To Lose a Battle (5 page)

1919–30

Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
,
The World Crisis

Youth could win, but had not learned to keep; and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.

T. E. LAWRENCE
, on Versailles

13 July 1919

Even on the Sunday afternoon preceding the next day’s great event, crowds had begun to form along the Champs-Élysées. By 3 a.m. that night an estimated 100,000 people had already taken up positions there. The Arc de Triomphe was unapproachable. Among the crowds, tempered by the presence of so many women still clad in mourning for a son or a husband, a tone of restrained, almost sober, jubilation dominated. It was all very different from the August day of five years earlier when frenetic Parisians had swarmed through the city singing the
Chant du Départ
and shouting ‘To Berlin!’

The janitors and charwomen had barely finished sweeping away the debris of diplomacy from Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors – that great chamber where in 1871 a victorious Prussian king had so arrogantly proclaimed himself Kaiser and which, half a century later, France with an unsurpassable sense of theatre had selected as the fitting stage for the final act in the tragedy entitled Revenge. After more than four years of the most terrible war humanity had ever known, peace was now a fact. In London, as the guns boomed out the news that the Treaty had at last been signed, loyal crowds had thronged outside Buckingham Palace to hear King George V say ‘I join you in
thanking God.’ But somehow, the discussions having dragged on so tediously, details of the Treaty itself had already fallen a bit flat. The British public was as glad as the Press to get back to more immediate and appealing topics; there were the first post-war Wimbledon and Henley, even though the
Illustrated London News
mourned that the latter was ‘not quite itself this year’.

In Paris especially the signature of the Treaty had swiftly become eclipsed by the imminence of this other, tangibly more magnificent occasion. 14 July 1919 was the day of the Victory Parade, France’s moment of supreme triumph – to many Frenchmen, possibly the greatest triumph in all her long history. Certainly never was there to be an occasion more fitting of
Le jour de gloire
celebrated by the
Marseillaise
than this first
Quatorze Juillet
since Alsace-Lorraine had returned to the fold from the forty-eight years of bondage.

On the eve of the procession, a temporary cenotaph almost filled the mighty vault of the Arc de Triomphe.
²
Each of the four sides of the cenotaph was guarded by a Victory, the wings of which had been fashioned from the fabric of war-planes. On the surfaces of its plinth could be read the sombre dedication, ‘
Aux morts pour la patrie
’ Throughout the night, flames of Greek fire smouldered and flickered from urns mounted at its angles, while powerful searchlights transformed its gilt plaster into gold. Surrounding the cenotaph, soldiers of all arms of the French Army kept vigil with rifles reversed. They were watched by a silent and reverent crowd, perched upon or kneeling between the circle of captured enemy cannon drawn up around the Étoile.

14 July 1919

Shortly after midnight, the massive pylon was towed out from under the arch by tractors, so as to enable the triumphal procession to pass through it, and established a short distance
away. As the dawn prefacing a day of silver and blue broke (it recalled to some of the more romantic-minded French journalists the day of Austerlitz), a remarkable spectacle greeted the eyes of those lucky enough to have gained access to balconies high up on buildings flanking the Champs-Élysées. As far as the eye could see, down the green line of the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, and all the way along the five miles of the processional route, fluttered the flags and pennants of the Allied nations from an endless forest of white masts. On either side of the Rond-Point was heaped a huge mound of captured German guns, surmounted on one side by the Gallic cock of 1914, preening himself for the fight, and on the other by the victorious cock of 1918, crowing his ascendancy to the world. Down at the Porte-Maillot, the resplendent masses of the Allied contingents were forming up behind their leaders, greeted by members of the Municipal Council, who, like the aediles of antiquity, were opening the city to the conquering armies.

At 7.45 a.m. a car arrived at the Étoile bringing Clemenceau, the dread ‘tiger’ who, from the brink of defeat, had flogged France on to victory through the last desperate year of the war. Occasionally shooting fierce glances to right and left, the old tiger, followed by his inseparable lieutenant, a serious and pasty-faced young man called Georges Mandel, shambled slowly up to the official stand. Shortly after eight appeared the President of the Republic himself, Raymond Poincaré, the man of Lorraine, a symbol of all that France had fought so gallantly to regain, his open car cheered along the length of the Champs-Ésées. Accompanied by France’s two glorious Marshals, Joffre and Foch, the President laid a wreath at the base of the cenotaph. The Marshals then drove off to take up their positions at the head of the parade. As the President resumed his position on the tribune, cannon began to speak out in the distance – from the Bois de Boulogne, from Mont-Valérien, from all the forts which, during the bitter winter of 1870, had endeavoured to save the city when besieged by the now humbled enemy. Rockets soared up and exploded over the Arc de Triomphe. Down at the Porte-Maillot, a captain took out his watch and gave the order heard at so many lethal dawns during
the preceding four years:
Avancez!
The drums rolled, the trumpets sounded out their fanfares in those peculiarly Gallic, almost querulously high-pitched notes, and approaching the Arc de Triomphe was soon heard the music of the regimental bands playing out the stirring strains of
Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine.
An electric sense of expectancy rippled through the crowd. All the fatigue of the long wait evaporated.

The chains which had encircled the arch, ever since the day when, forty-eight years ago, the Prussians had engraved perpetual hatred in French hearts by insisting on their rights to a triumphal march through the prostrate city, had been removed. Now, for the first time since that day of shame, marching men began to appear through the sacred arch. But those who led the way across the threshold in this historic moment, they were not Joffre or Foch; not the cavalry, or the zouaves, or any Allied detachment. They were three young men, or what remained of them, unspeakably crippled by war, still in uniform, but trundled by their nurses in primitive chariots like the prams of deprived children. Immediately behind them came a large contingent of more
grands mutilés.
Officers and men of all ranks mixed together, many already in mufti, they marched – or hobbled – without precedence or any semblance of military order, twelve abreast. Hardly one had not lost an eye or a limb, and many bore on their chests France’s most coveted decoration, the Médaille Militaire. The totally blind – some accorded the privilege of being ensign-bearers – came led by the one-legged, or the armless; men with their destroyed faces mercifully hidden behind bandages; men with no hands; men with their complexions still tinted green from the effects of chlorine; men with mad eyes staring out from beneath the skull caps which concealed some appalling head injury. Some were famous heroes, easily recognized by the crowd; among them, identifiable by his immense stature, limped Sergeant André Maginot, already a well-known figure in the Assembly, badly wounded at Verdun.

With a painful, halting pace the column moved by, down the Champs-Élysée to the stands specially set apart for them. As they passed a stand filled with a hundred and fifty young Alsatian
girls in national costume, flowers rained down upon them. For a brief moment the terrible spectacle of the broken men was met with a kind of stunned silence. Then ‘an immense cry, which seemed to spring from the very entrails of the race, arose from the vast crowd, a cry which was both a salute and a pledge’. No one who watched the
mutilés pass that day could be unaware of what they represented: of the many thousands
, more hopelessly maimed, lodged in hospitals across the country which they would never leave, of the hundreds of thousands of other war casualties, only relatively more fortunate, to whom the future could hardly offer much – and who in turn would be able to contribute but little towards the reconstruction of their exhausted nation; but above all of the lost legions of men who had not returned at all from the martyrdom of the Western Front, either whole or crippled. From metropolitan France alone these numbered 1,315,000 – or 27 per cent of all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven; no combatant nation except for little Serbia had a higher mortality rate – higher than Russia, higher than Germany or her allies. It was a fact which, so brutally brought home on this luminous day of victory celebrations, would never cease to haunt the nation.

There was a long pause in the procession, ‘as if to permit us to breathe – or to dry our tears’. Then came
la gloire
itself. Accompanied by a thunderous roll of drums and fanfare of trumpets a squadron of the magnificent Gardes Républicains rode through the Arc de Triomphe, and just forty yards behind them rode Joffre and Foch. Up to the eleventh hour there had been some discussion as to whether Joffre, fallen from grace during the Battle of Verdun, should take part in the parade at all. Finally Foch had settled matters by declaring with admirable magnanimity that unless Joffre rode with him,
inter pares
, he would not march either. So here they both were, riding abreast, the man who had saved France on the Marne in 1914, and the man who had brought her to final victory in 1918; France resisting, and France attacking. Each of the two leaders was wearing the uniform with which he had so long been associated: Foch all in grey, with a képi bearing three rows of oak leaves, Joffre a portly figure in black dolman and scarlet
breeches. Joffre, showing his age, seemed to be much moved by the vast crowds, which he repeatedly pointed out to Foch, as if surprised they should still recognize him; Foch, rigidly upright in the saddle of his famous charger, Émir, his Marshal’s baton with its seven gold stars firmly grasped in the right hand, resembled all that a victorious general should be. A few discreet paces behind – a position that had long become habitual – rode the neat and dapper figure of General Maxime Weygand, Foch’s Chief of Staff. Then came the rest of the Allied Generalissimo’s staff, including a Colonel Georges who, like Weygand, would also be called upon a fill a role of dreadful responsibility twenty years later.

Now it was the turn of the Allies. First, in alphabetical order, appeared the Americans with General Pershing at their head. Swinging along the route, they struck a
Times
correspondent as ‘the finest American troops Paris has yet seen, and their marching is really perfect’. As the bandsmen strummed out ‘Over There’, something about the lilt of it reminded excited French ears of the jazz that was now all the rage in Paris. Next came the Belgians, followed after a five-minute interval by the British, led by Sir Douglas Haig. As they bore past the colours of two hundred regiments that had fought and bled in Flanders or along the Somme, the crowd showed its enthusiasm by taking up the refrain of ‘Tipperary’ that France had got to know so well. Then followed Italians in slate-coloured uniforms, little Japanese in khaki, Portuguese, Roumanians, Serbs and Siamese, and men wearing French tunics of
bleu horizon
, men from the ‘new’ nations who owed their existence to the Allied victory, and who would in turn be abandoned by these same Allies within the next two decades – Czechoslovaks and Poles. So many armies had it required to overthrow the might of the German Empire. Yet one army was missing, one without whose aid the Miracle of the Marne could never have occurred and without whose allegedly bottomless reserves of men there would not this day be any victory celebrations – Russia, now sealed off from her former allies by revolution and civil war, and apparently forgotten.

Once the initial restraint imposed by the sombre overture to
the parade had passed, the crowd allowed itself to go wild. As each national detachment marched by, a fresh gust of cheering broke loose. Against all orders, cavalrymen closing intersections hoisted girls on to their saddles to provide them with a better view. Children and young women flung basketfuls of flowers on to the triumphal way and garlanded the bayonets of the soldiers with green and gilded paper crowns, so that as the morning went on it seemed as if they were marching on a carpet of blossom. On this day at least there was nothing grudging in France’s gratitude to her Allies. But, understandably enough, it was the mighty French contingent bringing up the rear of the parade for which the spectators had preserved the power of their lungs. A solitary figure riding through the Arc de Triomphe on a white horse, gravely majestic, tall and magnificent in a uniform of
bleu horizon
, the austere face even paler than usual, provided the signal for the opening of the day’s great climax – Marshal Pétain, the Commander-in-Chief. Behind him followed the
poilus
he had led through the ten months’ hell of Verdun, had nursed through the mutinies which so nearly broke the French Army the following year. From each of France’s twenty-one army corps, a company of the regiment bearing the highest battle-honours for gallantry had been selected to march in the parade. What a spectacle of triumphant glory they presented as they marched past with the regimental music thundering out
Sambre-et-Meuse
and the
Marche Lorraine
, the battle hymns that had so stirred French hearts during the years of agony! Then came the little
chasseurs
with their rapid pace and large floppy berets, men who had borne the brunt of the first German onslaught at Verdun; resplendent-looking hussars and
cuirassiers
in their glittering breastplates, who had not really had much of a chance in this war, after the first mad carnage during the Battle of the Frontiers; marvellous-looking men from France’s overseas empire, Foreign Legionnaires, ferocious Moroccan
goums
in turbans and flowing white robes, Algerian and Indo-Chinese
tirailleurs
, coal-black Senegalese with an alarming reputation for not taking prisoners; artillerymen drawing a battery of the famous 75s that had halted the Germans on the Marne, and a
battery of the less elegant, stubby 155s that had played so vital a role in the defence of Verdun; airmen, led by one of the few survivors of the legendary aces, René Fonck, bearing an ensign; marines in navy blue, who, cheek by jowl with the Belgians and British, had anchored the line in the muddy swamp of Flanders.