A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (33 page)

General Joseph Joffre
“If you refuse to carry out my orders, I’ll have you shot!”

Uncertainty gave way to panic. The government left Paris for Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast. But in the midst of it all Joffre remained impassive, maddeningly silent,
calm.
No matter how alarming the situation, how terrible the emergency, the tall and rotund generalissimo never seemed disturbed. He became famous for the care he took always to have a good lunch followed by a nap, end the day with a good dinner, and always get a full night’s sleep (in bed at nine, back at work at five). Even when things seemed to be at their worst, he made his staff understand that under no circumstances was his rest to be disturbed. But between mealtimes and bedtimes he was steadily on the move, using a big touring car driven by a Grand Prix racing champion to make repeated visits to his generals, especially those on the left. Thus he was able to keep himself in touch with events and observe his subordinates in action. He said so little during these visits, had so little to say even when told of shocking events or asked for guidance, that some of the men who dealt with him decided that he was little better than a stately idiot and that his principal contribution was his tranquilizing example. He has also been described as viciously political and self-serving behind his rocklike exterior. He has been accused of dismissing subordinates not so much for failure to perform as for becoming potential rivals or, worst of all, for showing their chief to have been wrong.

But fools rarely succeed under the kinds of circumstances confronting Joffre, and it was not by accident that things began to turn his way. The decision to strip troops from his embattled right wing and send them west by rail was his, and the consequences could not have been more important. The number of divisions facing the German right, seventeen and a half on August 23, rose to forty-one by September 6. In this way, gradually, Joffre gave himself one of the greatest advantages a general can have: superior mass. He magnified the significance of what has to be considered Moltke’s most grievous mistake: his incremental removal of nearly a quarter of a million men from the right wing, which was left without enough divisions to do all the things needing to be done. Thus the great strike force that had obsessed Schlieffen literally to his dying breath found itself outnumbered. It was also enfeebled: bone tired, short of supplies, and increasingly without food. It is possible that Moltke’s greatest mistake was in sending reinforcements to his left, which was in no danger, and accomplishing little of importance, instead of to Kluck and Bülow, where they might have made all the difference. Apparently he was discouraged from doing so by the Belgians’ destruction of key railways.

The French, in contast to the Germans, were reaping all the benefits of fighting on home ground with interior lines of communication. Every twenty-four hours another thirty-two trains arrived at the capital loaded with troops and guns from the east.

Even now, however, Joffre could find no way of stopping the Great Retreat. He continued to wait and watch. “A natural reluctance to abandon even provisionally more of our national territory,” he wrote to the minister of war as late as September 3, “must not make us engage too early in a general battle that might be launched in unpropitious circumstances.”

Moltke now made a change of strategy so far-reaching that it amounted to the end of the Schlieffen Plan. Kluck and Bülow were told to halt their advance. They were to stand in place and face west against whatever forces the enemy was mustering near Paris. All the other German armies were to return to the attack. The Third Army was to fight its way southward to the River Seine. The Fourth and Fifth were to advance west of Verdun, the Sixth and Seventh to force a crossing of the Moselle River. The goal of this last two pairs of armies was to break through on their respective fronts, link up, and so encircle the entire French right in the area around Verdun. Never in history had there been an encirclement on such a scale; it would dwarf Tannenberg. There was no way of being confident that such a thing was possible. The irony of this sudden and drastic shift was that its success would depend on the ability of the German left wing to get past the very fortifications whose strength had made the Schlieffen Plan seem necessary in the first place.

It is difficult to judge whether Moltke’s change of thinking was rooted in a genuine expectation of success or a desperate sense that his right wing was doomed to failure. It is certain that he did not believe the triumphal reports that continued to arrive at his headquarters and cause his staff to rejoice. “We must not deceive ourselves,” he told a member of the German government. “We have had successes, but we have not had victory. Victory means annihilation of the enemy’s power of resistance. When armies of millions of men are opposed, the victor has prisoners. Where are ours?…The relatively small number of captured guns shows me that the French have withdrawn in good order and according to plan. The hardest work is still to be done.”

As remote as he was from the action, as inadequate as knowledge of the situation on the ground was, his intuition was sound.

Background

THE FRENCH COMMANDERS

IT MAY SEEM ODD, AT FIRST, THAT ALMOST NO STUDY OF
the French army at the start of the Great War fails to discuss Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison. Though a professional soldier, Grandmaison never achieved high rank, and he did nothing of importance in the war before being killed in combat (a fate his critics could consider poetic justice) in 1915.

Still, he deserves the attention. Three years before the war began, as a lieutenant colonel in the Operations Bureau at army headquarters, Grandmaison delivered a pair of lectures that thrilled the generals in his audience. He heaped scorn on French military doctrine since the Franco-Prussian War, laying out a new approach that soon came to dominate the nation’s military thinking.

His doctrine, remembered today as “the cult of the offensive,” was rooted in the idea of all-out, nothing-held-back aggressiveness as the key to success in battle. And the word cult really does apply; by 1914 any French officer who failed to embrace it would find himself out of favor, suspect, and professionally sidetracked.

The consequences were fateful, almost fatal. Faith in the offensive, in the power of men wielding bayonets to overcome any enemy, caused Joffre’s generals to send their troops against German machine guns and artillery again and again in the war’s opening months, and to persist even as casualties rose to horrifying levels.

Such thinking had been in the air of France in the prewar years. Philosopher Henri Bergson, later a Nobel Prize winner, was preaching that élan vital, the life force, had a mystic power that if harnessed could enable the nation to defeat even the richer, more populous Germany next door. Also preaching was Ferdinand Foch, the gifted strategist and military theorist who in 1908 became director of the War College in Paris. He declared in his books and lectures that “the will to conquer is the first condition of victory.” Grandmaison, enrolled at the college during Foch’s tenure, became his disciple. Within a few years he was carrying belief in l’offensive à l’outrance, in aggressiveness without restraint, far beyond what even Foch had intended. His words were received with relief and gratitude by an officer corps tired of being told that the best France could hope for was to defend itself against the German military machine. Grandmaison’s insistence that the generals should expect to conquer sounded to them like music.

The triumph of the new doctrine came in 1911. That July, six months after Grandmaison’s electrifying lectures, a showdown over strategy erupted in France’s Supreme War Council. The newly appointed commander in chief, a certain General Victor Michel, put before the council his ideas on how to prepare for war with Germany. He had based his proposals on a concept called offense-in-defense: if war broke out, he said, France’s armies should be arrayed at varying distances from the nation’s eastern borders, where they would wait for the Germans to make the first move (impressively, Michel foresaw their invasion of Belgium) before deciding where and how to strike back. There were advantages to such an approach. It would enable the French to know where the enemy forces were situated and where they were going before deciding how best to move against them. It could require the Germans to commit themselves, perhaps overcommit themselves, and wear themselves down on the offensive while all French options remained open. But to the believers in offensive à l’outrance, such thinking was heresy and not to be endured. It rejected what Grandmaison had taught them: that “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.” Such words imply a willful blindness to the realities of the battlefield, but the beliefs on which they were based prevailed. Michel found it necessary to resign, and the Grandmaisonites became not just popular but the dominant faction in French planning.

It now became necessary to find a replacement for Michel, and the same General Joseph Gallieni who in 1914 would become military governor of Paris emerged as the pivotal figure. He had opposed Michel’s proposals, but less on grounds of theory than because of concerns about Michel’s personal capabilities and his intention, in case of war, to use reserves as frontline troops (something that the French generals abhorred but the Germans would do with significant success).

Minister of War Adolphe Messimy offered the job to Gallieni himself, who was respected on all sides, and Gallieni declined. Asked to take a few days to reconsider, the general again immediately said no. He explained that he regarded himself as too old; he was sixty-two at the time, in uncertain health, and within two years of retirement. He said also that he had too little experience in the command of large armies, and that—what was most important to Gallieni himself, and most reflective of his integrity—he could not honorably assume an office that he had caused to become vacant by failing to support Michel. Asked to suggest someone else, Gallieni offered the name of Paul-Marie Pau, a respected senior officer who had lost an arm in the Franco-Prussian War. Pau however was politically unacceptable, a practicing Catholic at a time when republican France suspected Catholics of seeking a restoration of the monarchy. (Foch, educated by the Jesuits and brother of a Jesuit priest, carried the same liability.) Gallieni’s second suggestion, Joseph Joffre, presented no such difficulties. He was solidly republican but beyond that a man of no politics. Though he enthusiastically accepted the doctrines of Grandmaison, he was no ideologue and in fact displayed little interest in ideas of any kind. He had never attended any of the higher staff schools, had only limited experience in the command of large numbers of troops, and had never attempted to school himself in higher strategy. Because of the gaps in his experience, his appointment surprised many people. Gallieni, however, knew what he was doing—he knew Joffre well.

General Joseph Gallieni
Prepared the way for the Battle of the Marne.

Gallieni (his family, like the Bonapartes, were of Italian origin and had come to France from Corsica) was twenty-one years old when, on the very day in 1870 that France declared war on the Germans to start the Franco-Prussian War, he graduated from the St. Cyr military academy. He was commissioned in the marine infantry, a branch that destined him for service in the network of colonies that France was establishing around the world. After the war, in which he became a prisoner of the Germans, he went on to assignments in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Tonkin (Vietnam). Responsibility came easily to him, and with responsibility came promotion. By the time he was forty he was governor of French Sudan, and for nine years beginning in 1896 he was governor general and commander in chief of the new colony of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. After putting down a rebellion there, he introduced an administration that made Madagascar not only peaceful but prosperous.

One of the needs at Madagascar was a system of fortifications for the colony’s new naval base, and in 1896 an army engineer less than three years younger than Gallieni joined his staff and took charge of construction. This was Joffre, who had started life as the eldest of eleven children of a village barrel-maker in southern France, won a scholarship to Paris’s elite École Polytechnique, interrupted his education to participate in the defense of the city when the Germans besieged it, and upon graduation took an army commission after failing to land the civilian job that was his first choice. He married young, but when his wife died he volunteered for foreign assignments. By 1885 he was chief engineer in Hanoi, and in 1893 in Africa he won his first moment of fame and promotion to lieutenant colonel by successfully taking command of an expedition to Timbuktu after his commanding officer was killed by rebellious tribesmen. He was recalled to France in 1900, Gallieni five years later, and by 1911 the two were among the army’s highest-ranking generals.