CHAPTER ONE
LA DÉBCLE
‘… car la Revanche doit venir lente peut-être
Mais en tout cas fatale et terrible à coup sûr
La Haine est déjà née, et la force va naitre
C’est un faucheur à voir si le champ n’est pas mûr.’
PAUL DÉROULÈDE
THREE and a half years elapsed between the First Battle of the Marne, when the Kaiser’s armies reached the gates of Paris, and Ludendorff’s last-gasp offensive that so nearly succeeded in the Spring of 1918. During this time the Germans remained on the defensive behind a brilliantly prepared and almost impregnable line, while the French and British wasted themselves against it in vain, at an unimaginable cost in human lives.
Only once did the Germans deviate from this strategy that paid so handsomely. In February 1916, they attacked in the Verdun sector, catching the French there thoroughly by surprise. Compared with the seven German armies that marched into France in 1914 and Ludendorff’s sixty-three divisions that struck at Haig in 1918, this assault on Verdun with only nine divisions was but a small affair. A small affair; yet out of it grew what those who took part in it considered to be the grimmest battle in all that grim war, perhaps in History itself. Certainly it was the longest battle of all time, and during the ten months it lasted nearly three-quarters of the French Army were drawn through it. Though other battles of the First War exacted a higher toll, Verdun came to gain the unenviable reputation of being the battlefield with the highest density of dead per square yard that has probably ever been known. Above all, the battle was a watershed of prime importance in the First War. Before it, Germany still had a reasonable chance of winning the war; in the course of those ten months this chance dwindled away. Beyond it, neither the French nor the German army would be quite the same again; Verdun marked the point at which, among the Allies, the main burden of the war passed from France to Britain, and its influence upon America’s eventual entry into the war cannot be overlooked.
In the aftermath, too, Verdun was to become a sacred national legend, and universally a household word for fortitude, heroism and suffering; but it was also a modern synonym for a Pyrrhic Victory. Long after the actual war was over, the effects of this one battle lingered on in France. Of the men to arise from the triumph of Verdun, one in particular will be forever associated with the appalling tragedy of a generation later, and today the marks of Verdun upon France and the French have not been eradicated. Behind the scribbles of ‘De Gaulle ne passera pas’ on Algerian walls lies perhaps more than just the adaptation of a famous battle-cry.
‘This Western-front business couldn’t be done again,’ declares Dick Diver in Tender is the Night. He was right, as 1940 proved; the nearest the Second World War came to it was at Stalingrad, often referred to as a Russian ‘Verdun’. The explanation of why there was no ‘Western-front business’ in 1940, why the German Panzers went rolling round the Maginot Line with such ease, why there was a Maginot Line at all, cannot be explained without reference to the happenings at Verdun in 1916.
Similarly to see how the German forces came to stand before Verdun in 1916, why they chose to attack what was reputedly the strongest fortress in Europe, and why the French withstood their attack with such incredible steadfastness, one needs to hark back to yet an earlier war — to the fateful year of 1870.
* * *
Six weeks after France had declared war that summer, the last Emperor of the French, his face rouged to conceal the agonies caused by a monstrous bladder stone, was on his way to captivity in Germany. Within another four-and-a-half months, at Versailles in the great palace that bears the inscription ‘à toutes les Gloires de la France’, and beneath a painting of Frenchmen chastising Germans, the Prussian King had himself proclaimed Kaiser. When at last the peace was signed, the conquerors insisted that its terms embrace a triumphal march through Paris, and only massed French citizens were able to prevent the Uhlans from perpetrating the ultimate insult of riding through the Arc de Triomphe.
One would have to search diligently through the pages of history to find a more dramatic instance of what the Greeks called peripeteia, or reversal of fortune. Where before has a nation of such grandeur (indeed, La Grande Nation), brimming over with hubris and refulgent with material achievement, been subjected to worse humiliation within so short a space of time? And when has a military power as assured in traditions of soldierly prowess been more shamefully defeated? In July 1870, Louis Napoleon’s forces had set off, optimistically entitled ‘The Army of the Rhine’, and lavishly equipped with maps of Germany, though none of France. After two minor defeats that were far from decisive, the French Army never ceased retreating. Old crones along the route jeered at the dispirited, bedraggled soldiery. The vigilant Uhlans pursued them; now like a pack of wolves, waiting for stragglers; now like beaters, driving the frightened coveys towards the guns. Finally, half the army under Bazaine was herded into Metz, where it surrendered after doing nothing for two months. Into the trap at Sedan, just forty miles downstream from Verdun, went the other half, under MacMahon and accompanied by the Emperor himself. ‘Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre et nous y serons emmerdés!’ remarked General Ducrot. The words might have applied to the whole bitter sense of total disgrace felt by the French Army after 1870. It was a terrible slur to be faced by the heirs of Henri IV and Condé, Turenne and Saxe, not to mention the great Bonaparte — by soldiers who, down through the ages, had considered themselves to be the warrior race of Europe.
The results of Louis Napoleon’s ill-advised declaration of war were to alter the character of war itself as much as they were to affect the future of all Europe. The employment of mass conscript armies and the merciless sieges where civilians had been indiscriminately blown to pieces by long-range guns introduced a new savagery into warfare, which for some centuries had been a reasonably gentlemanly affair. The harsh Prussian peace terms, requiring the surrender of two of France’s richest provinces and the payment of reparations on an unprecedented scale — so that the war would cost the loser nearly ten times as much as the victors — instilled a new bitterness into European relations. And the French Army would never forget its degradation.
* * *
In 1871, France was exhausted, bankrupt, demoralised; the countryside ravaged and torn by civil war of the most brutal kind. France has frequently astonished the world by her recuperative ability which stems from the intrinsic richness of a country twice as large as the British Isles, and her great resources of human energy — so often dissipated in the boudoir and the political lobby. Never, though, has her recovery been so rapid or so remarkable as after the catastrophe of 1870-1. The legacy of the war was soon liquidated. A scapegoat to bear the collective disgrace of the army was speedily found in the form of Bazaine. Well ahead of schedule, the crushing £200,000,000 of reparations were paid off, and in September 1873 the last Prussian soldiers left French soil. The French economy began to flourish as never before; the Paris Exposition of 1878 showed Europe that the affluence of the latter-day Second Empire was back again, though now a more solid achievement lay beneath the glittering surface.
Nowhere was the renaissance more striking than in the army. A new type of dedicated young officer — like Ferdinand Foch who, as an 18-year-old student, had seen Louis-Napoleon trail sick and defeated through Metz — strode forward to replace the fops of the Second Empire with their emulative Imperials. A new spirit ran through the whole army, determined to expunge the recent blots on its reputation. With it went a passion for study, replacing the traditions of the café and the vacuous routine of garrison life. It formed a marked contrast to the days when MacMahon had threatened: ‘I shall remove from the promotion list any officer whose name I read on the cover of a book’. Penetrating studies were made of the 1870 campaign, and in their sweeping reorganisation, the army leaders made no bones about imitating the conqueror. Three successive laws provided France for the first time with universal military service (of the exceptional le
ngth of five years) and a cadre of reserves. Under General Lewal a Staff College was created to lay the foundations for something better than the inefficient old General Staff disbanded by the reformers, and later, under General Miribel the État Major de l’Armée was formed. In peace, its role was to prepare for war and — notably — to plan the details of mobilisation in which France had been so deficient in 1870; in war, it was to provide the command of France’s principal group of armies. Thus, in embryo, came to life the famous Grand Quartier Général, or G.Q.G. In 1886, the French army adopted the first model of the Lebel rifle that it would go to war with in 1914; about the same time were laid down the calibres of guns that were used in the war; and a few years later high explosive Lyddite replaced black powder as a filling for shells.
Of all the military reorganisation undertaken by France after 1871, little concerns this story more than the defensive measures she carried out on her new frontier. (By a chain of cause and effect they were, moreover, to make inevitable Britain’s participation in the First War; though this could hardly be foreseen at the time.) The War of 1870 had been fought, on paper, more or less between equals. But now any thoughtful Frenchman could reasonably predict that disparity between the two nations would grow with increasing rapidity; the Germans were breeding faster and, with the transfer of Alsace-Lorraine, their industrial power was bound to expand more rapidly. However successful the reorganisation of the French army, it alone could now hardly suffice to protect France against Germany. In addition, the re-drawn frontier brought the hereditary enemy to less than two hundred miles from Paris, with no natural barrier like the Rhine or the Vosges in between. Thus a sapper general called Serré de Rivières was entrusted with the construction of a defensive system on a scale never before contemplated, and only to be outdone by Maginot. Instead of converting one or two cities into fortified camps, like Metz, which in 1870 had turned out to be an insidious trap, de Rivières built a continuous line of sunken forts; or rather, two continuous lines. On the Swiss frontier, the system was anchored on Belfort and ran uninterruptedly along the line of hills to Épinal. At the old fortress town of Toul on the Moselle the line began again, along the heights on the right bank of the Meuse, to Verdun. North of Verdun was the dense Argonne, and then the Ardennes, through which (until von Manstein showed the way in 1940) it was assumed no invading army could manoeuvre. Between the linchpins of Toul and Épinal, de Rivières ingeniously left a forty-mile gap in the defences, called the ‘Trouée de Charmes’. It was like a gateway in a wall, intended (perhaps a little naïvely) to entice within and canalise any German invasion, so that the French mass of manoeuvre lying in wait could then conveniently drive into both its flanks and eventually close in behind. Of course, the Belgian frontier was left unfortified, save for a few scattered fortresses like Lille and Maubeuge. It was Verdun, with its vital position, already fortified by Vauban — and indeed as far back as the Romans — that was both the principal strongpoint of, and key to, the whole system.
Fifteen years after Sedan the French Army had regained both its defensive and offensive power to such an extent that it might well have triumphed in a fresh war with Germany; which, in the way of victors, had begun to rest on its laurels. Bismarck, reflecting anxiously on his own maxim ‘a generation that has taken a thrashing is always followed by one that deals out the thrashings’, thought more than once of a preventive war. For although France’s military dispositions were mainly defensive, occasionally she emitted sounds revealing that notions of ‘revanche’ never lay very far beneath the surface. French officers’ messes took symbolic joy in bowling over skittles shaped like portly Prussian soldiers; while, just across the frontier, German reservists at Metz sipped their beer out of steins covered with such fierce inscriptions as ‘Kanonendonner ist unser Gruss’ and
He who on France’s border stood guard
Has deserved, as a soldier, his reward.
No cabaret or fête was complete without the appearance, greeted with wild enthusiasm, of an Alsatian girl in national costume. There was the fire-eating League of Patriots formed by Déroulède, who had been at Sedan as a private in the Zouaves, and who was now dedicated to keeping alight the flame of revenge. Finally, there was the outburst of jingoism which found expression through General Boulanger. In 1886, the British Ambassador wrote home caustically: ‘The Republic here has lasted sixteen years and that is about the time which it takes to make the French tired of a form of government.’ It was true, insofar as the leaders of the Troisième already stood in the customary repute of politicians in France. Suddenly the emotions of Paris and much of France were ignited by the swashbuckling magnificence of the Minister of War, General Boulanger, who appeared mounted on a superb charger at the July 14th parade at Longchamps. Without enquiring too deeply where he might lead them, the masses made Boulanger their idol overnight. During the nine days’ Boulangist wonder, inflammatory songs were heard in the street that seemed painfully evocative of the summer of 1870:
Regardez-le là-bas! Il nous sourit et passe:
Il vient de délivrer la Lorraine et l’Alsace.
In Berlin, Bismarck’s finger crooked round the trigger, but, fortunately for the peace of Europe, Boulanger soon committed suicide upon his mistress’s grave, ‘dying’, in the words of Clemenceau’s savage epitaph, ‘as he had lived, like a subaltern’.
With the ridiculous Boulanger, much of the hard-earned esteem of the new French army also passed away. In 1889 a new act reduced military service from five to three years. Militarism cannot be sustained for long without promise of fulfilment. And there were some appealing distractions to mitigate the pain of the amputated territories. The great age of nineteenth-century expansion meant the prospect of colonial acquisitions, and France hastened to join in the rush; cheered on from the sidelines by Bismarck, as he murmured ‘My map of Africa lies in Europe.’ As Algeria had made up for Waterloo, so Morocco and Tunisia, West Africa, Madagascar and Indo-China helped make up for Alsace-Lorraine. By 1914, France ruled over nearly four million square miles abroad, with fifty million inhabitants, the second greatest colonial empire in the world. Admittedly, in the eyes of some soldiers none of it was worth an acre of what was lost in 1871, but, for the time being, they were in the minority. As it was (a factor which Bismarck had certainly never calculated upon), France’s empire made her a great deal richer and more powerful when war finally came, as well as providing her with an additional 500,000 excellent troops.
Life in France was wonderfully good, too, during the three decades that spanned the century’s turn. ‘La Vie Douce’ could barely convey all it meant, though the Germans’ envious expression of ‘content as God in France’ perhaps came closer. Never had there been so much for so many. It was the epoch of the Eiffel Tower, of Degas and Renoir, Lautrec and Monet; of bistros and the Moulin de la Gallette, Maxims and the Lapin Agile, the Folies-Bergère and the Palais de Glace; of Verlaine and Rimbaud, Zola and Sarah Bernhardt, Debussy and Ravel, and, later, Péguy and Appollinaire; of provocative horizontales and hôtels particuliers, of picnics and gay phaetons in the Bois, where the new trees were already growing up to replace those that had been felled for fuel during the Siege. It was an epoch seething with ideas and creation. Every day there seemed to be something new; inventions like electricity and the telephone were now yoked to man’s service, and new medical discoveries to enable him to enjoy it all a little longer. The bicycle and le football introduced new pleasures; the Orient Express and Wagons Lits brought new and wider worlds within range of Paris. Once again she assumed her eminence as the world’s centre of culture and pleasure (it seemed impossible that the Commune had ever happened) and national pride was further inflated by Blériot’s feat and a series of sporting triumphs. In the realm of economics, marvels were wrought, and almost overnight, it seemed, France became a great industrial power. Jointly with Britain, she was known as the ‘banker of the universe’. In every sense, it was the epoch of ‘enrichissez-vous’ in which, for the first time, bourg
eoisie, peasants and even workers participated alike. (Only the wine-growers, their vines stricken with deadly phylloxera, seemed to be left out.) The newly powerful trades unions were seeing that a good part of the workers’ demands were fulfilled; and who could complain when a carafe of wine cost you thirty centimes and you could buy a turkey for seven francs? As in Adenauer’s ‘No Experiments’ Germany of today material prosperity distracts minds from grieving unduly over the Oder-Neisse, so in France la vie douce was altogether too good for one to think sombre thoughts of arms and revenge.
Then, there was the Dreyfus Affair, or simply The Affair, which for more than a decade focused the passions and attention of the entire country, averting its eyes from the clouds that were now mounting over the horizon. At this distance, it is difficult to appreciate the bitterness generated by The Affair, where even the highest in the land were involved. (The newly-elected pro-Dreyfus President had his top hat cleft on Auteuil race course by the cane of an anti-Dreyfusard baron.) In the army, where The Affair had its origins, national divisions were magnified and particularly disastrous. Broadly, the cleavage fell between the conservative, traditionalist, partly Monarchist and largely Catholic, caste of the army and the new, Republican, progressive and often anti-clerical elements of post-1870. When Dreyfus was finally cleared, the army leaders who had ranged themselves solidly against the wretched man sent the army several leagues further down the road of disrepute where Boulanger had first guided it.
The Price of Glory Page 2
