To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [117]
He had never seen Thaw so angry, saw Parsons listening as well. Parsons tossed the newspaper aside, raised himself out of the chair, moved close to them, said, “It’s just good news, Bill. You know the president didn’t want to fight. He’s probably scared that now he’s made some giant awful mistake, so he makes sure the newspapers say nothing but good stuff, get the whole country to agree with him. Shows our allies that we’re all primed for a big fight. Makes everybody happy.”
Thaw made a grunting sound, stared into his glass, said, “How happy are they gonna be six months from now when the whole world realizes it’s all bull. The only ones who are gonna be happy are the Boche.”
WITH THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE GERMAN NORTHERN DEFENSES, the Aeronautique Militaire decided that the position of the escadrille at Saint-Just-en-Chaussée was now too far from the front lines to be effective. On April 7, the orders had come, and the squadron was moved again. Their new airfield lay close to the village of Ham, a place like nothing the pilots had ever seen. Ham had been behind German lines for nearly three years, but as the Germans withdrew, they left a wide swath of utter devastation, and Ham was not spared. What the artillery had not destroyed, the Germans had. What had once been a quaint farming village was blasted into ruin.
In mid-April, the inevitable spring campaign had begun, but the outcome was nothing like anyone in the escadrille had expected. The plan had come from the French commanding general, Robert Nivelle, the man who had replaced Joseph Joffre. Joffre’s failure to end the stalemate had drained him of power, and his enemies in the French government had taken advantage. Nivelle wasted no time in asserting his own power over the French military. He organized a massive surprise attack in the region along the Aisne River, midway between the Verdun sector and the British lines to the north. But as had happened too often in the past, the attack was plagued by delays and difficulties, so that, when Nivelle finally ordered the plan into motion, the Germans were completely prepared. Despite serious reservations from the British, and many of Nivelle’s own commanders, in mid-April, a million Frenchmen had surged into the German defenses between Soissons and Reims. Signs of disaster were immediate. On the first day of the assault, the French suffered forty thousand casualties. But Nivelle stubbornly persisted, launching a continuing series of fruitless and costly attacks, until finally, by early May, Nivelle was forced to concede total defeat. The disaster cost Nivelle his job, but to an enormous number of weary French troops, it was the final straw. All along the Aisne front, thousands of French soldiers just quit, many laying down their rifles, refusing to fight, many more simply marching away, large groups of poilus clogging the roadways, an uprising that threatened to dissolve the French army from the inside out. The panic that resulted in Paris brought immediate change to the French High Command. Command was given to General Henri Pétain, an immensely popular commander, who quickly addressed the despair of his troops. Within a few short weeks, most of the mutiny had collapsed, and the poilus had begun to filter back to their positions in the line. Amazingly, word of the mutiny had been contained within the French army itself, and even the British were unaware what had happened. More important for the French, for several agonizing days a wide section of the French defenses had been almost completely unmanned. Before the Germans were even aware of the crisis,