The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the single object of victory in foreign war.
It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise, the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient, tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and salutary exception to the rule—their failure against Cæsar; from which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition—still vigorous.
The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel, the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Châlons, while the British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day, 2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its end.
The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to the German commanders a further French defeat. Those commanders knew their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the Allied forces—a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.
Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great effort in the West was already achieved.
They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and had been marked by a bewildering series of incessant victories. They were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the insufficient line opposed to them.
Sketch 65.
They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th French Army was forced back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or west of the Allies—the German right—stood the main army of von Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne, the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the first days of that bombardment from the new German siege train which had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chapter in the Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of Paris.