VICTORY OF THE MARNE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3222, 9 January 1917, Page 2

VICTORY OF THE MARNE.

The following article written for the New York "Times" by General MaUeterre, who was on the staff of General Joffre, and was taromndbd at the Maine, emphasises loch's part in the battle. General Maileterre was a professor at the Eoole Militaire before the war, and is a recognised authority on military subject's:—

"On the sth September, 1914, the armies of the Republic, in retreat since tlie 22nd August, after the check of their general offensive, had flowed south of the Marne and of the Argonno. " Their main front was between Paris and Verdun. Their right wing formed a sort of oblique flank in Lorraine from Verdun to Nancy and the Vosges. The Belgian army was shut up in the entrenched camp at Antwerp, and the small English army supported the ex treme left of the French line, nearest Paris.

The German armies, upheld by a formidable confidence, drunk with victory and with pride, surged towards Paris, which the French Government had just left, and which seemed tc them ipr-anahle of serious resistance. "For the Germans, as for the neutral powers, the defeat of France seemed an accomplished fact. It appeared that the German plan must succeed, as it had been foreseen and prepared by the strategists of Berlin. "On the 6th of September General Joffre addressed to his armies the famous order of the day, wnieh was destined to change the face of things. A few words, sublime in their brevity and their simplicity, were to suffice f cr turning Fortune towards Justice: —* \t the moment of engagement in a battle on which depends the safety of our country it is necessary to remind all that the time has passed for looking behind, that all efforts should he used in attacking and driving back the enemy. A group which can advance I o further should, cost what it may, keep the ground conquered and die upon it rather than retreat. In the present circumstances no faltering can be tolerated.'

" At the appeal of its chief the Frencn army lowered a threatening head and threw itself forward. The Germans, surprised, stopped, sustained the unexpected shock. This was the battle of the Marne, which was to last six days. On the 12th September came the victory of the Marne. And the commander in completed his order of the day of 6th September:—'The vigorous resumption of the offensive resulted in success. All, officers and soldiers, you have responded to my appeal, and yo; deserve thanks of our country.' "The victory of the Marne was in event which, from ai military stanipoint, is without precedent in history. It was not a victory like Austerlits, Jena or Waterloo, since the war continued and still continues. But it had a moral significance which made the certitude of victory, so to speak", pass from one camp to the other. " At the hour of writing these lines, when on the two battle fronts tho struggle continues under forms which eeent ** contrary to modern conceptions of a great war and with a Violence apparently increasing with time, the victory of the Marne remains the dominant fact. •' A victory is ordinarily the result el n lucky thought, of a clever maioeuvre. of a daring execution. It confirms the superiority of a chief and hw soldiers. Many victories have appeared to be surprises of hazard; chance, lucky or unlucky, must always be considered. Bu% history recognises that the great successes come to those who have merited them. . " Studied only from the point of view of strategy and tactics, the victory of the Marne already may be considered as one of these gallant battles where, by the respective valour of the combatants, the advantage has suddenly turned to the side which at first seemed beaten. Examples of this ton have not lacked in the annals of war; Praise mav in the future be given more freely to the very wise and very opportune retreat of our armies after the first engagements had proved that we were badly matched against very superior forces. . "It is certain that, in tearing his troops from the clinch and pressure of the German offensive and in bringing them, with a singular perspicacity, on to the lines of the Marne and tho Seine, between the entrenched camps of Pans and of Verdun, General Joffre has given proof of the master qualities of resolution and of sang frdW which characterise a great commander. "Supported by Paris and Verdun and the fortified lines of Loraine, our armies could regain their breath, reinforce and fortify themselves, and resist steadily the assault of the 2,000,000 Germans who had invaded French territory. One might have been content during some time with this powerful defensive while waiting for the English to bring up new troops and the Russian offensive to manifest itself in Poland. The trick was far from lost. What has happened since on the Aisne would probably have happened on the Seine and on the Marne. "Tho siege and fall of Paris, of which a momentary fear seized public opinion, was in reality impossible in the. presence of an army whose left wing was supported by the capital, and which could at any moment intervene for its defence. "Besides, the Germans, in spue of being hypnotised by "the dream of entering Paris, avoided approaching it, and at first thought only of completing the defeat and destruction of the armies lighting in retreat before them. It has been said since that this mistake of General von Kluck, in turning from Paris and inarching against our left, was the initial cause of the German defeat. ~ , . , ~ "By all good military logic, he could not have acted otherwise, but, deceived by preceding successes and doubtless mis-informed as to what was passing at Paris, von Kluck beTieved in a new and easy victory and that. there would always be time to return to Paris. Succeeding events disproved his calculations; but the fault goes back to the German General Staff, who had understood neither the danger to which it exposed tho German armies in converging them in a too narrow space l)etween two fortresses, nor tho offensive force and manoeuvring capacity inherent in the French army. It was not without reason, in fact, that General Joffre stopped the movement of retreat on tho line fixed l > himself, under the protection of tho exterior forts of the entrenched camn of Paris. He prepared, with the r l /- rison, a new army, and called to him the army corps of Lorraine. And whe i on 6th September, he sprung his offensive, ho already enclosed the body of the five German armies before him Itetween two flnak attacks the one coming from Paris on the army of Von Kluck, the other, from the Argonne, on the army of the Crown Prince.

A TRIUMPH OF THK FRENCH SI'IKIT.

" Strategy and tactics therefore, play a great part in this admirable counteroffensive. And it is with reason tint Joffre has been called the victor of the Marne. •' But there were other factors in determining this victory. The officers 'and men who responded' to the voice of the supreme chief, transmitting to them the call of the country in danger, had just undergone the hardest of ordeals —the ordoal of defeat, the ordeal of retreat, the ordeal of hunger. "One of the chiefs who by his energy contributed most to the victory, General Foch, has said since that he won the battle with ghosts of soldiers. It is absolutely true, and there is the marvel! It needed only one hour and a few phrases written by a firm and imperious hand to raise suddenly these half fallen armies, these harassed men, i«wished, almost spent, and to sweep them forward again as if carried by a tempest.

"I have seen them at work; I bear witness . And from one end of tlie immense lino to the other it was the same desperate and irresistible effort. Their bodies were feeble, bleeding; but their hearts and their souls were firm and vibrant-

"throughout those terrible days, through the grapeshot, the soldiers, fallen exhausted, the chief passed, raising them, sending them again to the attack. Without respite they marched and fought in a sort of grievous and heroic dream; and they compelled the victory.

"Ono must penetrate deeper in tho analysis of such a return of fortune. I have related the act of the Command-er-in-Chief and how General Joffre the previous day, almost unknown by the majority, by a few phrases possessed himself of aH these soldier hearts, stalked by extinction. "I will not painf Hie portrait of Joffre hero. He is too well known now by all the world. The pencil and the brush can only show faintly the inner flame hiden by such natures under appearances often heavy and tranquil. "And the same spirit flamed in each of us. Nothing could quench it, for It was fed at that sacred and eternal source, the love of country. This love created the victors of the Marne as -t will create the victors of to-morrow.

" This was Germany's great error, to underestimate the power of reaction of our soldiers and of our race. She does not understand now, and never will, the real causes of the victory of tho Marne, any more than she will understand her defeat.

"Tlie Germans felt so certain of victory, they were so convinced of their racial and military superiority, that they are still asking themselves tao reason for such a 6iidden failure of equilibrium. They had forged the most formidable war machine that had ever existed. They had joined the most scientific and complete destructive forces to the policy of domination pursued by their world politics. They had calculated everything, foreseen everything, prepared everything, to crush the two adversaries whose alliance was opposed to Germany's excess of power. They counted, later, a'ter the defe-'t of France and of Russia, on bullying isolated England, and adjusting Europe and the world as they wished. "All has lieen said on the origin and beginning of the war. It broke, without doubt, at the moment when it was least expected. It was with stupor that Europe learned that the war began by the violation of neutral Belgium. ' With all their foresight, Germany, did not dream that England could intervene.

" In spite of this first disappointment, and the still greater one caused ■ y tlie heroic resistance of Belgium, th-> General staff at Berlin pursued invanably the plan of offensive first conceived. It threw the heaviest bodies more than forty army corps—about 2,000,000 men—against Jhe French army, thinking in some weeks to render it impotent, push it into the interior, take Paris, destroy it if needful; then, this great stroke accomplished, being the greater part of the victorious troops against the Russians in Poland.

"It was the famous strategic shuttle founded on the length of time, more than a month, separating the Russian and French mobilisations. Its realisation had been admirably prepared for by the magnificent network of railroads disposed by Germany between the Rhine and the Vistula.

"During the first battles, in Belgium, in the Ardennes, and in Lorraine, the German plan seemed to succeed. W*a still remember with poignant emotion those tragic days durTug which our soldiers and our Allies recoiled before the tempest of iron and fire preceding the German columns. For it is remarkable that in these first encounters our troops ceded not to i fctacks of German troops, who hesitated to engage our infantry, but to the unprecedented avalanche of projectiles which fell upon them continuously, often with no indication of their source.

"The German artillery performed, to to speak, the office of advance guard; the infantry advanced only under cover of this moving curtain of explosives, which drove back slowly our surprised and disconcerted troops. Itwas a triumph for the heavy howitzers .which Germany some years ago introduced into her campaign artillery, rightly counting on their effect upon our army, which lacked them. "They knew only too well in fact, the weaknesses of our military organisation, and that, although voting the law of three years' military servico, the French Parliament had not given soon enough the indispensable credits for its application for the perfecting of Avar material.

"It appears that Germany (pushing to insanity her conviction that the French Army, in spite of the unexpected strength brought by the incorporation of the class of 1913, carried the scars of party divisions, and was inferior technically and materially to tho German Army) decided for the brutal attack. Therefore, what a surprise for tho head quarters, and tor tho army chiefs, when, after a Borrritriumphant march which brought them in fifteen days to the Marne, they found before them a narmy decided again to give battle, and which refused to be impressed by the crash" of tho great shells, which already they called irreverently 'fat pots.' The cannon of 75 milli-metres was to show its real power and prove its superiority. "These soldiers rose from their own ashes! What, thon, was the power that rendered them all at once victor ious, inasmuch as it seemed certain that they had neither the same materials as conquerors of the day before? "We always come back to this extraordinary moment, this unlooked-for crisis of the batle of the Marne, to this

decisive conflict that may be called the victory of the spiritual forces. "The Germans, certainly, thought they possessed this spiritual force as well as their material forces; they thought, even, that they were the sole possessors of it, and for this reason this victory of the Marne will remain incomprehensible to them. "For us, on the contrary, ft is clear enough, it cannot astonish us, for it '8 in accordance with our history and our national traditions. It has been called miraculous. Let us put aside heavenly interventions. It jvas a miracle, yet; but a miracle of the nation' 3 energy and the race's worth. "And the story of the French race ! is full of such miracles. Must we recall Tolbiac and Clovis, Poitiers and Charles-Martel, Bouvines and Philippe Auguste, Orleans and Jeanne d'Arc, and, more recently, Valmy and all tne immortal glory of £he armies of the republic? "But the Germans take no heed of these reminders of history. Not only they misunderstand the history of France and that of other peoples, but their immense and blind pride accepts only history written to suit them. A trenchant formula dominates their minds. "Deutschland über Alles' — 'Germany above all.' "Convinced that German kultur is the ultimate ideal of human civilisation, that might makes right, unconscious of strong French national tradition, they judged that France and her army, debilitated by a regime and by political and social customs of which they sa,w only the outer manifestations, would be incapable of resisting their implacable spirit of domination.

"They confounded spiritual forces with material ones. They inscrilied 'Gott mit uns' at the head of their armies, esteeming that God could not but be their ally. And in a sort of vertigo, which one can only define by that term of 'kolossal,' at once synthetising and ridiculing their madness, they marched out to conquer the universe! And in spite of their actual reverses, their terrible mental processes remain the same.

"The victory of the Marne, in siiprising them and even inspring them with a sort of superstitious admiratio t for France, has not enlightened them. Germany is incapable of a return if conscience and reason.

"One might admire the savage energy with which' they prolong a w.ir whose issue is certain. And yet the* were virtually beaten on the 12th .if September. "Beaten militarily, because since then all their offensive efforts have failed, as well on the Oriental as on the Occidental front; invested, blockaded, caught between two fires, Germany is no more than a besieged fortress which will capitulate sooner or later.

"Beaten morally, because events have revealed at the same time the defect in their armour and the wealmess of thta power which seemed so formidable ;. because all eyes are open on tho perfidy and atrocity of their methods of war.

" She has lost her military honour »v the violation of Belgium,, by organised massacre and pillage, by systematic lies and calumny. " Germany, with her acomplice, Austria, has loosed the most formidable and' deadly war that humanity has ever seen. Justice marches with the Allies; the hour of punishment approaches. " It seemed to us just to make known to the great and noble American nation the invincible confidence of Franco in victory, and" that this victory is befitting a nation whose traditions are formed of right, of truth, ol> liberty, and of honour.

"And this is why, having fought m my place during these glorious days, I can bear witness that the victory of the Ma-rne was indeed the victory of spiritual forces over material ones."