England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  But Pétain was not yet ready to reveal to his allies the full extent of the crisis in his army and Spears took himself off to the Aisne sector to investigate. If anything, it was even worse than he suspected. Just behind the front line, he discovered a battalion with red rosettes pinned to their uniforms, who had corralled their officers into a corner of the village they occupied and were busy learning all the words of the ‘Internationale’. Not far away another mutinous infantry battalion was being shelled by their own artillery, while cavalrymen, despised by the foot sloggers because they had spent most of the war waiting safely to be inserted into the breakthrough that never came, closed in.

  For the moment the British were the stronger ally but they could not possibly fight on without France who, despite its smaller population, continued to make a much larger contribution to the land war against Germany. France manned more than two-thirds of the trench line that divided Europe from the North Sea to Switzerland and had suffered four times the British casualties. One of the reasons for Spears’s popularity with the French was that he never ceased reminding his superiors of this or his admiration for the quicksilver qualities of the poilu in the attack.

  Pétain ended the mutinies, which Spears thought he considered an even greater service to France than his generalship at Verdun, with a judicious mixture of carrot and stick. Part of the carrot was a well-publicized directive explaining that the moment was not right for a breakthrough and that in future their tactics would be to wear down the enemy. ‘It is wholly unnecessary to mount huge attacks with distant objectives.’ What made this change of heart wholly credible was that in April the United States had declared war on Germany, leading to much joyful speculation that all the Allies had to do was hold the Kaiser and his allies until the arrival of a huge American army so outnumbered them that victory was inevitable. Meanwhile, the soldiers’ friend made life easier for his beloved, poilus by making home leaves more frequent – seven days every four months – and emulating the British by setting up cheap canteens for soldiers at railway stations.

  Stick came in the form of 554 death sentences though only 49 of these were carried out, the rest being commuted to deportation to some Dreyfusian penal hellhole. Those who faced the firing parties at dawn, often refusing a blindfold, were the ringleaders: the Reds, the anticlericalists, who wished to pull down the whole edifice and at both ends of the rifles there were eyes that had seen enough to make it easier than it should have been.

  Pétain himself, having tasted battle at such a late and elevated point in his career, had never killed anybody or been in great personal danger for prolonged periods. But like most professionals he realized that it was possible to exploit the basic instinct for self-preservation if soldiers knew that the alternative to the chance of an honourable death was the near certainty of a dishonourable one. In the early part of the Verdun battle he was reported to have cured an epidemic of self-inflicted wounds to hands or feet by posting orders that in future offenders would spend a night tied to stakes in no-man’s-land.

  One of the early casualties of Verdun was Capitaine Charles de Gaulle who was wounded there for the third time. It happened near Douaumont, one of the forts on the flanks of the salient, when German infantry rushed his position during a snowstorm. In the mêlée that followed he received a bayonet thrust in the left thigh and was taken prisoner.

  Given the high percentage of junior officer casualties among all the combatants, to be captured wounded would have been an honourable way to survive had he chosen it. But as well as his burning patriotism de Gaulle had an ambition that would simply not permit it. He could not endure the idea of his luckier and often dimmer classmates from St Cyr climbing the promotion ladder while he rotted in a prison camp. Determined to get back he made several escape attempts, once with the aid of a false moustache, and twice came close to making home runs to neutral Holland or Switzerland. At one point he was interned for a while in 1917’s version of Colditz along with British and Russian officers who were also persistent escapers.

  Between escapes and during the lengthy spells of solitary confinement he suffered as a result, he developed his theories about mobile warfare and the use of the new tanks as massed cavalry. In the early years of the peace, when he was trying to prove that he had something more to offer than just another good war record, it was these ideas that would bring the young officer who had joined Pétain’s last pre-war command back to the maréchal’s attention.

  Chapter Two

  On 14 July 1919, Bastille Day, sixteen days after the signatures on the 230-page Treaty of Versailles had, in theory at least, reduced the German Army to little more than a gendarmerie, a great victory parade was held in Paris. Pétain rode a grey charger some way behind the vanguard that, in sombre and proper contrast to the pomp and circumstance that would follow, was led by representatives of les grands mutilés: three young men in their wheelchairs. Immediately behind the paraplegics and spanning the Champs-Elysées shuffled in no particular order some of those who could still just about walk with the aid of crutches and walking sticks and the artificial limbs hidden beneath their trousers.

  Among the latter was the hulking and wondrously moustached figure of Sergent Maginot, the former Under-Secretary of State for War who in 1914, though almost 40, had volunteered for the infantry rather than sit out the conflict in Paris. André Maginot had won the Médaille Militaire for courage and devotion to duty, refused to become an officer, then lost half a leg at Verdun.

  Total French casualties during the Great War were put at 1.3 million killed, much higher than the British. Only the Germans and the Russians had lost more (1.8 and 1.7 million respectively) but per capita French losses were the highest of any of the major participants – 27 per cent of the 8.3 million they had in uniform. The British Empire had 93 5,000 killed in action, a little over 10 per cent of the 8.9 million it was estimated to have mobilized. About 743,000 of these came from the United Kingdom where, for the first time in its history, conscription had been introduced in 1915. All the colonial troops who died, including the 49,000 Indians and Gurkhas, were volunteers. Canada lost 60,000, Australia 59,000, New Zealand 16,000 and South Africa 8,000.

  After Sergent Maginot and the other maimed had gone by came mounted Republican Guards in all their Napoleonic finery. These were the escort for maréchals Joseph Joffre and Ferdinand Foch. Joffre had saved Paris in 1914. Foch was the steel-nerved genius who, as Supreme Allied Commander, stopped Erich Ludendorff’s 1918 spring offensive then turned the tide with his French, British and fresh American formations to win the war in six months. A respectable length behind Foch rode Gélnéral Maxime Weygand, his dapper Chief of Staff with his high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Weygand was said to be the illegitimate offspring of a Mexican dancer and the Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian archduke proclaimed Mexico’s Emperor by Napoléon III then abandoned to a revolutionary firing squad when the United States objected and French troops were withdrawn.

  For an hour the most decorated infantry companies in the French Army, now without doubt the largest, most powerful and certainly the most victorious army in Europe, followed Pétain down the Champs-Elysées to ‘Marche Lorraine’ and Rauski’s rousing ‘Sambre-et-Meuse’. Not only the home-grown foot-sloggers but also breast-plated cavalry, Senegalese warriors with tribal cheek scars, wiry Indochinese in conical hats, turbaned North Africans and inscrutable Foreign Legionnaires moving to their own regimental march, ‘Le Boudin’, the other martial airs being too fast for their loping desert pace. Then, bringing up the rear, a reminder of how much war had changed since 1914: a squadron of nine FT-17S, Renault’s latest refinement of the tank, clattering along at just under 5 miles an hour. The stench of their exhaust fumes lingered in the July heat, tracks flattening the dung deposited by the cavalry that had preceded them under the Arc de Triomphe.

  But first, as a kind of warm-up act before the long-awaited appearance of Pétain and his poilus, came the foreign contingents. The French had decided that their alli
es would march in 1,500–strong contingents and in alphabetical order. Since it was Les Américains rather than États-Unis General John Pershing’s Doughboys came first behind a sea of Stars and Stripes and a band playing ‘Over There’, the ragtime march Paris had taken to its heart. The Americans had suffered 50,300 battle deaths, most of them during the last six months of the war as American reinforcements poured into France. If the war had not ended, Pershing, who started his military career skirmishing with Geronimo’s Apaches, would have had over 3 million men under his command by now with more on the way.

  Pershing’s contingent was followed by the Belgians – 13,800 killed out of the 267,000 who served. Then, faintly at first, came the distant strains of ‘Tipperary’ and there was Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig with his British and Dominion troops: Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, (white) South Africans and Indians all shouldering the ten-shot Lee-Enfield rifles the French had quite envied until they saw the Americans’ Spring-fields, and crunching the pavés with an identical pattern of seventeen studs on the sole of each boot. The Parisians cheered, perhaps not quite as loudly as they had cheered the Americans but loud enough, and some waved paper Union flags along with their Tricolours and Stars and Stripes, while girls in the costume of newly liberated Alsace threw rose petals and the Tommies smiled and tried to keep in step.

  Sadly, the senior soldiers and statesmen of Britain and France had not emerged from their hard-won victory over Germany with anything like the mutual affection on display in Paris that Bastille Day. Between the principal Allies the conflict had ended on a high note of bickering which characterized the six months of treaty negotiations with Germany that followed and went on to sour Anglo-French relations for the next twenty years.

  During the last twelve weeks of the fighting the British had captured almost as many prisoners as the French, Americans and Belgians put together: 188,700 compared with 196,700. But their own losses had been heavy and Haig counselled accepting Berlin’s offer of an armistice, claiming that his soldiers were now doing most of the fighting, normally the French complaint. ‘Why expend more British lives?’

  But Pétain, along with much of the French officer corps, was against accepting a ceasefire until they had inflicted on Germany the kind of abject military defeat that would leave it bereft of military ambition for generations to come. Instead, the Kaiser’s army had been allowed to turn its back on the four years of carnage they had wreaked in France and Belgium and march home in good order, its professional cadre convinced that they had not lost the war but been betrayed by the politicians. ‘Deep fear of Germany pervaded the French nation on the morrow of their dazzling success,’ wrote Churchill. It was true. France saw Germany as down but not out and was determined not to let it back on its feet.

  Foch had at first favoured the armistice because he believed France would get a new frontier on the broad moat of the Rhine behind which the German tribes could bang their swords on their shields as much as they liked without disturbing their neighbours. Düsseldorf, Cologne, Koblenz and Mainz would all be on the eastern edge of a Rhineland transformed into a quasi-independent buffer state under Allied occupation. ‘America is far away and protected by the ocean,’ argued President Georges Clemenceau who backed his maréchal to the hilt. ‘England could not be reached by Napoleon himself. You are sheltered … we are not.’

  But US President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister David Lloyd George remained deaf to the entreaties of France’s most Anglophile President, whose first wife was an American, convinced that far from preventing another war this would cause one. Alsace-Lorraine went back to France but by a majority of two to one the Treaty of Versailles left Germany’s 1870 frontiers almost intact. ‘This is not peace,’ snapped Foch. ‘It’s an armistice for twenty years.’

  It took almost that long to finish burying the dead. It was not until August 1932 that Albert Lebrun, the French President, inaugurated at Verdun the Ossuary of Douaumont. It is near where de Gaulle was bayoneted and contains the bones of 130,000 unidentified soldiers, French and German, collected from the battlefield. All the British sector’s wartime graves were tidied into landscaped cemeteries on land donated to the Imperial War Graves Commission ‘in perpetuity’ by the Belgian and French governments. In July 1938 the commission completed its last necropolis in northern France when the Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux was unveiled by the newly crowned King George VI who was on a state visit with Queen Elizabeth.

  Remembrance of the fallen was very much the theme of their visit that was intended to revive what, when it suited political needs, was fondly supposed to have been the spirit of 1914–18. It started even before the royal yacht HMS Enchantress had berthed at Boulogne harbour where the royal party were greeted by a recently completed 30-foot-high Britannia gazing out to sea with raised trident and shield at the ready. The statue, which most locals found remarkably ugly, marked the spot where in August 1914 the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had been the first of Sir John French’s British Expeditionary Force to disembark. Maréchal Pétain, always wheeled out for these occasions, was at hand to make a pretty speech and be photographed planting a gallant kiss on the young Queen’s hand. In his response the King, who was learning to control his dreadful stutter, mentioned, ‘Ties that the passing years can never weaken’.

  This was about as true as Pétain’s kiss and everyone knew it. The passing years had seen them weaken almost to breaking point. Post-war rows about the greedy French being beastly to the Germans, demanding too much in the way of financial reparations, occupying the Saar coalfields, or the British having the effrontery to sign their new naval treaty with Germany on the 120th anniversary of Waterloo, had been bad enough. ‘England has always been France’s most implacable enemy,’ Pétain had told Mussolini’s ambassador in Paris and gone on to explain that, though the Germans were enemies too, ‘I would favour an alliance with Germans which would guarantee absolute peace in Europe.’

  At least the maréchal’s little outbursts of Anglophobia, which do not seem to have been all that frequent, were discreet. One of the more distressing signs of the decline of the Entente Cordiale was the public slanging matches some of the less exalted veterans of the recent conflict had indulged in.

  ‘No more wars for me at any price!’ declared Edmund Blunden. ‘Except against the French. If there’s ever a war with them I’ll go like a shot.’ His fellow war poet Captain Robert Graves quotes Blunden towards the end of his bestselling memoir Goodbye to All That which was first published in 1929. Graves, whose mother was German, was one of many young officers resuming their education at Oxford in 1919. ‘Anti-French feeling among most ex-soldiers amounted almost to an obsession,’ he discovered. ‘Some undergraduates even insisted we had been fighting on the wrong side: our natural enemies were the French.’

  In France these feelings were amply reciprocated, though sometimes it was emphasized that it was les Anglais they objected to and not the other natives of the British Isles or its far-flung colonies. Like Graves, Henri Desagneaux had been an infantry officer. In A French Soldier’s War Diary he records the contempt reserved for English troops after Ludendorff’s 1918 spring offensive, which concentrated its considerable weight on the British sector and took 20,000 prisoners. Paris was threatened and the German advance only came to a halt when Pétain plugged the breach with French divisions and Foch was put in command of all Allied troops.

  ‘The English gave way,’ wrote Desagneaux. ‘It was our troops, yet again, who saved the situation … the inhabitants are glad to see the French again. They have no confidence in the English any more … People have nothing but praise for the Canadians, Australians and Indians – it was they who stopped the enemy advance … the English are hopeless, it’s the Scots, the Australians and Canadians who do all the work.’

  Undoubtedly Dominion infantry led the British recovery when, on 8 August 1918, a surprise attack east of Amiens spearheaded by 480 tanks manned by UK British crews crashed through the German lines
. Ludendorff called it ‘Black Day’ and it convinced him that Germany would have to sue for peace. Within seventy-two hours some 16,000 prisoners and more than 400 guns had been captured. Never before had the German Army suffered a defeat of this magnitude. ‘Even now, old timers like us relive that feeling of impending doom which overtook us that day,’ wrote Heinz Guderian in his Achtung Panzer! that was first published in 1937. It was the beginning of Haig’s big push and the foundation of his claim that, at the end, it was the British who won the war.

  The high point came at the end of September when an English Midlands division breached the Hindenburg line, the enemy’s last major defence works. Life belts and rafts from cross-Channel ferries were used to make a surprise crossing of the St Quentin canal. Exploiting a foggy dawn, nine North Staffords dashed across the Riqueval Bridge, bayoneting a man about to detonate a demolition charge. This was an innovative British Army, no longer lions led by donkeys, thinking on its feet in a way the Germans, or the French for that matter, had not seen before.

  ‘I lost all my earthly faculties and fought like an Angel,’ a lieutenant in the Manchesters wrote home after being awarded a Military Cross. ‘With this corporal, who stuck to me like your prayers, I captured a machine gun and scores of prisoners … I only shot one man with my revolver (about 30 yards!); the others I took with a smile …’ A month later Wilfred Owen was dead, killed trying to build a pontoon bridge across the Sambre canal under fire. He was 25. Most of his poetry was published posthumously and few of his army contemporaries knew he wrote it. In his battalion he was mourned for being a good officer and, if he had been thought of as being a bit different, it was for his tendency to like the French, the result of a year in Bordeaux as an English language teacher before he joined up. It was not until 1931, when Britain had virtually disarmed, that the Oxford Francophobe Professor Blunden wrote that Owen’s ‘genius and premature death’ was reminiscent of Keats.