CHAPTER TWO
1915: A YEAR OF FRUSTRATION
The Western Front was built mostly by French, German and Belgian armies that were based on universal short-service conscription, backed up by lengthy reserve commitments. In other words, almost the entire male population had to serve with the colours for a time before reverting to civilian life, but still remaining liable to be called back in the event of a national crisis. This meant that the whole population was trained for war and more or less ready to fight. In Britain, by contrast, the peacetime army was volunteer, all-regular and long-service. This meant that it was small, drawn from a relatively small proportion of the population, and normally having little contact with the rest. It was designed for routine colonial policing rather than for a one-off ‘Great War’, which meant that when Britain found herself involved in such an unexpected event, exceptional measures had to be taken. What happened was that Kitchener and Lord Derby called for millions of ‘hostilities only’ volunteers who would be neither conscripts nor regulars. They did indeed join up in vast numbers in 1914, providing the manpower for many ‘New Army’ divisions. The problem was that there was little by way of infrastructure prepared to receive them, so they often had to waste many months before they could be properly equipped and trained. In fact it would not be until 1916 that most of the New Army divisions could take the field, and 1 July of that year turned out to be the fatal date on which many of them suffered their baptism of fire. In the meantime, through 1914, 1915 and the first half of 1916 it was the French army that had to bear the main brunt of the allied war on the Western Front.
The problem for the French was that they were forced to go on the offensive, because the Germans were now diverting reserves to the Eastern Front, against Russia, while adopting a largely defensive posture inside Belgium and France. In political terms it was not an option to simply leave them in place, although in military terms it would be very difficult to push them back. From the British perspective these difficulties soon raised major strategic questions, since there were many who still doubted the wisdom of deploying a large army to France at all. This became a debate between the ‘Westerners’, mainly in the army but largely supported by Prime Minister Asquith, who believed that the Western Front was the decisive theatre and should always be given priority, and the ‘Easterners’, who wanted to find an easier path by going round the flanks. Churchill and Lloyd George would become the leading lights in the latter movement, not least because they wanted to set out a position that was different from Asquith's. Their first blow fell on the Dardanelles on 19 February 1915, leading on to a hopeless campaign that would last eleven long months. Churchill himself was removed from the Admiralty as early as May, when Asquith widened his Liberal government into a coalition with the Conservative opposition.
Meanwhile on the Western Front there were few signs of a reliable method for making a breakthrough. In the Battle of the Frontiers the French army had already discovered that it was badly deficient in heavy and even medium artillery, and that the standard of cooperation between the gunners and the foot soldiers left much to be desired. Communications between artillery and infantry were notoriously difficult in the days before the radio became commonplace, especially for an attacker who had to readjust fire at frequent intervals to keep up with a rapidly changing situation. Joffre issued a stream of directives attempting to improve these tactics, and he ruthlessly weeded out incompetent commanders wherever he thought he detected them. The task, however, was too big and too intractable even for him. In essence a whole new ‘art of war’ had to be invented almost from scratch, and it would take a long time and hundreds of thousands of casualties before that could be achieved.
After the front had been established by November 1914, Joffre began a new series of attacks as early as 20 December, attempting to pinch out the flanks of what was known as the ‘Noyon salient’, in Artois and Champagne respectively. They were known as ‘nibbling’ (or in French ‘grignotage’) attacks, which implied a type of attrition in which gradual progress would nevertheless be made, but unfortunately they were sent in piecemeal over too wide a frontage and on too small a scale. There were a few gains in eastern Champagne, but in general the whole offensive was a complete failure, and it sputtered out on 17 March 1915. Meanwhile some fierce mountaintop battles flared in the Vosges, again bringing no success to the French.
One of the more encouraging episodes was at Neuve Chapelle in Artois on 10–13 March, when the British attacked on a two-mile front behind a particularly well-concentrated artillery bombardment. This was initially very successful, and suggested that a mathematical relationship could be established between the number of shells fired per mile of front, and the speed of the advance. It was doubly worrying to the Germans because they had only a single line of trenches, and this had been overrun. They nevertheless demonstrated characteristic tactical flexibility by bringing up sufficient reserves to plug the gap with an improvised second line of defence, and this was effective. The British found that their initial bombardment had used up most of their available ammunition in the space of a few minutes (15 per cent of the total British stocks in France), and attempts to renew the assault could make no further progress.
The Battle of Neuve Chapelle pointed lessons for the future to both sides. The British saw how powerful properly concentrated artillery could be, and how it might be used to achieve a breakthrough. However, in their next two attacks, at Aubers Ridge on 9 May and Festubert on 15 May, they were too short of guns and ammunition to be able to repeat the fleeting success of 10 March. For their part, the Germans were motivated to build second and even third lines of defence all along the front. By 1917 their concept of ‘defence in depth’ would be elaborated with very great sophistication, constantly multiplying the difficulties facing an attacker in proportion as the attackers devised new techniques of their own.
Perhaps the most dramatic of all the new assault techniques unveiled in this war was poison gas (chlorine), which the Germans finally used on 22 April 1915 at the second battle of Ypres. They had wanted to use it much earlier, essentially as an experiment, but the launch had been delayed for some time by contrary winds. When it eventually came, it happened to land on a remarkably wide selection of allied nationalities – Belgians, Algerians, French, British and Canadians – and it had a devastating effect on most of them. The Canadians held out most stoutly, but even so a four-mile-wide gap was opened, through which the Germans might have advanced past them into central Ypres. In the event they failed to seize their chance, whether from fear of their own gas or from sheer disbelief that a breakthrough had actually been achieved. Whatever the reason, the moment passed and the allies were able to consolidate a line, albeit considerably further to the rear than they had started. Bitter fighting continued until 25 May, including some new German gas attacks, but the chance of a breakthrough never recurred. Apart from anything else, the allies proved to be faster in adopting relatively good anti-gas measures than their opponents had expected.
Meanwhile the French launched a new offensive against Vimy Ridge in Artois on 9–15 May, with a brief renewal on 15–19 June. General Philippe Pétain achieved a dramatic initial success in the centre, but overall this battle, like so many others, was marked mainly by frustration and heavy casualties in the face of defences that the attacker had no means of capturing. There was, nevertheless, one pregnant pointer for the future hidden in the midst of Pétain's attack, when a Captain André Laffargue achieved a local tactical success with his platoon near Neuville St Vaast on 9 May. He analyzed the lessons in a pamphlet that soon became very influential not only in the French army, but among the British and German forces as well. What he was saying was basically that infantry armed with a selection of the new trench weapons could hope to achieve success on their own, without having to wait for artillery support to catch up. His formula depended firstly on each platoon or company developing as much firepower as possible with its own rifles, grenades, machine guns, mortars and trench cannons. But secondly he stressed the need to press forward into whatever gaps could be found in the enemy line or, in other words, to use ‘infiltration’ or ‘stormtroop’ tactics. Laffargue's ideas would reverberate for the remainder of the war among all armies, and in essence they represented the blueprint for infantry tactics throughout the rest of the twentieth century. In modern literature it is often alleged that it was the Germans who invented stormtroop tactics, since they used them to particularly good effect in the spring offensives of 1918; in fact they date back to the French as early as May 1915, and the British formally incorporated them in a manual issued in February 1917.
When taken together, the novel British techniques with artillery at Neuve Chapelle, the German use of gas at Second Ypres, and the French pioneering of stormtroop tactics on Vimy Ridge, all pointed to different aspects of the future of warfare. At the time, however, none of them stood out as clear ‘revolutions’, but remained submerged within wider battles that all ended in frustration and heavy casualties. The same can be said of the much older ‘breakthrough technology’ of mine tunnelling. Many mines were dug during 1915 and 1916, notably at St Eloi, Hill 60 at Ypres and perhaps most significantly at Messines, where a particularly elaborate array of mines was dug in 1916 but not blown until 7 June 1917. With charges of HE rather than gunpowder all these mines promised to yield a much bigger effect than had been possible in the days of Vauban or Guy Fawkes. Yet they were no easier or less perilous to dig than they had been in the past, and they required specialist diggers: usually men who had been coal miners in civilian life. Nor can it be said that they really changed the course of battles. It was notoriously difficult to co-ordinate the explosion of the mine with the infantry attack needed to capture the enemy position that it destroyed. Often the attacking troops would be just as shocked by the power of the explosion as the defenders, and in any case not even the biggest mine could have any more than a somewhat localized effect. It was only at Messines in 1917 that a large number of large mines – nineteen in all, containing a total of almost a million pounds of explosive – was detonated simultaneously, to wipe out the entire German front line. Even then, however, it was only the front line that was captured. In later battles the slow and laborious process of mining would be abandoned in favour of faster and more easily repeatable methods, such as the tank.
The tank was a marriage of armour plate with caterpillar tracks driven by an internal combustion engine. It had been a theoretical possibility for many years and had even captured the popular imagination, most notably in H.G. Wells's short story ‘The Land Ironclads’, which appeared in 1903.1Yet in the technological conditions of 1915 such a machine was extraordinarily difficult to design and build, and most military authorities were sceptical that it could be done at all, or even that it was worth doing. Little would have happened unless Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had thrown his quirky personal brand of energy behind it. Presumably he saw the creation of a ‘battleship’ for trench warfare as a naval responsibility, even though no one in the army had asked him to do it. Even so, tanks would not be seen in battle until September 1916, and would not make a major impact until November 1917.
Another new technology that had a much greater, and earlier, impact than the tank was the aeroplane. Already during the mobile operations of August 1914 it had performed some excellent reconnaissance work, showing that it could search far faster and deeper into unknown enemy territory than traditional cavalry. Then, as the fighting became more static, the value of aerial observation for artillery spotting was quickly appreciated as the key to accurate long- range fire, although it would be more than a year before ways were found to arm aircraft effectively for dog-fighting. Recognizable fighter planes became available in significant numbers only over the winter of 1915–16, when it was the Germans who took the lead, most notably with their Fokker Eindekker series. In that period a total of some 300 of these machines were able to shoot down about 1,000 enemy aircraft, before the aerial balance of power on the Western Front swung completely back to the allies.
Meanwhile many experiments were being made by both sides to conduct ‘strategic bombing’. There were allied raids to destroy German Zeppelin sheds from September 1914 onwards, whereas the Zeppelins were themselves soon being used to bomb cities such as Antwerp in August 1914 and London in January 1915. Both sides then hastened to design heavy fixed-wing bombers for this role, with the British Handley Page series being the heaviest and most numerous, but the German Gothas making a particularly noticeable impact on London in 1917.
It would be several years after the outbreak of war before either tanks or aircraft would be able to make a truly important impact on the ground battle. In the meantime defenders in general still retained the advantage over attackers by a very wide margin, and the profile of every battle remained depressingly uniform. The attacker might make some dramatic initial gains by some innovative artifice or ‘secret weapon’, but he would quickly get bogged down as the impetus slipped away and the defender brought his artillery and reserves to bear with murderous effect.
This pattern continued on 25 September 1915, when Joffre launched large-scale attacks in the eastern Champagne, as well as in Artois, once again on either side of the Noyon salient. In Artois the French attack on Vimy Ridge was co-ordinated with a British attack at nearby Loos, although it did not prosper. In the Champagne the maximum French advance was about two miles, but momentum was soon lost and the offensive had petered out by 6 October. The Germans regained most of the lost ground by counter-attacks, especially a large and carefully prepared one on 30 October. At Loos the story was somewhat similar. The British used gas for the first time, in part to compensate for the inadequate scale of their artillery support. However, the timing of the attack was not flexible, since it had to fit in with Joffre's wider timetable, which meant that the gas was released before the wind was strong enough to carry it into the German lines. It hung in no man's land, and in places wafted back into the British trenches, causing numerous friendly casualties. Nevertheless at some parts of the line the attack did drive straight through the German front line in fine style, only to be held up further back and then repulsed by counter-attacks. The British had not yet perfected the very difficult techniques needed to consolidate a captured position rapidly, or to direct reinforcements to the points where they were most needed. At Loos this last point generated an acrimonious controversy, in the course of which two inexperienced ‘New Army’ divisions and their commanders were shamefully scapegoated for Sir John French's mistakes. This provoked Haig to exploit his privileged access to the King, in order to blacken French's name. Finally, on 10 December 1915, less than a week after Lloyd George had displaced Asquith as prime minister, Haig's intrigues won him the ultimate success, and he displaced French as commander-in-chief of the BEF.
THE COSTS OF ‘TRENCHLOCK’
In the days before tactical radio there was no easy way for a commander to get timely news of what had happened at the front, so that he could make best use of his reserves. In particular it was not possible to lay survivable telephone cables across no man's land during the short time an attack was still in progress. Unless such cables were carefully buried some six feet below ground level, they were very likely to be severed by shell fire. There was thus a crucial ‘communications gap’ between the trenches from which the attackers jumped off, and the first enemy trench that they might capture. More than any other factor, perhaps, this did much to ensure the continuing superiority of the defensive over the offensive. There would thus be no breakthrough in 1915, although the prospect of one always continued to tantalize tacticians.
Without any dramatic movement of the fronts, the troops were forced to get used to an extremely static and uncomfortable style of warfare. In the face of random shelling or mortaring they had to learn to dig much deeper into the earth than their pre-war manuals had ever imagined. Against random sniping they had to crouch low below the parapets of their trenches, which were often less than five feet high, and certainly lower than the ideal recommended by engineering theory. Against rain and snow they had to use whatever shelter they could find, which was usually very inadequate, as were the arrangements for draining water away from the muddy floors of the trenches. The troops would often be left cold, soaked through and exposed to a variety of diseases, not least ‘trench foot’. Above all, however, they had to learn to make do without sleep. By night they had to patrol no man's land or improve the wire entanglements in front of their trenches; by day they had to dig those trenches deeper.
In these circumstances it soon became obvious that no troops could be expected to remain in the front line for very many days at a time. They burned up too quickly, even when enemy action was minimal. A complex system of reliefs was therefore set up whereby each brigade would begin well to the rear of the fighting lines, supposedly resting in comfortable billets and far from the risk of shelling. Then after a few days it would move up into the second line, where long-range enemy fire might reach it, and where the men would find plenty of support, logistical and engineering tasks to occupy their time. After a few more days they would relieve the men in the very front line, and take on full combat responsibilities for a time. But then they would be sent back to the second line once again, and so the ‘Jacob's Ladder’ of reliefs would continue. In theory it was an ideal system, and even humane. In practice it was far from that, since every relief involved complex movements at night, as the fresh troops stumbled up dark communications trenches to occupy unfamiliar fighting positions, while the spent troops stumbled back to rearward lines where, instead of being allowed to ‘rest’, they would find that the demands upon them only multiplied. Even more digging or handling of stores would be required, although at least the threat of death by enemy fire would be less. In 1915–16 there were very few weapons with an effective range that extended very much further than the opposing second defensive line, so troops who had been pulled back behind that were usually safe. But by 1917 this would change, as a result of increased aerial bombardment and more accurate long-range artillery.
In the front line there was never any assured safety, even on ‘quiet’ sections of the front, or at slack times when no great offensives were in the offing. Even when there was no obvious need for it, certain commanding officers and certain whole units liked to cultivate a reputation for being particularly thrusting, hyperactive or elite. Even when there was a notorious shortage of shells, as there was for all armies throughout much of 1915, certain artillery units liked to fire off their allocation as quickly as possible, and then cry for more. In some units remorseless trench raiding and aggressive patrolling in no man's land became elevated into a source of pride and almost a cult. All of these things inevitably made life exceptionally dangerous for whatever enemy unit was unfortunate enough to find itself manning the trenches opposite to the ‘thrusters’, since they would be harassed constantly and would suffer significantly higher casualties than might normally be expected. They would, in short, be forced to fight back rather than being allowed to serve out their time in the trenches in a state of passive inaction.
On the other hand, a significantly different situation obtained in the many sections of the Western Front where no such ‘thrusters’ were present. Especially during the shell shortage, many front line units discovered that if they did not provoke the enemy infantry opposite them, the enemy artillery would not fire back. In this and many other ways it was often possible to reduce casualties by what Tony Ashworth has called ‘the live and let live system’:2 the observation of informal or tacit mutual ceasefires between the two sides.
The best-known example was the ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914, which included such non-bellicose behaviour as carol singing across the lines and an impromptu football match between British and German soldiers.3 The high commands on both sides were scandalized, and cracked down on such overt fraternization, but what they could not do was ensure that their men always displayed maximum aggression. Troops in the front line were acutely aware that if they went out of their way to fire at the enemy whenever possible, or to patrol no man's land energetically, the enemy would surely retaliate in kind. Everyone's casualties would rise which, if there was no offensive in progress and no sensible tactical objective to be captured, would amount to a particularly purposeless sacrifice. On large sections of the Western Front for much of the time, therefore, the soldiers simply kept their heads down and tried to avoid attracting enemy retaliation. Sometimes they were compelled to open fire to satisfy the demands of higher commanders, but they would often find ways to do it at times and places designed to cause minimum damage, or in predictable ways that would allow the enemy to keep out of harm's way in due turn. Thus it was that some parts of this notoriously ‘dangerous’ theatre of war could remain almost entirely inactive for months at a time. For example, there was one British battalion that served honourably in or near the front line for an entire year, suffering only one officer casualty.4 This experience was very far from the oft- quoted notion that the average life expectancy of subalterns on the Western Front was no more than three weeks.
Of course, none of this reflects on the levels of casualties habitually suffered in major offensives, which were almost always shockingly high. The British lost over 90,000 in their four relatively small offensives from Neuve Chapelle to Loos, quite apart from the daily attrition of trench life. Bad as this was, it paled into insignificance beside the sacrifices of the French. By the end of 1915 they had already had as many as two million casualties, of whom about a third were killed.
As 1915 dragged on, the news gradually seeped back to the civilian populations at home that the war was no longer being fought at the quickstep, as at least two centuries of military history had led most of the press to expect. Instead, the Western Front had become a gigantic siege, reminiscent of Sevastopol in the 1850s or Petersburg in the 1860s, but all on a massively greater scale, with much more modern weapons and hugely heavier casualties. During the first months of the war the local newspapers had celebrated and highlighted every volunteer who joined up, and individually mourned each one who fell. After a year of war, by contrast, this patriotic enthusiasm had subtly changed into a broader type of coverage. The sheer number of casualties meant not only that it was impractical to write a personal story about each one, but also that casualties were no longer the sort of ‘news’ that people liked to read. The public had come to realize that military service was actually a great deal more dangerous than had originally been portrayed, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to find young men who would willingly step forward to join the fighting line.
In political terms this translated into a growing desire to find ways to outflank the Western Front, and find alternative theatres where victory would be easier. The Germans were already making their major offensive effort against Russia, and were starting to think seriously about declaring unrestricted submarine warfare. They were warned off for the time being, however, by the outraged US reaction to their sinking of the liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915 with the loss of 1,198 lives including 124 Americans. As for the French, they were naturally committed very centrally to the liberation of their national soil in northern and eastern France, although they also maintained their Mediterranean interests with a large fleet and a willingness to send troops to assist allied operations. This theatre had already become significant when Austria first attacked Serbia and started a new Balkan war; it became doubly active when Turkey entered the war against the allies on 29 October 1914, and then Italy joined on the allied side on 23 May 1915.
More than any of the other belligerents it was Britain that tended to look beyond the Western Front to the wider world. Before the war she had been a naval and colonial power with only a laughably small army for continental operations, even though that army now knew that if it allowed Paris to fall, the whole war would be lost. Naval opinion, however, had long been sceptical about the importance of fighting on the Western Front at all. In 1911 ‘the British way of war’ had been described by Sir Julian Corbett as a system of limited campaigns in distant places that could be isolated by superior sea power.5 In 1914 that doctrine had initially suggested attacks on the Kaiser's naval bases in north-west Germany, or even an amphibious expedition into the Baltic to capture Berlin from the north. However, upon closer analysis neither of these plans was found to be realistic, most notably because of the dense barriers of mines that would have to be crossed, so other possibilities were sought.
The Japanese were already dealing with German colonies in the Pacific, and a large force was being assembled to occupy German South West Africa and East Africa, although it would find a remarkable opponent in Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who would maintain guerrilla action throughout southern Africa until the end of the war, pinning down up to a third of a million British and Dominion troops. No less frustrating was the war against Turkey. A campaign was begun to secure the oilfields of southern Iraq and it started well, although by April 1916 it would end in the disastrous siege of Kut al Amara. Plans were made to invade Palestine from Egypt, but in early 1915 a much more promising idea seemed to be an attempt to force the passage of the Dardanelles. This would permit the capture of Constantinople and the opening of a warm-water sea route to Russia, so that munitions could flow to the Tsar and his beleaguered armies.
It was Winston Churchill, the First Sea Lord, who was the prime mover of this plan. An Anglo-French naval force was sent in February and March 1915, but failed to make progress against strong Turkish defences. There was a hasty rethink, and an ill-organized Anglo- French (and ANZAC) force of ground troops was eventually landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April, only to be pinned down in small beachheads from which no further progress could be made. There followed a process of ‘reinforcing failure’ until a total of almost half a million men had been landed, of whom almost 50 per cent became casualties. The final evacuation took place on 9 January 1916, and Churchill's military reputation lay in ruins for the remainder of the war. This experience doubtless explains why he would be so stridently and unfairly critical of the army and its generals throughout all the rest of his troubled life.