Background
Fernand de Langle de Cary was born in Lorient on July 4, 1849.
Fernand de Langle de Cary was born in Lorient on July 4, 1849.
He entered St. Cyr in 1867 and graduated as a cavalry officer in 1869.
De Cary fought in the Franco-Prussian War, 1870/71, distinguishing himself during the siege of Paris. He advanced steadily over the next two decades; then, after a tour of teaching at the War College, his career sped forward. A colonel in 1895, de Cary rose to brigadier general five years later and led a cavalry brigade in Algeria. He returned to France to take over an infantry brigade in 1903, and, three years later, as a major general, commanded a division. The former cavalryman was awarded a corps in 1908, and, from 1912 until his retirement two years later, he sat in the select circle of France's senior generals designated to command field armies in case of war, the Supreme War Council.
Langle de Cary barely had a chance to remove his uniform after leaving the service in July 1914. He was recalled to command the Fourth Army, three corps and a cavalry division, 160,000 men in all. With this force, he entered Belgium in mid-August on the eastern flank of General Charles Lanrezac's Fifth Army. By August 25, his forces were retreating southeastward, after a bloody encounter with the German Fourth Army in the Ardennes. De Cary retreated in good order to a line stretching, in early September, from Vitry-le-Francois to Bar-le-Duc. As the Germans had rolled forward, the French field armies threatened to pull apart from one another. General Foch and his newly formed Ninth Army were placed alongside Langle de Cary to help ease the strain. The latter's task during the fierce battle of the Marne was to hold tight to Foch on the left and General Sarrail's Third Army on the right. De Cary coolly held his line; at times, portions of two German field armies converged on his battered forces.
On September 8, he surmounted a final crisis only with the help of the XV Corps, just arrived that day from General Dubail's First Army in the Vosges. De Cary followed orders from General Joffre to pursue the retreating Germans from September 11 onward. By September 14 the Fourth Army bogged down north of St. Menehould, just as other French armies were halting in the face of well-prepared German defenses. There de Cary remained for the better part of a year of futile fighting, brightened by some advances during the offensive that took place in the autumn of 1915.
On December 11, 1915, de Cary was rewarded with command of the Center Army Group, stretching from the fortress of Verdun through Champagne. In January he received specific operational control over Verdun. In his bitter set of memoirs, he claimed that Joffre gave him the fortress because the commander in chief no longer trusted Dubail, commander of the Eastern Army Group, to defend it. But blame for the much-neglected fortress which Joffre himself had stripped of its heavy guns to support offensives elsewhere in 1915 fell on de Cary. Two days after the massive German attack on Verdun began on February 21, 1916, he suggested a massive withdrawal from the Plain of Woevre on Verdun's eastern flank. He soon found both Verdun and the nearby field armies pulled from his control and placed under the new arrival, General Pétain. In late March de Cary was relieved. Ostensibly withdrawn from active duty because of his age, he was one of a coterie of senior commanders, Dubail included, whom Joffre sacrificed as questions began to fly about the neglected fortress that was costing so much French blood to defend.
Langle de Cary was given a meaningless mission to inspect French forces in North Africa. Then, in December 1917, he was removed completely from active service. He retired to write his memoirs, pointing his pen at Joffre and Dubail in particular to explain his misfortunes over the course of a year and a half in the field. He died in Point-Scorff on January 19, 1927.