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trying to outflank the other in the so-called ‘Race for the Sea’.
    By the autumn of 1914, a continuous static front had been established from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. It was based not on natural features (the bastion of Verdun left in a precarious salientthat bulged out like a large hernia was the striking exception), but on a line of exhaustion. The first five months of the war in the West had cost both sides more heavily than any other succeeding year; Germany, a total of approximately 750,000 casualties; France, 300,000 killed (or nearly a fifth more than Britain’s total dead in the whole of World War II) and another 600,000 in wounded, captured and missing. The horrors of trench warfare now began.
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    Out of the victory of the Marne, Joffre emerged as immeasurably the most powerful figure on the whole Allied side. Before the battle, when the German guns were heard in Paris and cynical American correspondents were openly betting that on the morrow it would have become ‘a provincial city of Germany’, the Government had left hastily for Bordeaux. Exaggerated rumours of the deputies’ Capuan luxuries there soon reached the front, and for the rest of the war Bordeaux became a dirty word. The politicians sank to their lowest repute for many a decade. In the Government’s absence, the Grand Quartier Général assumed responsibility for the entire conduct of the war. As a Deputy remarked later, it had become a veritable ‘ministry’ in its own right. And never since Bonaparte had one Frenchman been so all-powerful or so popular as Joffre. Carloads of gifts, boxes of chocolates and cigars, rolled in daily and his officers grew weary dealing with the copious fan-mail; all of which Joffre somehow found time to read with obvious enjoyment.
    Joseph Joffre (his middle name, suspiciously enough, was Césaire) was the son of a humble cooper — one of a family of eleven — and, like Foch and de Castelnau, a Pyrenean. In 1870, as a student at the Polytechnic, he had been sent to Vincennes to learn how to fire a cannon, and, after his captain had collapsed with a nervous breakdown, found himself commanding a battery during the Siege of Paris. Soon after graduating from the Polytechnic as an engineer, he was sent to Indo-China, and there began a long career in France’s new empire. In 1894, he led a column in conquest of Timbuctoo, and first made his mark by his efficiency in organising the column’s supplies. Aged 33, he was then the youngest sapper Lieutenant-Colonel. Timbuctoo was followed by Madagascar, until Joffre was called home in 1904 to be Director of Engineers. Between 1906 and 1910 he commanded first a division and then a corps for brief periods; this was his only experience in commanding a large body of infantry.
    In 1910 he became a member of the War Council, and the following year, Chief of the General Staff; selected, as has been remarked earlier, more for his qualities as a ‘good Republican’ than for any military brilliance. It was to his credit, however, that between 1904 and 1914 there had been any improvements in the French fortresses and heavy artillery, and he had hammered through (just in time) the Conscription Bill of 1913. He was a talented organiser, but the dual rôle of Commander-in-Chief of France’s main group of armies also required him to be a first-rate strategist and tactician. This he was not.
    At the outbreak of war ‘Papa’ Joffre was a widower rising 63. According to Spears, who saw him frequently during 1914,
his breeches were baggy and ill-fitting. The outfit was completed by cylindrical leggings.… His chin was marked and determined. The whiteness of his hair, the lightness of his almost colourless blue eyes, which looked out from under big eyebrows, the colour of salt and pepper, white predominating, and the tonelessness of his voice coming through the sieve of his big, whitish moustache, all gave the impression of an albino. His cap was worn well forward so that