FIFTEEN
Mourir pour la patrie, c’est le sort le plus beau. (To die for the Fatherland is the most beautiful fate.)
—French 1914 slogan
ON 3 AUGUST 1914, Frenchmen found themselves at war again. Happily unable to see what lay ahead, they would optimistically call it the “Great War,” the “War to end all Wars.” Historians of the next generation would recognise it merely as the “First World War,” but their successors might well come to see it more realistically as simply the first act in a second “Thirty Years’ War.”
At a sudden end was the age of prosperity and unlimited promise which all Europe had begun to enjoy—and in which even poor medieval Russia was beginning to participate. Europe was about to descend into a new Dark Age whose shadows stretched unforeseeably far into the future. For the next four years, it was to seem as if War itself had become the sole arbiter in the world, with human leaders—so proud and powerful in the world of 1900—reduced to impotence in the face of a force infinitely greater than anything they had, or could have, foreseen, or been taught to handle. On both sides there were many— and not just among the Kaiser’s entourage in Berlin, or the sword-rattling revanchistes in Paris—who greeted the fall into conflict almost with relief, such had been the stresses and strains of holding back from it in preceding years.
André Gide hastened back to Paris by the last available civilian train; as it went by, he heard a railwayman shout: “All aboard for Berlin! And what fun we’ll have there!” Three days into the war he anticipated adventure of a higher level: “The wonderful behaviour of the Government, of everyone, and of all France . . . leaves room for every hope. One foresees the beginning of a new era: the United States of Europe bound by a treaty limiting their armaments.”1 Naturally, as to most Frenchmen now, the sine qua nonof such a rosy future had to be—above all—the rightful return of Alsace-Lorraine. Marcel Proust, however, right to the end, refused to believe in the prospect of war; it would be simply “too frightful,” he thought; he was much more concerned in finding a Paris publisher for his very long novel, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. His chronic asthma disqualified him from military service. In the provinces, reactions to the coming of war were distinctly more sombre, and more sober.
Among those to rally to the colours at the first opportunity were many members of the Dreyfus family. Alfred’s son, Pierre, fought in the first battles of 1914 as a corporal, then through Verdun and fifty-four days on the Somme, was gassed, promoted five times and ended the war a captain with the Croix de Guerre and Palm; nephew Émile died of wounds in 1915, awarded the Légion d’Honneur on his deathbed; his niece’s husband, Ado Reinach, was reported missing in August, his body never found. By the war’s end all but four soldiers from the Dreyfus and Reinach families had disappeared. It was a common story made exceptional by the patriotism of a Jewish clan which had suffered so much at the hands of the army. Alfred himself, despite being too old for the army aged fifty-five, repeatedly requested to be sent to the front and was finally permitted to take part as a gunner in the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of 1917.
There was little repetition of the wild, clamouring cries of “À Berlin!” in that July of forty-four years previously. On 28 July 1914, the British Ambassador, Lord Bertie, recorded in his diary: “There is much nervous excitement, but no popular demonstrations for war...” 2 Parisians, he noted, hoped that Britain would be the “deciding factor” in keeping Germany out of the war. He told Foreign Secretary Grey that if Britain should “declare herself solidaire with France and Russia there will be no war.” But, with much pro-neutralist opposition at home, Grey and the Asquith government dithered, sending no clear-cut message to the Kaiser. In execution of the Schlieffen Plan, mobilising a huge force of 1,300,000 men (out of a massive total of 3,120,000 heading east and west in 11,000 trains), Germany marched into and through Belgium. On 4 August war became general.
IN THE LAST MONTHS before the avalanche, and of his life, the great Jaurès had piously hoped that, in the event of war breaking out, his fellow German socialists would rip up the railway lines leading to the front. But his assassination put paid to such dreams. On the eve of war, socialists carrying placards proclaiming “Guerre à la Guerre!” gave the cabinet fearful visions of working-class riots and civil strife, but the scenes were brief. In fact, when Germany and France mobilised, socialists on both sides marched with everyone else. Jaurès was buried on the day a general war was declared, and his dreams were interred with him. Remarkably, a patriotic “Union Sacrée” coalition was formed to prosecute the war, and all politicians, even the left-wing pacifists, backed it. Across the country an atmosphere of quiet, rather businesslike resolve prevailed. Raymond Poincaré, a staunch revanchiste from Lorraine who would never allow himself to forget his childhood memories of Pickelhaube occupying his homeland, had been elected president, and the country was whole-heartedly behind him. The press, thoroughly brain-washed by its own Russophile outpourings of the past years, continued to deceive the public with imaginative accounts of the Tsar’s steam-roller crushing the enemy in the East.
THIS TIME, in some respects at least, the French Army was genuinely, superbly ready. In fact, it was perhaps a little too ready. Morale had climbed. The proportion of defectors on mobilisation, predicted to be 13 per cent, was in fact less than 1.5 per cent; but an exaggerated notion pervaded the army of 1914 that the Furia Francese, the élan vital of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, would somehow suffice to repel and defeat the attacking Germans. This seemed quite justified according to the “positivist” philosophy of Henri Bergson, then all the rage in France. In the crucial pre-war years there had been far too little pragmatic study at the École Militaire, so it was hardly surprising that in 1913–14 300 books on war were published in Germany, to only fifty in France. “You talk to us of heavy artillery. Thank God, we have none. The strength of the French Army is in the lightness of its guns,”3 the General Staff told the deputies in 1909. Thus, by August 1914, the whole French Army possessed only 300 heavy guns; the Germans 3500. The French military planners were not over-impressed by the new, deadly machine-gun, either. In 1910, General Foch, then Commandant of the Staff College, was among those who had reckoned on a brief, brutal conflict of a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, so that the enemy should see them clearly and be terror-struck by the furia of their onslaught, the infantry went to war in the red képis and blue pantaloons of the Second Empire, despising the Germans for converting to the less martial though more practical feldgrau.
France’s Commander-in-Chief was General Joseph (his middle name, conspicuously, was “Césaire”) Joffre, son of a humble cooper, one of a family of eleven and, like Foch, a Pyrenean. He was an elderly officer with an immense belly and an extraordinary capacity for calm (that rather un-French characteristic), which was his single greatest asset. Under him, the French forces were committed to Plan XVII. This prescribed that, on the outbreak of war, four out of her five armies, totalling 800,000 men, were to charge forward—predictably—towards the lost territories, objective the Rhine. Well informed of all this, the Germans wedded themselves to their Schlieffen Plan.63 Swinging down through neutral Belgium (the casus belli for Britain entering the war on France’s side) it comprised a vast right hook which would sweep around behind Paris, and then pin the French armies that were attacking eastwards up against the Swiss frontier. Under this blueprint (drawn up some years before the war), France would be knocked out in one mighty blow, before Russia could join in. Speed was essential, and there would be no room for any mistakes. Likened to the action of a revolving door, under Plan XVII the French Army would in fact add momentum to the door’s rotation, thereby doing just what Schlieffen wanted. Fortunately for France, unfortunately for Germany, his successor, Moltke—nephew of the military genius who crushed France in 1870, but there the resemblance ceased—tampered with the masterplan, weakening both the crucial right wing and the covering force facing the Russians. This would play a vital role in the battle of the Marne that was to follow.
All along the frontier the French infantrymen in their bright uniforms, carrying heavy packs and long, unwieldy bayonets, broke into the double behind their white-gloved officers. Many sang the “Marseillaise.” In the August heat, sometimes the heavily encumbered French attacked from a distance of nearly half a mile from the enemy. Their courage was supreme; but never had machine-gunners had such a heyday. The French stubblefields became transformed into carpets of red and blue. Splendid cavalrymen in glittering breastplates from the age of Murat hurled their horses hopelessly at the guns that were slaughtering the infantry. It was horrible, and horribly predictable.
FOR THE FIRST TERRIFYING WEEKS of August it looked as if the Schlieffen Plan was going to work. German outriders reached and captured the racing stables at Chantilly, just 25 miles north-east of Paris; one cavalry detachment claimed it could see the Eiffel Tower. Railway stations to the west and south were besieged with Parisians wanting to get out before the enemy arrived. The Minister of Defence rushed to the Élysée to demand that Poincaré appoint a military governor of Paris—a role that had been filled by the flaccid General Trochu in the last siege of Paris.
General Joseph Gallieni was to prove an unlikely national hero. He was sixty-five, retired from active service and already afflicted by the prostate cancer that would kill him in two years’ time. As a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant he had fought—and been captured—at Sedan in 1870. He was a quiet intellectual, who carried himself like an officer on parade. Tall and spare with a pince-nez (like Dreyfus) and a bushy grey moustache, he resembled no other French general of the epoch. Of the Commander-in-Chief, Joffre, he complained: “How fat and heavy he is; he will hardly last out his three years!” Gallieni insisted he be given a covering force of three active army corps; but for the best part of two crucial weeks he was left “Commander of the Armies of Paris” without an army. Pessimistically, he warned Poincaré that ministers were “no longer safe in the capital.” On the night of 2 September, almost the anniversary of the 1870 debacle at Sedan, the government left by train for Bordeaux. A bitter parody of the “Marseillaise” made the rounds of Paris:
Aux gares, citoyens!
Montez dans les wagons!
As the city prepared itself for a siege more hopeless than in 1870—or total destruction from the giant German 420 mm “Big Berthas” that had already reduced the Belgian forts to rubble.
MEANWHILE, A MIRACLE WAS IN THE OFFING which would evoke to devout Parisians the intervention of Saint Geneviève in turning back the Hunnish invaders in the fifth century. French Intelligence had acquired a haversack taken off the body of a German cavalry officer attached to General von Kluck’s First Army. In it was a bloodstained map showing lines of advance swinging south-eastwards, away from the capital. Joffre had been prepared to sacrifice Paris, but now he and Gallieni immediately realised the significance of the move: as von Kluck’s army was on the right flank of the massive German wheeling movement, it meant that its sweep was no longer going to envelop Paris, but was to swing to the east to trap the French against the Swiss frontier. Even better, this in effect denoted the collapse of the whole German strategy, initiated by Moltke’s tampering with the masterplan. In the east, unexpectedly, the Russians had been able to mount a powerful offensive that had taken most of East Prussia before Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Germany’s most successful team in the war, had been able to smash it at Tannenberg. In the meantime, and in alarm at the Russian success, a timorous Moltke had dispatched eastwards divisions from von Kluck’s vital right flank in France. With forces already removed to reinforce the centre, von Kluck simply had insufficient men to carry out the great wheel west of Paris, while keeping in step with von Bülow’s Second Army on his left.
Gallieni swiftly realised, “They offer us their flank!” 4 He pressed the normally ponderous Joffre into turning the whole elephantine army around and launching an immediate combined offensive. Gallieni would unleash General Maunoury’s newly formed Sixth Army to attack out of Paris, into von Kluck’s exposed flank. The Sixth Army units had only just arrived, exhausted, after long forced marches. The whole of the six armies under Joffre’s command—including General French’s small but heroic British Expeditionary Force—were also tired out after a month of retreats, dispiriting defeats and horrendous casualties. But the German Army was just as exhausted; in the coming battle many German prisoners were actually taken asleep, unable to move another step.
After a passionate appeal to General French to turn the retreating British forces about, Joffre from his makeshift Grand Quartier Général (GQG) near the battle-front issued the critical order: “We are going to fight on the Marne.”5 The first blow of the Allied counter-offensive came from Paris on the 6th, with 60,000 of General Maunoury’s troops who had barely detrained rushed to the front. The civilian response was phenomenal: 600 of the little red Renault taxis, so familiar to tourists, plied back and forth to the Ourcq battlefield only 35 miles distant. Each carrying five soldiers, they made the round trip twice in the day, rushing up crucial reinforcements. The “Taxis of the Marne” in the apt words of Barbara Tuchman, did indeed constitute “the last gallantry of 1914, the last crusade of the old world.”
The immediate, tactical effect of Maunoury’s attack was to force von Kluck to swing his flank westwards to meet the threat. As a result, a critical gap 30 miles wide opened up between his left and von Bülow’s Second Army. Into this gap marched French’s tired BEF and the French Fifth Army. To their right, in command of a newly formed Ninth Army, the fiery General Foch, whose aggression had already proved an expensive liability, now came into his own with his famous order: “My centre is yielding, my right is falling back, situation excellent. I am attacking!” But it was the brave adventurism of Gallieni and the city he commanded which turned defeat into victory. After three days of battle, on 9 September von Bülow ordered his army to fall back over the Marne. Two days later the retreat became general.
Sadly, the exhausted and slow-moving Allies could not press their advantage to roll up the whole enemy front. Now it congealed into a line of static trench warfare reaching from the Channel to the Swiss frontier. But the “Miracle of the Marne” provided battered France with an immeasurable psychological victory. Germany had in fact lost the war, though it would take another four—or thirty—years to persuade her of this. But at what a cost for France: in the two weeks that the terrible Battle of the Frontiers lasted, she had lost over 300,000 men killed, wounded and missing, and 4778 officers—representing no less than one-tenth of her total officer strength. By the end of the first five months of the war in killed alone the French Army had lost 300,000 men (or nearly a fifth more than Britain’s total dead in the whole of the Second World War). Because of the efficacy of the censors, the country did not realise the full extent of these losses for a long time. France had also lost the important cities of Lille, Valenciennes, Arras, Amiens, Cambrai, Laon and Soissons, as well as Rheims—where all the kings of France from Clovis to Louis XIV had been crowned—abandoned as an open city on 3 September. Nearly 12 per cent of all her territory, comprising 16.3 per cent of her manufacturing capacity and 20.4 per cent of the wheat crop, was now in enemy hands—as was, still, Alsace-Lorraine; while nearly 900,000 hungry and destitute refugees had been added to the hungry mouths France had to feed.
Nevertheless the country was saved—in one of those amazing recoveries that recur in her history. The government returned amid a mood of contrition, almost of smugness. A young Jean Cocteau would be employed contributing, for a little literary review, drawings of Belgian children who had, supposedly, had their right hands cut off by German soldiery. As more reports of German atrocities came in from the occupied territories, there was a growing sense that “France equalled Civilisation, Germany, Barbarism.”
OUT OF THE VICTORY of the Marne, Joffre emerged as immeasurably the most powerful figure on the whole Allied side. It might be said that the war was very nearly lost with him, but—with his unshakeable nerves—it would almost certainly have been lost without him. Isolated in its palace at Chantilly, Joffre’s GQG lived in an atmosphere of back-stabbing intrigue reminiscent of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Throughout 1915 they pursued the simple-minded, but murderously wasteful, strategy of what Joffre 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.” It was the least successful year of the whole war for Allied arms; and never again would the prospects seem so bright for the Central Powers as at its close.
In France a whole war industry was set up to improve the morale of the soldier at the front. Not allowed leave until March 1915, his need for female company was synthesised by an institution called “Marraines de Guerre” (“Godmothers of War”). It began as a scheme for women to adopt an unknown soldier, keeping him supplied with woollen comforters, and it grew into a powerful propaganda instrument. Sometimes frightened soldiers would be prompted into action by fear more of their marraine’s contempt than of their lieutenant’s revolver. For the majority, the marraine was simply an unseen, unknown Beatrice who wrote her soldier beautiful letters telling him to be brave and die well; the happy minority sometimes also found her willing to share her bed with him on leave. One sergeant, who collected forty-four marraines, eventually found that his leaves were never long enough to keep them all contented, and so deserted.
Now that he was acquainted all too intimately with the realities of war, the French front-line soldier became progressively irritated, then angered by the propagandists’ bourrage de crâne (brainwashing), which flowed out like lava from the capital. These were the writers and newspapermen, paid hacks of the propaganda machine and tools of “Anastasie,” the censor, who from their comfortable offices in Paris wrote of the nobility of war in the terms of Déroulède; of the brave boys dying beautifully pour la patrie.Forerunners of what today would be called the artisans of “spin,” they published accounts of the piling up of “mounds of German dead” at each attack at Verdun—to the accompaniment of “negligible” French losses. They published photographs of the teenagedgrands mutilés with such captions as “A Soldier Who Has Lost Both Feet, Yet Walks Fairly Well With Clever Substitutes,” or “A Soldier Who Has Lost Both Hands, Yet Can Handle a Cigarette and Salute as Before.”64 Nothing enraged the men submitted to the unimaginable suffering of Verdun, and its hecatombs of French lives lost there, more than nauseous effusions like these. At the front their officers would often go to extraordinary lengths to obtain copies of Le Journal de Genève, for a reasonably accuraterapportage of the war. The propagandists gave the common soldier a new nickname, the poilu, or “hairy-one”—the epitome of the tough soldier, coupled with the slogan: “To die for the Fatherland is the most beautiful fate” in an often-played military hymn. Thepoilu, however, had a rather different view: “The most beautiful fate is to live a long time and to be happy. Why lie?” wrote soldier and former professor Paul Cazin in the spring of 1915. Thebourrage— largely directed at the civilian population—liked to depict thepoilu as a perpetually cheerful bloke, as per Maurice Barrès when the spring offensives foundered in April 1915: “They are all gay hearted! They are having fun!”
By the end of the first year of war, Paris journalists were offered fewer reports of the laughing poilu, though the motif of singing, jovial soldiers persisted. There were exuberant propaganda posters captioned “On les aura!” But with the bitter life-and-death struggle at Verdun that lasted through 1916, these were replaced by the new, defiant slogan of “Ils ne passeront pas!” In February 1917, only months before the French armies mutinied, the cover of La Vie Parisienne deludedly depicted a jaunty infantryman, striding off to the front, pipe in mouth and mongrel at his heel, with all his needs strapped to his vast pack—including a coffee grinder and a girl in knickers.
But a new language grew up at the front, much of its vocabulary derived from the slang of Parisian workers, and their own songs. About the same time that some disaffected men were chanting the “Internationale,” “Quand Madelon” had become both a military march and a sentimental hit, which embroidered the theme of the marraine, the Dantesque unreachable and impeccable heroine:
Nous en rêvons la nuit, nous y pensons le jour,
Ce n’est que Madelon, mais pour nous, c’est l’amour . . .
(“We dream of her at night, we think of her by day,
It’s only Madelon, but—for us—it’s love . . .”)
Even before the war ended, the composer—Louis Bousquet—wrote a successor hit, “Le Mariage de Madelon,” where the eponymous heroine marries a corporal and produces a lusty son.
Contrary to popular belief, the poilu on leave disliked the bawdy entertainment offered in the Paris music halls—unless it was witty. He had his own bitter songs about the embusqués, the draft-dodgers, whom he hated almost more than the Boches. For the Boches,he reserved a respect that the Paris press did not, or was not allowed to, share. About the highest insult was “gueule de civil” (mug of a civilian). While patriots in Paris continued to hope for the bold offensive and sudden knock-out, the poilu had the simpler ambition of survival. Entering a second year of war, “acceptance” was really the operative word. Those who in 1914 had groused about conditions had by now either vanished or submitted.
AT THE END OF 1915 Haig and Joffre drew up a plan for the next year, whereby in the summer the French would attack with forty divisions on a 25-mile front south of the Somme, the British with some twenty-five divisions along the 15 miles to the north. It would also coincide with a Russian offensive on the eastern front.
But the enemy was to strike first, at Verdun. On 21 February 1916 the Germans attacked. Between the Marne and Ludendorff’s last-gasp assault in March 1918, it was the only time they would assume the offensive on the Western Front. It had supposedly a limited objective; not to capture Verdun, but to “bleed white” the French Army by forcing it to fight for the linchpin of her defences, the strongest fortress on earth— supposedly. Caught horribly unprepared, having denuded the forts of most of their guns, the French Army would suffer over 400,000 casualties; the attacking Germans, supported by an unprecedented weight of artillery on a front only 15 miles across, were to lose almost as many. General Philippe Pétain would be brought in to restore a disastrous situation. He managed to persuade the badly shaken troops: “You went into the assault singing the ‘Marseillaise’; it was magnificent. But the next time you will not need to sing the ‘Marseillaise.’ There will be a sufficient number of guns to ensure your attack’s success.”
In the ten months that it lasted, the battle of Verdun was to gain the grim repute as the worst battle of all time; certainly it was the longest. Another gigantic German miscalculation, it would end in one of the most glorious victories in France’s history; yet its cost would lead her down the road to defeat a generation later. 1916 was also, for Britain, the year of the Somme, the year when her new armies came of age in that terrible bloodletting on whose first day alone 60,000 young Britons and Empire troops would fall. The hero of the Marne, Gallieni, would retire and die; Joffre would be sacked—and so would his German opposite number, the chilly Falkenhayn, who had launched Verdun. Russia would launch its last offensive before succumbing to revolution.
IN CONTRAST TO GERMANY, where the Royal Navy’s blockade was biting hard by 1916, the French civilian population behind the lines suffered fewer deprivations. (The exception was, of course, in the occupied areas of the north-east; but even there life on the whole was more bearable than it was in Occupied France under the Nazis in the 1940s.) The worst scarcity was in coal since the German capture of the Lille area. For all the agricultural losses, food rationing never became a serious matter.
On his infrequent leaves, the permissionaire from the horrendous butchery at Verdun naturally gravitated towards Paris. Though a mere 150 miles away, it was indeed like entering another world. Sometimes the front-line poilu wondered whether the capital knew about the war at all and viewed its dazzling scenes with mixed feelings. By the time of Verdun, combatants on both sides equally had begun to sense a certain alienation for the “rear” and the civilian population. It was “them” and “us.” In Henri Barbusse’s great war novel, Le Feu, published already that year, 1916, one of the characters comments bitterly while on leave: “We are divided into two foreign countries. The front, over there, where there is too much misery, and the rear, here, where there is too much contentment.” In Remarque’s German classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, the same sentiment is echoed by his protagonist complaining while home on leave: “They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise.”6 After a spell in the line soldiers, whether French or German, felt as if they belonged to some exclusive, isolated monastic order whose grim rites were simply beyond the comprehension of the laymen behind the lines. With only a few sous pay in their pocket, pleasure—or even simply relief—would often be hard to find.
DESPITE HER TERRIBLE LOSSES and her suffering, France—like Germany—still displayed a remarkable solidarity in the pursuance of the war. From 1914 onwards this had been propped up by the staunch bulwark of the Union Sacrée. Its spirit was reminiscent of that which (temporarily) levelled the social barricades in Britain during the 1940 Blitz. For a nation of radicals and independents such as France, creation of the Union Sacrée, whereby men of all political hues submerged their feuds in the interests of national unity, had been one of the miracles of all time. There was that anti-militarist, socialist and crypto-anarchist, Anatole France, who attempted to enlist, aged seventy, and then resumed his seat among the conservatives of the Académie, which he had abandoned shortly after the Dreyfus affair; and there was that eater of clerics, Clemenceau, observed kissing an abbé on both cheeks.
Another source of great strength in the war effort were the women of France. To them the war had brought an emancipatory revolution. At the outbreak of war, almost to a woman they had rushed off to become nurses, fill the administrative gaps left by the men, work in the munitions factories. The soldiers grumbled on returning home to find their wives turned yellow by picric acid, but they had little redress. As the Frenchwomen who had not lost a husband, lover or brother became fewer and fewer, their initial excitement was replaced by a formidable dedication. Most of them had become marraines to one or more soldiers, according them benefits ranging merely from parcels of food to the highest a woman can offer a man. No other section of the French community was shoring up the will to war more substantially than the women; and perhaps symbolic of the whole spirit of 1916 was the divine Sarah Bernhardt, one leg now amputated, stumping the boards with a wooden leg. Here was France herself, mutilated but undaunted.
AS THE REVERSES AND CASUALTIES PROGRESSED, however, the distortions and corruption that war breeds were readily detectable. The embusqués, who had somehow dodged the war and the call-up, and the profiteers who had already amassed sizeable fortunes rapidly enriched the restaurateurs and the jewellers, who had never known business to be better. Even the humblest worker in a war plant was earning 100 sous a day, compared with the poilu’s 5 sous. As a result, inflation was gaining speed; by the end of 1916, the cost-of-living index had reached 135 ( July 1914 = 100). There was a vigorous black market. Agriculture had been disrupted by the number of peasants called to the colours, and eventually some had had to be returned to the fields; the great Renault motor works was closed down, all but for a small shop making stretchers (motor vehicles evidently being considered a luxury). But somehow the economy functioned under what was derisively known as the “Système D” (a derivation from the verb se débrouiller, meaning literally “to muddle through”).
JUNE 1916 had seen the climax at Verdun, with the Germans stopped within sight of the city; it also marked a turning point in the First World War. Fort Douaumont was finally being retaken in the bitter cold of December, marking the end of the ten-month-long battle. It was the only significant strategic defeat inflicted on the Germans since the “Miracle of the Marne”; but at an almost suicidal cost. Too many poilus from Verdun had spent their permissions in Paris to keep it quiet. A serious malaise afflicted “those in the know” about the state of morale in the army. But, nevertheless, here now was a brave new general, Nivelle, replacing the exhausted “Papa” Joffre, who had a new “formula,” heralding a much-talked-about new offensive.
Alas, Nivelle’s new formula led only to new disasters. Far too much talked about, it permitted Hindenburg to dig in and prepare for it. On 16 April 1917, the French infantry—exhilarated by all they had been promised—poured out of their trenches. By the following day, they had suffered something like 120,000 casualties. The Medical Services, seldom brilliant (in one hospital there were reported to be only four thermometers for 3500 beds), were overwhelmed. Nivelle persisted with his offensive—but he had lost the belief of the army. The kind of incidents that had occurred sporadically at Verdun multiplied. Macabre, sheep-like bleating was heard among regiments sent up to the line. Men on leave sang revolutionary songs imported from Russia. They beat up military police and uncoupled engines to prevent trains leaving for the front. Interceding officers—including at least one general—were set upon. On 3 May mutiny broke out. The 21st Division—which had gone through some of the worst fighting at Verdun the previous year— refused to go into battle. The ringleaders were summarily shot or consigned to Devil’s Island. But unit after unit followed the 21st, and over 20,000 men deserted. Regiments elected councils to speak for them, ominously like the Soviets that had already seized power in the Russian Army. One regiment attempted to reach the Schneider–Creusot arms plant, with the apparent intention of blowing it up. By June the mutinies had spread to half the French Army; at one point there was not a single reliable division standing between the Germans at Soissons and Paris. There were mass strikes in Toulouse and the Loire.
Astonishingly, the mutiny was not picked up by German Intelligence until order had been restored by the new chief, General Philippe Pétain, the “Hero of Verdun.” Even Lloyd George and General Haig were little better informed than Hindenburg. Almost to the end of the twentieth century, details of the French mutinies remained veiled, their secrets lying inside the Services Historiques de l’Armée, within the recesses of the sombre Château de Vincennes. Certainly many brave men were shot summarily, though from time to time accounts seeped out of how whole units were marched to quiet sectors of the front and then deliberately haché by their own artillery. Such was the fate of the wretched Russian Division in France, which news of revolution had reduced to a state of utter and contagious rebellion.
COUPLED WITH THESE DRACONIAN MEASURES, Pétain—nicknamed “le Médécin de l’Armée”—assured the men that he would never again permit their lives to be squandered in vain, instead: “We must wait for the Americans and the tanks.” And so it would be. But the French Army would never quite recover; indeed, it would not have done by 1940. As one veteran observed, “They [the leaders] have broken the heart of the French soldier” and later, prophetically, “What kind of a nation will they make of us tomorrow, these exhausted creatures, emptied of blood, emptied of thought, crushed by superhuman fatigue?” 7 Henceforth much of the fighting on the Western Front would devolve on Haig’s British Army, and the new fresh “doughboys” of Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force just beginning to arrive in France. But they would only be ready for the final battles.
Behind the lines throughout this grim period of 1917, there abounded rumours that had previously been submerged of profiteering, conspiracy and treason, espionage and defeatism. Political leaders like Caillaux were contemplating a compromise peace; more sinister were the activities of the traitors who earned millions of francs from German sources for their work of demoralisation, and the out-and-out defeatists, ranged around the Bonnet Rouge newspaper. Their leader, a former Minister of the Interior called Malvy, was sentenced to five years’ banishment, and the glamorous spy Mata Hari (possibly innocent, certainly insignificant) shot. The first great air-raids on Paris were carried out by heavy “Gotha” fourengined bombers. Once again, as in 1870 and in the London Blitz of 1940, this indiscriminate attack on the civil population proved counterproductive. Politically, however, the situation was dire. The miraculous Union Sacrée collapsed, as the Socialists withdrew their support.
There was one hope left: Clemenceau. As Poincaré pointed out in 1914, Clemenceau was “capable of upsetting everything! The day will perhaps come when I shall add: Now that everything seems to be lost, he alone is capable of saving everything.” The stormy petrel of French politics for over forty years, already a grown man and Mayor of Montmartre during the Siege and the Commune, leader of the Radicals, and now an old man of seventy-six, he was in himself a kind of one-man committee of public safety. From now on the war would be waged relentlessly, and ruthlessly. In the inimitable words of Winston Churchill: “The last desperate stroke had to be played. France had resolved to unbar the cage and let her tiger loose upon all foes, beyond the trenches or in her midst.” The Jacobin returned to the governance of France. At the front, when the soldiers spied Clemenceau’s old felt hat, the stubbornness of this old man inspired them—as Churchill was to do for Britain in 1940.
WITH THE ARRIVAL OF CLEMENCEAU, together with Pétain and—later—Foch redeemed, and now Pershing and his doughboys, everything began to change. It was as well for the Alliance that there was a Clemenceau ready to take up the fight, for 1918 was to bring the most dangerous months of the war since 1914. German forces liberated from the East by the post-revolutionary collapse of Russia enabled Ludendorff in March 1918 to launch a massive offensive aimed directly at Paris. Astutely, he struck on the hinge of the French and British Armies, tearing a great hole in the British front through which his troops poured to the very gates of Amiens, and—eventually—to Château-Thierry, 54 miles from Paris. Then, on 24 March 1918, explosions suddenly occurring in the middle of Paris, with no aircraft in the sky, were reckoned to be coming from a super-long-range gun, firing from inside the German lines. Nothing like this had ever been heard of before, or deemed possible outside the world of Jules Verne; once again, the genius of Herr Krupp had contributed a new novelty to civilisation.
Each shell carried only a small explosive charge, but—like the V2 rockets that struck terror into London from the end of 1944—what was so frightening about the “Paris Gun”65 was that its projectiles exploded without any warning, and quite indiscriminately. Clearly the Germans hoped that, coupled with the Ludendorff offensive, the continued bombardment would break the French will to resist. Most wickedly, it was aimed at the Louvre, but happily not a single shot hit this huge target. The greatest casualties it could exact came on Good Friday, 29 March, when a shell struck the church of Saint-Gervais during mass. Seventyfive were killed and ninety injured, though many died later of their injuries. Once again, as in August 1914, people began to flee out of Paris. In fact, Herr Krupp’s barrels wore out faster than Parisian nerves. One of the two monsters blew up, wiping out seventeen of its crew. It would not affect the course of the war, but would certainly harden the peace terms.
By July 1918 the offensive power of Ludendorff’s armies was spent. With a regenerated Foch declaring “tout le monde à la bataille” and supported by fresh American troops, the Allied counterstrokes hammered forward all along the line. On 8 August, Haig’s British Army inflicted what Ludendorff admitted was “the black day of the German Army.” By early autumn the German line had been rolled back, out of France, out of the territory they had held for the past four years—some of it, for nearly fifty years.
AT 11 A.M. ON 11 NOVEMBER 1918, all the guns ceased firing. A dense crowd congregated around the Chamber of Deputies in Paris where Clemenceau was expected to speak. Inside, as the cannon continued to fire outside, the seventy-seven-year-old “Tiger” with the white walrus moustache, architect of victory, rose trembling and declaimed: “Let us pay homage to our great dead, who have given us this victory!”8 Countless women dressed in mourning joined the crowds, which grew and grew as peasants poured in from the countryside, and soldiers returned from the front. There were warm displays of inter-Allied amity; but they would barely see out the signing of the peace treaty.
When the celebrants of Armistice Day in Paris paused to consider costs in the grey light of the following day, they counted 1.4 million Frenchmen killed in action, the largest proportion of any of the combatant nations; on top of that came the civilian dead and victims of the flu epidemic that took 40 million lives across the globe—together leading to a loss of 7 per cent of what France’s population would otherwise have totalled. Thus it was perhaps hardly surprising that the post–Armistice Day cry across the breadth of France was “Plus jamais ça!” “My work is finished,” observed an exhausted but triumphant Marshal Foch to Clemenceau, on Armistice Day; but “your work is beginning.” It was the understatement of the epoch.
FOR THE NEXT SIX MONTHS, as VIPs and delegates for the forthcoming peace conference began to swarm in, Paris once again became the centre of the world’s affairs. The Hôtel Crillon was found to be too small for the Americans’ 1300-strong delegation, so Maxim’s round the corner in the Rue Royale was annexed to it. The British delegation, which had numbered fourteen in 1815 had risen to 400. News of the German collapse had been greeted with headlines in Le Matin of “Revenge for Sedan, 1870” and “The Hour of Punishment,” and diplomats arriving for the peace conference were greeted by posters of “Let Germany Pay First,” with deputies proposing that the Germans be made to pay for the entire cost of the war.
The serious work of drafting the treaty began in January—and, pointedly, with a meeting of the “Ten” in the French Foreign Minister’s private office in the Quai d’Orsay; pointedly, because from beginning to end it was the French who would endeavour to direct and manipulate the negotiations. “I never wanted to hold the conference in his bloody capital,” Lloyd George complained later of his wartime ally, and— though in the gentler language of the American campus—Woodrow Wilson would come to share roughly the same opinion. Lloyd George and Wilson’s powerful adviser, Colonel House, would have preferred to stage the vital conference in a neutral city, like Geneva: “but the old man wept and protested so much that we gave way.” Anyway, where else? After all, it was France that had suffered most from the war, and had the greatest call for punishment of the enemy. And it was punishment that was the order of the day.
The talks dragged on from week to week, month to month; meanwhile, Parisian goodwill towards their former allies understandably evaporated. The new invaders were seen to commandeer scarce food and accommodation, and the best women. Young Harold Nicolson on the British Foreign Officer team, “gathered a vivid impression of the growing hatred of the French for the Americans. The latter have without doubt annoyed the Parisians.” 9 As delegates would spend their weekends off making tourist trips to the lunar landscapes of the Somme battlefields, a bitter new song, “Qui a gagné la guerre?” began to make the rounds.
THE DISCOURAGINGLY SWIFT TURNAROUND in Franco-American relations was not entirely surprising when one recalls how the most prominent figure of the moment was Thomas Woodrow Wilson. The French felt that this ascetic, unworldly professor from a stern Presbyterian background never really understood them. He did indeed seem curiously out of place. Only eight years after emerging from the obscurity of a New Jersey campus, Wilson had, as seen by his colleague, Herbert Hoover, “reached the zenith of intellectual and spiritual leadership of the whole world never hitherto known in history.”10 His capacity for inconsistency, and for turning on his friends and allies, had however been renowned long before he was picked to run for president; his capacity for suspicion was also unrivalled, but he could not bear plain speaking on the part of others. His remedy for the world’s problems was simple: “the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” A tendency to lecture was not well received by either Clemenceau or Lloyd George, who both had a view that their nations too had been involved in a war to make the world safe for democracy. “Talking to Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ,” complained Clemenceau; while Lloyd George thought of him as being like “a missionary to rescue the heathen Europeans, with his ‘little sermonettes.’ ” When it came to imposing the sweeping aphorisms of his “Fourteen Points,” Wilson the academic swiftly realised that it was rather easier to impart than to apply instruction. He was certainly no Talleyrand; nor was there any thought of inviting the Germans, as the Congress of Vienna had invited the defeated French in 1814–15, to attend the peace conference before the terms had been drawn up.
The inequalities that war had imposed upon the peacemakers were potently apparent. France had the biggest army in the world, but no money; the USA had the money, but no military force; Britain possessed only some of each. While Germany was quite intact, in France there lay the shattered skeletons of towns across the northern countryside and 1.4 million French dead. France’s public debt had increased from ff33.5 billion in 1913 to over ff219 billion in 1919, and she owed ff33 million abroad. Did her allies not understand? France needed to be more than repaid for her loss. She had to have lasting security, with frontiers in the ethnically German Rhineland, such as Louis le Grand and Napoleon had sought. In 1919, the French Army—still enduring terrible conditions—was rumoured to be once more on the verge of mutiny. Some British, so disciplined during the war, did in fact mutiny. In the East, the Soviet Russians were moving in on Poland, and the Germans—racked with the threat of civil war, Spartacist and Bolshevik revolution—were preparing for war again on their eastern marches.
By March on his return to the conference Lloyd George was sick, and tired, his shock of Welsh hair turned white. To Churchill, old Clemenceau seemed “grim, rugged, snow white.” Shortly after the talks had begun in February, he had narrowly missed an assassination attempt when a young man stepped out of a pissoire and emptied his pistol into Clemenceau’s car, hitting him near a lung, with the declaration: “I am a Frenchman and an anarchist.” Maynard Keynes viewed the principals and their negotiations unflatteringly:
Clemenceau, aesthetically the noblest; the President [Woodrow Wilson], morally the most admirable; Lloyd George, intellectually the subtlest. Out of their disparities and weaknesses the Treaty was born, child of the least worthy attributes of each of its parents, without nobility, without morality and without intellect . . .
By April none of the delegates meeting at the Quai d’Orsay were happy people. In France’s desperate pursuit of security at any price, Clemenceau—the man of 1871—had failed to gain for her a permanent frontier on the Rhine (instead he got a fifteen-year tenancy, which Adolf Hitler would promptly supersede), or annexation of the coal-rich Saar (though, throughout its entire history, the German-speaking Saar had only been French for eighteen years). Wilson told Clemenceau: “You base your claim on what took place 104 years ago. We cannot readjust Europe on the basis of conditions that existed in such a remote period.” Wilson, however, was thwarted in most of his lofty ideals; a hostile Congress at home would renege on them, then he succumbed to the illness that would eventually claim him. The Italians—troublesome throughout the peace conference—felt cheated of the Allied wartime promises, which had been offered out of all proportion to Italy’s modest military contribution, and opened the door to Mussolini. The British, fed up with arguing and with their allies, just wanted to get back across the Channel as quickly as possible.
FINALLY, AND AT THE LAST MINUTE, the peace treaty was ready. The scene shifted from the Quai d’Orsay to Versailles. Why Versailles? Clemenceau, with his bitter recollections as Mayor of Montmartre in 1871, claimed that—if the Germans were to appear in force in Paris— there could be riot and revolution as per the Commune. Also, all the administrative machinery of the Allied Supreme War Council had been out there since 1919. But of far greater significance was the pleasing historical congruence of making the enemy sign at the scene of his triumph, and France’s humiliation, forty-eight years earlier. On 28 April the German delegation set off from Berlin to receive the treaty that was to be imposed on them, headed by Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau from the Foreign Office. As they reached the battlefields of northern France, the French train driver—determined that the Germans should have the clearest view of the devastation the war had caused, slowed it down to 10 miles an hour. On arrival, a French colonel formally conducted them to the Hôtel des Reservoirs; by no accident selected because, in 1871, it was where the dejected French peace commission had resided while suing for peace with Bismarck. They found the building surrounded by barbed wire. Although there were French troops lounging in the courtyard, the Germans were made to carry their own baggage and seek their own rooms.
In the Trianon Palace Hotel, located on the edge of the park of Versailles, at three on the afternoon of 7 May, a hot afternoon and the first real day of summer, there was a shout by the huissiers announcing “Messieurs les délégués allemands!” Then the Germans received the Allied peace terms. As soon as they were seated, looking grimly isolated amid an assemblage of more than 200 dignitaries, Clemenceau as president of the peace conference began without ceremony. “Gentlemen, plenipotentiaries of the German Empire,” he declared, standing up:
This can be neither the time nor the place for superfluous words . . . The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of our account. You have asked us for peace. We are disposed to give it to you. The volume which the secretary general of the conference will shortly hand to you will tell you the conditions we have fixed . . .
I am compelled to add that this second Peace of Versailles has been too dearly bought by the peoples represented here for us not to be unanimously resolved to secure by every means in our power all the legitimate satisfactions which are our due.11
The Germans would be allowed just fifteen days in which to send “written observations” to the Allies; then they would be informed of the date upon which the finalised treaty would be signed.
Brockdorff-Rantzau, emaciated, ashen-faced and trembling, looked distinctly unwell and responded sitting down—possibly because he feared his legs might give way, though this apparent discourtesy to Clemenceau was taken by some (including Lloyd George) as proof that the Germans were as arrogant and unrepentant as ever. “We know the intensity of the hatred which meets us,” said Brockdorff-Rantzau frostily, and we have heard the victors’ passionate demand that as vanquished we shall be made to pay and as the guilty we shall be punished. The demand is made that we shall acknowledge that we alone are guilty of having caused the war. Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie.12
That night when they read the terms set out in the lengthy document, with its 440 separate articles and 75,000 words, the German delegates were rendered speechless. The reparations alone would ruin the country, while most of her coal mines, Germany’s principal economic asset, had been distributed among the Poles and the French. For the first time they began to speak of a Diktat; no German government could possibly accept it. After all, had they not signed an armistice rather than a capitulation?
Reactions among some of the Allied delegates echoed their sentiments. Wilson was recorded as commenting: “If I were a German, I think I should never sign it.” Young William C. Bullitt, who would return as US Ambassador to deal with the fallout of Versailles two decades later, resigned from the American delegation; in his note of resignation he declared forthrightly that he was “going to lie on the sands of the Riviera and watch the world go to hell.” Lloyd George recalled the prophetic fears he had expressed earlier in the conference:
You may strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her armaments to a mere police force and her navy to that of a fifth-rate power; all the same in the end if she feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 1919 she will find means of exacting retribution on her conquerors.13
But the die was cast; Germany had to sign. As Brockdorff-Rantzau and his dejected team left for Berlin, rocks were thrown at their cars by jeering members of the Ligue des Patriotes; some of the Germans cut with broken glass. Scheidemann’s government resigned; the German High Seas Fleet scuppered itself in Scapa Flow. Foch ordered remobilisation of the French Army, and a new war seemed likely to break out. Then the Germans, under their new Chancellor, Gustav Bauer, crumbled, as the Allies poised to march on Berlin.
On 28 June, a Saturday, the great hall in the palace was ready for the occasion it had been awaiting since Bismarck’s triumphant Prussians had desecrated it by daring to crown an enemy emperor there. The Gardes Meubles storerooms of Paris had been ransacked for Savonnerie carpets to restore the deserted rooms to their old imposing grandeur. Instead of Uhlans with spiked helmets, this time the avenue up to the château was lined with French cavalry—the pennants of their lances fluttering red and white in the sun. Never, “since the Grand Siècle,” thought Harold Nicolson, “has Versailles been more ostentatious or more embossed.” 14 It made him feel “civilian and grubby”—and extremely unhappy. (What the German delegates felt can best be imagined.) In the centre of the Galerie des Glaces, a horse-shoe table had been set up for the plenipotentiaries; in front of it, “like a guillotine,” a small table for the signatures. Clemenceau, still presiding, seated himself beneath the scroll of the heavy ceiling which reads: “Le Roi Gouverne Par Lui-même.” The heat was oppressive. Out of the silence, with a “harshly penetrating” voice, Clemenceau called out: “Faites entrer les Allemands!”
Once more the huge mirrors had Germans reflected in them; this time, in place of the triumphant, uniformed princes and grandees of Prussia, they were two very ordinary little men in frock-coats, Dr. Müller and Dr. Bell, “isolated and pitiful.” Both deathly pale, to the watchful Nicolson they did not appear as representatives of a brutal militarism. The one is thin and pink eye-lidded: the second fiddle in a Brunswick orchestra. The other is moon-faced and suffering: a privat dozent [unpaid junior university lecturer]. It is all most painful...15
In front of 200 pairs of anxious eyes, the Germans signed first of all. With this done, the other plenipotentiaries lined up to append their signatures. Amid a hum of relaxed conversation, Dr. Müller and Dr. Bell walked to a corner of the great gallery, to sit in comfortable obscurity between Japan and Uruguay. A Bolivian delegate came over and asked for their autographs. From outside there was a crash of guns, announcing to Paris that the “Second Treaty of Versailles”—as Clemenceau dubbed it—had been signed. “La séance est levée,” rasped Clemenceau—not a word more or less.
“Well, little girl, it is finished, and, as no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have made a just peace; but it is all in the laps of the gods,” commented Woodrow Wilson to his wife.16 Whatever pity might have been felt for the two German delegates that day, historians would reflect that—had the Kaiser and Ludendorff won—the punishment for Britain and France would clearly have been no less harsh; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed on a prostrate Russia demonstrated that. To tidy, and unforgetting, French minds, Versailles 1919 may have represented a full circle from 1871; but it would soon prove to be only a half-circle. In a prophecy of deadly accuracy, Foch declared: “This is not peace, but a truce for twenty years.” “The next time,” he warned, with deadly accuracy, “the Germans will make no mistake. They will break through into northern France and seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England.”
The circle would be completed twenty-one summers later, with Hitler’s little jig performed outside the wagon-lits coach at Compiègne, the same where Foch signed the armistice of 1918; his feet dancing on the Versailles Diktat. Surely even arrogant old Louis, looking down from the ceilings of the palace he built, with its dedicatory inscription of “À Toutes les Gloires de la France,” would have recognised what misery his successors and their discordant, increasingly reluctant allies were laying in store for themselves that June day of 1919? And, if only Louis-Napoleon had not been quite so proudly foolish in 1870 . . . wrote Winston Churchill in The World Crisis: “Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.” France had selected the stage for the final act in the tragedy entitled Revenge with an unsurpassable sense of theatre. As Churchill also remarked at that time, “the hatred of France for Germany was something more than human.” It was hardly a promising basis for the peace that was to end all wars.