HEADS OF ARMIES

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20034, 5 September 1939, Page 10

HEADS OF ARMIES

PEACE FRONT, AIM GAMELIN AMD GORT STAFF TALK LEADERS COMMON MEMORIES ' LESSONS OF GREAT WAR. The two most important people in the world to-day, next to Herr Hitler and Mr. Neville Chamberlain, are Marie Gustave Gamelin and John. Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, sixth Viscount Gort, writes Carli Olsson in Illustrated. Gamelin, as supreme chief of all | the armed forces of France —navy, army and air force —wields more power than any Frenchman since Napoleon. Lord Gort, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, is head of the British Army and all the military machine of the Empire. On the decisions of these two men, mutually taken at the first great staff talks in France, will depend not only our ultimate chances of victory if and when the storm breaks, but also the time in which it will be achieved. Only three years ago the phrase "staff talks” suddenly became a word of dread to many. When some first, tentative discussions began just after Hitler walked into the Rhineland there was an immediate outcry throughout the whole of the press. They were considered to be a menace to peace. Lloyd George got up in the House of Comm'ons and flatly told the country that he blamed staff talks for 1914-1918. He said that pre-war discussions among military staffs of England, France and Russia, and between Germany and Austria-Hungary, had so committed the countries concerned, that when crisis was sliding into catastrophe the diplomats and politicians were powerless to prevent it. The statement was immediately denied. But whether if was the whole truth or not, the 193 G AngloFrench staff talks were carried out under strict control and on a much watered-down agenda supplied by the Cabinet. To-day, however, we know that staff talks as complete and far-reach-ing as possible, so far .from being a menace to peace, are almost our last chance of obtaining it, and our sole means of putting up an effective front at the outset of a war against aggression. A God to the French So far as France is concerned, it is not necessary to mention anybody besides General Gamelin. Between him and his brother officers present at the Paris and Metz talks is a greater gap in rank and know-

ledge than between Lord Gort and the British officers in his entourage. The .former were just of that superefficient type of staff officer which France turns out in such numbers, but with nothing especially noteworthy about them. But Gamelin. .. . This grizzled, brusque martinet of Gs' is already a god to the French. As much as that rac e of cynical realists can idolise anybody Gamelin is the man. He is a “brainy” soldier, who all his life has studied one thing only—the art of war in all its phases. Most of the great military leaders of France have come from its provinces, but Gamelin is Parisian born and bred As a child his only pastimes were playing with toy guns and holding children’s parades in the garden of his parents’ Paris home. At the earliest possible age he went to St. Cyr, the Sandhurst of France. With only the minimum service in barracks he went to staff college, where he sat under Joffre and Foch. For all his steely blue gaze and abrupt .bearing he has never been the fire-eating type of officer. His preoccupation was always with plans and direction. Joffre picked him as his staff chief in 1914. All France believes that it was Gamelin who planned the masterly right flank stroke which turned the Germany Army at the Marne, when all seemed lost and a retreat on Paris had already been decided upon. H e was right-hand man to Foch, and drew up the plans for the great counter-offensive which broke the German Army in July, 1913. It is Gamelin’s boast that he knows the details J of every one of Napoleon’s campaigns off by heart, but his favourite reading “off duly” are abstruse works on philosophy. Maginot Line Rivetter In all the great crises of the last war it was always Gamelin who was the coolest. His favourite phrase is, “I am a philosopher,” and he has brought to all his life as a man of action the serenity and detachment of the study, which perhaps is the best possible combination for a leader in modern war. He knows Britain and the British Army as no other French general has done* before. He has been present at nearly all our manoeuvres since the war, not as a feted military guest, but travelling alone from place to place with a chauffeur companion. It is Gamelin who has rivettefi the Maginot Line so as to render impossible an enemy flank attack through the Swiss-Jura defences and who drove the line up to and along the Belgian frontier. If our troops fought in France again they would find something more substantial to hold than those hastily scraped-out trenches of the Somme. And about t he Maginot Line, it

was Gamelin who made a strange and rather penetrating remark: “Those who think the Maginot Line is merely a wall of shelter are under a delusion. It is planned to be a wall at our backs, not a wall to hide behind.” Gamelin’s nickname is "The Philosopher.” Lord Gort’s nickname is “Tiger.” One .gives up his spare lime to reading ponderous works of learning, and the other, as befits a man whose grandfather created Jorrocks, goes in for hunting—and for flying and yachting. But those are only surface differences. Gort is aLso a military scholar He was for some time commandant of the staff, college at Camberley—which is’ where’ he got his nickname. The story is that not only

did he drive into more work than any previous commandant hut that he also extracted a terrifying amount of hard wOric from the students. Some said afterwards that the atmosphere of the place was more like a foundry than a seat of learning. The same tigerish energy and drive won him his V.C. At the crossing of the Canal du Nord in 1918 when the Germans were on the run, he got his battalion of Guards across under a murderous fire. Severely wounded while crossing ground to order a tank across to help his men, he refused to go back, insisting on being carried forward on a stretcher, directing operations until all the positions had been taken. That V.C was added to a D.S.O. twice won, and M.C. Work Well Together Lord Gort, wh'o is now only 52, is a totally different type from most of pre-war leaders who, as a rule, only won high rank at an advanced age, and whose complacency was largely responsible for the muddled way the B.E.F. went into action in 1914. Gort and Gamelin got along better than any other combination of British and French leaders in the last war. There is a further factor for the success of the staff talks. Both have common memories and experience from the past of the field of operations, of blunders and successes and of the methods of the only enemy we would be likely to face.. It is not an affair, as then, of a French general who remembered only Sedan talking to an English general who remembered only the Zulu or South Africa War.