Background
Bulow was born in Berlin on March 24, 1846, the son of an army officer.
Bulow was born in Berlin on March 24, 1846, the son of an army officer.
Bulow fought in the wars of 1866 and 1870-1871 and joined the General Staff as captain in 1877. By 1894, he commanded the prestigious Fourth Foot Guards; three years later he headed the central department of the Prussian War Ministry in the grade of major general. Bulow was appointed deputy chief of the General Staff in 1902, headed the III Army Corps the following year, and in 1904 was promoted general of infantry.
In 1912 he was placed in charge of the III Army Inspectorate at Hanover in the grade of colonel general. On August 2, 1914, Bulow was given command of the Second Army which comprised mainly the Guards Corps and he led this force in the conquest of Liège and Namur. Shortly thereafter Biilow was also given nominal command over General Alexander von Kluck's First Army. By August 23/24, Billow's forces had defeated the French Fifth Army at the Sambre River, and followed this feat of arms with similar successes at St. Quentin.
The Germans crossed the Marne River on September 4, yet Bulow grew strangely pessimistic about the war in the west. He had good reason to be apprehensive. Kluck's First Army had twice swung in toward the southwest in order to sweep through the French defenses on the near side of Paris, in the process abandoning the original plan to march around the far side of the capital. A thirty-mile wide gap developed between Billow's Second Army and Kluck's First, which had already crossed the Marne and stood about thirty miles from Paris. Biilow was hardly a master of operative thinking and when the Allies discovered the gap between the two German armies, he panicked and became immobilized. On September 8 Colonel Richard Hentsch arrived from staff headquarters at Luxembourg and, finding only dire predictions of imminent disaster, ordered an immediate retreat from the Marne behind the Aisne River.
Briefly, Biilow was given command over the entire German right wing (First, Second and Seventh Armies) as the Entente counterattacked along the Aisne.
On October 10 he received command of a newly formed Second Army at St. Quentin. In January 1915, the kaiser promoted Biilow field marshal, but a heart attack in March forced him to seek temporary rest. Billow's subsequent attempts to be reinstated to active duty failed, and on June 22, 1916, he resigned from the army. Bulow died in Berlin on August 31, 1921. His lack of resolution and nerve at the Marne played no small part in the decision to retire him, and the publication of his account of the battle in 1919 did little to restore his reputation.