To Lose a Battle Read Online Free PDF Page A

It is not the crowd that religiously followed the bier of Zola or Jaurès… It is the brutish elemental crowd which does not change, which slavishly acclaims Caesar and Boulanger, which yells at the vanquished, which chooses its heroes indifferently among boxers, gladiators and captains.
    Cachin’s ire may well have been fanned by the poor turnout of his supporters on the 14th, but their small numbers that day were deceptively irrelevant to the intrinsic, let alone the potential, strength of the new Left in France. For in none other of the victorious nations had Russia’s October Revolutionevoked stronger sympathies than among the workers of France, the home of revolution itself. It struck powerful chords with the ancient and deep-rooted revolutionary mystique of 1793, 1848, but above all with the Commune of 1871, the brutal repression of which remained stamped in the minds of the French Left wing and whose failure Lenin had now used as a textbook to perfect his own revolution. The foundation in March 1919 of the Third International in Moscow had revived hopes of successful revolution in the hearts of the spiritual heirs of the martyred Communards, while it was no accident that among the interventionist forces in Russia it was the French at Odessa who had raised the flag of mutiny. And at home there was already abundant fuel on the economic and social scene for the flames of revolution to feed upon. From the very earliest post-war days the presence of a potent new force on the French political scene was increasingly apparent, and the bourgeois, property-owning classes closed their ranks accordingly.
    French Illusions
    With the Armistice of 1918, a series of insidious illusions had pervaded France. Falling back on the eternal, rather arrogant dogma of it being civilization’s implicit duty to come to the rescue, when necessary, of its fountain-head, she automatically presupposed that her Anglo-Saxon allies would henceforth never abandon her; that they (particularly America) would maintain their interest in reshaping Europe. But when President Wilson had come over to France to address the victorious doughboys about ‘peace upon the… foundation of right’, they had shown themselves frankly bored. They wanted to get home, and the American electorate showed that it wanted to keep them there – for ever. As the idealism of 1918 evaporated, so the Anglo-Saxon nations would retreat further and further into their shells. Even more than France, they would become preoccupied with their own pressing internal problems. Feelings would grow (particularly in Britain) that Germany had been treated with excessive harshness at Versailles, feelings generatedpartly by honest altruism, partly by the dictates of commerce, but partly by instinctive concern at a victorious France’s apparently annexationist tendencies, as revealed by her reaching out for the Saar and her sending troops into Germany’s bankrupt and defaulting Ruhr.
    Another illusion, one to which the glory of the Victory Parade doubtless added impetus, was that France felt she had won the war largely by her own superlative exertions. But the British and Americans knew that it could not have been won without them, and they would soon feel that the price paid, both in men and gold, had been too high. They would do almost anything rather than risk having to save France a second time, let alone regain Alsace-Lorraine for her. Hand in hand with this illusion went France’s belief that, primarily through the supremacy of her Army, she could enforce the peace by herself. But she could not, because morally, numerically and economically the war had left her feebler than she realized.
    As the true state of France’s economy became more widely apparent, so it became popular to cherish the happy, simple illusion that ‘the Boche will pay’. But Germany could not, would not pay. The Allies would not make her, and the effort to do so was to cost France herself too much. Finally, there