Joffre's determination to fight the war the French way cost his country dearly.
Joseph Césaire Joffre, was made commander-in-chief of France in 1911. For a period he was near-dictator of France, given free rein by President Poincare, pro military and anti German successor to Caillaux. Joffre directed France's military destinies from GQG, his Grand-Quartier-Générale, located in the little Marneside town of Vitry-le-François. He “remembered too well the events of 1870, and was resolved to resist more stoutly the lure of fortified places, and keep his armies together as a force of manoeuvre” (Buchan). His early belief in an offensive into Alsace Lorraine to redress their seizure in 1870 was the consequence.
Joseph Césaire Joffre, was made commander-in-chief of France in 1911. For a period he was near-dictator of France, given free rein by President Poincare, pro military and anti German successor to Caillaux. Joffre directed France's military destinies from GQG, his Grand-Quartier-Générale, located in the little Marneside town of Vitry-le-François. He “remembered too well the events of 1870, and was resolved to resist more stoutly the lure of fortified places, and keep his armies together as a force of manoeuvre” (Buchan). His early belief in an offensive into Alsace Lorraine to redress their seizure in 1870 was the consequence.
Events on the centre and right of the French Dispositions
Joffre held strongly to his views and required a stand at all costs in the east by Generals Dubai and Castelnau, holding Nancy if at all possible. In the centre he would need to hold the line Toul-Epinal-Belfort, and allow a short retreat by the Third and Fourth armies, pivoting on Verdun. The French 5th and BEF armies should be allowed a short retreat until such time as they could be reinforced, and enable an ‘ultimate reaction’ to the German advances.
General Auguste Dubail |
Castelnau himself had opposed the offensive
into Lorraine: he argued, with notable prudence, that his forces should merely
hold their strong positions on the hills around Nancy, and let the enemy do the
attacking. Joffre, however, was insistent that the offensive should go ahead,
and progress in the first few days convinced him of its success. Further south,
1st Army overran Sarrebourg. On the evening of the 19th, Castelnau
again urged caution on his local corps commander, Ferdinand Foch.
The French threw forward 320 battalions and
a thousand guns, which the Germans (who as it happened had chosen the same day
to deliver their own massive blow) met with 328 battalions and over 1,600 guns.
In the midst of Alsace-Lorraine, the rival attacks collided with shocking force
and heavy losses on both sides. Morhange was the site of huge carnage and
losses.
French aviators had warned their commanders
of the strength – indeed, near-impregnability – of the German position, but
they were ignored. The attackers pressed forward in two vast columns, between
the Forêt de Cremecy and the Forêt de Bride. Here was a battle that is today little known, yet was awesome in its scale and
character.
General Noel de Castelnau |
Behind this killing ground lay the hamlet of
Fontaine Saint-Barbe. This became a casualty-clearing station for the French,
though the medical facilities were overwhelmed.
On the night of the 20th, Castelnau, who
was furious with his subordinates, ordered a full retreat, fifteen miles back
inside France to the Meurthe river and the heights known as the Grand Couronné
of Nancy, which protected that city.
Joffre had repeatedly told the commanders of his right flanks that
their job was to tie down the maximum German forces, rather than to win the
war, which would be contrived by his centre, and further north toward the Ardennes. If this was so, it is
extraordinary that he accepted such huge losses in pursuit of secondary objectives.
Yet during those early days, the French disaster at Morhange was matched elsewhere. The slaughter in Alsace-Lorraine represented only one part of Joffre’s
disastrous achievement. Even as it unfolded, elsewhere along the front other
French armies were suffering still bloodier fates in piecemeal encounters with
the Germans. The most northerly, Gen. Charles Lanrezac’s Fifth, was a quarter of a
million men strong. They advanced into Belgium, up the Meuse past Sedan and Mezières
as far as Dinant, before meeting the Germans. One of the regiments collapsing into exhausted sleep on the streets of Dinant on the night of 14 August, contained a certain Lt. Charles de Gaulle.
A stream of reports were reaching Joffre - from
French airmen and from intelligence officers - that large forces of Germans were
crossing the front northwards, towards his left flank. The Belgians also
described enemy masses crossing their country in long, grey-green columns.
This merely led Joffre to the conclusion that since Moltke’s forces – whose
overall numbers he much underestimated – were so strong on both flanks, they
must be weak in the centre. Instead of focusing on the northern threat, the
commander-in-chief pressed France’s own, supposedly
decisive, thrust into Luxembourg and southern Belgium through the Ardennes. On
21 August he gave the order – among the most fateful in French history – for
nine corps of Third and Fourth Armies to attack between Charleroi and Verdun,
while the Fifth did likewise on the Sambre.
Thus, they unleashed a series of murderous
– and, on the French side, disastrously ill-coordinated – encounter battles
across a sixty-mile front. The fighting on this one day, the 22nd, cost
the French army 27,000 men killed, in addition to wounded and prisoners in
proportion. This was a much larger loss than the British suffered on 1 July
1916, first day of the battle of Somme, which is often wrongly cited as the
First World War’s high blood mark.
Ruffey’s third army pulled back across the
Meuse on 26th August and began slowly to retreat on the entrenched
camp of Verdun. After the French retreated, the Germans conducted another orgy
of violence against civilians, murdering 122 people in Rossignol on 26 August.
Langle’s fourth army had a more troubled
retreat, as it had further to trouble and was continuously engaged with
Wurtenburg’s Fourth Army. On the 25th, after the failure of its
Ardennes offensive it was still east of the Meuse, between Mezieres and
Montmady. Langle was gradually able to pull back towards
Paris, so that by 29th August he was on a line Buzancy-Rethel, and
next day he was crossing the Aisne. By early September, the French 4th
Army was astride the upper Marne, among the Champagne wolds, just south of
Joffre’s old HQ at Vitry-le Francois.
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