The Guns of August (67 page)

Then the President of the Republic, appearing “preoccupied and even dispirited,” although as always “cold and reserved,” asked Gallieni how long Paris could hold out and whether the government should leave. “Paris cannot hold out and you should make ready to leave as soon as possible,” Gallieni replied. Desiring, no less than Joffre, to unsaddle himself of the government, he found the advice painless. Poincaré asked him to return later to explain his views to the Cabinet, which in the meantime assembled and passionately argued the question that a bare ten days ago, when the French offensive was launched, would have seemed unthinkable.

Poincaré, Ribot, and the two socialists, Guesde and Sembat, were for staying, or at least awaiting the outcome of the approaching battle. The moral effect of departure, they contended, could produce despair, even revolution. Millerand insisted upon departure. He said a company of Uhlans might penetrate below Paris and cut the railroads to the south, and the government could not take the risk of being shut up inside the capital as in 1870. This time France was fighting as part of an alliance and it was the government’s duty to remain in contact with her Allies and the outside world as well as with the rest of France. Doumergue made a deep impression when he said, “It takes more courage to appear a coward and risk popular disfavor than to risk being killed.” Whether the emergency required reconvening Parliament, as was demanded in excited visits by the presidents of the two chambers, provided a subject for further heated dispute.

Fretting with impatience to return to his duties, Gallieni was kept waiting outside for an hour while the ministers argued.
Finally called in, he told them bluntly they were “no longer safe in the capital.” His stern and soldierly appearance and manner and the “clarity and force” with which he expressed himself made a “profound effect.” Explaining that without an army to fight outside the perimeter, he could not ward off assault by the enemy’s siege artillery; he warned that Paris was not in a state of defense and “cannot be put in one … It would be an illusion to believe that the entrenched camp could offer a serious resistance if the enemy should appear in the next few days before our line of exterior forts.” The formation of an army of four or at least three corps to fight under his orders outside the city as the extreme left wing of the French line was “indispensable.” The delay in preparing the defenses, before his appointment as Governor, he charged to influential groups who wanted Paris declared an open city to save it from destruction. They had been encouraged by GQG.

“That’s right,” Millerand interrupted. “It is the opinion at GQG that Paris should not be defended.”

Guesde, the socialist, speaking his first words as minister after a lifetime of opposition, excitedly broke in. “You want to open the gates to the enemy so Paris won’t be pillaged. But on the day the Germans march through our streets there will be a shot fired from every window in the working-class quarters. And then I will tell you what will happen: Paris will be burned!”

After hectic debate it was agreed that Paris must be defended and Joffre required to conform, if necessary under pain of dismissal. Gallieni argued against any rash removal of the Commander in Chief at this stage. As to whether the government should go or stay, the Cabinet remained completely at odds.

Leaving the ministers “overcome with emotion and indecision” and, as they seemed to him, “incapable of coming to a firm resolve,” Gallieni returned to the Invalides, making his way through the crowds of anxious citizens besieging its doors for permits to leave the city, to take their cars, to close essential businesses, and a thousand other reasons. The buzz
of anxiety was louder than usual; that afternoon for the first time a German
Taube
bombed Paris. Besides three bombs on the Quai de Valmy which killed two persons and injured others, it dropped leaflets telling Parisians that the Germans were at their gates, as in 1870, and “There is nothing you can do but surrender.”

Daily thereafter one or more enemy planes returned regularly at 6:00
P.M.
, dropped two or three bombs, and killed an occasional passerby in an effort, presumably, to frighten the population. The fearful went south. For those who remained in Paris during this period, when no one knew if the next day might not bring the spiked helmets marching in, the flights of the
Taube,
always at the
apéritif
hour, provided excitement to compensate for the government’s prohibition of absinthe. That night of its first visit Paris was blacked out for the first time. The only “little gleam of light” to pierce the general gloom, Poincaré wrote in his diary, was in the East where, according to a telegram from the French military attaché, the Russian armies were “developing their offensive toward Berlin.” In fact they were being cut down and surrounded at Tannenberg, and on that night General Samsonov committed suicide in the forest.

Joffre heard a more accurate version when a German radio message, intercepted at Belfort, told of the destruction of three Russian corps, the capture of two corps commanders and 70,000 other prisoners and announced, “The Russian Second Army no longer exists.” This terrible news coming when French hopes were already sinking might have dispirited even Joffre except that it was followed by other news which showed the Russian sacrifice had not been in vain. Intelligence reports revealed the transfer of at least two German corps from the Western Front to the East and were confirmed next day by reports of thirty-two troop trains passing eastward through Berlin. This was Joffre’s gleam of light, this the aid for which all France’s pressure on Russia had been brought to bear. Even so, it hardly counterbalanced the projected loss of the British whose commander’s refusal to remain in contact with the enemy opened the way to envelopment of the Fifth
Army. The Fifth was also in danger of being outflanked on its right through the space thinly filled by the Foch Detachment.

Wherever a weak sector needed reinforcement, another sector had to be dangerously depleted. On this same day, August 30, Joffre visited the front of the Third and Fourth Armies to look for forces he could assign to Foch. On the road he passed the retreating columns who had fought in the Ardennes and on the heights of the Meuse. Red trousers had faded to the color of pale brick, coats were ragged and torn, shoes caked with mud, eyes cavernous in faces dulled by exhaustion and dark with many days’ growth of beard. Twenty days’ campaigning seemed to have aged the soldiers as many years. They walked heavily, as if ready to drop at every step. Emaciated horses, with bones sticking out and with bleeding harness sores, sometimes dropped in the shafts, were hurriedly unharnessed by the artillerymen, and dragged off to the side of the road so as not to obstruct the way. Guns looked old and blistered with barely a few patches of their once new gray paint showing through the mud and dirt.

In contrast, other units, still vigorous, had become confident veterans in the twenty days, proud of their fighting skills and eager to halt the retreat. The ultimate compliment was earned by the 42nd Division of Ruffey’s Army which, after holding the rearguard and successfully disengaging, was told by its corps commander, General Sarrail, “You have given proof of
cran.
” When Joffre ordered this division transferred to Foch, General Ruffey protested violently on the ground of an anticipated attack. Unlike General de Langle of the Fourth Army whom Joffre had just found calm, confident, and “perfectly master of himself”—the one essential duty of a commander in Joffre’s eyes—Ruffey appeared nervous, excitable, and “imaginative to an excessive degree.” As Colonel Tanant, his Chief of Operations, said, he was very clever and full of a thousand ideas of which one was magnificent but the question was which. Like the deputies in Paris, Joffre needed a scapegoat for the failure of the offensive and Ruffey’s conduct decided the selection; he was removed that day from command of the Third Army and replaced by General Sarrail.
Invited to lunch next day with Joffre, Ruffey blamed his defeat in the Ardennes on the last-minute removal of the two reserve divisions that Joffre had transferred to the Army of Lorraine. If he had had those 40,000 fresh men and the 7th Cavalry Division, Ruffey said, he could have rolled up the enemy’s left, and “what a success for our arms we might have won!” In one of his terse and mysterious remarks, Joffre replied,
“Chut, il ne faut pas le dire.”
His tone of voice has been lost, and it will never be known whether he meant, “You are wrong; you must not say that,” or “You are right but we must not admit it.”

On that Sunday, August 30, the day of Tannenberg, the day the French government was warned to leave Paris, England received a shock, since known as the “Amiens dispatch.” Headed, with initial exaggeration, “Fiercest Fight in History,” it appeared with awful impact in a special Sunday edition of
The Times
on the front page where, ordinarily, discreet columns of advertising screened readers from the news. Subheads proclaimed, “Heavy Losses of British Troops—Mons and Cambrai—Fight Against Severe Odds—Need for Reinforcements.” This last phrase was the key; although the dispatch was to arouse an official storm, provoke a furious debate in Parliament, and earn a scolding from the Prime Minister as a “regrettable exception” to the “patriotic reticence” of the press as a whole, it was in fact published with an official purpose. Instantly seeing its qualities as recruiting propaganda, the Censor, F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, passed it and urged it upon
The Times,
which published it as a patriotic duty with an appended notice as to the “extreme gravity of the task before us.” It was written by a correspondent, Arthur Moore, who had arrived at the front in the midst of the retreat from Le Cateau and the hectic despair at GHQ.

He wrote of a “retreating and a broken army” after the series of engagements “which may be called the action of Mons,” of the French retreat on the flank, of the “immediate, relentless, unresting” German pursuit and its “irresistible vehemence,” of British regiments “grievously injured” though
with “no failure in discipline, no panic and no throwing up the sponge.” In spite of everything the men were still “steady and cheerful” but “forced backwards, ever backwards.” He told of “very great losses,” of “bits of broken regiments,” and of some divisions having “lost nearly all their officers.” Evidently infected with the mood of GHQ, he wrote rather wildly of the German right wing, “so great was their estimated superiority in numbers that they could no more be stopped than the waves of the sea.” Britain, he concluded, must face the fact that the “first great German effort has succeeded” and “the investment of Paris cannot be banished from the field of possibility.”

When, in summarizing the need for reinforcements, he spoke of the BEF which “bore the weight of the blow,” he laid the foundations of a myth. It was as if the French Army had been an adjunct somewhere in the offing. In fact the BEF was never at any time in the first month in contact with more than three German corps out of a total of over thirty, but the idea that it “bore the weight of the blow” was perpetuated in all subsequent British accounts of Mons and of the “Glorious Retreat.” It succeeded in planting in the British mind the conviction that the BEF in the gallant and terrible days of its first month of battle saved France, saved Europe, saved Western civilization or, as one British writer unbashfully put it, “Mons. In that single word will be summed up the Liberation of the World.”

Alone among the belligerents Britain had gone to war with no prearranged framework of national effort, no mobilization orders in every pocket. Except for the regular army, all was improvisation and, during the first weeks, before the Amiens dispatch, almost a holiday mood. Up to then the truth of the German advance was concealed by—to use Mr. Asquith’s exquisite phrase—“patriotic reticence.” The fighting had been presented to the British public—as to the French—as a series of German defeats in which the enemy unaccountably moved from Belgium to France and appeared each day on the map at places farther forward. All over England on August 30 as
The Times
was read at Sunday breakfast tables, people were
aghast. “It was as if,” thought Mr. Britling, “David had flung his pebble—and missed!”

In the sudden and dreadful realization that the enemy was winning the war, people, searching for hope, seized upon a tale that had cropped up within the last few days and turned it into a national hallucination. On August 27 a seventeen-hour delay in the Liverpool-London railway service inspired the rumor that the trouble was due to the transport of Russian troops who were said to have landed in Scotland on their way to reinforce the Western Front. From Archangel they were supposed to have crossed the Arctic Sea to Norway, thence come by ordinary steamer to Aberdeen, and from there were being carried by special troop trains to Channel ports. Anyone whose train was held up thereafter knowingly attributed the delay to “the Russians.” In the gloom following the Amiens dispatch with its talk of German numbers like “the waves of the sea” and its cry for “men, men and more men,” thoughts turned unconsciously toward Russia’s limitless manpower, and the phantoms seen in Scotland took on body, gathering corroborative detail as the story spread.

They stamped snow off their boots on station platforms—in August; a railway porter of Edinburgh was known who had swept up the snow. “Strange uniforms” were glimpsed in passing troop trains. They were reported variously to be going via Harwich to save Antwerp or via Dover to save Paris. Ten thousand were seen after midnight in London marching along the Embankment on their way to Victoria Station. The naval battle of Heligoland was explained by the wise as a diversion to cover the transport of the Russians to Belgium. The most reliable people had seen them—or knew friends who had. An Oxford professor knew a colleague who had been summoned to interpret for them. A Scottish army officer in Edinburgh saw them in “long gaily-colored coats and big fur caps,” carrying bows and arrows instead of rifles and with their own horses “just like Scottish ponies only bonier”—a description that exactly fitted the Cossacks of a hundred years ago as they appeared in early Victorian mezzotints. A resident of Aberdeen, Sir Stuart Coats, wrote to his
brother-in-law in America that 125,000 Cossacks had marched across his estate in Perthshire. An English army officer assured friends that 70,000 Russians had passed through England to the Western Front in “utmost secrecy.” At first said to be 500,000, then 250,000, then 125,000, the figure gradually settled at between 70,000 and 80,000—the same number as made up the departed BEF. The story spread entirely by word of mouth; owing to the official censorship nothing appeared in the papers except in the United States. Here the reports of homecoming Americans, most of whom had embarked at Liverpool, which was in a furor of excitement over the Russians, preserved the phenomenon for posterity.