Joffre and His Army

JOFFRE AND HIS ARMY
CHARLES DAWBARN
AUTHOR OF FRANCE AT BAY, ETC.
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED 49 RUPERT STREET LONDON, W.
Published 1916
IN MEMORY OF GENERAL GALLIÉNI TO WHOM THIS BOOK WAS DEDICATED (BY PERMISSION)
FOREWORD
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. And it is as well to remember, when the question of the future of France, after the war, arises, that the peasant supported to a great extent the physical sufferings of the war, the danger of death and mutilation, the exposure in the trenches, the cold and damp, whilst the townsman was harnessed to the intensive labour of producing shot and shell for infantry and guns. I do not insinuate that the townsman shirked the more bitter task. Each time a demand was made upon him, involving sacrifice of life, he also was ready to rise to any height of abnegation. And in the more mechanical branches of the war, such, for instance, as artillery and aviation, it was often a townsman who was the hero, and who gained, by some glowing deed, the precious symbol of the war cross and even, perhaps, the Legion of Honour. A pure Parisian was Guynemer, the sergeant pilot, who, on a monoplane where he was pilot and combatant, bore down six German machines in as many months, and won thus his stripes as sergeant, the military medal—the highest military award in France—the Legion of Honour and the War Cross with seven palms; and all this at the age of twenty-one. Indeed, in every enterprise that demanded skill and daring the townsman was to the fore. But it is not possible to differentiate in the heroism displayed by the French. The historian will never point to the bravery of one class and the timidity of another, for there has been bravery everywhere—bravery and heroism of the most sublime sort poured out with lavish hand to the eternal glory of France.