* The dispatch reads, “The saving of the left wing of the army under my command on the morning of the 26th of August could never have been accomplished unless a commander of rare and unusual coolness, intrepidity and determination had been present personally to conduct the operation.” Having evidently written or signed this report in one of the extreme swings of his unreliable temperament, Sir John reverted to antipathy, did not rest until he succeeded in having Smith-Dorrien recalled in 1915, and continued a malevolent vendetta against him publicly in the book he published after the war.
* Known as the Foch Detachment until September 5, when it became the Ninth Army.
20
The Front Is Paris
THE GRANDS BOULEVARDS WERE EMPTY, shop fronts were shuttered, buses, trams, cars, and horse cabs had disappeared. In their place flocks of sheep were herded across the Place de la Concorde on their way to the Gare de l’Est for shipment to the front. Unmarred by traffic, squares and vistas revealed their purity of design. Most newspapers having ceased publication, the kiosks were hung meagerly with the single-page issues of the survivors. All the tourists were gone, the Ritz was uninhabited, the Meurice a hospital. For one August in its history Paris was French—and silent. The sun shone, fountains sparkled in the Rond Point, trees were green, the quiet Seine flowed by unchanging, brilliant clusters of Allied flags enhanced the pale gray beauty of the world’s most beautiful city.
In the vast warren of the Invalides, Gallieni grappled with obstructionism and the hesitancy of officials to take the radical measures necessary to make the words “entrenched camp” a reality. He envisaged the camp as a base of operations, not a Troy holed up for siege. From the experience of Liège and Namur he knew that Paris could not withstand shelling by the new heavy siege guns of the enemy, but his plan was not to wait passively to be invested but to give battle—with the army he did not yet have—beyond the outer ring of fortifications. Study of the Balkan and Manchurian wars had convinced him that a system of deep and narrow trenches protected by earth mounds and logs, flanked by barbed wire and “wolf pits”—wide-mouthed holes fitted at the bottom with up-pointed stakes—and manned by trained and determined troops armed with machine guns would be virtually impregnable. These were what he was trying to construct in the stretches between the artillery posts, although he still did not have the army to man them.
Every day, sometimes two and three times a day, with increasing desperation he telephoned GQG demanding the three active corps. He wrote to Joffre, sent emissaries, hammered at the Minister of War and the President, repeatedly warned them Paris was unprepared. By August 29 he had received under his orders so far one naval brigade whose appearance, marching through the streets in white with high-pitched pipe, delighted the populace, if not Gallieni.
He conceived of the work to be done as tripartite: military defense, moral defense, and provisioning. To accomplish each of these tasks it was necessary to be frank with the public. As much as he despised politicians, Gallieni respected the people of Paris who, he considered, could be counted on to behave sensibly in the face of danger. He believed Poincaré and Viviani did not want to tell the country the truth, and suspected them of preparing a “mummery” to deceive the people. His efforts to obtain authority for demolition of buildings obstructing the forts’ line of fire were hampered by official reluctance to alarm the population. Each destruction of property required a document signed by both the mayor of the arrondissement and the Chief of Engineers fixing the value of indemnity to the proprietor—a process that was a source of endless harassment and delay. Each decision was enmeshed in a further “byzantine” argument by those who contended that Paris as the seat of government could not be a “fortified camp” to be defended militarily. The issue, as General Hirschauer disgustedly remarked, offered a “magnificent field of controversy,” and he feared the proponents of an open city would soon succeed in proving the post of Military Governor itself illegal. “You cannot convince the jurists without a text,” he said.
Gallieni provided one. On August 28 the Zone of the Armies was extended to include Paris and the country on both sides down to the Seine with the result that the municipal government of Paris was brought under the authority of the Military Governor. At 10:00 A.M. Gallieni assembled his military and civil cabinets in a Council of Defense which was held with everyone standing up and was over by 10:15. Members were asked not to discuss whether Paris should be defended but simply to attest that the presence of the enemy required the institution of a “state of defense.” Documents providing the legal basis were already drawn up and lying on the table. Gallieni invited each person to sign his name and immediately declared the Council adjourned. It was the first and last he held.
Ruthlessly he pursued work on the defenses, sparing no time or pity on demurers or the irresolute, on weakness or ineptitude. Like Joffre, he liquidated incompetents, on his first day of office dismissing a general of Engineers and another general two days later. All inhabitants of the suburbs, “even the oldest and least capable,” were impressed for labor with pick and shovel. An order for 10,000 spades and pickaxes to be collected within twenty-four hours was issued; by evening all had been delivered. When on the same occasion Gallieni ordered 10,000 bowie knives for use as tools his purveyor protested it was impossible because their purchase was illegal. “All the more reason,” replied Gallieni, looking at him sharply over his pince-nez, and the knives were obtained.
On August 29 an area around Paris within a radius of about twenty miles, reaching to Melun on the south and Dammartin and Pontoise on the north, was brought under Gallieni’s authority. Preparations were made for dynamiting bridges in the area. For those classified as “works of art” and part of the “national heritage” a system of special guards was arranged to ensure that they were not destroyed until the last extremity. All entries to the city, even the sewers, were barricaded. Bakers, butchers, market gardeners were organized and cattle brought in to graze in the Bois de Boulogne. To hasten the assembly of stocks of ammunition, Gallieni requisitioned transport “by all means available,” including the taxis of Paris, so soon to become immortal. Assigned to the Artillery Staff of the entrenched camp was one already encased in history, former Captain, now Major Alfred Dreyfus, returned to active service at fifty-five.
At the front the First and Second Armies in Lorraine, under the terrible pressure of Rupprecht’s guns, still held fiercely and tenaciously to the line of the Moselle. Their line wavered and bulged, in some places even was pierced by German wedges. Tightly contained by French counterattacks on their flanks, these could not be widened to major openings. The battle went on with Rupprecht’s armies probing for the weakest place and Dubail and Castelnau, losing troops to Joffre’s demands for the west, uncertain how long they could hold or whether they could hold. In the villages taken by the Germans the events of Belgium were re-enacted. In Nomeny on the outskirts of Nancy, “citizens fired on our troops,” declared the German Governor of Metz in a bulletin posted on the walls. “I have therefore ordered as a punishment that the village shall be burned to the ground. Nomeny is thus by now destroyed.”
On Castelnau’s left where the front turned to the west, Ruffey’s Third Army, unbalanced by the removal of Maunoury’s divisions, was falling back behind the Meuse below Verdun. Next to it the Fourth Army, which had rested in position on August 28 to prove the retreat was “strategic” and not a rout, was ordered, to the disgust of General de Langle, to resume its retreat on August 29. Further to the left where the pressure against the French line was the greatest, General Lanrezac’s Fifth Army was completing the turning maneuver preparatory for the counter-attack on St. Quentin which Joffre had imposed upon its unwilling commander. At the extreme end of the line, Maunoury’s Sixth Army was coming into position. Between Maunoury and Lanrezac the BEF was being pulled out by Sir John French despite his knowledge of the battle that would be fought on the morrow.
Almost the process was interrupted by a much-needed deed of An
glo-French cooperation when Haig sent word to Lanrezac that his troops were “perfectly ready to attack and he wished to enter into direct communication and act in concert with the Fifth Army in its planned action at St. Quentin.” One of Lanrezac’s staff immediately hastened to meet him and found Haig standing picturesquely on a little hill, while an orderly held his horse, beside a lance with fluttering white-cross pennon planted in the ground. Haig said his air reconnaissance reported the enemy moving southwest of St. Quentin, “exposing his flank as he advances.”
“Go quickly to your General and give him this information .… Let him act. I am anxious to cooperate with him in this attack.” The offer, conveyed to Lanrezac, gave him “lively satisfaction” and moved him to “say some nice things concerning Sir Douglas Haig.” Arrangements for joint action in the morning were confirmed, subject only to approval by the British Commander in Chief. At 2 A.M. word came from GHQ that Sir John French refused permission on the ground that the troops were “very tired and must have at least one day’s rest,” a requirement which, however true of the IInd Corps, was not true of the Ist Corps whose commander himself had reported them fit and ready. Lanrezac exploded with wrath. “C’est une félonie!” (It’s betrayal!) he shouted, and added what a listener described as “terrible, unpardonable things about Sir John French and the British Army.”
Nevertheless next morning, sandwiched between von Bülow who was moving down against him and Joffre who came up to superintend the offensive, Lanrezac had no choice but to attack. From papers found on a captured French officer, Bülow had learned of the coming attack and was not taken off guard. Doubting Lanrezac’s mood, Joffre arrived early in the morning at Laon, now Lanrezac’s headquarters, to lend him sangfroid out of his own bottomless supply. Laon is built on a high mesa from which the view extends over miles of rolling fields that rise and dip like the swells of a green ocean. Twenty miles to the north in a great semicircle the Fifth Army was drawn up facing northwest toward Guise and St. Quentin. From the tower of the cathedral at the highest point of the town the carved stone heads of cows, instead of gargoyles, gaze in bovine serenity over the landscape. Beneath them in the same silent calm, Joffre sat watching Lanrezac dictate orders and conduct the battle. He stayed for three hours without saying a word until, satisfied that Lanrezac was displaying “authority and method,” he felt able to leave for a good lunch at the station restaurant before proceeding with his racing chauffeur on his next errand.
This was to find Sir John French who, he suspected, had his eyes on the Channel coast and “might be getting out of our line of battle for a long time.” The place he held in the line between Lanrezac’s Army and the gathering Sixth Army of Maunoury was now crucial and yet outside Joffre’s power to control. He could not give orders to Field Marshal French as he did to Lanrezac or force him to fight by sitting behind him in silent surveillance. If, however, he could persuade the British to stand still, he hoped to stabilize a front on the Aisne along a line Amiens-Rheims-Verdun and resume the offensive from there. British Headquarters having taken another backward step the day before, Sir John was now established at Compiègne which was forty miles or—for tired armies—about three days’ march from Paris. While its neighbor, the French Fifth Army, was fighting all during this day at Guise, lifting enemy pressure, the British Army rested. Having retreated without pursuit the day before, it now, after eight hot days of marching, digging trenches, and fighting engagements great and small, at last came to a halt. The IInd Corps made a short march during the evening hours to bring it across the Oise, but the Ist Corps enjoyed a full day’s rest in the Forest of St. Gobain only five miles from where the left wing of Lanrezac’s Army, which had been marching and fighting for fourteen days and was no less tired, was engaged in major battle.
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.”
The Guns of August Page 49