The Price of Glory

by Alistair Horne

  The two huge forces, the German and the French (supported by the four valiant divisions which were all Britain could provide at the time), met with a crash which will resound down through the centuries. On one side, the great grey, disciplined hordes strode vigorously forward, confident in their numbers and the superiority of their race, singing raucously:

  ‘Siegreich woll’n wir Frankreich schlagen,

  Sterben als ein tapf’rer Held.’

  Perhaps a little more than other young men of Europe, after the long years of bourgeois prosperity they were yearning for the ‘great experience’. As one of them noted, ‘the war had entered into us like wine. There is no lovelier death in the world… anything rather than rest at home.’ The spectacle of the first shattered corpses fascinated them, for ‘the horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew us to the war.’ To their Crown Prince, watching them pass, they were ‘joyous German soldiers with sparkling eyes’.

  On the other side, young men filled with a mighty lust for revenge were marching up at that rapid staccato pace, accompanied by the regimental music and with the rather more melodious refrain of ‘Mourir pour la Patrie est le sort le plus beau’ on their lips. Magnificent specimens, these French soldiers of 1914, thought the soldiers of General French’s army, repeatedly astonished to find them bigger and tougher men than themselves. They ripped up the frontier posts in Alsace and sent them to be laid upon the grave of Déroulède. Then the enemy was located. The trumpeters sounded the call that sent a thrill more heady than wine through French veins:

  Y a la goutte à boire là-haut!

  Y a la goutte à boire!

  All along the frontier the infantrymen in their red trousers and thick, blue overcoats, carrying heavy packs and long, unwieldy bayonets, broke into the double behind their white-gloved officers. Many sang the Marseillaise. In the August heat, sometimes the heavily encumbered French attacked from a distance of nearly half a mile from the enemy. Never have machine-gunners had such a heyday. The French stubble-fields became transformed into gay carpets of red and blue. Splendid cuirassiers in glittering breastplates of another age hurled their horses hopelessly at the machine guns that were slaughtering the infantry. It was horrible, and horribly predictable. In that superb, insane courage of 1914 there was something slightly reminiscent of the lemmings swimming out to sea. But it was not war.

  For a whole week, as the censors released news of the capture of Mulhouse while suppressing such unpleasant details as casualties, France held her breath and thought Plan XVII might succeed. Triumphantly Le Matin proclaimed, ‘Plus un soldat allemand en France!’ But, at Joffre’s headquarters, courier after courier was arriving with news of identical disasters from all parts of the front. In the two weeks that the terrible Battle of the Frontiers lasted, France lost over 300,000 men in killed, wounded, and missing, and 4,778 officers — representing no less than one-tenth of her total officer strength. De Castelnau’s Second Army, which was to have led the advance to the Rhine, reeled back on Nancy almost in a rout; in it, the elite XX Corps commanded by Foch was particularly hard hit. To the North, the swinging German right wing pushed the French and the B.E.F. back to the Marne. In 1870, such catastrophes might well have led to a débâcle as disastrous as either of the Sedans, but this was not the France of either Louis Napoleon or Lebrun. Von Kluck committed his historic blunder of wheeling inwards, on his own responsibility, thereby exposing the First Army’s flank to the newly constituted army guarding Paris. Galliéni, the governor, spotted what had happened; Joffre made the retreating armies turn about; and the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ came to pass.1 With it the Germans lost their one chance of an absolute victory (it had been a close thing) though it took the Allies another four bloody years to prove it to them. Their mighty impetus finally checked, they fell back, but the French were too exhausted to turn the retreat into a rout. Then, in the last flicker of the war of movement, there took place the side-stepping motion towards the Channel, with each side trying to outflank the other in the so-called ‘Race for the Sea’.

  By the autumn of 1914, a continuous static front had been established from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. It was based not on natural features (the bastion of Verdun left in a precarious salient that bulged out like a large hernia was the striking exception), but on a line of exhaustion. The first five months of the war in the West had cost both sides more heavily than any other succeeding year; Germany, a total of approximately 750,000 casualties; France, 300,000 killed (or nearly a fifth more than Britain’s total dead in the whole of World War II) and another 600,000 in wounded, captured and missing. The horrors of trench warfare now began.

  * * *

  Out of the victory of the Marne, Joffre emerged as immeasurably the most powerful figure on the whole Allied side. Before the battle, when the German guns were heard in Paris and cynical American correspondents were openly betting that on the morrow it would have become ‘a provincial city of Germany’, the Government had left hastily for Bordeaux. Exaggerated rumours of the deputies’ Capuan luxuries there soon reached the front, and for the rest of the war Bordeaux became a dirty word. The politicians sank to their lowest repute for many a decade. In the Government’s absence, the Grand Quartier Général assumed responsibility for the entire conduct of the war. As a Deputy remarked later, it had become a veritable ‘ministry’ in its own right. And never since Bonaparte had one Frenchman been so all-powerful or so popular as Joffre. Carloads of gifts, boxes of chocolates and cigars, rolled in daily and his officers grew weary dealing with the copious fan-mail; all of which Joffre somehow found time to read with obvious enjoyment.

  Joseph Joffre (his middle name, suspiciously enough, was Césaire) was the son of a humble cooper — one of a family of eleven — and, like Foch and de Castelnau, a Pyrenean. In 1870, as a student at the Polytechnic, he had been sent to Vincennes to learn how to fire a cannon, and, after his captain had collapsed with a nervous breakdown, found himself commanding a battery during the Siege of Paris. Soon after graduating from the Polytechnic as an engineer, he was sent to Indo-China, and there began a long career in France’s new empire. In 1894, he led a column in conquest of Timbuctoo, and first made his mark by his efficiency in organising the column’s supplies. Aged 33, he was then the youngest sapper Lieutenant-Colonel. Timbuctoo was followed by Madagascar, until Joffre was called home in 1904 to be Director of Engineers. Between 1906 and 1910 he commanded first a division and then a corps for brief periods; this was his only experience in commanding a large body of infantry.

  In 1910 he became a member of the War Council, and the following year, Chief of the General Staff; selected, as has been remarked earlier, more for his qualities as a ‘good Republican’ than for any military brilliance. It was to his credit, however, that between 1904 and 1914 there had been any improvements in the French fortresses and heavy artillery, and he had hammered through (just in time) the Conscription Bill of 1913. He was a talented organiser, but the dual rôle of Commander-in-Chief of France’s main group of armies also required him to be a first-rate strategist and tactician. This he was not.

  At the outbreak of war ‘Papa’ Joffre was a widower rising 63. According to Spears, who saw him frequently during 1914,

  his breeches were baggy and ill-fitting. The outfit was completed by cylindrical leggings.… His chin was marked and determined. The whiteness of his hair, the lightness of his almost colourless blue eyes, which looked out from under big eyebrows, the colour of salt and pepper, white predominating, and the tonelessness of his voice coming through the sieve of his big, whitish moustache, all gave the impression of an albino. His cap was worn well forward so that the peak protected his eyes, which resulted in his having to tilt his head slightly to look at one. A bulky, slow-moving, loosely built man, in clothes that would have been the despair of Savile Row, yet unmistakably a soldier.

  But the really outstanding (in more than one sense) physical feature of Joffre was his belly. His appetite was legendar
y; staff officers often observed him consume a whole chicken at a sitting, and one, explaining his taciturnity at table, remarked that he never left himself time to speak, even had he wanted to. Joffre maintained his appetite to his death bed; in the final coma, when a hospital orderly tried to insert a few drops of milk between his lips, he opened his eyes abruptly, seized the glass and drained it, then went back to sleep. Once when criticising a general he remarked, tapping his own, that the man ‘had no stomach’, and no doubt his own supremacy in this respect helped make him additionally acceptable to democratic politicians suspicious of the Cassius-type.

  Joffre was a true viscerotonic, and this was the source of his principal strengths and weaknesses. He thought from his belly rather than with his mind, with the intuitive shrewdness of a peasant. Even one of his most loyal associates, and biographer, General Desmazes, comments on his extraordinary lack of intellectualism. Before the war he read little on military theory; afterwards he read not one of the books on the war in which he had played so large a rôle. He was totally lacking in curiosity and imagination. Haig remarked of him, patronisingly: ‘the poor man cannot argue, nor can he easily read a map’. In at least two respects, however, Joffre closely resembled Haig. One was his reserve. (Indeed, it is a mystery how together they ever communicated at all.) But where with Haig this was due to inarticulateness, with Joffre it was more often than not that there was simply nothing in his mind. A Headquarters visited by Joffre, hoping for some vital guidance from him, was generally left still hoping when the great man departed. There was the famous episode of the gunner colonel, who had come to the Generalissimo with a grave problem; after listening for a while, Joffre dismissed him with a pat on the shoulder and a laconic ‘You always loved your guns; that’s excellent.’ Joffre turned this taciturnity to good advantage when assaulted by politicians; like a hedgehog, he ‘rolled himself into a ball’, and his assailants went away, baffled.

  Above all, Joffre’s comfortable frame and healthy appetite provided him with utterly unshakeable nerves and an almost inhuman calm. At Chantilly he lived a life of strictest routine. Nothing, certainly not a national disaster, was allowed to interfere with it. In the morning (not early), the duty officer briefed Joffre on the events of the night. At 11.00 hours, the Major-General presented orders for his signature; 12.00 hours, lunch, any delay in which incurred Joffre’s quiet but terrible rage. Afterwards Joffre, accompanied later by Castelnau (on his appointment as Joffre’s Chief of Staff), would go for a walk in the Forest of Chantilly, hands clasped behind his back, his left leg dragging a little. On reaching one particular bench, they would sit down; Castelnau meditating, Joffre dozing. Later in the afternoon, Joffre would receive visitors; at 1700 hours, the Major-General reappeared with the afternoon’s orders; 1900 hours, dinner, and immediately afterwards the Generalissimo retired to bed. He slept the sound, guileless sleep of a child and, like Montgomery, gave strict orders that on no account, repeat on no account, was he to be disturbed. Joffre loathed the telephone because it was the one thing that could upset the rhythm of his work; even at the crisis of the Marne he had refused to have the President put through to him. Day and night Joffre’s tranquillity was guarded over by two watch-dog orderly officers. One was the devoted Thouzelier, or as he was usually called by Joffre, ‘sacré Tou-Tou’; on the old man’s fall from grace, the only one of his staff to follow him into exile. In a crisis, Joffre would sit in ‘Tou-Tou’s’ room, astride a chair, while the two officers telephoned orders. The only sign he ever gave that things were bad was the ritualistic screwing and unscrewing of the cap of his fountain pen. Thus, for over two fateful years, were conducted the affairs of the greatest army in France’s history.

  In his memoirs, Field Marshal Alexander complains that throughout his service as a fighting soldier in the First War ‘no commander above my Brigade Commander ever visited my front line.’ Joffre was no exception to this rule, and on his rare visits to the forward areas, about the closest combatants below the rank of Corps Commander came to him was in a march past or a decoration parade. He could not bear to have his tranquillity upset by confrontation with the actual horrors of war. This was the second characteristic which he and Haig had in common; Haig, his son tells us, ‘felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations because these visits made him physically ill.’ After pinning the Médaille Militaire on a blinded soldier, Joffre said: ‘I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles.… I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.’ It was in fact about the only emotion of this kind that he is recorded to have shown. In all his lengthy memoirs there is not one mention of the human element, not one word about the dreadful suffering of his soldiers. Like a peasant keeping account of his sacks of grain, Joffre in 1914 kept a little notebook in which he entered ammunition reserves still remaining. But it would have been better for France if he had also made accurate entries of the lives expended. As it was, so many First War generals, overwhelmed by the size of the forces suddenly placed under their command, tended to regard casualties as merely figures on a Quartermaster’s return; and in Joffre, the engineer, the technician, this dismal characteristic was particularly accentuated.

  To an exciteable, impressionable race like the French, Joffre’s greatest contribution, however, undoubtedly was this unusual degree of sangfroid. The Kaiser once predicted that ‘the side with the better nerves will win’, and one French soldier summed up the feelings of the rest when he scribbled in his diary that here was a leader whom ‘not even the worst situations would disconcert… this is what we did not have in 1870’. By not losing his head when his Plan XVII disintegrated about him, Joffre saved France. At the Marne, whereas the impetuous Foch might have attacked a day too early and the cautious Pétain a day too late, the unflurried Joffre (pushed by the inspired Galliéni) timed it correctly. But this great asset of Joffre’s also concealed terrible dangers. His power of deep sleep had created a legend throughout the nation that ‘if things were going badly he would not sleep’. It was a legend that often blinded both the nation, as well as Joffre himself, to just how bad things were. His confidence in himself was enormous and indestructible; in 1912 he had predicted ‘there will be a war and I shall win it’; even in November 1914 he had turned down the first project to issue steel helmets, declaring ‘we shall not have the time to make them, for I shall twist the Boche’s neck before two months are up’. Worst of all, this confidence, this fat man’s complacent optimism, was taken up and reflected back by the sycophantic Grand Quartier Général.

  Through his long absence in the colonies, Joffre suffered from the same disadvantage as Auchinleck of the Indian Army when commanding in the Western Desert. Appointed to the supreme command, Joffre had insufficient knowledge of his officers’ records to judge the good from the bad in the French Army, but when war had unmasked the inadequate he had acted with great ruthlessness. By the time of the Marne, two out of five Army Commanders, ten out of twenty Corps Commanders and forty-two out of seventy-four Divisional Commanders had been sacked or sent to Limoges; whence came a new word in the French language — limoger. Yet, when it came to pruning out de Grandmaison’s satraps from the G.Q.G., he somehow seemed powerless. Perhaps the G.Q.G. was too strong for him, perhaps his own indifferent intellect found it more comfortable to be surrounded by mediocrities. And this he certainly was; the G.Q.G. could be blamed for many of Joffre’s worst disasters, and the hostility it provoked in the country largely contributed to Joffre’s eventual downfall.

  Isolated in its palace at Chantilly, G.Q.G. lived amid an atmosphere of back-stabbing intrigue reminiscent of the court of Louis XV at Versailles. With the ambitious jockeying for position on every side, the different branches were distrustful of liaising too closely with one another. Each became a little moated castle on its own. The rare witty sally of Asquith’s about the War Office keeping three sets of figures, ‘one to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself’ applied
with even greater force to G.Q.G. The Deuxième Bureau had a curious mathematical formula for computing enemy losses, based on some marvellous racial equation whereby it was assumed that if two Frenchmen had fallen then three casualties had been suffered by the Germans. It was, alas, nearly always the other way about. Deceived by the Deuxième Bureau, the Troisième planned its operations totally divorced from the realities of war beyond the ivory tower of Chantilly. The G.Q.G. also maintained its own vast propaganda system, designed to deceive the outside world and thus perpetuate its own existence. Perhaps most typical of all the G.Q.G. personalities was the liaison officer to President Poincaré, General Pénélon, aptly nicknamed ‘April Smiles’, who could transmogrify the direst catastrophe into a triumph. Partially discredited and reduced in power, after 1914, the Government found it practically impossible to intervene in the mighty, sealed brotherhood that was the G.Q.G.

  To sum up on Joffre, it might be said that the war was very nearly lost with him, but that it would almost certainly have been lost without him.

  * * *

  With the exception of the first gas attack at Ypres in April — where the Germans came near to a breakthrough — 1915 saw them on the defensive in France, attacking ferociously in Russia. Meanwhile, Joffre and the G.Q.G. pursued the simple-minded, but murderously wasteful, strategy of what he called ‘grignotage’, or nibbling-away at the enemy; which has also been described as ‘trying to bite through a steel door with badly-fitting false teeth’. A series of major battles took place, each one aimed at a breakthrough, at forcing the Germans into the open again. (In his optimism, Joffre was here reinforced by Haig, who told Repington of The Times at the beginning of the year that when sufficient shells were accumulated ‘we could walk through the German lines at several places’.) But all the time the Germans just dug themselves a little deeper into the hard chalk. The first attack was conducted by Foch with eighteen divisions in Artois, in May; its only success was scored by Pétain’s XXXIII Corps, which advanced a bare two miles — but the reserves were not there to follow it up. After the French had lost 102,500, more than twice as many as the defenders, the offensive was abandoned. In September, Joffre tried again. Now he had the added excuse of coming to the rescue of the Russians, who had been dread-fully mauled by the Hindenburg-Ludendorff offensives in the East Joffre’s September effort was altogether more ambitious, with the French attacking both in Artois and the Champagne and the British making their first major effort of the war at Loos. A heavier bom bardment preceded the attacks, but so long in advance that all possibility of surprise vanished. Whereas in Artois in the spring there had been just one German line, in the Champagne the French penetrated the first only to be mown down from a second that had been rapidly dug on the reverse slopes during the warning bombardment. This time even Pétain failed, and about all his corps had to show was the capture of one cemetery. In the Champagne, Castelnau persisted in attacking, believing wrongly that a breakthrough had been achieved, long after all hope had evaporated. The casualty lists were larger than ever; 242,000 to 141,000, of which the British lost 50,380 to the Germans’ 20,000 at Loos.