After calling on General Henri Pétain, the commander of all French ground troops and therefore Haig’s counterpart, and dining with him in what Winston called his “travelling military palace,” they returned to Paris. At the Ritz in the small hours of the next morning Churchill wrote Clementine that it had been 1:00 A.M. when “Clemenceau, alert and fresh as when we started, dismissed me. The old man is vy gracious to me & talks in the most confidential way. He is younger even than I am!” Then Winston wired Lloyd George a full account of the day. The British divisions, he reported, were “in many cases only skeletons,” but French reinforcements would soon be arriving “as fast as they can come up…. Nothing more can be done than what they are doing.” At 4:00 A.M. his report went to London in cipher; it was decoded at the War Office and delivered to No. 10 at 8:30. Churchill saw the premier again at noon, and together they drafted an appeal to Woodrow Wilson for the speedy arrival of heavy American contingents. Winston telegraphed a copy of this to Lloyd George and, after lunching at the Ritz with Bender and Amery, set out alone for another tour of the front. Everything he saw convinced him that the war was approaching its climax. He wondered if this was appreciated at No. 10. Clemenceau could hardly have been more courteous, and Winston was never one to underrate his own importance, but premiers, he felt, should talk to premiers. Back at the Ritz he wired this to Lloyd George, adding: “It is considered certain here that the Germans will pursue this struggle to a final decision all through the summer and their resources are at present larger than ours…. Every effort must be made if we are to escape destruction.”250
The prime minister was handed this message when he awoke the next morning in Downing Street. He told his valet to start packing. Sir Henry Wilson joined him, and Churchill met their destroyer at Boulogne. Winston accompanied them as far as Montreuil, but the general staff insisted that he be excluded from the military talks. The council of war, held in Beauvais, included Clemenceau, Foch, Spiers (who acted as interpreter), and two American generals: John “Black Jack” Pershing and Tasker Bliss. The meeting formally endorsed the understanding Churchill had reached with the premier. In addition, Pershing brought President Wilson’s reply to the plea from Clemenceau and Churchill: 480,000 doughboys were on their way.
Lloyd George’s party, including Churchill, was back in London at 2:30 the following morning. Winston went straight to his desk at the Metropole. By the weekend the situation in France was reasonably clear. Montreuil had fallen, and one of the railways between Amiens and the capital had been cut. At that point, however, Teutonic discipline had collapsed. The starved German troops—starved by the Admiralty blockade Churchill had organized in 1914—had turned to pillage. By the time they re-formed, the hollow-eyed Tommies, their ranks thickened by French reserves from the south, had turned, anchored their lines, and were grimly holding on. Ludendorff had driven them back thirty-five miles, inflicted over 300,000 casualties, and created a huge bulge in the middle of the Allied line, but he hadn’t broken through. The first crisis was over. Churchill wrote on April 6: “I have been able to replace everything in the munitions sphere without difficulty. Guns, tanks, aeroplanes will all be ahead of personnel. We have succeeded in pulling the gun position round so completely since last summer that we can deliver 2000 guns as fast as they can be shipped. It has been touch & go on the front. We stood for some days within an ace of destruction.”251
As he sealed the envelope the second crisis was rising 136 miles to the east of him, in Flanders.
By early April Ludendorff had moved his “battering ram” (Sturmbock) opposite the old Ypres salient. A few minutes after midnight on Sunday, April 7, some twenty-five hundred muzzles roared in unison, sending the first of what would be thirty thousand shells toward Armentières and fouling the air with mustard gas. The German storm troops had fog again, and just before dawn Monday morning they buckled on their coal-scuttle helmets, climbed over their parapets, and lurched across no-man’s-land. Once again they ruptured the British trench line, this time on a thirty-mile front along the river Lys. Everything Haig had won in his Passchendaele drive was lost in a few days. By Wednesday evening Armentières had fallen; the loss of Ploegsteert, which Churchill had fortified as a battalion commander, swiftly followed. Spiers wrote in his diary: “Situation very critical…. British foresee severance with French & German objective gained.”252
On April 18, with the outlook obscure, Winston sent the prime minister an analysis of their strategic choices. If worst came to worst, there would be only two: “whether we should let go our left hand or our right: abandon the Channel ports, or abandon all contact with the French front line.” Loss of the ports would mean German dominance in the Strait of Dover, bottling up the Port of London, the shutdown of England’s key naval bases, and bombardment of “a large part of Kent and Sussex.” But the Allied line would be intact, with “the whole of France open for dilatory retirement or manoeuvre.” The alternative was worse. They could “wire in” and wait. Ludendorff would undoubtedly pivot southward toward the French. But after the Germans had crushed the poilus, “the British army would be at their disposal. They could deal with it at their convenience.” This, clearly, was the line Ludendorff hoped Britain would take. He appeared to be following an elementary principle: “Divide your enemy’s forces into two parts: hold off the weaker part while you beat the stronger: the weaker is then at your mercy.”253
A week later Churchill told the House that the Ministry of Munitions was in a position to deliver “a fairly good report.” Since the opening of the first German offensive five weeks earlier the BEF had lost about a thousand artillery pieces and some five thousand machine guns. Yet the troops now had “more serviceable guns as a whole, and more of practically every calibre, than there were when the battle began.” He crossed the Channel three days later to talk to Haig about shell supplies. Most of his time was now spent meeting the needs of the arriving Americans. Ludendorff, meanwhile, was battering his way toward the sea. On April 25 he took Mount Kemmel—a “mountain,” on the flat Flanders plain, being a peak 350 feet high—as his men, toiling up the slope, sang the gunners’ fighting song: “Wenn einer wüsste, Wie einem ist!” In the House, Churchill paid tribute to the British spirit: “No demand is too novel or too sudden to be met. No need is too unexpected to be supplied. No strain is too prolonged for the patience of our people. No suffering or peril daunts their hearts.”254
The enemy was now within five miles of Hazebrouck, a vital railway junction and Ludendorff’s chief objective. If it fell the British would face Churchill’s alternatives. In London the general staff had already reached his conclusion: they must not allow the enemy to drive a wedge between them and the French. But if Hazebrouck fell, Haig would have to withdraw his entire left wing, abandoning Dunkirk and putting the Channel at risk. Haig, stepping entirely out of character, was stirred to eloquence. He issued an “order of the day” to all ranks: “There is no other course open to us but to fight it out! Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend on the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.” The situation was not really as bad as it seemed. The German divisions accustomed to fighting Russians were finding the British unexpectedly tough. And at this crucial point Ludendorff also behaved uncharacteristically. He hesitated. He couldn’t decide which way to attack, and by the time he had made up his mind the obstinate Tommies had dug in. Foch studied his situation map and told Haig: “La bataille d’Hazebrouck est finie.” Ludendorff had driven in another huge bulge. Yet he still faced an unbroken Allied front. He had again achieved a tactical victory but a strategic defeat. Afterward German military historians agreed that the battle had been a Misserfolg—a failure.255
As the spring wore on, Churchill’s trips to France increased. He had established munitions plants on the Continent, and he needed p
roximity to military headquarters for coordinating the demands of all Allied forces. Haig therefore provided him with quarters of his own, the Château Verchocq. There, Winston wrote Clementine, he was “very comfortable…. I have a charming room filled with the sort of ancient woodcarved furniture that you admire and which seems to me to be very fine and old. The grounds contain avenues of the most beautiful trees, beech and pine, grown to an enormous height and making broad walks like the aisles of cathedrals. One of these must be nearly half a mile long.”256 He was here, going over reports, when Ludendorff’s third blow fell. Despite his two failures, none of the Allied leaders doubted that the kaiser’s military prodigy would strike again. He had the men and he was fighting the calendar; the blockade was crippling his homeland and the American menace grew daily. Foch, ever alert, called for a “foot-by-foot” defense of the Allied ground, and in Chaumont, General John Pershing, who had been reluctant to commit his troops piecemeal, now put all doughboys at the generalissimo’s disposal. Foch and Haig had agreed that Ludendorff would pounce upon the British again. In the larger view, they were right. His ultimate objective was, not seizure of the Channel ports or splitting the Allies, but the complete destruction of the British army. First, however, there would be a massive feint, an intermezzo, in the south. He meant to maul the French so savagely that they would be incapable of supporting their ally to the north.
Pétain’s troops were weaker than they appeared. They, too, had bled needlessly in 1917. Their Passchendaele had been the Nivelle campaign, named for General Georges Nivelle, who had replaced the bovine Joffre and whose star had seemed ascendant in the spring of that year. His answer to the trench had been “the unlimited offensive.” Nivelle was handsome, swashbuckling, and popular. Even the English liked him (his mother had been British), and in the châteaux far behind the lines where staff officers moved pins on maps, Allied generals had thrilled to his battle cry: “One and a half million Frenchmen cannot fail!”257 Unfortunately the excitement, the cry, and even the plan of attack had reached Ludendorff. The drive had been predicted in French newspapers and in orders circulated as low as company level, which meant that the Germans picked up prisoners carrying them. Nivelle had known this. He had also known that the enemy, as a result, were riposting with a strategic withdrawal called Alberich (after the evil dwarf in the Nibelungenlied), poisoning wells and sowing booby traps as they went. Nivelle had insisted that this hadn’t changed a thing. In fact, it had changed everything. The new Hindenburg line was a defender’s dream. It had turned Nivelle’s drive into a welter of slaughter. He had made no real gains, and the moment he stopped, revolt had spread among French troops. At the height of their mutiny, fourteen out of sixteen divisions on the Champagne front had been disabled. Even troops who didn’t rebel had marched into the trenches bleating in unison, demonstrating that they regarded themselves as sheep being led to the slaughter. Had the enemy known all this, Germany could have won the war with a single bold stroke. As it was, France’s army had been severely crippled. The French had lost nearly 300,000 men in 1914 and now, with Nivelle’s losses, they lacked the time and the resources to build a new striking force. The poilus had huddled sullenly in their trenches, and to redress their grievances the government had replaced Nivelle with Pétain, who was known to be cautious and receptive to demands from resentful troops. Even so, Clemenceau was worried about the possibility of a civilian uprising against the war. Although Churchill didn’t know it, at the time of their tour of the front the premier was keeping four crack divisions in the interior of France to deal with any insurrection. The threat was real. The dissidents weren’t called Bolsheviks, but France had subversive firebrands, too.
Curiously, it was the Americans, the newcomers, who picked the spot where the third German onslaught would come. The Chemin des Dames ridge, north of the Aisne, was so formidable a natural stronghold that the French had manned it with four divisions of their least reliable troops and three exhausted British divisions sent south for a rest. It happened that this was the sector closest to Paris. Ludendorff’s plan was to hit it so hard that every French reserve would be committed to the defense of the capital, and when that happened he was going to wheel and drive Haig into the sea. His preparations were superb. The American prediction that a great assault on the ridge was imminent was dismissed by Foch because there wasn’t a trace of activity in the German lines in that sector. Observation posts reported nothing, aerial photographs were a blank. Apparently there weren’t even any enemy batteries. Actually, there were nearly four thousand heavy Krupp guns there. You just couldn’t see them. Moving at night and hiding in woods during the day, with horses’ hooves wrapped in rags and the sounds of creaking gun carriages masked by cages of croaking frogs, Ludendorff had massed forty-one crack divisions in a wild weald of giant trees opposite the ridge and entrusted the command to Crown Prince Rupprecht. At one o’clock in the morning of Thursday, April 25, the war’s heaviest bombardment opened up and continued for nearly three hours. Before it ended, at 3:40 A.M., some of the defenders were raving, literally out of their minds. Pétain’s local commander had erred in stationing his men too far forward, where they were naked to the artillery cannonade, and in failing to establish defenses in depth. The Germans swarming up the slope behind a tornado of gas and shrapnel found that the Allied forces had virtually disintegrated. And there appeared to be nothing behind them but open country. The Germans were stupefied. The Allied center was a void. Nothing like this had been seen in four years of trench warfare. Ludendorff, receiving their almost incredible report, sensed that what he had meant to be a feint could lead to swift victory. He shifted his gaze from Flanders to Paris.
The Allied reserve in this part of the line comprised seven French and two other tired British divisions. It was pitifully inadequate. The Germans, with their vast superiority in numbers and morale, overran them. To the further astonishment of the attackers, the bridges over the Aisne were intact. On their flank, near Soissons, some French resistance was developing, but the center continued to gape wide open. By dusk that Thursday they had advanced ten miles and were on the Vesle. The French capital was eighty miles away. In the morning they crossed the Vesle, whose fine bridges were also undamaged, and surged onward, hobnail boots thumping and feldgrau trousers swishing weirdly in the sunshine. By May 30, when Soissons fell, they had overrun five French lines. On June 3 they were back on the Marne for the first time in nearly four years, the tip of their salient at a place called Château-Thierry. Churchill wrote Clementine: “The fate of the capital hangs in the balance—only 45 miles away.”258
At this point, writes Cyril Falls, the British military historian, “something astonishing happened. Up the Marne came marching new men. They were two divisions only, but they strode proudly through the flotsam and jetsam always present on the fringe of a stricken battlefield…. They were fine-looking men and even the rawest had a soldierly air.” The first Americans had arrived. Their vanguard was a brigade of U.S. Marines, an odd mix of tough professionals and Ivy League students who, like their Oxford and Cambridge counterparts of 1914—most of whom were now dead or maimed—had enlisted the week after their country entered the war. As they formed their line of battle an elderly French peasant shouted at them: “La guerre est finie!” “Pas finie!” a Harvard undergraduate shouted back, giving the sector its name.259 For five days the marines held five miles of Pas Finie against the gray enemy columns which came hurtling across the wheat field. Then they counterattacked, driving five divisions of Germans back through a boulder-strewn, gully-laced forest called Belleau Wood. Only one in four survived unscratched. More than a hundred were decorated for heroism. The French renamed the wood for them. Six days later doughboys recaptured the village of Vaux, on the other side of Château-Thierry. The crown prince ordered a halt and then a general withdrawal.
Thus ended the last of Ludendorff’s sledgehammer blows. Early in July he launched a Friedensturm, or peace offensive, sending fifty-six divisions in a pincer move
ment around Reims. But Foch had developed new defensive tactics, posting thinly held forward positions to confuse the enemy and then decimating the advancing German infantry with precise artillery strikes. Moreover, ten thousand American soldiers were now disembarking every day. They reached Reims in strength, and the Germans, after initial successes, were thrown back. Returning from the front, Churchill told an audience at the Central Hall, Westminster: “When I have seen during the past few weeks the splendour of American manhood striding forward on all the roads of France and Flanders, I have experienced emotions which words cannot describe.” Britain would claim no fruits of victory, he said, no “territorial or commercial advantage,” only the “supreme reconciliation” of Englishmen and Americans. “That is the reward of Britain,” he said. “That is the lion’s share.” He wrote Sinclair the following week: “If all goes well, England and U.S. may act permanently together. We are living 50 years in one at this rate.”260
His American mother chose this extraordinary moment to remarry. Her fiancé was Montagu Porch, a member of the Colonial Service who was three years younger than Winston. Jennie was sixty-four but she continued to be interested in men and they in her. “I can still remember the first time I saw her,” Porch told a reporter from the Daily Express. It had been just before the war; “she was sitting with some friends. She wore a green dress. Was it long or short? Don’t remember. But she was very beautiful.” He had asked her to dance, and she had replied with a smile: “I think you’d better go and dance with some of the younger girls.” He thought otherwise, and their remarkable courtship began. Porch was slender, he wore an elegant mustache, and his hair was prematurely white. Jennie had been dyeing her hair black; now she stopped. Porch was stationed in Nigeria, and after the war broke out he was commissioned in the Cameroons Expeditionary Force. Home on leave, he visited Jennie. Later he said he didn’t remember proposing, but somehow, by the time he departed, he had the definite impression that they were engaged. On May 31, at the height of the Chemin des Dames crisis, Repington wrote in his diary: “Lady R charming about her future. Mr Porch quite good-looking and intelligent. They get married tomorrow and go to Windsor for the weekend. Winston says he hopes marriage won’t become the vogue among ladies of his mother’s age.”261
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