Bazaine and Retain

THE TWO MARSHALS--Philip Guedalla --Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

It is a suggestive fact that the French people's national epic, Chanson de Roland, glorifies its defeat in war. For France, almost since its emergence as a nation, has been not only Europe's cultural capital, but its favorite battlefield and biggest graveyard. Living men have twice seen France smashed as a nation--in 1870 and in 1940. The French defeat of 1870 has long been associated with the name of Marshal Bazaine. Marshal Petain has become almost a synonym for the collapse of 1940.

In The Two Marshals Historian Philip Guedalla (The Second Empire, The Hundred Days) reports the overlapping lives and military theories of these two unhappy warriors. He points out that the debacle of 1940 was merely a continuation of the debacle of 1870, that the same disintegrating social causes, politics, and even people, were at work in both periods.

As history, The Two Marshals is solemn. But Historian Guedalla is not. He has long picked his way gleefully among history's corpses. But even readers who dislike Guedalla's rather mincing urbanity will value The Two Marshals as a timely study of an important but neglected period of history.

Forgotten Man. Most Americans have forgotten Marshal Bazaine, but he was once almost as dangerous to the U.S. as Marshal Petain. It was Bazaine who conquered Mexico for Emperors Napoleon III of France and Maximilian of Mexico while the U.S. was busy in the Civil War.

The French conquistador's beginnings were humble. He was born into a bourgeois family the year before Napoleon invaded Russia. Later young Bazaine flunked his exams for Paris' Ecole Polytechnique and, after an unsuccessful career as a grocer's boy, enlisted as a private. In a little more than a year he was a sergeant and transferred eagerly to the newly formed Foreign Legion.

It was not the Legion of Hollywood and Beau Geste. The French conquest of North Africa had barely begun. It was Bazaine and his fellows who were to change the lonely Legionnaires from cattle rustlers and vegetable gardeners in uncomfortable coastal posts to the legendary, kepi-ed figures firing through the loopholes of a desert fort.

One day Moroccan Chief AbdelKader indicated his disrespect for French authority by regaling his followers with nine camel-loads of human heads. Next he taught them how to fight in the desert by ambushing a French army, practically annihilating it. Nobody learned the lesson better than Sublieutenant Bazaine, who was wounded, promoted to lieutenant. Later Bazaine learned to assume his famous poker face as head of France's Bureau arabe (military intelligence) at Tlemcen, Algeria.

Cannibal War. In 1835 Don Carlos led a Spanish revolt, and Europe's powers were soon eager to take a hand. Under "the sacred principle" of nonintervention, the French soon intervened. (Nonintervention, said Talleyrand, is "a metaphysical and political term meaning about the same as intervention.") Chief of staff to the commander of France's international brigade was Legionnaire Bazaine. In campaigns which the British minister called "this cannibal war, these two-and-a-half years of lese humanite" Bazaine helped defeat reactionary Don Carlos and save Spain for Queen Isabella. When he led the French to the conquest of Mexico, he became a marshal.

"He was the first Marshal who had started as a legionnaire. ... He had risen from the ranks, like the great Marshals of the First Empire." His enemies whispered that he aimed to depose Maximilian and get the throne of Mexico for himself. But when Lee surrendered at Appomattox and the danger of a U.S. threat from the north began to haunt Napoleon III, Bazaine's days in Mexico were over. The French sailed home.

Back to 1600. The shadows of the Mexican misadventure and the menacing shadow of Prussia were meeting over France. Bazaine's home-coming took place in that gloom. He was almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, he had absorbed certain lessons that were to become a vital part of French military thought. From the story of Waterloo he had learned that a line of resolute men on the defensive could again & again break an enemy attack. From Mexico he had watched Lee's dashing Confederates lose a war despite their commander's brilliance in attack. He had also learned that dramatic sorties were invaluable in North Africa but were risky against European armies. Finally, Bazaine saw with misgivings the Prussian invention of the needle gun, with its immense superiority of fire power. His conclusion: for France defensive war is better than offensive war. "It is better," he said, "to conduct operations systematically (i.e., defensively], as in the Seventeenth Century." "That delusion," says Author Guedalla, "was to cost France the loss of a second war in 1940."

When Bazaine rode out to command the vital border fortress of Metz in 1870 (and, a month later, to become Commander in Chief of France's Army of the Rhine), he was heard to mutter: "Nous marchons a un desastre. (We're marching to a disaster.)" Napoleon III, unable to sit a horse (because of bladder trouble), his face rouged (to conceal his deathly pallor from his troops), followed close behind General MacMahon's doomed army. When MacMahon blundered into a German trap at Sedan, the Emperor mounted a horse despite his pain, rode along the firing line for hours seeking death. It never found him. At last, "muttering that they must stop the guns, that they must cease firing, that there must be no more bloodshed," Napoleon III surrendered with 80,000 men. Two months later Marshal Bazaine, whose faith in a defensive war led him to hole up in the fortress at Metz, surrendered his 180,000 men to the besieging Prussians.

Back to Spain. After the war Bazaine returned to Paris to become the national scapegoat, to be charged with treason for surrendering. He was court-martialed, condemned to death as a traitor. Later his sentence was commuted to 20 years' imprisonment in an island jail off the French Riviera. One dark night the 63-year-old Marshal knotted his baggage straps into a rope, attached one end to his body and tied the other end to a gargoyle, slid down, escaped. In 1888 he died in Spain.

Back to Bazaine. Twenty-five years passed before Bazaine's military views reappeared in France. The debacle of 1870 led the disgusted French to put their faith in those who, like Foch, were fanatical believers in the "offensive at all costs." But Bazaine's faith in the defensive, says Author Guedalla, became the faith of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain--the old man through whom "the abject philosophy of salvation by surrender . . . prevailed" in 1940, who "consummated a surrender far beyond the basest imputations of Bazaine's accusers."

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