What generals command

Usage examples of armies.

Her narrative sets in motion a gigantic German Army—three field armies, sixteen army corps, thirty-seven divisions, 700,000 men—wheeling through Belgium, marching on Paris.

I can do nothing about the Roman numerals which, it seems, are inseparably riveted to army corps, but I can offer the reader a helpful rule on left and right: rivers face downstream and armies, even when turned around and retreating, are considered to face the direc­tion in which they started.

The German and French armies each required two weeks to complete mobilization before a major attack could begin on the fifteenth day.

Only by a strategy of envelopment, using Belgium as a pathway, could the German armies, in Schlieften’s opinion, attack France successfully.

There was not enough room for the huge German Army to get around the French armies and still stay inside France.

The Germans had done it in 1870 when both armies were small, but now it was a matter of moving an army of millions to outflank an army of millions.

Enlarged with each successive year, by 1905 it had expanded into a huge enveloping right-wing sweep in which the German armies would cross Belgium from Liege to Brussels before turning southward, where they could take advantage of the open country of Flanders, to march against France.

The German mass would come between the capital and the French armies which, drawn back to meet the menace, would be caught, away from their fortified areas, in the decisive battle of anni­hilation.

Belgium was their pathway of attack too, through the Ardennes if not through Flanders, but their plan of campaign prohibited their armies from using it until after the Germans had violated Belgium first.

Germany’s territorial demands, William I had explained to the protesting Empress Eugenic, “have no aim other than to push back the starting point from which French armies could in the future attack us.

Reserves mixed with active troops would create “armies of deca­dence,” incapable of the will to conquer.

But in 1912 French soldiers still wore the same blue coats, red kepi, and red trousers they had worn in 1830 when rifle fire carried only two hundred paces and when armies, fighting at these close quarters, had no need for concealment.

By Febru­ary, 1914, it was ready to be distributed in sections to each of the generals of the five armies into which the French forces were divided, only that part of it which concerned him individually going to each one.

Like the Field Regulations it opened with a flourish: “Whatever the circumstance, it is the Commander in Chiefs intention to advance with all forces united to the attack of the German armies.

Leading the fight against the Three-Year Law, he insisted in his speeches and in his book UArmee nouvelle that the war of the future would be one of mass armies using every citizen, that this was what the Germans were preparing, that reservists of twenty-five to thirty-three were at their peak of stamina and more committed than younger men without responsibilities, that unless France used all her reservists in the front line she would be subjected to a terrible “submersion.