A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  No one on the Entente side was comfortable with the lull. Joffre wanted another attack by the British, to keep the Germans occupied in Belgium. Sir John French, eager as ever to demonstrate that London should let him have more troops, was willing to cooperate. Falkenhayn meanwhile, unable to ignore a cacophony of warnings about danger in the east, continued to thin his lines in Belgium and France. He wanted, naturally, to keep these withdrawals secret from the French and British. To this end he was preparing a series of diversionary offensives. The first and most important would be at Ypres, where France too was preparing to take the initiative.

  The Second Battle of Ypres, which introduced a horrifying new element into the history of warfare, had a suitably novel and horrendous prologue. For weeks British miners operating crude foot-powered devices called “clay-kickers” had been digging a tunnel from behind their lines into German territory. Their destination was Hill 60, the highest point on the Messines Ridge that overlooked much of the Ypres salient. The hill had been a key strongpoint and artillery observation post for the Germans since the autumn, when they first captured it. Once under Hill 60 (so named because it was sixty meters high, having been created years before with earth removed for construction of a railway), the tunnelers scooped out an underground chamber and packed it with explosives. When this cache was detonated at seven P.M. on April 17, it blew much of the hill hundreds of feet into the air, the German defenders and their weaponry and bunkers with it. The explosion was followed by an infantry attack that captured what remained of the hill at a cost of exactly seven casualties. An estimated one thousand Germans had died, with perhaps a hundred surviving. Hill 60 proved to be an uncomfortable prize, however, exposed as it was to German fire from three directions. Its possession was not enough to prevent the Germans from moving up an awesome array of their biggest siege mortars in preparation for Falkenhayn’s coming offensive and the experiment to be conducted in conjunction with it.

  Second Ypres began late on the afternoon of April 22 after forty-eight hours of the kind of intense artillery bombardment that everyone now knew to be the preamble to an infantry attack. This time, however, when the guns fell silent, they were followed not by waves of charging riflemen but by the opening of six thousand metal cylinders containing 168 tons of chlorine, a lethal heavier-than-air gas that stayed close to the ground as it was carried on the evening breeze toward the French lines. Chlorine had been chosen because it was readily available—the German chemical industry produced 85 percent of the world’s supply—and because of its effects: it destroys the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen and causes its victims to drown, generally with excruciating slowness, in their own fluids. No one on the French side knew what the gas was. It first appeared in the distance as a white mist, turning yellow-green as it drew closer. Its effects were immediate and terrifying. Every man still capable of moving ran for his life. With astonishing speed a four-mile expanse of the French front line was totally cleared. Nothing stood between the Germans and the shattered ruins of the little city of Ypres, which they had spent so many lives trying to take in 1914. In minutes, and without losing a man, they had achieved a breakthrough even more complete than the one the British had won and squandered at Neuve Chapelle five weeks before.

  The introduction of gas need not have come as such a surprise. A French divisional commander, a General Ferry, had learned of the German plans to use chlorine weeks before from a captured soldier. He had informed both the French high command and the British, suggesting that the canisters of which the prisoner had spoken should be located by aerial reconnaissance and destroyed with artillery. The only action taken in response to this warning was directed at Ferry himself. First he was reprimanded for communicating directly with the British rather than going through channels. After the battle, when the importance of Ferry’s warning was beyond question, he was sacked.

  The success of the new weapon was as big a surprise to the Germans as the weapon itself was to the French. The only earlier use of gas, on the Eastern Front in the depths of winter, had been such a failure that the Russians hadn’t bothered to report it to their allies. Though this new attempt, unlike the first, involved a deadly chemical, the Germans regarded it as a mere experiment, a peripheral element in an operation intended only to persuade the French and British that the Germans remained strong in the west. Not enough reserves were on hand to push through and occupy Ypres, in part because so many troops had been sent to the east. And though protective breathing devices had been developed years before for industrial purposes, none had been provided to the attacking troops.

  The advancing Germans were shocked by what they found: five thousand enemy soldiers on their backs, struggling for breath, suffocating in agony and terror. The Germans became so afraid of catching up with the gas as it rolled on before them that they advanced only two miles and stopped. By the time their commanders understood the scope of the opportunity that had been created, a congeries of British, French, and colonial troops had been sent forward into the gap and the opportunity was gone. From now on all the armies of the Great War would expect gas and be more or less prepared for it. And though both sides would use it extensively, never again would it disable enough men to decide the outcome of a battle. Even at Ypres the British and French needed only hours to understand what they were faced with and find ways to deal with it. First it was noticed that the brass buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms had turned green. Someone deduced from this phenomenon that the mysterious cloud must be chlorine and knew of a quick preventive: by breathing through a cloth on which they had urinated (a spare sock, for example), the troops could neutralize the poison before it reached their lungs. The first improvised gas masks thus emerged almost immediately after the first use of chlorine.

  It was not necessary to be exposed to the gas or in direct contact with the enemy to experience the horror of Second Ypres. Canadian Sergeant S. V. Britten tasted his share when, just hours after the start of the attack, he and his unit were assigned to strengthen defensive positions not used since the fighting of late 1914. “Left at 6: 30 P.M. for reserve trenches and reached our reserve dugouts via St. Julien,” he recorded. “Just rat holes! One hell of accommodation! Got to the trenches as a fatigue party with stake & sandbags, and though they were reserve trenches, they were so rotten. No trenches at all in parts, just isolated mounds. Found German’s feet sticking up through the ground. The Gurkhas had actually used human bodies instead of sandbags. Right beside the stream where we were working were the bodies of two dead, since November last, one face downward in full marching order, with his kit on his back. He died game! Stench something awful and dead all round. Water rats had made a home of their decomposed bodies. Visited the barbed wire with Rae—ordinary wire strung across. Quit about 1 A.M., came back to our dugouts and found them on fire. Had to march out to St. Julien, & put up in a roofless house—not a roof left on anything in the whole place. Found our sack of food had been stolen and we were famished. Certainly a most unlucky day, for I lost my cherished pipe. Bed at 4 A.M.”

  After the first day Second Ypres too turned into a standard Western Front slaughterhouse. The Germans, never having intended to capture anything, settled into defensive positions as usual while the French and British launched counterattacks that accomplished nothing.

  On the evening of April 24 General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who had been one of the BEF’s senior commanders from the start of the war and had repeatedly demonstrated his steadiness and courage, visited French at his headquarters and asked him to cancel an attack planned for the following morning. French refused, the attack went ahead, and the result was as Smith-Dorrien had predicted: a loss of thousands more British, Canadian, and Indian troops, with a gain of no ground. A division of Indian troops freshly arrived in Europe was almost annihilated while crossing a mile of open ground; the few who reached the enemy line alive were promptly gassed. Nearby a regiment of Senegalese troops—Africans transported to Europe by their French colonial masters—pani
cked after being ordered to follow the Indians and encountering chlorine. They turned on their heels, shot the officers who ordered them to stop, and kept running until they reached a supply area in the rear, where they ran amok. A corps of British cavalry had to be dispatched to bring the rampage to an end. The next day Smith-Dorrien sent a message to BEF headquarters, asking Chief of Staff Robertson to explain to French the hopelessness of further attacks. He also suggested a withdrawal to a shorter, stronger line nearer the city of Ypres. Upon receiving a curt reply, he sent another message suggesting that, if his resignation was wanted, he was prepared to submit it. Smith-Dorrien soon found himself ordered home.

  Lt. Gen. Horace Smith-Dorrien

  Removed from command for trying to do the right thing.

  Day after day, assured by Foch that Joffre would soon be sending reinforcements, French continued his offensive. The casualty lists grew longer. Not until May 1 did Foch confess that no French troops were coming—that exactly the opposite was happening; Joffre was removing troops from Ypres and sending them south for an entirely separate offensive. Finally French gave up. He ordered a pullback of three miles to precisely the position that Smith-Dorrien had been dismissed for suggesting.

  The battle dragged on into late May, not ending until the Germans ran low on shells. They had taken forty thousand casualties, the British sixty thousand. “The profitless slaughter pit of Ypres,” as Churchill would call it, had injected two new elements into the war: mining and gas. By introducing the latter, the Germans further damaged themselves in the eyes of the world—in American eyes most importantly. Intellectually, it was perhaps not easy to draw a moral distinction between piercing men’s bodies with bullets and bayonets, blowing them apart with high explosives, and killing them with gas. On some deeper level, however, people sensed that warfare had been made monstrous in a new way, that another step had been taken toward barbarism. Not for the first time and not for the last, it was the Germans who looked most barbaric.

  Background: Troglodytes

  TROGLODYTES

  THERE IS NOTHING MORE BIZARRE ABOUT THE GREAT WAR than the way in which, for four years, millions of citizens of Europe’s most advanced nations lived in holes in the ground. The Western Front was unlike anything the world had seen before or has seen since.

  In trying to visualize the front, the easiest mistake is to imagine a pair of ditches running parallel from the North Sea to Switzerland. The whole setup was much more complicated than that. Each side had five thousand men per mile of front on average, and this manpower was used to construct elaborate defensive systems, usually miles deep, that were zigzagging mazes fortified in all the ways that the latest technology made possible.

  Though the methods of the three armies differed in their details, the basics were similar everywhere. First came the true front line, a trench six or more feet deep and about that wide, generally heavily manned. A mile or so to the rear was a support trench with a second concentration of troops. Farther back still, beyond the range of all but the biggest enemy artillery, was a third line for the reserves. All but the lightest guns were behind this reserve line, unreachable except by the most successful offensives.

  Even this description is too simple. Trenches were often impossible to dig in the waterlogged soil of Flanders, where walls of sandbags had to be erected instead, and maintaining a continuous line could be difficult in the rough hills north of Switzerland. The German front “line” often included three parallel trenches, the first for sentries, another for the main force, the third for backup troops. However many such rows there were in any particular place, they were connected by perpendicular communications trenches, shielded by fields of barbed wire as much as thirty feet deep, and, more and more as the war wore on, studded with machine-gun nests. The trenches were less often straight than broken by dogleg turns, so that any enemy troops who got into them would have a limited field of fire.

  Life in this maze embodied a cliché about war: that it is tedium punctuated by eruptions of sheer terror. The food was loathsome: bread that was a week old by the time it reached the front, canned meat when meat was available, overcooked vegetables that invariably arrived cold. Alcohol was issued daily: wine for the French (half a liter at first, then a full liter), brandy for the Germans, and rum for the British first thing every morning. Latrines, six-foot-deep pits at the end of short side-trenches, were unspeakably foul, and the traffic made them a magnet for enemy artillery. With dysentery widespread, the men often preferred to use buckets, old food containers, or the nearest shell hole.

  Discipline was harsh and not infrequently arbitrary. British officers made wide use of Field Punishment Number One. Men deemed guilty of minor infractions would be lashed to a post or spread-eagled on an upright wagon wheel two hours daily (one in the morning, another in the afternoon) for as long as three months, often within range of enemy guns. And the punishments inflicted by the environment were often even worse.

  There was trench foot, a fungal infection caused by prolonged exposure to cold and wet. It could lead to gangrene, then to amputation. Twenty thousand British troops were afflicted with it in the first winter of the war. Until someone discovered that daily rubbings with whale oil were an effective preventive, men crawling to the rear were a common sight and were often accused of malingering.

  And there was trench mouth, which diseased the gums and caused teeth to fall out.

  And when the weather was warm, trench fever erupted, caused by the excretions of lice. It began with a tingling in the shins and led to something akin to a bad case of flu. It was rarely fatal but put thousands out of action.

  Lice were universal, their bites leaving red marks on the skin of every soldier. The men spent hours searching out the lice in their clothing and killing them with their fingernails or a candle flame. It was hardly worth the effort; the eggs remained in the seams and would hatch in a few hours.

  The rats were even worse. A single pair can produce more than eight hundred offspring in a year. The front, with its garbage and decaying human bodies, turned into rat heaven. Soldiers wrote home of rats everywhere, rats almost as big as cats, rats eating the eyes out of corpses. Rats would chew through a sleeping man’s clothes to get at the food in his pockets.

  To all this was added a stench that rose to heaven, the impossibility when it rained of finding a place to lie down, and artillery fire that never quite stopped even when the front was supposedly quiet. Historians note that the armies of the Great War were made up largely of industrial and farm workers who were inured to hard labor, bad treatment, and minimal creature comforts. Even the generals most inclined to regard them as cannon fodder, however, understood that no one could endure much of this life.

  And so the men were rotated. After no more than a week at the front, they would be pulled back to the support line, then to the reserve line, and finally to the rear. Even there, however, conditions were primitive. Shells still came roaring in, and exhausted, nerve-shattered troops would be drilled and harassed by officers eager to demonstrate their diligence.

  The men were supposed to be given regular leave—a week every four months, in the case of the French—but often it didn’t happen. When it did, the congestion of the railways and the low priority given to soldiers traveling alone could make it impossible for them to get home. Men returned to duty with venereal disease, contracted by eighty of every thousand men in the BEF. (The German rate was worse, the French somewhat lower.)

  A trench culture emerged, with its own hierarchy, language, and rituals. Stretcher-bearers, many of them conscientious objectors, were admired for the courage with which they went out to rescue the wounded. Runners (Adolf Hitler was one of them, and he ended the war with two Iron Crosses) were constantly exposed to fire as they delivered messages and scouted ahead when their units prepared to move.

  The setting was ideal for snipers, who became a professional elite. Sniper schools were established. Their products worked in pairs, a rifleman and an observer, firing hi
gh-powered rifles equipped with telescopic sights through holes in sheets of steel. Antisniper snipers came next. They were not always welcomed by the other troops, however; when snipers’ positions became known, they drew enemy artillery fire.

  Out beyond the lines lay no-man’s-land. (The term has been traced back to medieval England, where it applied to disputed ground between two jurisdictions.) Pocked with shell holes, littered with debris and dead bodies, no-man’s-land was sometimes half a mile or more in depth, sometimes only yards. Entering it meant death in the daytime, but at night it came to life. Raiding parties went out at sunset and returned at dawn, trying to see what enemy units were opposite, trying to capture prisoners to be questioned in the rear, sometimes just hoping for a few quick kills. For the most adventurous soldiers, this became a form of sport.