G. H. Perris

“ The mantles of the chasseurs are still blue, the breeches of the infantry red, the uniforms of the artillery and engineers nearly black; but already bright colours tend to disappear, and every other tone to assimilate with the dust of the high roads. By day and night there is but one traffic throughout these northern and eastern departments—files of cavalry, batteries of field-guns, columns of heavy-laden men, convoys of Parisian autobuses and hooded carts, pass incessantly through the silent forests out into the open plains. ”

“ Battle in the open would mean annihilation; yet it is only by assault that entrenched positions can be carried.
“Warfare will drag on more slowly than ever. While an invading army is being decimated by sickness and wounds, and demoralised by the heavy loss of officers and the delay of any glorious victory, the home population will be sunk in misery by the growth of economic burdens, the stoppage of trade and industry. The small, elastic, and manageable army of the past could make quick marches, turning movements, strategical demonstrations in the widest sense. ”

“ Setting aside high strategy and abstract teaching, he preached the virtue of all-round preparation—in the moral and intellectual factors, first of which a sane patriotism and a worthy command, as well as in the material factors of numbers, armament, supplies, and so on. “To be ready in our days,” he says, “carries a meaning it would have been difficult for those who formerly prepared and conducted war to grasp.... To be ready to-day, all the resources of the country, all the intelligence of its children, all their moral energy, must be directed in advance toward a single aim—victory. ”

“ Amid the tramp-tramp of the weary, dust-blinded columns, by the night bivouacs, under the rain of shrapnel and the crash of high explosive, men of the most diverse condition and character, shedding old vanities and new alarms, came down step by cruel step to the fundamental honesty, unity, and resolution of our nature. The mirage of an easy victory vanished; in its place a finer idea rose and rose till the armies saw nothing else: France must live! I may die, or be doomed to a travesty of life; at any price, France must be saved. ”

“ A repetition of the triumph of 1870 would not be enough, for, if France resisted as long this time, everything would be put in doubt. The blow must be still more swift and overwhelming. To be overwhelming, it must at once reach not portions, but the chief mass, of the French armies. But nowhere in the world had military art, working upon a favourable terrain, set up so formidable a series of obstacles to grand-scale manœuvre as along the line of the Meuse and Moselle Heights and the Vosges. ”

“ The soldier bred upon Napoleonic annals may long for the opportunity of free manœuvre; all the evolution of warfare is against his dream. An army neither feeds nor directs itself; it is supplied and directed as part of a larger machine executing a predetermined plan. Superiority of force is increased by concentration, and achieves victory by envelopment of the enemy as a whole, or his disintegration by the piercing of gaps, a preliminary to retail envelopment or dispersal. A course which loses the initial superiority and requires a considerable change of plan is already a grave prejudice ”

“ But the same Bernhardi, the master of all the German generals, and before him all the greatest captains, all the oracles of the military art, Moltke, Jomini, insist that the aim of war must be fixed as high as possible, and this aim is the complete ruin of the enemy State by the destruction, the putting out of action, of its armies. Only an enemy completely disarmed will bow to the will of the conqueror.... The opinion that prevailed with the German Staff is that to attack Paris before having finished with the Allied Armies would be a fault entailing very serious consequences.... ”

“ The batteries and convoys have gone on through the darkness, men rolling from side to side with fatigue on their horses or gun-carriages, as though drunk. With daybreak the greater trek recommences. The enemy has not been idle: in the distance behind rolls the thunder of heavy guns; pillars of smoke and flame rise from burning villages. And as, day after day, a new stage of retirement—increasingly controlled, it is true—is ordered, the question pierces deeper: What is to become of France? ”

“ England and9 America, even more than France, had outgrown any sort of liking for war. To be driven back to that gross test was a profound surprise. For the quick, proud French mind to find itself suddenly in face of defeat and the threat of conquest was a second and severer shock. The long retreat gave it time to perceive that this calamity arose largely from its own errors, and to re-group its forces in a truer conception of the character of modern warfare. Even Joffre may not have clearly realised this need; great instincts count in the crisis of leadership equally with powerful reasoning. ”

“ On September 10, General Maunoury addressed to his troops the following message of congratulation and thanks:
“The 6th Army has supported for five full days, without interruption or slackening, the combat against a numerous enemy whose moral was heightened by previous success. The struggle has been hard; the losses under fire, from fatigue due to lack of sleep and sometimes of food, have surpassed what was to be anticipated. You have borne it all with a valour, firmness, and endurance that words are powerless to glorify as they deserve. ”

“ Could the northern frontier have been defended? Was Lanrezac responsible for Charleroi, and, if so, why not Castelnau for Morhange? Was the German plan of envelopment exaggerated? Could the British have done more at Mons, and were they slow and timorous when the hour arrived to turn about? Was Paris ever in danger? And, coming to the battlevii itself, how was it decided? What parts did Gallieni, Von Kluck, Sir John French, and Foch play? Was Joffre really master of the field? It may be too soon to answer fully such questions as these; it is too late to evade them. ”

“ Enough has been said to show that the reverses of the beginning of the war which led to the long retreat were due not only to the brutal strength of the German invasion, but to bad information, bad judgment, bad45 organisation, an ill-conceived strategy and reckless tactics, on the side of the Allies. The impact on the north and north-west (including now the Crown Prince’s Army) of some 28 army corps—considerably over a million men—provided with heavy artillery, machine-guns, transport, and material on a prodigious scale, had never been dreamed of, and proved irresistible. ”

“ The answer must be that they were not broken, but were passing through the sort of experience which, in a virile race, wakens the dull-minded to their utmost effort, blows away the last traces of laxity and false idealism, and, by setting above every other fear the fear of a ruined Fatherland, rallies the whole mass on the elementary ground of defence to the death. Voices, lying voices, had whispered that France was diseased, body and soul, that the Republic would surely die of its corruptions. We have since discovered the immeasurable strength of democratic communities. ”

“ Over a million strong, they had left their homes, and gathered at their depots during these three weeks, to be whirled off to the frontiers and the first scarcely imaginable trial of modern conscript systems. It was a new thing in the world’s history, this sudden tremendous clash of the whole manhood of highly developed nations, armed with the most murderous machinery science could devise, and supported by vast reserves of wealth. It had fallen swiftly upon them, the doom that many learned men had declared to be impossible in the twentieth century ”

“ A succession of surprises marks the light regard for information of the enemy’s means and movements, as a series of instant reverses measures the scorn for well-pondered manœuvre. Was France required by her Eastern ally to attack at once? The attack need not have surpassed the proportions of holding actions punctuating a stout defence. Was Belgium closed to the French armies by the old treaty of neutrality? That did not justify a plan of campaign which left the north uncovered to a German aggression. ”

“ It was the first time all the services concerned in war preparations, including the War Council, the General Staff, the Staff Committee, the Higher War School, had come under a single control; and, even had there been no arrears, no financial difficulties, a greater permanence of Ministries, the task would have called for all one man’s powers of labour and judgment. Joffre was surrounded during that period by men more positive, in certain directions, than himself, more ambitious, men whose abilities could no more be defied than their influence. ”

“ The milder instructions of 1895 were condemned as based upon the “most dangerous” idea that a commander might prefer defence on a favourable, to attack on an unfavourable, ground. “In order to avoid all misunderstanding on so important a point of doctrine, the new instructions admit only a single justification for the defensive in combat, that is, the necessity of economising troops on certain points in order to devote more forces to attacks; so understood, the defensive is, properly speaking, no more than an auxiliary of the offensive.” “The offensive alone leads to positive results” ”

“ On the memorable fields of Montmirail, Vauchamps, and Champaubert, which a century ago witnessed our ancestors’ victories over the Prussians of Blücher, our vigorous offensive has triumphed over the German resistance. Held on his flanks, his centre broken, the enemy is now retreating toward the east and north by forced marches. The most redoubtable Corps of old Prussia, the Westphalian, Hanoverian, and Brandenburg contingents, are falling back hurriedly before you.
“This first success is only a prelude. The enemy is shaken, but not definitely beaten. ”

“ Amiens region, in support of an offensive from the old line of secondary fortresses La Fère–Laon–Rheims, was no sooner conceived than it had to be abandoned. Maunoury was compelled to send his divisions off piecemeal from railhead to the battlefield. The chief body of them had had such rest as a long journey in goods-vans permits; d’Amade’s reservists had been routed in the north, and had lost heavily. If Kluck had not been absorbed in the effort to destroy Sir John French’s little band of heroes, Maunoury’s task could never have been fulfilled. ”

“ Joffre was in no wise intimidated, never thought of temporising, immediately saw that a most daring crime can only be overcome by a still more daring virtue, and set all his mind to the task of gathering the utmost force in the best position for the decisive test. ”

“ What at first sight looks like a sudden change of fickle fortune is, in fact, the logical end of an immense strategical deception, of weaknesses in an imposing organism discovered by a higher intelligence, and exploited by a higher prudence and courage. However the lesser questions we have touched be answered in the light of fuller knowledge, it seems sure that history will pronounce Joffre’s master idea one of the boldest and soundest conceptions to be found in military annals. ”

“ In a telegram to the Minister of War, he added: “The Government of the Republic may be proud of the armies it has organised.” Neither then nor later did any phrase more worthy of the occasion than these fall from the pen or the lips of the Generalissimo. In success as in failure, he was the same silent, weighty, cheerful figure—Joffre the Taciturn, to the end. ”

“ King Albert was allowed to carry his army into the shelter of Antwerp, there to prepare for the battle of the Yser. Ostend, Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, all the coast of Flanders and the Channel, with its hinterland, and with them the sea communications of England, were ignored in obedience to the strategical doctrine of the major objective, and in the sure belief that if this were attained, the rest would follow easily. The watching world was staggered by the immense boldness of these criminals. ”

“ In air services, in petrol transport, and in the art of field defences, also, the French were outmatched. Aviation was essentially their sport and science; but the army had shown little interest in it, and had made only a beginning in its two main functions—general reconnaissance and the ranging of artillery fire.7 Thus ill-prepared for a modern large-scale offensive, France had not acquired the material or the tactic of a strategical defence. ”

“ Rivers of blood, the old, rich Gallic blood that mingled Roman experience and Mediterranean fire with the peasant vigour of the North, tempered through centuries of labour and exaltation. The best must needs suffer most; and France, historic guardian of ancient treasuries, standard-bearer of European civilisation, must suffer in chief for the weaknesses of the Western world. ”

“ It is, however, no less important than the battles of the left and the centre; for, if there was involved in them the fate of the capital, here not only Verdun, but Nancy and Toul, with the armies of the eastern frontier, were in the scales. Langle and Sarrail share equally with Gallieni and Maunoury, French, d’Espérey, and Foch the honours of the total victory. ”

“ No more dreadful struggle can be recorded. The German effort ceased on the night of September 9; and on the 11th the general withdrawal to the old frontier began. Like Foch, Langle, and Sarrail, Castlenau had won through by the narrowest of margins; but his, pre-eminently, was a victory of foresight and preparation. With all their power of heavy artillery (and here the resources of Metz and Strasbourg were at hand) , it is remarkable that the German Staff never attempted to repeat in Lorraine the coup of Liège. As the French respected Metz, they respected Verdun ”

“ There must be no more rash adventures on the east; from Belfort to Verdun, the front would be held defensively, with a minimum of strength, to fulfil the purpose for which its fortifications were built, and to protect the main forces, which would operate henceforth in the centre and west. The importance of the north-west coast, and the fact that Kluck was not approaching it, plainly suggested the creation of a new mass of manœuvre on this side to menace the German flank: this new body was Maunoury’s 6th Army. ”

“ While unable to create the means to a successful general offensive, the French Command had discounted, if not positively discredited, modern methods of defence and delaying manœuvre, methods peculiarly indicated in this case, since France had the same reasons for postponing a decision as Germany had for hastening it. The only hope of the Allies at the outset lay in a combination of defence and manœuvre: there was no adequate defence, and no considerable manœuvre, but only a general headlong attack on a continuous line. ”

“ Foch was the offensive incarnate; but, on the morning of September 6th, he could do no more than meet, and that with indifferent success, Bülow’s attack upon his left-centre. He was weakest where the enemy was most strong: a large part of the French guns could not reach the field for the beginning of the combat; the 9th Corps, in particular, felt the lack of three groups of artillery it had left in Lorraine. ”