Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (53 page)

It is sometimes suggested that Russia’s August offensive played a decisive role in deciding the outcome of the war, by persuading Moltke to transfer two corps from the west at a critical moment, shifting the balance of German forces in the east against those in the west from 1:10 to 1:8. This seems most unlikely. More plausibly, Germany’s resources were simply insufficient to fulfil its towering ambitions in France, while conducting simultaneous operations of any kind in the East. Germany’s Tannenberg triumph was also a disaster for its leaders and for those of its people who craved peace and hoped for an early negotiated end of the struggle. National euphoria prompted a surge of faith in the prospect that an absolute victory was attainable, above all in the mind of Erich Ludendorff.

The most conspicuous victim of those first eastern battles was Russian military self-confidence, which never recovered from its 1914 humiliations in East Prussia. Many officers recognised that they reflected the Tsarist army’s institutional inadequacy, together with a dearth of competent commanders, which would dog its battlefield performance to the end of its struggle in 1917. The Russian soldier displayed formidable willingness for suffering, and sometimes astonishing courage. These qualities made possible successes against the Austrians, but not against the Kaiser’s army.

Earlier Russian exultation was replaced by weeks of extreme alarm, indeed panic. Anticipating a German thrust into Poland, the bridges of Warsaw were prepared for demolition, while government officials and families packed their bags in readiness for flight. But the Germans were
temporarily content. They had frustrated Russia’s grand ambitions. Almost the entire attention of the Kaiser and his generals focused upon the Western Front, where the fate of their huge strategic gamble was now being decided.

9

The Hour of Joffre

1 PARIS AT BAY

August witnessed a remarkably comprehensive transformation of France’s capital into a war city – if not besieged, at least in imminent peril of such a fate. All public buildings including museums were closed. Motor buses were requisitioned by the government, while taxis for a time vanished from the streets. The Metro ran on, with women serving as ticket-collectors, but became so stiflingly overcrowded that many people preferred to walk. The most conspicuous street sounds were the klaxons of ambulances transporting wounded men from stations to hospitals. Many shops shut because their staff had gone to the army, as did all theatres save a few ‘moving-picture houses’. More than 50,000 people, almost all of them women, attended a service at Notre Dame to offer prayers for France.

Some commodities became scarce. There was plenty of milk – cattle grazed in the Bois de Boulogne – but butter was in short supply for lack of hands to churn it, and bakers stopped making croissants and all forms of ‘fancy bread’. There was little horsemeat to be had, because so many animals had been taken by the army that farmers deemed it more profitable to keep their remaining stock on the hoof, as prospective mounts, than to send them for slaughter. The Parc de Belleville was closed to the public so that it could accommodate sheep and cattle; its lake was drained and stocked with rabbits, a further precautionary measure in case the capital had to endure a siege.

Among many incongruities, one morning passers-by were startled to see a flock of sheep being driven along the Rue de Rivoli towards the eastern railway. The army took over the Hôtel George Cinq. The Grand Palais provided quarters for 2,000 marines in place of its usual works of art. Versailles became an armed camp. The night sky over the capital was pierced by scores of searchlight beams, probing for enemy aircraft. A daily
crowd of onlookers surrounded the American hospital at Neuilly, watching wounded men being brought in. Army volunteers of many nationalities presented themselves for medical inspection at the Court des Invalides. It was considered a reflection of respective societies’ health that doctors rejected half the Russian applicants, one-third of Poles, 11 per cent of Italians, 4 per cent of the English, and no Americans. The British ambassador expressed irritation that Lord Kitchener allowed the King’s subjects to opt for French service. The five hundred men who had already come forward, wrote Sir Francis Bertie crossly, should properly have joined their own country’s army.

The most acute famine was that of news: the only tidings of the war came in three terse, anodyne bulletins posted at intervals through the day by the War Ministry. The first news of the murderous fighting in Alsace reached Parisians through a five-day-old copy of an Italian newspaper, whose correspondent had filed a story from Basle. Many domestic titles closed down, and those that survived offered poor fare, because the price of paper soared, and thousands of printers as well as journalists had been mobilised. André Gide was so avid for information that he took nine newspapers a day. Marcel Proust admitted to seven: he found most bereft of enlightenment, but admired the military commentaries of Henri Bidou in the
Journal des débats
– ‘clear and remarkable, the only decent things I’ve read about the war’. His confidence was somewhat shaken, however, when Bidou accepted a second and simultaneous role as the paper’s dramatic critic: ‘I wonder he doesn’t get mixed up!’

In consequence of the shroud of secrecy with which Joffre and the government overlaid military operations, the nation was traumatised when, on 28 August, the government issued an abrupt communiqué announcing that ‘our lines extend from the Somme to the Vosges’. It was a devastating shock, to be thus casually informed that the enemy had advanced deep into the heart of France. ‘From what mad optimism we descended!’ lamented Gide. ‘The newspapers had done their job so well that everyone began to imagine that our army had only to show itself to put the entire German army to rout.’ Now, instead, people became resigned to a siege of the capital, a prospect rendered more plausible when, on the 29th, a Taube monoplane dropped five small bombs on the city.

On 30 August the nation learned that the government was decamping to Bordeaux, taking with it the gold reserves of the Bank of France, and that the Germans held Compiègne. At the British embassy Sir Francis Bertie burned his confidential papers. He wrote bleakly, ‘The Germans
seem sure to succeed in occupying Paris,’ and soon afterwards himself scuttled away to Bordeaux, along with most of the diplomatic corps. The rail journey took fourteen hours instead of the usual seven; Bertie complained that his staff was crowded into three compartments while the Russians had commandeered eight, to accommodate not merely their diplomatic families but also servants with children.

Civil servant Michel Corday, who had left Paris with his department, wrote disdainfully of his ministerial masters: ‘it is sad to see these men now … riding around in their cars … climbing into their special trains, see how gladly and openly they bask in their power’. There was much mockery of refugee ministers who did themselves well at the famous restaurant Au Chapon Fin; wits rechristened it
Au Capon Fin
, substituting ‘coward’ for ‘capon’. One evening over aperitifs, Corday and some politicians discussed, curiously tastelessly, a linguistic oddity that had suddenly assumed relevance: why was it that there was a word for a woman who had lost her husband – widow – but none for a mother who had lost her child? An absurd contest developed between rival military censors established in Paris and Bordeaux: each in turn exasperated journalists by approving for publication material which the other had blue-pencilled. The rules governing news were thought less stringent in Bordeaux, but France, like all the belligerent nations, banned enumeration of total losses.

Seeing the government quit the capital, a million humbler refugees did likewise. Among these was Proust, who set forth for his beloved Cabourg on the Normandy coast. The five-hour trip stretched to twenty-two, and on arrival he found the town’s little hospital crowded with wounded soldiers. Each day thereafter, he took them small gifts – playing cards, games, chocolates. A cluster of fugitive duchesses assisted in the establishment of soup kitchens for Belgian refugees, but the novelist noted that the local
cocottes
proved rather more competent in fulfilling this role.

One of war minister Adolphe Messimy’s last acts before leaving for Bordeaux was to appoint Gen. Joseph Gallieni military governor of Paris. A lean, gaunt, bespectacled sixty-five-year-old with long experience of colonial warfare, Gallieni had waived his claims upon France’s supreme command back in 1911, deferring to Joffre. He was, in the words of Lloyd George, who met him in those days, ‘evidently a very ill man; he looked sallow, shrunken and haunted. Death seemed to be chasing the particles of life out of his veins.’ Gallieni had retired from the army that April, but when recalled to the colours in this supreme emergency he summoned up reserves of energy, resolution and insight – not to mention wit – which
served France well. He, like Lanrezac, had earlier visited GQG at Vitry-le-François, and on 14 August vainly advised Joffre against an offensive in the Ardennes.

Now, Gallieni seemed a man for the hour. While Frenchmen are supposed by Anglo-Saxons to be chronically susceptible to displays of emotion, even the old general was surprised to be warmly kissed by Messimy when he accepted the military governorship on the 26th. He threw himself immediately into organising a defensive perimeter around the capital, though he had few illusions that, if the Germans broke through the French field army, Paris could again withstand such a siege as it had experienced in 1870. Gallieni fumed at the prevarications of bureaucrats, who seemed incapable of adjusting from the tempo of peace to that of extreme national peril: house demolitions essential to create fields of fire had not been carried out, for fear of distressing local communities.

On 27 August the government fell, and a reshuffle took place. Thereafter René Viviani remained prime minister, albeit a widely discredited one, but two socialists joined the government for the first time. Assembly deputies were disgusted by Messimy’s evident inability to exercise any control over Joffre – to Poincaré’s fury, the C-in-C even refused to allow the president to visit the front. Messimy was thus forced out of the War Ministry. His replacement by Alexandre Millerand did nothing to ease the difficulties of Gallieni. The governor inherited a 100,000-strong Paris garrison, but these men were the scrapings of the army, not a coherent fighting force. To hold the capital in the face of a German assault, the governor concluded, he would need three regular corps – reserve formations were useless – and there was no prospect Joffre would give them to him.

An Englishman in the first days of September lamented the emptiness of the most brilliant city in Europe. The terraces of fashionable cafés were almost deserted. One famous
boulevardier
sat alone and mournful, ‘deserted by his court’. A caustic Paris editor claimed that the road from the city to Fontainebleau was strewn with automobiles ditched because their owners, accustomed to entrusting the driving of them to chauffeurs, had themselves taken the wheel in order to flee, only to founder. The Invalides was besieged by frightened people desperate to secure military permits to quit the city, and long queues snaked around station ticket offices. Parisians watched disconsolately as trees were felled to create obstacles and loopholed wooden barriers were erected across streets. One afternoon a crowd in the Bois de Boulogne gawked at an eagle wheeling high in the sky, and debated its significance. Was this a bronze symbol of
Napoleon, or the family bird of the Hohenzollerns? Instead of either it proved to be a vulture, escaped from a zoo.

2 SIR JOHN DESPAIRS

Later in the autumn of 1914 Lloyd George, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, held a conversation with Castelnau, commanding Second Army. As they discussed the difficulties confronting the allies, the Welshman made some reference to France’s greatest soldier. ‘Ah, Napoleon, Napoleon!’ mused the general. ‘If he were here now, he would have thought of the “something else”.’ But then, asked if France could expel the Germans, Castelnau shrugged simply: ‘
Il le faut!
’ His assertion that the invaders’ removal was not an option, but a compelling necessity, was an important statement of France’s strategic predicament from the end of August 1914 until the armistice more than four years later. It signified the fact that Germany occupied large areas of French and Belgian territory. Thereafter, the allies felt obliged to sustain offensive operations, to dispossess the Kaiser’s armies of their gains.

But how? Admirers of Gallieni afterwards argued that he deserved credit for the great reversal of fortune which the French army contrived in September 1914, not least because confidence in Joffre fell so low. In the early weeks of the war the C-in-C had presided over a succession of bloodbaths, which cost the lives of more than 100,000 young men in attempts to fulfil Plan XVII. The commander-in-chief had utterly misread German deployments and intentions, and led his country’s armies to disaster. Had Joffre fallen dead on 1 September, history would remember him only as a bungler and butcher. He would later commit further misjudgements and preside over more costly failures which prompted his dismissal in December 1916.

Nonetheless, during a few short weeks in late August and September 1914, while the general did not establish a claim to be considered one of history’s outstanding soldiers, he contrived for himself a moment of greatness. His first notable achievement was that, after the disasters of the Frontiers battles, he suffered no personal collapse of nerve. His generation of European generals had been conditioned to anticipate heavy losses in any great clash; far from being traumatised by the casualty lists, most senior officers regarded a stoical response as a critical measure of their virility. But this did not prevent several commanders on both sides from succumbing to despair in the autumn of 1914.

Joffre did not. Belatedly this slow, heavy, strong man grasped the enemy’s intention. He preserved his self-discipline when others, French, British and German alike, conspicuously lost theirs; he displayed an Olympian calm and an iron will which proved decisive in averting the triumph of the Kaiser’s armies. Joffre’s transition, from the role of abattoir superintendent in the Battles of the Frontiers to that of allied saviour, began on 25 August, the day on which he initiated a major transfer of forces northwards from Alsace-Lorraine. Relying upon formidable pre-war French fortifications to contain larger numbers of Germans, he redeployed twenty infantry and three cavalry divisions to the centre and left of the allied line. The movement required immensely complex train scheduling, and would not be completed until 1 September. Meanwhile the retreat of the allied left continued, but in the centre of the front French armies launched some important and effective counter-attacks – for instance, on 25 August against German forces driving for Nancy. Castelnau, who commanded in that sector, showed conspicuous skill in directing the defence against Prince Rupprecht’s advance from Morhange.