To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  The left-wing challenge immediately following the end of the war was succeeded in France by a brief phase of deceptive parliamentary stability. Thoroughly alarmed by fears of the Bolshevik menace, the bourgeois parties had rallied together to form a right-of-centre Bloc National Républicain. At the elections of November 1919, the Bloc swept into power, winning nearly three-quarters of the seats in the Assembly, and furnishing France with the most right-wing parliament she had known since 1876. Meanwhile, the Left wing seemed to be tearing itself apart by internal divisions. During their congress at Tours in December 1920, the Socialist Party had split into the new Parti Communiste Française – uncompromising devotees of the Soviet Revolution – and the more moderate Socialists calling themselves the Section Française de la IIe Internationale Ouvrière (S.F.I.O.). This was followed, in 1921, by a similar split within the trade unions from which emerged the dissident Communist Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (C.G.T.U.), obedient to every instruction from Moscow and pledged to total war against management, in contrast to the more moderate line pursued by the old Confédération Générate du Travail (C.G.T.). Until the great reunion under the Popular Front of 1936, Communist would chastise Socialist, the C.G.T.U. would revile the C.G.T. Short-sightedly, employers and bourgeois rejoiced at this rift in the left-wing camp, and were encouraged by its apparent weakness to backtrack on essential social reforms, thereby building up for the future an explosive reserve of grievances and ill-will.

  Expressing his fundamental mistrust for the League of Nations, Clemenceau once remarked: ‘If you want to have a new spirit between nations, start by introducing a new spirit at home.’ In fact, post-war French politicians swiftly showed an instinct to return to the old spirit of the Third Republic – only worse. Before the war, issues had at least been relatively clear-cut and simple; hardy perennials such as anticlericalism and the Dreyfus Case helped define boundaries between parties, and there was always the supreme polarizing force of Alsace-Lorraine. Now revenge – la revanche – was fulfilled, and anticlericalism virtually a dead duck; issues were blurred and complex, and there was this mounting shortage of strong wills and clear minds capable of guiding their parties in the search for a coherent programme. Like amoebae, parties divided and redivided within themselves. Politicians became subject to the pull of the rapidly growing numbers of pressure groups all acting upon Parliament, and for many self-interest came, in the absence of any other grander motive, to be their guiding star. With the collapse of each successive government, it proved just that much harder (especially after Poincaré had gone) to create a majority with any promise of stability. A mad game of musical chairs ensued, to be played at a giddier and giddier rate until Hitler’s Panzers finally stopped the music.

  Though France’s governmental instability in the 1920s was principally provoked by discord over internal matters, such as the Budget, it was upon her external policy – particularly towards Germany – that this had the most baneful effects. The overriding practical purpose of the Versailles Treaty had been to guarantee the security of France, to prevent her from ever again being swamped by the Teutonic hordes. To this end the Germans were required by the Treaty to disband their General Staff, to reduce their Army in perpetuity to a militia of only 100,000 men, and forbidden tanks, heavy artillery or aircraft. Under the separate treaties of St Germain and Trianon, the Hapsburg Empire had been broken up into a row of small nations so as to deprive Germany of any powerful potential ally in Central Europe; and it was hoped that these Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Hungarians and Roumanians would all show their gratitude by remaining constant allies of France. By augmenting French industry at the cost of Germany’s it was reckoned that reparations would help erase the traditional disparity between the economic power of the two countries. Finally, to secure her vulnerable eastern frontier, France had been granted a footing in Germany’s Rhineland. But here she had got less than she wanted. Foch had declared: ‘If we do not hold the Rhine permanently, no neutralization, or disarmament, or any kind of written clause can prevent Germany… from sallying out of it at will.’ In the future, he added prophetically, there would not be time for the arrival of Anglo-American aid to save France from military defeat. But Lloyd George and President Wilson had thrown up their hands in horror, exclaiming that they could not countenance annexations by France that would only create another Alsace-Lorraine. In the end, France had had to be satisfied with the permanent demilitarization and a temporary occupation of the left bank of the Rhine.4 Foch boycotted the signature of the Treaty, grumbling in disgust and with some accuracy: ‘This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.’

  As the realities of the post-war world proceeded systematically to destroy France’s illusion that she was capable of maintaining the peace of Europe, so her leaders were beset by mounting anxiety that the provisions of Versailles could at best offer her only partial and temporary security. In the background there stood constantly the one unalterable fact of life from which they could never avert their gaze: even with the addition of Alsace-Lorraine’s 1,800,000 inhabitants and the effects upon Germany’s population of her territorial losses, there were in 1919 still only 39 million Frenchmen compared with 59 million Germans. Moreover, Germany sustained a vigorously expanding birth-rate, whereas that of France was static, so that even by 1931 she had still barely made good her war casualties. This was the one fundamental, constant factor at the back of France’s European policy throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.

  But because of her chronic state of governmental instability she found herself incapable of facing this problem with any consistent strategy of her own. One moment she would show herself bent on grinding down the Germans by marching into the Ruhr; the next, she was offering the olive branch of reconciliation. She would vaunt the supremacy afforded by the offensive might of the French Army, then hide herself behind a twentieth-century Great Wall of China. She would appear to place her faith in the League of Nations, while with the other hand she endeavoured to hem Germany about by alliances with the new East European buffer states, although it was all too doubtful whether any combination of these could ever replace the weight of the Russian behemoth, France’s defaulting ally now engrossed in the dream of Marxism and the nightmare of civil war. Even during the most hopeful post-war period of the Briand–Stresemann entente, which stretched intermittently from 1925 to 1929, attacks from the Right and lack of support on the Left forced Briand again and again to renege on his declared aims of Franco-German rapprochement. Finally, in 1929, when Premier for the eleventh time, Briand proposed from the tribune of the League of Nations a European Federation embracing Germany. It was a grandiose ideal a generation, alas, ahead of its time, and Briand was promptly overthrown by the French nationalists. Almost simultaneously came the death of Stresemann, the Weimar Republic’s most inspiring and inspired leader, and possibly the one man capable of stemming the rising tide of Nazism. Shortly before he died, exhausted and disillusioned, Stresemann summed up his dealings with France: ‘I gave and gave and gave until my followers turned against me… If they could have granted me just one concession, I would have won my people. But they gave nothing… That is my tragedy and their crime.’

  In actual fact, by the end of the first post-war decade France had made substantial concessions; she had, for instance, agreed to withdraw her troops from the Rhineland five years ahead of the specified time. But her concessions were so hedged about with the reservations imposed by the waverings of her diverse governments that, in German eyes, they bore no signs of genuine magnanimity or forward-looking statesmanship; rather they seemed acts of weakness and irresolution, forced upon France by her dissident allies or by the force majeure of external events. As the 1930s opened, Briand lamented with bitterness that despite all recent concessions made on reparations, nothing had diminished Germany’s ill-will. By 1931 Germany was like the genie in the bottle, who, instead of showing gratitude to his innocent liberator, slew him by way of requital for his prolonged suffer
ings.

  Now in the midst of France’s perennial game of legislative musical chairs, there burst the malignant, irreconcilable figure of Hitler.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Thank God for the French Army’

  Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls nor mountains nor seas could afford any security.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, Rasselas

  ‘Thank God for the French Army,’ cried Winston Churchill before the Commons on 23 March 1933. It was two months after the coming to power of Hitler. Few statements by Churchill outraged even Tory opinion more than this one. All round the House, he observed looks ‘of pain and aversion’. For it was also the year in which, having reduced her own arms expenditure to its all-time low for the inter-war period, Britain was urging France to follow suit. Preoccupied with the row over Larwood’s body-line bowling in the Test Match against the Australians, the yo-yo craze, trunk murders and the amorous successes of the Rector of Stiffkey,1 Britain had assumed a progressively detached attitude towards Europe’s problems. The emotional view of the Great War as a glorious crusade had been widely replaced by the doubts voiced by Lloyd George when he declared: ‘We all blundered into war’, and France’s role in leading Britain into this supreme blunder seemed to be illuminated with ever-increasing clarity. British public opinion, shocked at accounts by the Spenders and Isher-woods of starving, ricket-ridden children growing up in a Germany apparently broken by France’s avarice for reparations, had, unlike the French, ceased to regard Germans as the eternal enemy.2 By and large it had lapsed back into that normal, healthy Anglo-Saxon status quo ante of mistrusting all French designs, a spirit of the age which, as late as July 1934, The Times epitomized with its forecast: ‘In the years that are coming, there is more reason to fear for Germany than to fear Germany.’ It was the vision of the huge French Army, still presumptively the most powerful in the world, constantly poised over European affairs, which alarmed Britons, among whom, in praising it, Winston Churchill stood for only a dissident minority.

  But, as Hitler began to make it abundantly plain that he would not rest until the Diktat of Versailles was overthrown and Germany returned to her former ascendancy, what in fact was the state of the French Army? Was it still the superlative weapon of 1919?

  The Influences of Verdun

  The training and morale of an army, and even its weapons, are transient factors that can alter the balance between opposing forces within the course of one campaigning season. It is the more immutable matters of doctrine and fundamental strategy that require to be considered here. That a victorious army should, in its subsequent peace-time development, be strongly influenced by the experiences of the past war is a historical platitude and only too natural; but, to quote Frederick the Great, ‘experience is useless unless the right conclusions are drawn from it’. France having borne so much of the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front, the experience there came to weigh with particular gravity upon French military minds. Predominant was that of Verdun 1916, whence arose three separate influences, in many ways self-conflicting, but each vitally affecting the post-war French Army.

  The first related to the psychological consequences of Verdun emerging as the symbol and legend of ultimate glory. In most of the great Allied undertakings of the war, the glory had been shared, but Verdun, the longest and most terrible struggle of them all, had belonged solely to France. For ten agonizing months, and at a cost of over 400,000 men, she had measured herself in single combat against the full power of the German Army and won. As well as epitomizing the very nature of the war itself, Verdun proved to be a kind of watershed in it, ‘the walls upon which broke the supreme hopes of Imperial Germany’, as President Poincaré declared. With every justification, Verdun at once became a legend of national heroism and virility. In the passage of years it grew to be enshrined with the holy qualities of a miracle. It was France’s Battle of Britain, symbolizing just as much, though perhaps imbued with even greater emotive force, and bearing the same kind of latent peril. Just as post-1945 Britons, perplexed by imperial disintegration and adversities of trade, found (and still find) unreasoned comfort in the belief that whatever divinity had presided over Dunkirk and in the London skies would always, in the end, sally forth to save them, so Frenchmen, to their peril, came to regard Verdun as a touchstone of faith in the jungle of the inter-war world. In the Army, as recurrent financial crises rendered the replacement of obsolescent equipment a constant nightmare, it was always agreeable to recall the fundamental superiority which the French warrior race had displayed over the (now disarmed) enemy in 1916. Just as the British Navy ossified after Trafalgar, a kind of conservative complacency was bred in France: ‘What was good enough in 1916 is good enough now.’ To challenge it hardly guaranteed popularity in Army circles.

  Yet parallel to the first influence, a second contained the awareness of just how much warfare like Verdun had cost France. More regular officers and men of the French Army had gone through the inferno of Verdun than any other battle, and the frequent post-war commemorations ensured that their minds retained the full horror of those ten months: the ceaseless shelling from an enemy whom, very likely, one never saw, the wounded men agonizing untended, the hideous mutilations, the reliefs and ration parties never arriving, the senseless counter-attacks to recapture at impossible cost a few yards of shell-holes; the thirst, the hunger, the stench, the misery, the fear; above all, always the shells. A young lieutenant killed at Verdun scrawled in his journal: ‘They will not be able to make us do it again another day; that would be to misconstrue the price of our effort. They will have to resort to those who have not lived these days.’ Privately, the men of France’s post-war Army wondered to themselves if they could do Verdun again, if any other Frenchman, if any other human being could? In the lassitude left by the war, they felt the answer, morally, was no. There was indeed no doubt that, numerically, Verdun was the kind of battle that France, with her depleted population, could never, never fight again. But what kind of battle could she fight?

  Certainly, whatever those British critics of Churchill might have feared, it seemed increasingly improbable that France could ever herself engage in offensive warfare. Defensively, her interests were protected by the Versailles Treaty – for the time being. But the function of military staffs is to plan for contingency. France might, nevertheless, be attacked once again by the traditional enemy; in this event, how could she fight a defensive battle without suffering a Verdun? What new strategy, what new technique could be evolved to avoid it? In their pursuit of an alternative, the footsteps of France’s military thinkers led them back towards Verdun itself. The actual lessons gained there, and the conclusions drawn from them, constitute the third, and most portentous, influence emanating from that hideous battlefield.

  Most of the siege warfare of 1914–18 had surged back and forth over an amorphous line of trenches. What was peculiar about Verdun was the presence of concentric clusters of powerful underground forts. Although, for various reasons, France had grossly neglected these at the beginning of the battle, its subsequent course seemed to indicate that Verdun owed its survival to them. The mightiest of these forts, Douaumont, had actually been captured early on in an extraordinary, bloodless coup by a small group of Germans; its loss was later estimated to have cost the French the equivalent of 100,000 men. Its neighbour, Fort Vaux, with a garrison of only 250 men, heroically stood up to a whole Germany army corps and delayed the advance on Verdun one vital week. Others, like Souville, proved invaluable by furnishing shellproof shelters from which infantry could sally forth to repulse the attacking Germans, while supporting them with fire from artillery mounted beneath almost indestructible carapaces of thick steel. Only the very heaviest enemy shells could penetrate them. When a French Army Commission led by Marshal Joffre visited Verdun in 1922, it was astonished at the way in which the forts had absorbed the pounding of the German ‘Big Berthas’, an impression reinforced by the nigh-impenetrable strength which their scrutiny of Germ
any’s deep-dug ‘Hindenburg Line’ revealed. If only the French High Command could have utilized those forts properly in 1916, think how many valuable poilu lives might have been saved, all the while assuring the integrity of Verdun! Let these lessons not be ignored, the Commission warned itself.