The Guns of August (65 page)

Before that happened Sir John French on August 28 evacuated his forward base at Amiens, which was now menaced by von Kluck’s westward sweep, and on the following day gave orders for moving the main British base back from Le Havre to St. Nazaire below the Normandy peninsula. In the same spirit as the order jettisoning ammunition, the move reflected the single urgent desire that now possessed him—to leave France. Partly sharing it, partly ashamed to share it, Henry Wilson, as described by a fellow officer, “walked slowly up and down the room, with that comical, whimsical expression on his face, habitual to him, clapping his hands softly together to keep time, as he chanted in a low tone, ‘We shall never get there, we shall never get there.’ As he passed me I said, ‘Where, Henri?’ And he chanted on, ‘To the sea, to the sea, to the sea.’”

T
HE
G
RANDS
B
OULEVARDS WERE EMPTY,
shop fronts were shuttered, buses, trams, cars, and horse cabs had disappeared. In their place flocks of sheep were herded across the Place de la Concorde on their way to the Gare de l’Est for shipment to the front. Unmarred by traffic, squares and vistas revealed their purity of design. Most newspapers having ceased publication, the kiosks were hung meagerly with the single-page issues of the survivors. All the tourists were gone, the Ritz was uninhabited, the Meurice a hospital. For one August in its history Paris was French—and silent. The sun shone, fountains sparkled in the Rond Point, trees were green, the quiet Seine flowed by unchanging, brilliant clusters of Allied flags enhanced the pale gray beauty of the world’s most beautiful city.

In the vast warren of the Invalides, Gallieni grappled with obstructionism and the hesitancy of officials to take the radical measures necessary to make the words “entrenched camp” a reality. He envisaged the camp as a base of operations, not a Troy holed up for siege. From the experience of Liège and Namur he knew that Paris could not withstand shelling by the new heavy siege guns of the enemy, but his plan was not to wait passively to be invested but to give battle—with the army he did not yet have—beyond the outer ring of fortifications. Study of the Balkan and Manchurian wars had convinced him that a system of deep and narrow trenches protected by earth mounds and logs, flanked by barbed wire and “wolf pits”—
wide-mouthed holes fitted at the bottom with up-pointed stakes—and manned by trained and determined troops armed with machine guns would be virtually impregnable. These were what he was trying to construct in the stretches between the artillery posts, although he still did not have the army to man them.

Every day, sometimes two and three times a day, with increasing desperation he telephoned GQG demanding the three active corps. He wrote to Joffre, sent emissaries, hammered at the Minister of War and the President, repeatedly warned them Paris was unprepared. By August 29 he had received under his orders so far one naval brigade whose appearance, marching through the streets in white with high-pitched pipe, delighted the populace, if not Gallieni.

He conceived of the work to be done as tripartite: military defense, moral defense, and provisioning. To accomplish each of these tasks it was necessary to be frank with the public. As much as he despised politicians, Gallieni respected the people of Paris who, he considered, could be counted on to behave sensibly in the face of danger. He believed Poincaré and Viviani did not want to tell the country the truth, and suspected them of preparing a “mummery” to deceive the people. His efforts to obtain authority for demolition of buildings obstructing the forts’ line of fire were hampered by official reluctance to alarm the population. Each destruction of property required a document signed by both the mayor of the arrondissement and the Chief of Engineers fixing the value of indemnity to the proprietor—a process that was a source of endless harassment and delay. Each decision was enmeshed in a further “byzantine” argument by those who contended that Paris as the seat of government could not be a “fortified camp” to be defended militarily. The issue, as General Hirschauer disgustedly remarked, offered a “magnificent field of controversy,” and he feared the proponents of an open city would soon succeed in proving the post of Military Governor itself illegal. “You cannot convince the jurists without a text,” he said.

Gallieni provided one. On August 28 the Zone of the
Armies was extended to include Paris and the country on both sides down to the Seine with the result that the municipal government of Paris was brought under the authority of the Military Governor. At 10:00
A.M.
Gallieni assembled his military and civil cabinets in a Council of Defense which was held with everyone standing up and was over by 10:15. Members were asked not to discuss whether Paris should be defended but simply to attest that the presence of the enemy required the institution of a “state of defense.” Documents providing the legal basis were already drawn up and lying on the table. Gallieni invited each person to sign his name and immediately declared the Council adjourned. It was the first and last he held.

Ruthlessly he pursued work on the defenses, sparing no time or pity on demurers or the irresolute, on weakness or ineptitude. Like Joffre, he liquidated incompetents, on his first day of office dismissing a general of Engineers and another general two days later. All inhabitants of the suburbs, “even the oldest and least capable,” were impressed for labor with pick and shovel. An order for 10,000 spades and pickaxes to be collected within twenty-four hours was issued; by evening all had been delivered. When on the same occasion Gallieni ordered 10,000 bowie knives for use as tools his purveyor protested it was impossible because their purchase was illegal. “All the more reason,” replied Gallieni, looking at him sharply over his pince-nez, and the knives were obtained.

On August 29 an area around Paris within a radius of about twenty miles, reaching to Melun on the south and Dammartin and Pontoise on the north, was brought under Gallieni’s authority. Preparations were made for dynamiting bridges in the area. For those classified as “works of art” and part of the “national heritage” a system of special guards was arranged to ensure that they were not destroyed until the last extremity. All entries to the city, even the sewers, were barricaded. Bakers, butchers, market gardeners were organized and cattle brought in to graze in the Bois de Boulogne. To hasten the assembly of stocks of ammunition, Gallieni requisitioned transport “by all means available,” including the taxis of Paris, so
soon to become immortal. Assigned to the Artillery Staff of the entrenched camp was one already encased in history, former Captain, now Major Alfred Dreyfus, returned to active service at fifty-five.

At the front the First and Second Armies in Lorraine, under the terrible pressure of Rupprecht’s guns, still held fiercely and tenaciously to the line of the Moselle. Their line wavered and bulged, in some places even was pierced by German wedges. Tightly contained by French counterattacks on their flanks, these could not be widened to major openings. The battle went on with Rupprecht’s armies probing for the weakest place and Dubail and Castelnau, losing troops to Joffre’s demands for the west, uncertain how long they could hold or whether they could hold. In the villages taken by the Germans the events of Belgium were re-enacted. In Nomeny on the outskirts of Nancy, “citizens fired on our troops,” declared the German Governor of Metz in a bulletin posted on the walls. “I have therefore ordered as a punishment that the village shall be burned to the ground. Nomeny is thus by now destroyed.”

On Castelnau’s left where the front turned to the west, Ruffey’s Third Army, unbalanced by the removal of Maunoury’s divisions, was falling back behind the Meuse below Verdun. Next to it the Fourth Army, which had rested in position on August 28 to prove the retreat was “strategic” and not a rout, was ordered, to the disgust of General de Langle, to resume its retreat on August 29. Further to the left where the pressure against the French line was the greatest, General Lanrezac’s Fifth Army was completing the turning maneuver preparatory for the counter-attack on St. Quentin which Joffre had imposed upon its unwilling commander. At the extreme end of the line, Maunoury’s Sixth Army was coming into position. Between Maunoury and Lanrezac the BEF was being pulled out by Sir John French despite his knowledge of the battle that would be fought on the morrow.

Almost the process was interrupted by a much-needed deed of Anglo-French cooperation when Haig sent word to Lanrezac that his troops were “perfectly ready to attack and
he wished to enter into direct communication and act in concert with the Fifth Army in its planned action at St. Quentin.” One of Lanrezac’s staff immediately hastened to meet him and found Haig standing picturesquely on a little hill, while an orderly held his horse, beside a lance with fluttering white-cross pennon planted in the ground. Haig said his air reconnaissance reported the enemy moving southwest of St. Quentin, “exposing his flank as he advances.”

“Go quickly to your General and give him this information .… Let him act. I am anxious to cooperate with him in this attack.” The offer, conveyed to Lanrezac, gave him “lively satisfaction” and moved him to “say some nice things concerning Sir Douglas Haig.” Arrangements for joint action in the morning were confirmed, subject only to approval by the British Commander in Chief. At 2
A.M.
word came from GHQ that Sir John French refused permission on the ground that the troops were “very tired and must have at least one day’s rest,” a requirement which, however true of the IInd Corps, was not true of the Ist Corps whose commander himself had reported them fit and ready. Lanrezac exploded with wrath.
“C’est une félonie!”
(It’s betrayal!) he shouted, and added what a listener described as “terrible, unpardonable things about Sir John French and the British Army.”

Nevertheless next morning, sandwiched between von Bülow who was moving down against him and Joffre who came up to superintend the offensive, Lanrezac had no choice but to attack. From papers found on a captured French officer, Bülow had learned of the coming attack and was not taken off guard. Doubting Lanrezac’s mood, Joffre arrived early in the morning at Laon, now Lanrezac’s headquarters, to lend him sangfroid out of his own bottomless supply. Laon is built on a high mesa from which the view extends over miles of rolling fields that rise and dip like the swells of a green ocean. Twenty miles to the north in a great semicircle the Fifth Army was drawn up facing northwest toward Guise and St. Quentin. From the tower of the cathedral at the highest point of the town the carved stone heads of cows, instead of gargoyles, gaze in bovine serenity over the landscape. Beneath
them in the same silent calm, Joffre sat watching Lanrezac dictate orders and conduct the battle. He stayed for three hours without saying a word until, satisfied that Lanrezac was displaying “authority and method,” he felt able to leave for a good lunch at the station restaurant before proceeding with his racing chauffeur on his next errand.

This was to find Sir John French who, he suspected, had his eyes on the Channel coast and “might be getting out of our line of battle for a long time.” The place he held in the line between Lanrezac’s Army and the gathering Sixth Army of Maunoury was now crucial and yet outside Joffre’s power to control. He could not give orders to Field Marshal French as he did to Lanrezac or force him to fight by sitting behind him in silent surveillance. If, however, he could persuade the British to stand still, he hoped to stabilize a front on the Aisne along a line Amiens-Rheims-Verdun and resume the offensive from there. British Headquarters having taken another backward step the day before, Sir John was now established at Compiègne which was forty miles or—for tired armies—about three days’ march from Paris. While its neighbor, the French Fifth Army, was fighting all during this day at Guise, lifting enemy pressure, the British Army rested. Having retreated without pursuit the day before, it now, after eight hot days of marching, digging trenches, and fighting engagements great and small, at last came to a halt. The IInd Corps made a short march during the evening hours to bring it across the Oise, but the Ist Corps enjoyed a full day’s rest in the Forest of St. Gobain only five miles from where the left wing of Lanrezac’s Army, which had been marching and fighting for fourteen days and was no less tired, was engaged in major battle.