The Price of Glory (3 page)

* * *

In 1871, France was exhausted, bankrupt, demoralised; the countryside ravaged and torn by civil war of the most brutal kind. France has frequently astonished the world by her recuperative ability which stems from the intrinsic richness of a country twice as large as the British Isles, and her great resources of human energy
— so often dissipated in the boudoir and the political lobby. Never, though, has her recovery been so rapid or so remarkable as after the catastrophe of 1870-1. The legacy of the war was soon liquidated. A scapegoat to bear the collective disgrace of the army was speedily found in the form of Bazaine. Well ahead of schedule, the crushing £200,000,000 of reparations were paid off, and in September 1873 the last Prussian soldiers left French soil. The French economy began to flourish as never before; the Paris Exposition of 1878 showed Europe that the affluence of the latter-day Second Empire was back again, though now a more solid achievement lay beneath the glittering surface.

Nowhere was the renaissance more striking than in the army. A new type of dedicated young officer — like Ferdinand Foch who, as an 18-year-old student, had seen Louis-Napoleon trail sick and defeated through Metz — strode forward to replace the fops of the Second Empire with their emulative Imperials. A new spirit ran through the whole army, determined to expunge the recent blots on its reputation. With it went a passion for study, replacing the traditions of the café and the vacuous routine of garrison life. It formed a marked contrast to the days when MacMahon had threatened: ‘I shall remove from the promotion list any officer whose name I read on the cover of a book’. Penetrating studies were made of the 1870 campaign, and in their sweeping reorganisation, the army leaders made no bones about imitating the conqueror. Three successive laws provided France for the first time with universal military service (of the exceptional length of five years) and a cadre of reserves. Under General Lewal a Staff College was created to lay the foundations for something better than the inefficient old General Staff disbanded by the reformers, and later, under General Miribel the
État Major de l’Armée
was formed. In peace, its role was to prepare for war and — notably — to plan the details of mobilisation in which France had been so deficient in 1870; in war, it was to provide the command of France’s principal group of armies. Thus, in embryo, came to life the famous
Grand Quartier Général,
or G.Q.G. In 1886, the French army adopted the first model of the Lebel rifle that it would go to war with in 1914; about the same time were laid down the calibres of guns that were used in the war; and a few years later high explosive Lyddite replaced black powder as a filling for shells.

Of all the military reorganisation undertaken by France after 1871, little concerns this story more than the defensive measures she carried
out on her new frontier. (By a chain of cause and effect they were, moreover, to make inevitable Britain’s participation in the First War; though this could hardly be foreseen at the time.) The War of 1870 had been fought, on paper, more or less between equals. But now any thoughtful Frenchman could reasonably predict that disparity between the two nations would grow with increasing rapidity; the Germans were breeding faster and, with the transfer of Alsace-Lorraine, their industrial power was bound to expand more rapidly. However successful the reorganisation of the French army, it alone could now hardly suffice to protect France against Germany. In addition, the re-drawn frontier brought the hereditary enemy to less than two hundred miles from Paris, with no natural barrier like the Rhine or the Vosges in between. Thus a sapper general called Serré de Rivières was entrusted with the construction of a defensive system on a scale never before contemplated, and only to be outdone by Maginot. Instead of converting one or two cities into fortified camps, like Metz, which in 1870 had turned out to be an insidious trap, de Rivières built a continuous line of sunken forts; or rather, two continuous lines. On the Swiss frontier, the system was anchored on Belfort and ran uninterruptedly along the line of hills to Épinal. At the old fortress town of Toul on the Moselle the line began again, along the heights on the right bank of the Meuse, to Verdun. North of Verdun was the dense Argonne, and then the Ardennes, through which (until von Manstein showed the way in 1940) it was assumed no invading army could manoeuvre. Between the linchpins of Toul and Épinal, de Rivières ingeniously left a forty-mile gap in the defences, called the
‘Trouée de Charmes’.
It was like a gateway in a wall, intended (perhaps a little naïvely) to entice within and canalise any German invasion, so that the French mass of manoeuvre lying in wait could then conveniently drive into both its flanks and eventually close in behind. Of course, the Belgian frontier was left unfortified, save for a few scattered fortresses like Lille and Maubeuge. It was Verdun, with its vital position, already fortified by Vauban — and indeed as far back as the Romans — that was both the principal strongpoint of, and key to, the whole system.

Fifteen years after Sedan the French Army had regained both its defensive and offensive power to such an extent that it might well have triumphed in a fresh war with Germany; which, in the way of victors, had begun to rest on its laurels. Bismarck, reflecting anxiously on his own maxim ‘a generation that has taken a thrashing is always
followed by one that deals out the thrashings’, thought more than once of a preventive war. For although France’s military dispositions were mainly defensive, occasionally she emitted sounds revealing that notions of
‘revanche’
never lay very far beneath the surface. French officers’ messes took symbolic joy in bowling over skittles shaped like portly Prussian soldiers; while, just across the frontier, German reservists at Metz sipped their beer out of
steins
covered with such fierce inscriptions as
‘Kanonendonner ist unser Gruss’
and

He who on France’s border stood guard
Has deserved, as a soldier, his reward.

No cabaret or fête was complete without the appearance, greeted with wild enthusiasm, of an Alsatian girl in national costume. There was the fire-eating League of Patriots formed by Déroulède, who had been at Sedan as a private in the Zouaves, and who was now dedicated to keeping alight the flame of revenge. Finally, there was the outburst of jingoism which found expression through General Boulanger. In 1886, the British Ambassador wrote home caustically: ‘The Republic here has lasted sixteen years and that is about the time which it takes to make the French tired of a form of government.’ It was true, insofar as the leaders of the
Troisième
already stood in the customary repute of politicians in France. Suddenly the emotions of Paris and much of France were ignited by the swashbuckling magnificence of the Minister of War, General Boulanger, who appeared mounted on a superb charger at the July 14th parade at Longchamps. Without enquiring too deeply where he might lead them, the masses made Boulanger their idol overnight. During the nine days’ Boulangist wonder, inflammatory songs were heard in the street that seemed painfully evocative of the summer of 1870:

Regardez-le là-bas! Il nous sourit et passe:
Il vient de délivrer la Lorraine et l’Alsace
.

In Berlin, Bismarck’s finger crooked round the trigger, but, fortunately for the peace of Europe, Boulanger soon committed suicide upon his mistress’s grave, ‘dying’, in the words of Clemenceau’s savage epitaph, ‘as he had lived, like a subaltern’.

With the ridiculous Boulanger, much of the hard-earned esteem of the new French army also passed away. In 1889 a new act reduced
military service from five to three years. Militarism cannot be sustained for long without promise of fulfilment. And there were some appealing distractions to mitigate the pain of the amputated territories. The great age of nineteenth-century expansion meant the prospect of colonial acquisitions, and France hastened to join in the rush; cheered on from the sidelines by Bismarck, as he murmured ‘My map of Africa lies in Europe.’ As Algeria had made up for Waterloo, so Morocco and Tunisia, West Africa, Madagascar and Indo-China helped make up for Alsace-Lorraine. By 1914, France ruled over nearly four million square miles abroad, with fifty million inhabitants, the second greatest colonial empire in the world. Admittedly, in the eyes of some soldiers none of it was worth an acre of what was lost in 1871, but, for the time being, they were in the minority. As it was (a factor which Bismarck had certainly never calculated upon), France’s empire made her a great deal richer and more powerful when war finally came, as well as providing her with an additional 500,000 excellent troops.

Life in France was wonderfully good, too, during the three decades that spanned the century’s turn.
‘La Vie Douce’
could barely convey all it meant, though the Germans’ envious expression of ‘content as God in France’ perhaps came closer. Never had there been so much for so many. It was the epoch of the Eiffel Tower, of Degas and Renoir, Lautrec and Monet; of
bistros
and the Moulin de la Gallette, Maxims and the
Lapin Agile,
the
Folies-Bergère
and the
Palais de Glace
; of Verlaine and Rimbaud, Zola and Sarah Bernhardt, Debussy and Ravel, and, later, Péguy and Appollinaire; of provocative
horizontales
and
hôtels particuliers,
of picnics and gay phaetons in the Bois, where the new trees were already growing up to replace those that had been felled for fuel during the Siege. It was an epoch seething with ideas and creation. Every day there seemed to be something new; inventions like electricity and the telephone were now yoked to man’s service, and new medical discoveries to enable him to enjoy it all a little longer. The bicycle and
le football
introduced new pleasures; the Orient Express and
Wagons Lits
brought new and wider worlds within range of Paris. Once again she assumed her eminence as the world’s centre of culture and pleasure (it seemed impossible that the Commune had ever happened) and national pride was further inflated by Blériot’s feat and a series of sporting triumphs. In the realm of economics, marvels were wrought, and almost overnight, it seemed, France became a great industrial power. Jointly
with Britain, she was known as the ‘banker of the universe’. In every sense, it was the epoch of
‘enrichissez-vous’
in which, for the first time, bourgeoisie, peasants and even workers participated alike. (Only the wine-growers, their vines stricken with deadly phylloxera, seemed to be left out.) The newly powerful trades unions were seeing that a good part of the workers’ demands were fulfilled; and who could complain when a carafe of wine cost you thirty centimes and you could buy a turkey for seven francs? As in Adenauer’s ‘No Experiments’ Germany of today material prosperity distracts minds from grieving unduly over the Oder-Neisse, so in France
la vie douce
was altogether too good for one to think sombre thoughts of arms and revenge.

Then, there was the Dreyfus Affair, or simply
The Affair,
which for more than a decade focused the passions and attention of the entire country, averting its eyes from the clouds that were now mounting over the horizon. At this distance, it is difficult to appreciate the bitterness generated by The Affair, where even the highest in the land were involved. (The newly-elected pro-Dreyfus President had his top hat cleft on Auteuil race course by the cane of an anti-Dreyfusard baron.) In the army, where The Affair had its origins, national divisions were magnified and particularly disastrous. Broadly, the cleavage fell between the conservative, traditionalist, partly Monarchist and largely Catholic, caste of the army and the new, Republican, progressive and often anti-clerical elements of post-1870. When Dreyfus was finally cleared, the army leaders who had ranged themselves solidly against the wretched man sent the army several leagues further down the road of disrepute where Boulanger had first guided it.

Following on the heels of The Affair, and closely linked with it, came a measure which, to English minds, smacked of Henry VIII in the twentieth century. In 1902, Emile Combes, an anti-clerical politician, possessed of all the prejudices of a small-town provincial, came to power determined to complete the separation of Church and State in France. He passed a law expelling all ‘unauthorised’ religious orders (some of which had admittedly intervened in a most rashly improper fashion during The Affair). Schools were closed, even religious processions were stopped, and, in the expropriations of nunneries and monastries, wanton pillaging occurred. The army was finally called in to effect the expropriations, thereby confronting its officers with a grave issue of conscience,
parallel to that experienced by the British army over the ‘Curragh Mutiny’ a few years later. Typical was the case of a French Lieutenant-Colonel who, on asking what his superior was going to do, was told ‘I have’ flu’; whereupon, in a rage transcending rank, he seized the regimental commander fiercely, shouting, ‘I suppose when the war comes you will have’flu too!’ M. Combes’ law exacerbated divisions within the army, to a large extent widening the same chasm dug by The Affair. Worst of all, as a result of The Affair, the responsibility for promotions had been transferred from the army commission to the Minister of War, and now the newly-appointed, anti-clerical General André abused his power deplorably. Officers were set to spying on each other; the Grand Orient Lodge of the Free Masons was used as an intelligence service to establish dossiers on their religious persuasions; promotion became more a matter of an officer’s political views, and particularly to which church, and how often, he went on Sundays, than of merit. Thus, as late as 1917, the newly-appointed and respectably Protestant Commander-in-Chief, General Nivelle, could fly into a temper on discovering that his HQ had once been a Catholic Priests’ seminary. Officers like Foch, whose brother was a Jesuit, and de Castelnau, who was accompanied to the wars by his own private chaplain, would always be at a disadvantage, and it was no coincidence that in 1911 the office of the new Chief of the General Staff, fell to a general who ostentatiously ate meat on Good Friday.