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During those critical days General Joffre, who had called Gamelin "one of my red blood corpuscles," came to admire his little aide's unfailing composure as well as his swift and incisive tactical foresight. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, he observed: "If this is philosophy, it is time all generals were philosophers."
"Minimum Losses." Not only was Gamelin a gifted staff officer; the number and quality of his citations in the field make him stand out in the Wartime company of blunderers and butchers like Sir Galahad at a gang shooting.
At 4:40 on the morning of March 21, 1918, a heavy German bombardment opened a vast offensive designed to break between the French and British armies where they joined in the devastated regions of the Somme. Gas soon shrouded the British batteries and their fire ceased. A little before 9 a. m. masses of German troops released from the Eastern Front poured through the fog toward General Cough's British—battalion after battalion, column after column, complete with field bakeries, ammunition trains, medical units, until more than 1,000,000 men were in motion, and advancing columns stretched back 45 miles behind the German lines. On a 75-mile front the Allied lines gave way as the British lost 150,000 men and British and French liaison was broken. The French VI Army Corps was sent in to plug the gap and Gamelin's 9th Division, first in position, faced six German divisions rolling forward under the tremendous momentum of their advance.
Fighting defensively on a six-to-twelve-mile front, Gamelin's 9th fell back slowly, until on March 26, when the German advance had traveled 28 miles, it was almost isolated as units on both flanks gave way. Gamelin was faced with two possible movements: he could withdraw at once and take heavy losses, or counterattack on his flanks and, risking annihilation, take the chance of pulling his people out in comparative safety that night. He prepared to attack, moved his headquarters to the front, casually invited some British generals in to dinner—it was just before the emergency made Foch Supreme Allied Commander—watched his troops retreat in good order after dark. Then he got a new command made up of the 9th and another division, the remnants of two more, seven squadrons of French cavalry, one British cavalry division, took them into the joint British-French action that halted the German offensive in early April.
The secret of Gamelin's military success lay largely in his old mapmaker's and landscapist's instinct for geography. Not only was he able to take the maximum advantage of terrain so as to conserve manpower, but his shrewd disposition of fire power constantly enhanced the offensive quality of his command. His many citations praised his "highest qualities of method and of inspection" and his ability to carry his objectives "in the course of a general offensive at the cost of minimum losses." The French soldier did not like him less for that and the present French Army does not forget this quality in its Commander-in-Chief. "Very much all there," was the way one British general characterized Gamelin in the War years. He appears, during the entire War, to have made no major error in judgment. From that time on he was a marked man.