps to the Eastern Front to face the Russians, whose invasion of East Prussia ended in disaster at Tannenberg.3
Why is it called the Miracle of the Marne?
The name reflects how unexpected the recovery was. At the end of August 1914 defeat looked likely for France, yet the counterattack on the Marne halted the German advance, France did not fall and Paris was saved. That reversal, after weeks of retreat, is what the French call the Miracle of the Marne.4 › Battle of Lorraine, 1914
The battle is usually dated 5 to 12 September 1914, although some accounts give the main fighting as 6 to 10 September. From 9 September the German armies fell back about 65 km (40 miles) to the river Aisne and dug in on the high ground north of it, where the First Battle of the Aisne began.5
The plan and the gap
Germany's Schlieffen Plan aimed to knock out France in weeks by wheeling through Belgium and around Paris. But the German armies outran their supplies, and General von Kluck turned his First Army inward too soon, exposing a flank. A gap opened between the German First and Second Armies, and Allied scouts, on horseback and in the air, found it.6
The taxis of the Marne
The French commander Joffre stayed calm as his armies retreated, then chose his moment to turn and fight. To rush reserves from Paris to the front, the city's military governor Gallieni commandeered around 600 Paris taxicabs, a small effort in numbers but an unforgettable symbol of a nation improvising to survive. Each cab carried four or five soldiers, a few thousand men in all, and most reinforcements still traveled by train.7
Into the gap
The French Sixth Army struck the exposed German flank while the small British Expeditionary Force pushed into the gap between the two German armies. Moltke sent a staff officer, Richard Hentsch, to the front, and on 9 September, on his advice, first Bülow and then Kluck began to pull back. Fearing encirclement, the German command ordered a general retreat to the river Aisne, where the exhausted armies dug in. Neither army published official casualty figures for the battle, so estimates vary widely. One common count puts Allied losses at about 263,000 and German losses at roughly the same, while the historian Holger Herwig puts German losses at about 67,700 and British losses at 1,701.8
What the day decided
Those trenches never really emptied. From the Aisne the two sides raced north to the sea, extending their lines until a continuous front ran from the Channel to Switzerland. The war of movement was over. Everything that followed, Verdun, the Somme and the rest, grew from the deadlock the Marne began.9
The two-front war Germany feared
Germany had gone to war with a single great gamble: knock France out in six weeks, then turn the full army east against Russia before it could fully mobilize. The Marne destroyed that plan. When the German advance was halted short of Paris and thrown back to the Aisne, the quick victory in the west evaporated, and Germany was left fighting the long war on two fronts that its whole strategy had been designed to avoid. The front lines that formed after the battle would barely move for over three years. What began as a war of sweeping movement froze into the trenches, and a conflict meant to be over by Christmas settled into more than four years of attrition. That first winter, along parts of the line, the shooting briefly stopped for the Christmas truce of 1914.10
