The Price of Glory (6 page)

In his memoirs, Field Marshal Alexander complains that throughout his service as a fighting soldier in the First War ‘no commander above my Brigade Commander ever visited my front line.’ Joffre was no exception to this rule, and on his rare visits to the forward areas, about the closest combatants below the rank of Corps Commander came to him was in a march past or a decoration parade. He could not bear to have his tranquillity upset by confrontation with the actual horrors of war. This was the second characteristic which he and Haig had in common; Haig, his son tells us, ‘felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations because these visits made him physically ill.’ After pinning the
Médaille Militaire
on a blinded soldier, Joffre said: ‘I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles.… I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.’ It was in fact about the only emotion of this kind that he is recorded to have shown. In all his lengthy memoirs there is not one mention of the human element, not one word about the dreadful suffering of his soldiers. Like a peasant keeping account of his sacks of grain, Joffre in 1914 kept a little notebook in which he entered ammunition reserves still remaining. But it would have been better for France if he had also made accurate entries of the lives expended. As it was, so many First War generals, overwhelmed by the size of the forces suddenly placed under their command, tended to regard casualties as merely figures on a Quartermaster’s return; and in Joffre, the engineer, the technician, this dismal characteristic was particularly accentuated.

To an exciteable, impressionable race like the French, Joffre’s greatest contribution, however, undoubtedly was this unusual degree of sangfroid. The Kaiser once predicted that ‘the side with the better nerves will win’, and one French soldier summed up the feelings of the rest when he scribbled in his diary that here was a leader whom ‘not even the worst situations would disconcert… this is what we did not have in 1870’. By not losing his head when
his Plan XVII disintegrated about him, Joffre saved France. At the Marne, whereas the impetuous Foch might have attacked a day too early and the cautious Pétain a day too late, the unflurried Joffre (pushed by the inspired Galliéni) timed it correctly. But this great asset of Joffre’s also concealed terrible dangers. His power of deep sleep had created a legend throughout the nation that ‘if things were going badly he would not sleep’. It was a legend that often blinded both the nation, as well as Joffre himself, to just how bad things were. His confidence in himself was enormous and indestructible; in 1912 he had predicted ‘there will be a war and I shall win it’; even in November 1914 he had turned down the first project to issue steel helmets, declaring ‘we shall not have the time to make them, for I shall twist the Boche’s neck before two months are up’. Worst of all, this confidence, this fat man’s complacent optimism, was taken up and reflected back by the sycophantic
Grand Quartier Général.

Through his long absence in the colonies, Joffre suffered from the same disadvantage as Auchinleck of the Indian Army when commanding in the Western Desert. Appointed to the supreme command, Joffre had insufficient knowledge of his officers’ records to judge the good from the bad in the French Army, but when war had unmasked the inadequate he had acted with great ruthlessness. By the time of the Marne, two out of five Army Commanders, ten out of twenty Corps Commanders and forty-two out of seventy-four Divisional Commanders had been sacked or sent to Limoges; whence came a new word in the French language —
limoger.
Yet, when it came to pruning out de Grandmaison’s satraps from the G.Q.G., he somehow seemed powerless. Perhaps the G.Q.G. was too strong for him, perhaps his own indifferent intellect found it more comfortable to be surrounded by mediocrities. And this he certainly was; the G.Q.G. could be blamed for many of Joffre’s worst disasters, and the hostility it provoked in the country largely contributed to Joffre’s eventual downfall.

Isolated in its palace at Chantilly, G.Q.G. lived amid an atmosphere of back-stabbing intrigue reminiscent of the court of Louis XV at Versailles. With the ambitious jockeying for position on every side, the different branches were distrustful of liaising too closely with one another. Each became a little moated castle on its own. The rare witty sally of Asquith’s about the War Office keeping three sets of figures, ‘one to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself’ applied with even greater
force to G.Q.G. The
Deuxième Bureau
had a curious mathematical formula for computing enemy losses, based on some marvellous racial equation whereby it was assumed that if two Frenchmen had fallen then three casualties had been suffered by the Germans. It was, alas, nearly always the other way about. Deceived by the
Deuxième Bureau,
the
Troisième
planned its operations totally divorced from the realities of war beyond the ivory tower of Chantilly. The G.Q.G. also maintained its own vast propaganda system, designed to deceive the outside world and thus perpetuate its own existence. Perhaps most typical of all the G.Q.G. personalities was the liaison officer to President Poincaré, General Pénélon, aptly nicknamed ‘April Smiles’, who could transmogrify the direst catastrophe into a triumph. Partially discredited and reduced in power, after 1914, the Government found it practically impossible to intervene in the mighty, sealed brotherhood that was the G.Q.G.

To sum up on Joffre, it might be said that the war was very nearly lost with him, but that it would almost certainly have been lost without him.

* * *

With the exception of the first gas attack at Ypres in April — where the Germans came near to a breakthrough — 1915 saw them on the defensive in France, attacking ferociously in Russia. Meanwhile, Joffre and the G.Q.G. pursued the simple-minded, but murderously wasteful, strategy of what he called
‘grignotage’,
or nibbling-away at the enemy; which has also been described as ‘trying to bite through a steel door with badly-fitting false teeth’. A series of major battles took place, each one aimed at a breakthrough, at forcing the Germans into the open again. (In his optimism, Joffre was here reinforced by Haig, who told Repington of
The Times
at the beginning of the year that when sufficient shells were accumulated ‘we could walk through the German lines at several places’.) But all the time the Germans just dug themselves a little deeper into the hard chalk. The first attack was conducted by Foch with eighteen divisions in Artois, in May; its only success was scored by Pétain’s XXXIII Corps, which advanced a bare two miles — but the reserves were not there to follow it up. After the French had lost 102,500, more than twice as many as the defenders, the offensive was abandoned. In September, Joffre tried again. Now he had the added excuse of coming to the rescue of the Russians, who had been dread-
fully mauled by the Hindenburg-Ludendorff offensives in the East Joffre’s September effort was altogether more ambitious, with the French attacking both in Artois and the Champagne and the British making their first major effort of the war at Loos. A heavier bom bardment preceded the attacks, but so long in advance that all possibility of surprise vanished. Whereas in Artois in the spring there had been just one German line, in the Champagne the French penetrated the first only to be mown down from a second that had been rapidly dug on the reverse slopes during the warning bombardment. This time even Pétain failed, and about all his corps had to show was the capture of one cemetery. In the Champagne, Castelnau persisted in attacking, believing wrongly that a breakthrough had been achieved, long after all hope had evaporated. The casualty lists were larger than ever; 242,000 to 141,000, of which the British lost 50,380 to the Germans’ 20,000 at Loos.

Each battle had failed largely due to the lack of heavy guns and ammunition of all sizes. At Arras, Pétain had been limited to 400 shells on a twelve-mile front, and, to make things worse, over a period of six months hastily manufactured shells burst 600 guns, killing many of their crews. The 75s barely scraped the surface of the German dug-outs, so that time and again the attacking French were mown down as they left the trenches by a solitary untouched machine gun. An officer who later fought at Verdun described one such typical occurrence in the autumn Artois offensive:

Three hundred men of our regiment lay there in sublime order. At the first whistling of bullets, the officers had cried ‘Line up!’ and all went to their death as in a parade.

Still in the de Grandmaison spirit, officers declined to make themselves inconspicuous by carrying a rifle; instead they led the way brandishing their canes and were picked off by the hundred. The attacks assumed a drearily stereotyped pattern. First came the preliminary bombardment and the agonising wait in the front-lines; then the attack, with perhaps a fortunate few, generally very few, reaching the first German trenches to bayonet the survivors there; a brief pause, then the enemy’s deadly barrage on their own captured positions, followed by the inevitable counter-attack; finally, the attackers, too few to hold their ground, driven back to their own trenches, decimated relics of the original force; the remaining three-quarters to nine-tenths, dead, or dying with their bowels hooked on the wire of No-Man’s-Land, knowing that unlike Gravelotte in 1870 there would be no truce to collect the wounded, and hoping only to attract the merciful attention of an enemy machine-gunner. Thus ended 1915, in a complete and bloody stalemate. France had by now lost fifty per cent of her regular officers, killed or disabled, and her dead already approached the total Britain was to lose in the whole of the war. And the only thing it had proved was that this was no way to win a war.

CHAPTER THREE

FALKENHAYN

The World bloodily-minded,

The Church dead or polluted,

The blind leading the blinded,

And the deaf dragging the muted.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL,
1916

… the celebrated tale of the man who gave the powder to the bear. He mixed the powder with the greatest care, making sure that not only the ingredients but the proportions were absolutely correct. He rolled it up in a large paper spill, and was about to blow it down the bear’s throat.
But the bear blew first.
— WINSTON S. CHURCHILL,
The Second World War.

1915 was the least successful year of the whole War for Allied arms; never again would the prospects seem so bright for the Central Powers as at its close. The costly failures in the West had been matched by worse disasters in the East. Realising that there was no danger of a breakthrough in France, the Germans had been able to concentrate on pushing the pathetically ill-equipped Russians back across Poland, inflicting losses that would have sealed the fate of most European powers. By September Hindenburg and Ludendorff had captured 750,000 prisoners and come close to enveloping the main Russian army. Gallipoli, so brilliantly daring in conception, where, like many another undertaking of the First War, success seemed at times balanced on a razor’s edge, had passed into the hands of receivers. Courageous Serbia, the nation over which the war had ostensibly begun, had finally been submerged; her gallant old king forced to flee over the Albanian mountains in a bullock cart. Nervously sheltering behind the anti-submarine nets, Jellicoe’s formidable array of
Dreadnoughts
had won none of the sparkling naval victories that the British public and her Allies had expected. Instead, Scarborough and Hartlepool had been bombarded with impunity by Tirpitz’s battle-cruisers, and there appeared to be no solution to the mounting submarine menace. The sinking in May of the
Lusitania
had stirred America, but had not persuaded her to join hands with the Allies. Even in East Africa, the elusive von Lettow-Vorbeck and his handful of
Askaris
continued to pin down ten times as many Empire troops. Nowhere could the Allies find consolation
.