by G. J. Meyer
At 3: 10 A.M. on June 7, after a week of bombardment by the heaviest concentration of artillery seen on any front up to that time (Plumer had a gun for every seven yards of front), the mines were detonated. All nineteen went off nearly simultaneously, sending the entire ridge into the air. Tremors were felt in London—Lloyd George himself heard a faint boom while working through the night at 10 Downing Street. “When I heard the first deep rumble I turned to the men and shouted, ‘Come on, let’s go,’” a lieutenant with a British machine gun corps recalled. “A fraction of a second later a terrific roar and the whole earth seemed to rock and sway. The concussion was terrible, several of the men and myself being thrown down violently. It seemed to be several minutes before the earth stood still again though it may not really have been more than a few seconds. Flames rose to a great height—silhouetted against the flames I saw huge blocks of earth that seemed to be as big as houses falling back to the ground. Small chunks and dirt fell all around. I saw a man flung out from behind a huge block of debris silhouetted against the sheet of flame. Presumably some poor devil of a Boche. It was awful, a sort of inferno.” A private, a member of a tank crew, got a closer look at the devastation. “We got out of the tank and walked over to this huge crater. You’d never seen anything like the size of it, you’d never believe that explosives could do it. I saw about a hundred and fifty Germans lying there dead, all in different positions, some as if throwing a bomb, some still with a gun on their shoulder. The mine had killed them all. The crew stood there for about five minutes and looked. It made us think. That mine had won the battle before it started. We looked at each other as we came away and the sight of it remained with you always. To see them all lying there with their eyes open.”
Sir Herbert Plumer
Found the key to Ludendorff ’s new system.
Plumer’s infantry took possession of the long chain of seventy-foot-deep craters that now gaped where the ridge had been. It had been a spectacular success, one that achieved its objectives in minutes at almost no cost in British lives, but it was also distinctly limited. The British penetration was about two miles at its farthest point, and no effort was made to push deeper. Haig, interested in the operation only insofar as it contributed to his preparations for a main assault that was still more than a month in the future, had ordered it stopped as soon as the ridge was taken. His reasons were not trivial: he did not want the Second Army so far forward that his artillery could no longer protect it, and he did want it to dig in before the Germans could counterattack. Still, for a few hours there had been an opportunity to cut deeply into and possibly even through the broken German defenses, and that opportunity was not put to use. Perhaps the most important consequence of Messines Ridge was the taste it gave Plumer, a capable commander, of the advantages of a limited attack.
Haig still did not have London’s approval for his main offensive, and the success at Messines Ridge (which had, in the end, left the British still confined inside the old Ypres salient) had done nothing to ease the prime minister’s doubts. Lloyd George summoned Haig to a June 19 meeting with his recently created Cabinet Committee on War Policy to explain his plans in detail. Robertson also attended. Like Lloyd George one of those “only in America,” up-from-nowhere figures who appear in almost every nation in almost every generation, “Wully” Robertson was a genuinely remarkable individual, especially for the class-bound society that Britain was a century ago. Born in humble circumstances in 1860, he had joined the army at seventeen. (“I shall name it to no one for I am ashamed to think of it,” his mother wrote him when she learned of his enlistment. “I would rather bury you than see you in a red coat.”) He did well during ten years in the ranks, was changed by a commission from the army’s youngest sergeant major to its oldest lieutenant, and during long service in India mastered an array of languages, including Gurkhali, Hindi, Pashto, Persian, and Urdu. He served with distinction in the Boer War and returned to England to become both a reform-minded authority on military training and an expert on the German army. To this day he remains the only Englishman ever to rise from private soldier to field marshal (a rank he was given at his retirement, along with a baronetcy), but throughout his career he never attempted to shed the rough Lincolnshire accent that made his origins clear to all. From early in the war he had been committed to victory on the Western Front (opposing, among other alternatives, the Dardanelles campaign), and since his elevation to the lofty position of chief of the imperial general staff in December 1915 he had been Haig’s most important supporter. This made him deeply suspect in the eyes of Lloyd George.
The London conference went on for three days and was a contest from start to end. Haig laid out his plan and the great things he expected it to accomplish. Lloyd George peppered him with questions. He wanted to know why the generals believed a Flanders offensive could succeed this time, what their estimate of casualties was, how the enemy’s forces were disposed, and what the consequences of failure might be. He made it plain that he was not satisfied with the answers. The Royal Navy was called in and, to no one’s surprise, sided with the soldiers. Admiral Jellicoe, the semidiscredited semihero of the Battle of Jutland, raised Lloyd George’s furry eyebrows by asserting that Britain would be unable to continue the war for much more than another year unless the Belgian coast was taken. This warning was far-fetched (only a small number of Germany’s smaller submarines was based in Flemish ports) but so purely speculative that neither Lloyd George nor anyone else could prove that it was wrong. All the representatives of the army and navy were impatient with Lloyd George and offended by what they saw as his meddling. The cheek of this craggy Welshman, a man utterly lacking in military training or experience, seemed to them ludicrous and offensive.
In the end the prime minister yielded without having been won over. He gave in to political rather than military realities. After everything had been hashed out and hashed over, he had only one other member of the committee firmly on his side. A third member, the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law, also expressed doubt that Haig and Robertson had made their case. But, unknowingly echoing what Bethmann Hollweg had said in Berlin under almost identical circumstances five months earlier, he added that he did not think the committee could “overrule the military and naval authorities on a question of strategy.” Lloyd George understood that to countermand Haig and Robertson without broad bipartisan support would leave him exposed and vulnerable in the House of Commons. Also, one of Haig’s promises had to be taken into account. In a way reminiscent of what Nivelle had proclaimed when his plans for the Chemin des Dames were challenged, Haig said that if his scheme did not succeed it could quickly be called off. The losses could be ended while still at tolerable levels. Reluctantly and resentfully, certain that he was witnessing Great War stupidity at its worst, Lloyd George told Haig to proceed with his preparations while awaiting final approval.
Thus the meeting ended in a conditional victory for the generals. Viewed in a broader context, however, it had demonstrated the strength of the British system. When Haig and Robertson departed, they took with them not control of strategy but only permission to get ready for one more attack. That permission had been granted by the civil government, the power of which had in no way been diminished. The discussion had happened at the insistence of the prime minister, and the prime minister had the last word. Everyone knew and accepted, if unhappily in some cases, that ultimate authority lay with Lloyd George and his committee. The constitution was intact.
Imperial Germany’s constitution was supposed to work in somewhat the same way. Its chancellor was supposed to be in control and in fact had been in control when Bismarck held the office (though even he could have been dismissed by the kaiser at any time and ultimately was). But because the government’s leaders had no power base of their own (were not, as in Britain, chosen by the legislature), the strains and uncertainties of a protracted and total war caused control to slip out of the chancellor’s hands. The system broke down, finally, and a new one
had to be improvised. The improvising could have been done by the one man whom almost the whole German nation trusted, but Hindenburg had no interest. Thus it fell to the one man who both wanted it and seemed able to get Hindenburg to do whatever he wished—Ludendorff, a man elected by no one, a man the kaiser disliked intensely. Thus the war turned Germany into a true military dictatorship, something that it had in fact never before been.
The Russian authorities, meanwhile, were struggling to hold together their forces on the Eastern Front and having distinctly limited success. Among the German troops opposite those forces was a young newly commissioned officer, recently returned to duty after being wounded in action, named Rudolf Hess—the same Hess who in later years would be one of Hitler’s top henchmen. “Yesterday we saw heavy fighting,” he observed sardonically in a letter to his parents, “but only among the Russians themselves. A Russian officer came over and gave himself up. He spoke perfect German. He was born in Baden but is a Russian citizen. He told us that whole battles are going on behind their lines. Their officers are shooting each other and the soldiers are doing the same. He found it all too ridiculous. They can all get lost as far as he’s concerned. We invited him to eat with us and he thanked us. He ate well and drank plenty of tea before going off. There was a lot of noise coming from the Russian side yesterday. They were fighting each other in the trenches. We also heard shots coming from their infantry but they were firing at each other. Charming!”
On July 1, in spite of such disorders and to the delight of Paris and London, Kerensky somehow launched his offensive. Though not nearly as large as what had been promised before the fall of the tsar—not enough troops could be assembled for that—it still involved two hundred thousand men and more than thirteen hundred guns on a thirty-mile front. The mere fact that the Russians were able to take the initiative was cause for happiness, and there seemed to be grounds for optimism. The offensive was under the overall command of General Brusilov, father of the great offensive of 1916 and now commander in chief. It took place in Galicia, where Brusilov had achieved his earlier successes and the Russian forces were in better order, their morale higher, than in the north. They had been superbly equipped by their allies with artillery and aircraft, and nearly half of the defenders were Austrian rather than German troops.
The offensive appeared to go brilliantly at first, with a bombardment that destroyed much of the enemy’s forward defenses. The infantry attack that followed swept forward into enemy-held ground. It was all an illusion, however. The Russians were unaware of the new defensive system that Ludendorff had put in place on both fronts and that even the Austrians were using under German direction. The counterattack, when it came, was more than the Russian soldiers were able or willing to endure. They didn’t simply retreat, they quit the war on the spot, refusing to obey further orders. Officers who attempted to restore order were shot dead. On July 8 the Russian Eighth Army essentially went out of existence. Ten days after that Brusilov, who had had misgivings from the start but had been ordered to proceed by Kerensky, found himself relieved of command. By July 19 it was the Germans who were on the offensive, driving a disorderly mob of Russians before them. Their commander was the same Max Hoffmann who had been Ludendorff’s strategist at Tannenberg and was now chief of staff on the Eastern Front. Wherever the Germans advanced, the Russians fled. When the Austrians joined in, the Russians fled even from them.
It was, for all practical purposes, the end of the war in the east. Russian casualties had been almost trivial by the standards of the preceding three years—only seventeen thousand killed, wounded, or missing—but such numbers were meaningless in the context of a general collapse. The Germans would attack again later, in the north, but by then success would come so easily as to be almost a formality. Russia really was finished this time. It was the end of the provisional government as well. The future belonged to the Bolsheviks.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff, fortified by this success, now settled the question of who was in charge in Berlin. On July 6 the leader of Germany’s Catholic Center Party, a moderate and monarchist named Matthias Erzberger, had delivered a speech that shocked the nation. Using information obtained through international contacts made available by the Vatican, Erzberger not only argued but persuasively demonstrated that the submarine campaign had failed. He demanded reform, including a stronger governing role for the Reichstag, and German renunciation of territorial gains in order to secure a “peace of reconciliation.” This speech came at a point when the struggle for control over policy was particularly intense (many factions were involved, and their positions were too varied to be dealt with here), and it outraged the conservatives. The Reichstag’s annexationists bitterly attacked Bethmann. But in the face of renewed demands for his dismissal, the kaiser continued to support him.
On July 12, with the crisis at its height, there came a new and even greater shock. A telegram from the headquarters of the army high command announced the resignations of both Hindenburg and Ludendorff. It said the resignations of other members of the general staff would soon follow and that the reason was the impossibility of working with Bethmann Hollweg. It was blackmail plain and simple. In Britain or France, the resignation of any general behaving so high-handedly would have been accepted without comment. Kaiser Wilhelm was indignant, but he was also impotent and knew it. He responded by asking Hindenburg and Ludendorff to come to Berlin to see him. Bethmann resigned.
The timing was deeply unfortunate. Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, had called on the chancellor shortly before his resignation and presented an offer by Pope Benedict XV to attempt to mediate an end to the war. The first essential step, Pacelli explained, had to be a declaration of Berlin’s intentions with respect to Belgium. It was as clear to the Vatican as to everyone that no peace talks were possible unless Germany demonstrated a willingness to restore Belgium to its prewar status. Even the kaiser, who had long and pompously insisted that Germany’s security interests required it to maintain control of at least part of Belgium, had come to understand that such a goal was not realistic. Bethmann had responded encouragingly, telling Pacelli (without seeking the army’s agreement, of course) that Germany would agree to Belgium’s autonomy if Britain and France would do so as well. He even spoke of resolving the question of Alsace and Lorraine to mutual satisfaction. The Reichstag’s increasingly liberal majority almost certainly would have supported Bethmann if given the opportunity. But with Bethmann gone there could be no such opportunity. The papal initiative came to nothing.
After some difficulty in finding a new chancellor (various factions put forth their candidates, who one by one were rejected), the job was given to an obscure bureaucrat named Georg Michaelis. It is a measure of the depths to which Germany had fallen politically that Kaiser Wilhelm had not only never met Michaelis, he had never even heard of him. Michaelis would prove so lacking in experience, judgment, and strength of character that even Ludendorff—whom he was eager to please—was soon disappointed. Ludendorff, a complex and paradoxical character who despite always wanting his way did not really want to become dictator (he scoffed at suggestions that he himself should become chancellor), found himself responsible for everything, with no one of consequence to help on the political and diplomatic side. It hardly needs saying that neither he nor his agents (nor the hapless Michaelis) had any success in bringing the Reichstag under control. On July 19 a substantial majority of its members approved a resolution that offended the conservatives anew. “The Reichstag strives for a peace of understanding and the permanent reconciliation of peoples,” the resolution declared. “Forced territorial acquisitions and political, economic or financial oppressions are irreconcilable with such a peace.” The German government remained at war with itself.
France was a different case. The Third Republic was, in a sense, always at war with itself. It had been so in the days just before the war, when Caillaux with his pacific inclinations would have become prime minister if not for his wife. In the y
ears since then one government after another had fallen, in one case after only days in power. But behind the turmoil France retained the machinery needed to produce coherent political, military, and diplomatic decisions, and that machinery had continued to function. The government, after Joffre’s period of total control, had reestablished its authority over military strategy. It had done so in part because the army’s high command, divided between republicans and never-quite-trusted Catholics such as Ferdinand Foch, was never a coherent enough force to become a political threat.
In the summer of 1917 France needed only one final ingredient in order to operate effectively. It needed a prime minister as strong and determined and politically savvy as Lloyd George, one capable of making himself master of the nation.
That prime minister had been waiting in the wings all along, and he was about to emerge.
Background: Enter the Tiger
ENTER THE TIGER
BY 1917 GEORGES CLEMENCEAU HAD BEEN A PROMINENT figure in French politics and journalism—a magnetic, troubling, disruptive figure, hated and feared and adored—for half a century. All four of the governments that had come and gone in Paris since 1914 had kept him on the outside (that was where Clemenceau had always been happiest, making the insiders squirm), but he remained a force in public life.
And now his hour had come round at last. The nation, exhausted and confused, desperately needed new leadership. So many men had tried and failed that only one possibility remained. It was the man they called, by no means always affectionately, Le Tigre. With many misgivings, seeing no choice but to ignore the savagery with which the Tiger had been striking at him since the war began, President Poincaré asked him to form a government. Clemenceau, who throughout most of his career had been refusing invitations to come inside, accepted immediately. And immediately everything began to change. France had found its war leader, its Lloyd George.
