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Except for men under twenty-six who were merged with the active units, the reserves were formed into divisions of their own, intended for use as occupation troops and for other rear duty. Schlieffen changed all that. He added some twenty reserve divisions (the number varied according to the year of the plan) to the line of march of the fifty or more active divisions. With this increase in numbers his cherished envelopment became possible.
After retiring in 1906 he spent his last years still writing about Cannae, improving his plan, composing memoranda to guide his successors, and died at eighty in 1913, muttering at the end: “It must come to a fight. Only make the right wing strong.”
Schlieffen’s plan was maintained and Moltke consoled himself with the thought, as he said in 1913, that “We must put aside all commonplaces as to the responsibility of the aggressor.… Success alone justifies war.”
Every day’s schedule of march was fixed in advance. The Belgians were not expected to fight, but if they did the power of the German assault was expected to persuade them quickly to surrender.
The plan of campaign was as rigid and complete as the blueprint for a battleship. Heeding Clausewitz’s warning that military plans which leave no room for the unexpected can lead to disaster, the Germans with infinite care had attempted to provide for every contingency.
every precaution had been taken except one—flexibility. While the plan for maximum effort against France hardened, Moltke’s fears of Russia gradually lessened as his General Staff evolved a credo, based on a careful count of Russian railway mileage, that Russia would not be “ready” for war until 1916.
In 1914 two events sharpened Germany’s readiness to a fine point. In April, England had begun naval talks with the Russians, and in June, Germany herself had completed the widening of the Kiel Canal, permitting her new dreadnoughts direct access from the North Sea to the Baltic.
Situated ten miles from the Belgian border and forty miles inland from the Channel, Lille lay close to the path that an invading army would take if it came by way of Flanders. In answer to General Lebas’ plea for its defense, General de Castelnau spread out a map and measured with a ruler the distance from the German border to Lille by way of Belgium. The normal density of troops required for a vigorous offensive, he reminded his caller, was five or six to a meter. If the Germans extended themselves as far west as Lille, De Castelnau pointed out, they would be stretched out two to a meter.
French strategy did not ignore the threat of envelopment by a German right wing. On the contrary, the French General Staff believed that the stronger the Germans made their right wing, the correspondingly weaker they would leave their center and left where the French Army planned to break through.
While the Germans were taking the long way around to fall upon the French flank, the French planned a two-pronged offensive that would smash through the German center and left on either side of the German fortified area at Metz and by victory there, sever the German right wing from its base, rendering it harmless.
Under the peace terms dictated by Germany at Versailles in 1871, France had suffered amputation, indemnity, and occupation. Even a triumphal march by the German Army down the Champs-Elysées was among the terms imposed. It took place along a silent, black-draped avenue empty of onlookers.
The annexation, though opposed by Bismarck, who said it would be the Achilles’ heel of the new German Empire, was required by the elder Moltke and his Staff. They insisted, and convinced the Emperor, that the border provinces with Metz, Strasbourg, and the crest of the Vosges must be sliced off in order to put France geographically forever on the defensive.
They added a crushing indemnity of five billion francs intended to hobble France for a generation, and lodged an army of occupation until it should be paid. With one enormous effort the French raised and paid off the sum within three years, and their recovery began.
Notice the Germans complained when the French did it back to them
“N’en parlez jamais; pensez-y toujours” (Never speak of it; think of it always) had counseled Gambetta. For more than forty years the thought of “Again” was the single most fundamental factor of French policy.
France walled herself in behind a system of entrenched camps connected by forts. Two fortified lines, Belfort-Epinal and Toul-Verdun, guarded the eastern frontier, and one, Maubeuge-Valenciennes-Lille, guarded the western half of the Belgian frontier; the gaps between were intended to canalize the invasion forces.
Through returning prosperity and growing empire, through the perennial civil quarrels—royalism, Boulangism, clericalism, strikes, and the culminating, devastating Dreyfus Affair—the sacred anger still glowed especially in the army.
A captain of infantry confessed in 1912 that he used to lead the men of his company in secret patrols of two or three through the dark pines to the mountaintops where they could gaze down on Colmar. “On our return from those clandestine expeditions our columns reformed choked and dumb with emotion.”
Bismarck advised giving the inhabitants as much autonomy as possible and encouraging their particularism, for, he said, the more Alsatian they felt, the less they would feel French. His successors did not see the necessity.
German rule exploded in the Zabern Affair in 1913 which began, after an exchange of insults between townspeople and garrison, when a German officer struck a crippled shoemaker with his saber. It ended in the complete and public exposure of German policy in the Reichsland, in a surge of anti-German feeling in world opinion, and in the simultaneous triumph of militarism in Berlin where the officer of Zabern became a hero, congratulated by the Crown Prince.
France was not crushed; the French Empire was actually expanding in North Africa and Indo-China; the world of art and beauty and style still worshiped at the feet of Paris. Germans were still gnawed by envy of the country they had conquered.
At the same time they considered France decadent in culture and enfeebled by democracy. “It is impossible for a country that has had forty-two war ministers in forty-three years to fight effectively,” announced Professor Hans Delbrück, Germany’s leading historian.
The “idea with a sword” fulfilled the need. Expressed by Bergson it was called élan vital, the all-conquering will. Belief in its power convinced France that the human spirit need not, after all, bow to the predestined forces of evolution which Schopenhauer and Hegel had declared to be irresistible.
Belief in the fervor of France, in the furor Gallicae, revived France’s faith in herself in the generation after 1870. It was that fervor, unfurling her banners, sounding her bugles, arming her soldiers, that would lead France to victory if the day of “Again” should come.
the attention paid to the Belgian frontier gradually gave way in favor of a progressive shift of gravity eastward toward the point where a French offensive could be launched to break through to the Rhine.
The more the thinking of the French General Staff approached the offensive, the greater the forces it concentrated at the attacking point and the fewer it left to defend the Belgian frontier.
Foch’s mind, like a heart, contained two valves: one pumped spirit into strategy; the other circulated common sense.
In practice this was to become the famous order at the Marne to attack when the situation called for retreat. His officers of those days remember him bellowing, “Attack! Attack!” with furious, sweeping gestures while he dashed about in short rushes as if charged by an electric battery.
Though a profound student of Clausewitz, Foch did not, like Clausewitz’s German successors, believe in a foolproof schedule of battle worked out in advance. Rather he taught the necessity of perpetual adaptability and improvisation to fit circumstances.
the idea that morale alone could conquer, Foch warned, was an “infantile notion.” From his flights of metaphysics he would descend at once, in his lectures and his prewar books Les Principes de la Guerre and La Conduite de la Guerre, to the earth of tactics, the placing of advance guards, the necessity of sureté, or protection, the elements of firepower, the need for obedience and discipline.
Eloquent as he was on tactics, it was Foch’s mystique of will that captured the minds of his followers.
“This officer teaches metaphysics so abstruse as to make idiots of his pupils.” Although Clemenceau appointed Foch in spite of it, there was, in one sense, truth in the report. Foch’s principles, not because they were too abstruse but because they were too attractive, laid a trap for France.
Colonel Grandmaison grasped only the head and not the feet of Foch’s principles. Expounding their élan without their sureté, he expressed a military philosophy that electrified his audience. He waved before their dazzled eyes an “idea with a sword” which showed them how France could win.
“All command decisions must be inspired by the will to seize and retain the initiative.” The defensive is forgotten, abandoned, discarded; its only possible justification is an occasional “economizing of forces at certain points with a view to adding them to the attack.”
Within a few months of Grandmaison’s lectures, the President of the Republic, M. Fallières, announced: “The offensive alone is suited to the temperament of French soldiers.… We are determined to march straight against the enemy without hesitation.”
The new Field Regulations, enacted by the government in October, 1913, as the fundamental document for the training and conduct of the French Army, opened with a flourish of trumpets: “The French Army, returning to its traditions, henceforth admits no law but the offensive.” Eight commandments followed, ringing with the clash of “decisive battle,” “offensive without hesitation,” “fierceness and tenacity,” “breaking the will of the adversary,” “ruthless and tireless pursuit.”
Nowhere in the eight commandments was there mention of matériel or firepower or what Foch called sureté. The teaching of the Regulations became epitomized in the favorite word of the French officer corps, le cran, nerve, or, less politely, guts.
Over the years, while French military philosophy had changed, French geography had not. The geographical facts of her frontiers remained what Germany had made them in 1870.
While French history and development after the turn of the century fixed her mind upon the offensive, her geography still required a strategy of the defensive.
As Vice President of the Council, a post which carried with it the position of Commander in Chief in the event of war, General Michel was then the ranking officer in the army. In a report that precisely reflected Schlieffen’s thinking, he submitted his estimate of the probable German line of attack and his proposals for countering it. Because of the natural escarpments and French fortifications along the common border with Germany, he argued the Germans could not hope to win a prompt decisive battle in Lorraine. Nor would the passage through Luxembourg and the near corner of Belgium east of
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Not only was General Michel’s plan defensive in character; it also depended upon a proposal that was anathema to his fellow officers. To match the numbers he believed the Germans would send through Belgium, General Michel proposed to double French front-line effectives by attaching a regiment of reserves to every active regiment.
Men who had finished their compulsory training under universal service and were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-four were classed as reserves. Upon mobilization the youngest classes filled out the regular army units to war strength; the others were formed into reserve regiments, brigades, and divisions according to their local geographical districts.
The regular army’s contempt for the reserves, in which it was joined by the parties of the right, was augmented by dislike of the principle of the “nation in arms.”
The left parties, on the other hand, with memories of General Boulanger on horseback, associated the army with coups d’état and believed in the principle of a “nation in arms” as the only safeguard of the Republic. They maintained that a few months’ training would fit any citizen for war, and violently opposed the increase of military service to three years.
To perform the irresistible onslaught of the attaque brusquée, symbolized by the bayonet charge, the essential quality was élan, and élan could not be expected of men settled in civilian life with family responsibilities. Reserves mixed with active troops would create “armies of decadence,” incapable of the will to conquer.
The Kaiser was widely credited with the edict “No fathers of families at the front.” Among the French General Staff it was an article of faith that the Germans would not mix reserve units with active units, and this led to the belief that the Germans would not have enough men in the front line to do two things at once: send a strong right wing in a wide sweep through Belgium west of the Meuse and keep sufficient forces at their center and left to stop a French breakthrough to the Rhine.
Messimy, an exuberant, energetic, almost violent man with a thick neck, round head, bright peasant’s eyes behind spectacles, and a loud voice, was a former career officer. In 1899 as a thirty-year-old captain of Chasseurs, he had resigned from the army in protest against its refusal to reopen the Dreyfus case.
Unable to put loyalty to the army above justice, Messimy determined upon a political career with the declared goal of “reconciling the army with the nation.” He swept into the War Ministry with a passion for improvement.
He had been named War Minister on June 30, 1911, after a succession of four ministers in four months and the next day was met by the spring of the German gunboat Panther on Agadir precipitating the second Moroccan crisis. Expecting mobilization at any moment, Messimy discovered the generalissimo-designate, General Michel, to be “hesitant, indecisive and crushed by the weight of the duty that might at any moment devolve upon him.”
A trick of fate arranged that Messimy should be a forceful character and Michel should not. To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions, and Michel duly paid for his clairvoyance. Relieved of his command he was appointed Military Governor of Paris, where in a crucial hour in the coming test he was indeed to prove “hesitant and indecisive.”
Messimy, having fervently stamped out Michel’s heresy of the defensive, did his best, as War Minister, to equip the army to fight a successful offensive but was in his turn frustrated in his most-cherished prospect—the need to reform the French uniform.
