The Guns of August (9 page)

But the idea that morale alone could conquer, Foch warned, was an “infantile notion.” From his flights of metaphysics he would descend at once, in his lectures and his prewar books
Les Principes de la Guerre
and
La Conduite de la Guerre,
to the earth of tactics, the placing of advance guards, the necessity of
sureté,
or protection, the elements of firepower, the need for obedience and discipline. The realistic half of his teaching was summed up in another aphorism he made familiar during the war,
“De quoi s’agit-il?”
(What is the essence of the problem?)

Eloquent as he was on tactics, it was Foch’s
mystique
of will that captured the minds of his followers. Once in 1908 when Clemenceau was considering Foch, then a professor, for the post of Director of the War College, a private agent whom he sent to listen to the lectures reported back in bewilderment, “This officer teaches metaphysics so abstruse as to make idiots of his pupils.” Although Clemenceau appointed Foch in spite of it, there was, in one sense, truth in the report. Foch’s principles, not because
they were too abstruse but because they were too attractive, laid a trap for France. They were taken up with particular enthusiasm by Colonel Grandmaison, “an ardent and brilliant officer” who was Director of the Troisième Bureau, or Bureau of Military Operations, and who in 1911 delivered two lectures at the War College which had a crystallizing effect.

Colonel Grandmaison grasped only the head and not the feet of Foch’s principles. Expounding their
élan
without their
sureté,
he expressed a military philosophy that electrified his audience. He waved before their dazzled eyes an “idea with a sword” which showed them how France could win. Its essence was the
offensive à outrance,
offensive to the limit. Only this could achieve Clausewitz’s decisive battle which “exploited to the finish is the essential act of war” and which “once engaged, must be pushed to the end, with no second thoughts, up to the extremes of human endurance.” Seizure of initiative is the
sine qua non.
Preconceived arrangements based on a dogmatic judgment of what the enemy will do are premature. Liberty of action is achieved only by imposing one’s will upon the enemy. “All command decisions must be inspired by the will to seize and retain the initiative.” The defensive is forgotten, abandoned, discarded; its only possible justification is an occasional “economizing of forces at certain points with a view to adding them to the attack.”

The effect on the General Staff was profound, and during the next two years was embodied in new Field Regulations for the conduct of war and in a new plan of campaign called Plan 17, which was adopted in May, 1913. Within a few months of Grandmaison’s lectures, the President of the Republic, M. Fallières, announced: “The offensive alone is suited to the temperament of French soldiers .… We are determined to march straight against the enemy without hesitation.”

The new Field Regulations, enacted by the government in October, 1913, as the fundamental document for the training and conduct of the French Army, opened with a flourish of trumpets: “The French Army, returning to its traditions, henceforth admits no law but the offensive.” Eight commandments
followed, ringing with the clash of “decisive battle,” “offensive without hesitation,” “fierceness and tenacity,” “breaking the will of the adversary,” “ruthless and tireless pursuit.” With all the ardor of orthodoxy stamping out heresy, the Regulations stamped upon and discarded the defensive. “The offensive alone,” it proclaimed, “leads to positive results.” Its Seventh Commandment, italicized by the authors, stated:
“Battles are beyond everything else struggles of morale. Defeat is inevitable as soon as the hope of conquering ceases to exist. Success comes not to him who has suffered the least but to him whose will is firmest and morale strongest.”

Nowhere in the eight commandments was there mention of matériel or firepower or what Foch called
sureté.
The teaching of the Regulations became epitomized in the favorite word of the French officer corps,
le cran,
nerve, or, less politely, guts. Like the youth who set out for the mountaintop under the banner marked “Excelsior!” the French Army marched to war in 1914 under a banner marked
“Cran.”

Over the years, while French military philosophy had changed, French geography had not. The geographical facts of her frontiers remained what Germany had made them in 1870. Germany’s territorial demands, William I had explained to the protesting Empress Eugénie, “have no aim other than to push back the starting point from which French armies could in the future attack us.” They also pushed forward the starting point from which Germany could attack France. While French history and development after the turn of the century fixed her mind upon the offensive, her geography still required a strategy of the defensive.

In 1911, the same year as Colonel Grandmaison’s lectures, a last effort to commit France to a strategy of the defensive was made in the Supreme War Council by no less a personage than the Commander in Chief designate, General Michel. As Vice President of the Council, a post which carried with it the position of Commander in Chief in the event of war, General Michel was then the ranking officer in the army. In a report that precisely reflected Schlieffen’s thinking, he submitted
his estimate of the probable German line of attack and his proposals for countering it. Because of the natural escarpments and French fortifications along the common border with Germany, he argued, the Germans could not hope to win a prompt decisive battle in Lorraine. Nor would the passage through Luxembourg and the near corner of Belgium east of the Meuse give them sufficient room for their favored strategy of envelopment. Only by taking advantage of “the whole of Belgium,” he said, could the Germans achieve that “immediate, brutal and decisive” offensive which they must launch upon France before the forces of her Allies could come into play. He pointed out that the Germans had long yearned for Belgium’s great port of Antwerp, and this gave them an additional reason for an attack through Flanders. He proposed to face the Germans along a line Verdun-Namur-Antwerp with a French army of a million men whose left wing—like Schlieffen’s right—should brush the Channel with its sleeve.

Not only was General Michel’s plan defensive in character; it also depended upon a proposal that was anathema to his fellow officers. To match the numbers he believed the Germans would send through Belgium, General Michel proposed to double French front-line effectives by attaching a regiment of reserves to every active regiment. Had he proposed to admit Mistinguette to the Immortals of the French Academy, he could hardly have raised more clamor and disgust.

“Les réserves, c’est zéro!”
was the classic dogma of the French officer corps. Men who had finished their compulsory training under universal service and were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-four were classed as reserves. Upon mobilization the youngest classes filled out the regular army units to war strength; the others were formed into reserve regiments, brigades, and divisions according to their local geographical districts. These were considered fit only for rear duty or for use as fortress troops, and incapable, because of their lack of trained officers and NCOs, of being attached to the fighting regiments. The regular army’s contempt for the reserves, in which it was joined by the parties of the right,
was augmented by dislike of the principle of the “nation in arms.” To merge the reserves with the active divisions would be to put a drag on the army’s fighting thrust. Only the active army, they believed, could be depended upon to defend the country.

The left parties, on the other hand, with memories of General Boulanger on horseback, associated the army with
coups d’état
and believed in the principle of a “nation in arms” as the only safeguard of the Republic. They maintained that a few months’ training would fit any citizen for war, and violently opposed the increase of military service to three years. The army demanded this reform in 1913 not only to match an increase in the German Army but also because the more men who were in training at any one time, the less reliance needed to be placed on reserve units. After angry debate, with bitterly divisive effect on the country, the Three-Year Law was enacted in August, 1913.

Disdain of the reserves was augmented by the new doctrine of the offensive which, it was felt, could only be properly inculcated in active troops. To perform the irresistible onslaught of the
attaque brusquée,
symbolized by the bayonet charge, the essential quality was
élan,
and
élan
could not be expected of men settled in civilian life with family responsibilities. Reserves mixed with active troops would create “armies of decadence,” incapable of the will to conquer.

Similar sentiments were known to be held across the Rhine. The Kaiser was widely credited with the edict “No fathers of families at the front.” Among the French General Staff it was an article of faith that the Germans would not mix reserve units with active units, and this led to the belief that the Germans would not have enough men in the front line to do two things at once: send a strong right wing in a wide sweep through Belgium west of the Meuse and keep sufficient forces at their center and left to stop a French breakthrough to the Rhine.

When General Michel presented his plan, the Minister of War, Messimy, treated it
“comme une insanité.”
As chairman of the Supreme War Council he not only attempted to suppress
it but at once consulted other members of the Council on the advisability of removing Michel.

Messimy, an exuberant, energetic, almost violent man with a thick neck, round head, bright peasant’s eyes behind spectacles, and a loud voice, was a former career officer. In 1899 as a thirty-year-old captain of Chasseurs, he had resigned from the army in protest against its refusal to reopen the Dreyfus case. In that heated time the officer corps insisted as a body that to admit the possibility of Dreyfus’s innocence after his conviction would be to destroy the army’s prestige and infallibility. Unable to put loyalty to the army above justice, Messimy determined upon a political career with the declared goal of “reconciling the army with the nation.” He swept into the War Ministry with a passion for improvement. Finding a number of generals “incapable not only of leading their troops but even of following them,” he adopted Theodore Roosevelt’s expedient of ordering all generals to conduct maneuvers on horseback. When this provoked protests that old so-and-so would be forced to retire from the army Messimy replied that that was indeed his object. He had been named War Minister on June 30, 1911, after a succession of four ministers in four months and the next day was met by the spring of the German gunboat
Panther
on Agadir precipitating the second Moroccan crisis. Expecting mobilization at any moment, Messimy discovered the generalissimo-designate, General Michel, to be “hesitant, indecisive and crushed by the weight of the duty that might at any moment devolve upon him.” In his present post Messimy believed he represented a “national danger.” Michel’s “insane” proposal provided the excuse to get rid of him.

Michel, however, refused to go without first having his plan presented to the Council whose members included the foremost generals of France: Gallieni, the great colonial; Pau, the one-armed veteran of 1870; Joffre, the silent engineer; Dubail, the pattern of gallantry, who wore his kepi cocked over one eye with the
“chic exquis”
of the Second Empire. All were to hold active commands in 1914 and two were to become Marshals of France. None gave Michel’s
plan his support. One officer from the War Ministry who was present at the meeting said: “There is no use discussing it. General Michel is off his head.”

Whether or not this verdict represented the views of all present—Michel later claimed that General Dubail, for one, had originally agreed with him—Messimy, who made no secret of his hostility, carried the Council with him. A trick of fate arranged that Messimy should be a forceful character and Michel should not. To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions, and Michel duly paid for his clairvoyance. Relieved of his command, he was appointed Military Governor of Paris where in a crucial hour in the coming test he was indeed to prove “hesitant and indecisive.”

Messimy having fervently stamped out Michel’s heresy of the defensive, did his best, as War Minister, to equip the army to fight a successful offensive but was in his turn frustrated in his most-cherished prospect—the need to reform the French uniform. The British had adopted khaki after the Boer War, and the Germans were about to make the change from Prussian blue to field-gray. But in 1912 French soldiers still wore the same blue coats, red kepi, and red trousers they had worn in 1830 when rifle fire carried only two hundred paces and when armies, fighting at these close quarters, had no need for concealment. Visiting the Balkan front in 1912, Messimy saw the advantages gained by the dull-colored Bulgarians and came home determined to make the French soldier less visible. His project to clothe him in gray-blue or gray-green raised a howl of protest. Army pride was as intransigent about giving up its red trousers as it was about adopting heavy guns. Army prestige was once again felt to be at stake. To clothe the French soldier in some muddy, inglorious color, declared the army’s champions, would be to realize the fondest hopes of Dreyfusards and Freemasons. To banish “all that is colorful, all that gives the soldier his vivid aspect,” wrote the
Echo de Paris,
“is to go contrary both to French taste and military function.” Messimy pointed out that the two might no longer be synonymous, but his opponents proved immmovable. At a
parliamentary hearing a former War Minister, M. Etienne, spoke for France.

“Eliminate the red trousers?” he cried. “Never!
Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!
”

“That blind and imbecile attachment to the most visible of all colors,” wrote Messimy afterward, “was to have cruel consequences.”