To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The operational basis of Séré de Rivières’s assumptions proved more resilient than the technical. Influenced by their own defeat in 1870 and by Sadowa, H. Bonnal’s study of Prussia’s defeat of Austria in 1866, published in 1894, the French reckoned that the Germans would seek an early offensive, manoeuvring independently with a view to converging on the battlefield. The French answer was to adopt a flexible defence, keeping their forces concentrated so as to be able to counter-attack and defeat the dispersed elements of the German advance. As on the other side of the Rhine, doctrine was hammered out through the use of historical examples—in France’s case Napoleon’s campaign in 1813–14. The key element in this defensive strategy was the use of advance guards. Their first task was to identify the direction of the enemy thrust; but they had to have an offensive capability to reconnoitre effectively, to force the enemy to reveal his strength, and—most important of all—to fix him so as to limit his subsequent freedom of movement. Embodied in the use of advance guards, therefore, was the idea of the encounter battle. The main force would be fed into the fight which the advance guards had begun, so that defence would pass over to offence.24

  MAP 4. ALSACE AND LORRAINE

  The plan finalized in 1903, plan XV (French plans were numbered sequentially as one replaced another), worked with these concepts. It assumed that Belgium’s neutrality justified concentrating on the defence of the eastern, not the northern, frontier, and that the Germans should be allowed to invade and then be counter-attacked. However, indications that Germany’s strategy would favour envelopment rather than frontal assault, and that therefore an attack would come through Belgium, received confirmation in 1904. Documents containing the outlines of Schlieffen’s thinking, allegedly obtained from a German staff officer, were passed to the 2ème bureau (the intelligence department) of the French general staff.25 Railway construction at Aachen convinced General André, the minister of war, who had hitherto been sceptical of such suggestions, of the accuracy of the intelligence. But others, and in particular General Brugère, the vice-president of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre (who was the commander-in-chief designate in the event of war), suspected a German ruse. Brugère’s main reasons for doubt were to find subsequent echoes. First, Germany did not have the manpower to cover a front from Switzerland to the Channel unless it used its reserves from the outset, and that seemed as unlikely to Brugère as it did to many German generals. Secondly, the bulk of German railway construction remained in the Metz-Thionville area. France, if it concentrated to the north, would expose its eastern frontier; on the other hand, if Germany concentrated to the north, its manpower in Lorraine would be so weakened that France’s chances of success in the eastern theatre would be enhanced. The French began to consider the creation of a new army to be kept in reserve to meet a German thrust from the north, but in other respects left plan XV alone.

  In 1907 the French began work on plan XVI. There were deficiencies in the collection of French military intelligence; not until 1913 was a post on the Belgian border opened. There were failings in the assessment of the material: relations between the 2ème bureau and the 3eme bureau (operations) were not intimate. But in general the raw data was collected in sufficient quantity, and the conclusions drawn from it well founded. Its analysis was simplified by the fact that German intentions were not now changing as continuously as they had in the period 1897 to 1905. Their railway construction on the upper Rhine had continued apace. By 1908 General Henri de Lacroix was sufficiently convinced of Germany’s operational attachment to envelopment to conclude that Germany would invade Belgium. Plan XVI, which was approved in 1909, therefore shifted France’s putative deployment more to the north-west, and made provision for an army to cover the frontier with Belgium and Luxembourg. On the whole it was assumed that the Germans would come south of Liège, east of the Meuse, and through the Ardennes on to Verdun and Sedan. Thus, the plan added to the provisions of its predecessor rather than replaced it: by not taking on board the possibility of an advance north and west of the Meuse the French avoided the dilemma of whether or not to leave their forces in Lorraine weakened and their eastern frontier exposed.

  In 1910–11, however, a radical reappraisal of plan XVI was proposed by General Victor Michel, the new vice-president of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre. Michel was persuaded that the Germans would cross the Meuse. Reports that the Germans were increasingly using automobiles suggested that they planned to advance over flat, well-roaded terrain. The Belgian plain was a far better avenue for an invasion of France than either the hills of the Ardennes or the fortified area of Lorraine. Secondly, Michel appreciated that, by integrating their reserves, the Germans could extend their front to the north and west. He therefore reckoned on creating a French army of 1.3 million men, with 500,000 of them grouped around Lille and facing north. Michel’s plan rested on France, like Germany, using its reserves from the outset of the war. He felt that the restraining factor in France’s use of its reserves was the lack of qualified staff officers. He therefore proposed that each reserve regiment should be brigaded with a regular regiment: thus, the existing higher formations—brigades, divisions, and corps—would be effectively doubled in size with no increase in staff.26

  This issue, the employment of reserves, whether by Germany or by France, became the focus of Michel’s proposals. Their cause was not advanced by Michel’s personal unpopularity within the army, which saw him as politically too malleable and consequently inconsistent, ‘in turn boulangiste, antidreyfusard, dreyfusard’.27 The 3ème bureau rejected the tentative suggestion of the 2eme bureau that the Germans would use their reserves in the front line. The Conseil Supérieur de Guerre accepted the view of the 3eme bureau, and was thus able to turn down Michel’s proposed reorganization of France’s reserves. The strategic implications of Michel’s plan, that the Germans would come north of the Meuse, became peripheral. Michel resigned.

  Although their conclusions were related, the judgement of the 3ème bureau was wrong, that of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre was not. The failure to appreciate the extent to which German planning rested on the use of reserves was the single biggest mistake in French calculations. Because the French had a low opinion of the quality of their own reserves, they were reluctant to accept that the Germans could form a better estimate of theirs. But it does not necessarily follow that the reason that the French could not convince themselves that the Germans would use their reservists in the front line, and would therefore swing west of the Meuse, was because they themselves were determined not to admit their own reservists into their initial order of battle.28 Indeed, all the indications suggested the opposite.

  In 1911, when the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre rejected Michel’s proposals, France’s reservists were at a nadir of inefficiency. Because France took a larger proportion of its available manpower, the standard of fitness of France’s reservists was much lower than that of Germany. The 1905 law, which had established two-year service in France, had reduced the size of the active army but had created a larger French reserve. However, the training areas and the money required to make the reservists efficient were not forthcoming. In 1907 36 per cent of reservists, excluding those excused because of the needs of agriculture, had failed to report for service.29 Even more serious was the lack of officers. The impact of the Dreyfus affair, the efforts by Andre positively to republicanize the officer corps through the management of promotions, and the use of the army to suppress domestic disorder had all contributed to declining morale. Applications to the military academy at St Cyr had fallen from 1,895 in 1900 to 871 in 1911, and re-enlistment by NCOs from 72,000 to 41,000.30 Measures to boost the number of reserve officers, including a requirement that all pupils at the grandes écoles should receive military training, were part of the 1905 law. But supply still could not match the demands of plan XVI, which assumed the employment of 463 reserve battalions. (Plan XV had not only rejected the initial use of reserves but had also reckoned on ultimately using only 320 reserve battali
ons.) The reduction in the number of reserve battalions to 401 for employment in plan XVI’s successor was a deliberate attempt to improve the ratio of officers to men so as to enhance the ability to integrate the reserves with the regulars. It was a measure adopted, not because reservists were not to take their place in the line, but because they were.31

  The specific issue over which Michel fell was yet another aspect of this quality-versus-quantity argument. He planned to double the numbers of front-line infantry without any increase in artillery. Dubail, the chief of the general staff, called for 216 additional guns, both light field howitzers and heavy artillery.32 In 1911, in the middle of the second Moroccan crisis, with war an imminent prospect, the preoccupation of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre was with immediate combat-readiness. On this particular count Michel displayed little decisiveness and less urgency.

  In the aftermath of 1914 the correctness of Michel’s diagnosis would be used to castigate his opponents. In particular, Michel’s plan became associated with the defensive—not so much because it advocated the defensive (it actually spoke of French attacks both in Belgium and in Lorraine), but because the delays in mobilization and concentration which his proposed organization would impose would lose France the initiative and force it to fight defensively. His advocates therefore contended that his fall was the work of the proponents of the offensive. French military thought—and action—in 1914 was presented as the victim of a semi-mystical belief that the will to win was sufficient to achieve victory. Ferdinand Foch, in his lectures at the École Supérieure de Guerre, had declared: ‘A battle won is a battle in which one will not confess oneself beaten.’ Thus, the argument ran, in August 1914 the French armies rushed forward, drums beating, with cries of ‘à la baionette’, only for their red-trousered infantry to fall, casualties of twentieth-century firepower.

  Foch was one of two inspirational professors at the École Supérieure de Guerre in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The other was Charles Lanrezac. Stung by the surprise and speed of the defeat in 1870, their operational watchword was security and their solution the doctrine of advance guards. They were not the metaphysical advocates of superior morale suggested by selective use of Foch’s more tub-thumping and inspirational dicta. Instead, they presided over a rational analysis of warfare that produced a generation of professionally competent officers, immersed in the pursuit of practical solutions, and exposed to a high level of military debate.33 Much of this was, inevitably, concerned with the most problematic area of warfare, the tactical offensive.34 To win, an army had eventually to attack. And yet the development of breech-loading magazine rifles, the addition of machine-guns and quick-firing field artillery, gave the advantage to the defence. The broad solutions were for the attack to approach under cover, to close by breaking into small groups, advancing in bounds, and then to build up fire superiority. Once the attackers had gained fire superiority the final rush forward could follow. But both the last two stages were fraught with difficulties. The acquisition of fire superiority required troops which had dispersed in order to advance to concentrate again: in so doing they themselves provided fresh targets for the defence. But if they did not do this and did not gain fire superiority, the final rush forward would end in bloody disaster.

  French tactical thought, therefore, became a blend of realism and unavoidable wishful thinking. In a booklet published in 1906 Colonel Loyzeaux de Grandmaison emphasized the role that artillery support would play in giving attacking infantry fire superiority, and stated categorically that a frontal attack across open ground was impossible. On the other hand, infantry had to believe that they could succeed if they were to attack at all. The conquest of fear through discipline and morale became central to tactical possibilities. In the days of close-order drill command and cohesion had prevented troops running away. But dispersion put a premium on individual training and courage. Professionalism was, therefore, increasingly important.

  In all this, French tactical thinking was little different, and no less perplexed by the problems of firepower, than that of most other European armies on the eve of the First World War. Like other armies, that of France possessed many officers who were respectful of firepower, recognized the inherent superiority of the defensive, but were trying to integrate fire and movement in order to be able to sustain the attack. Thus, like other armies, its tactical thinking in 1914 was in a state of flux. Yet the uncertainty with regard to tactical doctrine was not in any direct sense the debate which Michel had entered. To be sure, his use of ill-trained reservists would make the prolonged skirmish and firefight stages of the attack harder to manage, and would therefore predispose the French army to the defence. However, Michel’s real concerns were not tactical but strategic. His task, like that of his predecessors, was how best to defend France. The debate about reservists therefore spanned two different levels of warfare. The principal accusation to be levelled at the French army before 1914 was its failure to distinguish between these two levels: generalized rhetoric about how to cross the last few hundred yards of a fire-swept battlefield became confused with the specific operational problem of how to respond to war with Germany.

  The confusion was exacerbated by the 3ème bureau, a main centre of opposition to Michel’s ideas, whose head in 1911 was the same Grandmaison who in 1906 had so presciently recognized the tactical difficulties of the attack. In February 1911 Grandmaison gave two conferences for the general staff derived from his observation of Germany’s manoeuvres and the latter’s preference for envelopment. He was concerned that the emphasis on envelopment, itself the reflection of the problems of a frontal attack, had percolated so far into operational thought that security, and broad and deep deployment, had become ends in themselves. If French and German forces actually came into contact, the Germans would immediately attack. The French, therefore had, to remember the need to upset the enemy’s plans, to press home their own attack on the decisive sector. They should echelon their reserves for that purpose, and not in order to secure or to seek the flanks: taking the initiative would provide its own security. Grandmaison’s lectures were designed to inject impetuosity and boldness into French operational thought, to challenge the caution and defensiveness which had characterized it from Séré de Rivières onwards. He was enormously influential. The 1913 edition of the instructions for the conduct of large formations was his work. At a tactical level, these echoed the themes he had voiced in 1906: the need for method and preparation in the attack, and the impossibility of attacking over open ground. But the regulations specifically failed to distinguish between the strategic offensive-defensive and the tactical. Grandmaison failed to provide clarification in the one area where it was most needed.35

  Michel’s resignation became the cue for a major reorganization of France’s military administration. Its effect was to unite the general staff and the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre, and so fuse the tactical and operational considerations of the former with the planning activities of the latter. Thus was the position of the 3ème bureau and of Grandmaison elevated. Thus too was confirmed the confusion between strategic and tactical thought.

  The Third Republic’s anxiety to subordinate its army to civilian control had made it reluctant to embrace the idea of a centralized general staff. The general staff itself was but one of fourteen services and directions answerable to the minister of war. Its chief was responsible for peacetime training, but in war not he but the vice-president of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre would be supreme commander. The chances of the minister of war uniting the efforts of these two offices were limited not only by the bureaucratic demarcations within the ministry itself but also by the instability of the republic’s governments. In 1911, however, the army’s argument, that its purpose in life was professional efficiency, not political intervention, found—in the context of Agadir—a more sympathetic audience. Messimy, the war minister, recognized the need to avoid the sort of internal divisions to which Michel’s proposal had given rise. He therefore abolished the post
of vice-president of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre, and the chief of the general staff became the professional head of the army in peace and its potential commander-in-chief in war.

  The man appointed to the new post was not Messimy’s first choice, Joseph-Simon Gallieni, nor even the second, Paul-Marie Pau. The former considered himself too old and too directly associated with Michel’s fall, and the latter was disqualified by virtue of his active Catholicism and his association with General André’s use of freemasons’ reports on the political attitudes of officers to regulate promotions between 1900 and 1904, the affaire des fiches. The new chief of the general staff was Joseph Joffre. Like Gallieni, he had made his reputation in the colonies; unlike Pau, his republican credentials were not in doubt. Assessments of Joffre remain sharply divided. Part of the problem is that, while physically Joffre loomed large, intellectually he remained elusive. Indeed, he was not an intellectual. He was a technician and an administrator, an engineer who had excelled in the construction of railways. He had not been at the École Supérieure de Guerre and he had no pretensions to knowledge of staff work. Unlike Grandmaison or Foch, he made no contributions to military thought, even his memoirs being written by other hands. Lyautey, the conqueror of Morocco, said Joffre was no strategist, and yet Joffre was to accomplish the most obviously ‘strategic’ victory of the First World War. Joffre, then, must be judged by his achievements. Between 1911 and 1914 these were considerable. Professional qualities, not political attachments, played an increasing role in appointments. Joffre was a good listener, and grouped round him, in his cabinet, those who were to form his staff when war came. By 1914 the French army enjoyed a greater fitness for war than at any period since 1870; many problems remained, but it had recovered its self-confidence and found an inner unity.