What happened in The Battle of Charleroi, 1914?
The Battle of Charleroi, one of the Battles of the Frontiers, was one of the key battles on the Western Front in 1914, and one of the early major German victories. The battle comprised a major action fought between the French Fifth Army, advancing north to the River Sambre, and the German Second and Third Armies, moving southwest through Belgium. Charleroi itself was a mid-size industrial town crossing the River Sambre, and was a battlefront stretching approximately 40 km west of Namur where the river joins with the Meuse. France’s pre-war strategy document, Plan XVII, determined that the French Fifth Army should join Third and Fourth Armies in an invasion of Germany through the Ardennes. This however assumed that Germany would not attempt an invasion of France further north, i.e. through Belgium. Whilst Lanrezac, Fifth Army commander, believed this a distinct possibility, particularly as he observed a massive build-up of German forces in Belgium, Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief,
