The Price of Glory (4 page)

The Affair, Combes and André were followed by the most intense bout of Socialist-led anti-militarism, that France had experienced since 1870. All politicians alike distrusted the General Staff, and the repute of the army sank to its lowest ebb. In 1905, a new Act reduced military service to two years, and with it the army declined from 615,000 men to 540,000; in 1906, a regiment in the South of France mutinied when called to suppress an uprising of the ruined winegrowers; in 1907 thirty-six per cent of territorials due for service failed to report. And all this at a time when the danger from without was growing ever more menacing. In Germany, the reins had been wrenched from the hands of Bismarck, who at least had wanted peace and had known how to keep it. Instead, there was the new Kaiser with his bellicose moustaches, a mass of Adlerian complexes attributable to his withered arm, who was capable of such wild switches of both mood and policy that even prominent Germans wondered whether he was quite normal and recalled the ‘Sibyl of Silesia’s’
prophesy of a hundred years earlier — that under this king catastrophe would come to Germany. The Kaiser, having duly noted all that was passing in France and egged on by the now ascendant warlords of the General Staff, was enticed to commit that deadly sin of great leaders; speculation. He began by butting into Morocco, with little idea of what he hoped to achieve and less of how it would all end.

* * *

After the Agadir crisis of 1911, a sharp accentuation of military fervour took place in both France and Germany. Many young men now came to agree with Stendhal that
‘La perfection de la civilisation serait de combiner tous les plaisirs délicats du dix-neuvième siècle avec la présence plus fréquente du danger.’
They did not concern themselves too much with what shapes that danger might assume. In France, the swing from the anti-militarism of a few years earlier was particularly marked. Maurice Barr
è
s, haunted by boyhood memories of drunken French soldiers crawling back defeated from battle, had succeeded Déroul
è
de; taking it upon himself to teach French youth how to die beautifully (and, more dangerously, to despise German arms), he enjoyed a far greater vogue in his writings than Déroul
è
de himself.

In 1913, the restoration of military service to three years was greeted with remarkably good humour by the nation at large. On the brink of war, the rifts within the country and the army caused by The Affair and M. Combes appeared to heal almost miraculously. A staunch
‘revanchist’
from Lorraine and legal adviser to the Schneider-Creusot arms empire, Raymond Poincaré, had been elected President, and the country was whole-heartedly behind him. When the ‘
Union Sacrée’
coalition was formed to prosecute the war, all politicians, even the left-wing pacifists, backed it in a degree of loyalty and unity that had not been seen in France since Napoleon I (nor was it to be seen again in the Third, Fourth or even Fifth Republics). In 1914, the Chief of the Sûreté could remark confidently, ‘the workers will not rise; they will follow the regimental bands,’ and even septuagenarian, anti-militarist Anatole France tried to join the colours. Contrasting sharply with 1870, when war came, there were few shouts of
‘À Berlin’
; instead, an atmosphere of quiet, united, rather business-like resolve prevailed.

* * *

In the army, morale had never been higher. The pilot lamp that — despite all the ‘distractions’ in the long years since 1871 — had been kept alight in its ranks by those dedicated to the ideals of
‘La Revanche’
and of erasing the shame of the lost war, now flared high. The proportion of deserters on mobilisation, which, it had been previously estimated would reach thirteen per cent, turned out in fact to be less than 1½ per cent, and during the first terrible winter only 509 French soldiers deserted. For several years, French dragoons at Pont-à-Mousson had been in the habit of sleeping with rope-ladders at hand, so as not to be taken by surprise by a German cavalry regiment across the frontier, which had boasted it would capture them in their beds on the outbreak of war. This time, in some respects at least, the French Army was genuinely, superbly ready. In fact, it was perhaps a little too ready.

When the Army had fully recovered its confidence after 1870, on the completion of de Rivières’ defence system, it had begun increasingly to abandon its defensive thinking. Its studies of 1870 seemed to prove convincingly that the main reason above all others for France’s defeat had been the lack of offensive spirit. There was much talk about the posture of attack being most suited to the national temperament; the spirit of the
‘furia francese’
was evoked from as far off as the Battle of Pavia in 1525, as was Danton’s exhortation to the defenders of Verdun in 1792—
‘il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace’.
The new mood was also well matched to the philosophy of Bergson that was now all the rage in France, with its emphasis on the
‘éilan vital’.
As the years moved farther away from the actual experience of war, so the philosophy of the offensive moved ever farther from reality. At pre-war French manoeuvres, British observers with memories from the Veldt were always struck by the antipathy to going to ground. At the École de Guerre little study was made of the success of the defence in the American Civil War, the Boer War or in the recent and more significant fighting in Manchuria. In fact, there was little pragmatic study of any sort, and it was hardly surprising that in 1913-1914 three hundred books on war were published in Germany, to only fifty in France.

During the critical years before 1914, the gospel of
‘L’attaque à outrance’
, as it had become known, found its ultimate prophet in Colonel de Grandmaison, Chief of the
Troisième Bureau
(Operations) of the General Staff. He and his supporters had engineered the
downfall of the Commander-in-Chief, Michel, whose approach to countering a German onslaught had been a little too rational for their liking. In his place was installed Joffre, who, because he was a sapper and had served most of his career in the colonies, could be assumed to know nothing of military theory and would make an excellent figure-head.

From top to bottom, the army was impregnated with de Grandmaison’s extravagant, semi-mystical nonsense: ‘In the offensive, imprudence is the best of assurances…. Let us go even to excess, and that perhaps will not be far enough…. For the attack only two things are necessary: to know where the enemy is and to decide what to do. What the enemy intends to do is of no consequence.’ Young soldiers on joining up were expected to learn by heart a catechism which incorporated the following words: ‘From the moment of action every soldier must ardently desire the assault by bayonet as the supreme means of imposing his will upon the enemy and gaining victory….’ Another product of the de Grandmaison philosophy, harking back to grim memories of the physical invasion of France in 1870, was the rigid dogma that — should the enemy dare to seize the initiative even for a moment — every inch of terrain must be defended to the death, and, if lost, regained by an immediate counter-attack, however inopportune. Enforced by threat of Court Martial and disgrace, this was a dogma that hardly encouraged tactical initiative among French army leaders.
¹
Even Foch, France’s leading military intellect, followed the de Grandmaison line. Only a few, like Colonel Pétain, resisted, teaching that ‘firepower killed’ and that it might do terrible things to any
‘Attaque à outrance’
unsupported by heavy weapons; for which heresy his promotion had lagged. De Grandmaison’s doctrine was to cost France hundreds of thousands of her best men, quite unnecessarily; later, discredited, he himself was to find death and
‘La Gloire’
before the end of 1914 while trying to prove his theories at the head of a brigade.

The de Grandmaison doctrine naturally enough had a profound effect on the equipment of the army. In 1909, the General Staff representative on the Chamber of Deputies’ Budget Commission declared: ‘You talk to us of heavy artillery. Thank God, we have none. The strength of the French Army is in the lightness of its guns.’ In 1910 Foch, then Commandant of the Staff College, said: ‘The aircraft is all very well for sport, for the army it is useless.’ The St. Étienne machine gun was brought into service that year, but, said the Inspector General of Infantry, it would ‘not make the slightest difference to anything’. A complicated weapon, it was something of a headache to the troops, and though brought out on manoeuvres to impress journalists, was otherwise left behind at Company HQ. Both machine guns and heavy artillery were deemed contrary to the Grandmaison spirit, and their withdrawal from the Army Estimates was joyfully supported by budget-conscious politicians. (The spirit was infectious and died hard; even after August 1914, Kitchener was telling General Murray that the British Army really should be able to take positions without artillery, instancing his own successes against the Fuzzy-Wuzzies!) Everything depended on what Foch called ‘the Will to Conquer’; that, supported by the bayonet and the ’75. The ’75 was indeed a marvellous weapon; well ahead of its age, quicker firing, more accurate, more mobile, and with longer range than any other field gun in service. To the de Grandmaison school it was ‘God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost’, but as General Weygand later added irreverently: ‘one would have liked to have seen it surrounded by a few saints.’ Superb for fighting in the open field — the kind of war envisaged by de Grandmaison — it could not be used for plunging fire, like the howitzers possessed in plenty by the Germans, and its projectiles were too light to be effective against entrenchments. Nevertheless, the ’75 saved France time and again during the war, and, for once, it was a weapon she had in sufficient numbers from the start. (Not so, alas, its ammunition, for Foch and the others had reckoned on a brief, brutal conflict of a matter of weeks.) Meanwhile, so that the enemy should see them clearly and be terror-struck by their furious numbers, the infantry went to war in the red
Képis
and pantaloons of the Second Empire, despising the Germans for converting to the less martial, though more practical
Feldgrau.
And, just as in 1870, the army found itself once again with a dearth of maps of France, but plenty of Germany.

By de Grandmaison, out of Joffre, was hatched the General Start’s disastrous Plan XVII. On the outbreak of war, four out of five French armies, totalling 800,000 men, were to charge forward, with the main impetus directed towards the lost territories; objective, the Rhine. The strategic aim was to dislocate the ponderous German war-machine before it could carry out its plans. But the
Deuxième Bureau
(Intelligence) of the General Staff were good pupils of de Grandmaison and had indeed not troubled themselves unduly to find out what the enemy’s intentions might be.

* * *

By the end of the old century, two new factors had forced a complete revision of strategy upon the German General Staff. One was General de Rivière’s system of fortifications, which now meant that any attack on France along the traditional invasion route would involve extremely hard, prolonged fighting. The second was France’s alliance with Russia, which meant that Germany would be faced with war on two fronts. Necessity bred one of Germany’s greatest military minds and his equally famous plan: Graf von Schlieffen, who was Chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1906. The Schlieffen Plan was to knock out France in a
Blitzkrieg
while Russia was still mobilising, then turn with all force to the East. The weight of the French Army would be lured towards the Rhine by leaving this sector deliberately weak, while the main German force marched rapidly through Belgium to outflank the French. It would then execute a huge wheel to the west of Paris and eventually, from the rear, pin the French Army up against the Swiss frontier. The plan has been likened to a revolving-door, and under their Plan XVII the French were in fact to add momentum to the door’s rotation, thereby doing just what Schlieffen wanted.

Fortunately for France and unfortunately for Germany, Schlieffen’s successor, Moltke, tampered with the master plan. Although the nephew of the great Moltke, the resemblance between them was roughly that of Louis Napoleon and his uncle. The younger Moltke was the first of the mediocre First War generals to bring disaster to his side by faint-heartedness and half-measures. Schlieffen’s last words are reported to have been ‘make the right wing strong’, but Moltke was fearful of what might happen if the French pushed too hard on the revolving door. Consequently, as additional forces became available, he added eight divisions to the left wing but only
one to the right. More disastrously, he weakened the covering force in the East, so that at the critical moment of the Battle of the Marne two army corps, that might have tipped the balance in favour of Germany, had had to be sent to save East Prussia from an unexpectedly strong Russian threat.

Although the German army of 1914 was a fearsome power, compared with that of 1870, it was a bludgeon to a rapier. It had had no dummy run against the Austrians at Sadowa. Whereas in the French army politics and religion had played their baneful rôle in promotion, in Germany the ‘caste’ system had tended to frustrate the rise of brilliant officers of humbler origins, such as Ludendorff. The idiotic sycophancy that surrounded the Kaiser, whereby at war-games the side commanded by His Majesty always had to win with a magnificent encirclement of the enemy, also had its effect. Moreover, the army that moved on France, a million and a half strong, the largest the world had ever seen, was far too big and unwieldy for a man of Moltke’s calibre to command effectively. Its strength lay chiefly in the excellence of its NCOs, in its reservist system (which completely deceived Joffre just as it had deceived Louis Napoleon) and the superiority of its weapons. Whereas the French had only six of the despised St. Étienne machine guns per regiment, the Germans had highly efficient Maxims that were not relegated to the Company Quartermaster. The whole French Army possessed only 300 heavy guns; the Germans had 3,500. The French heavies were mostly elderly 120 millimetre guns built in the 1880’s, with no recuperation system so that they had to run out up a ramp; they were outclassed in every way by the German 210s and 150s. For ‘super-heavy’ artillery, the French had to make do with a few 270 mm. mortars dating back to 1875, while the Germans had brand new 280s that could fire a\ shell weighing nearly 750 lbs. over a distance of six miles. Finally, they had the monster 420 mm. ‘Big Berthas’ that Krupp had produced in great secrecy, which were to pulverise the ‘impregnable’ Belgian forts and which later were to become all too familiar to the defenders of Verdun.
¹