Lord Kitchener arrives in France

On 1 September 1914 the British Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Herbert Kitchener, arrived in France to speak in person with the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal Sir John French. The meeting at the British Embassy in Paris was one of the most important conversations of the first weeks of the war. It settled that the British would remain at the front alongside the French.

The plan to retreat behind the Seine

After the battles of Mons and Le Cateau the British Expeditionary Force had been retreating south for a week; it had suffered heavy losses and was utterly exhausted. Sir John French had lost confidence in the French command, and above all in General Lanrezac, commander of the neighbouring Fifth Army. On 30 August he informed the Commander-in-Chief, Joseph Joffre, that his troops must leave the front line entirely and withdraw behind the Seine to rest and refit for several days, perhaps as many as ten. From then on supplies were to come through the port of Saint-Nazaire on the west coast of France.

For the French this meant that a dangerous gap would open on the left wing of their front, on the road to Paris. On 31 August Joffre, and also President Raymond Poincaré through the British ambassador, Francis Bertie, asked French not to withdraw his troops. In London the field marshal’s telegrams caused alarm. Kitchener had headed the War Office since the beginning of August and decided that the matter could not be settled by correspondence. After a night-time meeting of those ministers who could be gathered, he set off for the Continent aboard a destroyer before dawn on 1 September.

The conversation at the embassy

Kitchener summoned French to the British Embassy in Paris. The Prime Minister, René Viviani, and the Minister of War, Alexandre Millerand, also took part in the talks. The atmosphere was tense. French felt offended by the very fact that Kitchener had come in the uniform of a field marshal. The minister usually dressed that way, but the commander of the BEF took it as an attempt to show that he was being addressed not by a member of the government but by a senior soldier. The two men eventually went into a separate room. No independent account of their private conversation has survived. French noted in his diary that it had been a “rather unpleasant” meeting.

The outcome, however, was clear. After the conversation Kitchener telegraphed the government that French’s troops would remain in the front line and conform to the movements of the French Army, taking care only not to be outflanked. The field marshal was to regard this as an instruction. That same day the British rearguards fought an action at Néry, and the BEF’s headquarters had to flee in haste from German cavalry.

Significance

Kitchener’s visit closed the question of withdrawing the British from the front. A few days later the British Expeditionary Force took part in the counter-offensive on the Marne, which stopped the Germans before Paris. Had the British then withdrawn behind the Seine, the Allied line would have lacked the troops that advanced into the gap between the German armies.

The meeting, however, permanently soured relations between the two field marshals. French felt that the minister was encroaching on his powers as field commander and bore him a grudge until the end of his command in France.