by G. J. Meyer
The focal point of the French attack, the Chemin des Dames, could hardly have been a more formidable objective. The German defenses lay atop a high wooded ridge along the base of which the River Aisne followed its east-west course. The roads and railways behind the French lines almost all ran the wrong way, laterally instead of toward the front. Despite the difficulties, Nivelle proposed to overwhelm the Germans with a single crushing blow. When Joffre had first proposed a 1917 offensive, his plan had been to attack on a front of about sixty miles. Nivelle, convinced that the tactics that had worked in the final days of Verdun could be equally effective on a larger scale, had expanded that to a hundred miles. The Germans meanwhile, aware of what was coming, had increased the number of their divisions on and behind the Chemin des Dames ridge from nine to thirty-eight. Nivelle was undeterred. The more enemy divisions were on the scene, he said, the more he would be able to destroy.
Haig was skeptical, but his doubts were neutralized by Lloyd George’s disdain for him and enthusiasm for Nivelle and for his plan. Several of France’s most senior generals remained skeptical as well, but because some of them had been passed over when Nivelle was promoted to commander in chief, it was easy to attribute their objections to petty jealousy. Painlevé was so certain that disaster lay ahead that he had tried to resign from the cabinet and been refused. Now, at Compiègne, he explained his fears one final time. Again Nivelle shrugged him off. He said that if he were not allowed to proceed, he would resign. Poincaré, aware that Nivelle’s resignation would mean the fall of yet another government, hoping that the offensive would save the Russians and Italians from attack and impressed anew with his new commander’s absolute certainty, ended the discussion by telling him to proceed.
The offensive began on April 9 with an attack by four armies, three British and one French, on the northern edge of the old Somme battleground. It was intended partly to draw German reserves away from Chemin des Dames, but it was more than just a diversion. One of the hopes for it was that, if Haig’s troops broke through, they could advance to the east and link up with Nivelle’s advance. Once combined, the two forces would have enough mass to uproot Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group and drive it out of France. As at the Somme, the British preparations had been on a colossal scale. Their dimensions are apparent in the details: 206 trainloads of crushed rock brought forward to build firm roadways behind the British front, and days of preparatory bombardment by more than twenty-eight hundred cannons and heavy mortars—one for every twelve yards of line.
Haig’s Canadians were particularly well prepared and rehearsed. Early on the morning of the attack they moved undetected to within a hundred and fifty yards of the German defenses through a maze of sewers and tunnels that honeycombed the earth under Arras. Upon emerging they were able to advance under the protection of a perfectly timed creeping barrage. The Germans, their attention fixed on the French buildup at the Chemin des Dames, had not expected anything on this scale. Taken by surprise, within a few hours they were driven off most of Vimy Ridge, which dominates the countryside east of Arras. Thereafter, the advance was slowed by wintry storms and a stiffening of resistance as German reserves came into play.
“We moved forward, but the conditions were terrible,” a British artilleryman reported. “The ammunition that had been prepared by our leaders for this great spring offensive had to be brought up with the supplies, over roads which were sometimes up to one’s knees in slimy, yellowish-brown mud. The horses were up to their bellies in mud. We’d put them on a picket line between the wagon wheels at night and they’d be sunk in over their fetlocks the next day. We had to shoot quite a number. Rations were so poor that we ate turnips, and I went into the French dugouts, which had been there since 1914, and took biscuits that had been left by troops two years previously. They were all mouldy but I ate them and it didn’t do me any harm. We also had crusts of bread that had been flung out of the more fortunate NCOs’ mess at a previous date, we scraped black mud from them and ate them. One could make two biscuits last for about three quarters of the day.”
Haig continued to attack for weeks, partly to give continued support to Nivelle, partly because the success of the first day had caused him to believe (as he was inclined to do in the middle of all his offensives) that he was on the verge of a breakthrough. But little more was gained. Entente casualties had been fairly light in the early going—almost trivial by the standard of the Somme—but as Haig persisted into mid-May, the total mounted at a rate of four thousand every day. Haig tried as usual to get the cavalry into action, but by the time this was possible the Germans were ready. Machine guns and artillery massacred horses and riders alike.
One of many
Arras Cathedral, destroyed by shelling
From a strategic perspective, the results of Arras were ambiguous. Haig had grounds for claiming success: Vimy Ridge was a valuable trophy, the Germans had had to rush in tens of thousands of reinforcements from other points along the front, and in the exhilarating first three days the British had captured fourteen thousand prisoners and one hundred eighty guns. They had also advanced between three and six miles at various points—major gains on the Western Front. On the other hand, they had achieved no breakthrough and had no hope of linking up with Nivelle. By the time it all ended, the Germans had taken one hundred and eighty thousand casualties, Haig’s armies a hundred and fifty-eight thousand. Back in London, Lloyd George was freshly disgusted by the expenditure of so many men for such limited results.
Ludendorff was alarmed. April 9 was his fifty-second birthday, and his staff had prepared a party to observe the occasion, but he withdrew into isolation soon after getting the first reports from Arras. The early British gains, the loss of Vimy Ridge especially, seemed at first to indicate that his new system of defense did not work. “I had looked forward to the expected offensive with confidence, and was now deeply depressed,” he would recall. “Was this to be the result of all our care and trouble during the past half-year?” Closer examination, however, revealed that the fault lay in the failure of the German Sixth Army’s commander to use the system. General Ludwig von Falkenhausen had not followed instructions. Instead he had continued to do the things that he, like all the Western Front veterans on both sides, had been learning to do in two and a half years of trench warfare. He had tried to block the Canadian advance with a heavily manned and continuous front line; instead of falling back when pressed, that line had been ordered to stand its ground and so had been overwhelmed. He had kept his second and third lines close together and near the front, so that like the first they were shattered by the British artillery and overrun. He had positioned his reserves fifteen miles to the rear, too far away to make a difference at the crisis of the attack.
Where the system had been tried, however, it proved its effectiveness. The attackers had been allowed to advance into a killing zone where they were raked with artillery and machine-gun fire and then driven back with counterattacks. German losses had been kept at tolerable levels. As soon as this became clear, Falkenhausen was dismissed. Efforts were redoubled to ensure that the new system would be fully in place at the Chemin des Dames by the time the French attacked there.
Nivelle’s attack came at six A.M. on April 16. From start to finish it was a contest between an offensive of the most conventional kind—more than a week of intense artillery preparation, massed formations of infantry slogging in plain view toward their objectives—and the Germans’ new defense. Almost immediately it turned into something very like the debacle that Painlevé and so many others had feared. The idea that had governed all of Nivelle’s planning—that the tactics he and Mangin had used to retake Forts Douaumont and Vaux at Verdun would work in this different and much larger theater—proved to be totally inadequate to the occasion. (Nor had Nivelle considered that, by the time of his attacks at Verdun, the Germans were quite prepared to abandon ruined fortresses for stronger positions in the rear.) In many places French troops had to cross the Aisne at the start of t
heir advance, then climb a steep hillside obstructed with trees, a ragged network of ravines, and the inevitable German wire. The entire hillside was studded with German machine-gun nests so well dug in and protected with steel and concrete that they had survived the bombardment; they poured fire on the French as they came forward. The German first line was on the reverse slope, beyond the crest of the ridge. Thus most of the French shells had passed harmlessly over it, and those attackers who reached the crest were exposed against the sky. The German reserves were far enough back to be beyond reach of most of Nivelle’s batteries (he was undersupplied with long-range guns), but not too far back to enter the battle quickly.
In raw manpower terms, the advantage lay entirely with the French. Nivelle had three armies that among them included fifty-three divisions—at least 1.2 million men—and all three were used in the initial assault. But twenty-seven divisions were held back as the Mass of Maneuver, which was to exploit the breakthrough when it came. To absorb this attack the Germans had twenty-one divisions in position on or near the Chemin des Dames, and another twenty-seven as their counterattack force. They had been in possession of the ridge since September 1914, so that they knew every inch of it and had had more than two and a half years to shape it to their needs. And they were commanded by Crown Prince Wilhelm; he and his staff had become well acquainted with the Nivelle offensive formula at Verdun, and they had had the winter to adapt to it. And of course they held the heights.
One hundred and twenty-eight of France’s new tanks participated in the assault but accomplished nothing. As part of the new German tactics, every artillery battery was ordered to direct the fire of one of its guns at any tank that came into view. This tactic proved devastating: fifty-two tanks were blown to bits on the first day, and another twenty-eight broke down. Those that remained either fell into ditches excavated by the Germans or bogged down in mud.
The weather was on the side of the Germans. It had started to rain the night before the attack, and the rain turned to sleet followed by snow—an improbable development at this time of year. At many points the French never got close to their objectives. At others they were able, heroically and at great cost, to advance as much as two and a half miles. “A snow squall swept our position,” a French tank officer wrote after observing the opening of the attack. “Our first wounded soldiers were coming in, men from the Eighty-Third Infantry Regiment. We gathered round them, and learned from them that the enemy positions were very strong, the resistance desperate. One battalion did reach the top of the Cornillet—probably the one whose gallant advance we had watched—but it was decimated by fire from intact machine gun positions, and was unable to withstand the enemy’s counterattack. One of the wounded men, his arm in a sling and patches of blood on his forehead, shouted while driving by:
“‘The Boches are still holding out in the Grille Wood, but we are attacking them with grenades.’
“A helmetless lieutenant, his clothes disarrayed and with a wound in his chest, walked slowly toward our group:
“‘Ah! If only you [the tanks] had been with us! We found nothing but intact barbed wire! If it hadn’t been for that, we’d be far ahead now, instead of killing each other on the spot.’
“‘We just couldn’t keep moving,’ an alert corporal shouted, while using his rifle as a crutch. ‘Too many blasted machine guns, against which there was nothing doing!’
“‘The Boche certainly knew we were going to attack there,’ the lieutenant went on, ‘their trenches were jammed.’”
Even the French gains were in accord with the German defensive system. By midday the Germans were moving both their reserves and their masses of light artillery forward from the rear. They hit the French after they had been wearied and battered, sending them reeling back toward their starting point. As the day ended, the French had succeeded in moving their line forward approximately six hundred yards on average. (Nivelle had forecast gains of six miles on the first day.) The Mass of Maneuver had had no opportunity to go into action. It was another Somme.
Nivelle attacked again on the second day, this time sending his forces off in two directions in a forking maneuver. One army was to move toward the northeast and try to link up with a French force that was at the same time launching a separate, supporting assault in Champagne. This was a complete failure, first absorbed by the German defenses and then forced back. The other tine of the fork, commanded by Mangin, had some success in pushing to the north and west. It captured three towns of no great importance, but finally even Mangin’s relentless aggressiveness could not keep it from bogging down. In the end his men too were driven back. The French were everywhere stymied. Nivelle kept scheduling and canceling and rescheduling attacks by his Mass of Maneuver. The strain of having to prepare again and again to die unnerved the waiting troops.
On April 19 War Minister Painlevé again intervened, trying to get Nivelle to stop. The general, who in demanding approval of his grand plan had promised to call it off if a breakthrough were not achieved within forty-eight hours, refused. The very next day he found to his chagrin, however, that he had no choice but to pause: the divisions at the front were breaking down, both their morale and their supplies of ammunition dangerously low. Late on the day after that, April 21, a new phenomenon appeared. African troops—members of elite units that had often led the assaults of Mangin’s army—shocked and embarrassed their officers by shouting Vive la paix. “Peace! Down with war! Death to those who are responsible!” Other units were getting drunk en masse and refusing to march to the front.
On April 25, with Paris awash in rumors that put the casualty figures even higher than they actually were, President Poincaré humiliated the commander in chief by ordering an end to the attacks on the Chemin des Dames. Nivelle reacted ignobly. He blamed Mangin for the failure of the offensive and dismissed him from command of the Sixth Army. He then tried to blame Micheler as well. Micheler, who had regarded the offensive as hopeless from the start and had become almost insubordinate in saying so, responded with witheringly wrathful contempt. “What, you try to make me responsible for the mistake, when I never ceased to warn you?” he demanded. “Do you know what such an action is called? It is called cowardice.”
By the time the offensive was shut down, it had cost the French two hundred and seventy thousand casualties, including tens of thousands killed. Total German casualties have been estimated at one hundred and sixty-three thousand. These were losses that neither side could afford. Nivelle was destroyed, not so much because of his failure but because he had promised so much. On April 28 Painlevé elevated Pétain to chief of staff of the French army and asked Nivelle to resign as commander in chief (a post distinct from chief of staff). Nivelle, astonishingly, refused. Instead he became increasingly reckless in assigning blame. He completed his self-humiliation by refusing to resign even after Pétain was named commander in chief in his stead. By that time Pétain was faced with an entirely new kind of crisis—an army mutiny so widespread that for a while it appeared possible that France might be unable to stay in the war.
The war had reached a point at which several of the belligerent nations were not only in trouble but in danger of breaking down. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was by now well advanced. The Turks, their hard-fighting but weary soldiers chronically low on supplies and reinforcements, had lost the Caucasus to the Russians in 1916. In March 1917 British forces operating out of Egypt had captured the Mesopotamian capital of Baghdad, one of the greatest jewels in the Ottoman crown. The only thing keeping Turkey in the war was the certainty that its empire was doomed if Germany went down to defeat.
Russia’s provisional government too was faced with monstrous problems. It was being financed and generously supplied by the British and French but was increasingly unable to keep either its armies intact or its home front under control. On April 11 an All-Russian Conference of Soviets voted to support a continuation of the war, but it also called for negotiations aimed at achieving peace without annexations
or indemnities on either side. On April 15 tens of thousands of Russian troops came out of their trenches to join with their German and Austrian adversaries in impromptu and nearly mutinous Easter celebrations. On the following day Lenin arrived in Petrograd from his long exile in Switzerland; Ludendorff, hoping to foment further disruption inside Russia, had approved his travel by rail from Switzerland via Frankfurt, Berlin, Stockholm, and Helsinki. Upon his arrival the Bolshevik leader began maneuvering his followers into an antiwar stance calculated to take advantage of public discontent. The Russians had promised a May 1 attack in support of the Nivelle offensive and had assembled a massive force for the purpose. The offensive proved impossible, however, to carry out. The troops had become ungovernable, and not enough coal could be found to operate the necessary trains. On May 2 Kerensky became leader of the provisional government. He tried to address the army’s problems, but everything he did ended up making them worse. When he released all men over age forty-three from military service, a transportation system that was already on the verge of collapse found itself mobbed by middle-aged veterans desperate to get to their homes. When he abolished the death penalty for desertion, a million soldiers threw down their weapons. Many were drawn homeward by the hope of getting a piece of land when the great estates of the aristocracy were distributed to the people. Many were simply sick of war.
