Chapter 5

It was all perfectly practicable--on paper. The only difficulty was that there were so many things the German staff had omitted from its careful calculations--omitted, perforce, because it had never guessed their existence. And that spoiled their reckoning.

Foch had, for years, been teaching that fighting demands supreme flexibility, adaptability; that war is full of surprises which must be met as they arise; that morale, the spiritual force of an army, is subject to fluctuations caused by dozens of conditions which cannot be foreseen and must be overcome. The phrase oftenest on his lips was: "What have we to do here?" For, as he conceived warfare, officers and even privates must constantly be asking themselves that. One plan goes awry. Very well! we'll find a better.

But Foch had not trained the German general staff. They made war otherwise. And well he knew it! Well he knew what happened to them when their "blue prints" would not fit unexpected conditions.

He knew that they expected to take Nancy easily, that they were looking for some effort to defend it, but not for a French attack.

They did not know his maxim: "The best means of defense is to attack."

He attacked. His Twentieth corps fought its way through the center of the Bavarian army, into German Lorraine. Then something happened. Just what it was is not clear--but doubtless will be some day. The offensive had to be abandoned and the French troops had to withdraw from German soil to defend their own.

How bitter was the disappointment to Foch we may guess but shall never know. But remaking plans in his genius.

"What have we to do here?" he asked himself.

Then, "in the twinkling of an eye," says one military historian, "General Foch found the solution to the defense problem wherewith he was so suddenly confronted when his offensive failed of support."

XIII

THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE

What is known as the battle of Lorraine began at the declaration of war and lasted till August 26--though the major part of it was fought in the last six of those days.

I shall not go into details about it here, except to recall that it was in this fighting that General Castelnau lost his oldest son, stricken almost at the father's side.

A German military telegram intercepted on August 27 said:

"On no account make known to our armies of the west [that is to say, the right wing, in Belgium] the checks sustained by our armies of the east [the left wing, in Lorraine]."

So much depended on those plans which Castelnau and Dubail and Foch--and very particularly Foch!--had frustrated.

Joffre realized what had been achieved. And on August 27 he issued the following "order of the day":

"The First and Second armies are at this moment giving an example of tenacity and of courage which the commander-in-chief is happy to bring to the knowledge of the troops under his orders.

"These two armies undertook a general offensive and met with brilliant success, until they hurled themselves at a barrier fortified and defended by very superior forces.

"After a retreat in perfect order, the two armies resumed the offensive and, combining their efforts, retook a great part of the territory they had given up.

"The enemy bent before them and his recoil enabled us to establish undeniably the very serious losses he had suffered.

"These armies have fought for fourteen days without a moment's respite, and with an unshakable confidence in victory as the reward of their tenacity.

"The general-in-chief knows that the other armies will be moved to follow the example of the First and Second armies."

Now, where were those other armies? And what were they doing?

France had then eight armies in the field, and was soon to have a ninth--commanded by General Foch.

There was the First army, under General Dubail; the Second, under General Castelnau; the Third, under General Sarrail; the Fourth, under General Langle de Cary; the Fifth, under General Franchet d'Espérey; the Sixth, under General Manoury; the Seventh and Eighth armies are not mentioned in the Battle of the Marne, and I have not been able to find out where they were in service.

The First and Second armies, fighting in Lorraine, we know about. They developed, in that battle, more than one great commander of whose abilities Joffre hastened to avail himself. On the day he issued that order commending the First and Second armies, the generalissimo called Manoury from the Lorraine front, where he had shown conspicuous leadership, and put him in command of the newly-created Sixth army, which was to play the leading part in routing Von Kluck. And on the next day (August 28) Joffre called Foch from Lorraine to head the new Ninth army, which was to hold the center at the Battle of the Marne and deal the smashing, decisive blow.

In two days, while his troops were retreating before an apparently irresistible force, Joffre created two new armies, put at the head of each a man of magnificent leadership, and intrusted to those two armies and their leaders the most vital positions in the great battle he was planning.

The German soldiers facing Joffre were acting on general orders printed for them eight years before, and under specific orders which had been worked out by their high command with the particularity of machine specifications. And all their presumptions were based on the French doing what Teutons would do in the same circumstances. Their extra-suspender-button efficiency and preparedness were pitted against the flexible genius of a man who could assemble his two "shock" armies in two days and put them under the command of men picked not from the top of his list of available commanders, but practically from the bottom.

The Third, Fourth and Fifth armies of Joffre were those which had sustained the terrific onslaught in the north and had been fighting in retreat, practically since the beginning.

On August 25 Joffre declared; "We have escaped envelopment"--thanks largely to the action in Lorraine, holding back the Bavarians--and, clearly seeing that he could not hope for favorable results from a great battle fought in the north, he gave the order for retreat which meant the abandonment of north-eastern France to the Hunnish hordes.

What anguish that order caused him we shall never know. He realized to the full what the people of that great, prosperous part of France would have to suffer. He was aware what the loss of those resources would mean to the French, and also what their gain would mean to the Germans. He understood the effect of retreat upon the morale of his men. And he must have been aware of the panic his order would create throughout the yet-uninvaded parts of France where no one could know at what point the invasion would be checked. He knew that the nation's faith in him would be severely shaken, and that even his army's faith in him would be put to a supreme test.

But when a man trains himself to be a commander of men, he trains himself to go through, heroically and at any cost, what he believes must be done. To sacrifice one's self comes comparatively easy--given compelling circumstances and an obedient soul. But to sacrifice others never becomes easy to a man who respects the rights of others. And we shall never begin to comprehend men like Joffre and Foch until we shake ourselves free from any notion we may have that military expediency makes it easy for them to order great mental and physical suffering.

General Foch detached himself, on August 29, from his beloved Twentieth corps and betook himself to the little village of Machault, about twenty miles northeast of Châlons-sur-Marne, where he found assembled for his command an army made up of units from other armies. They were all more or less strange to one another and to him.

There was the Ninth army corps, from Tours, made up of Angevins (men such as Foch had learned to know when he was at Saumur) and Vendeans (the Bretons' south neighbors). Some of these men had been fighting without respite for nine days as they fell back, with the Fourth army, from the Belgian border. With them, since August 22, had been the remarkable Moroccan division under General Humbert.

Then there was the Eleventh corps of Bretons and Vendeans, which had been through the same terrible retreat.

And--not to enumerate too far--there was that Forty-second division of infantry which was destined to play one of the most dramatic, thrilling, forever-memorable parts in all warfare. It had been in the Ardennes, and had fallen back, fighting fiercely as it came.

To help him command these weary men whose hearts were heavy with forebodings for France, Foch had, as he himself has said, "a general staff of five or six officers, gathered in haste to start with, little or no working material, our note books and a few maps."

"Those who lived through these tragic hours near him," says René Puaux, "recall the chief questioning the liaison officers who did not know exactly where the different units were, punctuating his questions with: 'You don't know? Very well, then go and find out!'; putting together in his head the mosaic of which there were still so many pieces missing; gradually visioning a plan for bringing them together; calculating his effectives; estimating approximately his reserves of ammunition; discovering his bases of food supply."

And through all this stress he had the personal anguish of being unable to get word of his only son, Germain Foch, or of his son-in-law, Captain Becourt, both of whom had been fighting on the Belgian front.

"It was not, however," M. Puaux says, "the time for personal emotions. The father effaced himself before the soldier. There was nothing to be thought of save the country."

Thus we see Ferdinand Foch, on the eve of the first Battle of the Marne.

XIV

THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE

It was Saturday, August 29, 1914, when General Foch went to Machault to take command of the various units he was to weld into the Ninth army.

On the Tuesday following (September 1) Joffre was quartered with his general staff at the little old town of Bar-sur-Aube, fifty miles south of Châlons, and he had then determined the limits to which he would permit the retreat of his armies.

If a stand could be taken and an offensive launched further north than the Aube River, it should be done; but in no event would the withdrawal go beyond the Seine, the Aube and the region north of Bar-le-Duc.

He then placed his armies in the field in the relation in which he deemed they would be most effective: the First army, under General Dubail, was in the Vosges, and the Second army, under General Castelnau, was round about Nancy; the Third army, under General Sarrail, east and south of the Argonne in a kind of "elbow," joining the Fourth army, under General de Langle de Cary; then the Ninth army, under General Foch; then the Fifth army, under General Franchet d'Espérey; then the little British army of three corps, under General Sir John French; and then the new Sixth army, under General Manoury.

So Foch, on the third day of organizing his new command, received orders--at once terrible and immensely flattering--that he was to occupy the center of Joffre's battle line and to sustain the onslaught of Von Buelow and the famous Prussian Guards.

In the morning of Saturday, September 5, all commanders received from Joffre the now historic message:

"The moment has come for the army to advance at all costs and allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."

The men to whom this order was relayed by their commanders had, five-sixths of them, been ceaselessly engaged, without one single day's rest of any kind and much of the time without night rest either, for fourteen days, fighting as they fell back, and falling back as they fought; the skin was all worn from the soles of their feet, and what shoes they had left were stuck to their feet with blood.

"They had marched under a torrid sky," says Louis Madelin, "on scorching roads, parched and suffocated with dust. In reality they moved with their hearts rather than with their legs. According to Pierre Lasserre's happy expression, 'Our bodies had beaten a retreat, but not our hearts,' . . . But when, worn out with fatigue, faces black with powder, blinded by the chalk of Champagne, almost dying, they learned Joffre's order announcing the offensive, then the faces of our troops from Paris to Verdun beamed with joy. They fought with tired limbs, and yet no army ever showed such strength, for their hearts were filled with faith and hope."

At daybreak on Sunday, the 6th, Foch pitched his headquarters in a modern château near the little village of Pleurs, which you probably will not find on any map except a military one, but it is some six miles southeast of Sézanne. And the front assigned to Foch ran from Sézanne to the Camp de Mailly, twenty-five miles east by a little south. The Marne was twenty-five miles to north of him. Between him and its south bank were many towns and villages; the clay pocket (ten miles long) called the Marshes of St. Gond, but far from marshy in that parching heat; and north of that the forest of Epernay. His vanguards were north of the marshes. But as that Sunday wore on, the Prussian Guards drove Foch's Angevins and Vendeans of the Ninth Corps back and occupied the marshes. The Bretons on the east of Foch's line were obliged to dislodge, and the Moroccans and Forty-second Division had to yield on Foch's left.

Thus, at nightfall of the first day's fighting, Foch's new army had given ground practically everywhere.

The next day the German attack became fiercer, and it seemed that more ground must be yielded.

That was the day when Foch made his memorable deduction: "They are trying to throw us back with such fury I am sure that means things are going badly for them elsewhere and they are seeking compensation."

He was right! Von Kluck was retiring in a northeasterly direction under Manoury's blows; and even Von Buelow (whom Foch faced) was withdrawing parts of his troops from the line at Foch's left.

But the attempt to break through the center Foch held, waxed fiercer as the Germans realized the strength opposing them on their right.

And on Tuesday, the 8th, Foch was unable to hold--save at certain points--and had to move his headquarters eleven miles south, to Plancy.

He had now reached the Aube, beyond which Joffre had decreed that he must not retire. On its north bank his gallant army must, if it could not do otherwise, "allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."

On that evening he sent Major Réquin to the Forty-second Division with orders for the morrow. The most incredible orders!

The enemy had found his point of least resistance--on his right wing. He ought to strengthen that wing, but he could not. All the reserves were engaged--and the enemy knew it as well as he did. And it is a fixed principle of war not to withdraw active troops from one part of the line to strengthen another.

Only one part of his army had had any success that day: Toward evening the Forty-second Division and the Moroccans had made an irresistible lunge forward and driven the enemy to the north edge of the marshes.

They were weary--those splendid troops--but they were exalted; they had advanced!

Foch believes in the power of the spirit. He appealed to the Forty-second to do an extraordinary thing--to march, weary as it was, from left to right of his long line and brace the weak spot. And to cover up the gap their withdrawal would make he asked General Franchet d'Espérey to stretch out the front covered by his right wing and adjoining Foch's left.

In a letter to me, Lieutenant-Colonel (then Major) Réquin gives some graphic bits descriptive of that historic errand. He was a sort of liaison officer between General Grossetti, commanding the Forty-second Division, and the latter's chief, General Foch, his special duty being to carry General Foch's orders to General Grossetti and to keep the army chief informed, each evening, how his commands were being carried out.

"It was 10 P.M.," he writes, "when I roused General Grossetti from his sleep in the straw, in the miserable little shell-riddled farm of Chapton.

"The order astonished him; but like a disciplined leader, he started to execute it with all the energy of which this legendary soldier was capable."

The Forty-second came! While they were marching to the rescue the Prussian Guard in a colossal effort smashed through Foch's right. They were wild with joy. The French line was pierced. They at once began celebrating, at La Fère-Champenoise.

When this was announced to Foch he telegraphed to general headquarters:

"My center gives way, my right recedes; the situation is excellent. I shall attack."

For this, we must remember, is the man who says: "A battle won is a battle in which one is not able to believe one's self vanquished."

He gave the order to attack. Everything that he cared about in this world was at stake. This desperate maneuver would save it all--or it would not. He gave the order to attack--and then he went for a walk on the outskirts of the little village of Plancy. His companion was one of his staff officers, Lieutenant Ferasson of the artillery; and as they walked they discussed metallurgy and economics.

There could be nothing more typically French or more diametrically opposed to the conceptions of French character which prevailed in other countries before this war. And I hope that if Lieutenant Ferasson survives, he will accurately designate (if he can) exactly where Foch walked on that Wednesday afternoon, September 9, when, his center having given way, his right wing receded, he pronounced the "situation excellent," gave the order for attack, and went out to discuss metallurgy.

Toward six o'clock on that evening the Germans, celebrating their certain victory, saw themselves confronted by a "new" French army pouring into the gap they had thought their road to Paris.

The Forty-second Division (more than half dead of fatigue, but their eyes blazing with such immensity and intensity of purpose it has been said the Germans fled, as before spirits, when they saw these men) had not only blocked the roundabout road to Paris; they had broken the morale of Von Buelow's crack troops. Without this brilliant maneuver and superb execution the successes of all the other armies must have gone for naught.

"To be victorious," said Napoleon, "it is necessary only to be stronger than your enemy at a given point and at a given moment."

Foch's preferred way to take advantage of that given point and moment is with reserves, which he called the reservoirs of force. "The art of war consists in having them when the enemy has none."

But as there were no reserves available at that first Battle of the Marne, he exemplified his other principle that conditions must be met as they arise.

"I still seem," says René Puaux, "to hear General Foch telling us, one evening after dinner at Cassel several months later, about that maneuver of September 9.

"He had put matches on the tablecloth"--some red matches which Colonel Réquin treasures as a souvenir--"and he illustrated with them the disposition of the troops engaged. For the Forty-second Division he had only half a match, which he moved here and there with his quick, deft fingers as he talked.

"The match representing the Twelfth German Corps (which with the Prussian Guard was cutting the gap in Foch's weak spot) was about to make a half-turn which would bring it in the rear of the French armies.

"The general, laying down the half-match that was the Forty-second Division, made an eloquent gesture with his hand, indicating the move that the Forty-second made.

"'It might succeed,' he said, laconically, 'or it might fail. It succeeded. Those men were exhausted; they won, nevertheless.'"

At nine o'clock the next morning (September 10) the Forty-second entered La Fère-Champenoise, where they found officers of the Prussian Guard lying, dead drunk, on the floors in the cantonments, surrounded by innumerable bottles of stolen champagne wherewith they had been celebrating their victory.

Two days later Foch was at Châlons, to direct in person the crossing of the Marne by his army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy.

"The cavalry, the artillery, the unending lines of supply wagons," says Colonel Réquin, "the infantry in two columns on either side of the road; all this in close formation descending like a torrent to resume its place of battle above the passage on the other side of the river; was an unforgettable sight and one that gave all who witnessed it an impression of the tremendous energy General Foch has for the command of enormous material difficulties."

XV

SENT NORTH TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS

Germany's plan to enter France by the east gate, in Lorraine, was frustrated with the aid of Foch.

Her plan to smash through the center of the armies on the Marne was frustrated, with the very special aid of Foch.

Blocked in both these moves, there was just one other for Germany to make, then, on the western front.

And on September 14, Joffre, instead of celebrating the victory on the Marne, was deep in plans to forestall an advance upon the Channel ports, and began issuing orders for the transfer of his main fighting bodies to the north.

All this, of course, had to be done so as to leave no vulnerable spot in all that long battle line from Belfort to Calais.

Joffre had clearly foreseen the length of that line. He predicted it, as we have seen, in 1912. Doubtless he had foreseen also that it would be too long a line to direct from one viewpoint, from one general headquarters. What he was too wise to try to foresee before the war began was, which one of France's trained fighting men he would call to his aid as his second in command. He waited, and watched, before deciding that.

And late in the afternoon of October 4 he telegraphed to General Foch at Châlons, telling him that he was appointed first in command under the generalissimo, and asking him to leave at once for the north, there to coordinate the French, English and Belgian forces that were opposing the German march to the sea.

Five weeks previously Foch had been called to the vicinity of Châlons to assemble an army just coming into existence. Now he was called to leave Châlons and that army he had come to know--that army of which he must have been so very, very proud--and go far away to another task of unknown factors.

But in a few hours he had his affairs in order and was ready to leave.

It was ten o'clock that Sunday night when he got into his automobile to be whirled from the Marne to the Somme.

At four in the morning he was at Breteuil, where General Castelnau had the headquarters of his new army, created on September 20 and designated to service on Manoury's left. General Castelnau had not yet heard of the generalissimo's new order. He was sound asleep when the big gray car came to a stop at the door of his headquarters after its one-hundred-and-fifty-mile dash through silent towns and dark, war-invested country.

Six weeks ago Foch had been his subordinate. Then they became equals in command. Now the magnificent hero of Lorraine who, before the war, had done so much on the Superior War Council to aid Joffre in reorganizing the army, rose from his bed in the chill of a fall morning not yet dawned, to greet his superior officer.

Some black coffee was heated for them, and for two hours they discussed the problems of this new front--Castelnau as eager to serve under Foch, for France, as, eight weeks ago, Foch had been to serve under Castelnau. If the sublime unselfishness of such men could have communicated itself to some of the minor figures of this war, how much more inspiring might be the stories of these civilian commanders!