WEYGAND AND PETAIN
By BRIG.-GENERAL E. L. SPEARS
(the well-known author of " Liaison, 1914 " and " Prelude to Victory ") IT was, I believe, the chance of war and a great emergency that threw General Foch and Colonel Weygand, as he then was, together to form a combination which became legendary. Foch, on the eve of the Battle of the Marne in 1914, was called upon to command what was called at first the Foch Detachment and later became an Army. He was given Weygand as his Chief of Staff. Weygand was not a trained staff officer, and one of the strangest things about his career is that he who had not been through the mill of the French Staff College became the best known and most brilliant staff officer of our time. That is probably why he got on so well with Foch, who combined the very rare attributes of being not only a staff officer but a professor at the Staff College with the power of leadership in war.
Foch was a man who expressed himself with great difficulty. His military conceptions were always on the broadest lines. It was Weygand who put them into language all could under- stand and embodied them in clear orders. Weygand has always struck me as a little Mongolian in appearance : prominent cheek-bones, slits of eyes, a- little sparse moustache that used to be black and is now grey. Time has sharpened his features, and emphasised his pointed chin, which is the apex of the broad triangle of the lower part of his face. He has always been a spare man, with immense powers of work, and his mental powers are as great as they were a quarter of a century ago.
We may be certain that Weygand is the embodiment of the Foch doctrine. Foch was impervious to the idea of defeat and so will Weygand prove to be. Foch had the toughness of old oak. There is something more metallic in Weygand's similar quality. Foch was certainly an aggressive soldier. Weygand, in so far as the means at his disposal permit, will certainly be the same. Weygand saw Foch in the second Battle of the Marne allow the Germans to pierce the line without permitting this to influence his dispositions for the counter-attack which eventually saved the situation. Weygand was at his side all the time. It was he who drew up the orders. The lesson has not been lost on him. In all things he proclaims himself Foch's disciple. His conduct of the Polish campaign against the Bolsheviks was brilliant. He there proved that he could carry out offensive operations as well as his old Chief.
He has to his hand a magnificent instrument, the French Army, an infinitely finer instrument than it was in 1914. The French Army of those days was untrained, the officers lamentably ignorant of modern war conditions. The German Army had enormous superiority in material, yet the French Army learnt its lesson as it retreated, and produced out of a series of unparalleled disasters and defeats the means of ictory. This time the French Army has again been caught nawares at one point. The success of the enemy has been entirely due to mechanical tricks and surprises. We can hope via when Frenchmen and Germans meet on more equal terms the men who are fighting for their soil and their freedom will be able to beat those whose only object is conquest and rapine.
The French Armies deserve good commanders. Their officers are magnificent and are invariably liked and respected by their men. General Georges, commanding the Armies from Switzerland to the North Sea, and General Weygand in supreme command, provide leadership of a quality that has never been surpassed.
And behind them, in Paris, Marshal Petain, the man who held Verdun in 1916, the man who pulled the armies of France together after the debacle of the Nivelle offensive in 1917, has been called in to add wisdom and stability and resolution to the counsels of the Cabinet. Marshal Petain rose to be Commander-in-Chief of the French Armies in what were probably their most critical days. Of medium height, bald, fair, blue-eyed, with long white moustache, the impression this man of the north gives is of imperturbable calm. He is a native of Aire-sur-la-Lys on the borders of Flanders, where people are anything but effervescent. His voice is deep and pleasant, his speech deliberate. Never does a muscle of his face move when he is talking business, never can a change in his light-coloured eyes be detected.
Petain is a very clear thinker who knows how to give himself time for reflection. When he commanded a corps in front of Vimy I saw a good deal of him. He would walk alone for hours, head down, pondering. When trench warfare set in he was the first to carry out a really satisfactory and brilliant local operation, taking a great number of prisoners, when he captured Souchez and Ablain St. Nazaire. He obtained great fame at Verdun. He was always successful, for at every stage of the war he was just a little ahead of the practice, theory and thought of the moment.
On May 15th, 1917, after a very short time as Chief of Staff (an office corresponding to that of our C.I.G.S., in which he was succeeded by Foch), M. Painleve, then Minister of War, made him Commander-in-Chief. This was a time of maximum crisis, when the French Army lay under the shadow of the terrible reverses of April 16th, and a fearful dis- couragement had resulted. Revolted at finding that, in spite of the grandiloquent promises and fantastic prognostications of the then Higher Command, when General Nivelle was Commander-in-Chief, they had been hurled at German defences which were stronger, whilst their own preparations were weaker, than the year before on the Somme, the men murmured sullenly; then with practically no warning the growls grew into a great increasing rumble, and in a flash a number of divisions broke into open mutiny. In an incredibly short time it was found that there were only two divisions which were absolutely reliable between Soissons and Paris.- Petain saved the situation. Almost as quickly as it had spread the mutiny was suppressed. With calm, method, and infinite patience and forbearance, he re-established order and discipline. Executions were clamoured for, yet he only sanctioned twenty-three.
The Army recovered rapidly during the summer of 1917. Small but well-planned and very successful operations at Verdun and Malmaison, the latter bringing in some 12,000 prisoners (I think 8,000 were captured on the first day), soon re-established the morale, whilst German attacks on the Chemin des Dames were repelled, and General Antoine's army, sub- ordinated to the British Commander-in-Chief, did extremely well in the north.
Every Allied country owes a debt of deep gratitude to Petain, for in saving the armies of France he saved the Allied cause ; great as were his achievements as a commander in the field, they pale before this splendid feat. A man of immense courage and determination, it was he who finally led the French armies to victory in 1918. He is twenty-two years older today than he was at the Armistice, but at 84 Petain has lost little of the physical vigour and nothing of the mental alertness which he manifested when the last war was ending. The com- bination of a general who knows when to strike and a general who knows when to hold on to the death should inspire immense confidence in the peoples both of Britain and of France.
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