Castelnau becomes Joffre's chief of staff

On 10 December 1915 General Noël de Castelnau became chief of staff and deputy to General Joffre. It was the second change at the top of the French army within a week. A few days earlier Joseph Joffre had become commander-in-chief of all the French armies, including the troops at Salonika and the Dardanelles. Since he was now to direct the war on several fronts and represent France before the Allies, as at the Chantilly conference that ended on 8 December, he needed someone at his side to relieve him of day-to-day command of the front in France. The choice fell on one of the most respected French generals.

Who Castelnau was

The 63-year-old Castelnau, a graduate of Saint-Cyr and a veteran of the war of 1870, had before the war been deputy chief of the General Staff and one of the authors of the French war plan. In August 1914 he commanded the Second Army in Lorraine, and in September he saved Nancy in the Battle of the Grand Couronné, which earned him the nickname “the saviour of Nancy”. He then led, in the north, in Picardy and Artois, the first stages of the “Race to the Sea”. From June 1915 he commanded the Centre Army Group, and on 25 September he led its troops into the Second Battle of Champagne. In October he received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. The war took three of his sons. A devout Catholic and conservative, he aroused distrust in part of the republican left, but enjoyed great authority in the army.

As early as the turn of 1914 and 1915 Castelnau had warned that without a mass of heavy artillery and ammunition a breakthrough of the German front was impossible, and advised that men be spared until then. In a note of 25 October 1915 he wrote that the great effort in Champagne had not brought the expected strategic results: the enemy had been beaten but not broken. He called for a “balance sheet of the coalition” to be drawn up and for better coordination of the Allies’ operations.

Conflicting dates and scope of authority

Sources differ on the day of the appointment. The date of 10 December is given by the French historian Victor Giraud, who in 1921 described Castelnau’s war on the basis of the general’s letters and notes. His service records show 11 December, and the same date is borne by the dispatch from Paris that the New York Times printed on 12 December. The appointment was probably announced on 11 December. The British chronology of the war, for its part, records it as early as 9 December, which other available sources do not confirm. Castelnau handed over command of the Centre Army Group on 12 December to General Fernand de Langle de Cary.

The scope of the new post was also unclear. The French called it “chief of the general staff of the army”, and the British official history simply “Joffre’s chief of staff”. According to Giraud, Castelnau became deputy commander-in-chief and was to direct in particular the operations on the north-eastern front, that is in France. The New York Times, on the other hand, wrote that Joffre retained direct command of the armies of the east and north-east. The existing “major général”, the chief of staff in the strict sense, General Maurice Pellé, also remained at headquarters in Chantilly. French biographies of the general state that the Minister of War, Joseph Gallieni, later wanted to put him in Joffre’s place. Some officers in the commander-in-chief’s entourage, by contrast, were clearly hostile to him.

First task

The new chief of staff did not stay long in Chantilly. According to Giraud, on 15 December he left Paris for Salonika to judge on the spot whether and how to defend the bridgehead there. The Russian ambassador in Paris, Alexander Izvolsky, reported on 18 December that Castelnau had left for Salonika in secret two days earlier, because the reports of General Maurice Sarrail did not inspire much confidence in Paris. The general spent a dozen or so days in Macedonia and Athens and returned to Paris on 31 December. The real test came in February 1916, when the Germans attacked at Verdun. Castelnau then went to the scene, decided to defend the right bank of the Meuse and gave command to General Philippe Pétain.