His career as chief of the General Staff would prove otherwise. Although he later claimed that he detested staff work, Joffre was a master of details and a bureaucratic micromanager. He carefully read every major study and, if it supported his policies and decisions, initialed it to show approval. If it did not, he pondered his choices carefully and then edited the study to bring it into line with his own position. During the war, he flooded his field commanders—from army to division level—with telegrams, telephone calls, and a host of staff officers to make certain that they adhered to his strategy. He took to the roads by day and night to maintain a short leash on those commanders. He was not above visiting army headquarters and sitting there for hours to see that his will was being carried out. He had no patience for incompetent or failed commanders. He fired and promoted at will, the former often accompanied by fits of towering rage. But there were limits to his power, and he was careful for the most part to keep the war ministers whom he served informed of his actions and designs. And he showed the patience of Job in dealing with the testy British, fully recognizing that a breach in the Anglo-French relationship could jeopardize the war effort, and even the Entente.
Soon after his appointment to the army’s highest post, Joffre revealed his iron hand as he reshaped the French army. Along with his aristocratic and devout Catholic deputy, Édouard de Castelnau, Joffre was the architect of the French deployment plan in 1914. The so-called Plan XVII, historian Robert Doughty has argued, was “Joffre’s own.”*
In 1911, Joffre inherited a wealth of information from his intelligence branch, the Deuxième Bureau, pointing to a likely German thrust through southeastern Belgium and the Ardennes. This assumption had stemmed from British, French, and Russian observers at German maneuvers; from seemingly reliable espionage reports; and from recent German railway construction to its western border. Most spectacularly, in 1903 and 1904 French intelligence agents had received the so-called Vengeur documents—presumably purchased from a disgruntled German staff officer—that provided them with a rough outline of what less than two years later would be the Schlieffen Plan. Close examination especially in 1907 and 1913 of German railway building in and around Aachen led the Deuxième Bureau to the conclusion that the Germans likely would invade north of Liège in the direction of Brussels.80 Joffre’s operations branch, the Troisième Bureau, for its part argued that from the days of Frederick the Great to Helmuth von Moltke, German doctrine had favored massive envelopments. Still, there was always room for misinterpretation—but none for error.
Joffre had also inherited an operations plan and a political-strategic nightmare. Plan XVI, crafted by Henri de Lacroix and approved by the Superior Council of War in March 1909, addressed the expected German envelopment strategy.81 Believing that the enemy would seek to turn the French line of fortifications in Lorraine by sending one army through the Ardennes at Verdun and another through Sedan, and knowing the political objections to marshaling forces along the Belgian frontier, Lacroix created a flexible defensive-offensive strategy. He proposed placing a new Sixth Army at Châlons-sur-Marne,† west of Verdun, ready to deploy toward Toul-Épinal on the right, Verdun on the left, or Sedan-Mézières on the far left of the French line. The nature of the German invasion would determine the eventual choice.
The political-strategic nightmare had been brought about by Lacroix’s successor, Victor Michel. Much concerned about a German thrust through “the very heart of Belgium,” Michel in July 1911 proposed defending on the right from Belfort to Mézières while simultaneously launching a “vigorous offensive” on the left toward Antwerp, Brussels, and Namur.82 Since France lacked the regular forces for such a massive deployment, Michel suggested that it revive the “demi-brigade” of the French Revolution, one that featured three combined-arms battalions, including reservists. The Superior Council unanimously rejected his reorganization—and with it his strategy. Generals close to Minister of War Messimy referred to Michel as a “loony”83 and to his plan as “une insanité.” Michel resigned within two days of this rebuff.
Whom to choose as successor? Messimy, as previously stated, decided on youth: Joseph Joffre was a mere fifty-nine years of age, a moderate republican, and an experienced administrator. As well, Messimy reformed the army’s splintered system of High Command, Superior Council, and General Staff by placing the High Command “completely and without reserve” under Joffre.
Six weeks into the job, Joffre began work on what was to become France’s deployment plan in 1914. He rejected Michel’s notion of defending along the frontier with Belgium and shifted the center of gravity for the mass of French armies to the line Paris-Metz, assigning only reserve units to the Belgian border. His staff was convinced that the Germans would hold in Alsace-Lorraine and advance through Belgium, but in January 1912 the Superior Council of National Defense again made it clear that the French army was not to advance into Belgium until the Germans did so.84
Joffre kept the Belgian option to himself. He informed neither the politicians at Paris nor his corps commanders that he preferred to attack into southern Belgium against what he believed would be the “weak” German center. He later confided in his memoirs: “I preferred to say nothing [about the Belgian option] in an operations plan.”85 At most, he spoke of an advance “in the general direction of the northeast as soon as all French forces were assembled.” Clear as mud.
On 18 April 1913, Joffre shared with the Superior Council of War the basic contours of his Plan de renseignements. It was accepted on 2 May. His staff put the final touches on it in February 1914, and the ponderous annexes to the plan were completed on 1 May.86 France would concentrate five armies in the northeast. On the right of the French line, First Army was to drive toward Sarrebourg and Second Army against Saarbrücken; at the center, Third Army was to attack Metz-Thionville; and on the left, Fifth Army was to advance into Luxembourg toward Belgium. If the Germans came through Belgium, Joffre was given the green light to “penetrate the territory of Belgium at the first news of the violation of that territory by the German army.”87 In a secret annex, Joffre would have the British deploy on the left of Fifth Army west of Mézières. But in no case would he allow their action (or inaction) to affect his overall deployment.
Joffre’s army closely paralleled that of Moltke’s in terms of organization.88 The typical army corps consisted of about forty thousand men organized into two divisions. Each corps had as well a brigade of reserves, divided into two regiments of two battalions each, and a cavalry regiment of four squadrons. Its artillery consisted of 120 superb flat-trajectory 75mm (soixante-quinze) guns—nine four-gun batteries for each of its infantry divisions as well as twelve four-gun batteries as special corps artillery. Industrial output was set at about 13,600 rounds per day. Since the French army expected and prepared for a series of highly mobile battles, it saw little need to burden the corps with slow and ponderous heavy artillery. The concept of preliminary bombardment to “soften” the enemy line was rejected by most staff planners. Moreover, the army’s technical services objected to introducing additional calibers that would only multiply supply problems. And although the War Ministry had ordered 220 105mm howitzers (range twelve kilometers) on the eve of the war, similar objections from the technical services prompted it to reduce the order to 36. As a result, France entered the war in 1914 with a plethora of heavy artillery pieces—mostly 105mm and 120mm as well as elderly Rimailho 155mm guns.
Each French infantry division had two brigades of two regiments each; each regiment, in turn, had three battalions, including a machine-gun section of two guns. The divisional commander had at his disposal three groups of 75mm mobile field artillery pieces. Cavalry divisions (ten in 1914) were made up of three brigades each of two regiments (four squadrons), a total of about forty-five hundred “sabers.” Two four-gun, horse-drawn batteries of 75mm guns and a bicycle detachment of 324 men accompanied a cavalry division into battle. Each brigade had a machine-gun section with Model 1907 Saint-Étienne guns. The proverb
ial arme blanche carried lances, sabers, and antiquated single-action 1890 Lebel carbines (without bayonet). Cuirassiers and dragoons were resplendent in their steel breastplates, heavy cavalry in their brass helmets streaming long horsehair plumes. Cavalry’s major role was to scout enemy positions and to assist the infantry during attack.
Aviation was still in its infancy. The French Armée de l’air of some 140 operational aircraft organized into squadrons of 5 or 6 planes in 1914 was designed to track enemy movements and to fight its opposite numbers for control of the air. Range and bomb loads were limited. There were as yet no separate fighter and bomber squadrons. On 14 August, several French Voisin pusher biplanes bombed German Zeppelin hangars at Metz-Frescaty, thereby showing the way toward the future of military aviation.
Joffre was an ardent admirer of the all-out offensive, l’offensive à outrance. He vowed never again to allow a French army to be encircled as at Sedan on 1 September or to surrender under siege as at Metz on 27 October 1870. “The French Army, returning to its traditions,” he wrote in regulations in 1913, “accepts no law in the conduct of operations other than the offensive.”89 His forces, the proverbial furia françese, would advance en masse with drums and bugles sounding the attack. Cran (guts) and élan vital (spirit) would carry the day. “Battles are above all moral contests. Defeat is inevitable when hope for victory ceases.” Victory would come “to the one whose will is the steadiest and whose morale is the most highly tempered.” Defeat of the German armies, Joffre trumpeted, “remains, no matter what the circumstances, the first and principle [sic] objective.”90 He offered no further details on his intentions, other than to drive into the “heart” of Germany. There was no overall strategic goal. After all, by the time the French armies arrived in central Germany, the Russians would surely be in Berlin! And even if “beaten,” the French army would have “opened the way for the Russian offensive” and thus assured “final success.”91
The “will to win” also shaped French artillery doctrine. Whereas the 1895 regulations had stressed that the artillery was decisive in battle from start to finish, those of December 1913 rejected this postulate: “The artillery does not prepare attacks; it supports them.”92 Artillery was not to pulverize enemy positions before an attack was launched, but to limit its role to supporting the attack, once under way. In a war of maneuver, the legendary French 75mm rapid-firing field gun—deadly accurate and firing twice as fast (twenty to thirty rounds per minute) as the German 77mm or the British 13-pounder guns—alone could keep up with the advancing infantry; less mobile heavy artillery would only slow the advance.
CONCENTRATION AREAS OF OPPOSING ARMIES, 2 AUGUST 1914
Infantrymen in their heavy wool blue coats, red trousers, blue cap with red top (képi), nailed boots (brodequins), and carrying twenty-five kilograms of kit (poncho, entrenching tool, ammunition, mess gear, water bottle, as well as a pack with spare socks, shirt, and field dressing) would storm entrenched positions, led by their officers and drum-and-bugle corps. The combination of a withering hail of bullets from mainly single-shot 1886 Lebel 8mm rifles and 75mm cannon shells would turn the tide. Once among the enemy, the poilus would fix bayonets—la Rosalie, the thin, triangular “supreme weapon” according to the Infantry Regulations of April 1914—and finish off remaining defenders.93 “À la baionette! En avant!”* rang lustily through the woods of Alsace-Lorraine, the Ardennes, and the Argonne in August 1914. Few staff officers appreciated that the French corps with 120 75mm guns might be outmatched if a slugfest ensued against German corps with 108 77mm, 36 105mm, and 16 150mm guns.
Also not fully resolved by summer 1914 was the role that the reserves would play in a future war. In October 1913, British or Russian intelligence sources passed on to the French army a report on the state of the German army, in which one conclusion stood out: Moltke planned to use his first-line reserve formations “at the same time as the active army.”94 But what precisely did this mean? French military intelligence did not place a high value on Germany’s reserves and hence were convinced that the Landwehr would not be integrated with active units. Most likely, this precluded a drive across Belgium, as German regular forces would be insufficient to storm Belgium and France as well as Russian Poland.
With regard to his own reserves, Joffre was adamant that France, with a stagnant population of twenty million less than Germany, not only would have to draft all eligible males (in fact, 84 percent as opposed to 53 percent in Germany), but also to deploy its reserves from the outset of a war. His guiding planning principle, he later wrote, was “to wage war with all my forces.”95 Thus, he stood in the forefront (with President Poincaré) of those who in 1913 called for the extension of the term of conscripts’ service from two to three years. While this has generally been interpreted as preparation for a prolonged industrial war, it was in fact nothing more than Joffre’s conviction that the republic needed to have as many well-trained men under arms as Germany and to deploy them in an opening campaign. Under the terms of the loi troisième of August 1913, France increased the size of its “come-as-you-are” army to 884,000 men (against Germany’s 880,000 after its army increases of 1912 and 1913).96 Given that Germany would have to deploy one army to delay the anticipated Russian onslaught in the east, that Charles Mangin’s force noire would arrive from Africa, and that the British might deploy on the French left, the Allied armies would outnumber the Germans.
Last but not least, Joffre’s fixation with the “cult of the offensive” ruled out a prolonged war. While he warned the Superior Council of National Defense in February 1912 that a struggle with Germany might last for an “indefinite period”—at least six months just to reach the Rhine River after victorious opening battles—he did little to prepare either army or nation for that eventuality. That the war had to be short became an article of faith not to be assailed. The Field Regulations of October 1913 squared the circle: “The nature of war, the size of forces involved, the difficulties of resupplying them, the interruption of social and economic life of the country, all encourage the search for a decision in the shortest possible time in order to terminate the fighting quickly.”97 Alfred von Schlieffen could not have put it better.
On 31 July 1914, Joffre warned the cabinet that time was of the essence. Every twenty-four-hour delay in mobilization translated into a fifteen-to twenty-kilometer loss of territory.98 The Council of Ministers authorized mobilization on 1 August, when Germany declared war on Russia; 2 August was the first day of mobilization. Unlike 1870, mobilization proceeded smoothly. Between 2 and 18 August, fourteen major railway lines shuttled 4,278 trains, on average 56 per day, to garrisons and depots near the front at Sedan, Montmédy, Toul, Nancy, and Belfort. Only 20 were late. The peacetime home army of 884,000 absorbed 621,000 reservists into its forty-five infantry divisions; a further 655,000 men formed the twenty-five reserve divisions; and another 184,000 were organized into twelve territorial divisions. Last but not least, about one million men remained at their depots, awaiting deployment.99 The French navy escorted Louis Comby’s Constantine 37th and Paul Muteau’s Alger 38th colonial divisions as well as fourteen hundred men and horses of African 3d and 4th chasseurs from Algeria and Tunisia to France. Slowly, a vast force of 1.6 million infantrymen moved to the front at twenty-five to thirty kilometers per day.
There were far fewer deserters than the anticipated 10 to 13 percent: A mere 1.2 percent of the 1914 cohort of conscripts failed to report for duty, and many of these were classified as mentally handicapped, itinerants, or Bretons (who could not read French). Roughly 350,000 volunteers flooded recruiting depots and 3,000 peacetime deserters returned to serve.100 In fact, the response was so patriotic that Minister of the Interior Louis Malvy on 1 August shelved the infamous Carnet B, the government’s secret list of roughly twenty-five hundred known agitators, anarchists, pacifists, and spies to be arrested in case of mobilization as they posed a “national threat.”101 Not even the assassination of the supposed “pro-German Socialist traitor” Jean Ja
urès by a radical nationalist on the day before mobilization sparked an outcry against the war.
Lieutenant Henri Desagneaux of the Railway Transport Service on 4 August recorded the intense enthusiasm of the slogans painted on the transports as the poilus departed for the front: DEATH TO THE KAISER. STRING THE KAISER UP. DEATH TO THE BOCHES.* And everywhere he noted the same caricatures: “pigs’ heads in pointed helmets.” The civilian population was equally stirred. “Bouquets, garlands, flags.”102
The pressing question for the General Staff was where the main German blow would fall. Joffre spent the first week of August poring over intelligence reports, hoping that they would confirm the calculus behind his concentration plan. It was still “too early,” he later put it, “to announce formally my intention to operate in [central] Belgium.”103 Germany’s declaration of war on France on 3 August and on Belgium one day later relieved him of that quandary. On 8 August, Joffre issued his General Instruction No. 1, finally revealing his strategy.104 The goal remained nothing less than the “destruction” of the entire German army. To that effect, he ordered a double blow: In the south, Yvon Dubail’s First Army and Édouard de Castelnau’s Second Army were to attack in Lorraine, south of the German fortifications at Metz-Thionville; in the center, Pierre Ruffey’s Third Army and Fernand de Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army were to drive into eastern Belgium, north of the enemy line at Metz-Thionville. Joffre held Charles Lanrezac’s Fifth Army back at Rethel-Mézières as a reserve to repel what he took to be the main German drive through central Belgium.
Joffre believed that he had the right men in the right places. Castelnau, a devout Catholic in a largely anticlerical army, was known as the “fighting friar.” He was broad and short, and sported imperial-period whiskers. He had worked with Joffre on “all studies for Plan XVII” and was one of its “principal authors,” just the man to storm the Vosges and take Metz. Dubail, tall, slender, and solemn, was a “faithful, solid soldier, great disciplinarian, and conscientious.” Lanrezac, the “swarthy” native of Guadeloupe, was France’s most feared teacher of strategy at Saint-Cyr, the veritable “lion of the French army.” Ruffey had a stellar reputation as an artillery expert with a “brilliant and imaginative mind.” Langle de Cary was “a disciplinarian, full of authority, and animated to a very high degree by a sense of his responsibility.”105 It was Joffre’s plan, and these were his handpicked commanders. The offensives would start on 14 August. It was up to the Germans to deploy as Joffre expected.
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