The Guns of August (66 page)

When Joffre reached Compiègne he pleaded with the British Commander to stick fast until the offensive could be resumed at a favorable moment. His arguments seemed to produce no effect. He “distinctly saw” Murray tugging at the Field Marshal’s tunic as if to prevent him from yielding to persuasion. It was a supererogatory effort, for Sir John French kept saying, “No, no,” to Joffre and insisting that in
view of his losses his army was in no condition to fight and must have two days to rest and refit. Joffre could not dismiss him on the spot as he would have a French general; he could not even throw a fit of temper to gain his ends as he had with Lanrezac at Marle. With the British backing away from the space between Lanrezac and Maunoury, neither of their armies could hold along the present line and all hope of carrying out General Order No. 2 must be abandoned. Joffre departed, by his own confession, “in very bad humor.”

Sir John French’s intentions were even more drastic than he admitted to Joffre. Without regard for an ally fighting on the threshhold of defeat, he now told his Inspector of Communications, Major General Robb, to plan for a “definite and prolonged retreat due south, passing Paris to the east and west.” Even Kitchener’s instructions could not be blamed for this. Conceived in deep disapproval of Henry Wilson’s commitment to Plan 17, they were designed to restrain a too aggressive Sir John and a too Francophil Wilson from risking the British Army in some French-sponsored scheme of
offensive à outrance
that could lead to annihilation or capture. They were never intended to suggest such a degree of caution as would lead to actual desertion. But the sweat that comes from fear cannot be controlled, and Sir John was now gripped by fear of losing his army and with it his name and reputation.

His troops were not, as he pretended, a broken army unfit for further effort. By their own account they were in no mood to give up. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Maurice of the 3rd Division Staff said that despite exhaustion, sore feet, and lack of time for cooked meals “the restorative effect of a hot meal, a good night’s rest and a bath is little short of marvelous, and these were what our army chiefly needed … to enable it to take the field again.” Captain Ernest Hamilton of the 11th Hussars said that after its day of rest on August 29 the BEF was “now in perfect trim to turn and fight at any moment.” General Macready, Adjutant-General in the BEF, said “all they needed was rest and food to make them ready and eager” to show the Germans what they could do.

Nevertheless Sir John French next day sent Joffre definitive
notice that the British Army would not be in condition to take its place in the line “for another ten days.” Had he asked for ten days’ time out when fighting with his back to London he would not have survived in command. As it was, Sir John French remained Commander in Chief for another year and a half.

That afternoon, on edge to get his men on the move and away from the vicinity of the enemy, he was anxious to have Lanrezac break off his battle and resume the retreat with him shoulder to shoulder, less out of concern for covering Lanrezac’s flank than to protect his own. In an effort to obtain an order for the Fifth Army to do this, Henry Wilson called GQG and, finding that Joffre had not returned, spoke to General Berthelot who refused to assume authority but arranged to have Wilson intercept Joffre at the Hotel Lion d’Or in Rheims at 7:30 that evening. At mealtimes Joffre’s whereabouts were always known. Wilson, when he found him, argued in vain. All Joffre would say was, “Lanrezac must see it out to the end,” without specifying what end he had in mind. When Wilson returned with this news, Sir John decided not to wait, and gave orders for the BEF to resume the retreat next day.

Meanwhile Lanrezac’s advance on St. Quentin was meeting difficulties. A regiment of the XVIIIth Corps, under orders to take a village down the road, advanced under shrapnel falling like hail. Shells “gutted the road and tore branches from the trees in huge pieces,” wrote a sergeant who survived.

“It was stupid to lie down; one might as well keep moving .… Here and there men lay flat on their stomachs or on their backs. They were dead. One of them, under an apple tree, had all of his face missing; blood drowned his head. On the right drums sounded the bayonet charge followed by the trumpet. Our line advanced marked by the sparkle of the bayonets slanted against a blue sky. The rhythm of the drums quickened. ‘Forward!’ All the men cried ‘Forward!’ It was a superb moment. An electric shiver went through my scalp and contracted the roots of my hair. The drums beat in a rage, the hot wind carried the notes of the trumpet, the men shouted—they were transported! … Suddenly we were stopped. To
charge a village 900 yards away against a solid defense was folly. The order came, ‘Lie down, take cover.’”

The attack on St. Quentin was thrown back and, as Lanrezac had anticipated, heavy enemy pressure began to bear down upon his right. Bülow was attacking with all his forces instead of allowing the French to move forward against him so that they might be taken in the rear by the armies of Kluck and Hausen. Believing that the action was no more than the death throes of a broken army, Bülow felt “confident of the outcome.” In one sector the French were driven back across the Oise, and a panic developed when the bridges and narrow roads leading off them became jammed. Displaying “the greatest quickness and comprehension,” in the words of his least sympathetic observer, Lanrezac quickly ordered abandonment of the action at St. Quentin and a new concentration of effort to redeem the situation on the right at Guise.

Franchet d’Esperey, commander of the Ist Corps, the eager, sturdy little general burned by the suns of Tonkin and Morocco whom Poincaré called “a stranger to depression,” was ordered to rally the IIIrd and Xth Corps on his left and right. With the aid of officers riding up and down the front on horseback and bands playing once again the quick bright chords of the “Sambre et Meuse,” he reformed the line by 5:30
P.M.
Preceded by a well-prepared artillery action, the French moved forward once more to the attack. The bridge at Guise was piled high with ramparts of enemy dead. On the far side resistance was desultory; the French could feel it weakening. “The Germans were running away,” wrote an observer, and the French, “frantic with joy at the new and longed for sensation were carried forward in a splendid victorious wave.”

At the day’s end when the sergeant who had participated in the attack on St. Quentin returned to the village from which he had started that morning, he was met by a friend who had all the news. “He said it had been a great day. Our check didn’t matter. The enemy was pushed back, we were the winners. The Colonel was killed by a shell; he died while they were carrying him off. Commandant Theron was wounded in the chest. Captain Gilberti was wounded and would not live.
Many of the men were dead or wounded. He repeated it had been a good day because the regiment would sleep two nights in the same place.”

The retirement of the Guard Corps—the élite of Bülow’s Army—pulled back its neighbors and gave Lanrezac a tactical victory—at Guise, if not at St. Quentin. But he was now alone and exposed, facing north, while his neighbors on both sides, the British and the Fourth Army, each a full day’s march ahead of him, were continuing their retreat and further uncovering his flanks at every step. If the Fifth Army were to be saved it must immediately break off battle and rejoin its partners. But Lanrezac could get no directive from Joffre who was not at GQG when Lanrezac telephoned.

“Is the Fifth Army to delay in the region of Guise-St. Quentin at the risk of being captured?” Lanrezac asked General Belin, Joffre’s deputy.

“What do you mean, let your army be captured! That’s absurd!”

“You do not understand me. I am here at the express orders of the Commander in Chief .… I cannot take it upon myself to withdraw to Laon. It is for the Commander in Chief to give me the order to retire. Lanrezac was not going to take the blame this time, as at Charleroi.

Refusing to assume authority, Belin said he would report the question to Joffre as soon as he returned. When Joffre did return, although he appeared still confident, still unruffled, his hopes had suffered a second crash even graver than the debacle at the frontiers because now the enemy was that much deeper into France. He had no way of knowing that Lanrezac’s fight had inflicted a sharp check on Bülow’s army because the results did not yet show. He could only recognize that the Fifth Army was in truth left in a dangerous position, that the BEF was backing out, and he could “no longer nourish any hope of holding our Allies on the anticipated line of battle.” The Sixth Army, while still in the process of forming, was under heavy attack from Kluck’s two right-wing corps; the front he had hoped to hold was dissipated; more territory
would have to be yielded, perhaps as far as the Marne, perhaps even to the Seine.

During this period, the “most tragic in all French history,” as its chief investigator was to call it, Joffre did not panic like Sir John French, or waver like Moltke or become momentarily unnerved like Haig or Ludendorff or succumb to pessimism like Prittwitz. What went on behind that opaque exterior he never showed. If he owed his composure to a failure of imagination, that was fortunate for France. Ordinary men, Clausewitz wrote, become depressed by a sense of danger and responsibility; if these conditions are to “lend wings to strengthen the judgment, there must be present unusual greatness of soul.” If danger did not strengthen Joffre’s judgment in any way, it did call forth a certain strength of soul or of character. When ruin was all around him, he maintained an even tenor, a stolid control, what Foch, who saw him on August 29, called a “wonderful calm” which held the French Army together in an hour when it most needed the cement of confidence. On one of these days Colonel Alexandre, returning from a mission to the Fifth Army, excused his expression of gloom on the ground of “the bad news I have to bring.”

“What!” answered Joffre, “do you no longer believe in France? Go get some rest. You will see—everything will be all right.”

That night of August 29 at 10:00
P.M.
he issued the order for Lanrezac to retire and blow up the bridges of the Oise behind him. General d’Amade was ordered to blow up the bridges over the Somme at Amiens and fall back, along with Maunoury’s Army. On the right the Fourth Army was ordered to retire on Rheims, and General de Langle, who demanded rest for his troops, was told that rest depended on the enemy. As his final bitter act of the night of August 29, Joffre ordered preparations made for leaving Vitry-le-François, “that headquarters of broken hopes and lost illusions.” GQG was to be moved back to Bar-sur-Aube on an eastern tributary of the Seine. The news spread among the Staff, adding, as Joffre disapprovingly noted, to “the general nervousness and anxiety.”

Through a Staff failure, Joffre’s order to the Fifth Army did
not reach Lanrezac till early next morning, causing him a long night of unnecessary agony. Fortunately von Bülow did not renew the combat or, when Lanrezac withdrew, follow after. The results of the battle were as obscure to the Germans as to the French, and Bülow’s impressions seem to have been curiously mixed, for he both reported it to OHL as a success and at the same time sent a staff captain to von Kluck to say his army was “exhausted by the battle of Guise and unable to pursue.” Ignorant of this, the French—Joffre as well as Lanrezac—were possessed by a single aim: to disengage the Fifth Army and bring it out of danger and into line with the other French Armies before the Germans could outflank it on the left.

Meanwhile the threat to Paris of the oncoming German right wing was evident. Joffre telegraphed Gallieni to lay charges under the bridges of the Seine immediately to the west of Paris and of the Marne immediately to the east and to post platoons of Engineers at each one to make sure that orders to blow the bridges would be carried out. Maunoury’s Army, in falling back, would cover Paris and be the natural group to provide the army of three corps Gallieni was demanding. But to Joffre and GQG Paris was still a “geographical expression.” To defend it for its own sake and, for that purpose, put Maunoury’s Army at Gallieni’s disposal and under his orders was not Joffre’s intention. Paris, as he saw it, would stand or fall with the result of the battle he intended to fight with the whole field army under his own command. To the men inside Paris, however, the fate of the capital was of more direct interest.

The apparent result of the Battle of St. Quentin and Guise deepened the pall of dismay hanging over them. On the morning of the battle M. Touron, vice president of the Senate and an industrial magnate of the north, rushed into Poincaré’s office “like a whirlwind,” claiming that the government was “being deceived by GQG” and that our left had “been turned and the Germans are at La Fère.” Poincaré repeated the stout assurances of Joffre that the left would hold and that as soon as the Sixth Army was ready the offensive would be resumed, but in the back of his mind he feared that M. Touron might be
right. Cryptic messages filtered in, indicating a great battle was in progress. Every hour he received contradictory reports. Late in the afternoon M. Touron burst in again, more excited than ever. He had just been talking over the telephone to M. Seline, a fellow Senator from the Aisne who owned a property near St. Quentin and who had been watching the battle from the roof of his house. M. Seline had seen the French troops advancing and the puffs of smoke and the black shellbursts filling the sky and then, as German reinforcements, like an army of gray ants, were brought up, had seen the French thrown back. The attack had not succeeded, the battle was lost, and M. Touron departed wailing.

The second stage of the battle—at Guise—did not come under the eyes of the Senator on the roof and was even less clear to the Government than to GQG. All that seemed clear was that Joffre’s attempt to check the German right wing had failed, that Paris faced siege and might again eat rats as it had forty years before. The possibility of the fall of the capital, the question whether the government should leave, which had been lurking in ministerial minds since the Battle of the Frontiers, was now openly and urgently discussed. Colonel Penelon, liaison officer between GQG and the President, arrived early next morning, his usually smiling face for once somber, and admitted the situation was “intensely serious.” Millerand as Minister of War at once advised departure to avoid being cut off from the rest of the country. Gallieni, hastily summoned for his opinion, advised telephoning Joffre. Joffre acknowledged the situation was not good; the Fifth Army had fought well but had not accomplished his hopes; the English “had not budged”; the advance of the enemy could not be slowed and Paris was “seriously menaced.” He advised the government to leave so as not, by remaining, to be the means of drawing the enemy upon the capital. Joffre knew well enough that the German objective was the French Armies, not the government, but as the battlefield neared Paris, the presence of the government in the Zone of the Armies would tend to blur the lines of authority. Its withdrawal would remove a source of interference and leave GQG
with enhanced power. When Gallieni on the telephone tried to convince him of the necessity of defending Paris as the material and moral hub of the war effort, and again demanded an army to attack the enemy in the field before the city could be invested, he somewhat vaguely promised to send him three corps though not at full strength and largely made up of reserve divisions. He gave Gallieni the impression that he considered Paris expendable and was still unwilling to deplete his forces for its sake.