AUTUMN BOOKS I
The First Blitzkrieg
BY ANTHONY HARTLEY Tim Franco-Prussian War, which is now the subject of an intensely exciting and readable book by Michael Howard,* looks at once ana- chronistic and modern to twentieth-century eyes. On the one hand, there are all those highnesses attending the Prussian headquarters, the red and blue uniforms and curiously jagged sil- houettes of the French troops, the patrols of Ghlans and early memories of Maupassant short stories: 'How the Prussians came to . . .' But there is also Moltke and his Prussian general staff; there are the francs-tireurs, the bombard- ment of cities and the desperate organisation for total war carried out by the French delegation at Tours and Bordeaux.
Something of this mixed character even affected the attitudes of individuals: In negotia- tion Bismarck behaved reasonably--like a states- man of the eighteenth century dealing with a dynastic struggle. But it was also he who, with an eye on German public opinion, insisted most strongly on the bombardment of Paris and de- manded that villages in which the francs-tireurs carried out guerrilla forays should be burned and all the male inhabitants hanged. He, too, was affected by the national war which the Franco-Prussian struggle had become. As for the French, they were intoxicated by the idea of a repetition of Ninety-two and the waves of revo- lutionary rhetoric with which that memory was surrounded. After being bemused by the Napo- leonic tradition they were duped by that of the Jacobins, which led them to believe that a nation in arms could be as effective against Moltke as It had been against Brunswick. prom the very beginning the fact that the Germans had an efficiently mobilised national arnlY gave them a great advantage. Their superiority in numbers was not great, but it did exist. Far more important, the careful work of Moltke and his staff meant that complicated Illantzeuvres could be executed without the armies failing to bits, as was the case on the French side. Railways were kept running,. food arrived at the proper time, ammunition did not run short, maps were actually available for the use of line officers—all these essential features of Modern warfare being more or less totally lack- ing in the French armies.
In fact, it was not so much that Prussian arms Were better, though the excellence of their ar- tillery and its percussion fuses compensated for the superior range of M. Chassepot's breach- loading rifle. It was not even that individual .P.rench commanders were so bad, though Napo- leon le Petit seems to have communicated his spirit of hopeless resignation and invalid incapa- citY to most of the top imperial generals. Mr. ,noward shows clearly that victory could often have been secured by the excellence of French troops: 'the indictment against Bazaine is not he lost the battles of Rezonville and Grave- * TiE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR. By Michael Howard. (Hart-Davies, 63s.) lotte: it is that he failed to win them when vic- tory lay within his grasp.' But at no time did the French commanders really have their forces under the type of control which Moltke enjoyed over his. The history of the war is a constant tale of orders gone astray, rendezvous not kept, a total failure of intelligence which extended even to ignorance of the whereabouts of friendly formations—let alone those of the enemy.
By the time the first- and second-line imperial armies had been rounded up into Metz and Sedan by sweeping Prussian outflanking move- ments, it was too late for the French to react. The overthrow of the Second Empire and the arrival of the Republicans to power gave an added impetus to their efforts, but it also prac- tically coincided with the investiture of Paris, and new armies could hardly be formed in time to relieve a city whose fall would necessarily be fatal to further resistance. So the untried armies of the Loire, the West and the North were squandered in futile attempts to interrupt the siege nr to assist a sortie which hovered like a mirage before the eyes of the French leaders. Mr. Howard's account of this stage of the war is one of the most interesting parts of his book. Generals like Chanzy and Faidherbe, who kept up an indomitable struggle with armies which had become a rabble, deserve to be better known than they are. Much of the credit which has gone to Gambetta should really be theirs. For Gambetta, heroically active though he was, cannot be said to have contributed very help- fully to the actual conduct of operations, and his chief assistant, Freycinet, even less so. When they were not badgering overtaxed commanders with telegrams urging them to action, they were suggesting complicated strategic schemes which were obviously impossible to execute with the material available.
The war, in fact, provides two singular ex- amples of the misunderstanding which can exist between military and civilian minds. The Government of National Defence continually made impossible demands on its generals and their troops, carrying their distrust of profes- sional soldiers to the point of total disregard of what was practicable in modern warfare. At the German headquarters in Versailles ill-feeling be- tween Bismarck and Moltke rose as the siege of Paris went on without any sign of French capitulation. The Chancellor, conscious of the home front and a difficult diplomatic situation abroad, wished for a quick peace, which he was ready to ensure by not insisting on impossible terms. The Chief-of-Staff, on the contrary, wanted his military pound of flesh and talked of ad- vancing up to the Pyrenees if necessary to crush all further French resistance. These were fore- tastes of conflicts which were to be seen on a more majestic and more disastrous scale during the First World War.
At the end, of course, there had to be capitula- tion. Once the position in Paris became impos- sible, an armistice was the only possible alterna- tive, despite the heady oratory of Left-wing clubs and municipalities. Bismarck stuck to his intention of lenient, peace terms, though he was forced to insist on occupation of Paris and the cession of Metz. Thiers was glad enough to accept. As he told the new' Assembly at Bor- deaux, there was no room for childishness; it was a question of war or peace. Unfortunately, this lesson was not learned where it was most needed, in Paris itself, and the fires of the Com- mune were fed with the combustible stuff of outraged patriotism and conviction of betrayal. The Commune was part of the price which France paid for guerre a outrance, and there is endless speculation to be made on whether it would not have been better to have asked for peace after Sedan. Probably the choice is not a real one: no new regime could have afforded to begin its career by the surrender of Alsace- Lorraine. Moreover, prospects appeared a good deal brighter at the time than they do in retro- spect. Even now it seems that the French might have cut the communications of the Prussian army before Paris, forcing it to raise the siege. That they did not achieve this meant a long and fruitless struggle, ending with a defeat inexplic- able to those who had been taught that France had only to be republican to conquer.
As for the Germans, as they henceforth were, the result of the war for them was to all ap- pearances a triumphant one. But there were points of weakness in their position which were to be felt after Bismarck's death. Only the master-tactician could keep France isolated, thereby rendering innocuous its unrelenting hos- tility. The idea of the revanche was born the day of the signature of the peace treaty. As Chanzy said: 'He who forgets it should be hanged, but he who speaks of it before its time should be shot with the full honours of his rank.' One day France would find allies, and, on that day, Ger- man preponderance would disappear. Bismarck can never have imagined how terribly this threat would be realised.
Indeed, it was militarism which gained by the Franco-Prussian War. As Mr. Howard points out, the new methods of war, implying the mobi- lisation of whole populations, had profound poli- tical effect's. The fact that two days' advance in mobilisation could make a vital difference helped to establish that meshing system of precaution and counter-precaution which played a consider- able part in unleashing the First World War. From this followed the high degree of sensitivity and quick, drastic reactions of what Gerhard Ritter has called 'continental' foreign policy. In fact, Mr. Howard's excellent book is of far wider significance than a simple history of a nineteenth-century war. It is an introduction to that history of the influence of military con- siderations on European foreign policy from 1871 to 1914, which does not exist in English and which he is obviously the man to write.
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