NINE
THE FACE OF THE war at the beginning of 1917 was little altered from that it had shown to the world at the beginning of 1915, after the shutter of the trench lines had descended to divide Europe into two armed camps. In the east the course of the trench line had moved 300 miles and its southern shoulder now rested on the Black Sea instead of the Carpathians but in the north it still touched the Baltic. There was a new entrenched front on Italy’s border with Austria and on the Greek border with Bulgaria, while the entrenchments at Gallipoli and Kut had come and gone. In Caucasia a front of outposts and strongpoints straggled between the Black Sea and northern Persia and in Sinai an uneasy no man’s land divided the British defenders of the Suez Canal from the Turkish garrison of Palestine. That showed little change from 1915. In France there had been no change whatsoever. The geographical features on which the fighting armies had expended their final energies in the offensives of 1914 – the Yser, the low Flemish heights, Vimy Ridge, the chalk uplands of the Somme, the Aisne and the Chemin des Dames, the River Meuse at Verdun, the forests of the Argonne, the mountains of Alsace – remained the buttresses of the trench line, now greatly thickened, though over the narrowest of areas, by digging, wiring and excavation. Much digging and wiring had been deliberate, particularly on the German side where the defenders had sought to secure trenches against assault by the elaboration of their positions, by 1917 usually three belts deep and reinforced by concrete pillboxes; but a great deal of digging had also been hasty and improvised, done to incorporate stretches of trench won from the enemy into an existing system.
The thicker the trench system grew, the less likelihood was there of its course being altered even by the weightiest of offensive effort. The chief effect of two years of bombardment and trench-to-trench fighting across no man’s land was to have created a zone of devastation of immense length, more than 400 miles between the North Sea and Switzerland, but of narrow depth: defoliation for a mile or two on each side of no man’s land, heavy destruction of buildings for a mile or two more, scattered demolition beyond that. At Verdun, on the Somme and in the Ypres salient whole villages had disappeared, leaving a smear of brick-dust or pile of stones on the upturned soil. Ypres and Albert, sizeable small towns, were in ruins, Arras and Noyon badly damaged, the city of Rheims had suffered heavy destruction and so had villages up and down the line. Beyond the range of the heavy artillery, 10,000 yards at most, town and countryside lay untouched.
The transition from normality to the place of death was abrupt, all the more so because prosperity reigned in the ‘rear area’; the armies had brought money, and shops, cafés and restaurants flourished, at least on the Allied side of the line. In the zone of German occupation, the military government ran an austere economic regime, driving the coal mines, cloth mills and iron works at full speed, requisitioning labour for land and industry and commandeering agricultural produce for export to the Reich. For the women of the north, lost for news of husbands and sons away at the war on the wrong side of the line, managing by themselves, the war brought hard years.1 Only a few miles distant, in the French ‘Zone of the Armies’, a war economy boomed. Outside the ribbon of destruction, the roads were full of traffic, long lines of horsed and motor transport going to and fro, and in the fields, ploughed by farmers right up to the line where shells fell, new towns of tents and hutments had sprung up to accommodate the millions who went up and down, almost as if on factory shift, to the trenches. Four days in the front line, four in support, four at rest; on their days off, young officers, like John Glubb, might take a horse and ride ‘down old neglected rides, while all round my head was a dazzling bower of light emerald green. Underfoot crunched the beech nuts, while the ground was everywhere carpeted with anemones and cowslips. Pulling up and sitting quietly on my horse in the heart of the forest, it was impossible to catch a sound of the outside world, except the jingling of my own bit and the murmuring of the trees.’2
If the front did not change, either in its course, its routine, or its strange intermingling of the everyday and the abnormal, the end of the first full two years of war brought great changes in its management. The year of 1917 would begin with new directors at the head of the British, French and German armies. In Russia, soon to be shaken by revolution, prestige, if not authority, had moved from the Stavka to General Brusilov, the Tsar’s only successful general. Change of command in Britain had been brought about by an accident of war. On 5 June 1916, Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, en route to Russia on an official visit, was drowned when the cruiser Hampshire struck a mine north of Scotland. He was succeeded by Lloyd George who, becoming Prime Minister on 7 December, appointed Lord Derby to replace himself. In France the long reign of Joffre also came to an end in December and he was replaced by Nivelle, the fluent expositor of new tactics; the dignity of Marshal of France was revived to spare Joffre humiliation. Since August 1916, the German armies had been under the control of the Hindenburg-Ludendorff partnership, the combination that had proved so successful on the Eastern Front. Their reputation undimmed by the setback of the Brusilov offensive, they, or more particularly Ludendorff as effective head of operations, would bring to high command a genuinely new strategy: the rationalisation of the Western Front, to economise troop numbers for action elsewhere, the mobilisation of the German economy for total war and a determination, through the politically contentious strategy of an unrestricted submarine offensive, to carry blockade to the enemy.
Would changes in command, however, change anything? The generalship of the First World War is one of the most contested issues of its historiography. Good generals and bad generals abound in the war’s telling and so do critics and champions of this man or that among the ranks of its historians. In their time, almost all the leading commanders of the war were seen as great men, the imperturbable Joffre, the fiery Foch, the titanic Hindenburg, the olympian Haig. Between the wars their reputations crumbled, largely at the hands of memoirists and novelists – Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse – whose depiction of the realities of ‘war from below’ relentlessly undermined the standing of those who had dominated from above. After the Second World War the assault on reputation was sustained, in that era by historians, popular and academic, particularly in Britain, who continued to portray the British generals as ‘donkeys leading lions’, as flinthearts bleeding the tender flesh of a generation to death in Flanders fields, or as psychological misfits.3There were counter-attacks, particularly to salvage the reputation of Haig, who had become an Aunt Sally to playwrights, film directors and television documentary makers committed to the view that the First World War exposed the oppressiveness of the British class structure. Little ground, however, was won back.4 By the end of the century the generals, who had stood so high at the end of its Great War, had been brought, it appeared, irredeemably low by a concerted offensive against their names and their works.
It is difficult today not to sympathise with the condemnations, worse or better informed as they have been, of the generals of the First World War. In no way – appearances, attitude, spoken pronouncement, written legacy – do they commend themselves to modern opinion or emotion. The impassive expressions that stare back at us from contemporary photographs do not speak of consciences or feelings troubled by the slaughter over which those men presided, nor do the circumstances in which they chose to live: the distant chateau, the well-polished entourage, the glittering motor cars, the cavalry escorts, the regular routine, the heavy dinners, the uninterrupted hours of sleep. Joffre’s two-hour lunch, Hindenburg’s ten-hour night, Haig’s therapeutic daily equitation along roads sanded lest his horse slip, the Stavka’s diet of champagne and court gossip, seem and were a world away from the cold rations, wet boots, sodden uniforms, flooded trenches, ruined billets and plague of lice on, in and among which, in winter at least, their subordinates lived. Lloyd George, admittedly a radical and certainly no lover of his own high command, seemed to strike a just contrast when he wrote that ‘the solicitude with which most generals in high places (there were honourable exceptions) avoided personal jeopardy is one of the debatable novelties of modern warfare’.5
There are three grounds on which Lloyd George’s and, by extension, all criticism of the war’s generals may be held unfair. The first is that many generals did expose themselves to risk, which it was not necessarily or even properly their duty to accept. Among British generals, thirty-four were killed by artillery and twenty-two by small-arms fire; the comparable figure for the Second World War is twenty-one killed in action.6 The second is that, though the practice of establishing headquarters well behind the lines was indeed a ‘novelty’ in warfare – Wellington had ridden the front at Waterloo in full view of the enemy all day, while several hundred generals were killed in the American Civil War – it was one justified, indeed necessitated by the vast widening and deepening of fronts, which put the scene of action in its entirety far beyond the field of vision of any commander; indeed, the nearer a general was to the battle, the worse placed was he to gather information and to issue orders. Only at the point of junction of telephone lines, necessarily located behind the front, could he hope to gather intelligence of events and transmit a considered response to them. Thirdly, however, the system of communication itself denied any rapidity, let alone instantaneity, of communication when it was most needed, which was in the heat of action. The most important of the novelties of modern warfare in our own time has been the development of surveillance, targeting and intercommunication in ‘real time’, which is to say at the speed at which events unroll. Thanks to radar, television, other forms of sensoring and, above all, radio, commanders in the most recent large war of the twentieth century, the Gulf War, were kept in instant communication with the front, receiving and transmitting word-of-mouth information and instruction with the immediacy of person-to-person telephone conversation, while simultaneously orchestrating fire support for their troops by similarily rapid means against targets that could be observed in ‘virtual reality’.
Absolutely none of these means, including radio, was available to a Great War commander. He depended, instead, once the trench lines had been dug, on a fixed and inflexible grid of telephone cables leading back through the chain of intermediate headquarters – battalion, brigade, division, corps, army – to the high command. Further from the front, the cable could be strung above ground; in the ‘beaten zone’ where shells fell, it had to be buried. Experience proved that a ‘bury’ of less than six feet was broken by bombardment, so trench floors were laboriously excavated to provide the necessary protection. By 1916 the British army had developed a sophisticated system of branching at each intermediate command level, so that headquarters could communicate in three directions – forwards, rearward, and laterally, to neighbouring headquarters – from the same exchange.7
All worked excellently, until fighting began. Then the system broke down, almost as a matter of routine, at the point that mattered most, the front. In defence, under the enemy’s bombardment, the points of transmission were smashed up and the key personnel, forward artillery observers, were killed trying to do their job. In offence, as the troops moved forward from the heads of the cable grid, they automatically lost contact with the rear. Unwound telephone cable broke as a matter of course and expedients – signal lamps, carrier pigeons – were haphazard. To the unsatisfactory outcome in either situation there is ample and repetitive testimony. In defence on the Somme in 1916, for example, it was found by Colonel von Lossberg, OHL’s tactical technician, that eight to ten hours were needed on average for a message to reach the front from divisional headquarters and so, reciprocally, to pass in the opposite direction.8 In offence, communication could break down completely, as the reports at six levels of command – battalion, brigade, division, corps, army and general headquarters – during the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, reveal.
The reports from one battalion, the 11th East Lancashire, the unit actually in contact with the enemy, begin with the commanding officer writing at 7.20 a.m. that ‘the first wave crossed into no man’s land’. At 7.42 he ‘reported by runner [NB not telephone] intense fire of all descriptions’. At 7.50, ‘I sent Lt. Macalpine to establish telephone communication . . . [he] returned and informed me all communication was cut . . . it was not re-established all day.’ At 8.22 a.m. ‘no information from my waves; at 9 a.m. ‘saw no sign of 3rd or 4th wave’; at 10.01 a.m. ‘no report from my waves’; at 11.25 a.m. ‘no information from my waves’; at 11.50 a.m. ‘no reports from my waves except statements of wounded men’; at 3.10 p.m. ‘[neighbouring unit] not in touch with any of their waves’; at 3.50 p.m. ‘urgently require more men’; at 9.20 p.m. ‘I have no rockets . . . or any Verey Lights [the only emergency means of communicating with the supporting artillery]’; at 9.40 this commanding officer himself was ‘knocked out by a shell’.
The brigadier, at the next level of command upward, 94 Brigade, watched the battalions advancing but then lost word of them; ‘the telephone wires up to his Headquarters remained working well throughout, but from his Headquarters forward they were all cut, although the line was buried six feet deep’. He reported that a runner from a battalion ‘was buried three times on the way back and yet successfully delivered his message’, presumably one of few, if not the only one, the brigadier received during the day. The headquarters of the 31st Division, to which the brigadier was reporting, recorded at 8.40 a.m. that he ‘had telephoned that his line got across German front trenches but it is very difficult to see what is going on. He has no definite information’; at 6 p.m., nearly eleven hours after the attack had begun, the divisional commander was reporting to the level above, VIII Corps, ‘I have had my signalling people trying to get into communication [with the troops] but cannot get any sign at all.’ Nevertheless, at the level above VIII Corps, at Fourth Army headquarters, the Chief of Staff that evening confidently wrote out an operation order for the morrow, prefixed by the statement that ‘a large part of the German Reserves have now been drawn in and it is essential to keep up the pressure and wear out the defence’, while, at more or less the same time, Douglas Haig was recording that the VIII Corps ‘said they began well, but as the day progressed their troops were forced back . . . I am inclined to believe from further reports that few of VIII Corps left their trenches!!’ Two hours later the War Diary of the 31st Division records that the 11th East Lancashire Regiment, whose wounded commander had seen ‘my waves’ depart into no man’s land and enter the enemy positions before eight o’clock in the morning, had ‘30 all ranks available for holding front line tonight’. Complete casualty returns, taken later, would establish that the 11th East Lancs, the ‘Accrington Pals’, had lost 234 killed that day, of whom 131 found ‘no known grave’, and 360 wounded, leaving only 135 survivors.9
It is easy to rail against the apparent heartlessness of Haig’s diary entry, written in the comfort of his chateau at Beaurepaire after a day spent in the ordered routine of his Montreuil headquarters or on chauffeured drives around the safe rear area of the battlefield. While 20,000 soldiers died, or awaited death from wounds in overwhelmed hospitals or the loneliness of a battlefield shell crater, their supreme commander worked at his desk, lunched, paid calls on his subordinates, dined and prepared for a comfortable bed. The contrast can be made to seem truly shocking, particularly if it is remembered that Wellington, after a day at Waterloo in which he had shared every risk, rode home on a weary horse to a makeshift billet and there gave up his bed to a wounded brother officer.
Yet the contrasts are unfair. Wellington had seen every episode of the battle with his own eyes and precisely directed its stages. Haig had not even been a spectator. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, except the distant roar of the bombardments and barrage, and done nothing. There was nothing for him to do, any more than there was anything for him to see; even one of his most junior subordinate commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Rickman, saw no more of his Accrington Pals once they had entered the German trenches than ‘sun glinting on their triangles’, the metal plates fixed to their packs as an identification mark. The iron curtain of war had descended between all commanders, low and high alike, and their men, cutting them off from each other as if they had been on different continents. High commanders, of course, had the material with which to bridge the gap, the vast numbers of guns arrayed behind the lines. What they lacked was the means to direct the fire of the artillery on to the positions of the enemy who was killing their soldiers. In an earlier war, the gunners would have seen the targets with the naked eye; in a later war, artillery observers, equipped with radio and moving with the infantry, would have directed the fire of the guns by word of mouth and map reference. In the First World War, though the front was mapped in the closest detail, almost daily updated, the radio that might have called down the fire of the guns in ‘real time’, in real need, did not exist. A ‘trench set’ was under development but it required twelve men to carry the apparatus, largely heavy batteries, and, while spotter aircraft could correct by radio the artillery’s fall of shot, they could not communicate with the infantry who alone could indicate where fire was really needed.10 Since the only method of making rapid progress through a trench system, before the appearance of the tank, was by closely and continuously co-ordinating infantry assault and fire support, it is no wonder at all that the battle of the Somme, like the battles that had preceded it and most that would follow, did not work as a military operation.
Most of the accusations laid against the generals of the Great War – incompetence and incomprehension foremost among them – may therefore be seen to be misplaced. The generals, once those truly incompetent, uncomprehending and physically or emotionally unfit had been discarded, which they were at the outset, came in the main to understand the war’s nature and to apply solutions as rational as was possible within the means to hand. Robbed of the ability to communicate once action was joined, they sought to overcome the obstacles and accidents that would inevitably arise in the unfolding of battle by ever more elaborate anticipation and predisposition. Plans were drawn which laid down minute-by-minute manoeuvre by the infantry and almost yard-by-yard concentration of artillery fire, in an attempt not so much to determine as to predestine the outcome. The attempt was, of course, vain. Nothing in human affairs is predestinable, least of all in an exchange of energy as fluid and dynamic as a battle. While battle-altering resources – reliable armoured, cross-country vehicles, portable two-way radio – lay beyond their grasp (and they did so, tantalisingly, only in a development time to be measured in a few years), the generals were trapped within the iron fetters of a technology all too adequate for mass destruction of life but quite inadequate to restore to them the flexibilities of control that would have kept destruction of life within bearable limits.
The Mood of the Combatants
Is destruction of life ever bearable? By the beginning of 1917, this was a question that lurked beneath the surface in every combatant country. Soldiers at the front, subject to discipline, bound together by the comradeship of combat, had means of their own to resist the relentless erosion. Whatever else, they were paid, if badly, and fed, often amply. Behind the lines, the ordeal of war attacked senses and sensibilities in a different way, through anxiety and deprivation. The individual soldier knows, from day to day, often minute to minute, whether he is in danger or not. Those he leaves behind – wife and mother above all – bear a burden of anxious uncertainty he does not. Waiting for the telegram, the telegram by which ministries of war communicated to families word of the wounding or death of a relative at the front, had become by 1917 a never-absent element of consciousness. All too often, the telegram had already come. By the end of 1914, 300,000 Frenchmen had been killed, 600,000 wounded, and the total continued to mount; by the end of the war, 17 per cent of those mobilised would be dead, who included nearly a quarter of the infantrymen, drawn in the majority from the rural population, who suffered a third of the war’s losses. By 1918, there would be 630,000 war widows in France, the majority in the prime of life and without hope of remarriage.11
The worst of the French losses had been suffered in 1914–16, years in which the novelty of cash allowances paid direct to the dependants of soldiers had palliated anxiety; the allowances were described by an official opinion-taker as ‘the main cause of domestic peace and public calm’.12 The good wages paid in the emergent war industries helped, also, to suppress anti-war feeling, as did the satisfaction of responsibility for tilling the land assumed by wives, suddenly become heads of families, or resumed by grandfathers with sons at the front. France was still overwhelmingly an agricultural country in 1914. Its communities adapted to the absence of the young men and food was nowhere short. In 1917, nevertheless, the accumulated strains were starting to become apparent to those whose duty it was to monitor the public mood, mayors, prefects, censors: in the towns, where many male workers were exempt or had actually been recalled from military service to do factory work, morale was satisfactory; but ‘morale has fallen considerably in the countryside, where the original fortitude and resolution are no longer evident’.13 Loss of fortitude and resolution by June 1917, when this report was returned, was already widespread in the French army.
In Germany the resolution of the army and the people remained strong. Although over a million soldiers had been killed by the end of 1916 – 241,000 in 1914, 434,000 in 1915, 340,000 in 1916 – the successes at the front, which had brought the occupation of Belgium, northern France and Russian Poland and the defeat of Serbia and Romania, showed a return on sacrifice. The economic cost of waging what appeared to be a successful war was becoming however, hard to support. Female mortality, for example, increased by 11.5 per cent in 1916, 30.4 per cent in 1917 above pre-war rates, a rise attributable to diseases of malnutrition.14 While France fed well on home-grown produce, and Britain maintained peacetime levels of food imports until mid-1917, when the German U-boat campaign began to bite hard, Germany, and Austria also, had felt the privations of blockade from 1916 onwards. During 1917 the consumption of fish and eggs was halved, so was that of sugar, while supplies of potatoes, butter and vegetables declined steeply. The winter of 1916/17 became the ‘turnip winter’, when that tasteless and unnutritious root appeared as a substitute or an additive at most meals. Luxuries, particularly coffee, which had become a German necessity, disappeared from the tables of all but the rich, and real necessities, like soap and fuel, were strictly rationed. ‘By the end of 1916, life . . . for most citizens . . . became a time of eating meals never entirely filling, living in underheated homes, wearing clothing that proved difficult to replace and walking with leaky shoes. It meant starting and ending the day with substitutes for nearly everything.’15 In Vienna, largest city of the Habsburg empire, hardship was even more severe. Real wages had halved in 1916 and would halve again in 1917, when the poorer in the population would begin to starve. Worse, with 60 per cent of men of breadwinning age at the front, families were dependent on a state allowance that in no way substituted for a father’s income; by the end of the war, it bought less than two loaves of bread a day.16
The mood of all subjects of the Habsburg empire, moreover, had been altered by the death of Franz Josef, Emperor since 1848, in November 1916. Even among the least imperial of his peoples, Czechs and Serbs, many had held him in personal reverence. To theKaisertreu Croats, to the Germans and to the Hungarians, whose King he was, he had stood as a symbol of stability in their increasingly ramshackle polity. His departure loosened such bonds as still held the ten main language groups – German, Magyar, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Italian and Romanian – in Austria-Hungary together. Though his successor, Karl I, brought youth to the imperial throne, he could not begin, in the circumstances of war, to establish a strong imperial authority of his own. His own instincts, indeed, like those of his Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, were for peace and one of his first acts as Emperor was to announce that he would seek urgently to bring it about. In March 1917, through the agency of his wife’s brother, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon, he opened indirect negotiations with the French government, to identify the terms under which a general settlement might be achieved. As his principal motive, however, was to preserve his empire intact, and he was prepared to offer much German but little Austrian territory to achieve his object, his diplomatic initiative quickly foundered. The ‘Sixtus affair’, besides infuriating Germany, merely exposed Austria’s war weariness to the Allies, without inducing them in any way to moderate their policy of fighting for a final victory.
They, moreover, had already rejected a disinterested attempt to mediate peace made by President Wilson of the United States on 18 December 1916, by which, as a preliminary, he asked each side to set out the terms necessary to its future security. Germany replied in anticipation, making no concessions at all and emphasising its belief in impending victory; the tone of the reply was much influenced by the recent capture of Bucharest and the collapse of the Romanian army. The Allied response was equally uncompromising but precisely detailed. It demanded the evacuation of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro and of the occupied territory in France, Russia and Romania, independence for the Italian, and Romanian, and Czechoslovak and other Slav subjects of the Austrian and German empires, the ending of Ottoman rule in southern Europe and the liberation of the Turks’ other subjects. It was, in short, a programme for the dismemberment of the three empires which constituted most of the Central Powers’ alliance.17
Only states that retained a high degree of political unity could have responded with such confidence to a call for an end to hostilities in the twenty-eighth month of a terrible war. Such unity prevailed, in France and Britain alike, despite radical changes of personnel in both their governments. At the outbreak, the French assembly had renounced pursuit of party difference in a Union sacrée dedicated to national survival and eventual victory. The Union, despite a change of ministry, had been preserved. The Viviani administration had resigned in October 1915 but the new Prime Minister, Briand, had held office in the old government and sustained the coalition. The parties in the British parliament had also entered into coalition in May 1915, following criticism of the Liberal cabinet’s capacity to ensure an adequate supply of munitions to the front in France, but Asquith remained Prime Minister and succeeded in maintaining an outward show of unity for the next year. In Lloyd George, the Minister of munitions, he had, however, a colleague relentlessly and rightly dissatisfied with his undynamic style of leadership and, at the beginning of December 1916, he found himself outmanoeuvred in a scheme to rearrange the war’s higher direction. Agreeing at first to his own exclusion from a War Committee which would have draconian powers, he then declined to accept the new arrangement and forced Lloyd George’s resignation. In the fracas that followed he offered his own, mistakenly expecting it to be rejected by a majority in parliament. Recognising Lloyd George’s superior ability at a time of national crisis, his leading colleagues, Liberal and Conservative alike, overcame their dislike of his egotistic and devious personality and agreed to serve in a new coalition government over which the War Committee would rule with almost unlimited authority. Lloyd George’s government would remain in office until the end of the war.
If these political changes sustained the coalition process in both countries, they did not, however, solve the difficulty which lay at the root of the dissatisfactions with the Viviani and Asquith ministries: their relationship with the supreme command. In Germany, command could be altered at the word of the Kaiser, who, as supreme commander, had all military posts in his gift. He had already, by the end of 1916, removed Moltke and Falkenhayn. In Britain, too, a change of command required in theory only a decision by the responsible authority, though there it lay with government rather than monarchy. In practice, however, concern for public confidence made such changes difficult, as evidenced by the failure to relieve Sir John French long after his unsuitability for the direction of operations in France had become obvious to the cabinet. In France the situation was complex and more difficult still. Joffre, as Commander-in-Chief, exercised powers within the Zone of the Armies that had constitutional force. Even parliamentary deputies lacked the right to enter the Zone without his permission, while he had authority not only over the armies on French soil but had been given similar powers over those in the ‘theatres of exterior operations’ as well. As a result, commanders in France and Britain and, as would soon appear, Italy also, enjoyed a security of tenure to be shaken neither by casualty lists nor lack of success at the battlefronts.
In Britain, Haig would survive in high command to the very end of the war, despite a loss of confidence in him by Lloyd George that, by the end of 1917, was almost total. In France, loss of confidence in Joffre, which had been growing since the beginning of the Verdun battle, did lead to his elevation to empty grandeur in December 1916. No satisfactory readjustment, however, of the relationship between political and military authority was devised – General Lyautey, the Moroccan proconsul appointed Minister of War at the time of Joffre’s removal, was given enlarged administrative powers without rights of command in France – neither could a satisfactory substitute for Joffre be found. The politicians’ choice, Nivelle, was intelligent and persuasive and had transformed the situation at Verdun, once the Germans had desisted from the offensive, his recapture of Fort Douaumont crowning with success two years of rapid ascent from colonel’s rank. As events would shortly prove, however, the confidence he had in his own capacities was exaggerated, while that placed in him by the government was misjudged. How easy it is, in retrospect, to see that that was so, how difficult at the time to accept the fallibility of governments and general staffs. The fundamental truth underlying dissatisfaction with systems and with personalities in all countries was that the search for anything or anyone better was vain. The problem of command in the circumstances of the First World War was insoluble. Generals were like men without eyes, without ears and without voices, unable to watch the operations they set in progress, unable to hear reports of their development and unable to speak to those whom they had originally given orders once action was joined. The war had become bigger than those who fought it.
In Germany, in Britain and even in France, so grievously wounded by loss of life in defence of the homeland, the popular will nevertheless remained intact. Durchhalten, ‘see it through’, had become the watchword of the Germans. Terrible though the nation’s sufferings were, there was still no thought of accepting an unsatisfactory outcome.18 Belief in glorious victory might have gone; concessions remained as unthinkable as defeat. In Britain, which had begun to suffer mass loss of life only in 1916, the determination to see it through held even stronger. The year of 1916 had seen the voluntary impulse, which had brought millions into the ranks, attenuate and conscription laws passed which, for the first time in British history, compelled civilians into the army. Nevertheless, as theAnnual Register recorded with apparent accuracy, ‘The prospect of . . . sacrifices . . . appeared to be quite powerless in effecting any modification of the national resolution to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion.’19 Even in France, the idea of the ‘sacred union’ as a bond not only between politicians but between classes and sections also persisted until the end of 1916, on the basis that ‘France had been the target of foreign aggression and had therefore to be defended’.20 Illogically, the belief that the war might be ended quickly, by a German collapse or a brilliant French victory, persisted as well. The hope in success of a French victory was about to be brutally shattered.
THE FRENCH MUTINIES
A great offensive had been planned for 1917 at the meeting of Allied military representatives at Chantilly, French general headquarters, in November 1916, a repetition of the Chantilly conference of the previous December which had led to the battle of the Somme and to the Brusilov offensive. As before, the Italians were to resume their offensives against the Austrians on the Isonzo and the Russians promised a spring offensive also; they were imprecise about details, although enthusiastic about its potentiality, for Russian industry was now fully mobilised for war and producing large quantities of weapons and munitions.21 The great effort, however, was to be made in the centre of the Western Front, on the old Somme battlefield, by the French and British, to be followed by an offensive in Flanders aimed at ‘clearing’ the Belgian coast and recapturing the bases of the U-boats which were operating with increasing effect against Allied shipping.
Two events supervened to overtake these plans. The first was the replacement of Joffre by Nivelle, whose operational philosophy did not marry with a scheme for the resumption of the Somme battle. The Somme had degenerated into a struggle of attrition and the landscape bore the scars; broken roads, long stretches of broken ground, shattered woods, flooded valley bottoms, and labyrinths of abandoned trenches, dugouts and strongpoints. The Somme offered no terrain suitable for an abrupt breakthrough, of which Nivelle believed he had the secret. Nivelle was an officer of artillery, by 1917 the premier arm of trench warfare, and he had convinced himself that new artillery tactics would produce ‘rupture’. Under his control, a vast mass of artillery would drench the German defences with fire ‘across the whole depth of the enemy position’, destroying the trenches and stunning the defenders, so that the attackers, advancing under a continuous barrage and by-passing surviving pockets of resistance, would pass unopposed into open country and the enemy rear area.22 Since the Somme was unsuitable for such tactics, Nivelle proposed to return to the terrain and the plan of 1915. He would attack at the ‘shoulders’ of the great German salient on either side of the Somme. The French would take the southern Aisne sector, the Chemin des Dames, as their front of assault, while the British, by inter-Allied agreement, would reopen an offensive on the northern shoulder of the Somme salient, at Arras and against Vimy Ridge.
Had Nivelle not changed the plan for 1917, a German decision would in any case have nullified the Allied intention to resume the Somme offensive. On 15 March it was noticed that the enemy were beginning to withdraw from his positions along the whole front between Arras and the Aisne. This was the second eventuality unforeseen when Joffre had convened the Chantilly conference in November. Plans in war rarely coincide. While the Allies were agreeing to reopen the offensive on ground already fought across, the Germans were making the necessary preparations to give up that ground altogether. In September 1916 work had been set in hand to construct a ‘final’ position behind the Somme battlefield, with the object of shortening the line and economising force, to the extent of ten divisions, for use elsewhere.23 By January the new line, consisting of stretches named after the saga heroes, Wotan, Siegfried, Hunding and Michel and collectively known as the Hindenburg Line, was complete and by 18 March it was fully occupied. Once the British and French realised that the countryside in front of them was empty, they followed up, through a devastated landscape, and by early April were digging their own trenches opposite defences more formidable than any yet encountered.
Fortunately for Nivelle’s plan, the Hindenburg Line stopped just short of the Chemin des Dames, where he planned to deliver the blow, as it did also of the Arras-Vimy Ridge sector where the British and Canadians were to attack a little earlier; the Hindenburg Line exactly bisected the base of the salient between them. Unfortunately for the French, the defences of the Chemin des Dames, built up over the previous three years, since it was first entrenched during the German retreat from the Marne in September 1914, were among the strongest on the Western Front and, from the crest line, the Germans commanded long views into the French rear area. German artillery observers could overlook the positions in which the French infantry were to form up for the assault, as well as those of their supporting artillery. Moreover, a new German defensive doctrine, introduced as a result of Nivelle’s own success in recapturing ground at Verdun in December 1916, ensured that the front line would be held in minimum strength, but with counter-attack (Eingreif or ‘intervention’) divisions held just beyond the range of the enemy’s artillery, so as to be able to ‘lock in’ (another meaning of eingreifen) as soon as the leading waves of the enemy’s attacking infantry had ‘lost’ their own artillery’s fire.24 As Nivelle’s plan foresaw a ‘hard’ and ‘brutal’ offensive, lasting not more than forty-eight hours, during which the whole of the German positions would be overwhelmed in three successive advances 2–3,000 yards deep, close co-operation between infantry and artillery was necessary for success.25 Nivelle’s plan, however, made no provision for the rapid pushing forward of the French artillery, which, on the steep and broken terrain of the battlefield and in the circumstances likely to prevail, was in any case infeasible.
While the French Sixth, Tenth and Fifth Armies, together constituting the Group of Armies of Reserve and including some of the most successful formations in the army, with the I, XX and II Colonial Corps in the front line, awaited the day of attack, eventually fixed for 16 April, the BEF prepared for its own supporting offensive, due to begin a week earlier. Its particular objective was the crest of Vimy Ridge, to be attacked by the Canadian Corps, from which the way led down into the Douai plain and thence, it was hoped, into the unentrenched German rear area across which a rapid advance by cavalry could link up with Nivelle’s vanguards once they had cleared the Aisne heights at the Chemin des Dames eighty miles to the south. An enormous weight of artillery and stock of munitions – 2,879 guns, one for each nine yards of front, and 2,687,000 shells – had been assembled, to prepare an assault shorter in duration but double in weight to that delivered before the Somme the previous July. Forty tanks had also been got together, while the VI Corps of Third Army, the formation making the main assault, was able to shelter its infantry in the great subterranean quarries at Arras and bring them under cover to the front line through tunnels dug by the Army’s tunnelling companies. Similar tunnels had been dug opposite Vimy Ridge for the infantry of the Canadian Corps, four divisions strong, which was there to make the first major offensive effort by a Dominion contingent on the Western Front.
The April weather at Arras was atrocious, rain alternating with snow and sleet, the temperatures relentlessly low; wet and shelling had turned the chalky surface of the attack zone into gluey mud, everywhere ankle-deep, in places deeper. For once, however, the long period of preparation did not arouse fierce German counter-measures. The commander of the Sixth Army, occupying the Vimy-Arras sector, von Falkenhausen, kept his counter-attack divisions fifteen miles behind the front, apparently believing that the seven in line – 16th Bavarian, 79th Reserve, 1st Bavarian, 14th Bavarian, 11th and 17th and 18th Reserve – had sufficient strength to resist the assault.26 That was a mistake. Allenby and Horne, commanding Third and First Armies, had eighteen attack divisions, and a vast artillery superiority, while the local German commanders, knowing that Falkenhausen was holding his strategic reserves far away, also held their tactical reserves to the rear, with the intention of committing them only if the front broke.
These dispositions proved calamitous for the Germans. Their unfortunate infantry were pinned in their deep dugouts by the weight of the British bombardment, which had also torn their protective wire entanglements to shreds. Though their sentries heard the sounds of the impending assault two hours before it began, the cutting of their telephone lines meant that they could not communicate with their artillery, which had in any case been overwhelmed by British counter-battery fire.27 When the British and Canadians appeared, plodding behind their creeping barrage, the defenders were either killed or captured below ground or, if they were lucky, had just enough time to run to the rear. Michael Volkheimer, in the 3rd Bavarian Reserve Regiment at the southern end of Vimy Ridge, saw the advancing waves almost on top of his trench, shouted to a comrade, ‘Get out! The English are coming!’ and then ran to warn his regimental commander that ‘unless strong reinforcements were available to be thrown in from our side, the entire regiment would be taken prisoner . . . no such reinforcements were available, so the entire Ridge . . . fell into the hands of the enemy and of our regiment [of 3,000] only some 200 men managed to get away.’28
The first day of the battle of Arras was a British triumph. In a few hours the German front was penetrated to a depth of between one and three miles, 9,000 prisoners were taken, few casualties suffered and a way apparently cleared towards open country. The success of the Canadians was sensational. In a single bound the awful bare, broken slopes of Vimy Ridge, on which the French had bled to death in thousands in 1915, was taken, the summit gained and, down the precipitous eastern reverse slope, the whole Douai plain, crammed with German artillery and reserves, laid open to the victors’ gaze. ‘We could see the German gunners working their guns, then limbering up and moving back. Transport waggons were in full retreat with hundreds of fugitives from the Ridge. There appeared to be nothing at all to prevent our breaking through’, wrote a Canadian lieutenant, ‘nothing except the weather.’29 In practice, it was not the weather but the usual inflexibility of the plan that deterred progress. A predicated pause of two hours, after the objectives had been gained, prevented the leading troops from continuing the advance. When they did so, the day was shortening and impetus ran out. On 10 April the first German reserves began to appear to stop the gap and when, on 11 April, an attempt was made to widen the break-in by an attack on the right at Bullecourt, an Australian division found uncut wire which the handful of accompanying tanks could not break. An intermission was then ordered, to allow casualties to be replaced and the troops to recover. Losses by then totalled nearly 20,000, one-third of those suffered on the first day of the Somme, but the divisions engaged were exhausted. When the battle was resumed on 23 April, the Germans had reorganised and reinforced and were ready to counter-attack on every sector. As a result, attrition set in, dragging on for a month, and bringing another 130,000 casualties for no appreciable gain of ground. The Germans suffered equally but, after the humiliation at Vimy, quickly rebuilt their positions and were in no danger of undergoing a further defeat on the Arras front.
They had meanwhile inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the French. Their setback at Vimy had had two causes: first, an expectation that the British bombardment would last longer than it did, and a consequent failure to bring their counter-attack divisions forward in sufficient time to intervene, but second, an absolute deficiency in divisions on the Vimy-Arras sector. The compensation for that was to be felt by the French at the Chemin des Dames, where fifteen German counter-attack divisions had been assembled behind the twenty-one in line. If the Germans had been surprised at Vimy-Arras, it was to be the other way about on the Aisne, where evidence of a great offensive in preparation had alerted the Germans to what Nivelle intended.30 Then, too, there had been failures of security. Documents had been captured and there had been loose talk behind the lines. Nivelle, son of an English mother, spoke the language fluently and as early as January 1917, on a visit to London, ‘explained his methods in the most enchanting way across the dinner-table to enthralled and enraptured women who dashed off to tell their friends as much of the talk as they had understood’.31
One way or another, the Germans had got ample warning of Nivelle’s plan for ‘rupture’. They had also put in place their own new scheme for ‘defence in depth’, devised by Colonel von Lossberg, which left the front line almost empty, except for observers, while the ‘intermediate zone’ behind was held by machine gunners dispersed either in strongpoints or improvised shell hole positions. The supporting artillery, meanwhile, was deployed not in lines but in a haphazard pattern to the rear, while the real strength of the defence lay in the reserves deployed outside artillery range 10,000 and 20,000 yards from the front. The arrangement spelled doom to Nivelle’s plan, which required the French infantry to cross the first 3,000 yards of the Chemin des Dames front, a steep, wooded slope, pitted by natural cave openings, in three hours, the next 3,000 yards, on the reverse slope, where they would pass out of sight of their supporting artillery, in the next three hours, and the final 2,000 yards in two hours. Quite apart from the difficulties to be encountered in contesting those 8,000 yards – initial German resistance, wire entanglements, by-passed machine guns, local counter-attacks – the intrinsic weakness of Nivelle’s plan was that the energy of its initial stage was to be expended in an area that stopped 2,000 yards short of the real German defences. However successful, therefore, the French assault, and that was problematical, the attackers, when and if they achieved their final objectives, would immediately confront fresh troops whom, in their exhausted state, they would be hard-pressed to resist.
Nevertheless, something of Nivelle’s confidence in ‘rupture’ had communicated itself to his soldiers. General E.L. Spears, a British liaison officer, described the scene at dawn on 16 April on the start line, ‘A thrill of something like pleasure, excited sanguine expectation, ran through the troops. I was surrounded by the grinning faces of men whose eyes shone. Seeing my uniform, some soldiers came up to me eagerly. “The Germans won’t stand here . . . any more than they did before you at Arras. They fairly ran away there, didn’t they?” The effect of the cheerful voices was enhanced by the sparkles of light dancing on thousands of blue steel helmets’. As zero hour approached, the waiting infantry fell silent, while the artillery, which was to jump its barrage forward in enormous leaps, purportedly to carry the infantry onward, crashed into action. ‘The start seemed good’, Spears thought. ‘The German barrage gave the impression of being ragged and irregular. Hundreds of golden flares went up from the enemy lines. They had seen the French assaulting-waves and were calling their guns to the rescue . . . Almost at once, or so it seemed, the immense mass of troops within sight began to move. Long, thin columns were swarming towards the Aisne. Suddenly some 75s appeared from nowhere, galloping forward, horses stretched out, drivers looking as if they were riding a finish. “The Germans are on the run, the guns are advancing,” shouted the infantry jubilantly. Then it began to rain and it became impossible to tell how the assault was progressing.’32
It was not only the rain – and sleet, snow and mist, weather as bad and cold as on the first day of the battle of Arras – that made it impossible to chart the progress of the assault. The line of battle itself was disintegrating as the German defence sprang into action. ‘The headlong pace of the advance was nowhere long maintained. There was a perceptible slowing down, followed by a general halt of the supporting troops which had been pressing steadily forward since zero hour. German machine guns, scattered in shell holes, concentrated in nests, or appearing suddenly at the mouths of deep dugouts or caves, took fearful toll of the troops now labouring up the rugged slopes of the hills.’33
The over-rapid pace of the barrage, by which the infantry should have been protected, was leaving the foot soldiers behind. ‘Everywhere the story was the same. The attack gained at most points, then slowed down, unable to follow the barrage which, progressing at the rate of a hundred yards in three minutes, was in many cases soon out of sight. As soon as the infantry and the barrage became disassociated, German machine guns . . . opened fire, in many cases from both front and flanks, and sometimes from the rear as well . . . On the steep slopes of the Aisne the troops, even unopposed, could only progress very slowly. The ground, churned up by the shelling, was a series of slimy slides with little or no foothold. The men, pulling themselves up by clinging to the stumps of trees, were impeded by wire obstacles of every conceivable kind. Meanwhile the supporting troops were accumulating in the assault trenches at the rate of a fresh battalion every quarter of an hour. As the leading waves were held up, in some cases a few hundred yards and seldom as much as half to three-quarters of a mile ahead, this led to congestion . . . Had the German guns been as active as their machine guns, the massacre that was going on in the front line would have been duplicated upon the helpless men in the crowded trenches and on the tracks to the rear.’34
The massacre was comprehensive enough. Mangin, the hard colonial soldier commanding Sixth Army assaulting the left-hand end of the ridge, on hearing that his troops, who included his own colonials and the veterans of the XX ‘Iron’ Corps, were held up, ordered that ‘where the wire is not cut by the artillery, it must be cut by the infantry. Ground must be gained.’ The order was entirely pointless. Tanks might have broken the wire but none of the 128 little two-man Renault tanks, the first to be used by the French in battle, reached the German front line, almost all bogging in the churned-up approaches. The infantry by themselves could but struggle forward as long as they survived. On the first day they penetrated no more than 600 yards; on the third day the Chemin des Dames road, crossing the ridge, was reached; on the fifth day, when 130,000 casualties had been suffered, the offensive was effectively abandoned. There had been compensatory gains, including 28,815 prisoners, and a penetration of four miles on a sixteen-mile front, but the deep German defences remained intact. There had been no breakthrough, no realisation of Nivelle’s promise of ‘rupture’. On 29 April he was removed and replaced by Pétain. The French losses, which included 29,000 killed, could not be replaced.35
Nor could, for a time at least, the fighting spirit of the French army. Almost immediately after the failure of the offensive of 16 April, there began what its commanders would admit to be ‘acts of collective indiscipline’ and what historians have called ‘the mutinies of 1917’. Neither form of words exactly defines the nature of the breakdown, which is better identified as a sort of military strike. ‘Indiscipline’ implies a collapse of order. ‘Mutiny’ usually entails violence against superiors. Yet order, in the larger sense, remained intact and there was no violence by the ‘mutineers’ against their officers. On the contrary, a strange mutual respect characterised relations between private soldiers and the commissioned ranks during the ‘mutinies’, as if both sides recognised themselves to be mutual victims of a terrible ordeal, which was simply no longer bearable by those at the bottom of the heap. Soldiers lived worse than officers, ate inferior food, got less leave. Nevertheless, they knew that the officers shared their hardships and, indeed, suffered higher casualties. Even in units where there was direct confrontation, as in the 74th Infantry Regiment, the ‘mutineers’ made it clear that they wished their officers ‘no harm’. They simply refused to ‘return to the trenches’.36 That was an extreme manifestation of dissent. The general mood of those involved – and they comprised soldiers in fifty-four divisions, almost half the army – was one of reluctance, if not refusal, to take part in fresh attacks but also of patriotic willingness to hold the line against attacks by the enemy. There were also specific demands: more leave, better food, better treatment for soldiers’ families, an end to ‘injustice’ and ‘butchery’, and ‘peace’. The demands were often linked to those of participants in civilian strikes, of which there was a wave in the spring of 1917, caused by high prices, resentment at war profiteering and the dwindling prospect of peace.37 Civilian protesters were certainly not demanding peace at any price, let alone that of a German victory, but they complained that ‘while the people have to work themselves to death to scrape a living, the bosses and the big industrialists are growing fat’.38
Civilian discontent fed military discontent, just as the soldiers’ anxieties for their families were reinforced by the worries of wives and parents for husbands and sons at the front. The French crisis of 1917 was national. It was for that reason that the government took it so seriously, as did its nominee to replace Nivelle, Philippe Pétain. For all his outward abruptness, Pétain understood his countrymen. As the crisis deepened – and five phases have been identified, from scattered outbreaks in April to mass meetings in May, and hostile encounters in June, followed by an attenuation of dissent during the rest of the year – he set in train a series of measures designed to contain it and return the army to moral well-being. He promised ampler and more regular leave. He also implicitly promised an end, for a time at least, to attacks, not in so many words, for that would have spelled an end to the status of France as a war-waging power, but by emphasising that the troops would be rested and retrained.39 Since retraining would take divisions away from the front, he also introduced a new doctrine, akin to that already in force on the German side of the line, of ‘defence in depth’. Instructions he issued on 4 June were to avoid ‘the tendency to pack together the infantry in the front lines, which only augments casualties’. Instead, the first line was to be held only in strength enough to keep the enemy at bay and provide artillery observation.40 The majority of the infantry was to be kept in the second line, with a reserve in the third to mount counter-attacks. These instructions were strictly defensive in purpose. While the front was being reorganised for these new tactics, the army’s officers, with Pétain’s approval, were attempting to win back the men’s obedience by argument and encouragement. ‘No rigorous measures must be taken’, wrote the commander of the 5th Division’s infantry. ‘We must do our best to dilute the movement by persuasion, by calm and by the authority of the officers known by the men, and acting above all on the good ones to bring the strikers to the best sentiments.’ His divisional commander agreed: ‘we cannot think of reducing the movement by rigour, which would certainly bring about the irreparable’.41
Nevertheless, the ‘movement’ – indiscipline, strike or mutiny – was not put down without resort to force. Both high command and government, obsessed by a belief that there had been ‘subversion’ of the army by civilian anti-war agitators, devoted a great deal of effort to identifying ringleaders, to bringing them to trial and to punishing them. There were 3,427 courts-martial, by which 554 soldiers were condemned to death and forty-nine actually shot.42 Hundreds of others, though reprieved, were sentenced to life imprisonment. A particular feature of the legal process was that those sent for trial were selected by their own officers and NCOs, with the implicit consent of the rank and file.
Superficially, order was restored within the French army with relative speed. By August, Pétain felt sufficient confidence in its spirit to launch a limited operation at Verdun, which restored the front there to the line held before the German offensive of February 1916, and in October another operation on the Aisne drove the Germans back beyond the Ailette, the first-day objective of Nivelle’s ill-fated offensive. In general, however, the objects of the mutinies had been achieved. The French army did not attack anywhere on the Western Front, of which it held two-thirds, between June 1917 and July 1918, nor did it conduct an ‘active’ defence of its sectors. The Germans, who had inexplicably failed to detect the crisis of discipline on the other side of no man’s land, were content to accept their enemy’s passivity, having business of their own elsewhere, in Russia, in Italy and against the British.
‘Live and let live’ was not a new phenomenon, either of the First World War or any other. It had prevailed in the Crimea and in the trenches between Petersburg and Richmond in 1864–5, in the Boer War, where the siege of Mafeking stopped on Sundays, and on wide stretches of the Eastern Front in 1915–16. Soldiers, unless harried by their officers, have always been ready to fall into a mutual accommodation in static positions, often to trade gossip and small necessities, and even to arrange local truces. There had been a famous truce between the British and the Germans at Christmas, 1914, in Flanders, repeated on a small scale in 1915, while the Russians had organised Easter as well as Christmas truces as late as 1916. More generally, both sides on the Western Front, once they had properly dug themselves in, were content on those sectors unsuitable for major offensives – and they included the flooded zone in Flanders, the Belgian coal-mining area, the Argonne forest, the Vosges mountains – to fall into an unoffensive routine. In places the proximity of the enemy made anything but ‘live and let live’ intolerable; legend describes a sector of ‘international wire’, defending trenches so close that each side allowed the other to repair the barrier separating them. Even in places where no man’s land was wide, opposing units might unspokenly agree not to disturb the peace. The British high command fiercely disapproved of ‘live and let live’ and sought by many means – the ordering of trench raids, the despatch of trench-mortar units to particular sectors, the organisation of short artillery bombardments – to keep sectors ‘active’, with tangible results.43 The Germans found trench duty opposite British units, which consistently accepted casualty rates in trench warfare of several dozen a month, unsettling. The French, by contrast, were less committed to raiding than the British, rewarding those who took part in ‘patrols’ with leave (whereas the British regarded raiding as a normal duty), and generally preferred to reserve their manpower for formal offensives. After the Nivelle offensive, though divisions which had been affected by indiscipline took trouble to organise raids and report their activity to higher headquarters, the majority in practice relapsed on to the defensive.44 The cost of their effort to win the war – 306,000 dead in 1914, 334,000 dead in 1915, 217,000 dead in 1916, 121,000 dead in 1917, mostly before the mutinies, altogether a million fatalities out of a male population of twenty million – had deadened the French will to fight. Defend the homeland the soldiers of France would; attack they would not. Their mood would not change for nearly a year.
REVOLT IN RUSSIA
It was not only the French army that recoiled from the mounting cost of the war in 1917. The Russian army too, never as cohesive or as ‘national’ as the French, was creaking at the joints, even before its high command began to organise the spring offensives its representatives had promised at the inter-Allied Chantilly conference in December 1916.45 Its complaints mirrored those to be heard from the French after the Nivelle offensive: bad food, irregular leave, concern for the welfare of families at home, rancour against profiteers, landlords and ‘shirkers’, those who avoided conscription and earned good wages by so doing, and, more ominously, disbelief in the usefulness of attacks.46 The military postal censorship, which had warned the French government so accurately of discontent in the ranks, intercepted at the end of 1916 evidence of ‘an overwhelming desire for peace whatever the consequences’.47 It was fortunate for the Russian high command that the winter of 1916–17 was exceptionally severe, preventing any large-scale German offensive which, in the prevailing mood of the Tsar’s army, might have achieved decisive results.
Yet the situations in France and Russia were not comparable. Even during the worst of its troubles, at the front and at home during 1917, France continued to function as a state and an economy. In Russia the economy was breaking down and thereby threatening the survival of the state. The economic problem, however, was not, as in Germany or Austria, one of direct shortage, brought about by blockade and the diversion of resources to war production. It was, on the contrary, one of uncontrolled boom. Industrial mobilisation in Russia, financed by an enormous expansion of paper credit and abandonment of budgeting balanced by gold, had created a relentless demand for labour, met by releasing skilled workers from the ranks – hence so much of the discontent among peasant soldiers who did not qualify for a return to civilian life – and by a migration of exempt peasants, those who could show family responsibilities, from the land to the cities, where cash incomes were far higher than those won, often by barter, on the farm. Migrant peasants also found work in the mines, where employment doubled between 1914 and 1917, on the railways, in the oilfields, in building and, above all, in factories; state factories more than tripled their work force during the war.48
Higher wages and paper money brought rapid inflation, inevitable in a country with an unsophisticated treasury and banking system, and inflation had a particularly disruptive effect on agricultural output. Large landowners took land out of production because they could not afford the threefold increase in wages, while peasants, unwilling or unable to pay high prices for trade goods, withdrew from the grain market and reverted to self-subsistence. At the same time the railways, though employing 1,200,000 men in 1917, against 700,000 in 1914, actually delivered less produce to the cities, partly because of the demands made on them by the armies, partly because the influx of unskilled labour led to a decline in maintenance standards.49 By the beginning of 1917, at a time when exceptionally low temperatures had increased demand, supplies of fuel and food to the cities had almost broken down. In March, the capital, Petrograd, had only a few days’ supply of grain in its warehouses.
It was the shortage of food which provoked what would come to be known as the February Revolution (Russia, working by the old Julian calendar, calculated dates thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the west). The February Revolution was not political in origin or direction. It was initially a protest against material deprivation and became a revolution only because the military garrison of Petrograd refused to join in the repression of the demonstrators and then took their side against the gendarmerie and the Cossacks, the state’s traditional agencies of police action. The revolution began as a series of strikes, first staged to commemorate the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 9 January, when the Cossacks had put down the 1905 revolt, widening in February (March) to large-scale and repetitive demands for ‘Bread’. The size of the demonstrations was swelled by a sudden rise in temperatures, which brought the discontented out into winter sunshine, at first to search for food, then to join the activists in the streets. On 25 February, 200,000 workers were crowding the centre of Petrograd, smashing shops and fighting the outnumbered and demoralised police.50
The Tsar’s government was used to civil disorder and had always before found means to put it down. In the last resort, as in 1905, it called out the army to shoot the crowds. In February 1917 ample military force was to hand, 180,000 soldiers in the capital, 152,000 nearby. They belonged, moreover, to the Tsar’s most dependable regiments, the Guards – Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, Ismailovsky, Pavlosky, fourteen in all – which had served the dynasty since the raising of the most senior by Peter the Great. The Preobrazhensky, which wore the mitre caps of the wars against Charles XII of Sweden, and into which the Tsarevitch was traditionally commissioned as a boy-officer, were the guards of guards. The Tsar himself chose its soldiers from the annual recruit contingent, chalking ‘P’ on the clothes of those he selected, and he counted on them to defend him to the death.
By 1917, however, the infantry of the guards had been used up several times over. Those stationed at Petrograd belonged to the reserve battalions and were either new recruits or wounded veterans, ‘very reluctant to be returned to duty’.51 Their officers were for the most part ‘raw youths’, recent products of the cadet schools, while some of the soldiers were of a type – educated townsmen – whom care had been taken to exclude in times of peace.52 One of them, Fedor Linde, recorded his reaction to the first attempts at repression of the demonstrations near the Tauride Palace. ‘I saw a young girl trying to evade the galloping horse of a Cossack officer. She was too slow. A severe blow on the head brought her down under the horse’s feet. She screamed. It was her inhuman, penetrating scream that caused something in me to snap. [I] cried out wildly: “Fiends! Fiends! Long live the revolution. To arms! To arms! They are killing innocent people, our brothers and sisters!”’ Linde, a sergeant of the Finland Guards, was billeted in the barracks of the Preobrazhensky who, though not knowing him, followed his call, took to the streets, and began to battle with gendarmes, Cossacks, officers and such troops – the Ismailovsky and Rifle Guards held firm – as remained loyal.53
The main outbreak of violent demonstrations was on 27 February. By 28 February strikers and the whole of the Petrograd garrison had joined forces and revolution was in full swing. Tsar Nicholas, isolated at headquarters at Mogilev, preserved a characteristic unconcern. He seems to have believed, like Louis XVI in July 1789, that his throne was threatened by nothing more than a rebellion from below. He did not grasp that the army of the capital, the chief prop of his authority, was, like the Gardes françaises in Paris in 1789, in revolt against his rule and that the political class was following its lead. Russia’s parliament, the Duma, was discussing its mandate in the Tauride Palace, while Soviets, committees of the common people formed spontaneously not only in factories and workshops but in military units also, were meeting, sometimes in almost permanent session, passing resolutions and appointing representatives to supervise or even replace those in established authority. In Petrograd, the chief Soviet had nominated an executive committee, the Ispolkom, which was acting as the representative body of all political parties, including the Marxist Mensheviks and Bolsheviks as well as moderates, while on 27 February the Duma had formed a Provisional Committee which anticipated the creation of a new government. At the front, the officers of the General Staff recognised the force of irresistible events. A proposal to despatch a punitive expedition to Petrograd under the command of General Ivanov was cancelled by the Tsar himself when he conferred with his military advisers at Pskov, en route to his country palace of Tsarskoe Selo, on 1 March. There he also conceded permission for the Duma to form a cabinet. There, finally, on the afternoon of 2 March, he agreed to abdicate. The decisive influence upon him during those two days had been the advice of his Chief of Staff, Alexeyev, who on 1 March had cabled him in the following terms:
A revolution in Russia . . . will mean a disgraceful termination of the war . . . The army is most intimately connected with the life of the rear. It may be confidently stated that disorders in the rear will produce the same result among the armed forces. It is impossible to ask the army calmly to wage war while a revolution is in progress in the rear. The youthful makeup of the present army and its officer staff, among whom a very high proportion consists of reservists and commissioned university students, gives no grounds for assuming that the army will not react to events occurring in Russia.54
The Tsar’s abdication left Russia without a head of state, since the succession was refused by his nominee, the Grand Duke Michael, while the Duma would not accept that of the Tsarevitch. The revolution also shortly left Russia without the apparatus of government, since by an agreement signed between the Duma cabinet and the Ispolkom of the Petrograd Soviet, on 3 March, all provincial governors, the agents of administrative power, were dismissed and the police and gendarmerie, the instruments of their authority, disbanded. All that was left in place outside the capital were the district councils, the zemstva, boards of local worthies without the experience or means to carry out the orders of the Provisional Government. Its orders were, in any case, subject to the veto of the Ispolkom, which arrogated to itself responsibility for military, diplomatic and most economic affairs, leaving the government to do little more than pass legislation guaranteeing rights and liberties to the population.55
Yet the two bodies at least agreed on one thing: that the war must be fought. They did so from different motives, the Provisional Government for broadly nationalist reasons, the Ispolkom, and the Soviets it represented, to defend the revolution. While they continued to denounce the war as ‘imperialist’ and ‘monstrous’, the Soviets nevertheless feared that defeat by Germany would bring counter-revolution. Thus their ‘Appeal to the Peoples of the World’ of 15 March, called on them to join Russia in action for ‘peace’ against their ruling classes, but at the same time they were urging the army, through the Soviets of soldiers, to continue the struggle against ‘the bayonets of conquerors’ and ‘foreign military might’.56
The soldiers, with a popular revolution to defend, rediscovered an enthusiasm for the war they seemed to have lost altogether in the winter of 1916. ‘In the first weeks of the [February Revolution], the soldiers massed in Petrograd not only would not listen to talk of peace, but would not allow it to be uttered’; the petitions of soldiers to the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet indicated that they ‘were likely to treat proponents of immediate peace as supporters of the Kaiser’.57 The only supporters of immediate peace among all the socialist groups represented on the Ispolkom, the Bolsheviks, were careful not to demand it and, with all their leaders – Trotsky, Bukharin and Lenin – currently in exile, were in no position to do so.
A renewed war effort needed leadership of its own, however, and neither the Ispolkom nor the original Provisional Government was headed by figures of inspiration. The Ispolkom’s members were socialist intellectuals, the Prime Minister, Prince Lvov, a benevolent populist. The socialists, obsessed with abstract political ideas, had no understanding of practicalities, nor did they wish for any. Lvov had a high-minded but hopelessly unrealistic belief in the capacity of ‘the people’ to settle the direction of their own future. The Bolsheviks, who knew what they wanted, were excluded from influence by the people’s reborn bellicosity. In the circumstances it was to be expected that leadership should pass to a man of dynamism. He appeared in the person of Alexander Kerensky, whose unsocialist instinct for power but impeccable socialist credentials allowed him to combine membership of the Ispolkom with ministerial office, and to enjoy the strong support of ordinary members of the Soviet. First appointed Minister of Justice, he became Minister of War, in May (April under the Julian calendar, which the Provisional Government had dropped), and at once set about a purge of the high command, which he regarded as defeatist. Brusilov, the army’s most successful commander, became Chief of Staff, while Kerensky’s own commissars were sent to the front with the mission of encouraging an offensive spirit among the common soldiers.
Those in the Petrograd garrison may have been adamant for war in the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution. They petitioned, and sometimes demonstrated – ‘War for Freedom until Victory’ – safe in the knowledge that they would not be called upon to risk their lives; the seventh of the eight points of the Ispolkom’s notorious Order No. 1, abolishing governorship and police, stipulated that ‘military units that had participated in the Revolution . . . would not be sent to the front’. Troops at the front, though they treated Kerensky as a popular idol on his tours of inspection, proved less enthusiastic for what has come to be called the ‘Kerensky offensive’, of June 1917, launched to bring about the defeat of ‘foreign military might’ for which there was so much verbal enthusiasm in the rear. General Dragomirov, commanding the Fifth Army, reported the warning signs: ‘in reserve, regiments declare their readiness to fight on to full victory, but then baulk at the demand to go into the trenches’.58 On 18 June, nevertheless, Kerensky’s offensive opened, after a two-day preparatory bombardment, against the Austrians in the south, directed once again against Lemberg, pivot of the fighting in 1914–15, and target of Brusilov’s offensive the previous summer; subsidiary offensives were launched in the centre and the north. For two days the attack went well and several miles of ground were gained. Then the leading units, feeling they had done their bit, refused to persist, while those behind refused to take their place. Desertion set in, and worse. Fugitives from the front, in thousands, looted and raped in the rear. When the Germans, who were forewarned, counter-attacked with divisions already brought from the west, they and the Austrians simply recovered the ground lost and captured more themselves, driving the Russians back to the line of the River Zbrucz on the Romanian border. The Romanians, who attempted to join the Russians in the offensive from their remaining enclave north of the Danube, were also defeated.
While calamity overtook the Revolution’s forces at the front, the Revolution itself was coming under attack in the rear. Those who had overthrown the monarchy were not, in Russian political terms, extremists. That title belonged to the Majority (Bolshevik) wing of the Social Democrat Party whose leaders – Lenin, Bukharin – were in February either absent from Petrograd or in exile abroad. Lenin was in Zurich, Bukharin and Trotsky, the latter not yet a member of the Bolsheviks, in New York. By April, however, all had returned, Lenin through the good offices of the German government which, scenting the opportunity to undermine Russia’s continuing if faltering will to war by implanting the leaders of the peace movement in its faction-ridden capital, had transported him and his entourage from Switzerland aboard the famous ‘sealed train’ towards Sweden. From Stockholm the party proceeded to Petrograd, where it was welcomed not only by the local Bolsheviks but also by representatives of the Ispolkom and the Petrograd Soviet. Immediately after his arrival he addressed a Bolshevik meeting where he outlined his programme: non-co-operation with the Provisional Government; nationalisation of banks and property, including land; abolition of the army in favour of a people’s militia; an end to the war; and ‘all power to the Soviets’, which he already had plans to bring under Bolshevik control.59
These ‘April Theses’ failed to win support even from his Bolshevik followers, to whom they seemed premature, and his first effort to put them into practice justified their misgivings. When in July some of the more dissident units of the Petrograd garrison took to the streets, with Bolshevik connivance, in protest at an order to go to the front, an order designed to get them out of the capital, Kerensky was able to find enough loyal troops to put their rebellion down. The ‘July Events’ gave Lenin a serious fright, not least because, in the aftermath, it was revealed that he was receiving financial support from the German government. Time, nevertheless, was on his side, time measured not in the ‘inevitability’ of the ‘second revolution’ for which he was working, but in the increasingly limited willingness of the field army to remain at the front. The collapse of the Kerensky offensive had dispirited even those soldiers who resisted the increasingly easy opportunities to desert. Their lapse of will allowed the Germans in August to launch a successful offensive on the northern front which resulted in the capture of Riga, the most important harbour city on the Baltic coast. Militarily, the Riga offensive was significant because it demonstrated to the Germans the effectiveness of a new system of breakthrough tactics, designed by the artillery expert, Bruchmüller, which they were perfecting with the thought of applying it on the Western Front.60 Politically, it was yet more significant, since it prompted a military intervention which, though designed to reinforce the authority of the Provisional Government, would shortly result in its collapse.
The ‘July Events’ had caused Kerensky, the government’s only effective leader, to supersede Lvov as premier, while retaining the ministries of war and the navy. As Prime Minister, he also decided to replace Brusilov, though he had appointed him Commander-in-Chief, with an outspoken proponent of the anti-German war effort, General Lavr Kornilov. Kornilov was a man of the people, the son of Siberian Cossacks. For that reason he believed he would be followed, even by war-weary soldiers, in a personal campaign first against the defeatist Bolsheviks, then against his country’s enemies. On 25 August he ordered reliable troops to occupy Petrograd, with further orders to disperse the Soviet and disarm the regiments there should the Bolsheviks seek to take power, as seemed to be and was in fact their intention. Even before the fall of Riga, he had confronted Kerensky with demands for a programme of reform: an end to the Soldiers’ Soviets, the disbanding of politicised regiments.61 Militarily, his programme was entirely sensible. It was the only basis for continuing the war and for saving a government which, in a sea of defeatism, supported that policy. Politically however, Kornilov’s programme confronted Kerensky with a challenge to his authority, since its institution would inevitably entail conflict with the Soviets, the warshy Petrograd garrison and the Bolsheviks, with all of whom the Provisional Government was living in uneasy equilibrium. As Kornilov’s popularity grew among moderates, Kerensky’s authority dwindled, until a challenge became unavoidable. Kerensky could not throw in his lot with Kornilov, since he correctly doubted whether the general commanded sufficient force to do down the extremists. Equally, he could not turn to the extremists, since to do so would be to subordinate the Provisional Government to their power, which the most extreme among them, the Bolsheviks, would then be certain to wrest into their own hands. He could only await events. Should Kornilov succeed, the Provisional Government would survive. Should he fail, Kerensky could resume the political struggle in Petrograd in the hope of playing the factions off against each other. In the event, Kornilov was manoeuvred by others into staging a coup he had not planned, which failed through the refusal of his soldiers to join in, and so was removed from command.
His fall ended any chance of sustaining the fiction that Russia was still fighting a war. The Provisional Government lost what remained of its authority in the aftermath, since Kerensky’s dismissal of Kornilov lost him what support he retained among moderates and senior officers without winning him any from the forces of the left. The Bolsheviks were, indeed, now determined to mount the ‘second revolution’ and Lenin, who had now established his absolute leadership over the party, was looking only for a pretext. It was given him by the Germans who, during September, enlarged their success at Riga by gaining positions in the northern Baltic from which they could directly threaten Petrograd. The Provisional Government reacted by proposing to transfer the capital to Moscow.62The Bolsheviks, who represented the proposal as a counter-revolutionary move to consign the seat of the people’s power to the Kaiser, won wide support for the creation of a defence committee with authority to defend Petrograd by every means. As they now controlled their own disciplined force of Red Guards and could count on their own ability to manipulate the sentiments of the Petrograd garrison to their advantage, it merely remained to choose a date for a coup. Kerensky, aware that a coup was in the offing, took half-hearted measures to defend government offices during 24 October. His orders, which were ineffectively implemented by officers who no longer gave him their trust, tipped Lenin into decision. On the night of 24/25 October, his Red Guards seized the most important places in Petrograd – post offices, telephone exchanges, railway stations, bridges and banks – so that by next morning the Bolsheviks were in control. The Provisional Government put up a feeble resistance which was quickly overwhelmed. On 26 October Lenin announced the formation of a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars, whose first acts were to proclaim the ‘socialisation’ of land and an appeal for peace, to begin with a three-month armistice.
The three-month armistice effectively ended Russia’s part in the First World War. The army at once began to melt away, as soldiers left the front to return to what they believed would be land for the taking in their villages. The Germans and Austrians, nervous at first of dealing with revolutionaries, who were simultaneously calling for the workers of all lands to rise against the ruling classes as a means of everywhere bringing the war to a close, were slow to react to Lenin’s Peace Decree of 26 October. When world revolution – to the Bolsheviks’ surprise – failed to erupt and the appeal to peace was repeated by them on 15 November, the Germans decided to respond. On 3 December, their delegation, and those of Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria, met the Soviet representatives at Brest-Litovsk, the Polish fortress town on the River Bug lost by the Russians in 1915. Discussions, frequently adjourned, dragged on into 1918. The three-month armistice, tacitly accepted by the Germans, was rapidly running out, but the Bolsheviks, with no hand to play, continued to resist the enemy’s terms, which were for the separation of Poland from Russia and wide annexations of territory further east. Lenin protracted the negotiations, in part because he thought that, if peace were signed, Germany and its enemies would combine against the Soviet government in order to put down the general revolution he continued to believe was about to break out in Western Europe.63 In the end, the Germans lost patience and announced that they would terminate the armistice unless their terms were accepted and take as much of Russia as they wanted. On 17 February, their invasion began. Within a week they had advanced 150 miles, meeting no resistance, and seemed prepared to go further. Panic-struck, the Soviet government ordered its delegation to Brest-Litovsk to sign at Germany’s dictation. The resulting treaty ceded to the enemy 750,000 square kilometres, an area three times the size of Germany and containing a quarter of Russia’s population and industrial resources and a third of its agricultural land.
The Eastern Front, 1917–18
Germany had already transferred the best of its eastern army to the Western Front, in preparation for what it planned to be the war-winning offensives against the French and British, leaving only skeleton formations to occupy and exploit its new empire in the Ukraine. The Russian army had disappeared, its soldiers, in Lenin’s memorable phrase, having ‘voted for peace with their feet’. Hundreds of thousands had walked away from the war even before the October Revolution, into enemy captivity; ‘in 1915, while retreating from Galicia, about a million Russian soldiers became prisoners-of-war, three-quarters of them freely’.64 By the end of 1917 nearly four million Russians were in German or Austrian hands, so that the old imperial army’s prisoner losses eventually exceeded battlefield casualties by three to one; the most recent estimate of Russian battlefield deaths is 1.3 million, or about the same as the French, whose loss of prisoners to the Germans was trifling.65 The Russian peasant soldier simply lacked the attitude that bound his German, French and British equivalent to comrades, unit and national cause. He ‘found the psychology of professional soldiers unfathomable, [regarding his] new duty as temporary and pointless’.66 Defeat rapidly brought demoralisation, so that even soldiers decorated for bravery found little shame in giving themselves up to an enemy who at least promised food and shelter. It is greatly to the credit of Russia’s enemies in the First World War that they showed a duty of care to their myriads of prisoners not felt in the Second, when three of the five million Soviet soldiers captured on the battlefield died of starvation, disease and mistreatment. Perhaps because captivity did not threaten hardship, the Russian army had begun to disintegrate even before the collapse at the rear. Once the Bolsheviks began to sue for peace, disintegration became terminal.
By the spring of 1918, after the German occupation of the Ukraine, the revolutionary government found that it lacked the force to defend the power it had nominally seized. The only disciplined unit at its disposal was a band of Latvian volunteers, more committed to the cause of Latvia’s national independence than Bolshevik ideology. The peasant mass had returned to the land, leaving in uniform only a residue of the rootless, the lawless and the orphaned, ready to follow the flag of any leadership which could provide food and strong drink. Some of those leaders were ex-Tsarist officers, who, as opponents of Bolshevism, would raise ‘White’ armies, others Commissars who wanted a Red Army, but in either case desperate to find men, weapons to arm them, money to pay them. The Russian civil war was about to begin.
ROUT ON THE ITALIAN FRONT
In Italy, too, there was to be a breaking of armies in 1917, to follow that of the French and the Russian, though as the result of a great defeat, rather than a failed offensive or a social revolution. In October, at Caporetto, a small frontier town on the River Isonzo, the Germans and their Austrian allies would achieve a dramatic breakthrough of the positions the Italians had so painfully won in the thirty preceding months and dash the fragments of their army down into the plains.
The Caporetto disaster lost the Italian army its reputation, which it failed to regain during the Second World War. Gibes at the military qualities of the Italians have been commonly and cheaply made ever since. Unfairly; the Italians of the Renaissance city states had been notable soldiers, the Venetians an imperial people whose galleys and fortresses had defied the Ottoman Turks for 300 years. The Kingdom of Savoy had fought doughtily for national independence and unification against Habsburg power and battled as equals beside the French and British in the Crimea. It was only after unification that Italy’s military troubles began. Then, on to the hardy stem of the army of Savoy, recruited among the mountaineers of the Italian Alps and the industrious peasants and townspeople of the northern plains, were grafted the remnants of the papal and Bourbon armies of the south, toy armies without loyalty to their dynastic rulers or any sense of military purpose. ‘Dress them in red or blue or green’, the indolent King ‘Bomba’ of Naples had once observed to his military counsellors during a debate on new uniforms, ‘they’ll run away just the same.’ Bomba was a realist. He knew that, in a state where the landowners who should have supplied officers were principally concerned to wring the last ounce of rent or labour from the poor or landless peasants who supplied the rank and file, there could be no willingness to lay down life.
The War in Italy, 1915–18
The professionals of the army of Savoy, an army notable for its skills in artillery practice and fortress engineering, skills the Italians of the Renaissance had largely invented, did their best to transform the old and new elements into a national force, and with high intelligence; one of the distinctive features of the Savoyard officer corps was that, alone among those of Europe, it offered Jews a career open to talents. The disparity in quality between the recruits of north and south largely defeated their efforts. It is now disputed that the southerners made notably worse soldiers than northerners during the war.67 Some southern units certainly fought well. Nevertheless, it seems indisputable that, while the better-educated and more skilled recruits from the northern industrial cities went to the artillery and engineers, the infantry was disproportionately filled from the agricultural south. ‘The north-south division within the Kingdom was thus perpetuated by these wartime developments’, with the poor southerners bearing an unfair share of the human cost of a war which had been initiated by the kingdom’s northern dynasty and was directed, harshly and inflexibly, by northern generals.68
In the circumstances it was highly creditable that the Italian army had persisted in eleven costly and fruitless assaults on Austria’s mountain borderland. The incidence of an offensive every three months, between May 1915 and August 1917, was higher than that demanded of the British or French armies on the Western Front and the contingencies more wearing; shellfire in the rocky terrain caused 70 per cent more casualties per rounds expended than on the soft ground in France and Belgium.69 Italian discipline was harsher also. It may have been, as the Italian Commander-in-Chief, General Luigi Cadorna believed, that the social frailty of his army required punishments for infractions of duty of a severity not known in the German army or the BEF: summary execution and the choosing of victims by lot.70 Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the British or Germans would have stood for such ‘normal persuasion’ and it is a tribute to Italy’s sorely tried and dumbly uncomplaining peasant infantrymen that they did.71
All armies, however, have a breaking point. It may come when those in the fighting units are brought to calculate, accurately or not, that the odds of survival have passed the dividing line between possibility and probability, between the random chance of death and its apparently statistical likelihood. That dividing line had been crossed for the French at the beginning of 1917, when the number of deaths suffered already equalled that of the infantry in the front-line divisions: the million and more French deaths exceeded the infantry strength of the army’s 135 divisions. A survivor might therefore compute that chance – the ‘stochastic’ factor – had turned against him and that, in the British Tommy’s phrase, his ‘number was up’. By the autumn of 1917 the Italian army, with sixty-five infantry divisions, or about 600,000 infantrymen in fighting units, had suffered most of the 571,000 deaths to be incurred during the war, and the sense of ‘one’s number being up’ may have become collective. ‘Incredibly, morale still remained high on the eve of the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo fought on the Bainsizza Plateau from 19 August to 12 September. The basic reason for this was rather ominous; everyone expected this to be the last, decisive battle of the war’.72 The outcome, however, was deeply dispiriting. ‘The army suffered 100,000 losses and the gains left the Italian front line more vulnerable than before. Fifty-one divisions . . . had been thrown into this massive struggle but by the second week of September the end of the war seemed as far away as ever.’
Not to the Austrians. Just as, in the spring of 1915, the Russian successes in Galicia that had led to the fall of Przemysl and Lemberg caused Austria to ask the Germans for help, now the weight of the Italian attack in the Eleventh Battle prompted a similar appeal. On 25 August, the Emperor Karl wrote to the Kaiser in the following terms: ‘The experience we have acquired in the eleventh battle has led me to believe that we should fare far worse in a twelfth. My commanders and brave troops have decided that such an unfortunate situation might be anticipated by an offensive. We have not the necessary means as regards troops.’ His request was for Germans to replace Austrians on the Eastern Front, so that the divisions thus released could be brought to the Isonzo. Eventually, however, he was persuaded that German substitutes would be better employed against the Italians directly, a judgement Ludendorff endorsed, and, after a scheme to mount a diversionary offensive from the Tirol had been considered and rejected, it was decided to commit seven German divisions, formed with six Austrian into a new Fourteenth Army, in a direct counter-offensive on the Isonzo. The German divisions were specially selected. They included the 117th, which had had a long spell of mountain warfare experience in the Carpathians, the 200th, which included ski troops, and the illustrious Alpenkorps, a Bavarian mountain division, in one of whose units, the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, the young Erwin Rommel was serving as a company commander.73
Altogether the Austro-German force assembled for the ‘twelfth battle’ numbered thirty-five divisions against the Italians’ thirty-four, with 2,430 guns against 2,485. That was certainly not enough to achieve a breakthrough or even, by conventional reckoning, to mount an offensive at all. Cadorna, the Italian commander, had, however, as a result of his repetitive attacks, both come to disregard the eventuality of an enemy counter-measure and, at the same time, created conditions that promised to facilitate an enemy success. By his capture of much of the valley of the Isonzo, a mountain river running through a deep-cut valley, he had unwittingly created a trap in his own rear. By pushing across the river, but not far enough, he had left two bridgeheads in the enemy’s hands, which offered them the opportunity to drive down and up the valley from north and south and join hands behind the whole of the Italian Second Army.
Such was the Austro-German plan. Cadorna had done much to assist its realisation, by keeping the front line full of troops, where they were most likely to be cut off, and positioning his reserves far too near the rear, whence they would have difficulty arriving at the front in the event of a crisis.74 The intermediate lines were scarcely manned at all; all this, despite clear signs during October that an enemy operation was pending. Cadorna, however, could not clearly identify where it would fall and, because his staff lived in fear of his domineering personality, he received no advice that more prudent dispositions of his forces should be made on the most vulnerable sector. The only subordinate to differ from his view that the ground gained in the Eleventh Battle must be held with every man available – General Capello, a corps commander in Second Army – actually wanted to return to the offensive.
Objectively, there was no question of returning to the offensive. The enemy was already too strongly reinforced. Moving under cover of darkness over several nights, in the deep valleys beyond the Isonzo, the German and Austrian attack divisions had no difficulty in evading detection by Italian air patrols and in arriving in their jump-off positions on the evening of 23 October.75 Next morning the bombardment opened early, first with gas against the Italian artillery positions – Hugh Dalton, a future British Chancellor of the Exchequer, then a young artillery officer whose battery was on loan to the Italian front, recorded that Italian gas masks were ineffective – later switching to high explosive. By seven o’clock the Italian trenches were devastated and the assault began.
The point divisions were the Austrian 22nd, locally recruited in Slovenia, followed by the 8th ‘Edelweiss’ Division, largely composed of the élite Tirol Kaiserjäger. Attacking from Flitsch downstream, they were to follow the valley of the Isonzo towards Caporetto (called Karfreit by the Austrians), to meet the other point division, the Alpenkorps, attacking upstream from Tolmino (Tolmein). In the vanguard of the Alpenkorps marched the Bavarian Leibregiment (Body Guards), supported by the Württemberg Mountain Battalion. Rommel, commanding a group of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion’s companies, was no more content as a lieutenant with a supporting role than he would be as a panzer general in the 1940 blitzkrieg. He soon found himself separated from the Body Guards and out in front. There was little sign of the enemy and no resistance. ‘I then had to decide whether I should roll up the hostile position or break through in the direction of the Hevnik peak [a key height in the Italian rear]. I chose the latter. The elimination of the Italian positions followed once we had possession of the peak. The further we penetrated into the hostile positions, the less prepared were the garrisons for our arrival, and the easier the fighting. I did not worry about contact right and left.’76Rommel was, in fact, practising ‘infiltration’ tactics, a manoeuvre with infantry that, in the Second World war, he would repeat with tanks, driving deep, narrow corridors into the lines of the enemy, with the object of collapsing both their means and will to resist by a combination of material and psychological shock.
What Rommel was achieving on his tiny but critical sector was being repeated elsewhere. The Germans and Austrians, penetrating the steep defile of the Isonzo valley, by-passing Italian strongpoints and striking for the high ground, were biting out an enormous gap in the Italian front, fifteen miles wide, leaving behind them four Italian divisions isolated and surrounded. Moreover, the deeper the Austro-German Fourteenth Army advanced, the more they threatened the flanks of the larger concentrations of Italian troops to north and south, menacing the whole of Cadorna’s eastern front with the collapse of its rear area. The rational alarm of the high command was reinforced by panic in the ranks. Rumour of enemy breakthrough undermined the will of the common soldiers to resist, just as it would twenty-three years later when Rommel’s tanks would romp unchecked through the demoralised French army behind the Meuse. Lieutenant Rommel began to take prisoners in increasing numbers, first a few dozen, then hundreds, eventually a whole regiment 1,500 strong who, after hesitating to surrender to a single officer waving a white handkerchief as a signal of what he wanted – Rommel, always the individualist, had gone forward alone – suddenly threw down their arms, rushed forward to raise him to their shoulders and burst into shouts of ‘Evviva Germania’.77
The capitulation of this regiment, the 1st of the Salerno Brigade, came on the third day of the Caporetto battle. By then the whole Italian front on the Isonzo had fallen into collapse, the army was no longer obeying orders or even making a show of attempting to do so and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were streaming down from the mountains to the plains. There was worse; ‘reserves moving up prepared to do their duty were greeted with yells of “Blacklegs”. [Austrian] troops encountered Italian units in formed bodies marching into captivity, calling out “Evviva la Austria”.’78 On 26 October Cadorna, a man beset by nightmare, realised that a general retreat to the Tagliamento, the next large river west of the Isonzo, was inevitable. The enemy, rampaging forward, did not allow him to rest there. Though the Italians blew the bridges behind them, their pursuers got across and by 3 November had pressed them back to the River Piave, a major obstacle not to be crossed except by a deliberate assault of which the exultant victors, who had outrun their lines of supply, were not capable. Nevertheless, their achievement had been extraordinary. In eleven days they had advanced eighty miles, to within striking distance of Venice, forced the retreat of the Italians from the whole length of their mountain frontier between the Tirol and its hinge on the sea, and captured 275,000 prisoners; Italian battle casualties amounted to the comparatively small total, by First World War standards, of 10,000 dead.
Cadorna did his best to increase the number, by a ruthless and characteristic institution of the summary execution of stragglers, an episode unforgettably described by Ernest Hemingway, an ambulance volunteer with the Italians, in A Farewell to Arms; he was not actually present but that does not detract from the veracity of his account, one of the greatest literary evocations of military disaster. Cadorna’s judicial savagery could not halt the rout nor did it save his neck. He had never trusted his fellow-countrymen; they, in return, had never found it in their hearts to like him or even to respect him, unless out of fear. When, in the aftermath of Caporetto, he attempted to cast responsibility for the army’s collapse on to defeatism in the rear – there had been an outbreak of strikes in August and sporadic effusions of enthusiasm for ‘Lenin’ and ‘revolution’ – he lost the government’s support. On 3 November, echoing sentiments expressed in France after the Nivelle offensive, he referred to the Caporetto retreat as ‘a kind of military strike’. Five days later he had been removed from command, to be replaced by General Armando Diaz who, like Pétain after the Nivelle catastrophe, would offer the common soldier a more indulgent regime of leave and comforts as an inducement to sustain the fight.79
In practice, the Italian army, like the French, would not resume the offensive until the following year. When it did so, it would be in the company of a far stronger foreign contingent, largely British, than any offered as a buttress to the French in 1918. Caporetto, one of the few clear-cut victories of the First World War, was a triumph for the Germans, a vindication of the military qualities of their faltering Austrian allies, and a major defeat for the Allies at the end of a year which had brought disabling setbacks to their cause. If it had one positive effect, it was to force Britain and France to recognise that their haphazard system of directing their war effort, through informal liaison and intermittently convened conferences, could not continue if the war was to be brought to a conclusion in their favour. On 5 November, an inter-Allied meeting was convened at the Italian city of Rapallo, at which it was decided to establish a permanent Supreme War Council, with responsibility to co-ordinate the Allies’ strategy, to sit at Versailles under the aegis of the British, French and Italian prime ministers and the President of the United States.
AMERICA, SUBMARINES AND PASSCHENDAELE
President Woodrow Wilson had said America was ‘too proud to fight’, a sentiment that mirrored his own distaste for war. High-minded, idealistic, academic, he had formed the belief that plain dealing between nations in open diplomacy was the secret of averting and evading conflict. During 1916 he had, through his emissary, Colonel Edward House, made a determined effort to bring the combatants to negotiation on terms he regarded as fair to all and he had been dispirited by its failure. He was not, however, unrealistic about the place of force in international affairs nor was he unwilling to use force if necessary. In 1915 he had brought Germany’s campaign of ‘unrestricted’ submarine warfare to a close by a threat to use American naval power to preserve the freedom of the seas and he authorised Colonel House to promise to the Allies an American military intervention if they would accept his conditions for a peace conference and the Germans would not. As late as the spring of 1917, nevertheless, he had no intention of bringing his country to join the war, nor was there enthusiasm for entry among his fellow citizens. Among the large proportion of German descent were activists who, through the German-American Bund, campaigned against it.
Two events changed America’s outlook. The first was a clumsy German approach to Mexico, proposing an alliance, baited with the offer to return Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, if America went to war against Germany; this ‘Zimmermann telegram’ was transmitted to the American government by British naval intelligence – though the US State Department had intercepted it independently – and caused outrage when it was published on 1 March 1917. The second was Germany’s decision to resume the unrestricted U-boat campaign: sinking merchant shipping without warning in international waters.80 A return to the policy of 1915 had been debated in Germany since August 1916. The breach of maritime law, and its possible repercussions, was recognised. The prevailing code required commerce raiders, whether surface or submarine, to stop merchant ships, allow the crew to take to the boats, provide them with food and water and assist their passage to the nearest landfall before destroying their vessel. The unrestricted policy allowed U-boat captains to sink by gunfire or torpedo at will. The proponent of the policy was Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, chief of the German naval staff, whose argument was that only through an all-out attack on British maritime supply could the war be brought to a favourable conclusion before blockade by sea and attrition on land had exhausted Germany’s capacity to continue the war. He demonstrated by statistical calculation that a rate of sinking of 600,000 tons of Allied, but largely British, shipping a month would, within five months, bring Britain to the brink of starvation, meanwhile also depriving France and Italy of the supply of British coal essential to the working of their economies. A similar argument was to be used by the German navy during the Second World War, when it instituted an unrestricted sinking policy from the start. In the spring of 1917, the German navy, with about a hundred submarines available for operations in the North Sea, Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean, was ordered to open unrestricted attack against the twenty million tons of British shipping, out of a total of thirty million worldwide, on which the British homeland depended for survival.81
Hindenburg and Ludendorff, though opposed by the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, responded enthusiastically to Holtzendorff’s memorandum of 22 December 1916, urging the institution of unrestricted sinkings, and it was decided to take the risk – ‘fear of a break’ (with the United States), Holtzendorff had argued, ‘must not hinder us from using this weapon that promises success’ – at an imperial conference on 9 January 1917.82 The campaign, in the seas around the British Isles, on the west coast of France and in the Mediterranean, began on 1 February. The political effect in the United States was felt immediately and the severity of American reaction vastly exceeded German expectation. On 26 February, President Wilson asked Congress for permission to arm American merchant ships, the same day that two American women were drowned in the sinking of the Cunard liner Laconia by a German submarine. On 15 March German submarines made direct attacks on American merchant ships, sinking three. That was a direct challenge to the dignity of the United States as a sovereign power, one which Wilson reluctantly decided he could not ignore. On 2 April, before a special session of Congress, he reviewed the development of the German submarine campaign, declared it to be a ‘war against all nations’ and asked Congress ‘to accept the status of a belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it’. Four days later Congress resolved that war against Germany should be formally declared. Declarations against Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria followed, selective military conscription was enacted (18 May 1917) and the armed forces of the United States began at once to prepare for operations in Europe.
The mobilisation of the United States Navy, with the second largest fleet of modern battleships in the world after Britain’s, immediately altered the balance of naval power in the Atlantic and North Sea unchallengeably in the Allies’ favour; after December 1917, when five American Dreadnoughts joined the Grand Fleet, the High Seas Fleet, outnumbered by thirty-five to fifteen, could not hope to stand against it in battle.83 The United States Army, by contrast, was in April 1917 only 108,000 strong and in no condition to take the field; the federalisation of the National Guard, of 130,000 part-time soldiers, scarcely added to its effectiveness. The best American units belonged to the Marine Corps, but numbered only 15,000. Nevertheless, it was decided to form an expeditionary force of one division and two Marine brigades and send it to France immediately. Meanwhile, conscription would produce a first contingent of a million recruits, with another million to follow. It was expected that two million men would arrive in France during 1918.
The spectre of America’s gathering millions lent even greater urgency to Germany’s attempt to starve out its European enemies by U-boat action. The first months of unrestricted sinkings suggested that it might succeed. During 1915 the U-boats had sunk 227 British ships (855,721 gross tons), the majority in the first unrestricted campaign. During the first half of 1916 they sank 610,000 tons of shipping of all flags, but sinkings then declined sharply when, after May 1916, the German Admiralty reverted to stricter observance of maritime law. By the beginning of 1917, when an accelerated building programme had raised the total of U-boats to 148, sinkings rose proportionately, to 195 ships (328,391 tons).84 From February, when unrestricted sinkings began, the totals rose month by month to terrifying levels: 520,412 tons in February, 564,497 tons in March and 860,334 tons in April. Holtzendorff’s target of the 600,000 tons of monthly sinkings necessary to win the war had been exceeded, threatened to increase and bring Allied defeat.
The Admiralty could see no means to avert disaster. Arming merchant ships was pointless when U-boats attacked submerged with torpedoes. Mining the exits from the U-boat bases was ineffective, since British mines were unreliable and the bases too many and too inaccessible to be stopped up. Hunting U-boats, though tried, was like looking for a needle in a haystack, even on the shipping routes. Trapping U-boats with apparently harmless decoys not worth a torpedo, the celebrated ‘Q’ ships disguised as small merchantmen but heavily armed, worked on odd occasions until the German captains got canny. Diversion of shipping away from identified danger areas reduced losses only until the U-boats tried elsewhere. Meanwhile the haemorrhage continued apparently unquenchably. U-boat losses were negligible: ten in October to December 1916, only nine in February– April 1917, two of which were to German mines. The Allies’ only anti-submarine weapon, the depth charge, was useless unless U-boats could be found, and the hydrophone, the only detection device, could not find U-boats beyond a few hundred yards.
There was a solution available – convoy – but the Admiralty resisted it. Sailing ships in groups, even under escort, seemed merely to offer a larger group of targets. As the Admiralty’s Operational Division wrote in January 1917: ‘it is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater is the chance of a submarine being able to attack successfully’. The paper concluded by arguing that sailing ‘independently’ was the safer procedure.85 The analysis was, of course, wrong. In the spaces of the sea, a group of ships is little more conspicuous than a single ship, and, if not found by a U-boat, all would escape attack. Single ships sailing in succession, by contrast, presented the U-boat with a higher chance of making a sighting and so a sinking. Moreover, the Admiralty had been deluded by another mathematical misperception. In attempting to estimate the number of escorts it would have to find if it adopted convoy, it counted all sailings, which amounted to 2,500 weekly from British ports, and concluded it had insufficient warships. It was only under closer analysis by the new Minister for Shipping, Norman Leslie, and a junior naval officer, Commander R.G.A. Henderson, that a more manageable picture was revealed. The number of weekly arrivals of ocean-going merchant ships, those that actually sustained the war, was only 120–140 a week, and for those sufficient escorts could easily be found.86
By 27 April the senior admirals were convinced of the need to adopt convoying – apparently not at Lloyd George’s prompting, as is usually stated – and on 28 April the first convoy was sailed. It reached Britain without loss on 10 May. Thenceforward convoy was progressively introduced for all oceanic sailings and losses began to decline. Even in August they were still running at 511,730 tons, and they stood at 399,110 as late as December. Not until the second quarter of 1918 would they drop below 300,000 tons monthly, by which time nearly four million of the world’s thirty million tons of shipping would have been sunk in a little over a year. It was convoy that had reversed the fatal trend; but, as in the second U-boat war of 1939–43, it was not any one measure that brought about the U-boat’s defeat. Important subsidiary measures included the systematic laying of mine barriers (70,000 in the Northern Barrier between Scotland and Norway), the dedication of large numbers of aircraft and airships to anti-submarine patrols in narrow waters (685 aircraft, 103 airships) and the multiplication of escorts (195 in April 1918).87
An important indirect effect of convoy was to draw the U-boats into coastal waters, to hunt unescorted small vessels, where air patrol, hydrophone and depth charge could more easily find them, and minefields claim victims. Of the 178 U-boats lost during the war, out of 390 built, 41 were mined, only 30 depth-charged. Direct attack on U-boat bases, as on the famous Zeebrugge raid of 23 April 1918, interrupted submarine operations not at all. Nevertheless, however uncertain and halting the anti-submarine campaign, Holtzendorff’s war-winning total of sinkings was never achieved. If the British did not exactly win the U-boat war, the Germans still managed to lose it.
The unrestricted campaign nevertheless had the effect of driving Britain to undertake what would become its most notorious land campaign of the war, the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele, so-called after the village, destroyed in the course of the offensive, which became its ultimate objective. At the First Battle of Ypres in October– November 1914, the old BEF had succeeded in closing the gap between the open wing of the French army and the Flemish coast, so completing the Western Front. In the Second, in April 1915, the BEF had sustained the first gas attack of the war in the Western Front and, though surrendering critical ground in front of the city of Ypres, had held the line. In 1917, the military situation in the British army’s sector was a novel one. The Germans, despite their success against the French and the Romanians, and despite the progressive enfeeblement of the Russian army, were no longer in a position, as they had been in the year of Verdun, to undertake offensive operations. Their armies were overstretched and Hindenburg and Ludendorff awaited a strategic shift of balance, perhaps to be brought by a U-boat victory, perhaps by a final Russian collapse, before they could realign their forces for a new and decisive effort. In the meantime the British, on whom Nivelle’s aborted campaign had cast the burden of carrying on the war in the west, considered their position.
Douglas Haig, the hero of the First Battle, the defender of Ypres in the Second, had long nurtured plans to make the Ypres salient the starting point for a counter-offensive that would break the German line, while an amphibious attack cleared the coast, depriving the Germans of their naval bases at Blankenberghe and Ostend, and thus also dealing, it was hoped, a deadly blow to the U-boats. Haig had first proposed the scheme on 7 January 1916, soon after he succeeded French in command of the BEF. He reworked it for consideration at the Chantilly conference in November, only to see it set aside in favour of Nivelle’s project for breakthrough on the Chemin des Dames. With that devastated, Haig’s Flanders plan took on a certain inevitability. It was discussed at an Anglo-French conference held in Paris on 4–5 May, when Pétain, Nivelle’s successor, gave assurances that the French would support it with up to four attacks of their own. By June the French could no longer conceal from their British allies that such attacks could not be delivered. On 7 June, Haig met Pétain at Cassel, near Ypres, to be told that ‘two French Divisions had refused to go and relieve two Divisions in the front line’; the true figure was over fifty and Pétain’s assurance that ‘the situation in the French army was serious at the moment but is now more satisfactory’ was wholly meretricious.88 Lloyd George had, at Paris, guessed at the truth when he had challenged Pétain to deny that ‘for some reason or other you won’t fight’.89 Pétain had then merely smiled and said nothing. By June, with the truth of the French mutinies no longer deniable, it was clear that the British would have to fight alone. The matter of moment was to find a justification for them doing so.
Haig was adamant that they should and believed they would win a victory, the best of all reasons for fighting a battle. Local events in June, south of the Ypres salient, lent credence to his case. There on 7 June, the day he heard from Pétain the first admission of the French army’s troubles, Plumer’s Second Army had mounted a long-prepared assault on Messines Ridge with complete success. Messines continues the line of the Flemish heights east of Ypres, held by the Germans since the First Battle of October 1914, southward towards the valley of the Lys, which divides the plains of Belgium from those of France. So gradual are the gradients that, to the eye of the casual visitor, no commanding ground presents itself to view. More careful observation reveals that the positions occupied by the Germans dominated those of the British all the way to the only true high ground in Flanders, Mount Kemmel and the Mont des Cats, while denying the British observation into the German rear areas between Ypres and Lille. It had long been an ambition of the British commanders of the Ypres salient to take possession of the Messines crest and during 1917 their tunnelling companies had driven forward nineteen galleries, culminating in mine chambers packed with a million pounds of explosives. Just before dawn on 7 June 1917, the mines were detonated, with a noise heard in England, and nine divisions, including the 3rd Australian, the New Zealand and, veterans of the first day of the Somme, the 16th Irish and 36th Ulster, moved forward. Nearly three weeks of bombardment, during which three and a half million shells had been fired, had preceded the attack. When the assault waves arrived on the Messines crest, permanently altered by the devastations, they found such defenders as survived unable to offer resistance and took possession of what remained of the German trenches with negligible casualties. At a blow the British had driven the enemy from the southern wing of the Ypres salient. Haig’s ambition to drive in the centre and thence advance to the Flemish coast was greatly enhanced thereby.
The obstacle to a second major Western Front offensive, to follow the Somme the previous year, remained the hesitation of the Prime Minister. David Lloyd George was oppressed by the rising tide of British casualties, already a quarter of a million dead, and the paltry military return gained by the sacrifice. He looked for alternatives, in Italy against the Austrians, even against the Turks in the Middle East, policies that came to be known as ‘knocking away the props’ of Germany’s central military position. None commended themselves and Haig’s insistent demand for permission to launch a great Flanders offensive gained strength. Haig’s belief in its promise was not shared by Lloyd George’s principal military adviser, General Sir William Robertson, the ex-cavalry trooper whose innate intelligence and strength of character had carried him to the British army’s highest position. Yet he, despite his doubts, preferred Haig’s military single-mindedness to the Prime Minister’s political evasions and, when required to throw his weight one way or the other, threw it behind Haig.
In June Lloyd George formed yet another inner committee of the Cabinet, in succession to the Dardanelles Committee and the War Council, to assume the higher direction of the war. The Committee on War Policy, which included Lords Curzon and Milner and the South African, Jan Smuts, first met on 11 June. Its most important sessions, however, took place on 19–21 June, when Haig outlined his plans and asked for their endorsement. Lloyd George was relentless in his interrogation and criticism. He expressed doubts all too accurate about Haig’s belief in the importance of the Kerensky offensive, questioned the likelihood of capturing the U-boat ports and enquired how the offensive was to be made to succeed with a bare superiority, at best, in infantry and nothing more than equality in artillery. Haig was unshaken throughout two days of debate. Despite Lloyd George’s fears about casualties, compounded by the difficulties in finding any more men from civil life to replace those lost, Haig insisted that ‘it was necessary for us to go on engaging the enemy . . . and he was quite confident, he could reach the first objective’, which was the crest of the Ypres ridges.90
This was the nub of the difference: Haig wanted to fight, Lloyd George did not. The Prime Minister could see good reasons for avoiding a battle: that it would lose many men for little material gain, that it would not win the war – though Haig at times spoke of ‘great results this year’, that neither the French nor the Russians would help, that the Americans were coming and that, in consequence, the best strategy was for a succession of small attacks (‘Pétain tactics’), rather than a repetition of the Somme. He weakened his case by urging help to Italy as a means of driving Austria out of the war but his chief failing, unexpected in a man who so easily dominated his party and parliamentary colleagues, was a lack of will to talk Haig, and his loyal supporter, Robertson, down. At the end, he felt unable, as a civilian Prime Minister, ‘to impose my strategical views on my military advisers’ and was therefore obliged to accept theirs.91
The consequences would be heavy. The ‘Flanders Position’, as the Germans called it, was one of the strongest on the Western Front, both geographically and militarily. From the low heights of Passchendaele, Broodseinde and Gheluvelt, the enemy front line looked down on an almost level plain from which three years of constant shelling had removed every trace of vegetation; it had also destroyed the field drainage system, elaborated over centuries, so that the onset of rain, frequent in that coastal region, rapidly flooded the battlefield’s surface and soon returned it to swamp. To quagmire and absence of concealment the Germans had added to the BEF’s difficulties by extending the depth of their trench system and its wire entanglements and by building a network of concrete pillboxes and bunkers, often constructed inside ruined buildings, which offered concealment to the construction teams and camouflage to the finished work.92 The completed Flanders Position was actually nine layers deep: in front, a line of listening posts in shell holes, covering three lines of breastworks or trenches in which the defending division’s front-line battalions sheltered; next a battle zone consisting of machine-gun posts, supported by a line of pillboxes; finally, in the rearward battle zone, the counter-attack units of the division sheltered in concrete bunkers interspersed between the positions of the supporting artillery batteries.93 As important as the physical layout of the defences was the formational; the German army had, by the fourth summer of the war, recognised that the defence of a position required two separate formations and reorganised their divisions accordingly. The trench garrison, which was expected to bear the initial assault, had been thinned out, to comprise only the companies and battalions of the division in line. Behind it, in the rearward battle zone, were disposed the counter-attack divisions, whose mission was to move forward once the enemy assault had been stopped by the fixed defences and local ripostes of the troops in front.94
The defenders of the Flanders Position belonged, in July 1917, to ten divisions, including such solid and well-tried formations as the 3rd Guard Division and the 111th, in which Ernst Jünger was serving with the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers. On the main line of defence, that to be attacked by the British Fifth Army, 1,556 field and heavy guns were deployed on seven miles of front. The British had concentrated 2,299 guns, or one to five yards, ten times the density on the Somme fourteen months earlier. Fifth Army, commanded by the impetuous cavalryman, Hubert Gough, also deployed over a division to each mile; they included the Guards Division, the 15th Scottish and the Highland Divisions, arrayed shoulder to shoulder between Pilckem, where the British Guards faced the German Guards north of Ypres, to the torn stumps of Sanctuary Wood, south of the city, which had given shelter to the original BEF in 1914.
The Fifth Army had also been allotted 180 aircraft, out of a total of 508 in the battle area; their role was to achieve air superiority above the front to a depth of five miles, where the German observation-balloon line began.95 Visibility, in good conditions, from the basket of a captive balloon, was as much as sixty miles, allowing the observer, via the telephone wire attached to the tethering cable, to correct the artillery’s fall of shot with a high degree of accuracy and at speed. Improvements in wireless were also allowing two-seater observation aircraft to direct artillery fire, though laboriously, for two-way voice transmission was not yet technically possible. The war in the air, which in 1918 would take a dramatic leap forward into the fields of ground attack and long-range strategic bombing, remained during 1917 largely stuck at the level of artillery observation, ‘balloon busting’ and dogfighting to gain or retain air superiority.
The French air service, though a branch of the army, was unaffected by the disorders which paralysed the ground formations during 1917. It operated effectively against the German air raids over the Aisne in April and May and lent important support to the Royal Flying Corps during the Third Battle of Ypres. Its best aircraft, the Spad 12 and 13, were superior to most of those flown by the Germans at the beginning of the year and it produced a succession of aces, Georges Guynemer and René Fonck the most celebrated, whose air-fighting skills were deadly. When Guynemer was killed during Third Ypres on 11 September, the French Senate ceremonially enshrined the victor of fifty-three aerial combats in the Pantheon.96 The year was also to see, however, the emergence of the most famous German aces, including Werner Voss (48 victories) and the legendary ‘Red Baron’, Manfred von Richthofen (80 eventual victories), whose achievements were owed not just to their airmanship and aggressiveness but also to the delivery to the German air service of new types of aircraft, particularly the manoeuvrable Fokker Triplane, which displayed a significant edge in aerial combat over the British and French equivalents. Aeronautical technology, during the First World War, permitted very rapid swings in superiority between one side and the other. ‘Lead times’ in the development of aircraft, now measured in decades, then lasted months, sometimes only weeks; a slightly more powerful engine – when power output ranged between 200 and 300 h.p. at most – or a minor refinement of airframe could confer a startling advantage. During 1917 the Royal Flying Corps received three rapidly developed and advanced aircraft, the single-seater Sopwith Camel and S.E.5 and the two-seater Bristol Fighter, which provided the material to make its numbers, inexperienced as many of its pilots were, tell against the German veterans.97 It began also to produce its own aces to match those of the French and German air forces, the most famous being Edward Mannock, James McCudden and Albert Ball. McCudden, an ex-private soldier, and Mannock, a convinced Socialist, were cold-hearted technicians of dogfighting from backgrounds wholly at variance with the majority of public school pilots whom Albert Ball typified.98 Of whatever class or nation, however, all successful participants in the repetitive and unrelenting stress of aerial fighting came eventually to display its characteristic physiognomy: ‘skeletal hands, sharpened noses, tight-drawn cheek bones, the bared teeth of a rictus smile and the fixed, narrowed gaze of men in a state of controlled fear’.99
The outcome of the Third Battle of Ypres would be decided, however, on the ground, not in the skies above it. As at Verdun, and the Somme, the key questions at the outset were: could the weight of artillery preparation crush the enemy’s defences and defenders sufficiently quickly and completely for the attackers to seize positions within his lines from which counter-attack would not expel them? There was to be no initial attempt, as Nivelle had desired on the Aisne, for an immediate breakthrough. Instead, the first objectives had been fixed 6,000 yards away from the British start line, within supporting field-gun range. Once those had been taken, the artillery was to be moved forward and the process recommenced, until, bite by bite, the German defences had been chewed through, the enemy’s reserves destroyed and a way opened to the undefended rear area. The key feature to be taken in the first stage was the ‘Gheluvelt plateau’ southeast of Ypres and two miles distant from the British front line, whose slight elevation above the surrounding lowland conferred important advantages of observation.
The bombardment, which had begun fifteen days earlier and expended over four million shells – a million had been fired before the Somme – reached its crescendo just before four o’clock in the morning of 31 July. At 3.50 a.m., the assaulting troops of the Second and Fifth Armies, with a portion of the French First Army lending support on the left, moved forward, accompanied by 136 tanks. Though the ground was churned and pock-marked by years of shelling, the surface was dry and only two tanks bogged – though many more ditched later – and the infantry also managed to make steady progress. Progress on the left, towards the summit of Pilckem Ridge, was rapid, at Gheluvelt less so. By late morning, moreover, the familiar breakdown of communication between infantry and guns had occurred; cables were everywhere cut, low cloud prevented aerial observation, ‘some pigeons got through but the only news from the assault was by runners, who sometimes took hours to get back, if indeed they ever did’.100 Then at two in the afternoon the German counter-attack scheme was unleashed. An intense bombardment fell on the soldiers of XVIII and XIX Corps as they struggled towards Gheluvelt, so heavy that the leading troops were driven to flight. To the rain of German shells was added a torrential downpour which soon turned the broken battlefield to soupy mud. The rain persisted during the next three days, as the British infantry renewed their assaults and their artillery was dragged forward to new positions to support them. On 4 August a British battery commander, the future Lord Belhaven, wrote of ‘simply awful [mud], worse I think than winter. The ground is churned up to a depth of ten feet and is the consistency of porridge . . . the middle of the shell craters are so soft that one might sink out of sight . . . there must be hundreds of German dead buried here and now their own shells are reploughing the area and turning them up’.101
Rain and lack of progress prompted Sir Douglas Haig to call a halt to the offensive on 4 August until the position could be consolidated. He insisted to the War Cabinet in London, nevertheless, that the attack had been ‘highly satisfactory and the losses slight’. By comparison with the Somme, when 20,000 men had died on the opening day, losses seemed bearable: between 31 July and 3 August the Fifth Army reported 7,800 dead and missing, Second Army rather more than a thousand. Wounded included, total casualties, with those of the French First Army, numbered about 35,000, and the Germans had suffered similarly.102 The Germans however, remained in command of the vital ground and had committed none of their counter-attack divisions. Crown Prince Rupprecht, on the evening of 31 July, had recorded in his diary that he was ‘very satisfied with the results’.
The battle, however, had only just begun. Rupprecht could not reckon with Haig’s determination to persist however high losses mounted or wet the battlefield became. On 16 August he committed the Fifth Army to an attack against Langemarck, scene of the BEF’s encounter with the German volunteer divisions in October 1914, where 500 yards of ground was gained, and the Canadian Corps to a diversionary offensive in the coalfields around Lens, that awful wasteland of smashed villages and mine spoilheaps where the BEF had suffered so pointlessly during the winter and spring of 1915. He also continued a series of fruitless assaults on the Gheluvelt Plateau, from which the Germans dominated all action on the lower ground. Little ground was gained, much life lost.
On 24 August, after the failure of a third attack on Gheluvelt, Haig decided to transfer responsibility for the main effort at Ypres from Gough’s Fifth Army to Plumer’s Second. Gough, a young general by the war’s gerontocratic standards, had recommended himself to Haig as a fellow-cavalryman, noted for his ‘dash’ and impatience with obstacles. His troops had already learnt reasons to feel less confidence in his generalship than his superior held. Plumer, by contrast, was not only older than Gough but looked older than he was and had an elderly caution and concern for those in his charge. He had commanded the Ypres sector for two years, knew all its dangerous corners and had endeared himself to his soldiers, in so far as any general of the First World War could, by his concern for their well-being. He now decided that there must be a pause, to allow careful preparation for the next phase which would take the form of a succession of thrusts into the German line even shallower than Gough had attempted.
There was to be one last action before the pause, on 27 August, to attempt the capture of two long vanished woods, Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, just north of the remains of Gheluvelt village. The official history admits that the ground was ‘so slippery from the rain and so broken by the water-filled shell holes that the pace was slow and the protection of the creeping barrage was soon lost’ by soldiers who had been marched up during the night and kept waiting ten hours for the battle to start. When it did, just before two in the afternoon, the advance was soon held up by impassable ground and heavy German fire. Edwin Vaughan, a wartime officer of the 1st/8th Warwickshire Regiment, describes the effort of his unit to get forward:
Up the road we staggered, shells bursting around us. A man stopped dead in front of me, and exasperated I cursed him and butted him with my knee. Very gently he said, ‘I’m blind, Sir’, and turned to show me his eyes and nose torn away by a piece of shell. ‘Oh God! I’m sorry, sonny’, I said. ‘Keep going on the hard part’, and left him staggering back in his darkness . . . A tank had churned its way slowly behind Springfield and opened fire; a moment later I looked and nothing remained of it but a crumpled heap of iron; it had been hit by a large shell. It was now almost dark and there was no firing from the enemy; ploughing across the final stretch of mud, I saw grenades bursting around the pillbox and a party of British rushed in from the other side. As we all closed in, the Boche garrison ran out with their hands up . . . we sent the 16 prisoners back across the open but they had only gone a hundred yards when a German machine gun mowed them down.
Inside the pillbox Vaughan found a wounded German officer. A stretcher bearer party appeared with a wounded British officer ‘who greeted me cheerily. “Where are you hit?” I asked. “In the back near the spine. Could you shift my gas helmet from under me?” I cut away the satchel and dragged it out; then he asked for a cigarette. Dunham produced one and he put it between his lips; I struck a match and held it across, but the cigarette had fallen on to his chest and he was dead.’ Outside the pillbox he came across a party of Germans eager to surrender.
The prisoners clustered around me, bedraggled and heartbroken, telling me of the terrible time they had been having, ‘Nichts essen, Nichts trinken’, always, shells, shells, shells . . . I could not spare a man to take them back, so I put them into shell holes with my men who made a great fuss of them, sharing their scanty rations with them.
From other shell holes from the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks. It was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell holes, and now the water was rising about them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning. Horrible visions came to me with those cries, [of men] lying maimed out there trusting that their pals would find them, and now dying terribly, alone amongst the dead in the inky darkness. And we could do nothing to help them; Dunham was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries.
This was almost the end of Lieutenant Vaughan’s experience of 27 August. Just before midnight his unit was relieved by another, and he led his survivors back to the lines they had left on 25 August.
The cries of the wounded had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell holes . . . I hardly recognised [the headquarters pillbox], for it had been hit by shell after shell and its entrance was a long mound of bodies. Crowds [of soldiers] had run there for cover and had been wiped out by shrapnel. I had to climb over them to enter HQ and as I did so a hand stretched out and clung to my equipment. Horrified I dragged a living man from amongst the corpses.
Next morning, when he awoke to take a muster parade,
my worst fears were realised. Standing near the cookers were four small groups of bedraggled, unshaven men from whom the quartermaster sergeants were gathering information concerning any of their pals they had seen killed or wounded. It was a terrible list . . . out of our happy little band of 90 men, only 15 remained.103
Vaughan’s experience was typical of what the Third Battle of Ypres was becoming. Despite losses lighter than those suffered on the Somme in a comparable period, 18,000 killed and missing (the dead drowned in shell holes accounting for many of the missing), and 50,000 wounded since 31 July, the fighting was assuming for those caught up in it a relentlessly baleful character: constant exposure to enemy view in a landscape swept bare of buildings and vegetation, sodden with rain and in wide areas actually under water, on to which well-aimed shellfire fell almost without pause and was concentrated in lethal torrents whenever an assault was attempted against objectives which, nearby in distance, came to seem unattainably remote as failure succeeded failure. On 4 September, Haig was summoned to London to justify the continuation of the offensive, even in the limited form proposed by the prudent Plumer. Lloyd George, reviewing the whole state of the war, argued that, with Russia no longer a combatant and France barely so, strategic wisdom lay in husbanding British resources until the Americans arrived in force in 1918. Haig, supported by Robertson, insisted that, precisely because of the other Allies’ weakness, Third Ypres must continue. His case was bad – Ludendorff was actually withdrawing divisions from the Western Front to assist the Austrians – but because Lloyd George advanced worse arguments of his own, in particular that there were decisions to be won against the Turks and on the Italian front, Haig got his way. Henry Wilson, the superseded sub-chief of the General Staff and a fanatical ‘Westerner’, commented with characteristic cynicism to his diary that Lloyd George’s scheme was to give Haig enough rope to hang himself. The assessment that the Prime Minister wished to relieve his principal military subordinate, but dared not until he was compromised by overt failure, was probably accurate.104 There was, however, no obvious successor to Haig and so, however ill-judged his strategy and harmful its effect on his long-suffering army, it was to be continued for want of a better man or plan.
Plumer’s ‘step-by-step’ scheme, for which the pause in early September was the preparation, was conceived in three stages. In each, a long bombardment was to precede a short advance of 1,500 yards, mounted by divisions on a frontage of 1,000 yards, or ten infantrymen for each yard of front. After three weeks of bombardment, the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions, with the 23rd and 41st British, attacked up the Menin Road east of Ypres. The accompanying barrage fell on a belt a thousand yards deep and, under that devastating weight of fire, the Germans fell back. The same results were achieved in the battle of Polygon Wood, 26 September, and of Broodseinde, 4 October. ‘Bite and hold’, Plumer’s tactics, had been successful. The Gheluvelt Plateau had at last been taken, and the immediate area in front of Ypres put out of German observation (troops, nevertheless, continued to march out of the ruined town through its western end and circle back to reach the battlefield, as they had done since the Salient had been drawn tight around it in 1915, to escape long-range shelling on the only roads that rose above the waterlogged plain). The question was whether the next series of ‘bite and hold’ attacks could be justified. The first three, particularly that on Broodseinde, had hit the enemy hard. Plumer’s massed artillery had caught the German counter-attack divisions massed too far forward on 4 October and had caused heavy casualties, particularly in the 4th Guard Division.105 As a result, the Germans once again decided to refine their system of holding the front. Before Broodseinde they had brought their counter-attack divisions close up into the battle zone, to catch the British infantry as they emerged from their protective barrage. As the result had been merely to expose them to the ever heavier weight and deeper thrust of the British artillery, Ludendorff now ordered a reversal: the front was to be thinned out again and the counter-attack divisions held further to the rear, in positions from which they were not to move until a deliberate riposte, supported by a weighty bombardment and barrage, could be organised.106
In essence, British and German tactics for the conduct of operations on the awful, blighted, blasted and half-drowned surface of the Ypres battlefield had now been brought, as if by consultation, to resemble each other exactly. The attackers were to shatter the defenders with a monstrous weight of shellfire and occupy the narrow belt of ground on which it had fallen. The defenders were then to repeat the process in the opposite direction, hoping to regain the ground lost. It was, if decisive victory were the object, a wholly futile exercise, and Haig might, from the evidence with which events almost daily confronted him, have declined to join the enemy in prolonging the agony the struggle inflicted on both sides.
Even the most enthusiastic technical historians of the Great War, ever ready to highlight the overlooked significance of an improvement in the fusing of field-artillery shells or range of trench-mortars, concede that Haig should have stopped after Broodseinde.107He determined adamantly otherwise. Before Broodseinde he told his army commanders, ‘the Enemy is faltering and . . . a good decisive blow might lead to decisive results’.108 Immediately after, at a time when Lloyd George was surreptitiously trying to limit the number of reinforcements sent to France to make good losses suffered at Ypres, he wrote to Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘the British Armies alone can be made capable of a great offensive effort [so that] it is beyond argument that everything should be done . . . to make that effort as strong as possible’.109
The battle of the mud at Ypres – Passchendaele, as it would become known, after the smear of brick that represented all that remained of the village which was its final objective – would therefore continue. Not, however, with British soldiers in the vanguard. Some of the best divisions in the BEF, the Guards, the 8th, one of the old regular divisions, the 15th Scottish, the 16th Irish, the 38th Welsh, the 56th London, had fought themselves out in August and early September. The only reliable assault divisions Haig had left were in his ANZAC and Canadian Corps, which had been spared both the first stages of the battle and the worst of the Somme a year earlier. In what was called the ‘First Battle of Passchendaele’, the New Zealand and 3rd Australian Divisions tried on 12 October to reach the remains of the village on the highest point of ground east of Ypres, 150 feet above sea level, where the Germans’ Second Flanders Position of trenches and pillboxes marked the last obstacle between the BEF and the enemy’s rear area. ‘We are practically through the enemy’s defences’, Haig told a meeting of war correspondents on 9 October, ‘the enemy has only flesh and blood against us.’ Flesh and blood, in the circumstances, proved sufficient. Caught in front and flank by machine-gun fire, the ANZACs eventually retreated to the positions from which they had started their advance on that sodden day. So wet was the ground that shells from their supporting artillery buried themselves in the mud without exploding and the New Zealanders alone suffered nearly 3000 casualties in attempting to pass through uncut wire.
Having consigned the II ANZAC Corps to a pointless sacrifice, Haig then turned to the Canadians. General Sir Arthur Currie, commanding the Canadian Corps, had known the Ypres Salient since 1915; he did not want to lose any more of his soldiers there and his precise, schoolmaster’s mind forecast that the assault Haig requested would cost ‘16,000 casualties’. Though he had means of recourse to his own government, and might have declined, he nevertheless, after protest, complied with Haig’s order. The early winter had brought almost continuous rain and the only way forward towards the top of the ridge was along two narrow causeways surrounded by bogs and streams.110 On 26 October, the first day of the ‘Second Battle of Passchendaele’, the Canadians broke the First Flanders position and, at heavy cost in lives, advanced about 500 yards. The 11th Bavarian Division, defending the sector, also lost heavily and was taken out of the line. On 30 October the battle was resumed, and a little more ground taken, three soldiers of the 3rd and 4th Canadian Divisions winning the Victoria Cross. The 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions took over the front of attack for a fresh assault on 6 November, which captured what was left of Passchendaele village, and a final assault was made on 10 November, when the line was consolidated. The ‘Second Battle of Passchendaele’ had cost the four divisions of the Canadian Corps 15,634 killed and wounded, almost exactly the figure Currie had predicted in October.111
The point of Passchendaele, as the Third Battle of Ypres has come to be known, defies explanation. It may have relieved pressure on the French, in the aftermath of the mutinies, though there is no evidence that Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew enough of Pétain’s troubles to plan to profit by them. They had too much trouble of their own, in propping up their Austrian allies and in settling the chaos of the Russian front, to mount another Verdun; moreover, by the autumn of 1917, Pétain’s programme of rehabilitation was having its effect on the French army, which staged an attack near the Chemin des Dames, on 23 October, that recaptured over seven miles of front, to a depth of three miles, in four days, a result equivalent to that achieved with such effort and suffering at Ypres in ninety-nine. Edmonds, the official British historian, justifies Haig’s constant renewal of the Passchendaele battle with the argument that it attracted eighty-eight divisions to the Ypres front, while ‘the total Allied force engaged was only 6 French divisions and 43 British and Dominion [Australian, New Zealand and Canadian] divisions’.112 Context puts his judgement in perspective: eighty-eight divisions represented only a third of the German army, while Haig’s forty-three were more than half of his. What is unarguable is that nearly 70,000 of his soldiers had been killed in the muddy wastes of the Ypres battlefield and over 170,000 wounded. The Germans may have suffered worse – statistical disputes make the argument profitless – but, while the British had given of their all, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had another army in Russia with which to begin the war in the west all over again. Britain had no other army. Like France, though it had adopted conscription later and as an exigency of war, not as a principle of national policy, it had by the end of 1917 enlisted every man that could be spared from farm and factory and had begun to compel into the ranks recruits whom the New Armies in the heyday of volunteering of 1914–15 would have rejected on sight: the hollow-chested, the round-shouldered, the stunted, the myopic, the over-age. Their physical deficiencies were evidence of Britain’s desperation for soldiers and Haig’s profligacy with men. On the Somme he had sent the flower of British youth to death or mutilation; at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond.
THE BATTLE OF CAMBRAI
There remained one means of offence against the Germans that the mud of Flanders had denied its potentiality: machine warfare. The main reserve of the Tank Corps, built up incrementally during 1917, therefore remained intact. Its commander, Brigadier General H. Elles, had been seeking an opportunity to use it in a profitable way during the summer and had interested General Sir Julian Byng, commanding Third Army, in the idea of making a surprise attack with tanks on his front, which ran across dry, chalky ground on which tanks would not bog. One of Byng’s artillery officers, Brigadier General H.H. Tudor, of the 9th Scottish Division, had meanwhile been devising a plan of his own to support tanks with a surprise bombardment, thus denying the enemy forewarning of an attack. Byng accepted both Elles’s and Tudor’s plans in August and Haig’s headquarters approved them on 13 October, in principle at least. By early November, with the battle at Passchendaele lapsing into futility, Haig was anxious for a compensatory success of any sort and on 10 November, at Byng’s urging, gave his consent to the Elles-Tudor scheme.
The offensive was to be launched at the earliest possible moment at Cambrai with over 300 tanks. They were to be followed by eight infantry divisions and supported by a thousand guns. The nature of the artillery plan was crucial to success. Conventionally, artillery bombardments and barrages commenced only after all the batteries had ‘registered’, that is, established the accuracy of their fire by observing their fall of shot, a lengthy process which always alerted the enemy to what portended and allowed them to call reserves to the threatened sector. Tudor had devised a method of registering guns by calculating the deviation of each from a norm by electrical means; when the deviations were transferred mathematically to a comprehensive map grid, the artillery commander could be confident that his batteries would hit their designated targets without any of the preliminary registration which had always hitherto given offensive plans away.113
The tanks, massed on a front of 10,000 yards, were to advance in dense formation, with the infantry following close behind to take prisoners, capture guns and consolidate the ground conquered. The way into the enemy positions would be secured by the tanks crushing lanes through the wire – in the Hindenburg position at Cambrai several hundred yards deep – while the tanks would find a way across the trenches by dropping into them ‘fascines’ – bundles of brushwood – as bridges. There were three successive German lines, 7,000 yards – nearly four miles – deep, and it was intended to break through all in a single bound on the first day. Because the Cambrai front had long been quiet, it was garrisoned by only two divisions, the 20th Landwehr and the 54th Reserve, supported by no more than 150 guns.114 The 20th Landwehr was classified ‘fourth-rate’ by Allied intelligence. Unfortunately, the 54th Reserve, a better formation, was commanded by an officer, General von Walter, an artilleryman, who had, unusually among German soldiers, taken account of the tanks’ potentiality, and trained his gunners to engage moving targets from protected positions.115
Walter’s keen interest in tank operations – at a time when the German army had no tanks – was to be of the greatest influence on the outcome of the battle. So, too, was the failure of comprehension of the tank’s potential on the part of General G.M. Harper, commanding the 51st Highland Division, the infantry formation at the centre of the front of attack. Harper, brave but conventional, did not like tanks but loved his Highland soldiers. He had formed the view that tanks would attract German artillery fire on to his infantry and so, instead of insisting that they follow closely, ordered them to keep 150–200 yards behind.116 The resulting separation was to spell doom to the British attack at the now critical moment of the battle.
All began well. The unfortunate German soldiers garrisoning the Cambrai sector were unprepared for the hurricane bombardment that descended upon them at 6.20 on the morning of 20 November and the appearance of dense columns of tanks, 324 in all, rolling forward with infantry following. Within four hours the attackers had advanced in many places to a depth of four miles, at almost no cost in casualties: in the 20th Light Division, the 2nd Durham Light Infantry lost four men killed, the 14th Durham Light Infantry only seven men wounded.117
The difference was in the centre. There the 51st Highland Division, gingerly following the tanks at some hundred yards’ distance, entered the defended zone of the German 54th Reserve. Its gunners, trained by General von Walter, began to engage the British tanks as they appeared, unsupported by infantry, over the crest near Flesquières village, and knocked them out one by one.118 Soon eleven were out of action, five destroyed by a single German sergeant, Kurt Kruger, who was killed by a Highlander when the 51st Division’s infantry at last got up with the tanks. By then, however, it was too late for the division to reach the objective set for it for the day, so that, while on the left and right of the Cambrai battlefield, the whole German position had been broken, in the centre a salient bulged towards British lines, denying General Byng the clear-cut breakthrough espousal of Elles’s and Tudor’s revolutionary plan should have brought him.
In England the bells rang out for a victory, the first time they had sounded since the beginning of the war. The celebration was premature. Byng’s cavalry, which had picked its way across the battlefield in the wake of the tanks in the twilight of 20 November, was held up by wire they had not cut and turned back. His infantry nudged their way forward on 21 November and the days that followed. Then, on 30 November, the German army demonstrated once again its formidable counter-attack power. In the ten days since the attack had been unleashed, twenty divisions had been assembled by Crown Prince Rupprecht, the local commander, and in a morning attack they took back not only much of the ground lost to the tanks on 20 November but another portion, which the British had held beforehand. The Cambrai battle, which should have yielded a deep pocket driven into the German front, ended on ambiguous terms along the line of the ‘Drocourt-Quéant Switch’, a sinuous double salient which gave both the British and the Germans some of each other’s long-held territory. It was an appropriate symbol of the precarious balance of power on the Western Front at the end of 1917.