The Price of Glory Read Online Free PDF Page A

books on war were published in Germany, to only fifty in France.
    During the critical years before 1914, the gospel of ‘L’attaque à outrance’ , as it had become known, found its ultimate prophet in Colonel de Grandmaison, Chief of the Troisième Bureau (Operations) of the General Staff. He and his supporters had engineered thedownfall of the Commander-in-Chief, Michel, whose approach to countering a German onslaught had been a little too rational for their liking. In his place was installed Joffre, who, because he was a sapper and had served most of his career in the colonies, could be assumed to know nothing of military theory and would make an excellent figure-head.
    From top to bottom, the army was impregnated with de Grandmaison’s extravagant, semi-mystical nonsense: ‘In the offensive, imprudence is the best of assurances…. Let us go even to excess, and that perhaps will not be far enough…. For the attack only two things are necessary: to know where the enemy is and to decide what to do. What the enemy intends to do is of no consequence.’ Young soldiers on joining up were expected to learn by heart a catechism which incorporated the following words: ‘From the moment of action every soldier must ardently desire the assault by bayonet as the supreme means of imposing his will upon the enemy and gaining victory….’ Another product of the de Grandmaison philosophy, harking back to grim memories of the physical invasion of France in 1870, was the rigid dogma that — should the enemy dare to seize the initiative even for a moment — every inch of terrain must be defended to the death, and, if lost, regained by an immediate counter-attack, however inopportune. Enforced by threat of Court Martial and disgrace, this was a dogma that hardly encouraged tactical initiative among French army leaders. 1 Even Foch, France’s leading military intellect, followed the de Grandmaison line. Only a few, like Colonel Pétain, resisted, teaching that ‘firepower killed’ and that it might do terrible things to any ‘Attaque à outrance’ unsupported by heavy weapons; for which heresy his promotion had lagged. De Grandmaison’s doctrine was to cost France hundreds of thousands of her best men, quite unnecessarily; later, discredited, he himself was to find death and ‘La Gloire’ before the end of 1914 while trying to prove his theories at the head of a brigade.
    The de Grandmaison doctrine naturally enough had a profound effect on the equipment of the army. In 1909, the General Staff representative on the Chamber of Deputies’ Budget Commission declared: ‘You talk to us of heavy artillery. Thank God, we have none. The strength of the French Army is in the lightness of its guns.’ In 1910 Foch, then Commandant of the Staff College, said: ‘The aircraft is all very well for sport, for the army it is useless.’ The St. Étienne machine gun was brought into service that year, but, said the Inspector General of Infantry, it would ‘not make the slightest difference to anything’. A complicated weapon, it was something of a headache to the troops, and though brought out on manoeuvres to impress journalists, was otherwise left behind at Company HQ. Both machine guns and heavy artillery were deemed contrary to the Grandmaison spirit, and their withdrawal from the Army Estimates was joyfully supported by budget-conscious politicians. (The spirit was infectious and died hard; even after August 1914, Kitchener was telling General Murray that the British Army really should be able to take positions without artillery, instancing his own successes against the Fuzzy-Wuzzies!) Everything depended on what Foch called ‘the Will to Conquer’; that, supported by the bayonet and the ’75. The ’75 was indeed a marvellous weapon; well ahead of its age, quicker firing, more accurate, more mobile, and with longer range than any other field gun in service. To the de Grandmaison school it was ‘God the Father, God the Son,