The Price of Glory Read Online Free PDF

and God the Holy Ghost’, but as General Weygand later added irreverently: ‘one would have liked to have seen it surrounded by a few saints.’ Superb for fighting in the open field — the kind of war envisaged by de Grandmaison — it could not be used for plunging fire, like the howitzers possessed in plenty by the Germans, and its projectiles were too light to be effective against entrenchments. Nevertheless, the ’75 saved France time and again during the war, and, for once, it was a weapon she had in sufficient numbers from the start. (Not so, alas, its ammunition, for Foch and the others had reckoned on a brief, brutal conflict of a matter of weeks.) Meanwhile, so that the enemy should see them clearly and be terror-struck by their furious numbers, the infantry went to war in the red Képis and pantaloons of the Second Empire, despising the Germans for converting to the less martial, though more practical Feldgrau. And, just as in 1870, the army found itself once again with a dearth of maps of France, but plenty of Germany.
    By de Grandmaison, out of Joffre, was hatched the General Start’s disastrous Plan XVII. On the outbreak of war, four out of five French armies, totalling 800,000 men, were to charge forward, with the main impetus directed towards the lost territories; objective, the Rhine. The strategic aim was to dislocate the ponderous German war-machine before it could carry out its plans. But the Deuxième Bureau (Intelligence) of the General Staff were good pupils of de Grandmaison and had indeed not troubled themselves unduly to find out what the enemy’s intentions might be.
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    By the end of the old century, two new factors had forced a complete revision of strategy upon the German General Staff. One was General de Rivière’s system of fortifications, which now meant that any attack on France along the traditional invasion route would involve extremely hard, prolonged fighting. The second was France’s alliance with Russia, which meant that Germany would be faced with war on two fronts. Necessity bred one of Germany’s greatest military minds and his equally famous plan: Graf von Schlieffen, who was Chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1906. The Schlieffen Plan was to knock out France in a Blitzkrieg while Russia was still mobilising, then turn with all force to the East. The weight of the French Army would be lured towards the Rhine by leaving this sector deliberately weak, while the main German force marched rapidly through Belgium to outflank the French. It would then execute a huge wheel to the west of Paris and eventually, from the rear, pin the French Army up against the Swiss frontier. The plan has been likened to a revolving-door, and under their Plan XVII the French were in fact to add momentum to the door’s rotation, thereby doing just what Schlieffen wanted.
    Fortunately for France and unfortunately for Germany, Schlieffen’s successor, Moltke, tampered with the master plan. Although the nephew of the great Moltke, the resemblance between them was roughly that of Louis Napoleon and his uncle. The younger Moltke was the first of the mediocre First War generals to bring disaster to his side by faint-heartedness and half-measures. Schlieffen’s last words are reported to have been ‘make the right wing strong’, but Moltke was fearful of what might happen if the French pushed too hard on the revolving door. Consequently, as additional forces became available, he added eight divisions to the left wing but onlyone to the right. More disastrously, he weakened the covering force in the East, so that at the critical moment of the Battle of the Marne two army corps, that might have tipped the balance in favour of Germany, had had to be sent to save East Prussia from an unexpectedly strong Russian threat.
    Although the German army of 1914 was a fearsome power, compared with that of 1870, it was a bludgeon to a rapier. It had had no dummy run against the Austrians at Sadowa. Whereas