The Price of Glory (23 page)

Meeting an artillery attack is like catching a cricket ball. Shock is dissipated by drawing back the hands. A little ‘give’, a little suppleness, and the violence of the impact is vastly reduced.

Instead of standing stubbornly and heroically on the Right Bank, the French could have drawn back their hands from Verdun, which, since the dismantling of its forts, was in any case no longer such an indispensable defensive pinion. Behind Verdun on the Left Bank the undulating hill and wooded country continues for some twenty-five miles, as far as Ste. Ménéhould. Here a fighting withdrawal could have been staged, with the German advance checked by successive lines of defence on each feature. With the means then available, a German breakthrough to the flat open country around Chalons-sur-Marne would have been virtually impossible. Instead a terrible toll of the Crown Prince’s manpower would have been exacted by the French 75s and machine guns in their prepared emplacements, at relatively little cost to the defenders. The attack would have petered out, leaving the Germans exhausted and weakened to meet the Allied sledge-hammer blow on the Somme.

This is what
could
have happened. Had Pétain, the man who was to carry out Castelnau’s decision, been in de Castelnau’s place it is probably what would have happened. But a withdrawal, however fighting, was not in keeping with French military indoctrination of the First War; it was also not in keeping with the character of de Castelnau. Above all, in formulating his decision, de Castelnau was influenced by psychological imponderables. As Colonel de Thomasson, one of the more level-headed French writers on Verdun, remarks: ‘Sometimes sentiment provokes a courage which could not be otherwise inspired by cold reason.’ The army at Verdun was in a state of demoralisation bordering on rout. Eighteen months of un-remitted, bloody, disheartening failures lay behind it. Who knew whether it could now be called upon to fight a steady fighting withdrawal? Who could tell whether the rout might not merely be accelerated, turning into a complete collapse and unbarring the most direct approach to Paris? In the Franco-Prussian War in which de Castelnau had fought as a young officer he could recall all too vividly how, once it had started retreating, the French Army had never ceased until it was rounded up piecemeal. He knew his French soldier. With more spirit and
élan
on the attack than the dogged Britisher, he was also much more impressionable in adversity, altogether less capable of the kind of orderly, defensive retreat such as Britain’s soldiers have been accustomed to during so much of her military history. Moreover, these were French peasants fighting on French soil, every inch of it hallowed. In these circumstances, as de Thomasson remarks, ‘pure strategy cannot always have the last word’. Finally, could the nation morally survive the shock of losing Verdun, with all its legendary mystique? De Castelnau was committed; and so too was the man appointed to carry out de Castelnau’s decision.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PÉTAIN

There had emerged a leader who taught his army to distinguish the real from the imaginary and the possible from the impossible. On the day when a choice had to be made between ruin and reason, Pétain received promotion.…—COLONEL CHARLES DE GAULLE,
France and her Army
(1938)

Marshal Pétain has traced in our history pages some of which remain luminous while others give rise to interpretations that still conflict and arouse lively passions. We must celebrate the first. We cannot ignore the second.—ANDRÉ FRANÇOIS-PONCET (1953)
¹

S
IX
weeks before the assault on Verdun, the French Second Army had been relieved by the rapidly expanding British Army, and was pulled back out of the line to form a general reserve. After the hard autumn fighting in the Champagne the rest was felt to be well deserved. For the Army Commander, ensconced at Noailles, life had become extremely leisurely, consisting of daily rides in the beautiful forest. In fact, limited as are the distractions in any French provincial town, it was really almost too quiet.

When the first order announcing Pétain’s appointment was received by his staff, there was consternation at Noailles. It was after 10 p.m. and the General was to report to Joffre in Chantilly at 8 the next morning. But the General was not in his office; he was not in his quarters; he could be found nowhere. Alarm! France in her hour of need called for her saviour, but the saviour-designate was missing. Fortunately for her, however, Pétain’s Staff-Captain, Serrigny, knew — as a good ADC — something of the elderly bachelor’s habits. Ordering a staff car, he drove at top speed through the night to Paris. As he wrote years later in his long unpublished memoirs, ‘hazard or Providence made me knock on the door of the Hôtel Terminus of the Gare du Nord.’ It was now 3 a.m. The proprietess at first energetically — and no doubt with the liverishness customary to Parisian
hôteliers
roused at this hour — denied that Pétain had visited her hotel that evening. Serrigny played on her
finer feelings, insisting that it was ‘a matter of life or death for France’. Eventually the proprietress admitted that the General was in the hotel, and somewhat hesitantly led Serrigny upstairs. Outside a bedroom door stood ‘the great commander’s yellowish boots with the long leggings, which, however, on that evening were agreeably accompanied by some charming little
molière
slippers, utterly feminine.’ Undeterred, Serrigny knocks at the door. Wearing ‘the scantiest of costumes’, the General emerges. There, in the dingy station-hotel corridor, ensues a brief conference; in its historic connotations — though perhaps rather different circumstances — a little evocative of Drake at Plymouth. Serrigny relays the summons from Joffre. Sobs from within the unlit bedroom. Pétain, impassive, decisive, tells Serrigny he must find a bed in the hotel. In the morning they will journey together to G.Q.G. Meanwhile the night imposes its own duties. To these Pétain now returns.

What manner of man was this amorous general who was soon to earn from his countrymen so much honour and love, that would later be replaced by so much hatred and dishonour? At the time of which we write, Pétain was a bachelor of sixty, with commendable vigour for his age. After the war, a doctor who gave him a check-up (incredibly enough not recognising him) remarked: ‘One can see that you weren’t in the war.’ (Alas, but for his robustness, the final degradation might have been spared him.) With the commanding posture that was the unmistakable and indelible mark of St. Cyr, and clad in the uniform of ‘horizon blue’, there was no more impressive sight on a French parade ground. To have seen him and de Castelnau together, one might well have assumed that Pétain was the born aristocrat, the squat and rather swarthy general the peasant; though in fact it was the reverse. The cynical, observant Pierrefeu writes of Pétain on his advent to G.Q.G.:

I had the impression of a marble statue, of a Roman senator in a museum. Big, vigorous, of imposing figure, impassive face and pale complexion, with a direct and thoughtful glance….

And François-Poncet, on succeeding him at the Académie:

… a majestic carriage, naturally noble… his blue eyes contained a certain mystery. One would think they were made of ice… from his whole personality emanated an air of sovereignty … Wherever he appears, he imposes… Whoever once saw this figure, will never forget it.

Certainly women never did. His easy success often led him into precarious adventures; in 1917 the French intercepted a cable from the German Ambassador in Madrid reporting to Berlin that he had found a mistress for the new Commander-in-Chief, for the modest fee of 12,000 pesetas a month.

Many of Pétain’s peasant characteristics remained with him throughout his life. One was his simplicity — which he shared in some measure with Joffre. That was about all they had in common. He was early to rise and late to bed. In rare moments of leisure he liked to potter around the garden, and always said he would take up farming when he retired. His favourite pastime of an evening was to leaf through historical albums, studying portraits of the men who had made their mark on Europe during the past half-century. He seldom went to bed before midnight, and then often read the plays of Corneille till 2 a.m. In contrast to Foch always ready to adopt the conqueror’s pose, one foot before the other, Pétain so hated being photographed that the only portrait Repington could find in 1918 for
The Times
was one of him characteristically glaring at the camera. At his trial in 1945, he himself insisted on wearing the very simplest uniform of a Marshal of France, his only decoration the
Médaille Militaire
.

Not entirely unrelated to this dislike of show and publicity was Pétain’s chronic contempt for all forms of intrigue, and especially for politics and politicians. Already as a subaltern, when most of his contemporaries, mindful of where lay the springs of promotion in the Third Republic, were assiduously sucking up to the politicians, Pétain had the audacity to place a reservist Deputy under arrest for some minor military infringement. In his well-known
‘boutades’
against politicians Pétain appeared to fear no one; to Poincaré he once remarked acidly that ‘nobody was better placed than the President himself to be aware that France was neither led nor governed.’ In 1939, Pétain refused to be a candidate for the Presidency, recalling that he had once described it as only ‘suitable for defeated marshals’. In 1917 Pétain threw a share of the blame for the mutinies upon the frequent visits of Deputies to the front. The distrust had become mutual; about the same time, Abel Ferry, one of the more impressive French Deputies of the epoch, wrote in his diary:

Pétain is a
bastard
. He has command, but he is closed to everything which is not exclusively pertaining to military order. He sees only the defects of parliamentary collaboration.

The sourness in Pétain’s relations with parliamentarians may partly have been due to a curiously unexpected timidity in his makeup, derived from the insecurity of his humble background. Instead of ‘rolling himself into a ball’ like Joffre when ‘got at’ by politicians, Pétain retreated behind a barrier of wounding, cold irony. Whatever the explanation, the facts remain, and the antipathy was an unfortunate one. The slight to Poincaré alone was never forgotten, and would later prove both detrimental to Pétain’s career and — more disastrously — to the conduct of the war.

In many ways Pétain appears as the odd-man-out in the French military hierarchy of the First War. Where Joffre, Foch and de Castelnau were Pyreneans, Pétain came from a peasant family in the Pas-de-Calais and had all the characteristics of a northerner. The Pétains had never boasted of a military tradition. Aged fifteen when the Franco-Prussian War ended, Pétain, unlike Joffre and de Castelnau, had been too young to participate. His choice of the army seems to have been inspired by the anecdotes of a nonagenarian great uncle who had been a veteran of the Grand Army. Having worked his way through the Spartan mill of St. Cyr, he opted to join the newly formed Chasseurs Alpins. Five years’ rigorous service with them no doubt accounted in part for his splendid physique. He then transferred to the infantry at Besancon, where he became friends with a Lieutenant Herr. Pétain was extremely industrious, yet advancement went slowly for him; unusually so even by peacetime standards; five years a
sous-lieutenant
, seven years a lieutenant, and ten a captain. He was forty-four before he got his battalion. The out-break of war found him a colonel of fifty-eight, who had never served abroad. Imminent retirement lay ahead after a career of almost sub-average distinction, in anticipation of which he had already bought a small house on the edge of St. Omer. Then, in the space of eighteen months, from commanding a regiment of a few thousand men he was to rise to be an Army Commander with over half-a-million at his behest.

Confession had not been a factor in the slowness of Pétain’s promotion in the way that it had checked the career of Foch, de Castelnau and other ardent Catholics; indeed, Pétain could boast
that he had not been to Mass for thirty years, so on this score alone he should have been earmarked, as things stood, for rapid advancement. But in an age where friends-at-court were vital to a military career, Pétain the peasant from St. Omer had no influence. Nor, it might be said, had Joffre, the cooper’s son, but he had been quick to cultivate what he lacked, whereas Pétain never made an effort to conceal the contempt of the Third Republic that he had acquired early in his career. In sharp contrast to most of his contemporaries, Pétain seemed unambitious almost to the point of self-extinction; when offered the post of Commandant to the Rifle School, he refused because it would have meant his promotion over the heads of more senior majors. What told most against Pétain, however, was that while Joffre, Foch and de Castelnau all swam vigorously with the current, he alone stood against the prevailing tide of the de Grandmaison movement. While the others seemed still obsessed with the catastrophe of 1870, Pétain was assiduously and pragmatically studying more recent campaigns such as the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, where the defence had given so good an account of itself. The potentialities of the new weapons that the Grandmaisonites contemptuously dismissed from their armoury, the machine gun and the heavy howitzer, and even of the humble rifle in its modern form (he was himself a remarkably good shot) did not escape Pétain. The nucleus of Pétain’s discoveries was that ‘firepower kills’. Carried to their logical conclusion his theories meant that (if he were right) the
attaque à outrance
could be broken by a well-organised defence long before it reached the enemy.