FULL FEATURE: Pétain Goes to War, 1914

Several times recently I’ve been asked “what can I read about Pétain,” be it for a First or Second World War introductory viewpoint. The answer is, in English, not a lot. I have absolutely no intention of one-day writing a biography of this complicated man, who went from from hero to absolute zero in brutal fashion. I’d rather do one of Foch. What I don’t mind doing, however, is a multi-parter here on Substack aimed at giving anglophone audiences an introduction to France’s number one pariah.

You can see the first article, about his origins, here:

ARTICLE: Pétain, Origins.

In that one, we left Pétain approaching the First World War, nearly sixty already. ’In matters of infantry marksmanship, in particular, he is… one of the two or three foremost authorities in France. A most prominent figure.’ But then our sources tend to be from those lauding the legend. As one historian has pointed out, straight out of the dictator playbook: ‘If his military file also contained negative remarks, reports concerning conduct deemed questionable, we are unlikely to ever know, because Pétain had this file removed from the archives when he became head of state—and it has never been found.’

He remained utterly determined to stick to his guns (pun intended) and advocate for defensive warfare instead of the shinier French philosophy of ATTACK EVERYTHING. As the war approached, he banged this drum relentlessly with stuff that would be common sense by 1918: ‘that an offensive should only be attempted if the enemy had first been subjected to the attrition of fire.’ In April 1914, he was given a brigade in St. Omer, close to home. More importantly it was also close to Belgium and the potential scene of action in a future war. And yet time was against him, for Pétain ran the risk now of ageing out of his career and being forced to retire before he ever made it to the rank of general.

Then the war came. Pétain told one comrade that the time of it all frustrated him. He hadn’t had time to get to grips properly with his new command and it didn’t quite feel like his, yet. France didn’t have time for such nuance in the face of an overwhelming invasion, and in the opening days of the war he went to meet the enemy. This is the one time, so it seems, that he kept a diary, and apart from creepy descriptions of the women he met, (‘Pleasant appearance, despite a scar on her nose’) he recorded a warm reception as the crossed the border into Belgium; (which he appears to have mistaken for Luxembourg at first) ‘we were so tired we didn’t even have time to look at the map.’

(Jules Gervais-Courtellemont/Wikipedia)

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If you read my piece on de Gaulle in WW1, you know he was at Dinant by mid-August. Pétain was slightly to the south, but still on the Meuse. His first exposure to the reality of war was the sight of streams of refugees, before his men came under fire of the first time on 17th August. Then came the retreat. He got more and more bitter the more they fled from the enemy, especially when it came to reserve divisions which he did not deem up to scratch. That, in his opinion, was not the fault of the army but the bean counters and politicians. ‘A nation gets the army it deserves,’ he fumed.

Careers advance rapidly in wartime, and by the end of August he was being given a division, and the temporary rank of brigadier general. When he stopped for the night, the ladies of the house presented him with the requisite stars. They belonged to their own ancestor, General Gaston de Sonis, who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. One of the ladies of the house sewed them onto his uniform for him. On 28th August, the point where the French Fifth Army turned around on the retreat and valiantly lobbed themselves as the charging Germans in the Battle of Guise; his men attacked. At this point he felt powerless against the enemy onslaught. They seemed unstoppable.

The division that Pétain was given was the 6th. Under relentless strain, it was a broken unit of ragged, hungry men, and yet they would be called upon to help save France during the Battle of the Marne. His former classmate at Saint-Cyr, Charles Mangin, did not flatter Pétain with his account of the battle. ‘He is conserving his energy, not personally, for he knows how to go into the fray, but in the deployment of his troops. He has no confidence in them, and says so quite clearly.’ When the tables were turned and the Allied armies began chasing the Germans north again, he said that Pétain ‘advanced only with extreme slowness,’ leaving his own 5th Division to do the work. He labelled him ‘prudent,’ ‘skilful,’ but nonetheless ‘mediocre.’

And yet by this point Joffre, at the top of the tree, had binned off nearly 100 generals. Mediocre was enough to avoid the chop when so many were judged far more harshly, and so promotion came calling again. On 14th September, Pétain became a temporary Major General, which had looked all but impossible a few months previously. His division found themselves on the Aisne, where the enemy was digging in and the Western Front was emerging into the landscape. Everyone was digging in, and soon Pétain’s contrary doctrine would not look quite so batshit to his rivals. By the end of the month, he had earned a citation and the a rosette of the Légion d’Honneur for holding his ground in the face of an enemy attack and nothing more:

By his example, his tenacity, his composure under fire, his constant foresight, and his unwavering intervention in difficult moments, he obtained from his division, for fourteen consecutive days at the Battle of Reims, a magnificent effort, resisting repeated attacks day and night, and, on the fourteenth day, despite the losses suffered, victoriously repelling a furious enemy attack.

His reward, after less than two months of war, was an army corps of his own to command. Almost sixty years old and a mere colonel, a few weeks later Pétain now had command of tens of thousands of men. And their job, for him, was personal. They were sent to Artois, his native region. Here, he came back into contact with one Bernard Serrigny, a 44-year-old captain. However, the two would spend nigh on three decades in each other’s pockets. After Pétain’s fall, a book in Serrigny’s name, Trente ans avec Pétain, appeared. He wrote a lot of stuff down and it was published in the form of this book in 1959, when he had been dead five years. Some of the contents he wrote in his dotage, and absolutely can be perceived as trying to rehabilitate his chum. But other parts of it comprised posthumous publication of notes he made at the time during the First World War. Even if it is a baffling source, for the purposes of introducing Pétain to a wider audience I thought it might be interesting, even more so when you consider Pétain refused to write any memoirs, to look at the rest of 1914 through the eyes of someone who was side by side with the man. Buckle up, the captain is a judgy bugger who likes blowing his own trumpet.

To set the scene, whilst the Brits (with more French and the Belgians) were embarking on an existential scrap for survival in Flanders at Ypres and on the Yser, further down the line in Artois, Pétain arrived at his new Corps Headquarters to replace the outgoing General d’Urbal, who was going to take command of all the French troops in Belgium. At this point, the fate of Arras hung in the balance and both sides were hell bent on having it…