by G. J. Meyer
And Wilfred Owen, a young teacher who had never attended a university, enlisted in 1915 and was wounded three times before being diagnosed with shell shock and sent to a hospital in Scotland. There he met Sassoon, a captain from the landed gentry who had been decorated for heroism and later sent for treatment rather than being court-martialed for declaring his intention never to fight again. Owen showed his early efforts to write verse to Sassoon, who found them conventional and urged him to deal with what he had actually experienced and what he really felt. This is the most famous result:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Sweet and fitting it is, to die for one’s country. The poems of Lieutenant Wilfred Owen got almost no notice before the war ended. Afterward critics found in them a major voice. Owen never knew. He was killed exactly one week before the war ended, shot while leading his platoon across a canal in Belgium. The telegram reporting his death was delivered to his parents’ door as church bells rang in celebration of the armistice.
Chapter 29
Wars Without Guns
“It would be laughable to depart over fantasies.”
THEOBALD VON BETHMANN HOLLWEG
In the aftermath of Russia’s March Revolution and the failed offensives at Arras and the Chemin des Dames, struggles for power erupted in Petrograd and London. And although for Germany these events had not been the disasters that they were for the Entente, a struggle of the same kind occurred in Berlin too at exactly the same time. Paris, meanwhile, slipped into a deepening gloom, its leadership demoralized and adrift.
The stakes were perhaps highest in Russia. With the tsar deposed, with the tsar’s ministers under arrest and hateful factions battling for control of the provisional government, the Russian nation was faced with the most elemental of political questions. It had to decide not only who would govern but how. It had to settle on a form of government, and on some way of organizing its disintegrating economy. It had to do so in the middle of a war that it was losing, and with few established mechanisms in place. Through the first half of 1917 support for continuing the war remained substantial. Kerensky was saying that the revolution had been in part an angry reaction to rumors that the Romanov government might enter into a separate peace. He and the general staff, though their efforts to mount the offensive promised at Chantilly late in 1916 had ended in chaos, were preparing a more modest campaign for the summer. Resistance, however, was growing, and it was strongest where loyalty was needed most: in the army and the industrial workforce. By late spring more than thirty-five thousand troops were deserting monthly. The home front too remained dangerously turbulent, almost, at times, to the point of anarchy. The recently formed soviets, representing soldiers and sailors and workers, were deeply skeptical of what Kerensky was doing. The Communist Party’s Bolshevik faction, with Lenin now in charge, was increasingly bold in stirring up opposition.
The question for Germany was simpler: who was going to be in control? The contest was singularly unequal. On one side were virtually all the dominant elements of German society, united in opposition to reform of any meaningful kind. Their only real opposition was a single man, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, with the kaiser floating uncertainly between the two camps. Though his own thinking often coincided with Bethmann’s (in 1917 he issued an Easter message endorsing the chancellor’s proposals for electoral reform), he knew himself to be disappearing into the shadows cast by Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The two generals blamed Bethmann for everything. His failure to maintain control of domestic politics, they complained, was eroding the loyalty of the Reichstag. His pursuit of peace negotiations was making Germany look weak and encouraging the Entente to fight on. When strikes broke out in Berlin, they too were Bethmann’s fault.
The result was a standoff that lasted for months. At an April 23 conference, when Hindenburg and Ludendorff demanded approval of a war aims memorandum that declared Germany’s intent to annex large portions of the Balkans as well as parts of Belgium and France, Bethmann did not resist. A week later, however, he placed in the files a note stating that he regarded the memorandum as meaningless because it implied Germany’s ability to dictate terms to the Entente—an outcome that seemed worse than improbable at the time. “I have co-signed the protocol,” he wrote, “because it would be laughable to depart over fantasies.” The ambiguity of his position became public when, in a May 15 speech to the Reichstag, he declared himself to be “in complete accord” with the generals on war aims but also willing to offer Russia a settlement “founded on mutually honorable understanding.” This statement was self-defeating. It deepened Ludendorff’s hostility while at the same time confusing and alienating the increasing number of Reichstag members who understood that the U-boat campaign was failing, wanted a negotiated settlement, and could have provided the chancellor with a base of public support.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff drew their strength from two sources. One was their record of success in the field—a record that reached back to Tannenberg and had raised them to the stature of demigods. The other was the support they received from the richest, most powerful, most conservative elements of German society—groups convinced that only victory could deflect the general population from demanding reform of the entire system at war’s end. This coalition was potent if not entirely stable. But when it pressed for Bethmann’s removal, Kaiser Wilhelm showed surprising strength in resisting. He foresaw that any new chancellor was likely to be Ludendorff’s tool, and that this would be the end of the Bismarckian system. But the pressure was tremendous. Even the kaiser’s wife and Crown Prince Wilhelm were badgering him for the appointment of a new chancellor. And the generals had not played their last card. In contrast to Bethmann and the kaiser, they had the advantage of knowing what they wanted and being willing to do practically anything to get it.
In Britain too the struggle was between the head of the government and the general staff, but beyond that there were few similarities to the situation in Germany. The British political system, being so much more mature than Germany’s, made a military challenge to the government’s control of policy virtually inconceivable—nothing of the kind arose in the course of the war. The struggle was over control of the BEF only, but was no less intense for being limited. The adversaries were Lloyd George, who had always had strong opinions about how the war should be conducted and now as prime minister was subordinate to no one, and Haig and General Sir William Robertson, based in London as chief
of the imperial general staff. At issue, as the summer of 1917 began, was the question of what to do with the BEF, which in two and a half years had grown to be among the most powerful armies in history. Lloyd George, his government now enjoying solid public support after a shaky start, remained scornfully skeptical of the generals’ tactics and strategies. Arras and the Chemin des Dames had destroyed whatever inclination he once might have had to leave such matters in the hands of the professionals. He could see no reason to attempt further offensives before American troops were present in large numbers. He continued to push for an Italian offensive while the French and the Russians recovered their strength and the United States translated its potential into an army ready to fight. The generals, inevitably, disagreed.
The importance that Lloyd George attached to the arrival of an American army required, that May, a considerable act of faith. It had not been certain, in the immediate aftermath of Washington’s declaration of war, that the United States would be doing more than sending money, equipment, and ships to its new allies. When the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee declared that “Congress will not permit American soldiers to be sent to Europe,” Wilson quickly proved him wrong, but the president had stunningly little to work with. Until a gradual buildup was authorized in 1916, the U.S. regular army included one hundred and thirty thousand men, which barely put it among the twenty largest armies in the world. It had no tanks, almost no aircraft, and few machine guns in spite of the fact that the machine gun was an American invention. The nation’s distrust of military establishments was reflected in a law limiting the general staff to fifty-five officers, no more than twenty-nine of whom could be based in Washington.
The American army also had no divisions; its largest unit was the regiment. A First Division was hurriedly put together and dispatched to France as a demonstration of the seriousness of Washington’s intentions. Led by General John J. Pershing, a stern West Pointer who had started his career in the Indian wars, it would march through the streets of Paris on July 4 to an ecstatic reception. It was far too small to make a difference and was not trained for combat, however, and no other divisions were ready to follow it.
The difficulties of creating an army capable of making a difference on the Great War’s Western Front are almost impossible to exaggerate. The first draft since the Civil War was put in place, and by mid-1917 every American male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one (later this would be raised to forty-five) was registered. Thirty-two training camps, each occupying eight to twelve thousand acres and containing fifteen hundred buildings capable of accommodating forty thousand men, were constructed in sixty days. Nearly every noncom in the old regular army was commissioned, and new schools in every specialty from gunnery to baking were brought into existence up and down the East Coast. The Entente was sending combat veterans across the Atlantic to show green American instructors how to teach even greener inductees the arts of modern war. The French tutors specialized in artillery, liaison, tactics, and fortifications, the British in machine guns, bayonets, mortars, sniping, and gas. Managing all this required expanding and restructuring the War Department and general staff even more rapidly than the new camps were thrown together.
Veteran and newcomer
Ferdinand Foch, left, and John J. Pershing.
Ambitious as the expansion was, it did not prepare Washington for Pershing’s estimate, sent shortly after his arrival in France, of how many troops he was going to require within a year. “It is evident that a force of about one million is the smallest unit which in modern war will be a complete, well-balanced and independent fighting organization,” he reported. “Plans for the future should be based…on three times this force—i.e., at least three million men.”
None of which was of the smallest interest to Douglas Haig, whose attention was focused not a year ahead but on Flanders in 1917 and whose faith centered not on the United States but on his own ability to produce a breakthrough at Ypres. He was supported by the Royal Navy, the leaders of which saw the Belgian coast as a place where their seaborne guns could support infantry operations and as a strategic prize urgently needing to be recovered. The Admiralty had been developing plans for an amphibious invasion since 1915. By the spring of 1917, in cooperation with the army, it had begun the construction of huge floating docks capable of putting ashore infantry and tanks. Haig seized at the opportunity that this appeared to present. He and his staff developed a plan of their own, one that would combine a new offensive out of the Ypres salient with an amphibious landing and unhinge the German position in Belgium. Pressed from two directions, Haig believed, the Germans would have to give up the coast. Without room for maneuver, they might be driven out of Belgium entirely. Then, their flank exposed, they might even be forced back from the Hindenburg Line. At a minimum, the British would capture the ports of Ostend, Zeebrugge, and Blankenberge, thereby depriving the Germans of the ports from which some of their smaller submarines were venturing into the Channel. Such gains would greatly strengthen Britain’s position in any peace negotiations.
The amphibious operation was the only novel aspect of the plan. The attack out of Ypres was to be a traditional Western Front offensive: a supposedly overwhelming artillery bombardment followed by a supposedly irresistible infantry attack resulting in a breakthrough that the cavalry could then exploit. The whole thing could not have been better calculated to provoke Lloyd George, who fumed from the moment he learned of it. To him it seemed nothing more than another foredoomed recipe for throwing away thousands of lives and wrecking what remained of the new armies that Britain had been nurturing since 1914. The landing of troops from the sea, genuinely innovative though the idea was, could not be safely attempted until after the main breakthrough was achieved. To quiet Lloyd George, Haig set down a criterion for the landing. The breakthrough would be counted as real, and the amphibious force sent into action, when the British took possession of the town of Roulers, seven miles inside German territory. Lloyd George was unimpressed. He was certain that Roulers was out of reach. Haig and Robertson thought it presumptuous of the prime minister to have an opinion on such matters.
Weather, always a factor in war, had to be a particular concern for anyone planning operations in western Belgium. Flanders is an exceedingly flat geography, one almost devoid of anything more notable than scattered farmhouses, sleepy villages, and occasional patches of trees. Today, when visitors search out the battlegrounds around Ypres, they have difficulty identifying the so-called ridges and hills that the Great War made immortal; these features are rarely more conspicuous than wrinkles in a tablecloth. Flanders is also an exceptionally low part of northern Europe’s great coastal plain, so near to being an extension of the sea that its inhabitants spent centuries installing drains, canals, and dikes to bring it to the point where it could be farmed. Even today it is about as wet as terrain can be without becoming an estuary. Even in what passes for dry weather in Flanders, one has to turn over only a few spadesful of earth before striking water. When it rains—as it almost always does in late summer, and heavily—the whole area turns to mud. The composition of its soil is such that, when saturated, it becomes a bottomless, unmanageable, uniquely gluey mess.
Haig was warned. The summers of 1915 and 1916 had been unusually dry by Flanders standards, but his staff examined records back to the 1830s and reported that normally “in Flanders the weather broke early each August with the regularity of the Indian monsoon.” The retired lieutenant colonel who was military correspondent of the Times of London cautioned Robertson against trying to mount a major operation in the low country in late summer. “You can fight in mountains and deserts, but no one can fight in mud and when the water is let out against you,” he said. “At the best, you are restricted to the narrow fronts on the higher ground, which are very unfavorable with modern weapons.”
“When the water is let out against you”: this must have been a reference to what the Belgians had done in the depths of their desperation in 191
4, opening the dikes and inundating the countryside east of the River Yser to stop the Germans from breaking through. It was a warning that the Germans might do something similar if in similar jeopardy. It should have brought to mind yet another danger: that heavy bombardment might so wreck the whole region’s fragile drainage system as to make flooding inevitable whatever the Germans did. Haig did not brush these warnings aside, but neither did he allow them to deflect him. They made him impatient to get started while Flanders remained dry. As soon as the Arras operation was behind him, he shifted to building up an attack force at Ypres. He proceeded without Lloyd George’s approval and even though Pétain had advised him (a warning never communicated to Lloyd George) that his plan had no chance of success.
Haig hoped to prepare by establishing a new strongpoint on the edge of the salient, some piece of relatively high ground that, once reinforced, could serve as an anchor for troops moving forward to pry the Germans out of their defenses. In this connection he was given a magnificent gift by one of his army commanders. General Sir Herbert Plumer, a pear-shaped little man with the bristling white mustache of a cartoon Colonel Blimp, had been commander of the Second Army on the southern edge of the salient for two years—two terrible years during which the fighting at Ypres had accounted for fully one-fourth of all British casualties. In 1915 Plumer had begun a tunneling program aimed at the German positions opposite his line, and in 1916 he expanded it into the most ambitious mining operation of the war. Twenty shafts, some almost half a mile long and many of them more than a hundred feet deep to escape detection and drained by generator-driven pumps, were extended until finally the diggers were beneath the Messines Ridge, from which the German artillery spotters had long enjoyed an unequaled view of the area. One of the mines was discovered and destroyed by the Germans, but by May the other nineteen were finished, packed with explosives, and still unknown to the enemy.
