FRANCE: Strategy

” All that France desires is security and reparations.” (Synthesis of Premier Poincaré’s speeches during the past year.)

Early in the week heavy pressure was brought to bear on Premier Poincareéto call two or three new classes to the French Army to prepare for a possible conflict with the growing Nationalist forces of Germany. André Tardieu, leader of the Clemenceau following in the Chamber of Deputies, was foremost in this move, with a threat to overthrow the Ministry if M. Poincaré did not comply.

The apostles of French culture professed themselves amazed and were, perhaps, disconcerted by Hitler’s abortive coup in Bavaria. Poincaré had already telegraphed the French Ambassador in Berlin that this was the sort of thing that France could not tolerate. The astute Ludendorff as military leader and the Irredentist Hitler as political leader of an intransigent Bavaria, threatened the right flank of any possible French ” march to Berlin.” Should such leaders overthrow the Reich, France would be bound to act. The French General Staff foresaw ” the necessity for certain military measures to protect the French troops in the Ruhr.” The first of these measures would be to straighten out the Ruhr salient by taking strategic positions to the South in Westphalia. It was estimated that France could put 200,000 men in motion: 55,000 already in the Ruhr basin, 95,000 in the Rhineland, 50,000 massed near the frontier, including large garrisons at Metz and Strasbourg, with reserves at Belford Epinal and Verdun.

German credit accumulations in foreign countries are estimated at $3,000,000,000. It is stated that a billion is deposited in Great Britain, a billion in the U. S. and a third of a billion divided between Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. Part of these sums would have been immediately available for financing a Reich-wide Nationalist Revolution. This also the French General Staff had in mind. The failure of the Ludendorff-Hitler putsch called a halt in French military measures, as the reports from a Germany in convulsion were so contradictory that even the French General Staff, with its very complete spy-system, could make little of the events.

L’Echo de Paris suggested through its evangel, the publicist ” Pertinax,” that the best the French can do is to leave the Germans to stew in their own juice and organize the Rhineland and Ruhr (for the collection of reparations) into a separate barrier state between Germany and France. This policy the French have all along denied as being their object in seizing the Ruhr. It would, however, be convenient if the events in Germany caused by the Ruhr seizure were to compel Premier Poincaré to adopt Pertinax’s policy against his will.