The question was, How soon should the “forward movement” be resumed? At the earliest moment, on a level with Paris, in the valley of the Marne? Or should the retreat continue to a line forty miles farther back behind the Seine? Continuing the retreat meant yielding that much more territory to the Germans, but the barrier of the Seine would provide a breathing spell for the armies to gather strength when not under direct pressure of the enemy. As the Germans’ chief aim was to destroy the French armies, so “our chief aim,” Belin urged, must be to “keep ourselves alive.” To take the “prudent” attitude and reform behind the Seine was now both a national duty and the course best designed to frustrate the aims of the enemy. So Belin argued, eloquently supported by Berthelot. Joffre listened—and next day issued General Order No. 4.
It was September 1, eve of the anniversary of Sedan, and the outlook for France appeared as tragic as it had then. Official confirmation of the Russian defeat at Tannenberg came in from the French military attaché. General Order No. 4, in contrast to the firm tone of the Order that followed the debacle on the frontiers, reflected the shaken optimism of GQG after a week of spreading invasion. It prescribed continued retreat for the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Armies “for some time to come” and set the Seine and Aube as the limit of the movement “without necessarily implying that this limit will be reached.” “As soon as the Fifth Army has escaped the menace of envelopment,” the armies “will resume the offensive”; but unlike the previous Order it named no specific time or place. Yet it contained the genesis of the future battle, for it spoke of bringing reinforcements from the Armies of Nancy and Epinal to participate in the renewed offensive and said “the mobile troops of the fortified camp of Paris may also take part in the general action.”
Upon this as upon every other act and order of the next four days, layers of dispute were to be heaped by the partisans of Joffre and those of Gallieni in a long and painful controversy over the origins of the Battle of the Marne. Unquestionably Joffre had in mind a general battle if not the battle at the time and place it was actually to occur. The battle that he envisaged would take place when the five pursuing German armies would come “between the horns of Paris and Verdun,” and the French Armies would be drawn up in a shallow curve or net stretched across the center of France. Joffre thought he had a week’s time to make his arrangements, for he told Messimy, who came to say goodbye to him on September 1, that he expected to resume the offensive on September 8 and anticipated that it would be called “the battle of Brienne-le-Château.” A town twenty-five miles behind the Marne, about halfway between that river and the Seine, Brienne had been the scene of a Napoleonic victory over Blücher. It may have seemed an appropriate omen to Joffre. Amid the general gloom of further enforced retreat, under the awful shadow of the approaching enemy, his sangfroid, his appearance of serenity and confidence, once again impressed Messimy.
It did not comfort Paris which saw itself uncovered by a retreat of the armies to the Seine. Joffre called Millerand and gave him an unsparing summary of the military situation. The “accentuated” retreat of the English had uncovered the left flank of Lanrezac’s Army so that the retreat must continue until Lanrezac was disengaged. Maunoury had been ordered to fall back on Paris and place himself “in relation” to Gallieni, although Joffre said nothing about putting the Sixth Army under Gallieni’s command. Enemy columns were taking a direction slightly away from Paris, which might offer some “respite”; nevertheless he considered it “urgent and essential” that the government quit Paris “without delay,” either this evening or tomorrow.
Gallieni, informed of this development by a frantic government, called Joffre who managed to avoid speaking to him but was given his message: “We are in no condition to resist .… General Joffre must understand that if Maunoury cannot hold, Paris cannot withstand the enemy. Three active corps must be added to the forces of the fortified camp.” Later that afternoon Joffre called back and informed Gallieni that he was putting Maunoury’s Army under his orders. They would now become the mobile troops of the fortified camp of Paris. Such troops are traditionally commanded independently of the Field Army and could be withheld from a general battle at the will of the garrison commander. Joffre had no intention of giving them up. In a deft maneuver on the same day he requested the Minister of War to put the fortified camp of Paris and all its forces under his authority as Commander in Chief, “to enable me to use the mobile forces of the garrison in the field if the case arises.” Millerand, no less under Joffre’s spell than Messimy, so ordered it on September 2.
Meanwhile Gallieni had an army at last. Maunoury’s forces which he could now dispose of consisted of one active division belonging to the VIIth Corps, a native Moroccan brigade, and four reserve divisions: the 61st and 62nd under General Ebener which had been taken from Paris originally, and the 55th and 56th Reserves which had fought so valiantly in Lorraine. Joffre agreed to add, since it was not under his control anyway, the first-rate 45th Division of Zouaves from Algiers which was just then detraining in Paris and one active corps from the field army. Like Kluck, he picked a damaged one, the IVth Corps of the Third Army which had suffered disastrous losses in the Ardennes. It was receiving replacements, however, and its transfer from the Third Army’s front at Verdun to the Paris front was a reinforcement of which Kluck thought the French incapable. Troops of the IVth Corps, Gallieni was informed, would arrive by train in Paris on September 3 and 4.
Instantly upon receiving Joffre’s verbal assignment to him of the Sixth Army, Gallieni drove north to make contact with his new command. How late was the hour was apparent when he passed refugees converging upon Paris in flight from the oncoming Germans, a look on their faces of “terror and despair.” At Pontoise, just outside Paris to the northwest where the 61st and 62nd Divisions were coming in, all was disorder and dismay. The troops who had been caught in severe combat as they retreated were wearied and bloody; the local population was in panic at the sound of the guns and at reports of Uhlans in the neighborhood. After talking to General Ebener, Gallieni went on to see Maunoury at Creil on the Oise, thirty miles north of Paris. He gave Maunoury orders to blow up the Oise bridges and to try to delay the enemy’s advance as he fell back on Paris and under no circumstances to allow the Germans to get between him and the capital.
Hurrying back to Paris he passed a happier sight than the refugees—the splendid Zouaves of the 45th Algerian marching through the boulevards to take their places at the forts. In their bright jackets and ballooning trousers they created a sensation and gave Parisians something to cheer once again.
But inside the ministries the mood was black. Millerand had passed on the “heart-breaking” facts to the President: “all our hopes are shattered; we are in full retreat all along the line; Maunoury’s Army is falling back on Paris .…” As Minister of War, Millerand refused to take responsibility for the government remaining an hour longer than tomorrow evening, September 2. Poincaré faced “the saddest event of my life.” It was decided that the entire administration must move to Bordeaux as a unit, leaving none behind in Paris lest the public make invidious comparisons between ministers.
Upon Gallieni’s return to the city that evening, he learned from Millerand that all civil and military authority for the foremost city in Europe as it came under siege would be left in his hands. Except for the Prefect of the Seine and the Prefect of Police, “I would be alone.” The Prefect of Police, upon whom he would have to depend, had been in office, he discovered, barely an hour. The former Prefect, M. Hennion, on learning that the government was leaving, flatly refused to stay behind, and upon being ordered to remain at his post, resigned “for reasons of health.” For Gallieni the exit of the government at least had the advantage of silencing the advocates of an open city; their legal excuse was gone and he was free to defend Paris as a fortified camp. Although he “preferred to be without ministers,” he thought that “one or two might have stayed for the sake of appearances.” This was hardly fair to those
who would have liked to stay, but Gallieni’s contempt for politicians was all-inclusive.
Expecting the Germans at the gates in two days, he stayed up all night with his staff, making “all my dispositions to give battle north of the city from Pontoise to the Ourcq,” that is, over an area forty-five miles wide. The Ourcq is a small river that feeds into the Marne east of Paris.
Late that night information reached GQG that could have spared the government the necessity of flight. During the day a bag was brought to Captain Fagalde, Intelligence Officer of the Fifth Army. It had been found on the body of a German cavalry officer attached to Kluck’s Army who, while riding in an automobile, had been shot and killed by a French patrol. In the bag were papers, including a map smeared with blood which showed the lines of advance for each of Kluck’s corps and the point each was to reach at the end of that day’s march. The lines for the whole army pointed in a southeasterly direction from the Oise toward the Ourcq.
GQG correctly interpreted Captain Fagalde’s find as showing Kluck’s intention to slide by Paris between the Sixth and the Fifth Armies in an effort to roll up the left of the main French line. If they also recognized that this meant he would forgo attack on Paris, they took no great pains to impress that view upon the government. When in the morning Colonel Penelon, liaison officer between GQG and the President, brought Poincaré news of Kluck’s change of direction he did not bring any suggestion from Joffre that the government need not leave. On the contrary Joffre sent word that the government must go, that Kluck’s intentions could not be certain, that his columns were already at Senlis and Chantilly, twenty miles away, and Paris would be under his guns very soon. How far the significance of Kluck’s turn was understood by Poincaré or Millerand is hard to say; in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight. Urgency, even panic, was in the air. Once having gone through the agony of coming to a decision, the government found it hard to change. Millerand, in any event, continued adamant for departure.
It was September 2, Sedan Day, and “the hateful moment had come.” When he learned that arrangements had been made for the government to leave in the middle of the night instead of by day in the sight of the public, Poincaré’s “grief and humiliation” increased. The Cabinet insisted that his presence was legally required at the seat of government; even Mme. Poincaré, who begged to continue her hospital work in Paris as a public gesture, was not allowed to remain. Ambassador Myron Herrick of the United States, his face all “puckered up” came to say goodbye with tears in his eyes.
To Herrick, as to everyone inside the French capital at that moment, “the terrible onslaught of the Germans,” as he wrote to his son, “seems almost beyond resistance.” He had received a warning from the Germans advising him to leave for the provinces as “whole quarters” of Paris might be destroyed. He was determined to stay, however, and promised Poincaré to protect the museums and monuments of Paris under the American flag as being “in the custody of humanity at large.” Already he had formed a plan, fitting the desperate and exalted mood of the hour, that “if the Germans reached the outskirts of the city and demanded its surrender, to go out and talk with their army commander and, if possible, the Kaiser.” As custodian of their embassy, at their request, he could demand a hearing. In later days, when friends who had lived through the first week of September in Paris used to count themselves a select number, Gallieni would say, “Don’t forget, there was also Herrick.”
At seven o’clock Gallieni went to take farewell of Millerand. The War Ministry in the Rue St. Dominique was “sad, dark and deserted” and the courtyard filled with huge moving vans in which the archives were being piled for shipment to Bordeaux. The remainder were burned. The process of packing up created a “lugubrious” atmosphere. Climbing the unlit staircase, Gallieni found the Minister alone in an empty room. Now that the government was leaving, Millerand did not hesitate to allow Paris and everyone in it to come under fire. His orders to Gallieni, who hardly needed to be told, were to defend Paris “à outrance.”
“Do you understand, M. le Ministre, the significance of the words, à outrance?” Gallieni asked. “They mean destruction, ruins, dynamiting bridges in the center of the city.”
“À outrance,” Millerand repeated. Saying goodbye, he looked at Gallieni as at a man he was unlikely ever to see again, and Gallieni felt “pretty well persuaded, myself, that I was remaining to be killed.”
Some hours later, in darkness and self-imposed secrecy that afflicted many of them with a sense of shame, ministers and members of Parliament boarded the train for Bordeaux, clothing the inglorious moment in a noble statement to the public next morning. “To hold out and fight,” it said, must now become the order of the day. France would hold out and fight while on the seas England cut the enemy’s communications with the rest of the world and the Russians “continue to advance and carry the decisive blow to the heart of the German empire!” (It was not considered the moment to add news of a Russian defeat.) In order to give the greatest “élan and effectiveness” to French resistance, the government, at the demand of the military, was moving “momentarily” to a place where it could remain in unbroken and constant contact with the whole country. “Frenchmen, let us be worthy of these tragic circumstances. We will obtain the final victory—by unfaltering will, by endurance, by tenacity—by refusing to perish.”
Gallieni was content with a short sharp notice worded deliberately to dispel rumors that Paris had been declared an open city and to let the people know what to expect. His proclamation appeared on the walls of Paris in the morning:
ARMY OF PARIS. CITIZENS OF PARIS.
The members of the Government of the Republic have left Paris to give a new impulse to the national defense. I have received a mandate to defend Paris against the invader. This mandate I shall carry out to the end.
Paris, September 3, 1914
Military Governor of Paris, Commander of the Army of Paris
Gallieni.
The shock to the public was all the greater since GQG’s policy of issuing only the least explicit communiqués had left people uninformed as to the seriousness of the military situation. The government appeared to have decamped without due cause. Its nocturnal going off left a painful impression which was not dispelled by what proved to be an extended and tenacious affection for Bordeaux. Puns were made at the expense of the government, calling them “tournedos à la Bordelaise,” and the crowds who stormed the railway stations in their wake inspired a parody of “The Marseillaise”:
“Aux gares, citoyens!
Montez dans les wagons!”
These were “days of anguish” for the Military Government of Paris. With the armies retreating north and east of the city, the problem of how long to hold and when to destroy the eighty bridges in the region caused increasing tension and anxiety. Commanders in each sector, as soon as they had assured passage of their own troops, were anxious to blow up the bridges behind them in order to cut off pursuit. GQG’s orders were to let “no bridge fall intact into enemy hands”; at the same time the bridges would be needed for a return to the offensive. Three different commands were operating in the area: Gallieni’s, Joffre’s and, geographically between them, that of Sir John French whose chief concern since Kitchener’s visit was to make a show of his independence of everybody. Engineers of the Paris camp guarding the bridges were beset by a conflict of orders. “A disaster is preparing,” reported an officer of Engineers to General Hirschauer.
By nightfall of September 2 the British had reached the Marne and got across next day. Below Compiègne the troops discovered they were marching off their maps, and now it dawned on them that this was not after all a “strategic retreat” as they had been told by their officers. Their bases at Boulogne and Havre had by now been evacuated and all stores and personnel moved down to Saint-Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire.
About a day’s march behind them the Fifth Army was still not yet out of danger of envelopme
nt. In the continuing hot weather, retreat and pursuit went on, prey as tired as pursuers. Since the Battle of Guise the Fifth Army had been marching eighteen to twenty miles a day. Along its route groups of deserters pillaged farms and homes and spread panic among the population with tales of German terror. Executions took place. Lanrezac thought no army ever underwent such an ordeal as his. At the same time a British officer said of the BEF, “I would never have believed that men could be so tired and so hungry and yet live.” Trying to find a source of encouragement during these days, Henry Wilson said to Colonel Huguet, “The Germans are over-hasty. They urge the pursuit too fast. The whole thing is overdone. They are bound to make a big mistake and then your hour will come.”
Up to this point Joffre and his advisers at GQG, although aware of Kluck’s inward wheel, did not see in it an important or early opportunity for attack on his flank. Kluck’s shift in pursuit of the British on September 2 left them uncertain whether he might not be turning back against Paris. In any event their minds were not on Paris but were fixed on a general battle along the Seine, not to take place until they had reestablished a solid front. After further anxious consultation at GQG, Joffre came to a decision to continue the retreat “several days’ march to the rear” of where the armies then stood, which would allow time to bring up reinforcements from his right wing. Despite the risk of weakening the barely held line of the Moselle, he decided to bring over a corps each from the First and Second Armies.