SIX
THE EXHAUSTION OF ALL the combatant armies’ offensive force during the winter of 1914, in the east only a little later than in the west, brought Europe by the spring of 1915 a new frontier. It was quite different in character from the old, lazy, permeable frontiers of pre-war days, crossed without passports at the infrequent customs posts and without formality elsewhere. The new frontier resembled the limes of the Roman legions, an earthwork barrier separating a vast military empire from the outside world. Nothing, indeed, had been seen like it in Europe since Rome – not under Charlemagne, not under Louis XIV, not under Napoleon – nor would be again until the outbreak of the Cold War thirty years into the future.
Unlike the limes and the Iron Curtain, however, the new frontier marked neither a social nor an ideological border. It was quite simply a fortification, as much offensive as defensive, separating warring states. Such fortifications had been dug before, notably in Virginia and Maryland during the American Civil War, in Portugal by Wellington during the Peninsular War, at Chatalja outside Istanbul during the Balkan Wars and by the Tsars on the Steppe (the Cherta lines) during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. None compared in length, depth or elaboration with Europe’s new frontier of 1915. Measured from Memel on the Baltic to Czernowitz in the Carpathians and from Nieuport in Belgium to the Swiss border near Freiburg, the line of earthworks stretched for nearly 1,300 miles. Barbed wire, an invention of American cattle ranchers in the 1870s, had begun to appear, strung in belts between the opposing trenches by the spring. So, too, had underground shelters, ‘dugouts’ to the British, and support and reserve lines to the rear of the front. In essence, however, the new frontier was a ditch, dug deep enough to shelter a man, narrow enough to present a difficult target to plunging artillery fire and kinked at intervals into ‘traverses’, to diffuse blast, splinters or shrapnel and prevent attackers who entered a trench from commanding more than a short stretch with rifle fire. In wet or stony ground, trenches were shallow, with a higher parapet to the front, built of earth, usually sandbagged. The drier and more workable the soil, the less need for supporting ‘revetments’ of timber or wattle along the internal trench walls, and the deeper the dugouts; these, which began as ‘scrapes’ in the side of the trench nearest the enemy, excavated thus to protect the entrance from incoming shells, developed quite soon into deep shelters, approached down staircases; the ‘stollen’, thirty feet or more deep, eventually excavated by the Germans into the chalk of Artois and the Somme, would prove impervious to the heaviest bombardment.
Yet there was no standard trench system. The pattern varied from place to place, front to front, the design depending upon the nature of the terrain, the ratio of troops to space – high in the west, low in the east – tactical doctrine and the course of the fighting which had caused the line to rest where it did. On wide sectors of the Eastern Front in the spring of 1915 no man’s land, the space separating the contestants’ front lines, might be three to four thousand yards wide. Between Gorlice and Tarnow, south of Cracow, scene of the great Austro-German breakthrough to come, ‘there was not much more than a thin, ill-connected ditch with a strand or two of barbed wire before it, and communications to the rear often ran over open ground . . . There was almost no reserve position either.’1 In the west, by contrast, no man’s land was usually two to three hundred yards wide, often less, in places only twenty-five. Intense trench fighting could even produce an ‘international’ barbed wire barrier, mended by both sides. Barbed wire had become plentiful by the spring of 1915, though entanglements, strung on wooden posts, later on screw pickets which could be fixed without noisy hammering, were still quite narrow. The dense belts fifty yards deep were a development of later years. To the rear of the front line, the British made a practice of digging a ‘support’ line, separated from the first by two hundred yards and usually a sketchier ‘reserve’ line four hundred yards further back. Connecting these lines, and kinked also by traverses, ran ‘communication’ trenches which allowed reliefs and ration parties to reach the front under cover, all the way from the rear. Diagrammatically, the layout would have appeared quite familiar to any siege engineer of the eighteenth century: ‘parallels’, connected by saps.2 Any diagrammatic neatness, however, quickly disappeared, as trenches were abandoned because of flooding, exposure to enemy view, or loss to the enemy in combat. New trenches were always being dug to ‘improve’ the line or make good stretches lost in fighting: old support or communication trenches became new front lines: a successful advance would leave a whole trench system behind, perhaps only to be taken over again as the balance of local advantage swung the other way. The Western Front, as the first air photographs taken would shortly reveal, rapidly became a maze of duplicates and dead ends, in which soldiers, sometimes whole units, easily lost their way. Guides who knew the trench geography were an essential accompaniment in unit reliefs, when one battalion took the place of another at the end of a front-line stint. So, too, were signboards pointing to the more enduring trenches and the ruined remains of human habitation; in the Ypres salient in the winter of 1914–15, there were still traces of the buildings the Tommies had named Tram Car Cottage, Battersea Farm, Beggar’s Rest, Apple Villa, White Horse Cellars, Kansas Cross, Doll’s House.3
The British, hurried to Ypres in October 1914 to stop the open gap in the Western Front, had got below ground level wherever and as best they could. Shelter pits, which one man could dig at the rate of one cubic foot of earth removed in three minutes, or enough to give him cover in half an hour, became trenches when joined up.4 More often, the first shelter was an existing ditch or field drain; when deepened, or as rain fell, these ready-made refuges filled with water and proved habitable only at the expense of great labour or not habitable at all, as the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers discovered south of Ypres in October 1914. ‘The roads and many of the fields are bordered by deep ditches . . . the soil is clay, mostly, and sand . . . The Company Commanders set their men to dig behind covering parties [holding the front from the Germans opposite] . . . C and D [Companies] dug regulation traversed trenches by sections. A [Company] dug by platoons . . . B Company dug a support trench . . . and left one platoon to man it. The other three platoons went to a willow-lined dry ditch behind Cellar Farm . . . and improved it with their trenching tools.’5 In December, on a nearby sector, they took over a similar sector, ‘Within twenty-four hours it was “rain, rain, rain”. The winter floods had come, the ditch turned out to be a stream which opened into the river; it was one of the main drains in this much-drained low country. The parapet fell in right and left; the ditch-trench ran with a rapid current and had to be abandoned by day.’ With the help of the Royal Engineers and timber from a local sawmill, the trench was eventually revetted and built up above water level. ‘[The timber] had to be driven into a moving mass of mud . . . by men working in two feet . . . of water, within shouting distance of the enemy . . . Two weeks of hard labour produced a dry trench with a floor above the ordinary flood-water level . . . In 1917 it was still the driest trench in the sector.’6
The longevity of this trench was unusual; static though the Western Front was to become, few stretches endured in their original state from 1914 until 1917. The Fusiliers’ experience in January 1915 in a position near the River Lys, south of Ypres, explains why:
the Lys was still rising, so it was decided to let the trenches go and build a breastwork. Work began today [January 25] . . . On land where water lay so near the surface it was often difficult to find earth solid enough to fill sand-bags, so during the following weeks the battalion toiled building breastworks out of liquid mud. The wooden frames for the parapet were made in sections by the [Royal] Engineers. These sections, large brushwood hurdles, sheets of corrugated iron, and innumerable sand-bags, formed the load of the nightly carrying-parties . . . On the left of the Battalion front a gap was found through which much of the trench there could be drained for occupation . . . While breastwork and trench were in the making the company wiring sections worked in rivalry . . . in time, belts of barbed wire several yards across, fixed on stakes, stretched across the entire front. Until the line was completed, and that was not for weeks, it remained disconnected. To get along a company front, parts had to be taken at the double or by a flying leap, running the gauntlet of German snipers, who accounted for most of the casualties during the first months of the year.7
Bit by bit, battalions like the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers turned the British sector of the front into a defensible and moderately habitable line. The Germans, whose decision to retreat from the Marne to ground of their own choosing allowed them to avoid the wet, low-lying, overlooked sectors they left to their enemies, were better established. Theirs had been a deliberate strategy of entrenchment, as reported by the commanders of the pursuing French formations which were stopped in sequence as they advanced from the Marne. On 13 September, Franchet d’Esperey signalled in his evening report to Joffre at GQG that Fifth Army had encountered a new phenomenon, an organised trench system extending beyond the city of Rheims on both sides, which his advance guards could neither turn nor penetrate. In the few days following, each of the other army commanders transmitted similar intelligence. On 15 September, Foch reported from Ninth Army that he had been stopped by an entrenched line stretching eastward from Fifth Army’s flank. On 16 September Sarrail, from Third Army, signalled that it was in continuous contact with the enemy who had ‘surrounded Verdun with a network of trenches’ which he could not carry by infantry assault. Castelnau, on his right, found the same day that his Sixth Army was faced by a continuous trench line he could not outflank, while on 17 September Dubail, First Army, reported that his front was crossed by a continuous line of trenches thrown up by labourers the Germans had impressed from the local population.8From Rheims to the Swiss frontier, therefore, the Germans had already succeeded in carrying out Moltke’s order of 10 September to ‘entrench and hold’ the positions reached after the retreat from the Marne, while from the Aisne northwards towards the English Channel a line of entrenchments was being dug piecemeal as the series of short-range outflanking movements failed one after the other. The last of these stages of the ‘Race to the Sea’ ended in episodes of ditch-deepening, scraping, scrabbling, pumping and rough field-carpentry, as described by the officers of the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, all under the fire of an enemy dug into higher, drier ground on the ridges that overlook Ypres and its surroundings from the east.
The British, who had learnt recent and important lessons in South Africa, where the Boers had taught them at the Modder and Tugela rivers the value of complicating any trench system, compensated for the inferiority of their overlooked positions in Flanders by digging in duplicate and triplicate, an insurance both against sudden infantry assault and artillery damage. The Germans, who had last dug earthworks around Paris in 1871 and otherwise derived their knowledge of trench warfare from indirect studies of the Russo-Japanese War, had a different doctrine. In two instructions, issued on 7 and 25 January 1915, Falkenhayn ordered that the western armies were to fortify the front in a strength sufficient to assure that it could be held with small numbers against attack by superior forces for a long time.9 Falkenhayn’s insistence on this point derived from his pressing need to find reinforcements from France and Belgium for the campaign in the east, where the demands of the fighting in Masuria and the battles on the Vistula, together with the necessity to prop up the Austrians in Galicia, exerted a growing drain on his resources. He had already sent thither thirteen divisions, and another seven, excluding locally raised formations, would go before the crisis in the east would pass. Those transferred, moreover, were among his best, including the 3rd Guard and six other peacetime divisions and four first-line reserve divisions, including the 1st Guard Reserve. They represented over one-tenth of his western field army and a third of its peacetime Prussian formations, those most counted upon for their offensive qualities.
The army in the east was growing into a formidable striking force. That remaining in the west, though continuing to include an elite, thenceforth comprised a disproportionate number of non-Prussian formations, Bavarians, Saxons and Hessians, of weaker Reserve and of undertrained war-raised divisions. It is not surprising, in the circumstances, that the doctrine of defence Falkenhayn laid down was draconian. The front line was to be the main line of resistance, built in great strength, to be held at all costs and retaken by immediate counter-attacks if lost. Secondary positions were to be dug only as a precaution. Some German generals, including Prince Rupprecht, commanding Sixth Army opposite the British in Flanders, objected even so to the digging of a second line, believing that the front troops would hold less firmly if they knew there was a fall-back behind them. Not until 6 May 1915 was a binding order issued by OHL for the whole of the German front to be reinforced by a second line of trenches, two to three thousand yards to the rear.10 By then, however, the main line of resistance was becoming a formidable fortification. In the chalk of Artois and the Somme, on the heights of the Aisne and the Meuse, the German infantry were burrowing deep beneath the surface to construct shell-proof shelters. Concrete machine-gun posts were appearing behind the trenches, which were heavily walled with timber and iron. Parapets were thick and high, trench interiors floored with wooden walkways. Militarily, the German front grew in strength week by week. Domestically, it was even becoming comfortable. Electric light was appearing in the deeper dugouts, together with fixed bedsteads, planked floors, panelled walls, even carpets and pictures. Rearward from their underground command posts ran telephone lines to their supporting artillery batteries. The Germans were settling in for the long stay.
The French permitted themselves no such comforts. The occupation of France by the enemy – the departments of Nord, Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Oise, Aisne, Marne, Ardennes, Meuse, Meurthe-et-Moselle and Vosges lay partly or wholly under his hand by October 1914 – was an intrusion to be reversed at the earliest moment. Occupation was worse, moreover, than a violation of the national territory. It was a grave disruption of French economic life. The eighty French departments not directly touched by the war were largely agricultural. The ten occupied by the Germans contained much of French manufacturing industry and most of the country’s coal and iron ores. If only to prosecute the war, it was urgent that they be recovered. Joffre therefore deprecated the construction of an impermeable front line on the German model, since he wanted to use the positions his soldiers held as a base for decisive offensives across no man’s land. In a sense, however, he was bound with Falkenhayn by the imperative to economise forces. Whereas his German opponent, however, wanted to turn the whole of the Western Front into a passive sector, so as to find troops for the east, Joffre wanted to subdivide it into passive and active sectors, the former providing attack forces for the latter. Geography dictated where the subdivisions should fall. The wet and the hilly sectors – Flanders in the north, the heights of the Meuse and the Vosges in the south – should be passive. The active sectors should be those intervening, particularly those shouldering the great German salient in the Somme chalklands at Arras and in the Champagne near Rheims.
Two offensives in those sectors in December proved premature. The First Battle of Artois, 14–24 December, ended without any result. The Winter Battle in Champagne, which began on 20 December, dragged on, with long pauses, until 17 March, costing the French 90,000 casualties and bringing them no gain in territory at all. There was also local and quite inconclusive fighting further south, in the Argonne, near Verdun, in the St Mihiel salient, and around Hartmannweilerkopf in the Vosges, a dominant point to which both sides sent their specialised mountain troops, Jägerand Chasseurs Alpins, to engage in fruitless assaults against each other; ‘le vieil Armand’, as the French called it, was to be the grave of many of their finest soldiers. Joffre, brought to recognise that the French army was as yet too ill-equipped, the German trenches too strong, for any decisive result to be gained, reconstituted his plans. During January he issued two instructions laying down how the front was to be organised. In the first, he ordered that the active sectors were to consist of strongpoints sited to cover the ground to the front and to the flanks with fire. The passive zones in between were to be garrisoned only with lookouts, and to be heavily wired but held by fire from the active zones. Across the whole front, active and passive, two belts of wire were to be constructed, twenty yards or so apart and about ten yards deep, with gaps for patrols to pass through. Behind the line of strongpoints there were to be secondary positions with shell-proof shelter for counter-attack companies.11 A survey of the fronts of the eight French armies revealed that most of the work Joffre required had already been done. In his second January letter he therefore stipulated that the front be strengthened by the digging of a second line some two miles to the rear, resembling the first, as a precaution against local break-ins. Such work had already been completed in the Verdun and Rheims sectors. Joffre added the general instruction that fronts were to be held as thinly as possible, to economise manpower and avoid casualties, and that local commanders should avoid pushing outposts too close to the enemy’s positions, a practice he thought wasteful of lives.
That was the exact opposite of developing British policy, which was to ‘dominate no man’s land’ by redigging trenches closer to the enemy’s and staging frequent trench raids. The first trench raid appears to have been mounted on the night of 9/10 November 1914 near Ypres by the 39th Garwhal Rifles of the Indian Corps.12 Fierce irruptions into enemy positions under cover of darkness was a traditional feature of Indian frontier fighting and this first murderous little action may have represented an introduction of tribal military practice into the ‘civilised’ warfare of western armies. The event set a precedent of which the British were to make a habit and which the Germans were to copy. The French, despite their long experience of tribal warfare in North Africa, never found a similar enthusiasm for these barbaric flurries of slash and stab. Disposing of many more field guns in their corps reserves than either the British or Germans did, they preferred to dominate their defensive fronts from a distance with artillery fire, for which, after the solution of the shell shortage of the winter of 1914–15, they were amply supplied.
These three different methods of holding the Western Front, along the line on which it had settled in November, would not have been much apparent to an overflying observer in the following spring. From the air it had a drably uniform appearance, a belt of disturbed earth, ravaged vegetation and devastated buildings some four miles across. Later, as the power of artillery increased and local infantry fighting conferred advantage on one side or the other, the zone of destruction would widen. What would scarcely change for the next twenty-seven months was the length of the front or the geographical trace which it followed. That remained apparently unalterable by the effort of the armies on either side until, in March 1917, the Germans voluntarily surrendered the central Somme sector and retired to shorter, stronger, previously prepared lines twenty miles to the rear. Until then the Western Front stood the same, month after month, for almost every yard of its length, running in a reversed S shape for 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border. It began at Nieuport in Belgium, where the sluggish Yser discharges seaward between high concrete embankments thirty yards apart. The eastern bank was held by the Germans, the western – since Joffre could not bring himself to entrust this critical hinge to the Belgians, even as defenders of their own territory – to the French. Below Nieuport’s complex of locks, and behind its high rampart of holiday hotels that front the coastal dunes, in 1914 quickly gapped and broken by artillery exchanges, the front followed the line of the Yser southward through a perfectly flat landscape of beetfields and irrigation channels, above which the roads run on causeways, as far as Dixmude, where a spur of slightly higher ground runs out from the Flemish ridges towards the sea. After November 1914, much of this territory was under water, the inundations forming a barrier impassable to the German naval troops who held the breastworked trenches on the eastern side.
Below Dixmude the line again ran just above sea level to Ypres, which it skirted in a shallow loop – ‘the Salient’ – overlooked from November 1914 until October 1918 by the German trenches on the higher ground at Passchendaele and Gheluvelt. The medieval wool trade had brought wealth to Ypres, displayed by a fine cathedral and a magnificent cloth hall. Both were far advanced in ruin by the spring of 1915, together with the seventeenth-century ramparts and nineteenth-century barracks at the rear of the town, past which so many thousands of British troops were to march southwards, along a route best judged to spare them from shelling on their way to and from the trenches. Behind Ypres the ground rises towards ‘Flemish Switzerland’, Kemmel, Cassel and the Mont des Cats, where British generals had their headquarters and troops released from duty in the line found recreation in the little towns of Poperinge – ‘Pop’ – and Bailleul. ‘Pop’ became a place of mixed attractions to the BEF: the famous Talbot House, Toc H, run by the Reverend Tubby Clayton for the high-minded and churchy who were prepared, as he insisted, to shed rank once inside its doors; the infamous Skindles for officers who wanted a good meal and the company of loose women. Skindles today is scarcely identifiable, but Toc H survives, its attic chapel, ‘the Upper Room’ breathing the Anglican religiosity of suburban volunteer soldiers pitched headlong into the hell of early twentieth-century warfare. The dim, stark chapel under the eaves remains a deeply moving way-station to any pilgrim to the Western Front.
South of Ypres the geographical advantages enjoyed by the Germans become more evident in the ridges of Aubers and Messines, frequent objectives of British offensives, and in the coalfields around Lens, where spoilheaps provided vantage points and pitheads, too, until they were destroyed by shelling. Nearby, at la Bassée, the line entered France and began to ascend the chalk ridges of Artois. Here early hydraulic engineers, seeking the aquifers that lie deep beneath the surface, had first developed the artesian well – the well of Artois – and here the soil provided for the German defenders the best conditions for defensive positions they were to find on the Western Front. The chalk belt extends southwards, through the Somme, into the Champagne but nowhere did the Germans better dominate their enemies than at Vimy, where to the east the dip slope of the ridge falls suddenly and dramatically into the plain of Douai, which thence runs towards the great north-south strategic railway, the ‘ligne de rocade’, linking Lille with Metz. Because the division between upland and plain at Vimy is so radical, it was a feature which the Germans had to hold and they were to do so against repeated Allied assaults until it was taken in an epic Canadian assault in 1917.
Below Vimy the line passed slightly east of Arras, another treasury of medieval wool wealth architecture, battered flat during the war, now restored from cellars upward – cellars that sheltered Allied troops in tens of thousands during the war – to the downlands of the Somme. The Somme is an unappealing river, marshy and meandering, but the countryside that surrounds it appears fondly familiar to an English eye, rising and falling in long, green swells and hollows reminiscent of Salisbury Plain or the Sussex Downs. The British would come to know it well, for by 1916 their length of line, progressively extended southward as their numbers grew, reached almost to the valley of the River Somme at Péronne, which would form their new boundary with the French for the rest of the war.
The French share of the line, even after their transfer of the portions north of the Somme to the British, was always the longer. Immediately south of the Somme it ran through countryside closer and more wooded than that to the north until it reached Noyon on the Oise, its nearest approach to Paris, which lies only fifty-five miles distant; for most of the war the masthead of the newspaper edited by the great radical politician, Georges Clemenceau, would carry the words, ‘Les allemands sont à Noyon.’ There it turned sharply eastward to follow the slope of the ridge between the Aisne and the Ailette rivers – this was the section first entrenched by the Germans after the battle of the Marne and so the original part of the Western Front – a ridge known as the Chemin des Dames after the pleasure path constructed on its crest for the daughters of Louis XV.
East of the Chemin des Dames, the abortive assault on which in 1917 was to precipitate the ‘mutinies’ of the French army, the line followed the heights above Rheims, which was to lie within range of German artillery for most of the war. Onward again, still drawing out to the east, the trenches crossed the dry, stony plateau of the Champagne pouilleuse, ironically one of the French army’s largest peacetime training areas. The absence there of hedges or trees suited the manoeuvre of large bodies of troops and the practice of artillery, in pre-war rehearsals of mobile warfare that the Western Front’s coming into being had wholly frustrated.
At the eastern edge of the Champagne, near Ste Menehoud, the line entered the forest of the Argonne, a tangled wilderness of trees, streams and small hills, in which neither side could mount major operations but where both, nevertheless, kept up a constant bickering. Above the Argonne rise the heights of the Meuse, crowned by the fortifications of Verdun and encircled to the east by German trenches which then dropped down into the plain of the Woevre. The Woevre was critically important to the Germans, for it gave an easy approach to their own great fortress of Metz, and they had fought hard in the opening battles of 1914 to retain it. In late September they had actually secured the advantage of gaining a foothold across the Meuse at St Mihiel, a salient that provided a bridgehead beyond the most important water obstacle on the Western Front and caused the French endless trouble. It would remain in German hands until retaken by the Americans in September 1918.
Below St Mihiel the advantage lay with the French. During the battle of the Frontiers they had succeeded in retaining the city of Nancy and such high points nearby as the Ballon d’Alsace, from which commanding views stretch in all directions. Possession of the crests of the Vosges and of the line of the Meurthe river, which makes its way through those mountains, guaranteed to the French the security of the eastern end of the Western Front.13 Over its last fifty miles the front ran generally within German territory – though French before 1871 – through the high Vosges, across the Belfort gap until it reached the Swiss frontier near the village of Bonfol. There the Swiss militia army, fully mobilised for war, surveyed the termini of the opposed trench barriers from neutral territory.14
THE STRATEGY OF THE WESTERN FRONT
The strategic geography of the Western Front is easy to read now, was easy to read then and largely dictated the plans made by each side at the start of trench warfare and in the years that followed. Much of the front was unsuitable for the style of major operations both sides envisaged, in which the power of artillery would prepare the way for large-scale infantry assaults, to be followed by cavalry exploitation into open country. The Vosges was such a front, and was accepted to be so by both French and Germans, who held it with second-rate divisions, reinforced by mountain infantry who occasionally disputed possession of the high points. Indeed, south of Verdun, neither side was to make any major effort between September 1914 and September 1918 and this stretch, 160 miles long, became ‘inactive’. Elsewhere, the Argonne proved unsuited to offensives as, for different reasons, did the Flemish coastal zone. The former was too broken, stream-cut and tree-choked, the latter too waterlogged for the delivery of attacks that required firm, unobstructed avenues of advance for a successful conclusion. Shelling into the Argonne threw the woodland into a jungle of broken vegetation; in the sea-level fens of Flanders, shelling quickly reduced the soil to quagmire. In the centre, the heights of the Aisne and the Meuse, though they were both to be contested in great battles, too much favoured the defender for offensive effort to be profitable. It was therefore only on the dry chalklands of the Somme and the Champagne that attacks offered the promise of decisive success. The former stood below the wet Flemish country, the latter above the mountainous forest zone of the Meurthe and Moselle. They were separated from each other by the high ground of the Aisne and Meuse, the bulge in the front to which they formed the shoulders. Military logic therefore required that it was at those shoulders that the attackers should make their major efforts and defenders be best prepared to withstand an assault.
Who would be attackers and who defenders? In August 1914 it was the Germans who had attacked; Schlieffen’s maps showing the ‘line of the 31st day’ coincide in eerie accuracy with the early Western Front. In September the French counter-attacked; the engagements during the ‘Race to the Sea’ follow the course of the stabilised line in Artois, Picardy and Flanders with an equivalent precision. The trace of the railway network explains how these outcomes came about. Early in the campaign of 1914 the Germans took possession of the Metz–Lille line, running north-south within their area of conquest. The French, on the other hand, retained control of the Nancy–Paris–Arras line facing it. The latter is closer to the line of engagement than the former, and that proximity explains why the French were better able than their enemy to deliver reserves to the crucial point in time to win one battle after another.
The ‘Race to the Sea’ is thus best understood as a series of stalemated collisions along the successive rungs of a ladder whose uprights were formed by those vital parallel railways. Amiens, Arras and Lille, near which the principal engagements of the ‘Race to the Sea’ were fought are, as a glance at the railway map shows, all located on cross-country lines linking the two great north-south routes. Since the physical and human geography remained unaltered by the course of the fighting, the strategic advantage rested with the French, though the tactical advantage rested with the Germans, who had chosen the pick of the ground at the final points of contact.15
Since strategic geography is a major determinant of strategic choice, the geographical advantage enjoyed by the French disposed them to attack. Geography did not, however, supply the only argument for such a decision, nor for the complementary German decision to await attack on the Western Front. The real reasons were quite different. France, as the victim of Germany’s offensive of August 1914, and the major territorial loser in the outcome of the campaign, was bound to attack. National pride and national economic necessity required it. Germany, by contrast, was bound to stand on the defensive, since the setbacks she had suffered in the east, in its two-front war, demanded that troops be sent from France to Poland for an offensive in that region. The security of the empire was at stake; so, too, was the survival of Germany’s Austrian ally. The Habsburg army had been grievously damaged by the battles in Galicia and the Carpathians, its ethnic balance disturbed, its human and material reserves almost exhausted. A renewed Russian effort might push it over the edge. The real outcome of 1914 was not the frustration of the Schlieffen Plan but the danger of a collapse of the Central Powers’ position in Eastern Europe.
A piecemeal adjustment against that risk had been made as early as the last week of August, when the 3rd Guard and 38th Divisions had been transferred from Namur to East Prussia, as a result of the Tannenberg crisis. They had been followed by ten more between September and December. Moltke had not wanted to let any go. His successor, Falkenhayn, resented the transfer of every one. He believed that the war had to be won by making the major effort in the west. There the French army was recovering from its losses of the opening campaign – thirty-three new divisions were forming – while French industry was gearing up for a war of material. The British were creating a whole new army of volunteers, while training their peacetime militia, the Territorial Force, for active service; together these would produce nearly sixty divisions, besides those from Canada and Australia which were hastening across the Atlantic and Pacific to the motherland’s aid. Of these figures Falkenhayn did not have exact intelligence but his impression of the gathering of a huge reinforcement was accurate enough. It would shortly double the force opposing the Germans on the Western Front, while they were already reaching the limits of expansion open to them from their manpower potential. The number of their divisions could be increased by reducing the infantry strength of each, counting on artillery and machine guns to make good the consequent diminution of firepower, a measure already in hand. The absolute limit of troop availability already stood, nevertheless, in sight.
In the circumstances, Falkenhayn had convinced himself that 1915 must be a year of offence in the west and defence in the east, within the larger policy of bringing Russia to make a separate peace. He lacked, however, the authority to carry his case. Though the Kaiser, as Supreme War Lord, had confirmed him in the appointment of Chief of Staff in January 1915, when he gave up the post of Minister of War, he was acutely aware that the real prestige of office attached to Hindenburg, as victor of Tannenberg, and his chief of the eastern staff (OberOst), Ludendorff. What they did not want, he could not insist upon; conversely, what they wanted he was increasingly obliged to concede. Moreover, Ludendorff was waging an active campaign to undercut his primacy, which the German system in any case did not clearly define. Whereas Joffre exercised the powers of government within the Zone of the Armies, and Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State of War at the outbreak, effectively acted as Commander-in-Chief also, Falkenhayn was neither supreme commander, since that dignity belonged to the Kaiser, nor his immediate subordinate, since between him and Wilhelm II stood the Military Cabinet, a body without executive authority but ample influence.16 It was through the Military Cabinet that Ludendorff began his intrigue. He was assisted by the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, who shared the German people’s admiration for Hindenburg in full measure. During January 1915, the Chancellor approached the Military Cabinet with the proposition that Falkenhayn should be replaced by Hindenburg, so that a major offensive could be opened in the east. When the senior officers of the Military Cabinet pointed out that the Kaiser liked and trusted Falkenhayn, a friend of his youth, and disliked Ludendorff, whom he thought overambitious, the Chancellor withdrew. Shortly thereafter, however, he came into contact with Ludendorff’s agent inside Supreme Headquarters, Major von Haeften, who suggested he approach the Kaiser direct. Bethmann Hollweg did not only that but enlisted the help of both the Empress and the Crown Prince to argue for Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s eastern strategy. Falkenhayn fought back, first confronting Hindenburg with the demand that he resign his post, though that was impossible in the face of German public opinion, then securing Ludendorff’s transfer from eastern headquarters to that of the Austro-German army in Galicia.
When Hindenburg appealed to the Kaiser for his return, he found he had gone too far. Wilhelm II decided that the hero of the day was challenging the authority of the supreme command. He could not, however, find the will to impose his own. Lobbied by his wife and son, the Chancellor, even the superseded von Moltke, he clung to Falkenhayn, while knowing that he must also keep Hindenburg and grant him much of what he wanted. The result was a compromise. Falkenhayn, though affronted, decided not to make the thwarting of his strategy a resigning issue, came to a personal accommodation with Hindenburg and acquiesced in the return of Ludendorff to the OberOst headquarters. Hindenburg, perceiving that Falkenhayn could not be displaced, contented himself with the token of the transfer of troops from west to east that he had already received, and the freedom of action thus granted him to pursue the chance of further victories over the Russians. He had hopes that more troops could be extracted if he could make a convincing case for mounting an offensive that would cripple the Russian army and stabilise the still fluid Eastern Front. In those hopes lay the germ of the plan for a renewal of battle east of Cracow which would result in the great breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow in the coming May. Meanwhile the debate between Germany’s ‘westerners’ and ‘easterners’ would rumble on unresolved.17
There was as yet no such division of opinion on the Allied side. Despite the absence of any supranational command organisation, akin to the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee which so successfully co-ordinated Anglo-American strategy during the Second World War, the informal understanding between the British and French general staffs was working well. The Russian view was also represented through their liaison officers at both French and British headquarters. Field Marshal French was, in any case, of one mind with General Joffre. Joffre had but one thought: to drive the invader from the national territory. French shared it, if for reasons less burningly patriotic, more calculatedly strategic than those of his brother commander. Curiously, he believed, like Hindenburg, that the war would be settled on the Eastern Front. Nevertheless, ‘until the Russians [could] finish the business’, he was certain that the right policy for Britain was to commit all the troops available to Western Front operations.18 They were growing rapidly in number. By early 1915 the BEF was large enough to be divided into two Armies, First and Second, the Territorials were reaching France in strength and the first of the volunteer divisions of Kitchener’s New Armies were beginning to appear also. Soon the British would be able to take over stretches of the line from their ally and find a striking force to mount offensives on their own initiative.
The question was, where? An early plan to make a major effort on the Belgian coast, with the Royal Navy supporting a combined Anglo-Belgian army, foundered on Admiralty warnings that its light ships could not stand up to German coastal artillery and that its battleships could not be risked in such confined waters.19 Plans to use troops against the Austrians were shown to be equally unrealistic. Militarily weak though Austria-Hungary was, geographically it was almost unapproachable by a maritime power. The Adriatic was an Austrian lake, denied to the Royal and French Navies by Austrian submarines and its recently built Dreadnoughts. Gallant Serbia could be supported only by use of routes through Bulgaria which, though as yet non-belligerent, was hostile, or Greece, which was prudently preserving her neutrality. If Italy were to enter the war on the Allied side, which seemed increasingly likely, that would heighten the pressure on Austria, but would bring no direct assistance to Serbia nor open the Adriatic, since the Italian Dreadnought bases were in the Mediterranean. Romania, friendly to the Allies, could not risk entering the war unless and until Russia achieved the upper hand on the Eastern Front. The only other region beyond the Western Front where Britain might use its growing strength in independent action was therefore in Turkey, which had joined Germany and Austria as a belligerent ally on 31 October. The only active front Turkey had opened, however, was against Russia in the Caucasus, which lay too far from any centre of British power for an intervention to be contemplated there. Moreover the British government was as yet unwilling to divert troops from France, though it was prepared to consider deploying naval forces, as long as its preponderance in the North Sea was not diminished, if a promising use for them could be found. In January the British War Council began to consider the preparation of a naval expedition to the Turkish Dardanelles, with the object of opening a way to Russia’s Black Sea ports. The mission was to be strictly naval, however; Britain’s commitment to France remained, in every sense, complete.20
Yet the Western Front presented not only militarily but also geographically a strategic conundrum. There was the initial difficulty of how to break the trench line; beyond that lay the difficulty of choosing lines of advance that would bring about a large-scale German withdrawal. During January the French operations staff at GQG, now located at Chantilly, the great horse-racing centre near Paris, began to analyse the problem. It turned on the rail communications which supported the German armies in the field. There were three systems that led back across the Rhine into Germany. The southernmost was short and easily defended. That left the two systems that supplied the Germans holding the great salient between Flanders and Verdun. If either, or preferably both, could be cut, the Germans within the salient would be obliged to fall back, perhaps creating once again those conditions of ‘open warfare’ which, it was believed, alone offered the chance of decisive victory. The French at Chantilly, the British at GHQ at St Omer, therefore agreed during January that the correct strategy during 1915 was for offensives to be mounted at the ‘shoulders’ of the salient, in the north against the Aubers and Vimy Ridges which stood between the Allies and the German railways in the Douai plain behind, in the south against the Champagne heights which protected the Mezières-Hirson rail line. The attacks would, in theory, converge, thus threatening the Germans in the great salient with encirclement as well as disruption of their supplies.
It was thus agreed between the French and British. There was to be a spring offensive, jointly British and French in Flanders and Artois, French alone in Champagne.21 Indeed, this first agreement was to set the pattern for much of the Allied effort on the Western Front throughout the war. The pattern was to be repeated in the coming autumn, during 1917 and, finally with success, in 1918. Only in 1916 would the Allies attempt something different, in the offensive against the centre of the great German salient to be known as the battle of the Somme.
This, however, is to anticipate the failure of the spring offensive of 1915. Fail it did, however, for reasons to become tragically familiar with every renewal of the French and British efforts. There was, indeed, warning of failure before the spring offensive ever began, in the miscarriage of a minor and preliminary attack by the British at Neuve Chapelle in March. All the contributing factors that were to bedevil success in trench offensives for much of the war were present, both the functional and structural. The functional were to be cured, in time, the structural persisted, even after the development and large-scale deployment of the tank in 1917. Among the functional were inadequacy of artillery support, rigidity of planning, mispositioning of reserves and lack of delegation in command. Among the structural were the relative immobility and total vulnerability to fire of advancing infantry and absence of means of speedy communication between front and rear, between infantry and artillery and between neighbouring units. The unfolding of action at Neuve Chapelle demonstrates the operation of all these factors as if in a military laboratory.
THE WESTERN FRONT BATTLES OF 1915
Neuve Chapelle was launched partly because Sir John French was unable to comply with Joffre’s request that the BEF assist the preparation of the coming Artois offensive by taking over more of the French line, partly, it seems though never stated, because the Field Marshal was anxious to restore his army’s reputation, damaged in French eyes by its failure to win ground during the December fighting. The plan was simple. Neuve Chapelle, a ruined village, twenty miles south of Ypres in the Artois sector into which the British had been extending their position as fresh troops arrived in France during the winter, was to be attacked on 10 March by the British 7th and 8th Divisions and the Meerut and Lahore Divisions of the Indian Corps. The front of attack was about 8,000 yards, behind which 500 guns had been assembled, to fire a stock of 200,000 shells, mainly light-calibre, into the enemy trenches, the barbed wire protecting them and certain strongpoints in the rear.22 There was also to be a ‘barrage’ – the term was French, meaning a dam or a barrier – of bursting shells fired behind the German trenches, parallel to the front of attack once it was under way, to prevent German reinforcements reaching their stricken comrades. The British and Indians, as they advanced, would be supported by reserves moving forward to take further objectives, but only on the receipt of orders from General Sir Douglas Haig, at First Army, through the subordinate corps, divisional, brigade and battalion headquarters.
The bombardment, which opened at seven o’clock in the morning, took the Germans by complete surprise. That was an achievement, rarely to be repeated; even more of an achievement was First Army’s success in having assembled the leading waves of an attack force of sixty thousand men within a hundred yards of the enemy in complete secrecy, a fact scarcely ever to occur again. The defenders, belonging to two infantry regiments and a Jäger battalion, about one-seventh in strength to their assailants, were overwhelmed. Their wire had been extensively cut, their front trench destroyed. When the British infantry assaulted at five past eight, they were not opposed and within twenty minutes a breach 1,600 yards wide had been opened in the German line. The makings of a victory, local but significant, had been won.
Then the functional factors making for failure started to set in. The British plan stipulated that, after the first objective 200 yards inside the German wire was taken, the infantry was to pause for fifteen minutes while the artillery shelled the ruins of Neuve Chapelle village in front of them. The intention was to disable any remaining defenders waiting there. In fact there were none. Those that had escaped the initial bombardment were hurrying rearward towards the strongpoints which had been built precisely to check such a break-in as the British had now made. After this second bombardment the British followed fast, into open country beyond the bombardment zone and scenting triumph. Orders, however, now required that they should wait for a second time. The commander of the battalion in the centre, 2nd Rifle Brigade, managed to send back a message requesting permission to disregard the order and continue the advance. Surprisingly – there were no telephone lines and this was the pre-radio age – it was received; even more surprisingly an answer was returned from brigade headquarters speedily enough to affect the situation, wholly for the worse. Permission to move forward was refused.
It was now about half past nine and the Germans were recovering their wits. Falkenhayn’s tactical instruction of 25 January had laid down that, in the event of an enemy break-in, the flanks of the gap were to be held and immediately reinforced, while reserves were to hurry forward and fill the hole. That was what was beginning to happen. On the British left, where the bombardment had left the German positions intact, two machine guns were brought into action, by the 11th Jäger Battalion, killing hundreds of soldiers of the 2nd Scottish Rifles and 2nd Middlesex; on the right, the attackers had lost their way, an all too common occurrence in the broken ground of the trench zone, and stopped to get their bearings. During the delay, the Germans there hastily organised the defence of that flank. Meanwhile, according to plan, fresh British battalions were crowding into the gap opened by the leading waves. By ten o’clock, ‘roughly nine thousand men [were squeezed] into the narrow space between Neuve Chapelle village and the original British breastwork [where] they lay, sat, or stood uselessly in the mud, packed like salmon in the bridge pool at Galway, waiting patiently to go forward’. Fortunately, the German artillery batteries within range had little ammunition available.23
The British artillery, which had ample stocks, could not rapidly be informed of the deteriorating situation, one of the structural defects contributing to failure. Without radio, communication depended on flag signals or runners, the first usually obscured, the second slow and vulnerable. At half past eleven a bombardment was organised against the 11th Jäger’s machine-gun positions, and an officer and sixty-three men came out to surrender, having killed about a thousand British soldiers. Precise and timely bombardment of their and other strongpoints could not be attempted because the gunners could not be informed. All the while the local German commanders, junior but determined and well-trained officers, were hurrying reserves to the flanks by bicycle or on foot. By contrast, and here the functional contribution to failure was at work, the British junior officers were passing their observations of the local situation, as the plan required, back up the chain of command so that authority could be granted for any alteration of the all-defining plan they requested. Behind the battle zone, telephone lines speeded communications but it was still painfully, indeed lethally, slow. ‘The Corps commander in some room five miles or more from the battle had to make a decision on the flimsiest and often false information, and the necessary orders had then to travel back, along the same chain, to be considered and written out in greater detail at each stage (divisional headquarters, brigade headquarters, battalion headquarters), till finally they reached the front-line companies.’24 What all this meant, in terms of the actual rather than planned timetable in this particular trench battle, was that between nine o’clock in the morning, when the German line had been broken and a way forward lay open for the taking, and the writing of firm orders to exploit the success at ten to three in the afternoon, nearly six hours elapsed. By the time those written orders had filtered down, via telephone and runner, another three hours were lost. The time the advance was resumed on the ground was between half past five and six.25
Dark was drawing in and so were the German reserves. The flanks of the break-in had been secured before midday. By nightfall fresh German troops, hurried forward from battalions in rearward support, were filling the open gap and bending their flanks forward to join up with the positions at the edges which had never been lost. Next morning the British renewed the offensive but thick mist prevented their artillery from locating targets and the attack soon stopped. It was now the turn of the Germans to discover that structural defects could impede the operation of a well-laid plan. On the day of the original attack, 10 March, a fresh division, the 6th Bavarian Reserve (in which Adolf Hitler was serving as a battalion runner) had been ordered forward to deliver a counter-attack in the early morning of 11 March. On a dark night and across country, however, the troops simply could not march fast enough to reach their designated jumping-off positions. The attack was therefore postponed for a day, at the order of Prince Rupprecht, commanding Sixth Army in whose sector Neuve Chapelle lay, after he had come to see the situation for himself. When, on the morning of 12 March, the attack did go in, it was immediately stopped with heavy German losses. The British front-line commanders had used the pause imposed by the mist the day before to consolidate their foothold and site twenty machine guns in commanding positions.
As a result, the ‘exchange ratio’ of casualties, as it would now be termed, at Neuve Chapelle, was eventually almost equal: 11,652 British killed, wounded, missing and prisoners to about 8,600 German.26 That was to become a familiar outcome of trench-to-trench offensives, large and small, throughout the course of the war, whenever an initial assault was followed by an enemy counter-attack. The reasons, in retrospect, are easy to identify. At the outset, the advantage lay with the attackers, as long as they could preserve a measure of secrecy, a diminishing possibility as the war prolonged and defenders learnt how greatly survival depended upon surveillance and alertness. Almost as soon as the attackers entered the enemy’s positions, however, the advantage tended to move towards the defenders, who knew the ground, which the attackers did not, had prepared fall-back positions, and were retreating towards their own artillery along, if lucky, intact telephone lines. The attackers found themselves in exactly the opposite situation, moving into unknown and confusing surroundings, and away from their supporting artillery the further they advanced, thus progressively losing contact with it as telephone lines were broken or left behind. Then, when the defenders counter-attacked, the advantage reversed. The attackers had familiarised themselves with the ground taken, organised its defences, to their advantage but the enemy’s confusion, and re-established telephonic communication with their artillery. In this see-saw, functional and structural weaknesses disfavoured first one side, then the other, to the eventual frustration of all effort to break through to open country or break back to the original line of defence. The physical product of offence and counter-offence was an ever thicker and more confused trench line, resembling a layer of scar tissue, picked at and irritated, over the site of an unsuccessful surgical operation.
The British nevertheless judged Neuve Chapelle a partial success, if only because it restored the fighting reputation of their army in French eyes. It was unfair that it should ever have been doubted. What was at issue was not the combatativeness of the British soldier but the still colonial outlook of their commanders, who expected decisive results for a comparatively small outlay of force and shrank from casualties. French generals, from a different tradition, expected large casualties, which their soldiers still seemed ready to suffer with patriotic fatalism. The British soldier, regular, Territorial, wartime volunteer, was learning a similar abnegation, while their leaders were coming to accept that operations in the new conditions of trench warfare could succeed only with the most methodical preparation. The qualities of dash and improvisation that had brought victory in mountain and desert for a hundred years would not serve in France. The only dissentients from this new and harsher mood were the Indians, for whom Neuve Chapelle marked their swansong on the Western Front. They would fight again, in the coming battles of Festubert and Loos, but not as a striking force. Losses already suffered had crippled many battalions and the sepoy, raised in a tradition of warrior honour quite different from the European, could not understand that a wound did not exempt the recipient from a return to the trenches. ‘We are as grain that is flung a second time into the oven’, wrote a Sikh soldier to his father the week after Neuve Chapelle, ‘and life does not come out of it.’ A wounded Rajput had written home a little earlier, ‘This is not war, it is the ending of the world.’27 By the end of the year the two Indian infantry divisions would have been transferred from France to Mesopotamia where, in a desert campaign against the Turks, they rediscovered a more familiar style of warmaking.
Neuve Chapelle was significant also because it anticipated in miniature both the character and course of the spring offensive in Artois, to which it was a preliminary, as well as its renewal in Artois and Champagne in the autumn. For a moment, indeed, during Neuve Chapelle, the leading waves of British and Indian troops had glimpsed the way open to the crest of Aubers Ridge, which was to be the British objective during their part of the Artois attack. Before that could be launched, however, the British had undergone an offensive in the reverse direction, in Flanders, which came to be known as the Second Battle of Ypres. The First, which had secured the ‘Salient’ at the end of 1914, had petered out in confused and ineffective fighting, largely conducted by the French, in December. By the beginning of April, however, Falkenhayn had decided, in order partly to disguise the transfer of troops to the Eastern Front for the forthcoming offensive at Gorlice-Tarnow, partly to experiment with the new gas weapon, to renew pressure on the Ypres salient. The attack was to be a limited offensive, since Falkenhayn’s hopes of achieving decision in the west had, he knew, to be postponed as long as Hindenburg and Ludendorff could effectively divert the movement of strategic reserves to the Eastern Front; nevertheless, he hoped to gain ground and secure a more commanding position on the Channel coast.
Gas had been used by the Germans already, on the Eastern Front, at Bolimov, on 3 January, when gas-filled shells had been fired into the Russian positions on the River Rawka west of Warsaw. The chemical agent, known to the Germans as T-Stoff (xylyl bromide), was lachrymatory (tear-producing), not lethal. It appears to have troubled the Russians not at all; prevailing temperatures were so low that the chemical froze instead of vaporising.28 By April, however, the Germans had a killing agent available in quantity, in the form of chlorine. A ‘vesicant’, which causes death by stimulating overproduction of fluid in the lungs, leading to drowning, the material was a by-product of the German dye-stuff industry, controlled by IG Farben, which commanded a virtual world monopoly in those products. Carl Duisberg, head of IG Farben, had already rescued the German war effort from collapse by his successful drive to synthesise nitrates, an essential component of high-explosive obtainable organically only from sources under Allied control. Simultaneously he was co-operating with Germany’s leading industrial chemist, Fritz Haber, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, to devise a means of discharging chlorine in quantity against enemy trenches. Experiments with gas-filled shells had failed (though, with a different filling, gas shells would later be widely employed). The direct release of chlorine, from pressurised cylinders, down a favourable wind, promised better. By 22 April, 6,000 cylinders, containing 160 tons of gas, had been emplaced opposite Langemarck, north of Ypres, where the trenches were held by the French 87th Territorial and 45th Divisions, the latter composed of white Zouave regiments from Algeria, African Light Infantry (white punishment battalions) and native Algerian riflemen. Next to them was the Canadian Division, first of the imperial divisions to reach the Western Front; the rest of the Ypres salient was held by three British regular divisions, the 5th, 27th and 28th.
The afternoon of 22 April was sunny, with a light east-west breeze. At five o’clock a greyish-green cloud began to drift across from the German towards the French trenches, following a heavy bombardment, and soon thousands of Zouaves and Algerian Riflemen were streaming to the rear, clutching their throats, coughing, stumbling and turning blue in the face. Within the hour, the front line had been abandoned and a gap 8,000 yards wide had been opened in the Ypres defences. Some of the gas drifted into the Canadian positions but their line was held and reinforcements found to stem the advance of the German infantry who, in many places, dug in instead of pressing forward. Next day, on the Allied side, there were hasty improvisations. The gas was quickly identified for what it was and, as chlorine is soluble, Lieutenant Colonel Ferguson, of the 28th Division, proposed that cloths soaked in water be tied round the mouth as a protection. The Germans attacked the Canadians with gas again on 24 April, but the effect was less than on the first day and more reinforcements were at hand. Efforts at counter-attack were made both by the French and British. On 1 May there was another gas attack in the jumble of broken ground known to the British as Hill 60, the Dump and the Caterpillar, south of Ypres, where a railway line runs through the spoil heaps of the cutting near Zillibeke. Today the pockmarks and tumuli of this tiny battlezone still exude an atmosphere of morbidity sinister even among the relics of the Western Front. On 1 May, when the soldiers of the 1st Battalion the Dorset Regiment clung to the firestep of their trenches as gas seized their throats and the German infantry pounded towards them across no man’s land, the scene must have been as near to hell as this earth can show. The situation was saved by a young officer, Second Lieutenant Kestell-Cornish, who seized a rifle and, with the four men remaining from his platoon of forty, fired into the gas cloud to hold the Germans at bay.29 Another officer who devoted himself to those gassed reported that ‘quite 200 men passed through my hands . . . some died with me, others on the way down . . . I had to argue with many of them as to whether they were dead or not.’ In fact, ‘90 men died from gas poisoning in the trenches; [and] of the 207 brought to the nearest [dressing] stations, 46 died almost immediately and 12 after long suffering.’30
The line was held, nevertheless, by the Dorsets’ almost inhuman devotion to duty and the Ypres Salient, though pushed back to within two miles of the city, was thereafter never dented. Gas in a variety of forms, the more deadly asphyxiant phosgene, and the blistering ‘mustard’, would continue in use throughout the war, and chlorine would kill thousands of Russian troops in German offensives west of Warsaw in May. Its intrinsic limitations as a weapon, dependent as it was on wind direction, and the rapid development of effective respirators, ensured, however, that it would never prove decisive, as it might have done if large reserves had been at hand to exploit the initial surprise achieved by the Germans in the Second Battle of Ypres.
The Allies had no technological surprise with which to inaugurate either of their offensives on the Western Front in 1915, and both failed, with heavy loss of life, for little or no gain of ground. In May, the French and British attacked in Artois, against the high ground from which the Germans dominated their positions, the British against Aubers Ridge on 9 May, the French against Vimy Ridge a week later. Although the French had artillery and ammunition available in quantity – 1,200 guns, 200,000 shells – while the British had not, the difference between their achievements was negligible. Haig’s First Army was simply stopped in its tracks. The French, spearheaded by Pétain’s XXXIII Corps, gained the summit of Vimy Ridge, to look down into the Douai plain through which the crucial rail tracks in enemy hands ran, only to be decisively counter-attacked by reserves reaching the summit before their own, positioned six miles in the rear, could join them. It was another example of the structural factors making for failure in trench warfare actually bringing it about.31
When the offensive was renewed in September, this time in Champagne as well as Artois, the results were scarcely different, though both armies had considerably larger numbers of divisions to deploy than in the spring. Their number had been increased on the French side by reorganisation, which had produced another twelve (numbered 120–132), on the British by further transfers of Territorial divisions to France, and the first appearance there in number of the ‘New Army’ or ‘Kitchener’ divisions of wartime volunteers. The plan of attack had been proposed to Sir John French by Joffre on 4 June. It required as a preliminary that the British take over more of the French line, to free the Second Army, which Pétain had been appointed to command, for the Champagne phase of the offensive. Haig had already in May taken over part of the French front in Flanders; now, in response to Joffre’s request, the new British Third Army moved south to the Somme to relieve Pétain’s army. The British now held most of the line from Ypres to the Somme, leaving a short length near Vimy from which the French Tenth Army would attack as soon as preparations for Joffre’s plan were completed.
That took time. The will was present – on 7 July, at the first inter-allied conference of the war, held at Chantilly, the French, British, Belgians, Serbs, Russians and Italians, who had joined the alliance in May, pledged themselves to common action – but the means were not. In late June the French and British munitions ministers had met, when David Lloyd George told Albert Thomas, his opposite number, that both guns and shells were lacking for a major effort by the BEF in France. He wished to postpone the joint offensive until the following spring. Joffre resisted; he wanted urgent action, both to sustain pressure on the Germans and deter the diversion of troops to other theatres. The British government, in which the Conservatives had joined the Liberals to form a coalition ministry on 26 May, recognised that the autumn offensive was a test of confidence and withdrew its opposition. Practical difficulties nevertheless persisted. The British takeover on the Somme took time; so did the preparation of the Champagne battlefield. Both allies were learning that a large-scale attack against trenches could not be launched extempore; roads had to be built, stores dumped, battery positions dug. The date of the opening of what would be called the Second Battle of Champagne was postponed from the end of August to 8 September, then, because Pétain demanded time for a lengthy bombardment, until 25 September.
The Germans profited from the delay, and the undisguisable signs of impending attack, to strengthen the portions of their line against which they detected the offensive was preparing. Falkenhayn’s instructions of January had laid down that a second position was to be constructed behind the first, with concrete machine-gun posts in between. Despite the enormous labour entailed, the system was complete by the autumn, forming a defensive belt up to three miles deep.32 As experience was already demonstrating that a forward movement of three miles against enemy fire tested an individual burdened with battle-gear to the limit of his physical, let alone moral powers, the German positions in the Western Front were becoming impregnable, certainly against an offensive planned to achieve breakthrough on the first day. Worse still for the attacker, German defensive doctrine required that the second position be constructed on the reverse slope of any height occupied – and the Germans, by careful choice during the retreat of 1914, occupied the high ground – so that it was protected from the Allied artillery fire designed to destroy it. The role of the German artillery was, by contrast, not to bombard trenches but to attack the enemy infantrymen as they assembled and then to lay a barrage in no man’s land once they moved forward; those who penetrated that barrier of fire were to be left to the machine gunners who, experience was showing, could stop an attack at ranges as close as 200 yards or less.33
The effectiveness of the Germans’ preparations was proved all too painfully on 25 September 1915, at Loos, the site of the BEF’s offensive in Artois, at nearby Souchez, where the French renewed their assault on Vimy Ridge, and at Tahure, la Folie and la Main de Massige in distant Champagne, where the French attacked alone. In both sectors the offensives were preceded by a discharge of chlorine gas. At Loos, the gas hung about in no man’s land or even drifted back into the British trenches, hindering rather than helping the advance. In any case the six British divisions engaged – three regular, 1st, 2nd, 7th, two ‘New Army’, 9th and 15th Scottish, one Territorial, the 47th – were quickly stopped by machine guns; when two reserve divisions, both New Army, 21st and 24th, were started forward in support, it was from a position so far to the rear that they did not reach the original British front line until dark. They were ordered to resume the advance next morning, which they spent marshalling for the attack. In early afternoon they moved forward in ten columns ‘each [of] about a thousand men, all advancing as if carrying out a parade-ground drill’. The German defenders were astounded by the sight of an ‘entire front covered with the enemy’s infantry’. They stood up, some even on the parapet of the trench, and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across the open grassland. The machine gunners had opened fire at 1,500 yards’ range. ‘Never had machine guns had such straightforward work to do . . . with barrels becoming hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen falling literally in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption’ until they reached the unbroken wire of the Germans’ second position: ‘Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle the survivors turned and began to retire.’
The survivors were a bare majority of those who had come forward. Of the 15,000 infantry of the 21st and 24th Divisions, over 8,000 had been killed or wounded. Their German enemies, nauseated by the spectacle of the ‘corpse field of Loos’, held their fire as the British turned in retreat, ‘so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy after such a victory’.34 A German victory Loos was; though the British persisted with attacks for another three weeks, they gained nothing but a narrow salient two miles deep, in which 16,000 British soldiers had lost their lives and nearly 25,000 had been wounded. The battle had been a terrible and frustrating initiation to combat for the soldiers of the New Armies, though the Scots of the 9th and 15th Divisions, in particular, seem to have shrugged off casualties and taken setback only as a stimulus to renewed aggression. Major John Stewart, of the 9th Black Watch, wrote to his wife after the battle, ‘the main thing is to kill plenty of Huns with as little loss to oneself as possible; it’s a great game and our allies are playing it top hole’.35 His was not a lone voice. The new British volunteer divisions yearned to prove their soldierly qualities and the patriotism of the French still burnt strong. It would be a year or more before the ardour of either army was quenched by the deluge of pointless losses.
Yet Loos, in strategic terms, was pointless and so, too, were the efforts of Pétain’s Second Army and de Langle’s Fourth in the offensive in Champagne that opened the same day. There twenty divisions attacked side by side on a front of twenty miles, supported by a thousand heavy guns and behind a gas cloud similar to that launched at Loos. The results were equally unavailing. Some French regiments attacked with colours unfurled and the brass and drums of their bands in the front trench. Others, when the advance faltered, found senior officers urging them forward. One of them, the famous colonial general, Charles Mangin, was shot through the chest as he organised an assault, though he returned to duty ten days later. For all his efforts and those of others like him, for all the continuing bravery of the French common soldier, the attempts on the Champagne heights nowhere gained more than two miles of ground. The Germans’ second line was not penetrated and, when the fighting ended on 31 October, their positions remained intact, though 143,567 French soldiers had become casualties.36
It had been a doleful year for the Allies on the Western Front, much blood spilt for little gain and any prospect of success postponed until 1916. The Germans had shown that they had learnt much about the methods of defending an entrenched front, the Allies that they had learnt nothing about means of breaking through. It was a bitter lesson for the French, all the more so because, in a widening war, their allies seemed bent on seeking solutions elsewhere, leaving the main body of the enemy implanted in their territory. Yet the defeat of the enemy through victories outside France looked no closer a prospect than breakthrough towards the Rhine. In Russia, where German intervention had rescued Austria from collapse, on the new Italian front which had opened in May, in the Balkans, on the Turkish battlegrounds, the course of events favoured the enemy. Only at sea and in Germany’s distant colonies had the Allies established an advantage, and, as they knew, in neither the naval nor the colonial theatres could success bring them victory.