To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  At various intervals came the victorious commanders, whom the crowd instantly recognized and applauded. Gouraud, the one-armed hero; Pau, also bearing an empty sleeve, but from 1870; Fayolle and Debeney; Maistre and Mangin, once nicknamed by his troops ‘the butcher’; and Castelnau, whose black brassard, recalling that he himself had lost three sons in the war, seemed to draw particularly warm acclaim from the stands. All famous warrior names, and in the recognition each received, those angry memories of the futile costly offensives, the frightful reverses, the reproaches that the generals were wantonly throwing away the lives of their men – all these were submerged in this moment of sublime thanksgiving. But it was the men, not the chiefs, that the crowd were chiefly saluting, and particularly the infantry that made up the vast bulk of the procession. Wave upon wave they came, the renowned cutting-edge and very substance of the French Army, which had fought and endured, suffered and died, in the most unspeakable conditions ever imposed upon humanity, all through the war from the first murderous clash on the frontiers, through Verdun and the Somme and the Chemin des Dames, to the Second Marne and the final glorious advance of October 1918. As the crowd watched the tattered colours of the infantry regiments file by, a kind of delirium overtook it. There were many who began, quite instinctively, to sing La Madelon, with tears streaming down their faces. What thoughts, what memories were passing through the minds of the troops as they marched by the statue of Strasbourg in the Concorde, now disburdened of its mourning crêpe for the first summer since 1870! For in all French hearts this Quatorze Juillet was a day of destiny that had been dreamed about, not merely over the past agonizing five years, but for another forty-three beyond them. Enough Frenchmen, both watching and marching, were sufficiently old to recall the shame of that defeat. Pétain (who, alas, would live on to act as caretaker for France under a new and still more humiliating defeat) had been a schoolboy, but Foch as a youth had witnessed Louis-Napoleon retreat sick and defeated through Metz, and Joffre had manned a cannon on the ramparts of Paris during the four months’ siege; Clemenceau had been one of the Deputies to protest against the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, and had narrowly escaped being lynched in the civil war that followed with the Commune. But now, as President Poincaré had declared to him in a special message, ‘In the light of this glorious morning, the last traces of the painful past have just been removed for ever.’

  For over an hour the march-past of the French contingent continued. It was hard to realize that, in the course of the past year, France had already demobilized nearly three million men. It was also pardonable for a Frenchman to believe, watching this magnificent cavalcade of his Army, that France had won the war largely by her own efforts – and losses. Finally, to close the procession, nine of General Estienne’s assault tanks rumbled through the Arc de Triomphe. The sulphurous smell of burning oil and the deafening roar and clatter that reverberated with their passage under the great archway seemed more a token of the potency of the French Army of today than a harbinger of the battles of tomorrow. Who could have any doubts that France, emerging triumphant from the inferno, now possessed the world’s most powerful instrument of war on land? What a day! What a spectacle! As the dust from tanks settled and the golden cenotaph was dragged slowly back under the arch, the thought impressed itself on one onlooker that ‘a sight like this will never be seen again. Because there will never again be a war.’

  Light and Shadows

  All through the night of 14 July 1919 revellers danced through the streets of a dazzlingly illuminated Paris, turning it (as The Times remarked) into ‘one vast ballroom’, hoping, believing, that the euphoric vie douce of pre-1914 would return – had returned. But sombre spectres were already casting their deep shadows. For anyone who read the small print in the newspapers, they were apparent even before the feast began. On the previous Friday there had been a disagreeable little incident at the Café de la Paix. It had been thronged with gay, chattering customers, including many Allied officers and their ladies, when a group of waiters on strike suddenly appeared on the scene, upsetting tables, breaking crockery and spilling drinks. Blows were exchanged between patrons and strikers, but the arrival of some hundred reserve police quickly restored order. The disgruntled waiters, it appeared, were striking for an eight-hour day and better food and working conditions, similar demands to those which, on the very day of the signature of the Peace Treaty, had brought about a Métro and bus strike, paralysing the city. That spring, inflation and the growing restiveness of the workers – la vie chère instead of la vie douce – had been the main topic of conversation in many a French household. Fortunately, or so it seemed to Parisian property-owners, the Government was being tough with these left-wing demonstrators. But its toughness was only embittering the atmosphere. It was clear that France, in giving her all for victory, had gravely neglected some aspects of her internal health. The Union Sacrée, that miraculous war-time truce between all parties and all classes, had barely survived the Armistice!

  Then, on the very day of the Victory Parade, there had been disquieting reports from Berlin in the papers, telling of a street fight between wounded German ex-soldiers and some French officers. The affray had ended in the killing, by some unknown hand, of a French Serviceman. It was a nasty reminder that the Beast was still not quite dead. And meanwhile from Washington where the Senate was beginning its deliberations on the Peace Treaty, rumours were coming that President Wilson might yet have difficulty in persuading the American Congress to ratify the instrument that was to guarantee France, once and for all, against the menace of the Beast. Four months later the dreadful rumours became reality.

  Left-wing Dissent

  In France one important group had boycotted the victory celebrations – the political constellation of the far Left, Communists, internationalists and extreme Socialists. The recent war, in their eyes, had been but a criminal affair between the capitalist classes. The workers in their millions had died in it, but it had been no concern of theirs, and the war had not ended in a holy revolution, bringing the overthrow of the existing order, as had happened in Russia. Therefore there was no cause whatever for rejoicing. Instead, the extremists had decided to stage their own show. Together with some disabled ex-Servicemen, about a hundred strong,3 they gathered near the Place de la Trinité. As a macabre demonstration against militarism, they had intended to roll several of the mutilés in their invalid carriages in front of Foch’s horse as he rode past the Opéra. But they were forestalled by the police and dispersed. Reforming on the exterior boulevards, they then marched through the East End of Paris to pay tribute to the Communard martyrs enshrined at Père Lachaise Cemetery. There was a scuffle at the cemetery, and some twenty arrests were made. The next day Marcel Cachin, editor of L’Humanité, blazed forth in vituperation against the Victory Parade:

  Bitterness! Disgust! I have recognized the crowd. It is not the crowd that took the Bastille and sang for the first time of liberty in the streets. It is not the crowd that religiously followed the bier of Zola or Jaurès… It is the brutish elemental crowd which does not change, which slavishly acclaims Caesar and Boulanger, which yells at the vanquished, which chooses its heroes indifferently among boxers, gladiators and captains.

  Cachin’s ire may well have been fanned by the poor turnout of his supporters on the 14th, but their small numbers that day were deceptively irrelevant to the intrinsic, let alone the potential, strength of the new Left in France. For in none other of the victorious nations had Russia’s October Revolution evoked stronger sympathies than among the workers of France, the home of revolution itself. It struck powerful chords with the ancient and deep-rooted revolutionary mystique of 1793, 1848, but above all with the Commune of 1871, the brutal repression of which remained stamped in the minds of the French Left wing and whose failure Lenin had now used as a textbook to perfect his own revolution. The foundation in March 1919 of the Third International in Moscow had revived hopes of successful revolution in the hearts of the spiritual he
irs of the martyred Communards, while it was no accident that among the interventionist forces in Russia it was the French at Odessa who had raised the flag of mutiny. And at home there was already abundant fuel on the economic and social scene for the flames of revolution to feed upon. From the very earliest post-war days the presence of a potent new force on the French political scene was increasingly apparent, and the bourgeois, property-owning classes closed their ranks accordingly.

  French Illusions

  With the Armistice of 1918, a series of insidious illusions had pervaded France. Falling back on the eternal, rather arrogant dogma of it being civilization’s implicit duty to come to the rescue, when necessary, of its fountain-head, she automatically presupposed that her Anglo-Saxon allies would henceforth never abandon her; that they (particularly America) would maintain their interest in reshaping Europe. But when President Wilson had come over to France to address the victorious doughboys about ‘peace upon the… foundation of right’, they had shown themselves frankly bored. They wanted to get home, and the American electorate showed that it wanted to keep them there – for ever. As the idealism of 1918 evaporated, so the Anglo-Saxon nations would retreat further and further into their shells. Even more than France, they would become preoccupied with their own pressing internal problems. Feelings would grow (particularly in Britain) that Germany had been treated with excessive harshness at Versailles, feelings generated partly by honest altruism, partly by the dictates of commerce, but partly by instinctive concern at a victorious France’s apparently annexationist tendencies, as revealed by her reaching out for the Saar and her sending troops into Germany’s bankrupt and defaulting Ruhr.

  Another illusion, one to which the glory of the Victory Parade doubtless added impetus, was that France felt she had won the war largely by her own superlative exertions. But the British and Americans knew that it could not have been won without them, and they would soon feel that the price paid, both in men and gold, had been too high. They would do almost anything rather than risk having to save France a second time, let alone regain Alsace-Lorraine for her. Hand in hand with this illusion went France’s belief that, primarily through the supremacy of her Army, she could enforce the peace by herself. But she could not, because morally, numerically and economically the war had left her feebler than she realized.

  As the true state of France’s economy became more widely apparent, so it became popular to cherish the happy, simple illusion that ‘the Boche will pay’. But Germany could not, would not pay. The Allies would not make her, and the effort to do so was to cost France herself too much. Finally, there was the mortal illusion (although, certainly, Foch for one did not share it) that vanquished, ruined, truncated, revolution-torn Germany could never again be a military menace. But had Frenchmen forgotten already how the harsh settlement imposed by Prussia in 1871, with its territorial amputations, had kept alight France’s own fire of revenge for the best part of half a century? Would France indeed have been so ready to rush to the aid of her ally, Russia, in 1914, had Alsace-Lorraine not weighed heavily upon the balances? Now France’s supreme grievance had been erased, but Versailles had simply transferred the burden to Germany, mourning her lost territories in the East.

  Financial Stresses

  Of all the sources of her illusions, probably the most consequential lay in France overestimating her own powers to mould the post-war world – an error that was to claim Britain too in the years following 1945. It was in fact ‘a haggard France’ that faced the dawn of victory. The bare economic facts were daunting: France had expended some 25 per cent of her national fortune; almost 7 per cent of her territory had been devastated by war, including some of the richest industrial areas; 3¼ million hectares (12,500 square miles, or roughly the area of Holland) of fertile soil had been ravaged; 3,500 miles of railway and over 30,000 miles of roads were destroyed; coal production was down by 37 per cent compared with 1914, steel by 60 per cent; the trade deficit had risen from 1½ million to 17½ million francs. France’s Ministry of Finance estimated the material damage caused by the Germans, and which would be the basis for reparations, at 134,000 million gold francs, a staggering figure compared with 5,000 million which Germany had demanded, and got, from France in 1871. Yet, showing the same extraordinary recuperative capacity that had amazed the world in 1871, France after 1918 repaired her shattered industries, and her courageous peasants got her raddled fields back under the plough far quicker than anyone could have imagined. It was to her financial structure, however, that the really lasting damage had been done. To pay for the war, France had ineluctably allowed inflation to have its head by issuing a flood of paper money. By the Armistice the franc had lost nearly two-thirds of its value. This was only a beginning; whereas it then exchanged at 26 to the pound sterling (5.50 to the dollar), already by the time of the Victory Parade it had depreciated to 51 to the pound. By May 1926 its value had sunk to 178 to the pound, and finally, two months later, with a hostile mob beating on the gates of the Palais Bourbon, to 220.

  The causes were not hard to find. Fanned by the new virulence of the revolutionary Left, the French workers’ very justifiable demands for better conditions and higher wages to offset this war-time inflation gave the spiral an extra spin. Then there were the additional millions which had to be spent in paying the pensions of the legions of ex-Servicemen, notably the mutilés. But the most pernicious influences here harked back to those two illusions, namely, that France’s allies would always be ready to help her, and that ‘the Boche will pay’. By the end of the war the public debt had reached 156,000 millions, of which 32,000 millions were owed to the United States and Britain. The Budget of 1919 had been postponed more than seven months, during which time further vast loans had been launched, so that when the Budget was finally agreed it showed an enormous deficit of 27,000 millions. Nobody viewed this too tragically. First, it was automatically assumed that the Allies would be accommodating, and generous, in the recovery of France’s war debts; it was widely thought, in the words of a cynical expression popular at the time, that the Allies could not possibly expect France to repay ‘the cost of overcoats in which her soldiers had got themselves killed’. But Britain for one, with nearly a million of her own men lying dead in Flanders fields and with equally grave internal problems at home, did not quite see things that way.

  Hopes for Reparations

  When the Budget had been postponed in December 1918, the Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz (according to Clemenceau ‘the only Jew who knows nothing about money’), made it clear that he expected France’s budgetary deficits to be redeemed then and thenceforth by German reparations. At the Peace Conference, France had estimated her total war damages at 209,000 million gold francs, while the overall claims of the Allies amounted to some 400,000 million. But British Treasury experts reckoned that the most that could be squeezed out of Germany would be 75,000 million. With the British showing marked distaste for the whole subject from the outset, most bitter discord had surrounded the talks on reparations at Versailles, a discord that certainly did not go unobserved beyond the Rhine. Finally – and fatally – the sum to be paid by Germany was left open for future negotiation. It was as an open sore that the issue of reparations remained open, gaining little for France but ill-will. In 1923 Germany defaulted on her payments, and France occupied the Ruhr to force her to pay. Britain, seeing political ambition behind the financial pretexts (and indeed there were nationalist Frenchmen who openly expressed hopes that the occupation might prove permanent) dissociated herself. From the ensuing industrial breakdown resulted the final collapse of the German mark. Down in Bavaria an angry unknown Austrian acquired his first national publicity. Throughout Germany a legacy of lasting resentment was created, as well as a few martyrs of whom Hitler would later make excellent capital. Relations with Britain became chronically estranged, and would hardly regain their former cordiality before the eve of the second world crisis, while in France herself the franc threatened to run after the Reichs
mark. On being forced to retreat from the Ruhr, the illusion of France’s power in the post-war world received its first serious shock.

  Reparations, with the international hostility they caused, did more than anything else to clear the way for the Second World War. They certainly did not result in balancing France’s Budget, as Klotz and his successors had hoped. In fact, out of all the international transactions intertwining reparations with the repayment of war debts in the 1920s, Germany probably gained more than France. During the first half of the 1920s, seven different Ministers of Finance, following on each others’ heels, failed to put France’s house in order. Although the return of Raymond Poincaré in 1926 brought France an almost miraculous three-year period of quasi-stability (as well as prosperity), in the seventeen months after his retirement in 1929 another five governments came and went. France’s financial dilemma extended itself into the 1930s, bringing down government after government, rendering impossible any consistent foreign policy – let alone any policy of reconciliation with Germany – bedevilling the Third Republic throughout the remainder of its existence, and finally hamstringing it when the necessity to rearm confronted France with desperate urgency.

  Lack of Men and Ideas

  ‘The means by which Providence raises a nation to greatness are the virtues infused into her great men.’ So said Burke in his memorial to Pitt. By the end of the 1920s it was painfully apparent that the political being of the Third Republic was suffering from a grave deficit of great men, as much as it was of great ideas. Clemenceau had been rapidly dispatched, in much the same manner as the British nation was to deal with its warlord in 1945 – ‘passé le péril, maudit le saint’. Briand was tottering, Painlevé ageing, while in the same year that both Clemenceau and Foch died, 1929, ill-health forced Poincaré from the political scene. After the ceremony solemnizing the liberation of Strasbourg in 1918, he had been heard to sigh ‘Now I can die.’ Despite his own remarkable resurrection in 1926, the overtones of Poincaré’s remark were loaded with a double significance. With the return of Alsace-Lorraine, the supreme motivating and uniting ideal had been removed from French politics. Where was there now a Holy Grail worth questing and fighting for? Balancing the Budget was hardly a substitute. At the same time, Poincaré’s sigh echoed the psychological lassitude that was increasingly to beset French politics, later to be compounded with the physical consequences of France’s terrible war losses; for among these, the one category bled whiter than all the rest comprised the liberal professions (of the total mobilized, 23 per cent had been killed), the source which should have supplied the new Clemenceaus and Poincarés. In her autobiography, The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir tells of a Dr Lemaire, who, on returning from the front where he had operated on hundreds of wounded under the most sickening conditions, ‘took to his bed and never got up again’. How many of France’s young intellectuals lucky enough to survive the trenches and who should now be taking over the reins of government, had, like Dr Lemaire, simply slumped within themselves, mentally and morally drained?