The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne Read Free Book Online

called by Joffre, ‘sacré Tou-Tou’ ; on the old man’s fall from grace, the only one of his staff to follow him into exile. In a crisis, Joffre would sit in ‘Tou-Tou’s’ room, astride a chair, while the two officers telephoned orders. The only sign he ever gave that things were bad was the ritualistic screwing and unscrewing of the cap of his fountain pen. Thus, for over two fateful years, were conducted the affairs of the greatest army in France’s history.
    In his memoirs, Field Marshal Alexander complains that throughout his service as a fighting soldier in the First War ‘no commander above my Brigade Commander ever visited my front line.’ Joffre was no exception to this rule, and on his rare visits to the forward areas, about the closest combatants below the rank of Corps Commander came to him was in a march past or a decoration parade. He could not bear to have his tranquillity upset by confrontation with the actual horrors of war. This was the second characteristic which he and Haig had in common; Haig, his son tells us, ‘felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations because these visits made him physically ill.’ After pinning the Médaille Militaire on a blinded soldier, Joffre said: ‘I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles.… I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.’ It was in fact about the only emotion of this kind that he is recorded to have shown. In all his lengthy memoirs there is not one mention of the human element, not one word about the dreadful suffering of his soldiers. Like a peasant keeping account of his sacks of grain, Joffre in 1914 kept a little notebook in which he entered ammunition reserves still remaining. But it would have been better for France if he had also made accurate entries of the lives expended. As it was, so many First War generals, overwhelmed by the size of the forces suddenly placed under their command, tended to regard casualties as merely figures on a Quartermaster’s return; and in Joffre, the engineer, the technician, this dismal characteristic was particularly accentuated.
    To an exciteable, impressionable race like the French, Joffre’s greatest contribution, however, undoubtedly was this unusual degree of sangfroid. The Kaiser once predicted that ‘the side with the better nerves will win’, and one French soldier summed up the feelings of the rest when he scribbled in his diary that here was a leader whom ‘not even the worst situations would disconcert… this is what we did not have in 1870’. By not losing his head whenhis Plan XVII disintegrated about him, Joffre saved France. At the Marne, whereas the impetuous Foch might have attacked a day too early and the cautious Pétain a day too late, the unflurried Joffre (pushed by the inspired Galliéni) timed it correctly. But this great asset of Joffre’s also concealed terrible dangers. His power of deep sleep had created a legend throughout the nation that ‘if things were going badly he would not sleep’. It was a legend that often blinded both the nation, as well as Joffre himself, to just how bad things were. His confidence in himself was enormous and indestructible; in 1912 he had predicted ‘there will be a war and I shall win it’; even in November 1914 he had turned down the first project to issue steel helmets, declaring ‘we shall not have the time to make them, for I shall twist the Boche’s neck before two months are up’. Worst of all, this confidence, this fat man’s complacent optimism, was taken up and reflected back by the sycophantic Grand Quartier Général.
    Through his long absence in the colonies, Joffre suffered from the same disadvantage as Auchinleck of the Indian Army when commanding in the Western Desert. Appointed to the supreme command, Joffre had insufficient knowledge of his officers’ records to judge the good from the bad in the French Army, but when war had unmasked the inadequate he had