A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  One other thing was paradoxical about Joseph Caillaux. Behind his invincible facade of fashionable propriety, behind his cold and eccentric public persona, he was an adventurous womanizer. He did not marry until he was into middle age. When he did, his choice was a divorcée older than himself who had been his mistress for some years. Not long afterward he entered into an affair with a married woman, Madame Henriette Claretie. Their liaison was not frivolous. With some difficulty the two divorced their spouses and were married.

  All these currents—hatred for Caillaux’s taxation proposals, conservative belief that the future of the nation hinged on the service extension, questions about the alliance with Russia, and the support given to Caillaux by Jaurès and the Socialists—came together in the 1914 election. In the words of Barrès, Caillaux was a menace because he was the one man who could “bring Jaurès’s pacifist dream down from the clouds, to make the theories of working-class internationalism and the fraternity of all people both practical and realizable.”

  The campaign was more than spirited. As a Caillaux victory loomed, his enemies cast aside what little restraint was customary in the politics of France. The conservative press attacked him relentlessly. Characteristically, Caillaux disdained to reply; he would coolly assert his innocence of whatever the latest charge happened to be but go no further. He was coasting toward a victory that would lead to a reappraisal of national policy and possibly to the resignation of Poincaré (who threatened just such a step). But then his private life was brought into the political arena, and everything changed.

  Caillaux’s first wife, a woman spurned and vengeful, made available to Gaston Calmette, the editor of the conservative publication Le Figaro, letters that Caillaux had sent to her in 1901 when she was still his mistress and married to another man. Calmette, who had been attacking Caillaux viciously, now promised his readers a “comic interlude” that he opened by printing one of the letters. Its content was not scandalous in any sexual sense; Caillaux had boasted of appearing to fight for his income tax proposal while actually assuring that it could not pass. This raised questions about possible duplicity on his part (unless of course he was simply trying to impress his paramour), but it was hardly a smoking gun. Much was made of the fact that Caillaux signed himself Ton Jo, “Your Joe.” The tone was inappropriately intimate when used by a gentleman in addressing a married lady, but even by the standards of its day it was something less than outrageous.

  The second Madame Caillaux, however, was not amused. Despite her affair and divorce and remarriage, Henriette cared greatly about her reputation and place in society. She hated the world of politics and the abuse to which it exposed her husband. Lately, when in public, she had found herself hissed and laughed at when people learned that she was the spouse of that traitor to his class, the man who wanted to tax incomes. She complained of being unable to eat or sleep, and when she tried to talk with her husband about what was happening, he (as he ruefully acknowledged later) did not take her seriously.

  What terrified Henriette about the publication of the letter, apparently, was the possibility that it would be followed by love letters that she and Caillaux had exchanged while still married to other people. There was gossip to the effect that these letters too had been given to Le Figaro.

  On the afternoon of March 16 she dressed elegantly, went by chauffeured auto to the shop of a Paris gun dealer, and there purchased a small Browning automatic pistol. The dealer took her to his basement for instruction in the pistol’s use. From there she went to the offices of Le Figaro, where, her hands and her weapon concealed in a fur muff, she created consternation by identifying herself and asking to see Calmette. The editor was out, as it happened, and she had to wait hours for his return. When at last he arrived through a rear entrance, he was told of his visitor and urged not to see her. He gallantly replied that he would not deny a lady. Upon being admitted to his office, Henriette asked Calmette if he knew why she wanted to see him. When he replied that he did not and offered her a chair, she took out her pistol and squeezed the trigger until its six bullets had been discharged. Calmette was hit four times and killed. Later Henriette testified that, intending only to frighten him, she had closed her eyes before firing and pointed the pistol at the floor. Calmette, unfortunately for both of them, had fallen to the floor as soon as he saw the gun and so put himself in the line of fire. When members of the Figaro staff came running into the office, Henriette surrendered her weapon but imperiously maintained her dignity. “Do not touch me,” she declared. “I am a lady.” When the police were preparing to take her to jail, she refused to enter their wagon. She had a vehicle suitable to her station, she said, and would travel in it. The police agreed.

  It was the most sensational story in years, one that combined murder and sex with wild speculation about what had motivated Henriette and what further scandals might be revealed. It monopolized the attention of the Paris newspapers all that spring and summer. Its first effect was to sideline Caillaux politically: he immediately resigned from the cabinet and announced (he would later change his mind) that his political career was over.

  In spite of the scandal, the election turned out to be a disaster for Poincaré and the conservatives and a triumph for Caillaux’s Radicals and their Socialist allies. Under ordinary circumstances, Caillaux would have become premier. But now someone else had to be found for the job, and with Caillaux out of the running, no one was holding Poincaré to his threat to resign. For two weeks, as the formidable Poincaré used his constitutional authority to block a succession of candidates who were opposed to the service extension, France remained without a government. Finally, grudgingly, Poincaré agreed to the appointment of René Viviani, a onetime socialist and a rising but inexperienced political star who in 1913 had voted against the extension but now promised to withdraw his opposition. In the weeks ahead Viviani would show himself to be emotionally fragile (his career would end in insanity) and willing to follow Poincaré’s guidance in dealing with the July crisis.

  Henriette’s trial, from its start early in July, was an early specimen of full-bore media circus, obsessing press and public alike, making the news about yet another crisis in the distant Balkans seem dreary and pointless by comparison, and constantly giving rise to new sensations. (One of the trial judges challenged another to a duel.) Then came the state visit that Poincaré paid to St. Petersburg, taking Viviani with him and using the long days at sea to instruct the new premier in the importance of military readiness and the alliance with Russia.

  Even if there had been no trial and no voyage to Russia, French passivity throughout the crisis undoubtedly would have been to Poincaré’s liking. The president was the closest thing to a true master of French politics to have emerged in decades. He had begun his career as the youngest lawyer in the country, became the youngest member of the Chamber of Deputies at twenty-six, was elected premier in his forties, and in 1913, at age fifty-two, became both the youngest president in the nation’s history and the first to be elected while serving as premier. In 1914 he was mindful of what General Joffre had told him: that France was now strong enough to win a war with Germany if Serbia tied up a substantial part of the Austro-Hungarian army, Russia took the field against the Germans, and Britain too came in on France’s side. The British factor made it essential that France stand aside during the diplomatic crisis. Paris could have changed the outcome of the crisis only by discouraging the Russians from being so quick to mobilize. Caillaux, as premier, almost certainly would have done this. The tsar’s reluctance to mobilize makes it at least possible that Caillaux could have succeeded.

  The magnitude of the international crisis finally came crashing in on Paris on Wednesday, July 29. A chivalrous jury found Madame Caillaux not guilty, and France’s newspapers awoke from their trance to discover that Europe was on the brink of war. Poincaré and Viviani returned to Paris, finding the capital burning with war fever. July 29 was also the day on which Tsar Nicholas first ordered and then temporarily ca
nceled general mobilization. Thanks to the scheming Ambassador Paléologue, Paris had only limited knowledge of what was happening in St. Petersburg, and the Russians had no reason to think that the French government was not enthusiastic about their mobilization. By Friday full mobilization was under way in Russia, but no word of it appeared in the Paris newspapers. The papers were, however, carrying excited and unfounded reports that Germany was mobilizing secretly. Joffre was demanding French mobilization.

  With Caillaux out of the picture and the final slide into war under way, there was in all of France only one man of importance who not only thought that war might be prevented but was committed to preventing it if he could. This was Jean Jaurès, whose gifts were so prodigious that it seemed briefly possible that even now, far into the eleventh hour, he might make a difference.

  As a leader, a thinker, and simply as a human being, Jaurès stood out like a giant in the summer of 1914. Like Caillaux he was widely hated, but only for the most honorable of reasons: he had dedicated his life to the achievement of democracy and genuine peace not only in France but across the continent. But he was respected too—respected and loved to an extent remarkable for a man whose socialist convictions had put him permanently outside the boundaries of political respectability. Everyone who knew him and has left a record of the experience tells of a sunny, selfless, brilliant personality, bearded and bearlike and utterly careless of his appearance, indifferent to personal success or failure but passionately dedicated to his vision of a better, saner world.

  Born in provincial obscurity, he had been sent to Paris on scholarship and excelled at the most elite schools to be found there. He had gone first into an academic career and then into politics, earning a doctorate along the way. Drawn by his sense of the injustices of industrial society into the Socialist Party, he soon became its dominant figure and a practical, nondogmatic adapter of Marxist thought. He was opposed to imperialism, colonialism, and militarism, all of which he saw as a waste of resources that could be used for better purposes. But he was not opposed to nationalism, envisioning a Europe of autonomous democracies working together for a prosperity in which the poor and the powerless could share. He believed that political liberty was meaningless without economic liberty, that the power of the industrialists, banks, big landowners, and church must be curtailed, and that small family businesses and farms must be preserved. An anticlerical, he nevertheless opposed the efforts of his associates to bar Catholics from teaching in the universities. Above all he was opposed to the secret alliances of the great powers, France included. He foresaw how disastrous a general war would be with a clarity that can still astonish anyone who reads the things he wrote and said. He was widely regarded as the greatest orator of his time, and by consistently demonstrating his integrity and indifference to personal advantage, he had unified France’s leftist factions and made the Socialist Party a force in national politics. By late July France appeared to be divided into two camps: one that regarded Jaurès as a public danger, another that was ready to follow him. In the midst of mounting hysteria he was the one prominent figure calling for restraint, deliberation, and a search for a way out of war—for sangfroid. “The danger is great but not insuperable if we keep our clearness of mind and strength of will,” he wrote in his last newspaper column, which appeared on Friday, July 31, “if we show the heroism of patience as well as the heroism of action.”

  France’s conservative voices, meanwhile, were anything but calm. “We have no wish to incite anyone to political assassination,” the newspaper Action Française had declared on July 23 in what was becoming the characteristic tone of Jaurès’s enemies, “but M. Jean Jaurès may well shake in his shoes! His words may perhaps give some fanatic the desire to settle by the experimental method the question of whether anything would be changed in the invincible order of things if M. Jean Jaurès were to suffer the fate of M. Calmette.” Another paper told its readers that “if on the eve of war a General were to detail half a dozen men and a Corporal to put Citizen Jaurès against a wall and to pump the lead he needs into his brain at point-blank range—do you think that General would be doing anything but his elementary duty?”

  On the evening of July 31, just back from a hurried trip to Brussels where he had addressed an emergency meeting of Socialists from several countries, including Germany, Jaurès and a small group of his associates went to the foreign ministry, where they met with vice minister Abel Ferry and demanded every possible effort to keep Russia from mobilizing. By this time the government not only knew of the Russian mobilization but had received, via the German ambassador, Berlin’s warning that it too would mobilize if the Russians did not reverse course. Viviani, after consultation with Poincaré, had given the Germans his promise of an answer by one P.M. tomorrow, Saturday. Now Ferry simply told Jaurès that it was too late, that “everything is finished, there is nothing left to do.”

  “To the very end,” Jaurès answered angrily, “we will continue to struggle against war.”

  “No,” Ferry replied. “You won’t be able to continue. You will be assassinated on the nearest street corner.”

  Two hours later a twenty-nine-year-old man named Raoul Villain, well educated but aimless, confused, and unemployed, was walking along the Rue Montmartre when he saw several men enter the Café du Croissant. Among them was Jaurès, and Villain recognized him. As he watched, Jaurès took a seat with his back to an open window. For half an hour, while Jaurès ate his dinner and conferred with the editors of his newspaper, L’Humanité, about what should be said in the Saturday edition, Villain paced outside. He was armed; inflamed by the hysteria all around him, he had been planning to travel to Germany and shoot the kaiser. Here, suddenly, was an opportunity to demonstrate his patriotism and strike a blow for France right at home.

  Inside the restaurant a man rose from his place at another table and approached the Jaurès group. He was a friend of one of Jaurès’s companions, and he wanted to show off a photo of his baby daughter.

  “May I see?” Jaurès asked. He examined the picture, smiled, asked the child’s age, and offered congratulations. At that instant Villain, standing just outside the window, fired two shots into the back of his head. Jaurès was dead before the police arrived, and the next day France and Germany mobilized. The Socialists in both countries, now without anyone capable of bringing them together, supported the move to war.

  Chapter 8

  First Blood

  “All the courage in the world cannot prevail against gunfire.”

  —CAPTAIN CHARLES DE GAULLE

  The war began in earnest on August 2, when an advance force of German cavalry moved into Luxembourg to seize its network of railways. That same day Germany delivered an ultimatum to Belgium, demanding unobstructed passage for its armies. Young King Albert refused. His little army, which could put only seven divisions totaling one hundred and seventeen thousand troops into the field, began blowing up bridges and rail lines leading into Belgium from Germany. Suddenly the little city of Liège, always locally important as a center of road, rail, and water transportation, became the most important place on the continent. Its defenses, on high bluffs looming over the River Meuse, dominated the narrow passage through which the Schlieffen right wing had to pass on its way westward. Unless these defenses were overcome, and quickly, the German advance would be blocked almost at its starting point and the entire offensive reduced to a shambles.

  Liège was no ordinary city but a ring of twelve massive forts that together made it one of the most formidable military strongpoints in the world. Each of these forts contained eight or nine big guns under armored turrets, and each was built of reinforced concrete and designed to withstand direct hits from the heaviest artillery then in existence. General Gérard Leman, the elderly Belgian commander at Liège, had some eight thousand troops inside the forts plus, as a mobile force, a division of twenty-four thousand infantry, five hundred cavalry, and seventy-two field guns. The Germans, as part of their mobilization plan, had
formed, trained, and stationed near the border a special strike force of thirty thousand men plus mobile field artillery whose sole mission was to attack and neutralize the forts. When the lead elements of this force moved on Liège from the south on August 4, they were greatly outnumbered by the defenders but immediately launched a night assault. They met ferocious fire and were thrown back. They quickly attacked again and were again repulsed. This put the Germans in a desperate situation.

  Leman, ordered by King Albert to hold his position at all costs (a term meaning death before surrender or retreat), learned of the appearance of German cavalry to his north and concluded that he would soon be surrounded. To keep his mobile force from capture, he sent it off to join the main Belgian army. This removed almost a quarter of Belgium’s total fighting forces from danger of encirclement and capture, but at a price: it ended any possibility that Leman would have enough troops to keep the Germans at a distance from which their guns would be unable to do their worst.

  There now arrived on the scene, and on the world stage, an obscure German officer who quickly established himself as the hero of the siege and with startling speed would become one of the most important men in the German army. This was Erich Ludendorff. (Note the absence of a von in the name—he was not a member of Prussia’s Junker aristocracy.) Recently promoted to major general, a tall, portly, double-chinned forty-nine-year-old, Ludendorff was on temporary assignment as liaison between the Liège assault force and the German Second Army, which was still assembling on the German side of the border. There had been good reason for giving Ludendorff this assignment: a few years earlier, as a key member of Moltke’s staff, he had developed the plans for the reduction of the Liège fortifications. (With typical thoroughness, he had once spent a vacation in Belgium in order to examine the defenses at first hand.) In the German army, unlike the French, it was customary to send staff officers into the field, into combat, where they could observe their plans in action, assist in making adjustments when reality began to intrude, and learn from the experience. But Ludendorff was constitutionally incapable of remaining a mere observer or adviser. It was he who had sent the cavalry that, by showing itself north of Liège, had caused Leman to send most of his troops away. Then, coming upon a brigade whose commander had been killed in one of the early attacks, he put himself in charge. Bringing howitzers forward and directing their fire on the Belgian defenses, he led an assault that gave him possession of an expanse of high ground from which the city and its central citadel were clearly visible.