FRANCE: Good Grey General

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On August 25, 1914, seven German Armies totaling 1,700,000 men were spread over a jagged 300-mile front from the Swiss frontier to the outskirts of Paris. In 20 days they had advanced like a vast hinge whose outer point traveled 180 miles, smashed through Belgium, through Mons and down the Oise, occupied 14,000 square miles of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The French plan of an offensive through the German centre had been abandoned. At Paris, in the headquarters of General Joffre, commanding the French forces, the shock had bereft most officers of any plan except continued retreat.

The original German plan provided that the First Army under Kluck was to pass through Belgium, shoulder the Belgian Army out of the war, march southwest of Paris across the Seine, protecting the German right flank. But in the uncertainty of movement and position, Kluck lost direction, veered toward Paris instead of circling southwest to envelop it. Sensing the significance of the German right wing’s undershot, in the evening of August 25, Marshal Joffre’s tactical adviser, a smooth, silent, chubby little 42-year-old officer named Maurice Gamelin had written out Joffre’s historic Instruction No.2: “Having been unable to carry out the offensive maneuver originally planned, future operations will be conducted in such a way as to reconstruct on our left a force capable to resuming the offensive . . . while the other armies hold the enemy in check for such time as may be necessary.”

Kluck continued southeast. Early in the morning of September 4, General Galliéni, military governor of Paris in France’s greatest emergency, saw that Kluck was still moving southeast of the city and exposing the German right flank. He rushed his troops into position, telephoned Joffre asking for permission to attack. At six that same morning Colonel Gamelin, inconspicuous in his dark chasseur uniform, mysterious to other officers in his influence on Joffre, saw the same opportunity. He left his lodgings, crossed to Joffre’s Operations Section, where officers were arguing over huge military maps scaled at three miles to the inch. He pointed out the opportunity on the map, urged an advance the next day. Joffre came in. Gamelin repeated his opinion. Joffre seemed impressed, discussed it with other officers who were skeptical, postponed decision but wired asking about the condition of the troops who would be called upon to bear the brunt of the offensive. As he was having dinner that night the answers came back. They were moderately encouraging. After dinner Galliéni got Joffre on the telephone, renewed his arguments, and at ten o’clock that night Joffre issued his Instruction No. 6: “It is desirable to take advantage of the exposed position of the German First Army . . . all dispositions will be taken during the day of Sept. 5, with a view of launching an attack on the 6.”

Marching into position on Sept. 5, French Moroccan troops accidentally collided with Kluck’s cavalry and reserves. Kluck sent corps after corps to reinforce them, opened a hole between the First and Second German armies through which British and French troops, advancing on schedule, poured the next day. The Second German Army retreated north and east, separated further from Kluck’s men, who were now being attacked from the rear. Three days later, faced with disaster, the whole German front withdrew, retreated 60 miles in five days, abandoned the attack on Paris, lost the chance of a lightning victory and with it the World War.

Reputation. The War made no big military reputations at the time. “Papa” Joffre was kicked upstairs as early as 1916 and General Foch was bitterly criticized for misjudging enemy strength and strategy. The British high command shifted from Sir John French to Sir Douglas Haig. The Germans fired Moltke, then tried Falkenhayn and finally brought from the East old Paul von Hindenburg, who lost his war. But a few younger men in secondary posts came through the ordeal with reputations not only untarnished but so brightened that now, a quarter of a century after Armageddon 1914-18, it is they to whom their countrymen have given their arms to command in the war-darkened world of 1939.

The U. S., for instance, has such a man in its new Chief of Staff George Marshall, who, as chief of staff of the First Army, ably disposed the troops in the greatest battle in which the U. S. ever participated, the Meuse-Argonne. British Chief of the Imperial General Staff Lord Gort showed no great strategic ability in France but some incredible heroism, for which he won a V. C. But by far the most outstanding War-trained officer now in high command is Maurice Gustave Gamelin. At 66 he is the head of what, by almost unanimous acclaim, is today the world’s finest military machine, one which he did much to create. His responsibilities are not only national but international. Supreme Commander of all French armed forces, a title not held by any soldier of France since Napoleon I, he is also slated to become commander-in-chief of the armies of France, Great Britain and their allies in the event of war with the Axis.

The eyes of Europe are naturally upon General Gamelin, and last week they followed him to the south of France. To the east the Italians were holding their greatest peacetime maneuvers, an exercise calculated to show what they would do if General Gamelin ever undertook to do what Napoleon did in 1796, strike through the Maritime Alpine passes and sweep across the Po Valley (see p. 19).

General Gamelin is a world authority on Napoleon’s movements. It is his quiet boast that he can recite every Army order Napoleon issued — and to whom. But, although he is quite aware that the Po route may some day be his own, the Italian maneuvers were not his chief interest last week. Since he took charge of her armies, France has acquired a possible new border to defend or cross, the border between France and Spain. Having vainly urged Léon Blum to pitch in with the Loyalists and lick Francisco Franco in 1936, General Gamelin was now doing the next best thing. He was inspecting the 250,000 interned Loyalist troops quartered in French concentration camps. If Generalissimo Franco should squeeze an attacked France from the south, Generalissimo Gamelin would undoubtedly arm his 250,000 Loyalist guests and turn them loose on their former enemies. Like most of his countrymen, Maurice Gamelin hopes this may never be necessary. But the terse little (5 ft. 4 in.) general has a terse little motto: “Optimism is a luxury.”

Philosopher. Both ancestry and environment made Maurice Gamelin a soldier. He was born in 1872 (the year after the Franco-Prussian War) in Paris at No. 262 Boulevard St. Germain, just across from the War Ministry, in whose shadow he played war games as a child. His mother even painted a charming picture of him at the age of 20 months, beating a toy drum (see cut, p. 20). On his father’s side he was descended from at least five generals, one of whom served under Louis XVI. His father, Zephirin Auguste Joseph Gamelin, became Controller General of the French Army after he had been gravely wounded at Solferino, during Napoleon Ill’s fight against the Austrians.

Maurice first went to the Collège Stanislas, a strict and scholarly Catholic school with considerable social standing and a military flavor. One of his teachers was Mgr. Henri Marie Alfred Baudrillart, now Cardinal Baudrillart, who still remains one of General Gamelin’s best friends. At Stanislas, methodical Maurice further disciplined his mind by memorizing ten lines of prose at night (because it was harder than poetry) and reading a book of philosophy a week. After Stanislas he entered St. Cyr, French West Point, where in 1893 he finished first in a class of 449.

There followed three years of service with the 3rd Regiment of the Tirailleurs Algériens, because he wanted to see some rough service, and three years with the Army’s Geographical Service, because he liked to paint landscapes in water color, survey and map. In 1899 he was admitted to the War College, where he studied tactics under Lieut. Colonel, later Marshal Foch, who particularly noticed his qualities. He graduated in 1902 with the commendation of “très bien.”

During the next four years he had various field commands and in 1906 he became orderly officer to General Joffre, then commander of the 6th Infantry Division in Paris. In 1912, when Joffre was promoted to the Supreme War Council, Gamelin was chosen as Joffre’s chef de cabinet, or military secretary. During this time the French General Staff was discussing (but only discussing) the possibility of a German violation of Belgian neutrality to attack France. Gamelin made a study of it and wrote out a defense of such an attack. That was the germ of Joffre’s Instruction No. 2.

During those critical days General Joffre, who had called Gamelin “one of my red blood corpuscles,” came to admire his little aide’s unfailing composure as well as his swift and incisive tactical foresight. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, he observed: “If this is philosophy, it is time all generals were philosophers.”

“Minimum Losses.” Not only was Gamelin a gifted staff officer; the number and quality of his citations in the field make him stand out in the Wartime company of blunderers and butchers like Sir Galahad at a gang shooting.

At 4:40 on the morning of March 21, 1918, a heavy German bombardment opened a vast offensive designed to break between the French and British armies where they joined in the devastated regions of the Somme. Gas soon shrouded the British batteries and their fire ceased. A little before 9 a. m. masses of German troops released from the Eastern Front poured through the fog toward General Cough’s British—battalion after battalion, column after column, complete with field bakeries, ammunition trains, medical units, until more than 1,000,000 menwere in motion, and advancing columns stretched back 45 miles behind the German lines. On a 75-mile front the Allied lines gave way as the British lost 150,000 men and British and French liaison was broken. The French VI Army Corps was sent in to plug the gap and Gamelin’s 9th Division, first in position, faced six German divisions rolling forward under the tremendous momentum of their advance.

Fighting defensively on a six-to-twelve-mile front, Gamelin’s 9th fell back slowly, until on March 26, when the German advance had traveled 28 miles, it was almost isolated as units on both flanks gave way. Gamelin was faced with two possible movements: he could withdraw at once and take heavy losses, or counterattack on his flanks and, risking annihilation, take the chance of pulling his people out in comparative safety that night. He prepared to attack, moved his headquarters to the front, casually invited some British generals in to dinner—it was just before the emergency made Foch Supreme Allied Commander—watched his troops retreat in good order after dark. Then he got a new command made up of the 9th and another division, the remnants of two more, seven squadrons of French cavalry, one British cavalry division, took them into the joint British-French action that halted the German offensive in early April.

The secret of Gamelin’s military success lay largely in his old mapmaker’s and landscapist’s instinct for geography. Not only was he able to take the maximum advantage of terrain so as to conserve manpower, but his shrewd disposition of fire power constantly enhanced the offensive quality of his command. His many citations praised his “highest qualities of method and of inspection” and his ability to carry his objectives “in the course of a general offensive at the cost of minimum losses.” The French soldier did not like him less for that and the present French Army does not forget this quality in its Commander-in-Chief. “Very much all there,” was the way one British general characterized Gamelin in the War years. He appears, during the entire War, to have made no major error in judgment. From that time on he was a marked man.

Brazil to Syria to Home. In 1919 General Gamelin headed the French military mission to Brazil, a job requiring the greatest tact since the old German pre-War influence in the Brazilian Army was still strong. In 1925 he was recalled and soon sent to Syria to help put down the Druse revolt, a suppression which he later succeeded in accomplishing alone with considerable bloodshed on the part of the Druses. He was on hand when French planes and artillery wiped out 1,456 civilians in the native quarters of Damascus, thus proving that Maurice Gamelin had no particular interest in inflicting minimum losses on his country’s enemies. He was made commander of France’s Army of the Levant, then brought home in 1928. Three years later he became Chief of Staff and in 1935 achieved what was then the biggest French military job, that of Vice President of the Supreme War Council (the President is the War Minister).

As France’s No. 1 Soldier, Gamelin has continued the Maginot Line to the sea, mechanized the Army to a point below Germany’s but at which he thinks it can be most effective, extended the conscript period from a year, to 18 months, to two years—this over the bitter opposition of most French politicians. He has confidence in the Army he has built. During the Munich crisis he believed the French Army was ready to fight, and General Gamelin quietly went to London to tell the statesmen so. He got about the same attention that he got in 1936 from short-lived Premier Sarraut when he told the Government he could chase the Germans out of the Rhineland if they wanted him to. The thoroughgoing General would not agree to shove off, however, without ordering a general mobilization and M. Sarraut feared it was too close to the general election to risk it. The history of Adolf Hitler’s aggressions dates from there.

War plans are not war plans once they have been made public, and General Gamelin’s are not exceptions. Nobody but the French high command knows what the French Army intends to do if & when it comes in conflict with the Axis. Best semiprofessional guess suggests it would try to knock the spots off Italy’s northern industrial area by air, call up all its 5,000,000 reserves, sit tight behind its Maginot Line and see what happened. A hint in favor of the last course comes from a remark General Gamelin made when asked if the French had considered making an early drive on the German Limes: “What! I do not propose to startthe war by a battle of Verdun!”

Benevolent Formality. Maurice Gamelin is generally characterized as colorless. That, however, is the way the French have learned to like their generals best. Napoleons I and III had plenty of color but they did not pay off at the finish. In 1889 colorful General Boulanger came close to seizing the country. The colorful military cliques of the century’s turn—on one’ side the Catholics and reactionaries; on the other the Radical Socialists and Freemasons—gave France its Dreyfus case. Nowadays no French soldier votes and on the subject of politics the Army is known as la grande muette (the big dumb woman). Particularly in these times, France wants her soldiers mute and professional, and the mutest and most professional is Maurice Gamelin.

The good grey little General leads a good grey little life. Just before 9 o’clock each morning he leaves his apartment on the third floor of a five-story house at No. 55 Avenue Foch, near Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. He is driven in a staff car to his office in a long, low, old-fashioned building at No. 4 bis Boulevard des Invalides, below the gold dome of Napoleon’s tomb.

Except in summer, when the Generalissimo is often away weeks at a time on tours of inspection of French military establishments, Gamelin works at his office all day receiving visitors, holding staff consultations, reading reports, laying out plans, until about 7 p. m.

General Gamelin is very easily approached, his voice is quiet and he is always calm. (“It’s no use getting angry at things, it’s a matter of indifference to them.”) His well-trained memory is still prodigious. He is said not only to know every road near any French frontier, but also to know by name and sight every French officer down through the rank of colonel. He is not chummy with his staff, but treats them with what they call “benevolent formality.”

The General usually wears, except on ceremonial occasions, a dark civilian suit. He does not mind the numerous luncheons and dinners he has to attend, likes to go out evenings, to hear opera and ancient music. If he stays home he reads. His library is stocked principally with philosophy, folklore, political and military history and treatises on his other old favorite: map making. He has few friends, but one of his best, oddly enough, is that other able professional, Marshal Pietro Badoglio of Italy. On his 55th birthday General Gamelin married. He and his wife, who is as neutral-toned as her husband, have no children. Madame la Générale enjoys going to maneuvers.

When he was in Brazil, the General did a great deal of riding. He occasionally does some now. When he commanded Chasseurs Alpins he skied and climbed mountains. Mountain skiing is his favorite sport, but he gets almost none of it nowadays. Nor has he touched his paint box for years. “If we could be sure of a little peace for a while,” he recently sighed to an aide, “I might get back to painting.”

Even the few anecdotes about this thoroughly professional little man take on some of their subject’s small, neat dignity. Last year, visiting a Chasseurs’ encampment on a mountain plateau, he shook hands with familiar oldtimers and then was taken to the picket line to see some of the St. Bernards who do the outfit’s liaison work. Gravely the General kneeled down and shook hands with the best of them, too.

On Bastille Day, month ago, down the Champs-Elysées rolled one of the most blazingly colorful military parades ever seen. There were white-plumed Republican Guards in scarlet and blue; bear-skinned, red-coated, white-cross-belted British Guardsmen; rakish, bereted Chasseurs à pied (Blue Devils); smart ski-shouldering Chasseurs Alpins; bearded Foreign Legionnaires; burnoosed Spahis with shoulder-slung rifles on Arabian ponies or brandishing lances on racing dromedaries; turbaned brown Madagascar riflemen; sun-helmeted white Colonial scouts; fezzed black Senegalese sharpshooters; earthshaking, ear-shattering tanks—all ablaze with the armed might of Imperial France. In the reviewing stand, half-hidden behind politicians and visiting dignitaries, stood a little man with grey hair, a small grey mustache, in a small blue-grey uniform—Commander-in-Chief Gamelin. He could hardly be seen. But the troops knew he was there, and so did the people.