Back to the Front by Stephen O’Shea Read Free Book Online

shock—what the last six lines really are: they are a propaganda argument—words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far—against a negotiated peace."
    Despite the critical abuse, the sentimental old poem has shown great staying power in popular culture. It, along with the
     songs "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" and "Over There" and Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, may be said to form the final fading pages in the scrapbook of First World War cliche. As such, the Essex Farm Cemetery, its
     beribboned wreaths shivering in the wake of onrushing afternoon traffic, now doubles as a shrine to a vanished syllabus. The
     cannons of the Salient have long been silenced, as has its canon.
    T HE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN laid out the route of attack. The bulk of the German army—its right wing—would swing through Belgium,
     skirt the Atlantic coast, pass west and then south of Paris. By doing this it could eventually encircle the French armies
     that, Schlieffen had once again correctly surmised, would be busy throwing themselves at well-fortified defensive lines to
     regain Alsace and Lorraine. Indeed, since the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which France had lost Alsace
     and Lorraine, the general staff of its army had thought of little else but recovering the two provinces from the Germans.
     Out of this keen sense of injured pride came a military doctrine that elevated the attack to an almost quasi-mystical status.
     Attacking a outrance (to the utmost), no matter what the terrain or the strength of the opposition, entailed wearing the dashing but conspicuous
     red trousers and blue coat of the infantryman and running directly at enemy machine-gun fire, presumably protected from injury
     by one's warrior insouciance, or elan. Such were the pitifully inadequate tactics taught at elite French military academies. Their strategic thinking, which had
     been dignified by the name of "Plan XVII," called for remorseless, predictable, frontal attacks into Alsace and Lorraine.
     As in 1870 and 1940, in August 1914 the French were hopelessly outsmarted by the Germans.
    Under the command of Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre, an avuncular officer with a seemingly boundless appetite for casualties,
     the French army went to the slaughter, launching attack after attack a outrance until entire battalions were annihilated.
     In the summer and fall of 1914, France lost as many men on the battlefield as the American army would in all of the twentieth
     century. Their conscript army was thrown away by incompetent generalship. In the month of August alone, more than 210,000
     Frenchmen died in the headlong offensives of Plan XVII. The bloodbath was more than appalling, it was absurd.
    Joffre blamed his subordinates. He demoted dozens of generals and sent them to the city of Limoges for reassignment: whence
     the French verb limoger for any high-profile firing. According to many accounts, Joffre's imperturbable demeanor in the face of horrific losses sometimes
     reassured but more often repelled. The sacredness of the general's stomach—Joffre always had two well-cooked, uninterrupted
     feasts a day, no matter how dire the military situation — contrasted dramatically with his callow disregard for the lives
     of his soldiers.
    While Joffre minded his digestion and sent tens of thousands to their doom in the east, 750,000 Germans were walking toward
     France from the north. As the Kaiser's armies advanced through Belgium, they carried out a highly publicized policy of Schrecklichkeit, or "Frightfulness," meant to discourage any attempts at civilian resistance. Hostages were taken and shot, and cities were
     burned, a brutal overture for the total war to come. The Belgians became a nation of refugees, crowding the roads south to
     France and the boats over to England. Of the hundred thousand or so who reached Britain, the most famous of the lot never
     really landed there at all because he was, in point of fact,