Dawbarn Joffre and His Army

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-7364-1597-3
Verlag: anboco
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 392 Seiten

This book is intended as a presentation card to the French army. It is a plain story for plain people, and there has been a deliberate avoidance of any technicalities. In it you will find references to the leading figures in the fighting organisation of France-Joffre and his most brilliant collaborators; and I have tried to render just homage to the 'poilu,' who is the French common soldier. Perhaps the most touching thought about that man, whose deeds of glory and pure heroism will inspire the poets for many a long year, is that he represents not the soldier of profession, but the soldier drawn from the most peaceful occupations. Practically the first great encounter of the French with the Germans in the battle of Charleroi, and the subsequent retreat, accounted for a large part of the regular army, and more or less placed hors de combat the greater number of its officers. That professional force was replaced by the Reserve and later supplemented by the youngest classes-men culled from the very heart of pacific France. They came to the trenches with all their civilian instincts-it was a peasant and bourgeois army-but in an amazingly short space of time they were vying with the old soldier in the brilliance of their exploits, in their ability to endure supreme hardship with the greatest gallantry, and without complaint: an extraordinary story of adaptability. And it came to pass in the process of time that there was the army at the front and the army in the rear: the army of the field and the army of the munition factory, recruited from different elements, for the men in the trenches were the peasants, the sons of agricultural France; and the army of the factories-the munition workers-was composed of the artisan and typical town dweller.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dawbarn, Charles

Leseproben

THE AWAKENING

"Rather than submit to the slavery of the Germans, the whole French nation would perish." These words of General de Castelnau are no idle boast—the coloured eloquence of a General who wishes to hearten his troops: they are a simple statement of fact. France has left behind eloquence and embroidered phrases: her commerce, her agriculture, her arts are gone. She has only one business, that of fighting: her men are all mobilised. And behind them stand the old, the young, the women and children, waiting their turn, should that turn come. And if France ever lies under the German heel, at least of the French people there will be none left to weep. That is the spirit animating the army of Joffre, that army whose exploits must have impressed even the most unimpressionable by their continued splendour. Never was finer heroism displayed than theirs. And they recognised from the very first the desperate character of the enterprise. It was not a war of chivalry. There has been no incident as at Fontenoy when Lord Hay, addressing the French guards, invited them to fire first. The Germans carried no sentiment of any kind into the battlefield, where their sole endeavour was to overcome the adversary, and any means were considered legitimate. To them the doubtful honour of the most diabolical inventions for destroying life. This is not the atmosphere—the atmosphere of asphyxiating gas—where chivalry thrives, and the French character, legends, and traditions of fighting, are utterly opposed to such scientific barbarities. "These civilised savages inspire me with more horror than cannibals," said Flaubert. But far from being overcome and dismayed by German barbarism, the French showed an instant spirit of adaptation; the hideous conceptions of the Hun brain were hurled back to them across the trenches. And horror begets horror. Officers, from the most accomplished generals down to the subalterns, learned with astounding speed the new art of war—this terrible, unscrupulous, brutal combat which, after fearful carnage in the open, as at Verdun, constantly ran itself to earth, settling down into trench war of the most monstrous description.

Protracted trench warfare, it has been said a thousand times, is quite contrary to the French disposition, which is all dash and go and impulse. But to-day we shall have to revise our views, no doubt, and find that the French have mixed with their audacity, with their natural quickness of thought and action and their high receptivity, some of that resistance and tenacity which are characteristically British. Confirmed Anglophiles in France attribute this phenomenon to the moral influence of ourselves—a flattering and satisfying doctrine to our own self-esteem. But the appearance of this "new" virtue extended to all parts of the population, and was so universal that we cannot credit this grand attribute of the French in the hour of their great adversity to anything but their own innate qualities. It was exhibited by mayors of communes, even the most remote, who have been exposed to the brutalities of the invaders; by the clergy to a conspicuous degree—nothing was more touching and remarkable than their absolute devotion in the most nerve-racking conditions. It was shown, indeed, by the whole of the civil population, young and old, and especially by women. How splendid they were! They did their work with extreme quietude, with a positive genius for adaptability, and no illustrated paper published photographs of their uniforms—for they had none. On the first day of the mobilisation the French women turned into the fields to gather the harvest the men had left on the ground. They had no time to choose a suitable costume; no need of exhortations from the Board of Agriculture. They were left to do the work, and they did it without fuss and without parade. Such examples of determination, tenacity, sheer self-sacrifice, courage and abnegation existed in all directions, diffusing a golden light over the country, just as the coloured windows at the Invalides bathe the tomb of Napoleon in a splendid effulgence.

In the army itself the adaptability of its leaders is a thousand times exemplified by the manner in which erudite soldiers who have taught tactics and strategy in the War School, along certain lines, suddenly confronted with the problems of actual war, have seen that they were quite other than those laid down in the text-books, and thereafter have speedily adapted themselves to the new conditions. Some failed, and there arose the rumour of many enforced retirements from active command. But the inference to be drawn from this was not always correctly stated. The generals in most cases were not incompetent; they correctly applied the old war rules to the situations as they arose; but they were not sufficiently supple; they did not adapt themselves to the new conditions. The officers who proved the most successful were, for the most part, the colonels and majors, who in a few months obtained important commands.

The classic instance of this is General Pétain, who, when the war broke out, was a colonel, and rose with breathless rapidity to take supreme command of the armies at Verdun during that terrific fight which occupied many weeks of the Spring of 1916. Romantic as such a rise may seem to be, it is as well to remember that the new commander was eminently qualified by reason of his long preparation to occupy such a position. He possesses one of the finest brains in the army—which in France for long has been an intellectual profession—and had so trained it that he was able at once to take advantage of the new conditions of warfare which have so materially changed since the area of war was charted for the guidance of commanders.

When the war broke out, France was not ready. We in England have been often accused of our lack of foresight; but the fact that France, living under the shadow of war, at least since the Agadir incident, was unprepared seems to have been incredible folly. How is it to be explained? The explanation is politics, and the pleasant, but alas! entirely false, atmosphere created by the dreams of pacifists. Whilst Germany planned war and prepared for it in the most cold-blooded manner, France was dreaming of peace and behaving as if war were a thing of the past. All her preoccupations were pacific; to her purblind politicians, the real danger was either a struggle between Capital and Labour—and there were not wanting signs that this was probable—or else a largely imaginary conflict between the dispossessed Church and the State. And, again, there was a large party in the nation led by the persuasive eloquence of Jaurès which urged that universal peace was a practical reality. France herself did not want to fight, England showed no bellicosity; Germany, it was true, through her governing classes, displayed a disquieting tendency to bully, but the heart of the people—was not that pacific? Had not Socialism, and the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, taken firm root? The French Socialists were convinced that it had. And so they argued war was a practical impossibility; for, certainly, this great mass of German opinion, penetrated with Socialism and with the ultra-pacific doctrines which go with it, would never permit the nation to be drawn into war for the benefit of the fire-eaters and directors of the great war machine. The wish was father to the thought, and these misguided but well-meaning people were always seeing across the Vosges evidence of the same beneficent principles that manifested themselves at home. The French Socialists were, indeed, to a great extent anti-militarist: did it not take two to make a quarrel? Was it likely that they would be wantonly attacked when they had not the least intention of attacking anybody? Very naturally, I think, they argued in that strain—and the great fault was that the directors of opinion in France, as in England, made no effort to explore the dark waters of political probability. It was pleasant to walk ruminatingly along the banks and to dream that the good time would always continue. The bomb-shell of the invasion brought the awakening. In a certain sense English politicians were more to blame than the French, chiefly because no one of them with their hard practical Anglo-Saxon sense really believed in universal brotherhood—there was no Jaurès to capture the public imagination by the witchery of words. England realised clearly enough that war between France and Germany was, sooner or later, inevitable, and the high failure of these self-same politicians was that they did not bring home to the public conscience the no less inevitable intervention by England. "But we are not scaremongers! There was too much talk already about the sword and keeping one's powder dry," say the apologists. But it is precisely in a pacific interest that the so-called leaders of the nation ought to have spoken. Mathematics is the base of war—and of its prevention; and in this case the sum was easy: merely two and two make four. If England had displayed the precaution that she adopts in other affairs—the caution of the typical citizen safe-guarding his own personal interests—then Germany would have thought a long while before crossing the frontier and would still have been thinking about it. Knowing what we do of the Teuton temperament, revealed more particularly in the report of the camp at Wittenberg, we are convinced that Germany would have hesitated long had she not had the quasi conviction of an easy victory. Everything points to that: the rapid defeat of France, and then a swift turning upon Russia, whose mobilisation is proverbially slow and whose armament was known to be ludicrously inadequate. Undoubtedly a little plain speaking as well as definite and resolute...