As a general rule, mechanical drill is irksome to the Latin mind; it fetters his individuality. The idea of turning perpetually in a barrack square to attain perfection in movements in mass is by no means to his liking. He has never been attracted to it, nor to the cult of buttons and straps and military tailoring. He cares little for such things. On the march, he considers only the question of covering the ground in the quickest manner with the least expenditure of force. He is largely indifferent to his appearance. Perhaps his artistic instinct tells him that sweat-covered, with the dust of the road upon him, he is vastly more picturesque, more like the real, traditional "poilu," than immaculate in a new uniform of celestial blue. He is proud of the general's praise of his fitness and stamina after his march of fifty kilometres with a heavy pack on his back; he would consider it intolerable if he were reproached for some slackness in his dress, for buttons that had been displaced, for a belt that had slipped. These things are of no consequence, he says, impatiently. He does not understand that attention to minutiæ which is the bee in the bonnet of the old-style disciplinarian. And yet tradition counts in this nation of soldiers in a manner surprising to those who associate indifference with an outward air of insouciance. It is as if each man were a Fregoli capable of a dozen rôles. Certainly, at the end of a long march he will pull himself together with a brave air if he has to pass before the eyes of foreign officers or through a village street with the inhabitants lined up to receive him. There is pride at the bottom of his character as readily aroused as those instinctive martial qualities which he inherits from the great-grandfather of the Napoleonic Wars.
CHAPTER X
GALLIÉNI AND HIS POPULARITY
General Galliéni[1] came to his task of defending Paris with a reputation gained in Madagascar. Nine years of successful government had transformed the island, torn with conflict, into a peaceful possession. Already credited with great organising powers, he was suspected of being a good strategist, and he was soon to prove it. His very appearance, energetic, thin, with large, osseous face looking like an eagle in spite of the pince-nez, gave Paris a wonderful impression of youth and energy. He was a man who would make things happen, conjectured the citizens—and, certainly, he looked like it. His stride was masterly, and his orderly officers grew thin in his service; there was a story of a plump private secretary who visibly dwindled in an effort to keep pace with the "patron's" energetic gait.
[1] General Galliéni died May 28, 1916, while this book was in the press.
Paris had never faltered in its attitude of pure valour even when news lacked and rumour stalked, gaunt-eyed, and unfettered by the least fact, along the Boulevards. Galliéni's appointment to the governorship of the city put fire into hesitating pulses and new courage into hearts. To see him crossing the street in his uniform of cerulean blue, that attractive colour of the French Army, was to receive a lesson in youth and virility. He had the look of the fighter grateful to Parisians, who, recalling their past, did not like the notion of being handed over tamely to the enemy as an "open" city. An open city, forsooth! What ignominy for the capital of all the talents! When the Governor was formally invested on August 26, 1914, the muscles of his administrés grew tense with resolution. Then there would be resistance, resistance to the point of street fighting. Inch by inch the town would be disputed. The Eiffel Tower would be blown up, so that the enemy could not use its apparatus and antennæ to transmit or receive messages; bridges would be destroyed and the Underground would be rendered useless. The two million inhabitants who remained faithful to the city would be evacuated to the communes south and west of the metropolitan area. This was the plan as revealed later, and was apparently authentic. That the Governor thought the measures would be necessary I do not believe; but it was well to be prepared.
In his military eye the enemy could not enter the city until the home army had been destroyed; that was an elementary principle of warfare. But how much did the Germans know, definitely, of the condition of the Allies? One had to be quite sure of that before one could forecast with accuracy their line of action. Did they consider the Allies were definitely crushed? It seems almost certain that they did. Such a state of mind is revealed in the despatches they sent from the front, each more affirmative than the other. They told of the utter rout of the French, of their inability to withstand the advance. Thus, as Colonel Feyler points out, the Germans were in much the frame of mind of Napoleon at Waterloo. History was repeating itself in new conditions. Napoleon disdained Wellington, whom he considered a mediocre general, and Blücher, a brave but blundering hussar, and so, without sufficient preparation, sent his legions against the British lines. If the German commanders had not the sublime arithmetic of Napoleon: "One hundred and twenty thousand men and I make two hundred thousand," that was the spirit of their calculations. They were impressed with their own invincibility. And there was some excuse for their belief that the English had been annihilated and the French demoralised. The British Army was only saved by bull-dog tenacity and a constitutional inability to accept defeat; the French showed a new quality of resistance because of the presence of their Three-Year soldiers—the three "Regular" classes with the colours—wherewith the reserves were stiffened into homogeneity. In any case, the Germans exaggerated the effect of their successes. The wish was father to the thought. The apparent direction of the retreat induced them to believe that the fruit was ripe and ready to fall into their expectant mouths. Surely, they argued, Joffre is going to repeat the mistake of Bazaine in 1870 and shut himself up in Paris as his predecessor did in Metz. He is anxious, certainly, they said, to seek the protection of the Paris forts, and yet he must know their shortcomings, for, forty years before, he had helped to build them.
But the cold fact remained that Joffre did not enter Paris, but flung down the gage of battle on the Marne, leaving Paris on his left as a protection to that flank and the eastern forts on his right to prevent his line from being turned in that direction. Galliéni was quick to realise the situation, to see its possibilities and its dangers and the necessity for swift decision. If Paris had to be fought, the best defence was a forward move outside the city, an offensive-defensive. But a bare week remained before the Germans approached within striking distance. In those feverish days, the Governor of the city mobilised thousands of labourers and set them to work digging trenches. It was obviously impossible to do more than erect a temporary barrier against the tide, but the Parisians were caught and fascinated by the energy of their chief, who instilled into them his own confidence and his own combativeness. Galliéni knew his public with the divination of a psychologist, and he built barriers at the narrow city entrances with felled trees and stones torn from the roads. Obviously such fortifications could not stand a moment against artillery, but their purpose was as much moral as military. If they prevented Uhlans from capturing the gates by a forward rush, they were equally operative in inspiring Parisians with the reality of war, which some were in danger of forgetting, and at the same time gave them the assurance that they were being protected. The temperament of la ville lumière has something of the child in it: a curiosity and interest in everything, a thoughtless courage, and the need of constant assurance that it is being cared for.
And when the hosts advanced, sweeping from the north of Paris to the east, it was Galliéni who saw the fault and determined to profit by it. Von Kluck had disregarded the Paris army either through ignorance or temerity, and he was to pay the price. The Governor collected an army from here, there and everywhere, placed it under a superb tactician, General Maunoury, and at the critical moment carried it to the field of battle. Our "intellectual general," as Gabriele d'Annunzio calls him, combined activity with perception. There was something Napoleonic and something Parisian, too, in his notion of utilising taximeters to carry soldiers to the German right wing, which, threatened, had reinforced itself with a corps d'armée and now seemed likely to envelop the French left. Up aloft Von Kluck's airmen decided that the Parisians were leaving their city by the thousand in taxicabs. It was Galliéni's army of Zouaves and Territorials hurrying out to strike a rapid and decisive blow at the invaders.
When Von Kluck marched straight upon Paris as if to devour it and turned aside to the south-east, he gave Galliéni, as we have said, the opportunity he sought. It is, of course, wrong to assume that the Germans suddenly changed their plan; this was not so, unless they wished to fly in the face of all accepted rules of war. It is highly dangerous to neglect one's main objective, the crushing of an enemy, for a subsidiary one. And if the Germans had entered Paris without defeating the Allies, they would have committed a heavy blunder. Heaven-born commanders like Napoleon could afford to take the risks and by their genius escape; lesser men have to abide by the rules of the game. Yet the Germans, proud in their superiority of numbers and equipment, might have supposed that they could detach part of their forces to finish off the Allies and with the remainder occupy the city. After all, strategy is a matter of common sense, and the plain man can see the danger to a general of entering a city whilst his enemy is at large, powerful enough to imprison him within the walls and to cut his communications. To a strategist of Galliéni's calibre the problem was perfectly clear.