It would take too long to tabulate the various attempts to extort money from Deputies for the national defence. But though the attenuated credits cannot be laid to the charge of the General Staff, it is true that experts were divided on the use that could be made of the heavy siege-pieces which the Germans thrust into battle. Such cumbersome weapons would prove white elephants said some in authority, and protested that they could not "hold" the infantry. However that may be, Joffre was faced with the difficulty that the Germans, instead of entering France by the eastern gate, where forts and "cover" combined to make the task supremely difficult, chose the easier road by Belgium and through the Luxembourg. Yet it was obviously impossible to tell by which route the enemy would enter. Joffre was forced to watch them all, to secure contact at each point, to feel the enemy, and then retreat towards his reserves. This, indeed, was the plan more or less successfully carried out. But the fact that Belgium was the main path of the invasion caused a rapid transposition of forces at the last moment, for the bulk of the army had to swing from the east to the north, and the process took time. Here, again, the Germans were at an advantage, for they had systematically built railways to the edge of the Luxembourg and in Alsace-Lorraine, so that their mobilisation was startlingly rapid.
Joffre was certainly unprepared for the speed with which the enemy brought into play his reserves. This was due to the cunning use which he made of his strategic railways, but also to a perfidious advance in the date of mobilisation. The army was already on a war footing when France had begun her work of assembling troops. And so Joffre was handicapped by many things, by lack of rapid railway transit, of heavy cannon and of the minute preparation and prevision which extended to the years preceding his appointment. Germany had prepared for war whilst France was thinking of peace and dreaming of progress in art and letters and general culture, anticipating a universal brotherhood, pathetically chimerical in the face of the armaments across the Rhine. Politics were greatly responsible for the inferiority of France in the opening weeks of the war. The troops assembled on the Franco-Belgian frontier had not at once the value of the invading force. They were wanting in numbers, in the perfection of their equipment and in the intensity of their training. Though Joffre had justly condemned incompetence in high places, it is also true that France was overweighted by the masses of a highly trained enemy which placed all its reliance upon the strength and rapidity of the first blow.
The Socialist doctrine would have substituted popular élan and the fierce revolutionary spirit for what it held to be the sterile stupidity of a long and intensive military preparation. And again, the Socialist movement in Germany proved a snare and delusion to many of the faith in France. Was it possible that war could come when millions of the masses in each nation were vowed to peace? The nation was deceived—perhaps it wanted to be deceived. In any case, it was much more interesting to concentrate upon human progress, to let the mind dwell upon the delightful prospect of the millennium, when there will be no more war, and when an era of peace and tranquillity and of mutual co-operation will have been ushered in, than to linger upon a picture of militarism bound up with cannon and its human food.
The French General Staff apparently thought that the German attack would come from the two frontiers and would seek to envelop the French Army in its tentacles, and thus conclude with one swift, tremendous blow a campaign more disastrous than that of 1870. It seems clear, also, that M. Barthou's success in carrying the Three-Years Law was an important factor in the resolution of Germany to invade France by Belgium rather than by the East. The new legislation had given great strength to the "cover," and thus there was little chance of passing that way. Probably had Germany attacked France by the East, England would never have been brought in and her rôle would have been confined to protecting the French coasts by her fleet. Thus, M. Barthou might properly contend that the mere fact that the Three-Years Law was voted determined the action of Germany and enlisted the support of England.
We have shown that Joffre by his system of making war and his qualities of heart and head is the ideal democratic chief. Obviously, there is little of the Napoleonic temper in his strategy, which is made up of prudent vigour and discernment rather than of brilliancy or spontaneity. Some urge that Joffre should have made his stand upon the Aisne rather than upon the Marne, since the latter line was better defended by Nature, but his reserves were not sufficiently accessible. In any case, conditions have altered since Napoleon's day, and even the Corsican's great faculty of improvisation scarcely would have found scope in twentieth-century conditions. None the less, Joffre's dispositions at the battle of the Marne, when he drew the enemy to his own battle-ground and supported his line at each end with the forts of Paris and of the East were strictly in the style of the Master. And by his very victory he proved the martial qualities of the French, since with the aid of the English they administered a sharp repulse to an enemy flushed with success and organised and equipped in a manner superior to the Home forces. Until the story is disproved, I shall continue to think that the battle of the Marne would have been definitive and the enemy driven from the soil of France had Joffre possessed an adequate supply of munitions.
We have taken the Generalissimo to the edge of the great battle: let us now give a few particulars of his chief collaborator.
CHAPTER VII
THE SECOND IN COMMAND
If ever Nancy is minded to raise a statue in its beautiful Place Stanislas to a battle-hero it will be surely to Noel-Marie Edouard Curières de Castelnau, for to him is due the existence of the city. During three tremendous weeks its fate hung in the balance—weeks in which Joffre was developing the final phases of his retreat and then delivering battle on the Marne. With flank and rear defended from the immense army that de Castelnau and Dubail prevented from passing the gap of Nancy, the master strategist was enabled to win. Nancy lies in the plain; it can be never defended, people said, and, therefore, it was to be left an open town. Did not the Treaty of Frankfort forbid the placing of cannon which would command German soil? Be that as it may, the doubters had forgotten le Grand Couronné, a series of wooded heights and steep plateaux, which marked the junction of Meurthe with Moselle and interposed a rugged barrier between the old Lorraine capital and the frontier. Here, with a forethought unusual in a country where so little had been prepared, trenches had been dug; and when de Castelnau was forced to retreat from the annexed province before an impassable barrier of artillery, he raised earthworks, installed barbed wire entanglements and brought heavy guns from Toul. It was the turn of the Germans to be surprised. With three attenuated army corps and four or five divisions of reserve, de Castelnau kept at bay an immense force of the enemy which battered savagely at the gates.
How gaily the army marched out to the reconquest of annexed Lorraine and to occupy the Germans whilst the English landed in Belgium. It was a force thoroughly representative of France, for it was recruited from all parts. There were reservists from Bordeaux, from Marseilles, from Montpellier and from the West, but the heart of the crusade was the famous 20th Army Corps from Nancy—Lorrainers to a man—who had inherited the memory of the année terrible. With a gesture that expressed eloquently their spirit, they knocked over the frontier posts as they sang the Marseillaise with the strenuous accent of the soldier engaging in a holy war. Great was their first enthusiasm, but great, also, their disappointment, for none met them in the streets; no hand flung flowers to them; no voice cried in gladness: "Vive l'Armée! Vive la France!" The silence was sinister, scarcely broken by the dull reverberation of distant cannon bombarding Pont-à-Mousson. It took them a little time to realise that the masters of the soil, fearing a demonstration, had threatened the inhabitants with its consequences. The silence and the gloom were fully explained.