The Price of Glory (5 page)

CHAPTER TWO

JOFFRE OF THE MARNE

En avant! Tant pis pour qui tombe
La Mort n’est rien. Vive la tombe
Quand le pays en sort vivant.
      En avant!

PAUL DÉROULÈDE

D
OWN
plunged the avalanche, sweeping away alike the midgets that had been preparing its descent, as well as those that had tried feebly to prevent it. The wind of its passage snuffed out the age of unrivalled prosperity and unlimited promise, in which even poor medieval Russia was beginning to take part, and Europe descended into a new Dark Age from whose shadows it has yet to emerge. For the next four years, it was to seem as if the avalanche were the sole arbiter in the world, with human leaders, political and military, reduced to impotence in the face of a force infinitely greater than anything they had ever foreseen and — in the gentle life of Edwardian Europe — had ever been trained to handle.

Though, from a point of view of doctrinal and material shortcomings, France entered the war in a condition depressingly similar to that of 1870, this time at least her mobilisation functioned; for which much of the credit must go to Joffre, who had made himself an expert on railways. Nearly two million men were brought into position by 4,278 trains, and of all the trains set in motion only nineteen ran late. It was a remarkable achievement; however, the Germans mobilised even more efficiently. Reservists numbering 1,300,000 poured towards the fronts and Joffre, deceived by the Kaiser’s pledge that there would be ‘no fathers of a family in the first line’, could not believe that reserve formations would take part in the initial battles. The strength of the German armies that the French met in executing their Plan XVII convinced Joffre that the enemy’s main weight lay in front; consequently he was completely taken by surprise by the great phalanx that was swinging round by Liège to hammer him in the back.

The two huge forces, the German and the French (supported by the four valiant divisions which were all Britain could provide at
the time), met with a crash which will resound down through the centuries. On one side, the great grey, disciplined hordes strode vigorously forward, confident in their numbers and the superiority of their race, singing raucously:

‘Siegreich woll’n wir Frankreich schlagen,
 
Sterben als ein tapf’rer Held.’

Perhaps a little more than other young men of Europe, after the long years of bourgeois prosperity they were yearning for the ‘great experience’. As one of them noted, ‘the war had entered into us like wine. There is no lovelier death in the world… anything rather than rest at home.’ The spectacle of the first shattered corpses fascinated them, for ‘the horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew us to the war.’ To their Crown Prince, watching them pass, they were ‘joyous German soldiers with sparkling eyes’.

On the other side, young men filled with a mighty lust for revenge were marching up at that rapid staccato pace, accompanied by the regimental music and with the rather more melodious refrain of ‘
Mourir pour la Patrie est le sort le plus beau’
on their lips. Magnificent specimens, these French soldiers of 1914, thought the soldiers of General French’s army, repeatedly astonished to find them bigger and tougher men than themselves. They ripped up the frontier posts in Alsace and sent them to be laid upon the grave of Déroulède. Then the enemy was located. The trumpeters sounded the call that sent a thrill more heady than wine through French veins:

Y a la goutte à boire là-haut!
Y a la goutte à boire!

All along the frontier the infantrymen in their red trousers and thick, blue overcoats, carrying heavy packs and long, unwieldy bayonets, broke into the double behind their white-gloved officers. Many sang the
Marseillaise.
In the August heat, sometimes the heavily encumbered French attacked from a distance of nearly half a mile from the enemy. Never have machine-gunners had such a heyday. The French stubble-fields became transformed into gay carpets of red and blue. Splendid cuirassiers in glittering breastplates of another age hurled their horses hopelessly at the machine guns
that were slaughtering the infantry. It was horrible, and horribly predictable. In that superb, insane courage of 1914 there was something slightly reminiscent of the lemmings swimming out to sea. But it was not war.

For a whole week, as the censors released news of the capture of Mulhouse while suppressing such unpleasant details as casualties, France held her breath and thought Plan XVII might succeed. Triumphantly
Le Matin
proclaimed,
‘Plus un soldat allemand en France!’
But, at Joffre’s headquarters, courier after courier was arriving with news of identical disasters from all parts of the front. In the two weeks that the terrible Battle of the Frontiers lasted, France lost over 300,000 men in killed, wounded, and missing, and 4,778 officers — representing no less than one-tenth of her total officer strength. De Castelnau’s Second Army, which was to have led the advance to the Rhine, reeled back on Nancy almost in a rout; in it, the elite XX Corps commanded by Foch was particularly hard hit. To the North, the swinging German right wing pushed the French and the B.E.F. back to the Marne. In 1870, such catastrophes might well have led to a débâcle as disastrous as either of the Sedans, but this was not the France of either Louis Napoleon or Lebrun. Von Kluck committed his historic blunder of wheeling inwards, on his own responsibility, thereby exposing the First Army’s flank to the newly constituted army guarding Paris. Galliéni, the governor, spotted what had happened; Joffre made the retreating armies turn about; and the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ came to pass.
¹
With it the Germans lost their one chance of an absolute victory (it had been a close thing) though it took the Allies another four bloody years to prove it to them. Their mighty impetus finally checked, they fell back, but the French were too exhausted to turn the retreat into a rout. Then, in the last flicker of the war of movement, there took place the side-stepping motion towards the Channel, with each side trying to outflank the other in the so-called ‘Race for the Sea’.

By the autumn of 1914, a continuous static front had been established from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. It was based not on natural features (the bastion of Verdun left in a precarious salient
that bulged out like a large hernia was the striking exception), but on a line of exhaustion. The first five months of the war in the West had cost both sides more heavily than any other succeeding year; Germany, a total of approximately 750,000 casualties; France, 300,000 killed (or nearly a fifth more than Britain’s total dead in the whole of World War II) and another 600,000 in wounded, captured and missing. The horrors of trench warfare now began.

* * *

Out of the victory of the Marne, Joffre emerged as immeasurably the most powerful figure on the whole Allied side. Before the battle, when the German guns were heard in Paris and cynical American correspondents were openly betting that on the morrow it would have become ‘a provincial city of Germany’, the Government had left hastily for Bordeaux. Exaggerated rumours of the deputies’ Capuan luxuries there soon reached the front, and for the rest of the war Bordeaux became a dirty word. The politicians sank to their lowest repute for many a decade. In the Government’s absence, the
Grand Quartier Général
assumed responsibility for the entire conduct of the war. As a Deputy remarked later, it had become a veritable ‘ministry’ in its own right. And never since Bonaparte had one Frenchman been so all-powerful or so popular as Joffre. Carloads of gifts, boxes of chocolates and cigars, rolled in daily and his officers grew weary dealing with the copious fan-mail; all of which Joffre somehow found time to read with obvious enjoyment.

Joseph Joffre (his middle name, suspiciously enough, was Césaire) was the son of a humble cooper — one of a family of eleven — and, like Foch and de Castelnau, a Pyrenean. In 1870, as a student at the Polytechnic, he had been sent to Vincennes to learn how to fire a cannon, and, after his captain had collapsed with a nervous breakdown, found himself commanding a battery during the Siege of Paris. Soon after graduating from the Polytechnic as an engineer, he was sent to Indo-China, and there began a long career in France’s new empire. In 1894, he led a column in conquest of Timbuctoo, and first made his mark by his efficiency in organising the column’s supplies. Aged 33, he was then the youngest sapper Lieutenant-Colonel. Timbuctoo was followed by Madagascar, until Joffre was called home in 1904 to be Director of Engineers. Between 1906 and 1910 he commanded first a division and then a corps for brief periods; this was his only experience in commanding a large body of infantry.

In 1910 he became a member of the War Council, and the following year, Chief of the General Staff; selected, as has been remarked earlier, more for his qualities as a ‘good Republican’ than for any military brilliance. It was to his credit, however, that between 1904 and 1914 there had been any improvements in the French fortresses and heavy artillery, and he had hammered through (just in time) the Conscription Bill of 1913. He was a talented organiser, but the dual rôle of Commander-in-Chief of France’s main group of armies also required him to be a first-rate strategist and tactician. This he was not.

At the outbreak of war ‘Papa’ Joffre was a widower rising 63. According to Spears, who saw him frequently during 1914,

his breeches were baggy and ill-fitting. The outfit was completed by cylindrical leggings.… His chin was marked and determined. The whiteness of his hair, the lightness of his almost colourless blue eyes, which looked out from under big eyebrows, the colour of salt and pepper, white predominating, and the tonelessness of his voice coming through the sieve of his big, whitish moustache, all gave the impression of an albino. His cap was worn well forward so that the peak protected his eyes, which resulted in his having to tilt his head slightly to look at one. A bulky, slow-moving, loosely built man, in clothes that would have been the despair of Savile Row, yet unmistakably a soldier.

But the really outstanding (in more than one sense) physical feature of Joffre was his belly. His appetite was legendary; staff officers often observed him consume a whole chicken at a sitting, and one, explaining his taciturnity at table, remarked that he never left himself time to speak, even had he wanted to. Joffre maintained his appetite to his death bed; in the final coma, when a hospital orderly tried to insert a few drops of milk between his lips, he opened his eyes abruptly, seized the glass and drained it, then went back to sleep. Once when criticising a general he remarked, tapping his own, that the man ‘had no stomach’, and no doubt his own supremacy in this respect helped make him additionally acceptable to democratic politicians suspicious of the Cassius-type.

Joffre was a true viscerotonic, and this was the source of his principal strengths and weaknesses. He thought from his belly rather than with his mind, with the intuitive shrewdness of a peasant. Even
one of his most loyal associates, and biographer, General Desmazes, comments on his extraordinary lack of intellectualism. Before the war he read little on military theory; afterwards he read not one of the books on the war in which he had played so large a rôle. He was totally lacking in curiosity and imagination. Haig remarked of him, patronisingly: ‘the poor man cannot argue, nor can he easily read a map’. In at least two respects, however, Joffre closely resembled Haig. One was his reserve. (Indeed, it is a mystery how together they ever communicated at all.) But where with Haig this was due to inarticulateness, with Joffre it was more often than not that there was simply nothing in his mind. A Headquarters visited by Joffre, hoping for some vital guidance from him, was generally left still hoping when the great man departed. There was the famous episode of the gunner colonel, who had come to the Generalissimo with a grave problem; after listening for a while, Joffre dismissed him with a pat on the shoulder and a laconic ‘You always loved your guns; that’s excellent.’ Joffre turned this taciturnity to good advantage when assaulted by politicians; like a hedgehog, he ‘rolled himself into a ball’, and his assailants went away, baffled.

Above all, Joffre’s comfortable frame and healthy appetite provided him with utterly unshakeable nerves and an almost inhuman calm. At Chantilly he lived a life of strictest routine. Nothing, certainly not a national disaster, was allowed to interfere with it. In the morning (not early), the duty officer briefed Joffre on the events of the night. At
11.00
hours, the Major-General presented orders for his signature; 12.00 hours, lunch, any delay in which incurred Joffre’s quiet but terrible rage. Afterwards Joffre, accompanied later by Castelnau (on his appointment as Joffre’s Chief of Staff), would go for a walk in the Forest of Chantilly, hands clasped behind his back, his left leg dragging a little. On reaching one particular bench, they would sit down; Castelnau meditating, Joffre dozing. Later in the afternoon, Joffre would receive visitors; at 1700 hours, the Major-General reappeared with the afternoon’s orders; 1900 hours, dinner, and immediately afterwards the Generalissimo retired to bed. He slept the sound, guileless sleep of a child and, like Montgomery, gave strict orders that on no account, repeat
on no account,
was he to be disturbed. Joffre loathed the telephone because it was the one thing that could upset the rhythm of his work; even at the crisis of the Marne he had refused to have the President put through to him. Day and night Joffre’s tranquillity was guarded over by two watch-
dog orderly officers. One was the devoted Thouzelier, or as he was usually called by Joffre,
‘sacré Tou-Tou’
; on the old man’s fall from grace, the only one of his staff to follow him into exile. In a crisis, Joffre would sit in ‘Tou-Tou’s’ room, astride a chair, while the two officers telephoned orders. The only sign he ever gave that things were bad was the ritualistic screwing and unscrewing of the cap of his fountain pen. Thus, for over two fateful years, were conducted the affairs of the greatest army in France’s history.