[40] For details of the last stages of the retreat and pursuit, see La Marche sur Paris de l’Aile Droite Allemande, by Count de Caix de Saint Aymour (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle); Gordon and Hamilton, op. cit.; and La Retraite de l’Armée Anglaise du 23 Août 1914, by Ernest Renauld, Renaissance, November 25, 1916.
On September 3, General Lanrezac was removed from the command of the French 5th Army—“because his views were contrary to a complete liaison with the British Army,” says M. Hanotaux (Rev. des Deux Mondes, March 1919); but this is a partial and inadequate statement. As we have seen, Lanrezac had been at issue with G.Q.G. from the beginning of the campaign.
M. Hanotaux quotes a note sent to the Minister of War, M. Millerand, on September 3, by General Joffre, who, “finding that the rapid recoil of the British Army, effected too soon and too quickly, had prevented Maunoury’s Army from coming into action in good conditions, and had compromised Lanrezac’s left flank,” described his intention thus: “To prepare a new offensive in liaison with the British and with the garrison of Paris, and to choose the battlefield in such a way that, by utilising on certain parts of the front prepared defensive organisations, a numerical superiority could be assured in the zone chosen for the principal effort.”
[41] An anonymous writer, “ZZZ,” in the Revue de Paris, September 15, 1917, says that Field-Marshal French’s communication was made on September 1 to the French Government—probably it was a result of the Kitchener interview—and was transmitted to Joffre by the Minister of War, who, subject to the full liberty and responsibility of the Generalissimo, favoured the idea of resistance on the north and north-east of Paris.
[42] Petit Parisien, June 16, 1916.
[43] Le Livre du Souvenir, by Paul Ginisty and Arsène Alexandre, pp. 75–6.
PARIS AND THE GERMAN PLAN
[44] Major-General Sir F. Maurice, in his brilliant study, Forty Days in 1914 (London: Constable. 1919), speaks, however, of the German Staff assuming “that Paris had only a moral and not a military value.” General Maurice refers to the city as being “at the mercy of the enemy,” and emphatically condemns Kluck for failing to occupy it, and so “sacrificing substantial gains in favour of a grandiose and ambitious scheme which, as events proved, could not be realised” (p. 139). Despite General Maurice’s great authority, I see no reason to change the conclusions in the text with regard to the points here discussed. There are several important factors which he does not mention, particularly the influence of the appearance of the new 9th Army, under Foch, at the French centre, and the equalisation at this time of the German and Allied forces. Kluck was the victim of necessity rather than of any grandiose ambition; and as for the Staffs, it was more Joffre’s strategy than “Prussian conceit and self-sufficiency” that “marred the execution of a well-laid plan.”
Says Mr. Joseph Reinach (La Guerre sur le Front Occidental, 1914–15, ch. v. sec. 7): “Bernhardi has classed the capitals of Europe in two categories: those whose capture has a decisive importance from the military point of view, like Paris and Vienna, and those whose importance is much smaller. To take Paris, what glory! to enter Paris, what a gage! But the same Bernhardi, the master of all the German generals, and before him all the greatest captains, all the oracles of the military art, Moltke, Jomini, insist that the aim of war must be fixed as high as possible, and this aim is the complete ruin of the enemy State by the destruction, the putting out of action, of its armies. Only an enemy completely disarmed will bow to the will of the conqueror.... The opinion that prevailed with the German Staff is that to attack Paris before having finished with the Allied Armies would be a fault entailing very serious consequences.... The event does not prove that this opinion was mistaken.”
[45] This message, first published by Le Matin, February 27, 1918, was dispatched by Mr. Gerard, United States Ambassador in Berlin, on the morning of September 8, to his colleague in Paris, Mr. Myron Herrick, who received it late on the same evening. It read as follows: “Extremely urgent. September 8. The German General Staff recommends that all Americans leave Paris via Rouen and Le Havre. They will have to leave soon if they wish to go.—Gerard.” It is added that the message was sent on the pressing wish of the German Staff, and that it was doubled, one copy going via Switzerland, and the other via Rome.