French and British fought side by side for survival in the two most destructive wars in history. After terrible trials and sufferings, they twice emerged victorious, and at the moments of triumph paid each other generous and heartfelt tribute. But they did not understand each other. Nor did they establish trust and durable affection, either at the level of governments or – exceptions notwithstanding – among the generality of their citizens. Even in the best of circumstances, alliance is a potential source of resentment, as partners pursue differing aims, and seek to shift some of the burden of suffering. The First World War was no exception. The absence of Franco-British solidarity during the inter-war decades fatally dashed the hopes of both peoples – and of the world – that they had fought ‘a war to end war’. The different fates of the two during the Second World War, even if both were finally victors, planted further seeds of mistrust, and created divergent national myths.
CHAPTER 10
The argument that there is no written bond binding us to France is strictly correct. There is no contractual obligation. But the entente has been made, strengthened, put to the test and celebrated in a manner justifying the belief that a moral bond was being forged. The whole policy of the entente has no meaning if it does not signify that in a just quarrel England would stand by her friends . . . Our duty and our interest will be seen to lie in standing by France in her hour of need. France has not sought the quarrel.
It has been forced upon her.
Foreign Office memorandum, July 1914
From Entente to Alliance, 1904–14
France . . . is a country and a nation whose ideas, whose ambitions, whose ideals we can understand and know the limits of . . . There is no fear now or sentimentality on either side . . . France has become bourgeois . . . sensible, prudent, cautious in her old age.
GEORGE SAUNDERS, foreign correspondent.1
The Entente is not an alliance. For purposes of ultimate emergencies it may be found to have no substance at all.
EYRE CROWE, foreign office, 19112
During the early years of the twentieth century, the British, whether they admired or disapproved, were no longer afraid of France, but they worried about Russia and were beginning to be alarmed by Germany. The French rarely felt particular affection for Britain, but regarded the entente cordiale as a potential source of security in the face of a Germany they regarded not only as a historic enemy, but as a reviving menace. The entente was not evidence of a more intimate relationship, however. If there were two European countries that had long regarded themselves as having affinities, they were Britain and Germany. They were huge trading partners. Liberals admired German earnestness and efficiency; the Left envied the massive organization of its Social Democrats and trade unions; and intellectuals admired its universities. German cavalry officers came to hunt with the Pytchley and the Quorn. German students won Rhodes scholarships to Oxford, whereas French students hardly ever attended British universities. Admiral von Tirpitz, architect of Germany’s naval challenge, sent his daughters to Cheltenham Ladies’ College.3 It would be hard to identify such spontaneous links between the French and the British, except, as we have noted, in the artistic and literary worlds. There was often a cultural and social divide between French and British diplomats and politicians. Few French politicians (with the notable exception of Georges Clemenceau) visited Britain. Organized expressions of friendship tried to bridge the gap. Most famous then, though since forgotten, was the Franco-British Exhibition of Science, Arts and Industries – popularly known as the ‘Franco’ – held in London at the specially constructed ‘White City’ in 1908.4 There were many other official gestures of goodwill, including the statues of Queen Victoria at Nice and Biarritz, and of Edward VII at Cannes and in Paris.
There was no certainty that Britain would be an ally of France in any European war. In both countries there were influential voices resisting entente euphoria. A.J. Balfour, prime minister when the entente was signed, had no idea ‘what may be expected for the Anglo-French understanding and would be ready to make an agreement with Germany tomorrow’.5 France’s eyelashes fluttered only at Russia, a virile protector kept happy with large amounts of cash. But Britain’s relations with Russia were chilly. The Admiralty and the Indian government considered that Russia and France were still the main long-term global threat. In both Paris and London, some feared that excessive concessions were being made and, more ominously, that the other might drag them into an undesired conflict with Germany.
What transformed the situation were the actions of Berlin, so unpredictable and confused that even now it is impossible to interpret them with certainty. Germany in the 1900s was building a short-range battle fleet, which had no purpose other than to threaten British home security. In March 1905, Germany interfered with the Anglo-French deal to let France take over Morocco. The reason was to show the world, and particularly France, that no deals could be made without German consent, at Germany’s price, and thus to show that the entente was worthless. The French government panicked. Delcassé, architect of the entente, was forced out of office in June 1905. As with most German diplomatic initiatives in these years, the outcome was the opposite of that intended: Britain drew closer to its arch-rival, Russia. ‘An entente between Russia, France and ourselves,’ wrote Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal foreign secretary from 1905, ‘would be absolutely secure. If it is necessary to check Germany it could then be done.’ In April 1906 he began the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Russian entente of August 1907. Still, in colonial matters, Britain and France, as well as Britain and Russia, continued to cause each other suspicion and annoyance down to 1914.
When Germany made a second attempt to exert pressure over Morocco in 1911, it sent a gunboat, Panzer, to Agadir to ‘protect’ German residents. (One was sent specially to be protected.) This annoyed the British, who regarded the sending of gunboats as their prerogative. The chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, made a vehement though vague speech at the Mansion House that in effect threatened war with Germany. No one wanted a war over Morocco, any more than they had over South Africa, but it was a sign that European diplomacy was becoming rougher. Governments and peoples began to think that a major war was possible, and even to plan for one. Britain recognized, and perhaps exaggerated, German ambitions. Many Germans did regard Britain as arrogant, oppressive and corrupt (as, indeed, did many French). But anglophobe fantasies about a struggle for global dominance were very far from Berlin’s actual foreign policy, which was incoherent and blustering rather than megalomaniac.
The Kaiser as stage villain brings France and Britain together. France is now habitually represented as a pretty peasant girl.
Lloyd George’s speech was significant because he was a leading radical, a former ‘pro-Boer’. Yet despite his strong words, the Liberals, who came into office in 1905, were more pacific, less pro-French, more pro-German and more anti-Russian than their Tory predecessors. Most Liberals wanted appeasement of Germany and refused any commitment to France. Grey’s foreign policy therefore had to be ambiguous, even duplicitous. Grey, the scion of an old Whig dynasty, was an introspective bird-watcher whose mild manners concealed a surprising ruthlessness. He had to square what he thought necessary for national security with what the Liberal Party and their Labour allies would swallow – broadly speaking, nothing threatening, unethical, or pro-Russian. Unlike his Tory predecessors Lansdowne and Salisbury, Grey did not speak French. Paul Cambon (ambassador since 1898 but never at home in London) did not speak English. They conversed by articulating very slowly in their respective languages. Not surprisingly, subtle nuances of British policy – perfidy and hypocrisy as the French were tempted to see it – were lost in the process. But the real misunderstanding was not linguistic, but political: the combination of Grey’s ambiguity, secrecy, and sometimes high-minded duplicity, with Cambon’s stubbornly logical wishful thinking. For Cambon, a Franco-British alliance was desirable, it followed rationally from earlier agreements, and hence it must be deemed to exist, whatever the Liberal government and its followers in Westminster might think. Secret meetings began between British and French generals to discuss how – were it ever necessary – a British army might be sent to France. Friendly contacts were encouraged at a lower level. General Henry Wilson, the War Office’s director of operations, a fervently francophile Ulsterman, spent his holidays cycling round spying out the land. He even left a small map showing his planned movements of British troops as a sort of votive offering at a French war memorial on one of the 1870 battlefields.6An agreement was reached by which the Royal Navy concentrated in home waters, to face the German battle fleet, while the French navy concentrated in the Mediterranean. In November 1912, Grey and Cambon exchanged letters setting out their understanding of what the two countries agreed to do if there were a threat of war. The British insisted on wording that denied any obligation. Whereas the French wanted to say that the two countries ‘will immediately deliberate on the means for acting together’, the British would only agree to ‘discuss with the other whether [to] act together . . . and if so what measures they would be prepared to take’.7 This enabled Grey and Asquith to assure Parliament that Britain was bound by no commitment. The French assumed that Britain would in practice support them if they were the victims of German aggression. Grey hoped that public opinion would indeed demand intervention in such a case. But a senior foreign office official still thought in April 1914 that ‘should war break out on the Continent the likelihood of our dispatching any expeditionary force is extremely remote.’8
In July 1914, the disaster came. It began in the Balkans with a shady dispute between Serbia, Austria-Hungary and Russia – just the kind of conflict Liberals, and the Liberal press, were least inclined to get involved in. ‘We care as little for Belgrade,’ declared the Manchester Guardian, ‘as Belgrade for Manchester.’9 Grey detected a feeling in Britain that France was only being dragged in because it ‘had the misfortune to be involved in a Russian quarrel’. Asquith struggled privately with the contradictions of his own policy, writing in his diary on 2 August that ‘We have no obligation of any kind either to France or Russia to give them military or naval help . . . We must not forget the ties created by our long-standing and intimate friendship with France.’10
On 1 August Germany declared war on France, having long before decided that in case of war with Russia, France must be eliminated first. Asquith, Grey and some other Liberals, notably Winston Churchill, most Tories, and many diplomats and soldiers, believed that Britain had a national interest and a moral obligation to prevent France from being crushed. Grey wrote later that ‘Germany . . . would then have been supreme over all the Continent of Europe and Asia Minor’, which would mean ‘the isolation of Britain, the hatred of her by both those who had feared and those who had wished for her intervention; and ultimately that Germany would wield the whole power of the Continent’.11 Churchill argued that British intervention would be decisive without being too burdensome, as a limited military presence would have a strong moral, political and even strategic effect, while the main effort would fall to the Royal Navy. So ‘the presence or absence of the British army . . . will very probably decide the fate of France’; yet ‘the naval war will be cheap’. Grey even argued that Britain would be practically as much affected by staying out of the war as by going in.12
The government was threatened with collapse: Asquith and Grey would resign if the Cabinet refused to aid France; at least three and perhaps five members would resign if it agreed to do so. Liberal back-bench opinion was strongly anti-war.13 Had the government fallen, a Coalition including Tory ministers would have favoured intervention, but there would certainly have been serious division within Britain, a delay in acting, and tension with France. While the Cabinet thrashed about – ‘It was decided not to decide,’ said one of the anti-war ministers14 – Grey played desperately for time, telling the Germans they should not count on British neutrality, and the French that they should not count on British support. Cambon, going through ‘the darkest moments of my life’, asked bitterly ‘whether the word “honour” should be struck out of the English vocabulary’.15 His counterpart in Paris, Sir Francis Bertie, felt ‘sick and ashamed . . . Here today it is “Vive l’Angleterre”, tomorrow it may be “Perfide Albion”.’16 He began to prepare the embassy for a mob attack.
The dilemma was ended by Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium on 2 August, in order to outflank France’s frontier defences and take her army in the rear. Britain was committed to defending Belgian neutrality by the Treaty of London (1839), an expression of one of the oldest principles of British foreign policy: the need to keep a potential enemy (in the past, of course, France) away from the ports of the Low Countries, springboards for invading England. The defence of Belgium provided both a pretext and a genuine reason for joining the war. As far as the Cabinet was concerned, however, it might not have been a sufficient reason had the view not been gaining ground that Britain had a vital interest in standing by France. Wavering ministers, such as Lloyd George, knew that resigning would simply bring in a Liberal–Tory coalition that would intervene anyway. As far as the public was concerned, Belgium’s fate showed that the war was just – an impression confirmed by savage German atrocities against civilians.
Controversy has persisted ever since. Hardly had fighting begun than it was argued that if Britain had been open and definite either that it would, or would not, join a war, then either the Germans, or the Franco-Russian allies, would have drawn back. Historians now agree that the other governments made their decisions irrespective of British action or inaction. Both Berlin and Paris believed that the British army was too weak to affect a conflict that most expected to be decided quickly. The French (far more committed to Russia than to Britain) wanted political, financial and naval support, but regarded the presence of British troops in France as symbolic. When in 1909 General Wilson had asked his friend General Foch what would be the smallest force that could be helpful in case of war, he replied ‘One single private soldier, and we would take good care that he was killed.’17
A second, weightier, argument concerns the broader consequences of the war: no political goal seems worth the stupendous suffering and destruction of 1914–18, which dealt a permanent blow to Europe, weakened Britain, and created the conditions for later catastrophe. Nearly a century later, we are likely to feel that the war was not worth fighting, that its objects were at best ephemeral, and that it was futile and frivolous in its archaic values of national prestige and honour. This was not, of course, the view of most participants. On all sides people were convinced not only that they were defending their countries against aggression, but that they were fighting for universal values. The view quickly formed in France and Britain that they were defending justice, democracy and civilization against the violence of ‘militarism’, and hence were fighting ‘la dernière des guerres’, as the poet Charles Péguy put it; or in H.G. Wells’s famous phrase, ‘a war to end war’. Ideas have changed: yet even now it is impossible to imagine that democratic states would not oppose by force an act of aggression such as that carried out by Germany in 1914.
In 1914 few, if any, realized how horrific industrial war would be. It is arguable that a quick German victory – assuming this to have been the outcome if Britain had refused to help France – would have been less disastrous than the Allies’ pyrrhic victory after four years of carnage. Such a judgement requires hindsight: but can we be sure what hindsight shows? Interventionists feared that German victory would mean not peace, but further aggression against Britain and the Empire, probably with French and Russian connivance, forcing Britain into a fatal war resulting in ruin and loss of independence. We might find this melodramatic. But it is no more convincing to go to the extreme of optimism, and assume that British neutrality and German victory would have meant lasting peace, leaving Britain and its empire intact, and merely creating a forerunner of the European Union under enlightened German hegemony.18 It is impossible to know what the effects of a complete German victory would have been on the victors or the vanquished. It would undoubtedly not have advanced or even preserved liberal and democratic government in Europe. It is reasonable to imagine Germany, Russia, Austria and France all under authoritarian regimes, and large populations in the Low Countries, northern France and eastern Europe annexed against their will to the victor states. Nor would colonial peoples have benefited from being fought over and parcelled out. Grey’s fear that a triumphant Germany would not be content with primacy in Europe, but would have regarded Britain as its next target, was, and remains, plausible.
The British and the Defence of France, 1914
We . . . fight beside our gallant allies in France and Belgium in no war of arrogance, but to uphold our national honour, independence and freedom. We have violated no neutrality, nor have we been false to any treaties . . . Having then this trust in the righteousness of our cause, pride in the glory of our military traditions, and belief in the efficiency of our army, we go forward together to do or die for GOD – KING – AND COUNTRY.
SIR JOHN FRENCH, Order of the Day19
Britain entered the war on 4 August without a plan of campaign. It was decided at the last minute to send the British Expeditionary Force (originally designed for service in India against Russia) – an enterprise that two days earlier Asquith had said was ‘out of the question’.20 There seemed to be no other options. The navy’s schemes to land troops on the German coast, reminiscent of the good old days of Pitt the Elder, were scotched by the army. The BEF arrived in France with remarkable dispatch. Using 1,800 special trains, 240 requisitioned ships, 165,000 horses, London buses, and delivery vans (some proclaiming HP Sauce to be ‘the World’s Appetiser’) – ‘immense convoys’ recalled one Frenchman, ‘loaded with bacon, tea and marmalade’ – it was in place in France only sixteen days after the war began.21 Some of its units wore pith helmets, as if for colonial service, and the inhabitants of Boulogne were thrilled that the first troops ashore were Highlanders with kilts and bagpipes. The modern khaki uniforms of most of the army reminded some of golfing clothes. Regimental bands played the ‘Marseillaise’, and soldiers threw coins to chidren. The French responded with generous quantities of drink, and even, so eager rumour had it, with patriotic sexual favours. One soldier recalled that ‘It was good to be an Englishman that day; good to feel that Englishmen then in France could now look Frenchmen squarely in the face.’22
The BEF is often said to have been the finest army Britain has ever had. It was certainly the finest with which Britain has ever begun a war. Lessons from South Africa had been learned: the infantry had been taught to shoot accurately and fast; the cavalry could fight on horseback or on foot. Morale was high: ‘our motto was, “We’ll do it. What is it?”’23 But it was small. Containing nearly all the regular troops in the United Kingdom supplemented by reservists (60 per cent of the total), it mustered some 110,000 men at the outset, of whom 75,000 were combat troops. But there were 1.7 million Germans and 2 million French. The new secretary of state for war, Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener, instructed the BEF’s commander, Field-Marshal Sir John French, that he could expect few reinforcements and so must avoid heavy casualties. Even so, it was estimated that 75 per cent of the force would be killed, wounded or captured in six months of fighting.24 This proved an under-estimate.
The Western Front 1914–17
Neither the British nor the French had much idea of each other’s intentions. The latter, commanded by General Joseph Joffre, had not been sure whether the British – called l’armée W – would turn up at all, and if so how many there would be. So there were no plans for what the BEF might do. As earlier agreed, they assembled to the left of the French army, round the antique fortress of Maubeuge, near the Belgian border. As neighbours they had a French cavalry corps, patrolling the open spaces beyond the armies’ flanks, and some elderly French territorials. They relied on French planning, and had no fall-back position in case things went wrong.25 This must have seemed a remote danger, as the main fighting was expected to be 150 miles to the east on the German frontier.
It had long been supposed, even by popular novelists, that the Germans would send forces into Belgium, but the French high command maintained that it would only be a feint. By mid-August, the most perceptive – including Kitchener – deduced that it was much more. It was in fact the spearhead of the notorious Schlieffen Plan, intended to knock the French out by aiming the decisive blow through central Belgium and north-western France, reaching Paris, and taking the main French army from behind. This plan – if it worked – was supposed to finish the war in the west in weeks, permitting Germany and Austria to turn their main forces against Russia.
No one had planned that the five British divisions, barely arrived, would be directly in the path of this German right hook: thirty-four divisions totalling 580,000 men. The Belgians had decided to fight, and appealed for Allied aid. The BEF and French forces advanced into Belgium, hoping to stem the German advance, which they still greatly underestimated. Some young British officers realized the truth as night fell:
The evening was still and wonderfully peaceful . . . A dog was barking at some sheep. A girl was singing as she walked down the lane behind us . . . Then, without a moment’s warning, with a suddenness that made us start . . . we saw the whole horizon burst into flames . . . A chill of horror came over us . . . we felt as if some horrible Thing, utterly merciless, were advancing to grip us.26
The BEF dug in near the industrial town of Mons. The hurrying Germans, unaware that they were there, crashed into them on 23 August, the first British battle in western Europe since Waterloo, thirty miles away. British rifle fire, so intense that the Germans thought that they were facing automatic weapons, inflicted 5–10,000 casualties on the massed columns. Yet the BEF, outnumbered three to one, and with the French on their right in sudden retreat, had to fall back, fighting another delaying action, again outnumbered, at Le Cateau on the 26th. This time they lost more heavily, and were forced into a rapid retreat of 100 miles in ten days, slogging through sweltering heat along roads clogged with vehicles and refugees, and harried by German cavalry. Part of this disarray was due to their commander, Sir John French, a dashing cavalry leader in South Africa out of his depth in France. Mistrust and misunderstanding between the new Allies almost caused disaster. Sir John had been unnerved by the sudden retreat of the French army on his right, commanded incompetently and with arrogant disregard for the British by General Lanrezac. The situation was aggravated by the inability of the senior commanders on either side to speak each other’s language, hence great responsibility fell on junior liaison officers, such as the bilingual Lt Edward Spears, son of a cosmopolitan Franco-Irish family, born and largely brought up in France. There were cultural barriers more mysterious than language: when a British officer was arrested by the French as a suspected spy, his captors wanted him to undress to provide ‘some proof that you are English’. It was unclear exactly what they were hoping to see.27
French’s object became to save his BEF from the danger of annihilation, irrespective of what his ally might do. For a time he wanted to make a dash for the coast, almost anticipating the events of 1940. By early September he was near Paris, demanding to pull out of the fighting for two weeks’ rest and refit – a crazy idea as the war reached a crisis. Asquith wrote, ‘We all think this quite wrong because he would . . . give our allies hereafter some pretext for saying that, at the pinch, the English had deserted them.’28Kitchener hastened to Paris to tell him to fight on. Sir John’s panic was in a sense understandable, as the French seemed to be in serious trouble, and many British units had been in practically ceaseless retreat, averaging three hours’ rest per night. Up to 20,000 men had been killed, wounded, captured, or left behind.29 One Dragoon Guards trooper recalled that horses and men fell asleep on the march: ‘I fell off my horse more than once . . . Pain could be endured, food scrounged, but the desire for rest was never-ending.’30Fortunately, the pursuing Germans were in no better condition, with their lorries mostly broken down, their horses dying, and their men exhausted.
By 5 September, the German armies were in a rough line along the River Marne, east of Paris, with their nearest units only some twenty miles from the city walls. Joffre had been pulling divisions from the east to stem this advance, ordering that anyone showing weakness should be shot, and sacking incompetent generals. These included Lanrezac, replaced by the dashing Franchet d’Esperay, soon known to the admiring BEF as Desperate Frankie. Joffre came to plead with French to join in a great counter-offensive: ‘Monsieur le Maréchal, c’est la France qui vous supplie.’ Sir John struggled to reply in French, then burst out, ‘Damn it, I can’t explain. Tell him that all that men can do our fellows will do.’31 The BEF found themselves by chance opposite a wide gap between the German 1st and 2nd Armies, held only by a screen of cavalry. In the words of an unimpressed French historian, ‘Despite Joffre’s pleas and their crushing numerical superiority, the British attacked with great diffidence, exploiting none of their local successes.’32 The BEF did indeed remain cautious, but rarely was the ‘miracle of the Marne’ marked by rapid or decisive action: all the armies were too exhausted. The real miracle was that the German high command decided it had lost, and from 9 to 14 September pulled back thirty miles to the River Aisne. This marked the failure of the German plan to knock out France quickly, though it had cost the French 385,000 casualties in five weeks of fighting.33
British historians have usually emphasized the key role of the BEF. Having slowed the German advance at Mons and Le Cateau, they were in just the right place to turn the tide at the Marne. This view confirmed the arguments of those who had pressed for intervention when war broke out: if the BEF had not been there, or even if it had arrived a few days later, Germany would have conquered France, and the history of the world would have been different. French historians, however, rarely acknowledge any such debt. In their view, the French army stopped the German invasion, with the BEF playing a negligible part. It is far from clear that it was the BEF that decisively delayed the German spearhead, which, because of exhaustion, lack of supplies, and the diversion of troops to other fronts, was grinding to a halt anyway. The ‘miracle of the Marne’ was a vast operation involving over a million men on a 100-mile front. The British did little fighting, suffering only 1,701 casualties compared with French losses of 80,000. The BEF was important more for what the Germans feared it might do than for what it actually did: they had decided that if the British crossed the Marne – which they did on 9 September – they would retreat.34 Hence, the BEF did contribute to the sudden German loss of confidence that was the main outcome of the battle.
The rest of 1914 saw the two sides still striving for rapid victory by manoeuvring to outflank each other to the north-west. The BEF was redeployed on the left of the Allied line, close to its supply ports. In October and November French, British, Indians and Belgians fought a long and bloody battle in defence of the Belgian town of Ypres – the first of four ever bloodier battles over its ruins. From then on, the lines were fixed. The old BEF had largely been wiped out, having lost 90,000 men killed, wounded or captured, two-thirds of them at Ypres. Many of its regiments were down to 100 men; the 2nd Highland Light Infantry had only thirty of some 600 who had been mobilized at Aldershot three months earlier. By the end of 1914, the French had lost 995,000 men, killed, wounded and prisoners, and the Germans 800,000. These were the deadliest months of the whole war – the clash of armies in the open was far more lethal than the worst battles in the trenches.1 35
The year had not, as most experts had expected, ended in a knockout. The French army and government were too strong and resilient to succumb to the Schlieffen Plan. The war would become a harrowing test of endurance, blood and treasure that Germany was never likely to win. Kitchener had realized early on that it would be a long struggle, and that Britain would have to raise a mass army for the first time. He warned the French that Britain had practically no more troops, for ‘to send untrained men into the fighting line was little short of murder’. Consequently, ‘no very important supply of British effectives could be looked for until the late spring of 1915 and . . . the British army would only reach full strength . . . during the Summer of 1917’.36 For the time being, the French would have to bear the brunt of the slaughter.
The Germans were occupying the coalfields, iron mines and industrial cities of northern France. So the French built new factories in Paris, Lyons and Toulouse; perfumeries turned to making explosives; dozens of hydroelectric power stations were built in mountain valleys. French arms factories would in time supply the Serbs, the Russians and finally the Americans with artillery, machine guns and eventually aircraft and tanks.37 But all this depended on British money, coal, steel and ships, for Germany had seized 75 per cent of French coal production and 63 per cent of its steel. The French government had expected to pay for a short war with their large gold reserves, but as early as April 1915, 1.5 billion francs of British credit was needed to finance purchases in the USA, Canada and Britain – the first of many loans. From August 1916, France became dependent on British subsidies, without which it could not have fought on. This recalled every war since 1688: Britain financing Continental allies to prevent the hegemony of a hostile power. In modern conditions, unprecedented control of both economies was necessary. The Allies set up a joint purchasing authority, so that they would not bid up world prices against each other in commodities such as wheat and sugar. As the war went on, economic symbiosis increased. British and American imports were vital for arms production. France’s normal overland trade with her Continental neighbours had halted, so exports to Britain were needed to maintain civilian employment and plug the trade deficit. By 1917, over 60 per cent of French GNP was being swallowed up by the war – comparable with the effort of the USSR during the Second World War.38
Wrangling over money, with the French suspecting the British of profiting from the war, and the British annoyed that the French wanted to preserve gold reserves while spending British subsidies, caused lasting resentment. Most imports and exports had to be carried in British ships, for which there was increasing demand, and this effectively brought the French economy under British supervision. The British government requisitioned all ships and restricted the import of non-essentials into Britain (which included the luxury goods so crucial to the French economy) to clear shipping capacity for food and raw materials. It insisted that the French should do the same if they wanted the use of British ships. In September 1916, British consuls reported that 200 merchant ships were daily lying idle in French ports, and the British government began withdrawing ships from French service. This slowed coal and steel imports and arms production. There were accusations of ‘misuse’ of British ships, and angry press comment in both countries. The French government agreed to speed up loading and unloading by freeing up more rail traffic, which meant restrictions on civilian travel and on home leave for the troops. The British and French economies came under joint official control, with inter-allied authorities for purchase and allocation of goods. The aim was that all allied citizens should carry a comparable economic burden. By November 1917, the British and French effectively pooled their economic resources. They also created a single body for buying supplies from the USA. The French trade minister, Etienne Clémentel, hoped that after the war ended, this joint trading system would continue, as a barrier against German economic dominance. Jean Monnet, his English-speaking assistant, revived these ideas during the Second World War.
French ministers knew that controls were necessary, but it was politically useful to blame unpopular restrictions on British pressure. The ambassador, Bertie, warned that ‘there is an inclination . . . to think that we are making use of France against Germany for our own sole benefit’. British trade unionists came over to try to convince French socialists that Britain was not fighting for profit, and delegations of schoolteachers also went. The historian H.A.L. Fisher, who had studied in France, was sent on an official mission in 1916. He was worried by what he perceived as unawareness of British efforts, and even ‘actual depreciation of the part which England was playing in the war’, especially after the battle of Verdun, which left a sense of grievance in France. Yet Whitehall disliked the idea of propaganda, and little was done to put the British case in France. The ambassador noted in his diary that many French believed that Britain was being ‘enriched by the war which we consequently wish to protract, and the longer it lasts, the more certain we are to get into our hands . . . all the commerce of the world’.39 ‘Carthage’ was alive and well.
Les Tommy and the French
Après la guerre finie
Soldat anglais parti
Once the war is done,
English soldier gone.
Song
As the BEF disembarked in August 1914, the mayor of Boulogne called for ‘an enthusiastic and brotherly welcome’ to ‘the valiant British troops’. Fearing that the welcome might be more than brotherly, Kitchener warned of ‘temptations, both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both . . . and while treating all women with perfect courtesy you should avoid any intimacy.’40 Rarely can a field-marshal’s instructions have been so energetically breached.
By summer 1917 there were over 2 million ‘British’ (including Indian and Dominion) troops in France – the peak. During the course of the war, over 5 million served in France – the most intense and numerous direct contacts that have ever occurred between the two nations, and the biggest single experience of ‘abroad’ ever undergone by British men. Remarkably, this has been little studied41 – a proof of how inward-looking and selective memory of the Great War became, with each nation wrapped up in its own trauma. What we can say is therefore both impressionistic and somewhat speculative.
The limitations imposed by circumstance partly explain why this experience has been so little remembered (compared, for example, with the American presence in Britain during the Second World War), and also why it left ambivalent feelings. The contact was geographically restricted. The war from 1915 was largely static, and political, practical, and strategic motives kept the BEF mainly confined to the three north-western departments – Pas de Calais, Nord and Somme – bisected by the trench lines. This region had a history of economic contacts with the North of England’s textile industries. Lille was France’s main centre for studying English. Roubaix had its second oldest football club, set up by English textile engineers.42 British military presence became massive and visible. In many areas there were more British than French. There were British buses, roadsigns, posters and goods in the shops. Place names were informally anglicized: Monchy Breton to ‘Monkey Britain’, for example, and Auchonvillers to ‘Ocean Villas’. Military needs kept soldiers moving: from the devastated battle zone, emptied of civilians, to inhabited rest areas in the rear, where the closest soldier–civilian contacts took place, and via transit depots and bases (notably Amiens, Rouen, Le Havre and Etaples) to and from Britain. Most of France did not see les Tommy, while those regions that did mainly saw them on the move. Personal contact was therefore fleeting. Moreover, the military authorities and welfare bodies worked to limit contacts with civilians, keeping the troops ‘out of mischief’ through sport, concerts, training, canteens, libraries and hostels.43 Only non-combat troops – a large number – at the depots and lines of communication, including administrators, storekeepers, medical staff and military police, had lasting contacts with French civilians.
The war also imposed socio-economic constraints. Life in northern France had been shattered, creating broken families, loss of livelihoods and destitution. Many people had fled or been evacuated; others had arrived as refugees from Belgium and occupied northern France, ruled by the Germans with a very heavy hand. If the BEF was a manifestation of war, and itself an instrument of devastation, it was also a source of income: British, compared with French soldiers, had plenty of money, and Dominion troops even more. Routine contacts soldiers had with civilians once the euphoric welcome of August 1914 had passed were wholly or partly commercial: with the owners and staff of estaminets (the northern name for bars), peasants selling food and illicit alcohol, householders providing billets, and women offering sex. Reported one cynical French official in 1917, ‘the English are loved in proportion to the money they leave’.44 There were cultural differences between a largely rural society and a mostly urban army, whose men often found local conditions primitive: ‘The farmer and his wife curmudgeons, everything filthy; we slept in our “flea bags” in preference to the dirty, filthy bed in the room.’45 At least one regular battalion wore shorts, as if still in India, and ‘The men treat the French civilians just like “niggers”, kick them about, talk army Hindustani to them.’46 Many French households found the compulsory billeting of large numbers of often noisy and demanding troops a disruptive burden: ‘No one in the area is master of his own house.’47
Language difficulties were overcome by the rapid acquisition of pidgin English and French (il n’y a plus and ça ne fait rien, for example, becoming napoo and san fairy ann). ‘Och, it’s easy,’ explained a Scottish soldier, ‘I just ask the wifie for twa iffs an she gives me three eggs.’ A French waitress was equally fluent: ‘Messieurs, when you ’ave finis, ’op it.’ But letter-writing was difficult, and hence the maintenance of relationships once men had been moved. Nevertheless, one French postal censor was shocked in 1916 at the number of women writing to British soldiers after their units had left, ‘as if engaged’. The Irish war artist William Orpen thought that by 1917 ‘nearly every French girl could speak some English, and great was their anger if one could not understand them’.48
What we know of this long, abnormal and often intense relationship comes from letters (monitored by the authorities, and often self-censored for the folks at home), diaries, later memoirs and works of literature. It also comes from the records of military authorities concerned with order and discipline – something bound to skew our vision by giving prominence to theft, vandalism, drunkenness and prostitution. Theft and vandalism came in many forms. Hungry and thirsty soldiers retreating after Mons helped themselves to apples from the orchards, and to anything else they could find. In the battle zone, abandoned and semi-abandoned houses and farms were sources of firewood and building materials. Fires were started to keep warm, and these often spread. It was little consolation to locals that the Germans were worse, and the French no better. ‘Scrounging’ was a developed art, and it took place on a huge scale. Anything removable – potatoes, coal, straw, chickens, eggs, milk, wood – was likely to be removed. To the frustration of the military police, this was winked at by regimental officers. We might wonder why the former bothered, but they were responding to complaints from local people and mayors, which greatly increased from 1916. The British were convinced that the French were exaggerating losses as they knew the army would pay. Worse was the impact of official military activity. Horses were pastured in the fields, which were also trampled in exercises. Fodder was requisitioned and barns occupied, disrupting farming activity. Land was taken over for everything from football pitches to airfields.49
Drink fuelled the Franco-British relationship. One of the few booming industries close to the front line was its manufacture and supply, drawing on established practices of home brewing and distilling. In some villages, every second house turned into anestaminet, also supplying food. ‘The estaminets with their cheap wine and feeds of eggs and chips were paradise to us.’50 If there was wrangling over prices, and no doubt difficulty with unruly soldiers, there must also have been much complicity between soldiers and civilians to hoodwink the military authorities. One young officer, Robert Graves, was disgusted by the whole situation:
I find it very difficult to like the French here . . . I have not met a single case of the hospitality that one meets among the peasants of other countries [though] we are fighting for their dirty little lives. They suck enormous quantities of money out of us too . . . Every private soldier gets his five-franc note (nearly four shillings) every ten days, and spends it at once on eggs, coffee and beer in the local estaminets; the prices are ridiculous and the stuff bad . . . the other day I saw barrels of already thin beer being watered from the canal with a hose-pipe.51
He was surprised that ‘there were so few clashes between the British and the local French – who returned our loathing and were convinced that, when the war ended, we would stay and hold the Channel ports’. If this was an extreme view – coloured by Graves’s rather priggish fastidiousness – the ancient fear of post-war occupation was voiced even in French government circles. President Poincaré was uneasy at being invited to lunch by George V, who was visiting his troops – he felt that he should have been the host on French soil.52 At a less exalted level, ordinary people simply got tired of the overwhelming presence of so many foreign men.
‘BENE AND HOT’
A picturesque example of how France could leave traces on British behaviour was the taste acquired by troops from Lancashire for the sweet liqueur Benedictine, especially mixed with hot water – ‘Bene and hot’ – creating something resembling warm cough mixture. After the war, the habit flourished, and Lancashire became a centre of Benedictine drinking. Nearly a century later, the Burnley Miners’ Club remains the world’s largest single consumer of Benedictine.
William Orpen, ‘Dieppe’: British troops acquiring a taste for Benedictine.
‘LE FOOT’
We know little of whether the British presence produced durable effects on French life, except in one important area: football. The ubiquitous British habit of starting kick-abouts at any spare moment, as well as organized tournaments whenever circumstances permitted, amazed both the French and the Germans. The common practice of kicking balls into no man’s land as a ‘kick-off’ for attacks was considered by the Germans as shockingly unmilitary. The French ‘could not understand the reason why the English spent so much of their life on football . . . instead of practising warfare’.53 Eventually the French 5th Army set up sports teams, and there were inter-Allied matches. French inexperience was evident, ‘the French players never being able to control the ball sufficiently to bring it near to the goal mouth . . . [They] were fast enough and would no doubt make good footballers if they had more practice with British teams.’54 This wartime experience began the take-off of football as a mass sport all over France.
Villages in the rest areas, where soldiers normally spent four days out of twelve, provided a haven where they could get clean, sleep, eat and for a time forget the war. In contrast with the trenches – ‘devastation, desolation and khaki’ – it seemed a rural idyll: ‘the ground was everywhere carpeted with anemones and cowslips . . . in the heart of the forest, it was impossible to catch a sound of the outside world’; ‘How much we owe to that peaceful little village fourteen miles behind the lines for restoring us all to sanity and our customary high spirits.’ As well as communing with nature, human contact with civilians, especially women, was a crucial part of relaxation: ‘one gets dreadfully tired of eternally seeing people in trousers, and those khaki!’55 Billeting in houses and farms allowed relationships, resembling domestic life, to form – and billeting allowances (1 franc per day for officers, 50 centimes for NCOs, 5 centimes for private soldiers) kept many French families going. Soldiers were very appreciative of kindness: one sick man, who was nursed by his hosts, said that ‘they could not have done more for me had I been their most loved relation’.56
The local French communities had become predominantly female, as most men between the ages of eighteen and fifty had been mobilized and were away fighting outside the British zone. If this could create a maternal atmosphere for young soldiers inestaminetsand billets, it also meant a very erotic one. Pre-war stereotypes created fantasies, not only of Paris as ‘a sort of gigantic brothel where women wore nothing but georgette underwear and extra long silk stockings’, but in general of ‘a different system of taboos about sex’. This expectation could rather comically lead to disappointment, with ‘the poorer classes’ being found ‘rather repellent’,57 and to huge misunderstanding, when highly unusual wartime sexual behaviour – sternly disapproved of in France – was interpreted by the British as ‘typically French’.
British expectations about the French led to absurd misunderstandings.
Contemporaries reiterated that war created special conditions: the absence of normal social controls, the need for affection and intimacy on the part of frightened and traumatized men (including boys who ‘did not want to die virgins’58), pressure from comrades to prove virility, boredom, ready money, the effects of drink and – among the privileged behind the lines – ample opportunity. Among civilians, the absence of male breadwinners, homelessness, the need to bring up children amid food shortages and spiralling prices, especially during the severe winter of 1916–17, the inadequacy of government aid, and the harsh official requisitioning policy of farm produce, all created an impoverished female population. This was the context for relationships running from patriotic infatuation on the French side and boyish fantasy on the British – one soldier was content ‘just to sit and look . . . without speaking’ at the daughter of the family where he was billeted59 – via flirtation and touching, to romantic passion, and commercial or semi-commercial sex. Some peasant families adopted a practical attitude that would not have surprised readers of Maupassant, and in some cases at least must have combined pleasure with business: ‘the farm was run by a widow and her three daughters all good looking. The sergeant slept in the farmhouse and after two days I found out that my two mates had fixed up with two of the daughters to sleep with them leaving the youngest one for me. I was indeed sorry when we were moved.’60 Relationships such as these, and the wholly commercial ones near base camps, ports and railway stations, led to an epidemic (highest among the Australians) of venereal diseases, ‘a grave danger to the troops’ fighting ability, especially for the officer’.61 About 55,000 British soldiers – about one in thirty – needed hospital treatment during 1917 alone.62 Exhortation and punishment having a predictably limited effect, the army eventually turned to regulated brothels on the French pattern – displaying a blue light for officers, red for other ranks – in spite of criticism in Britain. It was estimated that 50–60,000 women were working as prostitutes for British soldiers. Those found to be infectious were liable to internment in Rouen.
French soldiers were naturally resentful of les Anglais, who had more money and were regarded as more smartly uniformed – hence punningly nicknamed les sanglés, ‘the tightly fitted’. Fear of infidelity among women at home was obsessive in all the armies, and for most of the war the main suspect seducers for the French (apart from the detested embusqués, the shirkers) were the British. Characters in one famous war novel complain of ‘More women arrested at the English camp. And not whores, you can be sure: married women . . . What a blow for their husbands, when they find out . . . they should have their heads shaved.’63 It was considered ‘shameful’ for married women to be seen with British soldiers, and indignant neighbours sometimes had offenders arrested as prostitutes. There was a report that one married woman, learning that her husband was arriving on leave, claimed that she had been raped. A visiting British politician was worried by ‘the attitude of our junior officers . . . towards French women, the light way they treat them in public’.64 French feminists were shocked to discover an ‘almost pornographic’ soldiers’ phrase-book entitled ‘Five Minutes Conversation with Young Ladies’. Starting with ‘Voulez-vous accepter l’apéritif?’ and ‘Pouvezvous dîner avec moi?’ it progressed briskly to ‘Permettez-moi de vous baiser la main – de vous embrasser’ and ‘Où habitez-vous?’ and the wistful but frank observation that ‘Notre bonheur sera de courte durée.’ The book was denounced not only as an insult to France, but as a blow against Anglo-Saxon women who expected their men to be returned ‘morally and physically pure’.65
For all these reasons, wartime contacts did not create unalloyed affection. Alongside British memories of cheering crowds and hospitable peasants were others of rapacity, promiscuity and dirt. If the French were grateful to their British defenders, they often felt that they were behaving like conquerors. The massive British presence, if it created friendships and a few marriages, also gave rise to mutual dislike – even ‘loathing’ according to Robert Graves – on both sides. Fortunately, the BEF was ‘one of the best-mannered armies in history’.66 French relations with the notoriously indisciplined Australians and the late-arriving Americans were worse, culminating in serious Franco-American brawls in Paris, and a ‘horribly violent’ Inter-Allied rugby final between France and the USA in 1919 (France won).67 Nevertheless, the arrival of the Americans put the British in the shade. The reasons seem plain: the warmly welcomed arrival of the BEF in 1914 had not brought rapid victory, but the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force in 1918 promised to do just that.
William Orpen, ‘Changing billets’: Troops billeted on French civilians often formed intense if short-lived relationships.
No precise balance sheet of memories is possible, but two points are worth noting. First, the memory of the British presence was positive enough to make it a rallying point for resistance against the new German occupation in 1940, and to add extra warmth to the welcome given to the British in northern France in 1944. On the other hand, the number of Franco-British marriages seems to have been quite small – only fifty-one in Calais during the whole war, for example.68 Richard Cobb mentions a sprinkling of ex-Tommies who settled in northern France, often making advantageous marriages with the daughters of shopkeepers or estaminet owners, and speaking ‘an odd blend of English and chtimi’ (the dialect of the industrial north).69 Nevertheless, the war did not create numerous cross-Channel family bonds.
Some French civilians had far more dangerous, and sometimes tragic, contact with the British. It began early and accidentally, as soldiers left behind in the 1914 retreat were found and helped by French families, including children, sometimes after weeks of hiding in the woods. It was widely believed that the Germans were killing and even torturing captured soldiers – all too plausible, given the atrocities in Belgium. As the months passed, it did indeed become the case that isolated soldiers were liable to be shot as spies, and civilians helping them risked death or forced labour, and the burning of their houses. In one incident, eleven British soldiers hiding in a mill were captured and shot, along with their French protectors. Some took part in more-or-less informal escape networks; others simply sheltered British troops in their own houses. The most nightmarish case was that of Trooper Fowler, of the 11th Hussars, who was found in January 1915 wandering dazed, filthy and starving in the woods near Le Cateau. He was hidden by a peasant family, the Belmont-Goberts, in a cupboard in their kitchen, which was crowded with billeted German soldiers. In the cupboard he stayed until 1918, air and food reaching him through a gap in the wood, only emerging when the Germans were away. Despite the strain on the physical and mental health of Fowler and his hosts, they all managed to survive the war. Less lucky was a corporal from the same regiment hidden in the same village, who was caught in September 1915 and shot, his hostess being sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour in Germany. There were several similar cases.70
The best known, thanks to recent investigation by Ben Macintyre, is that of Private Robert Digby, of the Hampshires, who with several comrades was sheltered from September 1914 onwards by the people of Villeret, a village twenty miles south-west of Le Cateau.71 Several families became directly involved, pooling their meagre rations and providing hiding places from the Germans billeted in the village. Many neighbours knew what was going on, because the soldiers attempted to pass as locals – not too difficult where German soldiers were concerned, but transparent to real Picards. Digby, sheltered by the Dessennes, a family of peasants cum tobacco smugglers, fell in love with twenty-year-old Claire, and they had a daughter, Ellen/ Hélène, born in November 1915. Whether through jealousy, village feuding, or simply fear at increasingly ferocious German threats against abettors of British ‘spies’, Digby and three comrades were betrayed and shot publicly in the village in May 1916. He wrote ‘the last letter of my life’ to ‘darling Claire’: ‘Farewell, and never forget Robert, who dies happy and satisfied for France and for my own country . . . Embrace my baby girl and later, when she is grown, tell her the truth about her father.’72
When the Germans retreated the following year to the Hindenburg Line, they systematically razed Villeret and hundreds of other villages in a vast swathe of desolation. People returned after the armistice, destitute. During the 1920s, some received medals and financial compensation from the British government and public for their help to British soldiers. The poverty-stricken Madame Belmont-Gobert was decorated and paid back-dated mess fees (tuppence a day) for the years that Trooper Fowler had spent in her cottage; and the 11th Hussars raised further money for her – and acquired the cupboard itself for the regimental museum.73
The other way for French civilians to become dangerously involved with the British was through espionage or resistance behind the German lines. Women led important networks, helped by their greater ability to move around in occupied France and Belgium. Louise Thuliez, a schoolteacher from Lille, began travelling round ‘like a determined terrier’, contacting lost soldiers, finding them hiding places, and then guiding them through Belgium to Holland. Princesse Marie de Croÿ (who was half British) joined in, offering her château north of Le Cateau, which had become a military hospital, as a hiding place, and providing clothes, food, money and forged papers. Networks also provided military information to the Allies (for example, by counting troop trains) and distributed resistance literature. There were several such networks, but they had no experience in security, nor did the soldiers they helped. Marie de Croÿ was compromised by a letter of thanks sent to her from Britain by a grateful escaper. Another, Eugène Jacquet, a Lille wine merchant, was shot and his large network destroyed partly on the evidence of a diary left behind by an escaping British airman.74 Such organizations were quickly penetrated and their organizers arrested. An important contact in Belgium was Edith Cavell, the principal of a nursing school in Brussels. She agreed to shelter escapers brought in groups by Louise Thuliez and subsequently shepherded to the Dutch frontier by teams of couriers (some of them peacetime smugglers). More professional resistance activity was undertaken by Louise de Bettignies, a young English-trained governess from Lille, who was recruited by British intelligence when she arrived in Folkestone as a refugee in 1914. Using Catholic connections, she built up a network of 200 agents, gathering material on the German army and maintaining contact by wireless and carrier pigeon. She was regarded as ‘an utterly trustworthy and reliable individual who was a masterly judge of character and drove her agents hard’. In 1915 the chief of the imperial general staff wrote of her that ‘neither asking nor accepting any reward, she organized and directed an extensive and most efficient service of intelligence . . . sending complete records of troops movements for many months past’.75
In August 1915 Edith Cavell was arrested, possibly because neither she nor escaping soldiers paid much attention to security. For reasons unclear, she admitted everything, including the names and activities of other members of the network.76 She and a male associate were executed in October. She was hailed as a martyr, frequently referred to in France as a new Joan of Arc – a real sign of reconciliation, considering that Joan had long been a symbol of anglophobia. Thuliez, de Croÿ and others received long prison sentences, but were released in 1918. Louise de Bettignies was caught in November 1915, but she managed to swallow a report she was carrying and gave no information. Chastened by the international outcry over Cavell’s shooting, the Germans commuted her death sentence to hard labour, but she continued to resist in prison, and harsh treatment contributed to her death in September 1918. A memorial was erected in Lille, and her name was used to inspire resistance in 1940, though subsequently she, and other resisters – 600 women were in German prisons by the end of the war – have faded from popular memory, overshadowed by the Resistance of the Second World War.77
Stalemate and Slaughter, 1915–17
In the most literal sense . . . we are defending England in France. ‘A Paper by the General Staff on the Future Conduct of the War’ (1915)78
It does not appear to me that the gain of two or three more kilometres of ground is of much consequence . . . Our object rather seems to be to kill as many Germans as possible at the least loss to ourselves. British general79
Whatever you do, you lose a lot of men. French general80
How should the war be fought? How could it be won? The assumptions of most experts that for military, economic and political reasons a modern war could only last a few months had been confounded. One conclusion, that of ‘westerners’, was that the decisive struggle was the Western Front, where the British and French must defeat the German armies. This view required Britain to commit its maximum force as soon as possible, preferably by adopting conscription. Numbers and firepower would bleed the enemy to death, at the necessary cost of the blood of one’s own soldiers. Those who balked at this prospect sought other strategies: naval blockade to strangle German trade, and if necessary starve its people; or the opening of new eastern fronts in the Balkans or the Turkish empire. ‘Easterners’ hoped to force Germany to disperse its forces to aid its allies. They also wanted to prop up the Russians, who had suffered heavy defeats, but whose manpower might eventually bring victory. This required acceptance of a long war and a defensive strategy on the Western Front. It also meant that new British forces would be diverted to other theatres, and so the French army would bear the brunt in the west. This had both moral and political implications. The French (and the Russians) would have to do most of the dying for the time being. The British army, when it reached maximum strength in 1917, could be expected to play the decisive role in winning the war, giving the British government a predominant voice in the peace.
This strategic dilemma was not a Franco-British divide. Some French politicians, mistrusting their own generals, were receptive to ‘eastern’ enterprises; most British generals were or became ‘westerners’; and all British politicians and generals knew that their own security demanded that France should not be defeated, or seek peace. But in practice, the debate did turn on whether Britain would agree to French demands to send more and more men to France, and take over far more of the trench line. This grew to 450 miles long, but the British at most held only a quarter of it – admittedly, including highly contested areas that had to be strongly manned. But how strongly? Should not the British take over more? This constant tussle meant that relations between the British and French governments, and between British and French headquarters, were often strained, and at times neared breaking point: ‘in each other’s eyes at least, the French expected too much too soon, while the British did too little too late’.81 Inevitably there were suspicions of bad faith. ‘While we knew that we were “playing the game” loyally and unselfishly by our allies,’ noted a senior BEF staff officer blandly, ‘the idea of “Perfide Albion” is by no means dead in France and probably our allies did not place implicit confidence in the honesty of our policy and diplomacy.’82
As the two Allies were, though side by side, fighting independently, it was difficult to resolve differences and make joint decisions. Two sovereign governments controlled two independent armies, took their own decisions, and kept their secrets. Cooperation was decided by negotiation at ministerial and military conferences. There was no joint strategic authority or unified command. Much depended on personal contact and confidence among ministers and generals who came and went. Traditional Franco-British prejudices aggravated by linguistic incomprehension were always a factor. It did not seem to help much that Sir John French was an enthusiastic collector of Napoleonic memorabilia or that his successor Sir Douglas Haig had communicated with Napoleon at spiritualist seances. The British found the French demanding, secretive, emotional, talkative and bad-mannered. The French found the British amateurish, slow, timid, uncooperative and uncommunicative. The mercurial Sir John French wrote in his diary that ‘the conversation was of the usual kind when I am confronted with the French Generals. It is very difficult to describe; but they appear to throw all logical argument to the winds when their own ideas are in the least degree opposed. They become absolutelymulish.’ Haig at least took French lessons, and apparently became reasonably fluent – in so far as such a notoriously inarticulate man could. He liked Joffre (‘not clever, but reliable’) and although ‘they are funny fellows the French Generals . . . I think I can work with them’. Yet we should not exaggerate the effects of personal and national friction. Both sides knew that they had to get on, and relations somewhat improved after the bad start in 1914. ‘The great thing to remember in dealing with them,’ advised the chief of the imperial general staff, ‘is that they are Frenchmen and not Englishmen, and do not and never will look at things the way we look at them. I suppose that they think that we are queer people.’83
In 1915, the ‘easterners’ had their chance. The French suggested an expedition to Salonika to aid the Serbs. The British, particularly Kitchener and Churchill, preferred a seaborne attack on Istanbul – ‘the one imaginative strategic idea of the war on the Allied side’.84 The potential gains from a relatively small effort seemed dazzling compared with the bloody stalemate in France: to knock Germany’s new ally Turkey out of the war, relieve Russia from Turkish advances in the Caucasus, have a warm-water route through the Black Sea to supply Russia with munitions, and so keep its huge potential strength harnessed to the Allied cause. Other benefits might be to bring Italy and some Balkan states into the war on the Allied side. But was this too optimistic? Even if the plan had worked and the fleet reached Istanbul, would the Turkish government have tamely surrendered? Arguably, the whole strategy was unrealistic.85
The French were willing, as the British would provide most of the forces and take most of the risk. On 18 March 1915, an Anglo-French fleet under the British Admiral de Robeck, including sixteen mostly obsolescent battleships, attempted to force the narrow straits to Istanbul. They were nearly successful, but mines, hard to sweep under fire from shore, sank several ships, including three battleships, and – perhaps with victory in their grasp – they drew back. Troops would have to clear the land defences. On 25 April, 200 ships landed British troops, French colonial troops, and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at the tip of the narrow Gallipoli peninsula. They mostly took the Turks by surprise, and their best chance was to break through before they could rally. But the Anzacs were fought to a standstill within sight of the goal. Thereafter, they could not advance against increasing Turkish resistance. In August, a second landing of 20,000 British and Gurkhas again came within yards of breaking through. The peculiar horrors of the campaign included the cramped area of fighting; lack of shelter from artillery fire; heat; thirst; and epidemics. A French Zouave captain wrote:
Diseases snake through the trenches under the burning sun . . . in the air, in the food, in the stinking water, in the irritating whine of mosquitoes, the alarming buzzing of huge flies, the countless tormenting bites of fleas and lice . . . as millions of fragments of metal tear the unbreathable air . . . We eat our bread kneeling on the ground. And our air is made of dust and iron.86
The casualties were large: probably over 250,000 Turks were killed and 46,000 of the Allies (21,000 British, 15,000 French and 10,000 Anzacs). A casualty of a different kind was Winston Churchill, who resigned from the Cabinet and went to fight in the trenches. It was decided to end the campaign, and the troops were efficiently evacuated, without loss of life, in December and January. The French-led Salonika expedition was also a failure, though a less bloody one. The problem of supplying Russia was partly alleviated by building a railway from the northern port of Murmansk – which would prove a lifeline in the Second World War.
Both sides intended to force a decision in 1916. The result would be a series of battles of industrialized destruction which left permanent scars on the societies, cultures and memories of all the participants. At a general staff conference at Chantilly on 6 December 1915, France, Britain (which adopted conscription early in 1916), Russia and Italy had agreed to launch ‘a simultaneous combined offensive with the maximum of troops possible on their respective fronts’.87 This would force the Germans to fight everywhere at once, ‘wear out’ – i.e. kill – their reserves, overwhelm them and bring victory. After much polite negotiation – in which Joffre was reluctant to ‘force my choice of the theatre of operations upon our Allies’, while Haig was eager to ‘do everything possible’ to fall in with his plans88 – it was decided that the main effort would involve both the French and British attacking astride the River Somme in June 1916, to coincide with Russian and Italian offensives.
The Germans also had a plan to finish the war. General von Falkenhayn intended to pre-empt the Allied attack, rather than waiting for the moment ‘when the balance of numbers will deprive Germany of all remaining hope’. He, like many German nationalists, saw Britain as the ‘arch enemy’ holding the entente together, just as it had led the alliance against Napoleon. British strategists feared a German surprise attack to seize the Channel ports and invade England while the BEF was stuck in Flanders mud. But Falkenhayn ruled out invasion as unfeasible, and considered the British army too strongly entrenched to attack directly. Instead, he decided to destroy the French army, and so deprive Britain of its Continental auxiliary:
The strain on France has reached breaking point – though it is certainly borne with the most remarkable devotion. If we succeed in opening the eyes of her people to the fact that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for, that breaking point would be reached and England’s best sword knocked out of her hand.
The French army was too strong to be defeated conventionally, so Falkenhayn decided to force it to fight in unfavourable circumstances. This would be done by attacking a place so significant it would force the French ‘to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death.’ If the French did not take the poisoned bait and retreated, ‘the effect on French morale will be enormous’.89 Moreover, the plight of the French would force the inexperienced British to attack to help them, thus suffering huge casualties too. The chosen killing-ground for Operation Gericht – ‘Judgement’ – was the exposed fortress town of Verdun. Judgement Day came on 21 February 1916. ‘Capitaine Danrit’ (the nationalist writer Emile Driant), who was holding a forward position, had written to a friend the previous day, ‘To foresee “the war of tomorrow” was not difficult: it was bound to come. To predict this attack on Verdun . . . was more daring. We’re about to have it.’90 He was among the first to be killed. For four months the Germans struggled forward, with men on both sides lost in a chaos of devastation that all found hard to describe. ‘Imagine, if you can, a storm, a tempest, growing steadily worse, in which the rain consists entirely of cobblestones, in which the hail is made up entirely of masonry blocks.’ No one has managed to compute exactly the human cost – ‘I realize that I’m walking on corpses, from the way the soil gives under my feet, and feels slippery and soft’ – but both sides suffered casualties of over 300,000.91
Haig, in response to Joffre’s pleas, reluctantly took over part of the French line. Kitchener’s new army was scarcely ready to attack, and Haig was unwilling to have his men killed in place of Frenchmen. He did not want to be diverted from the Somme offensive planned for June, which he was unwilling to bring forward except in case of ‘an emergency to save the French from disaster, and Paris perhaps from capture’.92 So for three months the French had to bear the brunt of the Verdun offensive themselves. This had a lasting effect on French perceptions of the British, and in many soldiers’ letters there were complaints at British inaction. One wrote that the British were ‘holding on to their beautiful army for after the war’.93 The idea that the British were willing to ‘fight to the last Frenchman’ was sufficiently widespread to be used as German propaganda not only during this war, but in the 1930s and 1940s too.
Verdun became, and in French memory remains, the Calvary of their nation, the supreme ordeal of will and endurance, the turning point of the First World War, and its deepest horror. The battle continued because for both the French and the Germans Verdun became a symbol of victory or defeat: the more soldiers died, the more important it became to persevere. Its dominance in the French imagination is an important reason why they remember the First World War as a French, rather than an Allied, effort – even though the Germans attacked Verdun as a blow against Britain.
For the British, the equivalent national memory is of the Somme, ‘the ghostly twin of Verdun’.94 The general staff hoped the offensive might land the decisive blow. For the first time the British army would take the lead – increasingly so as the French haemorrhaged at Verdun, and were obliged greatly to reduce their share in the offensive. President Poincaré feared that ‘the English will say they have saved France; the victory will be an English victory; the peace will be an English peace’.95 But there was no victory. On 1 July 1916, nineteen British and three French divisions attacked simultaneously. The French made reasonable advances, as did some of the British formations, mainly those benefiting from French heavy artillery support. But the British suffered 57,000 casualties, of whom 19,000 were killed, out of the 100,000 men who advanced – the worst losses ever suffered by the British army in a single day, and as many as the French lost at Leipzig (1813), the bloodiest battle of the Napoleonic wars. Advancing reinforcements heard a sound like ‘wet fingers screeching across an enormous plate of glass’ – the screams of thousands of wounded men.96 A British officer advancing over the same ground weeks later found bodies of men wounded that day, who had ‘crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets round them, taken out their bibles and died’.97 The carnage on 1 July – a subject that still arouses passionate controversy – was due to an over-estimate of the effects of the huge artillery bombardment of 1.7 million shells, which it was wrongly believed would have smashed the German defences. The French attack suffered less, and the failure of British commanders to profit from greater French experience may have been a consequence of imperfect inter-Allied relations.
Though the memory of horror and waste is common to Verdun and the Somme, there is a great difference. Verdun, the indomitable defence of French soil, could have meaning. The Somme, a failed attack on muddy foreign fields, became a crowning symbol of futility – even though a central image of that futility, that of untrained British troops advancing in lines against machine guns, was a later myth. Haig later pleaded that he had undertaken and pursued the offensive to take the pressure off the French at Verdun. This question too still causes controversy.98 The campaign had been planned before the Germans attacked Verdun as part of a joint Allied strategy. It was not brought forward, but was launched on the original schedule, albeit with far less French involvement. While helping the French became a significant aim, it was neither the principal nor the original motive, and cannot be regarded as the reason for the heavy British losses. It was the Russians, not the British, who came to the aid of Verdun by attacking early. Meticulously planned by General Alexei Brusilov, theirs was the only Allied success, shattering the Austrian army and advancing some sixty miles on a broad front, forcing the Germans to transfer forces from the Western and Italian fronts. Yet in the ghastly logic of the war of attrition, the Somme did have major consequences. The Germans found the British army far more formidable than expected, and they too suffered grievously, even more than at Verdun. Though the British lost roughly twice as many lives as the Germans, they had not collapsed, and the Germans could not mount the decisive counter-attack they had planned. Far from winning the war, the Germans were only just holding on. The British, despite their losses, were now the leading Allied power.99
France and Britain determined to try again in 1917, while the new democratic Russian republic, in power since March, was still fighting on the Eastern Front. The new prime ministers David Lloyd George and Aristide Briand, horrified by the carnage and mistrusting their generals, wanted a different solution. ‘They looked for a new man with promise,’ observes William Philpott. ‘They found a man who made promises.’100 This was General Robert Nivelle, who had a British mother and spoke excellent English. This should have been an advantage, but it contributed to disaster. Nivelle was clever, optimistic and persuasive. He convinced Lloyd George to support his plan for winning the war at a stroke, through a coordinated Franco-British attack. French ministers dubiously acquiesced. The sceptical Haig was placed by Lloyd George under Nivelle’s direction. The latter believed that he had discovered ‘the formula’ for a rapid breakthrough without huge losses: overwhelming and carefully coordinated artillery fire, followed by rapid advance by concentrated masses of infantry. This was something like what Brusilov had done the previous year. But Nivelle was no Brusilov, and the Germans were not the Austrians. The Germans had decided to remain on the defensive in the west, while finishing off the Russians, decimated by Brusilov’s costly victory. So in March 1917, taking the Allies by surprise, they abandoned their positions opposite the British and withdrew thirty miles to the Hindenburg Line. The abandoned area was thoroughly devastated: buildings were blown up, trees cut down, wells poisoned, ruins booby-trapped. The new line was shorter, and required fewer troops. It meant that the planned British attacks in support of Nivelle’s offensive had lost much of their point. Yet Nivelle went ahead, and the French attacked on 16 April, focusing on the Chemin des Dames on the heights north of the River Aisne. The result was carnage comparable with that of the British at the Somme: 130,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in five days. The attack was called off, and Nivelle sacked. The government and high command were in crisis. French soldiers had had enough, and there were mutinies involving about 40,000 men in half the army’s divisions.
These were strange mutinies, however. There were riots, a good deal of speech-making and vandalism, and some men, doubtless inspired by events in Russia as well as their own history, shouted ‘Vive la Révolution!’ But there was little violence, and few men deserted to the enemy or abandoned forward positions. They had gone on strike against futile slaughter. The response was also moderate. Though a few officers ordered summary executions, most – led by the new chief of the general staff, the phlegmatic GeneralPétain – took steps to rally the men. They promised no more useless attacks, and better food, rest and leave. Though over 3,000 men were found guilty of mutiny, and 499 sentenced to death, only twenty-seven were executed.101 The Germans never realized how vulnerable the French army was during the summer of 1917. Had they done so, they might have won the war. Arguably – though it is an argument found more among British than French writers – the French army remained largely passive until the final battles in 1918. Pétain decided to ‘wait for the Americans and the tanks’.
Instead of following Pétain’s defensive strategy, Haig decided that he could break through from Ypres. An important reason was to force the Germans away from the coast, and capture their submarine bases, for the submarine campaign, aimed at starving Britain, was inflicting its highest-ever level of sinkings. Haig accepted optimistic intelligence reports, based on intricate but unreliable estimates of German casualties. These indicated that the Germans were close to collapse, and that a final effort could break them.102The result was the third battle of Ypres, remembered as Passchendaele, which began in July 1917. To the grimly familiar pattern – early advances followed by immobility and mutual slaughter – was added the ordeal of mud, stirred up by shells and unseasonably heavy rain: ‘the ground is churned up to a depth of ten feet and is the consistency of porridge’.103 Thousands of men were lost in the quagmire. The British, Australians and Canadians lost over 250,000 men, as did the Germans. It was suggested, as after the Somme, that the battle had been necessary to take the strain from the demoralized French, but the real reason was Haig’s conviction that the British could strike a blow to hasten the end of the war.
All schemes for forcing a decision, at Gallipoli, Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres, turned into struggles of attrition: while the attacking side, usually the Allies, inevitably lost heavily, so did the defenders, as they were forced to move reinforcements forward under earth-shattering shellfire. The British called it ‘wearing-out’, the French ‘usure’. But every army was wearing itself out as much as it wore out the enemy: every one approached breaking point, and some broke. The Brusilov offensive crippled the Austrian army, which began to dissolve with desertions and mass surrenders; but the Russians themselves lost a million men, and this contributed to revolution. The French, mangled by Verdun and then by Nivelle’s futile offensive, mutinied in April 1917. The Italian army disintegrated in October 1917. The British and German armies fought on, racked by the horrors of the Somme and Ypres. The British came briefly in sight of collapse in the face of the last German onslaught in March–April 1918, and the Germans effectively did collapse from August 1918 onwards.
The Germans had always been pessimistic about a long war. In manpower and production, the Central Powers were outweighed by the Allies. Austria and Turkey required German troops to prop them up. The bloodbath on the Western Front was eviscerating their army. An equally decisive struggle was taking place at sea. The Royal Navy throttled German maritime trade, and put pressure on neutrals. British money and credit sustained the Allied effort, and (as Napoleon had found) could outbid its enemy in the few neutral markets the Royal Navy did not control. Germany’s industry was short of raw materials, and its population was increasingly hungry. The average daily calorie intake fell from 3,400 to 1,000, and the civilian deathrate increased by 37 per cent. The German surface fleet – one of the causes of the conflict – could not shake British control even of the North Sea, and after the battle of Jutland (May 1916) it stayed in port. Submarines seemed to offer the means of starving Britain as Britain was starving Germany. But the German navy’s plans were absurdly optimistic. In 1915 it had only twenty-seven U-boats, which managed to sink only twenty-one of 5,000 ships travelling to and from Britain. Its declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915, sinking on sight all ships in European waters, was politically disastrous, especially when the liner Lusitania was sunk in May 1915. The United States – already a vital source of war materials for the Allies – was brought closer to war. During 1917, the Germans pinned their last hopes on another U-boat campaign. The navy calculated that by sinking 600,000 tons of shipping per month for six months they could force Britain to surrender by 1 August 1917. But though sinkings reached a frightening level in the spring of 1917, and Britain adopted mild rationing, the German sums were disastrously wrong, and Britain was never in danger of defeat.104 The main result of their campaign was to make American entry into the war inevitable.
In every country, there were calls for peace negotiations, mostly from left-wing, humanitarian or religious voices. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, announced ‘Fourteen Points’ for a peace based on compromise and self-determination. But compromise had become impossible: all had sacrificed so much that governments and peoples alike wanted victory, and both sides thought it was possible. A report on British army morale in December 1917, based on monitoring soldiers’ letters, concluded that ‘War weariness there is, and an almost universal longing for peace but there is a strong current of feeling that only one kind of peace is possible and that the time is not yet come.’105 Similar comments could have been made of every army, except the Russian and part of the Austrian. The Allies were fighting a war to destroy ‘militarism’, and this required not only victory, but dismantling the structures in Germany and Austria that sustained military power. Germany – now effectively under a military dictatorship run by the stolid Marshal Hindenburg and the brilliant, ruthless and unstable General Ludendorff – needed victory to maintain Germany’s status as a great power and stave off revolution at home.
The Road to Pyrrhic Victory, 1918
Many of us are now tired. To those I would say that victory will belong to the side that holds out the longest . . . there is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight to the end. The safety of our Homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend on the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.
FIELD-MARSHAL HAIG, ‘Order of the Day’, 11 April 1918
The Germans knew that their last chance of victory was during the first half of 1918. Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia in November 1917, abandoned the struggle and ceded huge territories to Germany, providing vital resources for war and releasing German troops for use in the West. The United States had declared war in April 1917, but would not have a significant army in Europe for many months. Ludendorff returned to the logic of the Schlieffen Plan: destroy the most dangerous opponent first. This was now the British army. On 11 November 1917, it was decided to launch ‘an annihilating blow’, in the form of a series of massive surprise attacks. It was Germany’s final gamble.
The first blow was struck on 21 March 1918 on the old Somme battlefield. ‘Operation Michael’ began with an intense bombardment by 6,600 guns and 3,500 mortars, followed by an attack led by storm troops armed with flame-throwers and machine guns, and cloaked by fog. The brunt of the attack was borne by the British 5th Army, thinly spread, under-gunned and, having recently taken over part of the French line, with incomplete defences. The British expected an attack further north, to threaten the Channel. Instead, the Germans had hit at their weakest point, where they linked up with the French. As in 1914, the Germans nearly split the Allies apart. There was confusion and panic, with large numbers of men surrendering, and a disorderly retreat marked by looting and drunkenness – ‘the Boche could not do worse’, wrote one Frenchwoman. The civilian population were suddenly exposed to another German invasion, and many had to leave everything and flee. Many felt let down by the British, and the prefect of the Nord department reported that the BEF had ‘earned the hostility of the population’. An Australian soldier was shot dead by the owner of a house he was looting.106 Communication and command collapsed in places, and rumours of German breakthroughs increased the panic. ‘The whole truth cannot of course be told,’ commented the British official historian later.107 Was this at last the breaking point, the delayed consequence of the Somme and Passchendaele? It was the closest the British came to the sort of débâcle the Russians, Austrians and Italians had suffered: ‘we had to make a hasty retreat with all our worldly possessions – every road out of the village was crowded with rushing traffic – lorries, limbers . . . wagons, great caterpillar tractors with immense guns behind them, all were dashing along in an uninterrupted stream’.108 The Kaiser was jubilant: ‘if an English delegation comes to sue for peace it must kneel before the German standard for it was a question here of a victory of monarchy over democracy.’109 One hard-bitten French infantry officer was entirely unsympathetic (and entirely unjust110):
The Western Front 1914–18
the English gave way . . . It was our troops, yet again, who saved the situation . . . the inhabitants are glad to see the French again. They have no confidence in the English any more . . . on the first day, regiments – at Amiens – threw down their weapons and fled with the civilians. It is said that they have lost 70,000 men and 1,100 guns . . . People have nothing but praise for the Canadians, Australians and Indians – it was they who stopped the enemy advance . . . [the English] were arriving panic-stricken, having fled fifteen kilometres, shouting ‘Run for it’ . . . everyone says the same: the English are hopeless, it’s the Scots, the Australians, and Canadians who do all the work.111
The postal censors reported ‘since the beginning of the German offensive . . . a marked animosity toward British troops’.112
Things were not really so bad for the BEF. Although 21,000 prisoners had been taken on 21 March – one of the biggest totals in British history – this was largely because of surprise, overwhelming odds and faulty positioning. The men streaming rearwards or wandering about lost were often support troops or non-combatants. According to the military police, combat troops on the road ‘were chiefly those who were genuinely lost and anxious to rejoin their units.’ If the morale of 5th Army really had collapsed, the Germans would probably have won the war.113 Although they smashed a wide gap forty miles deep through the British line, and advanced towards the communications centre of Amiens, from the beginning they were failing to reach their planned objectives.
The British appealed to the French for help. But General Pétain was reluctant to send too many of his reserves in what seemed a lost cause. He was expecting an attack himself and was determined to defend Paris, which on 23 March was shelled by huge German guns sixty-five miles away. He told Clemenceau that the British army was defeated and would be forced to surrender, and that the French might be too.114 His pessimism, and mistrust of the British, would reappear fatefully in 1940. Nevertheless, within a few days French divisions did arrive to plug the gap between the two armies. The crisis brought about what had for years been ineffectively discussed: unity of command. General Ferdinand Foch was appointed supreme Allied commander. He was the only conceivable generalissimo – especially given Lloyd George’s loathing of Haig. A man of intellectual and personal authority, Foch had been involved in Anglo-French coordination since before 1914, and was already the military adviser to the inter-governmental Supreme War Council.
On 9 April Ludendorff launched his second offensive against the BEF further north – ‘Operation Georgette’, threatening the Channel ports, the Allies’ carotid artery for supplies and for American manpower. British and Germans were now both flagging. Haig issued his famous Order of the Day calling for a fight to the last. Foch, in the British view, was miserly with French reinforcements, but the BEF managed to halt the German advance. One unexpected obstacle were lavish British supply dumps, at which German troops, subsisting on ersatz bread and turnips, stopped to ‘gorge themselves on food and liquor.’115 They were disheartened to discover, despite the vaunted submarine campaign, how much better supplied the Allies were than they themselves and their families at home. Ludendorff then launched his third offensive, on 27 May, this time against the French and Americans along the Aisne, who were also thrown back. The Germans crossed the Marne, as far as they had got in 1914. This was more than Ludendorff wanted, for he had intended the attack here to be only diversionary, to keep the Franco-Americans occupied while he launched a final decisive blow against the British in Flanders. This he was forced to postpone, when the French counter-attacked on the Marne in July, supported by American, British and Italian troops.
Instead of Ludendorff attacking the British, they attacked him. On 8 August, the Germans were completely surprised by an offensive east of Amiens by 450 British tanks leading Canadian and Australian infantry. They pushed foward eight miles, the longest one-day advance of the whole war. Ludendorff later called this ‘the black day of the German army . . . [It] put the decline of [our] fighting power beyond all doubt [and] opened the eyes of the staff on both sides.’116 Not only had they been surprised by an undetected concentration of British forces, and overwhelmed by new technologies of war, but many soldiers had given up. Germany’s leaders realized that they could no longer win. But they did believe they could hold on.
General Foch, although associated with the lethal policy of all-out attack in 1914, had, like other Allied generals, rethought his views. These he demonstrated to the surprised British foreign secretary A.J. Balfour with ‘violent pugilistic gestures first with his fists and then with his feet’.117 He wanted a succession of rapid blows all along the German line, using superiority of guns, tanks and aircraft. The aim was not to make a breakthrough – so often shown to be impossible – but to force the enemy into a general retreat. His order was ‘Tout le monde à la bataille!’ The tired French and keen but inexperienced Americans struck in the Argonne on 12 September. Everyone had been waiting for the Americans to arrive in large numbers. When they did, reactions were mixed. Wrote one French soldier in August 1918: ‘everywhere is invaded by Americans, who get everything they want. But you can’t blame them because they’ve really got down to work, and where they’ve fought they haven’t been like the cowardly English, they’ve given the Boches a good thrashing.’118 In the occupied areas, reactions to the British were different. The BEF at last had the satisfaction – after the bitter experiences of the March retreat – of being feted as liberators. ‘The people are so crushed by Jerry’s persistant [sic] cruelty, and every little kindness that we can show them, is too much for them, and the tears roll down their cheeks.’ When Scottish troops liberated Lille – with a pipe band described as ‘funny but nice’ – they were mobbed by the welcoming crowd and covered in flowers. In the industrial town of Avesnes, liberated by an English patrol, people ‘laughed and wept at the same time, everyone shook hands in a kind of wild delirium. Only those who lived though those unforgettable moments can really understand.’119
The biggest and most decisive campaign of the war was fought in the autumn of 1918, principally between the British and the Germans. For the first time since 1914 the former proved markedly superior in skill, tactics, leadership, ideas, organization and equipment. The Germans were dug into their strongest-ever defensive position, the Hindenburg Line, six layers deep. General Rawlinson’s 4th Army assaulted it at the end of September. The main defence line ran along the deep Saint-Quentin canal, impassable to tanks and fortified with masses of barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. Only in one place, where the canal ran through a tunnel, did attack seem conceivable, but the carefully prepared assault by the Australian Corps and two fresh but inexperienced American divisions was thrown back in confusion. The 46th (North Midland) Division launched an alternative attack where both sides had assumed it was impossible: across the canal itself. On 29 September, aided by painstaking intelligence, minute planning, successful concealment, and scientifically precise artillery fire, they stormed across equipped with life-jackets and rafts from Channel ferries, at a cost of only 150 casualties. The North Staffordshires seized the vital Riqueval bridge, bayoneting a German sapper as he lit the demolition fuse. This amazing feat proved that the BEF could now pierce the strongest defences the Germans could construct, defended by their best troops. They ‘had not only broken the Hindenburg Line, they had broken the will of the German Army and the German leadership’.120 From then on, the Germans retreated along the whole front, and the Central Powers began to collapse. The cost in lives was terrible, as warfare in the open brought casualties again to 1914 levels. The BEF suffered 260,000 casualties at the highest daily rate of the whole war. But the result was decisive. The French, Americans and Belgians combined took 193,000 prisoners during the culminating four months of combat; the British and Imperial forces, less than half their number, took 200,000.121 Yet few on the Allied side thought the end was imminent. The British expected to be fighting until 1920. But after the loss of the Hindenburg Line the German High Command feared total military collapse and anarchy at home. So on 5 October, hoping to divide their enemies, they asked President Wilson for an armistice. French and British politicians and generals were willing to agree, rather than demanding unconditional surrender. They feared that if the war continued American power would increase and their own diminish, thus weakening their ability to influence the peace terms.122 On 11 November, fighting stopped. The BEF – now 1,859,000 men, half of them teenagers – halted just north of Mons, where it had begun in 1914:
We marched back fifteen miles . . . A blanket of fog covered the countryside. At eleven o’clock we slung on our packs and tramped along the muddy pavé. The band played but there was very little singing . . . we were very old, very tired, and now very wise.123
Remembrance
The war had created new cross-Channel ties. There had been much sympathy for French sufferings in the war-ravaged north. Winifred Stephens’s Book of France (1915) was part of a campaign to raise relief funds. After the war, devastated towns and villages were adopted by towns in Britain, the Dominions and the United States, which raised funds and gave direct help. For example, Newcastle adopted Arras; Sheffield, Bapaume; Llandudno, Mametz; Birmingham, Albert – often places where local regiments had fought. Visits to the war zone by the bereaved, and by former soldiers and their families, began soon after the armistice. Michelin published a guidebook. The British were the first to come in large numbers. The British Legion organized a visit of 15,000 people to Ypres in 1928.124 Memorials were built to the 600,000 men who had been killed in France. Some had only just been completed when the next war began. People came to remember their own nation’s sacrifices, and mourn their personal losses. British emotions focused on Flanders and Picardy, with pilgrimages to British military cemeteries. The French had their own tragic shrine far to the east at Verdun.
Perhaps such divergence happens after every war. Yet this seems an extreme case. Part of the explanation is the way the war had been fought. General Robertson had written in 1915, ‘I believe [the French] are as good allies as any country could have. I merely wish to emphasize the great difficulty there has been and always will be in operations conducted by allied armies. It is only natural.’125 Anglo-American relations in the Second World War probably benefited from the fact that the two Allies fought mostly in separate theatres, except towards the victorious conclusion. The Western Front from 1914 to 1918, in contrast, was particularly unfavourable to promoting inter-Allied affection. This is not only because of the appalling and inglorious conditions. The British and French although in proximity fought largely separate wars, less as comrades in arms than as wary and sometimes jealous neighbours. When they did fight close together, in Gallipoli, they maintained, says one French historian, ‘a strong feeling of solidarity’.126But on the Western Front they were largely confined to helping each other out in crises, inevitably a cause of tension. The British resented taking over French trenches because they found them badly built and filthy – a lingering folk memory. Some Frenchmen, as we have seen, came to despise British – particularly English – soldiers as slow, incompetent and even cowardly. Their letters suggest that much of the time they had little awareness of the British presence.127 The exploits of the BEF in finally forcing the Germans out of France in August–October 1918 were largely overlooked amid the general Allied advance, in which each ally cheered on its own. French historians today regard the turning point as the French attack on the Marne, not the British attack at Amiens, Ludendorff’s ‘black day’. On the other hand, the hasty British retreat in March – which must have been seen by many French soldiers as putting them back where they started in 1914 – was not forgotten. Captain Charles de Gaulle ended the war convinced of the ‘insolence and uselessness of allied officers’ and ‘overwhelmed by general feelings of xenophobia’. Captain Robert Graves, returning to Oxford, found among undergraduates back from the trenches an ‘anti-French feeling . . . amounting almost to an obsession’.128
Many memoirs, histories and novels simply ignored the existence of the ally; many still do. Those that did not conveyed a mixture of messages. Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan praised the French, and emphasized the dour endurance of their tough peasant soldiers. André Maurois, a writer who had served as a liaison officer with the BEF, produced a widely read series of novels featuring ‘Colonel Bramble’ and his friends, a supposedly affectionate portrayal of the British as pathologically eccentric, cold and alien. Two other liaison officers, Spears and Huguet, wrote personal accounts arguing respectively for the importance and the insignificance of the BEF’s part in the war, which Huguet thought reflected the insular, mercenary and treacherous nature of the British race. Official memorials and ceremonies, of course, gave thanks to the Allies. In France in particular, they still do: ninetieth anniversary remembrance ceremonies of the battle of the Marne in 2004 paid generous tribute to the BEF. But the victory did not lead to trust and cordiality between France and Britain in the post-war years. For that to happen, ‘the war to end war’ would have had to be followed by a confident agreement on maintaining peace. It was not. Revulsion from the slaughter, yearning for reconciliation with the former enemy, and fear that the bloodshed had been futile inevitably devalued the wartime alliance.
1 In men killed, the French army lost approximately 60,000 per month in 1914; 30,000 in 1915; 21,000 in 1916; 14,000 in 1917; 22,000 in 1918.