The Price of Glory (24 page)

It was sheer heresy. For a long time, the way ahead barred, Pétain found no opening for preaching his gospel. It was not till 1906 that a post as instructor at the École de Guerre gave him an opportunity. There, with the de Grandmaison wave at its peak, his lectures seemed singularly unglamorous alongside those of the fiery Foch and Colonel de Maud’huy, the Chief of the Infantry Course, who was alleged to make his sons pray each evening to become as ‘brave as Bayard’. Pétain’s students nicknamed him
‘Précis-le-sec’
. But he had his converts, too. One of them was a thoughtful, gangly young man called Charles de Gaulle, who, so impressed was he by Pétain’s teachings, applied on leaving St. Cyr to join the regiment then under his command, the 33rd. To Pétain, for whom the future seemed to hold nothing but the obscurity of a colonel in retirement,
the war and the dramatic failure of Plan XVII brought an unexpected opportunity to prove his ideas. Joffre’s ruthless
limogeage
of inept generals resulted in rapid promotions for those who had shone, and Pétain was foremost among these. The stonewall defence, the deadly concentrated firepower of his troops in the retreat from the frontiers, and then at the Marne, impressed friend and foe alike. At the end of August 1914 he was promoted to Brigadier on the field; so suddenly that an elderly spinster had to furnish him with stars unsewn from her father’s uniform. His rise to Divisional, then Corps Commander followed in rapid succession. In the abortive Artois offensive of May 1915, the attack by Pétain’s Corps at Vimy Ridge was so well prepared that for a moment it seemed as if the whole German front might collapse. In the autumn, in Champagne, Pétain had one of his few failures. The intense preliminary bombardment, so characteristic of Pétain, was just too prolonged and sacrificed the vital element of surprise. But at least Pétain, unlike most of the other First War Commanders — and in opposition to de Castelnau, then his immediate superior — knew when to stop, instead of trying to redeem failure fruitlessly, and at terrible cost in lives.

All the time, Pétain was learning with a rapidity almost unique among his fellows, and with an adaptability rare for his age. Says Spears, ‘at every stage of the war he was just a little ahead of practice, theory and thought of the moment’. In an age when infantrymen and gunners almost prided themselves in their ignorance of each other’s function, Pétain, the St. Cyrien, had learnt more about the use of artillery than many gunners would ever know. During the Artois offensive, it was said that Pétain laid every gun himself. Even Haig was agreeably impressed by his first encounters with him: ‘I found him businesslike, knowledgeable, and brief in speech. The latter is, I find, a rare quality in Frenchmen!’

By the end of 1915 — now an Army Commander widely respected by the army elite, though still little known to the public — Pétain had developed his theories on firepower into a series of pithy axioms and coherent formulae. ‘The offensive is the fire which advances; the defensive the fire which stops,’ said Pétain; ‘Cannon conquers, infantry occupies’ (a conclusion he had reached well before Falkenhayn composed his Verdun Memorandum). In explaining the suspension of his corps’ operations during the spring Artois offensive, Pétain coldly and sardonically assaulted the most sacred litany of the French Army:

It is always prejudicial to cede ground to the enemy. But these inconveniences cannot be related to those which could result at a given moment from the capture by the enemy of three or four battalions, with a loss, by consequence, of several thousands of men.

After the failed offensives of the autumn, Pétain wrote a report which conveyed a barely disguised criticism of Joffre’s bull-headed striving for a
percée
. Because of the Allies’ inadequate resources of heavy artillery, he declared, it was impossible to

carry with the same
élan
the successive positions of the enemy… one does not seek, in fact, to produce a breakthrough. In this first offensive act, what one wants is to inflict such casualties on the enemy that it will be possible later on to attack in depth, at certain chosen points, with superiority.

Pétain was also a disciple of attrition, but in an entirely different sense from Joffre and Haig with their inhumanly simple calculations that the Germans could be beaten in the long run through losing man for man, by virtue of the Allied superiority in cannon fodder. ‘One does not fight with men against
materiel
’, was one of Pétain’s favourite maxims; attrition had to be performed by guns, not infantrymen. In his belief in a series of minutely planned, economical offensives with limited objectives — each adding to the total exhaustion of the enemy until the moment for the ‘definitive effort’ arrived, instead of the one ‘Big Push’ — Pétain bore some resemblance to the great Turenne. He might also be likened to Montgomery, in that he judged this ‘definitive effort’ could not take place until there was certainty of success; until the attacking force had three-to-one superiority. Another of his favourite maxims was: ‘audacity is the art of knowing how not to be too audacious.’ It was a tenet that lay at the roots of his later reputation as the over-cautious general, later still as a pessimist, and finally, a defeatist.

But this caution, this frugal husbanding of manpower, was not founded purely on cold reasoning. To those close to him in rank — and particularly to visiting politicians and journalists — Pétain gave an impression of regal, almost inhuman chilliness, accentuated by the statuesque majesty of his figure. After dining with Pétain in 1918 (where he had clearly not enjoyed his wonted social success),
Colonel Repington noted in his diary: ‘Freezing formality as usual. Pétain inspires terror except among a few of his old hands. He reminds me of the average royal personage, who is one person in company and another when alone…. As usual no one addressed Pétain unless he first addressed them, and only one person spoke at a time.’ A violently hostile book written in 1943 tells of Pétain’s icy formality when taking over the 33rd Regiment as a colonel. A lieutenant-colonel, who had evidently been a close friend in his class at St. Cyr, greeting the new C.O. had addressed him as
tu
, only to receive a shrivelling rebuff: ‘Colonel, I must request you to keep your distance. I shall require you to salute me, to speak to me only as
vous
, and, when you must address me, I should prefer to be called
mon colonel
.’ Even allowing for the passions of the moment, the story is probably true; it is thoroughly in keeping with Pétain’s character (and the 33rd was suffering from lack of discipline when he took it over). But for all Pétain’s coldness to his near-equals, the reputation he enjoyed with the
poilus
was legendary, and unique among French commanders. He was the paternal figure, the leader who really cared for his men, who suffered what they suffered. Word had quickly got round that at the Marne, in contrast to the generals of the Plaza-Toro breed, who led attacks from the various Chateaux of France, Pétain had moved up into the front line when the infantry quailed under the German shells. Later, inspecting a decimated regiment, he said:

You went into the assault singing the
Marseillaise;
it was magnificent. But next time you will not need to sing the
Marseillaise
. There will be a sufficient number of guns to ensure your attack’s a success.

He kept his word. After the 1915 offensives, the troops had come to believe that if Pétain called for an attack there must be some point to it, that it would not be a senseless sacrifice of lives in the way of those over-ambitious generals, out to gain recognition from the conquest at any price of a few yards of enemy trench.

Those long years in junior command had given him an intimacy with the
poilu
denied to most of the other French chiefs, and because of his low rank in 1914 he knew — unlike Haig and Joffre — very well what wounded men looked like. In his rapid rise to stardom he still retained a measure of the paternalism of the good C.O. He
knew how much apparently little things mattered to the fighting soldier. Neglect of them could throw him into a searing rage; as when he discovered that a rest camp for troops out of the line had been placed within sound of the guns. ‘What an idiot!’ cried Pétain, on learning at Verdun that a battalion commander, having received the order of alert just as the rations arrived, had ordered his men to depart forthwith on empty stomachs; ‘He doesn’t deserve to be a corporal.’

Like a Napoleon or a Montgomery, in fact like any truly great captain, Pétain enhanced his magnetic influence over rank-and-file by frequent surprise visits to the front, presenting medals in person immediately after an attack, enquiring about the wounded. The northern, pale-blue eyes seemed to be everywhere, and he was reputed to have a remarkable instinct for knowing whom to praise and whom to blame. Though he was apparently deeply affected by his visits to hospitals, Pétain refused to allow squeamishness to deter him from his duty. On one such occasion he was so moved by meeting a hopelessly wounded eighteen-year-old that he arranged, at his own expense, for the young soldier to see his mother.

Many years later, at the nadir of tragedy, when Pétain, in his dotage, was being pressed to closer collaboration with the Nazis, the faithful Serrigny remarked to him: ‘You think too much about the French and not enough about France.’ Perhaps it was true. Certainly Pétain’s love for the French soldier in 1916 seems to have been entirely naïve and genuine, remarkably free (whatever may have been written more recently) of bogus popularity seeking; in any case, soldiers the world over are phenomenally quick to distinguish the genuine from the phony. As Pierrefeu says of him, after his appointment to the Supreme Command:

Never did Pétain cease to be himself in the presence of the troops. No familiarity, no fatherly affection, no display of sentiment; for such do not deceive the soldier for a moment. He remained calm and imposing, a true Commander-in-Chief wielding sovereign authority. He spoke as man to men, dominating them with his prestige, without trying to put himself on a lower level, as do those who form a false picture of the people. But there was such sincerity and seriousness in his tone, he seemed so absolutely honest, just, and human, that nobody doubted his word. The General derived all his strength, in fact, from his humanity.

As has been seen, the choice of Pétain to command at Verdun was made less because of his qualities than because he happened to be available at the moment. Yet obviously his two great assets — his understanding of the defensive and the devotion he inspired among the troops — ideally suited him to the task there. It was the tragic irony of Fate that, because of the terms of reference to which de Castelnau had committed him in advance, this uniquely humanitarian general would be called upon to subject the men under his command to what was shortly to become the most inhuman conflict of the whole war.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE TAKE-OVER

À la Guerre, les hommes ne sont rien; c’est un seul homme qui est tout.
—NAPOLEON I

O
N
reporting to Chantilly on the morning of February 25th, Pétain and Serrigny found that ‘the panic was at its peak’. The fall of Verdun was expected momentarily, ‘and everybody was saying that General Herr should be shot’. Somehow it leaked out that Pétain had come from Paris, not Noailles, and the word was quickly passed round by those veterans of intrigue that he had first been to see the Minister of War, Galliéni, the implacable foe of G.Q.G. Doubtless the rumour helped augment the alarm in the air. Only Joffre himself, true to form, seemed unaffected by it all. Greeting him with the words ‘
Eh bien!
Pétain, you know that things really aren’t bad at all,’ he gave a laconic resumé of the situation, then sent the new Commander on his way, remarking cryptically, ‘Now you are easy in your mind.’

The party set forth on the road for Verdun. At Châlons-sur-Marne, Pétain stopped to lunch with General Gouraud, the one-armed hero.
¹
By now Pétain appeared to have sunk into a kind of gloom (and no doubt fatigue), as betrayed by a nervous tic of the right eyelid. Always the perfect aide, Serrigny tried to distract him with Rabelaisian reminiscences from army life of twenty years ago. In the course of the conversation, it was revealed that Nini, the garrison belle of Amiens, with whom Gouraud had been passionately enamoured as a Captain, had in fact bestowed her favours on all three officers in the course of time. Gouraud’s manifest disconcertion delighted Pétain, and — according to Serrigny — he ‘left Châlons in complete serenity’. But his earlier mood soon returned. Deep snow-drifts and sheet ice slowed down the party’s progress, and beyond Bar-le-Duc it was reduced to an average of two miles an hour, on running into the chaotic rear of the Verdun army. All the un-
mistakable signs of defeat greeted Pétain’s eyes in his first glimpse of the men he was to command. Every few yards the narrow road was blocked with an indescribable mêlée. Convoys of reinforcements intermingled with men from the depots of Verdun, civilian refugees and shattered regiments all streaming back to the rear. Disorder was accentuated by the terrible conditions. Horses drawing guns slithered helplessly on the icy road, ambulances full of wounded skidded into ditches. The spectacle, especially of the broken infantrymen, strongly affected Pétain. A lieutenant filing past with seventy-five mud-stained survivors of the decimated 2nd Zouaves noted that the new general was unable to hold back his tears; it was a detail he remembered all his life.

Reaching Herr’s headquarters at Dugny, Serrigny recalls he ‘had the impression very clearly that we had entered a lunatic asylum…. Everybody was talking and gesticulating at the same time.’ Herr, on the verge of breakdown, made little sense. His Chief of Staff (Ops) did not even seem to know what were the boundaries of the various corps under command; there was no map of troop positions, and no one could state just what orders had been issued. All they could tell Pétain with certainty at Dugny was the dreadful news that Douaumont had fallen. Quickly taking stock of the atmosphere, Pétain remarked icily to Serrigny: ‘In these circumstances we shall install ourselves at Souilly, where I hope we may find a little more calm.’ Retracing his footsteps to the little village of Souilly that lay astride the main Bar-le-Duc/Verdun road, Pétain was met by de Castelnau, to whom he relayed the dire tidings about Douaumont. Tearing out a sheet from his notebook, de Castelnau scribbled down his historic order that Verdun must be defended at all costs on the Right Bank, and handed it to Pétain. The command of all forces at Verdun was to be taken over at midnight. It was already 11 p.m. and at first Pétain demurred on the grounds that he was not yet
au fait
with the situation. But de Castelnau was adamant, having already promulgated (unknown to Pétain) this second order.