by Gwynne Dyer
“It doesn’t do any good to talk about it now,” said Art Pratt, in a matter of fact voice. “Some of you enlisted so full of love of country that there was patriotism running down your chin, and some of you enlisted because you were disappointed in love, but the most of you enlisted for love of adventure, and you’re getting it.”
Again the querulous subterranean voice interrupted: “Go to sleep, you fellows—there’s none of you knows what you’re talking about. There’s only one reason any of us enlisted, and that’s pure, low down, unmitigated ignorance.”
John Gallishaw, Trenching at Gallipoli
EXCURSION 2
THE STEEL SLEET AND THE CONTINUOUS FRONT
At first there will be increased slaughter—increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try to, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt forever. Then … we shall have … a long period of continually increasing strain upon the resources of the combatants … Everybody will be entrenched in the next war.
J.S. Bloch, Budushchaya Voina [Future War], 1897
THESE PREDICTIONS ABOUT THE NEXT WAR BETWEEN THE GREAT powers were first published in Russian by Jan Bloch, a Polish financier who had never been a soldier. But he got it all right: the trenches, the unprecedented scale of the slaughter, the enormous industrial resources that would be mobilized for the struggle—even the detail that most of the countries fighting the war would ultimately face revolution at home. He got only one thing wrong: he thought that so horrifying a prospect would deter the great powers from embarking on such a war.
Bloch was born in the part of Poland that then belonged to the Russian empire. He studied at the University of Berlin and returned home to pursue a financial career in a Warsaw bank, but he found time to conduct a fourteen-year study of modern warfare in his spare time. He published his conclusions in a six-volume, 3,084-page work in Russian in 1897, but it became famous across Europe only with the publication of the one-volume English translation, Is War Now Impossible?, in the following year.
By the time of Bloch’s study, all the countries of mainland Europe (but not the British) had created mass armies: their young men were conscripted into the army for two or three years in order to train them for war, and then they were sent home—but they remained in the reserve for another fifteen or twenty years, with an obligation to train annually and rejoin the army full-time if there was a war. Bloch’s analysis, based on an examination of modern military technologies (such as smokeless gunpowder, rapid-firing rifles, Maxim machine guns and long-range artillery), showed that these mass armies would not be able to wage battles in the old, decisive way because the sheer amount of firepower would force men to go to ground. An entrenched man would then, on average, be able to stop four men advancing against him across open ground, so the armies would have to stop moving, and the rest of the war would be conducted along an enormous battlefront like a siege operation on a continental scale. Armies of millions of men would inhabit these trenches year in, year out, and immense industrial resources would be consumed in attempts to break the resulting stalemate. The struggle might eventually be decided by attrition, if one side ran out of men and industrial resources before the other, but a likelier outcome was that the economic and social strains would be so great that they would lead to the “break-up of the whole social organization” and revolutions from below.
The book caused a sensation, and was partly responsible for the convening of the world’s first peace conference at The Hague in 1899. However, the people who should have taken most interest in it, the professional military officers who served the various great powers, dismissed it out of hand as the ravings of an amateur. Why, if Bloch were right, the cavalry would even have to give up their horses! Reflecting on this obstinate ignorance shortly before his death in 1901, Bloch wrote: “The steadfastness with which the military caste clings to the memory of a state of things which has already died is pathetic and honourable. Unfortunately it is also costly and dangerous.” Dangerous because if the armies refused to recognize that that was the future of war, then war was indeed still possible. Thirteen years later, it duly came.
The general staffs of all the European armies had prepared elaborate plans for the first moves in the war and not much for later phases because they thought that there wouldn’t be any later phases. They assumed that the war would be like those of the mid-19th century, which in most cases were settled swiftly after a few decisive battles. The French and the Russians planned headlong attacks on Germany from the west and the east, while Britain, although a member of the Entente, had not formally committed itself to sending troops to the continent at all. The Germans, outnumbered by at least two-to-one and facing attacks on two fronts, adopted a gambler’s strategy: the Schlieffen Plan.
Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the Imperial German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, reckoned that Germany would have six weeks to knock France out of the war before the Russian army was fully mobilized and ready to attack, but that it was unlikely to succeed in doing that by a frontal attack against the French army along the Franco-German border. The German army might push the French a long way back, but France would still be in the war, and most of Germany’s troops would still be tied up in the west when the massive Russian army finally moved into Germany from the east. So the German plan was to surprise the French by marching west into Belgium before swinging round and advancing south past Paris, and finally swinging back east to envelop the French army and force France to seek peace. The whole operation, Schlieffen reckoned, would take precisely forty-two days, and then the German troops would be transferred east to stop the “Russian Steamroller.”
There were only two problems with the Schlieffen Plan. One was that Belgium’s neutrality was guaranteed by Britain, and attacking it was likely to result in a British army being sent to France to fight the Germans (although the Germans went on hoping that it wouldn’t until the last minute). The other was that the German army just couldn’t march fast enough to get all the way around to the rear of the French army—for it had a long way to go—before the French and the British moved enough troops into northern France and western Belgium to stop them.
At first, the mobilization of the new mass armies went exactly according to plan: the German army, for example, grew sixfold in size in the first two weeks of August 1914 as all the reservists joined their regiments, and the trains then delivered them swiftly and efficiently to the various fronts. By the middle of the month there were 1,485,000 German soldiers on the borders with France and Belgium, ready to march and fight as soon as they got off the trains. The French, the Russians and lesser players like the Austrians performed similar miracles of organization—but then everything went wrong.
The French attacked straight across the frontier into Germany in massive force in accordance with Plan XVII. Their doctrine was offensive à outrance: by sheer élan the French infantry would charge through machine-gun fire and shrapnel, and sweep the German defenders aside. Indeed, the French soldiers were still wearing blue coats and red trousers in August 1914, despite the fact that this made them highly visible to the German machine-gunners. The offensives all failed amid great carnage, and by the end of August the French were on the defensive everywhere.
But the Schlieffen Plan failed too. When the French and the small British Expeditionary Force went over to the defensive in late August they were able to stop the German attack well short of Paris—and then something happened that took the soldiers completely by surprise (although Bloch had predicted it fifteen years before). As soon as the exhausted armies stopped moving, they began entrenching to protect themselves from the lethal firepower of the enemy soldiers facing them, and those trenches quickly became a “front line” that made any further movement or manoeuvre virtually impossible. General Foch, later commander of the whole French army, was one of the first to no
tice what was happening. Sent to the western end of the front line after the armies had fought each other to a standstill north and east of Paris, he complained: “They have sent me here to manoeuvre, but things are not going very brightly. This eternal stretching out in a line is getting on my nerves.”
As the Allies and the Germans repeatedly tried to get around the remaining open end of this peculiar new obstacle, the armies would collide, halt and end up digging new stretches of trench, and within a few more weeks the front line reached the sea near Nieuwpoort in Belgium. Suddenly there were no more enemy flanks that you could hope to get around, just an endless front line. It was theoretically possible to walk 750 kilometres from the English Channel to the border of neutral Switzerland along either of two parallel lines of trench, sometimes as close as ten or twenty metres apart but more usually several hundred, without ever setting foot on the surface. The “Western Front” (from the German Westfront) was born.
The same thing happened in the east. The Russians mobilized far faster in 1914 than the German General Staff expected, and invaded eastern Germany in four weeks, not six, while the bulk of the German army was still committed to battle in France. So the Schlieffen Plan would have been a failure strategically even if it had gone exactly according to plan: in theory, the Russian army could have been nearing Berlin by the time the German army was enveloping Paris. But in practice it didn’t much matter, because the much smaller German army defending in the east was nevertheless able to stop the Russian offensive cold. By winter another “front line” of trenches had come into existence in Eastern Europe, this one 1,600 kilometres long, and the war of rapid movement and decisive victories that the generals had foreseen was over. Everywhere, it had just become much easier to defend than to attack.
The reason for burrowing down into the trenches was obvious: industrial weapons—quick-firing artillery and machine guns that spewed out six hundred bullets a minute—filled the air with a lethal steel sleet, and anybody trying to move above ground was almost certain to be hit. In the first month of the war France lost 75,000 men killed and another 175,000 wounded. Had the French army continued to fight that kind of war, it would have run out of men entirely in about one year. The act of killing had been mechanized, and the trenches, however dreadful, were the only way to keep losses down to a (barely) tolerable level. Men became the prisoners of machines, trapped below ground level—except, of course, when they were ordered to attack, and had to stand up into the machine-gun fire.
The essence of the general’s art had always been to manoeuvre his forces, but now no movement at all was possible until he had broken through the trench line facing him—and the continuous front meant that every attack had to be a frontal attack. Since infantrymen could not hope to survive the hail of fire that would greet them if they tried to advance unaided—that was why they had dug the trenches in the first place—the only way to break through was to eliminate the sources of that fire by shelling the enemy’s barbed wire, trenches and gun positions into ruin before the attack. At least that was the theory.
So the trench war became a war of artillery, and over half the casualties were now caused by shellfire. The greatest problem of 1915 for every country was not at the front but at home, where shell production could not keep up with demand. Even in Britain, the world’s most industrialized country, there was a critical shell shortage in 1915, and the demands went on mounting: at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, the nineteen-day British bombardment used 4.3 million shells, weighing 107,000 tons. Battles had become an industrial operation in reverse, in which the rate of destruction at the front matched the rate of production at home.
But still the infantry could not break through, though they died in their millions trying. The shells could destroy most of the enemy’s machine guns in the first-line trenches, and even the enemy’s guns behind the lines, but enough defenders always survived to make the advance a slow and costly business, and the bombardments turned the ground into a wilderness of shell holes across which any movement was very difficult. Eventually the attackers might take the enemy’s first-line trenches—and by the middle of the war these alone could be a belt up to three thousand metres wide—but by that time the enemy’s reserves would have arrived and manned a whole new trench system just to the rear. There was no way around the trenches, and seemingly no way through them either.
Trapped in a two-front war and seriously outnumbered, the Germans went over to the defensive on the Western Front in early 1915. It was the British and French who launched almost all the great offensives on the Western Front, which is why they usually lost more men attacking the German trenches than the Germans did in defending them. Yet in coldly rational terms it made sense, because they had more men to put into the field than the Germans. If enough people were killed, the Germans would eventually have to stop fighting because they would run out of men first.
This was such a horrifying concept that it was rarely articulated, but it is impossible to believe that the planners and managers of the battles did not understand it at some (perhaps unadmitted) level. What else can explain the grim determination with which British and French generals pursued apparently futile enterprises like the Battle of the Somme, in which the British imperial forces captured only 115 square kilometres in five months of fighting at a cost of 415,000 men killed and wounded, including 24,000 Canadians, 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders, 3,000 South Africans and 2,000 Newfoundlanders—3,600 men for each square kilometre? The territory gained and lost was not of any value, nor did any of these offensives ever come near to a decisive breakthrough. What really mattered was that the Germans were compelled to sacrifice men and equipment at a comparable rate, although their total human and material resources were much smaller. And this extraordinary war of attrition continued for about forty months, from the end of 1914 to the spring of 1918.
CHAPTER 3
THE GREAT CRUSADE
MOST CANADIAN TROOPS WERE SENT TO THE WESTERN FRONT IN France and Belgium, but as part of the British imperial forces, Canadians ended up in every theatre of the war: there were Canadian fighter pilots in Italy, Canadian river pilots and marine engineers in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Canadian sailors on all the world’s oceans. In October 1915 Private Lester B. Pearson, #1059, Canadian Army Medical Corps (who would one day become secretary of state for external affairs and then prime minister of Canada), landed in Macedonia in northern Greece with a new British expeditionary force. Britain and France had decided to violate Greek neutrality (rather like the Germans violated Belgian neutrality) in order to bring help to their Serbian allies against the Austrians and the Bulgarians, and Pearson was part of the help. He was eighteen years old.
My impressions of those first few days are of a vast muddy plain with our half dozen tents the only sign of human habitation; of ceaseless rain and fierce winds; of horse ambulances coming down the road with their loads of human agony; of the bugle blowing the convoy call; of the boom of guns; of struggling in the mire with wounded soldiers of the Tenth Division slung over our shoulders—we had no stretchers as yet.… They had been undergoing terrible experiences up in the hills. The weather was below freezing, but through official mismanagement, they had only tropical clothing. Practically all of them were frostbitten and some in addition badly wounded, but not one complained.
We pitched our tents, spread straw over the mud and laid the casualties down on that, till there would be forty or fifty in a tent. Then the medical officer would come around with his lantern, the dead and dying would be moved to one side, the dangerous cases would be attended to at once and the less serious ones simply cheered up. All the while the wind whistled over the Macedonian plain and the sleet beat against the canvas. Nightmare days when we all worked till we dropped … but the chance for real service, the goal of our months of training.
Letters home, October 1915, quoted in Lester Pearson, Mike: Memoirs, vol. 1
For the first time in Canada’s history, there were also women in uniform: 2,50
4 Canadian nurses served in every theatre of the war. The first Canadian women arrived behind the lines in France in early 1915, and by the autumn of that year hundreds of Canadian nurses were struggling to keep sick and wounded soldiers (and themselves) alive in the pestilential conditions of the Eastern Mediterranean theatres of war as well. In August Mabel Clint of No. 1 Canadian Field Hospital arrived on the island of Lemnos, just off the Gallipoli battlefield, to find “sanitary conditions appalling, food scarce and bad, heat great, small quantities of water, and a frightful plague of flies.”
Then one by one the Officers, sisters and orderlies succumbed to dysentery, till only three out of thirty-five nurses were on duty in No. 1. Canadians seemed to feel the change of climate particularly, but lack of food, water and the general environment was the determining factor.… No. 3 suffered still more.… Within a few days of each other, their Matron and a sister fell victim to the scourge. As the little cortège of those well enough to attend followed the flag-draped coffins on wheeled stretchers, with the Sisters’ white veil and leather belt laid on them, some of the patients in my ward were moved to tears.… It was expected that other nurses would die, and … the order went forth that other graves must be ready.… A trench to hold six was dug in the Officers’ lines. A laconic notice-board bore the legend: “For Sisters only.” At the moment, as one of our Mess remarked, you could almost “pick the names of the six.”
Nursing Sister Mabel Clint, Lemnos, 1915, Our Bit
In the end, only thirty-nine Canadian women died overseas, but it was nevertheless a sign of the times. Even the strict rules of a traditional male-dominated society were collapsing before the war’s voracious demands for manpower and, even more important, for total commitment.
