To Lose a Battle Read Online Free PDF

was the mortal illusion (although, certainly, Foch for one did not share it) that vanquished, ruined, truncated, revolution-torn Germany could never again be a military menace. But had Frenchmen forgotten already how the harsh settlement imposed by Prussia in 1871, with its territorial amputations, had kept alight France’s own fire of revenge for the best part of half a century? Would France indeed have been so ready to rush to the aid of her ally, Russia, in 1914, had Alsace-Lorraine not weighed heavily upon the balances? Now France’s supreme grievance had been erased, but Versailles had simply transferred the burden to Germany, mourning her lost territories in the East.
    Financial Stresses
    Of all the sources of her illusions, probably the most consequential lay in France overestimating her own powers to mould the post-war world – an error that was to claim Britain too in the years following 1945. It was in fact ‘a haggard France’ that faced the dawn of victory. The bare economic facts were daunting: France had expended some 25 per cent of her national fortune; almost 7 per cent of her territory had been devastated by war, including some of the richest industrial areas; 3¼ million hectares (12,500 square miles, or roughly the area of Holland) of fertile soil had been ravaged; 3,500 miles of railway and over 30,000 miles of roads were destroyed; coal production was down by 37 per cent compared with 1914, steel by 60 per cent; the trade deficit had risen from 1½ million to 17½ million francs. France’s Ministry of Finance estimated the material damage caused by the Germans, and which would be the basis for reparations, at 134,000 million gold francs, a staggering figure compared with 5,000 million which Germany had demanded, and got, from France in 1871. Yet, showing the same extraordinary recuperative capacity that had amazed the world in 1871, France after 1918 repaired her shattered industries, and her courageous peasants got her raddled fields back under the plough far quicker than anyone could have imagined. It was to her financial structure, however, that the really lasting damage had been done. To pay for the war, France had ineluctably allowed inflation to have its head by issuing a flood of paper money. By the Armistice the franc had lost nearly two-thirds of its value. This was only a beginning; whereas it then exchanged at 26 to the pound sterling (5.50 to the dollar), already by the time of the Victory Parade it had depreciated to 51 to the pound. By May 1926 its value had sunk to 178 to the pound, and finally, two months later, with a hostile mob beating on the gates of the Palais Bourbon, to 220.
    The causes were not hard to find. Fanned by the new virulence of the revolutionary Left, the French workers’ very justifiable demands for better conditions and higher wages to offset this war-time inflation gave the spiral an extra spin. Then therewere the additional millions which had to be spent in paying the pensions of the legions of ex-Servicemen, notably the mutilés. But the most pernicious influences here harked back to those two illusions, namely, that France’s allies would always be ready to help her, and that ‘the Boche will pay’. By the end of the war the public debt had reached 156,000 millions, of which 32,000 millions were owed to the United States and Britain. The Budget of 1919 had been postponed more than seven months, during which time further vast loans had been launched, so that when the Budget was finally agreed it showed an enormous deficit of 27,000 millions. Nobody viewed this too tragically. First, it was automatically assumed that the Allies would be accommodating, and generous, in the recovery of France’s war debts; it was widely thought, in the words of a cynical expression popular at the time, that the Allies could not possibly expect France to repay ‘the cost of overcoats in which her soldiers had got themselves killed’. But Britain for one, with nearly a