Versailles) amounted to 464,000 men; in France, it was only 184,000, a ratio that would continue right the way through to the Second World War. Yet politics had forced a reduction in the length of military service from three years to one, and hopes that the population deficit of metropolitan France could be made good by a vast colonial army were never quite fulfilled. Thus instead of a total strength of over 300,000 men, about two-thirds of this was the most the French could muster. As far as the hard core of professionals was concerned, there was certainly little enough inducement for good men to stay on. With a captain paid approximately £11 a month, and a major in command of a whole battalion paid only £16, 7 officers without private incomes lived in desperate straits. They had no vote, and now that the supreme goal – revenge – had been achieved, wherein resided the glory of an Army career?
Composed of all too many officers whom the previous war had left drained of élan vital , the French General Staff allowed itself to become bogged down in bureaucratic methods; paper-asserie , as the French call it, the blight to which all armies are susceptible, flourished. It was difficult to see exactly where the power of decision lay. The once omnipotent and cohesive Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre (Supreme War Council), from whose members would be designated France’s senior commanders in time of war, no longer filled anything but a consultativerole. Divided by mutual antipathy and jealousies, its generals had little contact with each other; their staffs followed suit, each existing in its own watertight compartment. There was not much discussion on a higher strategic and tactical plane, and what there was tended to follow abstract intellectual paths from which little practical use ever emerged. General Beaufre, writing of his own experiences at that time, states that
At the Ministry of War, the General commanded in theory, but had not the money, the administration, the personnel or the equipment; the Permanent Secretary had the money and the administration, without the responsibility of command; the various departments had personnel and equipment, but neither money nor command. The Minister stood at the head of all this, but could achieve nothing without obtaining unison from the whole orchestra, the complexity of which helped to paralyse all initiatives. The ensemble possessed only one force – that of inertia.
In this state of inertia, the Army tended to rest content with the techniques and equipment of 1918. To a large extent the financial strain imposed on successive military budgets by the Maginot Line provided it with little alternative. 8 Although, with the taxis of the Marne and later by her victualling of Verdun along the voie sacrée – the ‘sacred road’ – the French Army had pioneered warfare by road, as its post-war mechanical transport aged and was not replaced it regressed to relying for mobility once more on railways – and horses. While other armies (notably the German) were experimenting with radio communications, the French clung to the telephone, even despite the lessons gained from 1914–18, when operations had so often failed after the severing of lines by artillery barrages, and regardless of the new threat to land communications which modern air power and tanks posed. In 1924 the Army decided to replace its automatic rifle and to modify the standard infantry cartridge; the new weapon came into service by 1932, but – typical of the prevailing inertia – the rifle, intended to utilize the same cartridge, was not selected until 1936. As late as 1939,only a few hundred thousand had been issued. General Weygand, before he retired as Inspector-General of the Army in 1933, had prescribed that five infantry divisions be motorized and a cavalry division be converted into a Division Légère Mécanique ; 9 but otherwise the rest of the Army showed little advance on that which had processed so
Composed of all too many officers whom the previous war had left drained of élan vital , the French General Staff allowed itself to become bogged down in bureaucratic methods; paper-asserie , as the French call it, the blight to which all armies are susceptible, flourished. It was difficult to see exactly where the power of decision lay. The once omnipotent and cohesive Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre (Supreme War Council), from whose members would be designated France’s senior commanders in time of war, no longer filled anything but a consultativerole. Divided by mutual antipathy and jealousies, its generals had little contact with each other; their staffs followed suit, each existing in its own watertight compartment. There was not much discussion on a higher strategic and tactical plane, and what there was tended to follow abstract intellectual paths from which little practical use ever emerged. General Beaufre, writing of his own experiences at that time, states that
At the Ministry of War, the General commanded in theory, but had not the money, the administration, the personnel or the equipment; the Permanent Secretary had the money and the administration, without the responsibility of command; the various departments had personnel and equipment, but neither money nor command. The Minister stood at the head of all this, but could achieve nothing without obtaining unison from the whole orchestra, the complexity of which helped to paralyse all initiatives. The ensemble possessed only one force – that of inertia.
In this state of inertia, the Army tended to rest content with the techniques and equipment of 1918. To a large extent the financial strain imposed on successive military budgets by the Maginot Line provided it with little alternative. 8 Although, with the taxis of the Marne and later by her victualling of Verdun along the voie sacrée – the ‘sacred road’ – the French Army had pioneered warfare by road, as its post-war mechanical transport aged and was not replaced it regressed to relying for mobility once more on railways – and horses. While other armies (notably the German) were experimenting with radio communications, the French clung to the telephone, even despite the lessons gained from 1914–18, when operations had so often failed after the severing of lines by artillery barrages, and regardless of the new threat to land communications which modern air power and tanks posed. In 1924 the Army decided to replace its automatic rifle and to modify the standard infantry cartridge; the new weapon came into service by 1932, but – typical of the prevailing inertia – the rifle, intended to utilize the same cartridge, was not selected until 1936. As late as 1939,only a few hundred thousand had been issued. General Weygand, before he retired as Inspector-General of the Army in 1933, had prescribed that five infantry divisions be motorized and a cavalry division be converted into a Division Légère Mécanique ; 9 but otherwise the rest of the Army showed little advance on that which had processed so
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