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Updated: April 30, 2025
Beyond that, De Castelnau was still holding the heights in front of Nancy. The powerful German advance had forced the Allies back some hundred and thirty miles, almost to the shelter of the Paris fortifications. It seemed only a matter of hours to the fall of Paris when General Joffre began his counteroffensive on September 6, 1914.
On the other hand, M. Millerand, Minister of War, has visited General Joffre at the army headquarters and returned to Paris to-night "very satisfied with the situation." I took a spin in an automobile to-day to Versailles, and thence to Buc with its red brick aerodrome tower, sheds, and long rows of hangars.
A high, level plateau rises steeply a couple of hundred feet from the valley of the Aisne and formed the center and eastern flank of the battlefield. The plateau is deeply notched by three steep-sided ravines running down to the Aisne. Through these General Joffre, if he chose, could bring up supports unnoticed and without danger to positions on the plateau.
General Gallieni, as a strategist, enjoys the same high reputation as the commander-in-chief, General Joffre. He was born on April 24, 1849, at Saint-Beat in the department of the Haute Garonne. He entered the Saint-Cyr military academy in 1868, and was appointed a sub-lieutenant in the Third Regiment of Marine Infantry two years later, and he fought with his regiment through the war of 1870.
Young Smith, who pretends to read the Head's newspaper when he leaves it lying about you know how he swanks about it said the Precedent or General Joffre had given a French kid who was only fourteen and had enlisted and killed a lot of Huns, till they found him out and sent him back to school, a legion of honours or something.
"The object," was the reply, "will be the same as was the object when we first moved into France." "Paris?" asked a voice. "Paris," was the brief reply. "Good! And there is no chance of failure, you say?" "Not unless our plans come to the ears of General Joffre. If he knew of the plan he might, of course, hurry up reënforcements enough to stop it."
If it were successful beyond expectation, it would achieve all that Nivelle had hoped to do by a frontal attack, and would compel a general German retreat by turning the enemy's flank as Joffre had tried to turn it in October 1914. But short of such extravagant anticipations it might materially help to win the war by defeating the real German offensive for 1917.
And like General Mangin, the great Joffre himself, Gallieni, Franchet d'Esperey, d'Humbert, and other distinguished leaders of the French Army, he made his reputation in the French Colonial service.
Two days later, on August 27, 1914, General Joffre brought together, using army corps and divisions recruited elsewhere, a supplementary army, the Ninth Army, which was detailed to take its place between the Fourth and Fifth Armies. He intrusted its command to a general, who, while commanding the Twentieth Corps, had distinguished himself by his brilliant conduct in Lorraine, General Foch.
And though Joffre went on to name many leaders, many armies, many moral forces incarnate in many men as co-responsible for victory, no one could know quite so well as he how completely the France of which Renan dreamed as a glorious possibility, is realized and typified in the man whose name leads all the rest as having saved not France only but the liberties of mankind.
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