by Colin Smith
This was frustrating enough. But to make matters worse Fashoda had come at a time when the French Army and much else French was being torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair: a festering, self-inflicted wound that had become an international cause célèbre and so upset Queen Victoria that she had cancelled her annual holiday in France. Capitaine Alfred Dreyfus was that rare thing in most European armies of the 1890s: a Jewish officer. He was a refugee from Alsace, under German rule since the defeat of 1871, where his wealthy family had owned a cotton mill at Mühlhausen. In October 1894 Dreyfus, an artillery officer on a temporary attachment to the General Staff in Paris, was accused of passing secrets to the German Embassy, court-martialled and sentenced to hard labour for life on the nightmarish South American Devil’s Island penal colony off French Guiana.
In Paris, where it was rarely hard to fan the embers of its smouldering anti-Semitism, it was a popular verdict. Prior to his transportation to South America in chains, a salivating mob were encouraged to attend a public ceremony at which Dreyfus was stripped of all badges of rank and decorations and his sword snapped in two. Throughout this ordeal Dreyfus’s cries that he was innocent were drowned by the taunts from his civilian audience.
The men who convicted Dreyfus were genuinely convinced of his guilt. But four years later, by the time Kitchener and Marchand had met at Fashoda, Dreyfus’s innocence – first suggested by British private detectives hired by his family – had been established beyond all reasonable doubt. The real culprit was the high–living Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy whose outrageous acquittal in January 1898 by a corrupt court martial caused the novelist Émile Zola to write J’Accuse, his famous 4,000-word proclamation of Dreyfus’s innocence. ‘The truth is on the march,’ concluded Zola, ‘and nothing will stop it.’ Shortly afterwards, despite the verdict in his favour, Esterhazy fled to England. An officer who had committed perjury to secure Esterhazy’s acquittal then killed himself.
By now it was obvious that there existed among the army’s senior ranks a faction far more concerned with covering up their mistakes than righting a shameful miscarriage of justice. First the French officer corps, then it seemed almost the entire nation, was split between the Dreyfusards and their opponents. Some of the latter even conceded that Dreyfus might not be guilty but believed he had to be sacrificed for the greater good. It was a point of view strongly defended by the Catholic Church. The French Army must not be undermined by a plot hatched by Jews and Freemasons, the twin axes of evil as far as many conservative Catholics were concerned.
The scandal dragged on for over a decade. In 1899 an emaciated, fever-ridden Dreyfus was brought back to France only to have his conviction upheld by a new court martial. After international protests, not least from Queen Victoria who in an uncoded telegram to the British Embassy in Paris referred to him as ‘the poor martyr Dreyfus’, he was ‘pardoned’ though his supporters insisted that he had done nothing to be pardoned for. Not until 1906 was the artillery officer fully exonerated, restored to the army, promoted and awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
The affair left its mark on a whole generation of French officers. In 1902 the Dreyfusard and secular Radical Party, in which French Freemasonry was strongly represented, was elected to office. Within three years, to the great displeasure of the Vatican, they had repealed the Napoleonic Concordat and separated the Church from the state. Troops found themselves being used to close down illegal convent schools while Masons also began to flourish in the officer corps. Practising Catholics started to feel that when it came to promotion it was no longer how good a soldier you were but who you knew in the Grand Orient Lodge with its large military membership. In the garrison towns of Toulouse, Bastia and Montélimar, Catholics and Freemasons fought duels, sometimes with fatal results.
In a milder way a certain Major Philippe Pétain also became a casualty of this quarrel. Pétain had long ago lapsed from the strict Catholicism of his boyhood and at 50 he had had numerous and sometimes inappropriate love affairs, never married, and was maintaining at least one illegitimate child, the product of a brief relationship with a teenage shop assistant. But Pétain still held the Church in great respect and resented the influence of the anticlerical faction who were now ruling the roost in the army. When a well-known Freemason offered him the command of the prestigious rifle school at Châlons, which would have meant automatic promotion to lieutenant colonel, he turned it down. It would take him another four years to reach that rank and by then he was approaching retirement age.
Pétain looked every inch a soldier and lived up to appearances. The erect bearing, piercing grey-blue eyes and generous blond moustache belonged to an excellent horseman, fencer and rifle shot. And in recent years he had delighted his seniors with the lucid and popular lectures he delivered in his clipped undemonstrative way at the École de Guerre where he was an Assistant Professor of Infantry Tactics. He argued for firepower with accuracy, dismissing the old musketry dictum that marksmanship counted less than delivering rapid volleys. In 1870 the Chassepot rifle had been the best infantry weapon in Europe and he believed that France’s failure to exploit its accuracy had made a significant contribution to the Prussian victory.
Pétain had been a 14-year-old boarder at a strict Catholic school in the marshy flatlands of his native Pas de Calais when the Franco-Prussian War – usually referred to as the debacle until the next debacle some seventy years later – persuaded him that his vocation was for the military and not, as he had believed for most of his boyhood, in holy orders. He was from a family of smallholders originally of Flemish stock – the name comes from Piet-heim, meaning Peter’s home – whose bit of land and literacy placed them at least a couple of notches above the ordinary peasant farmer and they were always careful to refer to themselves as cultivateurs.
Even so, the family’s only military experience had been in the ranks. His maternal grandmother’s brother, one Philippe-Michel Lefebre, had been about to be ordained when his seminary was closed down and he was pressganged into the army. During some twenty years’ service he campaigned for Napoléon in Italy before he was allowed to resume his theological studies, though later in life Abbé Lefebre enjoyed reminiscing about his soldiering, not least to his great-nephew who was not quite ten when the Abbé died.
The only other Pétain who had worn uniform was his father’s elder brother Cyrille, though this was hardly a source of pride. Having had the misfortune to have his conscription number come up, Cyrille, as the law permitted, paid a citizen substitute to march for him, the money coming from the sale of some of his doting parents’ land. But not long afterwards, for reasons unknown – perhaps an affair of the heart – Cyrille decided to enlist anyway, signed on for fifteen years and went to Algeria. Then his regiment was shipped to the Crimea. The Russians proved a more efficient foe than Arab rebels and at some point Cyrille decided he would soldier no more and was posted as a deserter. Later it emerged he had settled in the Caucasus where he raised a deracinated sub-clan of the Pétains with whom there was little communication.
His nephew’s entry into the army some twenty years later came at a time when the officer training school at St Cyr was widening a social base which, in the years since Waterloo, had been decidedly aristocratic. Officer cadet Pétain entered the academy in 1876, the year Sitting Bull defeated Custer, at the start of a career that would see some of the most momentous changes in warfare since the invention of gun powder. Two years later he was, in order of excellence, number 229 of the 386 cadets who received their commissions as sous-lieutenants and pledged on bended knee their willingness to die for their country.
But for the next thirty-six years Pétain was never given the opportunity to put his oath to the test. Unlike some of his contemporaries he did not elect to join one of the regiments policing the French Empire where, like its British rival, there was always the chance of a skirmish with its less docile subjects. Perhaps Pétain was more hard-headed than some and failed to see the romance of foreign fields, but this was not as un
adventurous as it seems. Young French officers expected sooner rather than later to participate in a war of revenge against Germany that would recover Alsace and Lorraine and eradicate the shame of 1870. When the great day came it would be an unspeakable anguish to be marooned in some fever-ridden colonial posting while others won all the glory.
Fashoda had only briefly held out the prospects of war with England, the old enemy. On 8 April 1904, following Edward VII’s ground-breaking official visit to Paris the previous year, Britain and France signed the Anglo-French Entente that newspapers on both sides of the Channel began to refer to as the Entente Cordiale. To prevent more Fashodas, it had already been agreed that the British and French spheres of influence in Africa should be divided by the watershed between the Nile and Congo. The Entente was a continuation of this, a desire to settle all the outstanding issues between them which might flare up into a colonial turf war. It took in West Africa, Madagascar, Siam, the Pacific’s New Hebrides, Newfoundland’s cod fishing banks and Morocco, where it was decided France could do anything it liked except build fortifications that menaced Gibraltar.
Whatever the French thought, as far as the British were concerned at first the Entente was not an alliance and nor was it intended to be anti-German though the Germans thought it was. A treaty of alliance between Britain and France was not signed until shortly after the outbreak of war with Germany in August 1914. At that point Pétain, now a full colonel, had spent the last year commanding a brigade, though, two years away from mandatory retirement at 60, his superiors had not seen fit to promote him to brigadier général. But he could console himself with the thought that many of his contemporaries at St Cyr had not risen above major and had long since left the army. To retire on a colonel’s pension was no bad thing for an officer who had never heard or fired a shot in anger.
Before he got his brigade Pétain had commanded the 33rd Infantry Regiment at Arras where in 1913 one of his junior officers, recently hatched from officer school, had been Sous-lieutenant Charles de Gaulle, the monarchist schoolteacher’s son who as a child had been so stung by the shame of Fashoda. De Gaulle’s entry into the army had not been easy. At St Cyr, where short haircuts accentuated his large nose and protruding ears, he was known as ‘The Great Asparagus’. Six foot five inches of uncoordinated endeavour, however hard he tried, his marks for horsemanship, fencing and rifle shooting – all the things Pétain excelled at – were dismal. There was certainly nothing of the beau sabreur about de Gaulle. Yet his instructors noticed that this somewhat aloof, difficult young man had other qualities. He won a distinction for his ‘practical fieldwork’ and praise for something known as ‘moral education’. And another asset had been noted: a stubborn refusal to give in.
On the face of it Pétain, still the compulsive womanizer with the piercing blue eyes and magnificent moustache, did not have much in common with this gangling, long-necked and studious subaltern. But, far from stupid himself, one day he would find himself doing a lot to further the career of a clever and dedicated young officer who, by the fortunes of war, would be granted the time to develop some original ideas.
In February 1916 Pétain, by now a général thanks to the mass sacking of incompetent senior officers, got the job that would make him not only a maréchal of France but give him worldwide recognition and a lingering fame for saying something he never actually said. As commander of the 2nd Army he was told to take his men to the fortress of Verdun on the Meuse, the traditional invasion route to Paris, and hold it.
Verdun was the longest battle in history. It lasted for almost ten months and was an attempt by the German commander Erich von Falkenhayn to ‘bleed the French white’ by making them defend a position that was not only of tactical importance but also a symbol of the national will to defend the capital. (In 1870 Verdun had lasted six weeks.) The battle took place over 4 square miles of pulverized ground and the most conservative estimates put the German dead at 100,000 and the French at 120,000, with a combined total of at least another 700,000 men wounded.
The French casualties might have been much higher but for Pétain’s skill at defensive tactics, his insistence on keeping up morale by constantly rotating his front-line troops and his reluctance to mount costly counterattacks. He may have looked like a lot of other generals but gradually his poilus began to realize that here was a soldier’s soldier. ‘I have a chilling mask,’ he confided to the French journalist Henri Lottman at Verdun. But behind this lapidary exterior, and by the standards of that conflict, Pétain cared deeply about the lives of men who had so often come from the same rural background as his own. ‘My heart bled when I watched our 20-year-olds going under fire at Verdun,’ he would write in his own account of the battle, ‘… knowing they would quickly lose the enthusiasm aroused by their first battle … their eyes staring into space as if transfixed by terror.’
Soon the Paris press, Fleet Street and even war correspondents from the neutral countries such as Spain and Switzerland began to give the caring general whose men were putting up such stubborn resistance some attention. Fulsome praise in The Times, then very much the voice of the establishment, probably did much to ensure formal British recognition in the award of the Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George. Verdun made Pétain. Yet he was there for scarcely two months of the battle, just long enough to put his indelible mark on it. Above all he was the soldiers’ friend, reluctant, as his British biographer Charles Williams puts it, ‘to throw warm bodies at barbed wire and machine-guns’.
By the end of April 1916 French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre, impatient with Pétain’s reluctance to go on the offensive and perhaps a little jealous of the attention he was getting, kicked him upstairs to command the Centre Army Group. Verdun was the most important of this Army Group’s tasks but Pétain would no longer be responsible for the day-to-day running of the battle. His replacement as head of the 2nd Army was the dashing and well-connected Robert Nivelle, whose mother was English. It was Nivelle who uttered the words so often wrongly attributed to Petain: ‘Ils ne passeront pas.’ Once the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme, which began at the end of June, had begun to draw the best German troops away from Verdun it was Nivelle who launched the counter-attack that finished the battle by Christmas. As a result he was made Commander-in-Chief and Pétain’s star seemed to be on the wane.
But Nivelle did not last very long. In April 1917, in a quagmire caused by unseasonal flurries of snow and sleet and ignoring Pétain’s protests, Nivelle launched a massive offensive in the southern sector near Reims. A few days earlier the British had enjoyed some limited though costly success around Arras in the north. But Nivelle’s attack along a 25-mile front on the river Aisne, in which for the first time the French Army used the tanks the British had invented, was an unmitigated disaster. A predicted advance of 6 miles was halted after 600 yards with many of the tanks bogged down on their start line. The infantry they should have been supporting were mown down. What was left of a Senegalese regiment being used as first-wave shock troops because of their well-known love of hand-to-hand combat broke and ran. For the first day’s fighting it had been estimated that French casualties would be in the region of 15,000; the real figure was 100,000. Morale began to crumble. There were protests. Troops being sent up to the front no longer sang their marching songs. Instead when they spotted senior officers they began to bleat like sheep being sent to the slaughter.
Nivelle was sacked and Pétain was appointed Commander-in-Chief, a position he held until the end of the war. His first task was to deal with the growing unrest in the army. Almost half the front-line divisions were infected by it and in some it had progressed from a partial withdrawal of labour – they would defend but not leave their trenches and attack – to the Bolshevism preached by those Russians who felt that the recent replacement of the Tsar by Kerensky’s social democrats was not going nearly far enough. At one point Paul Painlevé, the War Minister, estimated that there were no more than two reliable divisions between Paris
and no-man’s-land 70 miles away. By extraordinary good fortune the Germans had yet to hear about it and, if the French had had their way, the British would have remained equally unaware. But there had already been trouble with unruly conscripts in the capital itself and nothing could control Parisian gossip.
One of the people whose job it was to sift the rumour mill was the bilingual, clever and ambitious Major Edward Spears who had been involved in a secret pre-war project to write the Anglo-French code book that, in theory at least, enabled the Allies to start the conflict with an agreed cypher. A polo-playing Hussar officer of Anglo-Irish and possibly Alsatian Jewish stock, Spears had been on front-line liaison duties since August 1914, was wounded four times and had several British and French decorations for gallantry including a Military Cross and the ribbon of a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.
‘A Paladin worthy to rank with the truest knights,’ was Winston Churchill’s description of Spears. The fighting bard of Omdurman was now Minister for Munitions and had met Spears several times at the front both as a visiting politician and during his short post-Gallipoli penance as a battalion commander. More importantly, the major was admired, though certainly not as effusively, by Pétain and was beginning to add French politicians to his contacts. Aged 30, he had recently been appointed liaison officer between the French and British War Cabinets, a newly created post with a clerical staff from both armies and an office in Les Invalides close to France’s new Commander-in-Chief.