Chapter X Galliéni and His Popularity
General Galliéni1 came to his task of defending Paris with a reputation gained in Madagascar. Nine years of successful government had transformed the island, torn with conflict, into a peaceful possession. Already credited with great organising powers, he was suspected of being a good strategist, and he was soon to prove it. His very appearance, energetic, thin, with large, osseous face looking like an eagle in spite of the pince-nez, gave Paris a wonderful impression of youth and energy. He was a man who would make things happen, conjectured the citizens—and, certainly, he looked like it. His stride was masterly, and his orderly officers grew thin in his service; there was a story of a plump private secretary who visibly dwindled in an effort to keep pace with the “patron’s” energetic gait.
Paris had never faltered in its attitude of pure valour even when news lacked and rumour stalked, gaunt-eyed, and unfettered by the least fact, along the Boulevards. Galliéni’s appointment to the governorship of the city put fire into hesitating pulses and new courage into hearts. To see him crossing the street in his uniform of cerulean blue, that attractive colour of the French Army, was to receive a lesson in youth and virility. He had the look of the fighter grateful to Parisians, who, recalling their past, did not like the notion of being handed over tamely to the enemy as an “open” city. An open city, forsooth! What ignominy for the capital of all the talents! When the Governor was formally invested on August 26, 1914, the muscles of his administrés grew tense with resolution. Then there would be resistance, resistance to the point of street fighting. Inch by inch the town would be disputed. The Eiffel Tower would be blown up, so that the enemy could not use its apparatus and antennæ to transmit or receive messages; bridges would be destroyed and the Underground would be rendered useless. The two million inhabitants who remained faithful to the city would be evacuated to the communes south and west of the metropolitan area. This was the plan as revealed later, and was apparently authentic. That the Governor thought the measures would be necessary I do not believe; but it was well to be prepared.
In his military eye the enemy could not enter the city until the home army had been destroyed; that was an elementary principle of warfare. But how much did the Germans know, definitely, of the condition of the Allies? One had to be quite sure of that before one could forecast with accuracy their line of action. Did they consider the Allies were definitely crushed? It seems almost certain that they did. Such a state of mind is revealed in the despatches they sent from the front, each more affirmative than the other. They told of the utter rout of the French, of their inability to withstand the advance. Thus, as Colonel Feyler points out, the Germans were in much the frame of mind of Napoleon at Waterloo. History was repeating itself in new conditions. Napoleon disdained Wellington, whom he considered a mediocre general, and Blücher, a brave but blundering hussar, and so, without sufficient preparation, sent his legions against the British lines. If the German commanders had not the sublime arithmetic of Napoleon: “One hundred and twenty thousand men and I make two hundred thousand,” that was the spirit of their calculations. They were impressed with their own invincibility. And there was some excuse for their belief that the English had been annihilated and the French demoralised. The British Army was only saved by bull-dog tenacity and a constitutional inability to accept defeat; the French showed a new quality of resistance because of the presence of their Three-Year soldiers—the three “Regular” classes with the colours—wherewith the reserves were stiffened into homogeneity. In any case, the Germans exaggerated the effect of their successes. The wish was father to the thought. The apparent direction of the retreat induced them to believe that the fruit was ripe and ready to fall into their expectant mouths. Surely, they argued, Joffre is going to repeat the mistake of Bazaine in 1870 and shut himself up in Paris as his predecessor did in Metz. He is anxious, certainly, they said, to seek the protection of the Paris forts, and yet he must know their shortcomings, for, forty years before, he had helped to build them.
But the cold fact remained that Joffre did not enter Paris, but flung down the gage of battle on the Marne, leaving Paris on his left as a protection to that flank and the eastern forts on his right to prevent his line from being turned in that direction. Galliéni was quick to realise the situation, to see its possibilities and its dangers and the necessity for swift decision. If Paris had to be fought, the best defence was a forward move outside the city, an offensive-defensive. But a bare week remained before the Germans approached within striking distance. In those feverish days, the Governor of the city mobilised thousands of labourers and set them to work digging trenches. It was obviously impossible to do more than erect a temporary barrier against the tide, but the Parisians were caught and fascinated by the energy of their chief, who instilled into them his own confidence and his own combativeness. Galliéni knew his public with the divination of a psychologist, and he built barriers at the narrow city entrances with felled trees and stones torn from the roads. Obviously such fortifications could not stand a moment against artillery, but their purpose was as much moral as military. If they prevented Uhlans from capturing the gates by a forward rush, they were equally operative in inspiring Parisians with the reality of war, which some were in danger of forgetting, and at the same time gave them the assurance that they were being protected. The temperament of la ville lumière has something of the child in it: a curiosity and interest in everything, a thoughtless courage, and the need of constant assurance that it is being cared for.
And when the hosts advanced, sweeping from the north of Paris to the east, it was Galliéni who saw the fault and determined to profit by it. Von Kluck had disregarded the Paris army either through ignorance or temerity, and he was to pay the price. The Governor collected an army from here, there and everywhere, placed it under a superb tactician, General Maunoury, and at the critical moment carried it to the field of battle. Our “intellectual general,” as Gabriele d’Annunzio calls him, combined activity with perception. There was something Napoleonic and something Parisian, too, in his notion of utilising taximeters to carry soldiers to the German right wing, which, threatened, had reinforced itself with a corps d’armée and now seemed likely to envelop the French left. Up aloft Von Kluck’s airmen decided that the Parisians were leaving their city by the thousand in taxicabs. It was Galliéni’s army of Zouaves and Territorials hurrying out to strike a rapid and decisive blow at the invaders.
When Von Kluck marched straight upon Paris as if to devour it and turned aside to the south-east, he gave Galliéni, as we have said, the opportunity he sought. It is, of course, wrong to assume that the Germans suddenly changed their plan; this was not so, unless they wished to fly in the face of all accepted rules of war. It is highly dangerous to neglect one’s main objective, the crushing of an enemy, for a subsidiary one. And if the Germans had entered Paris without defeating the Allies, they would have committed a heavy blunder. Heaven-born commanders like Napoleon could afford to take the risks and by their genius escape; lesser men have to abide by the rules of the game. Yet the Germans, proud in their superiority of numbers and equipment, might have supposed that they could detach part of their forces to finish off the Allies and with the remainder occupy the city. After all, strategy is a matter of common sense, and the plain man can see the danger to a general of entering a city whilst his enemy is at large, powerful enough to imprison him within the walls and to cut his communications. To a strategist of Galliéni’s calibre the problem was perfectly clear.
What he could not know, however, was the exact intentions of the Germans: whether they were going to attack the Home Army and simultaneously enter the city, or whether they would relinquish occupation until they had made certain of the destruction of the Allies. To meet the alternative he employed his habitual energy and resource; he was prepared for the two events. Even after the battle he took unlimited precautions, accumulating vast stocks of fodder and cattle in the Bois de Boulogne, until the famous playing-ground looked like a western cattle-ranch; he took, also, a careful census of the city, so that food might be apportioned to the population. As a military precaution he continued to construct trenches and defences of all sorts. Why did he pursue this mole-like activity of throwing up earth, since the danger was past? Galliéni had a double purpose: to reassure Parisians against the return of the Germans and to train the young soldier in the art of modern war. And so he built endless lines of trenches, until the country round Paris from Beauvais in the north to Fontainebleau in the south was scored and ribbed with excavations. In their depths he hid monstrous black cannon, ready to belch flame and disappear again into their pits. He left nothing to chance.
A year after his appointment to the Governorship, he rose to the higher plane of Minister of War. The Viviani Cabinet had quietly given way to the Briand Administration, and, with that thoroughness of which the French are capable in great crises, they began to reconstruct their military organisation. His new post gave Galliéni a vast rôle, in which his lively temper and insatiable capacity for work found full employment. His part in the battle of the Marne had become known, and enhanced his reputation. It was realised that he had acted with immense decision. Thus he became newly popular with the Parisians, and his singular features—the eyes gleaming behind the glasses as if they were unsleeping in vigilance—were reproduced everywhere. His popularity threatened to rival that of Joffre, except that Joffre appealed more subtly and invariably to the army. The new Minister, however, was more Parisian than the Generalissimo, more distinctly Latin—Parisian, also, in a certain truculence more affected than real, for Galliéni is a tender-hearted man, a little diffident outside the strict orbit of his duty. He was particularly strenuous in his dealings with the embusqué. That furtive creature, who shelters behind the flag, was brought forth from his snug post in the rear. Several hundreds found employment at the Ministry of War; thousands more were scattered up and down the country in dépôts, in stores and factories, in headquarters of commanders. Galliéni routed them out mercilessly, and sent one hundred and fifty thousand of them to their regiments. From his own ministry in the Rue St. Dominique, one chilly November morning, there emerged a melancholy column of five hundred military clerks, who wended their way to the grey lines of the trenches, abominably wet and dismal, in contrast with those comfortable Ministerial quarters. The Minister’s implacability pleased both Paris and the country. Both were ready to do their duty, but needed to be told that there was perfect equality in everything and no preferential treatment. Galliéni struck pitilessly at abuses. A Territorial officer who drove his superior’s car was punished as firmly as a médecin major who showed undue favour to certain of his patients and retarded their return to the Front. At times, no doubt, the Minister was guilty of exaggeration; but even this was typically French and was better than inactivity. In calling up auxiliaries (men exempted from military service because of physical defects) he overlooked the economic needs of the country; but these matters were soon put right.
He proved the foe of red tape and routine. He opened windows in his Ministry, which had been closed for years, and let in fresh air. He broke down the methods of the Circumlocution Office, doing away with useless labour, installing typewriters and feminine secretaries, the wives and daughters of those who had fallen in the field, and thus relieving many men for purely military duties. “Simpler methods,” he cried to all who would hear; “I want results”; and, of course, he obtained them. Then he suppressed recommendations. To Parliament, a little dubious and jealous of its privileges, he explained that, whilst open to proper representations from every soldier, he could not listen to interested recommendations. He re-established the sovereign power of discipline, but at the same time constituted himself a court for the correction of abuse of authority. In the Chamber he conquered sympathies, though obviously uncomfortable in the atmosphere. I saw him the day after his maiden speech as Minister and congratulated him on his success. “Ah, if you only knew how much this sort of thing costs me,” he said, “you would not talk of my success,” and he shrugged his shoulders with a gesture half-humorous, half-ironical. The soldier pleased in the tribune because of his directness and vibrant patriotism; but when Socialists interrupted him it was plain that he chafed at the restrictions of time and place which prevented him from making suitable reply! On one occasion he was about to leave the House because of the behaviour of the Socialists, and was induced with difficulty by M. Viviani to return to his place on the Front Bench. Unconsciously he had repeated the protest of General Pau a few years before. It was unfortunate that it was not more effective, for the opposition of the Socialists arose over a question of regulating the hours of cafés in Marseilles—palpitating subject in time of a national war! The Minister was happiest when dealing with the incorporation of the 1917 class—lads of eighteen who were going to the Front. The Senate before whom he spoke appreciated his patriotic quality, and the fact that, though a disciplinarian and an energetic commander, he yet kept in his heart the sense of sacrifice of young lives given to the country.
In every department Galliéni laboured to promote efficiency and to perfect the great machine in his hands. By some he was reproached for living voluntarily in the great white light of publicity, but Galliéni knew that unless he had the public emphatically on his side his reforms could be crushed by politics. When once he had established his right to freedom of action, then no political cabal, thinking of its influence at the polls, could pull him down. It was for this reason that he took the public into his confidence, so that it might know that the best was being done that could be done. If Galliéni showed no mercy to the shirker, it was because he wished to encourage the peasant in the trenches and the mechanic in the factory by the thought that there was justice for all and favouritism for none. Much of his work was accomplished without the least blare of trumpets or the smallest paragraph in the Press. He reorganised the medical service of the army in the sense of bringing hospitals into line with authority, and suppressed the laisser-aller of the amateur and philanthropic institution.
Though not in the ordinary sense a social figure—indeed, he is the despair of hostesses—Galliéni has social graces and an artistic side to his character wanting from the more burly figure of General Joffre. Though he keeps his counsel in all professional matters, he is not naturally silent; he has a dozen interests, not exclusively military, and touches life at all points. As a young man, following his studies in the military school, he consorted with a literary set in the Latin Quarter, and the friends of his youth were Ernest Daudet and Jean Richepin. He reads and speaks several languages, believing that one should go direct to one’s authorities, and his conversation is informed with study, reflection and travel. He is the type of the modern soldier: savant, philosopher and metaphysician. A wide experience and intellectual tastes have given him toleration, but he has none for incapacity and dereliction of duty. Though accused of overweening ambition, he is ambitious only to serve the country. “For an old man like myself, death on the battlefield would be a recompense,” he said on a recent occasion. “I should die in defending Paris with the enthusiasm of a young lieutenant.” This is the spirit which flamed from the historic poster on the walls of Paris at the moment when the Government departed to Bordeaux: “I have received a mandate to defend Paris, and I intend to fulfil it to the end....”
It was patriotism which induced him to accept the heavy succession of the Ministry of War from M. Millerand. Years before he had been offered the post, but declined it “because it meant presence in the Chamber.” But the war changed everything; it was impossible to urge personal reasons when the country was at stake. But he knows so little of political labels that he makes his friends laugh in confusing one kind of Republican with another. To him they are all the same, provided they have the national interests at heart. For this reason he was equally friendly with men of such divergent tendencies as Gambetta, Jules Simon, Waldeck-Rousseau and Albert de Mun. It is because of his many-sided appeal that he inspires collaborators with peculiar devotion. Two qualities outstand: his perennial youth, represented by a figure which might be that of a young cavalry officer, though he has passed the age limit, and a scientific precision of thought which means that in everything he is clear, precise, and piercing, like a sword-blade.
Illness caused him, unfortunately, to relinquish his post at the Ministry of War in the spring of 1916, after a few months of strenuous work, but his influence remains as that of a good patriot inexorable in his country’s service.
Notes
1 General Galliéni died May 28, 1916, while this book was in the press.