by G. J. Meyer
Clemenceau was seventy-six years old in 1917, which meant he had been thirty at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, but he was still a volcano of energy. He rose at five every morning, wrote and read for two and a half hours, and then spent half an hour with a calisthenics coach before going to his office. All through the war he had been a member of the French Senate. His position on its army and foreign affairs committees enabled him to know more than most about how the war was being managed and what was happening behind the scenes, and he used his newspaper to complain about what he knew. When the war began, the paper was called L’Homme Libre, The Free Man. Before the war was two months old, the government, offended by its biting criticism, ordered it shut down. One day later Clemenceau launched a replacement, L’Homme Enchaîné, The Man in Chains. It too was briefly suppressed. When publication resumed, Clemenceau became somewhat less indiscreet but no less critical. He regarded it as his mission to raise difficult questions. “The danger of speaking out and the danger of remaining silent,” he observed, “balance agonizingly in our minds.” His articles were the scourge of the Viviani government, then of the Briand government, then of the governments of Ribot and Painlevé. They also heaped scorn on generals. Clemenceau showed no more deference than Lloyd George to the expertise of military professionals. He admired only two, Foch and Pétain, and deferred not even to them. The poilus loved his paper and bought a hundred thousand copies of every edition.
Premier Georges Clemenceau
“Home policy? I wage war! Foreign policy? I wage war!”
Not surprisingly, French officialdom regarded him as an impossible man. “So long as victory is possible he is capable of upsetting everything!” Poincaré said early in the war. “A day will perhaps come when I shall add: ‘Now that everything seems to be lost, he alone is capable of saving everything.’” It was perhaps the most prophetic statement of the war. It reflected the fact that, regardless of how many enemies Clemenceau had made and how much his enemies resented him, it was impossible to question his patriotism, his ability, his hatred of Germany, or his commitment to victory at any cost.
He had been a singular character from youth, and life had made him more so. The son of a provincial physician who served time in jail for his outspoken criticism of the Second Empire, Clemenceau shaped himself in his father’s image: radically republican, antimonarchist, anticlerical, cynical and scornful of the whole French establishment. He completed medical studies but afterward went to the United States, arriving while the Civil War was in progress and remaining for four years. He supported himself as a teacher and correspondent for French newspapers and married a nineteen-year-old American girl named Mary Plummer, who had been his student in Stamford, Connecticut. (The marriage, the only one of Clemenceau’s long life, produced three children but ended unhappily after seven years.)
Back in France and living in Paris in 1870, when Napoleon III was captured by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, he was already prominent enough in leftist politics to be appointed mayor of the eighteenth arrondissement, working-class Montmartre, after radicals seized control of the city. From there he went on to serve in the Chamber of Deputies, to write for and found radical publications, and to champion such causes as separation of church and state and the rights of miners and industrial workers. Among his passions was one that alienated him from the Jaurès socialists who might otherwise have been his best allies: military preparedness. He regarded the loss of Alsace-Lorraine as an intolerable humiliation and renewed war as not only inevitable but desirable, the only way of putting things right. “One would have to be deliberately blind not to see,” he wrote, “that the [German] lust for power, the impact of which makes Europe tremble each day, has fixed as its policy the extermination of France.”
Clemenceau gloried in opposition, and for many years he led one of the Chamber’s many factions. He regarded the middle classes that dominated French politics, the most respectable people in the country, as enemies of progress and justice. During the years of conflict surrounding the Dreyfus case, in which the leadership of the French army was exposed as having knowingly sentenced an innocent Jewish army captain to a life of penal servitude for allegedly selling state secrets to Germany, Clemenceau led the coalition that broke the power of the conservatives and brought the government and the military under republican control. He had repeatedly refused ministerial appointments, but in 1906, with antagonism between the multitudinous factions causing one government after another to fall in quick succession, Clemenceau consented to become minister of the interior. In this position he surprised and delighted the conservatives by using the army and police to subdue striking miners. Though he continued to advocate the eight-hour day, the right to unionize, accident and old-age insurance for workers, and a progressive income tax, the socialists from that point on regarded him as untouchable. But his unexpected firmness won so much support from the center that later the same year he became premier. His government lasted almost three years—itself an achievement. It affected the course of the war to come by strengthening France’s Entente with Russia (which Clemenceau saw as vital to survival, though he professed to despise the tsarist regime) while laying the foundations of her secret alliance with Britain.
As the Great War became years old and the costs mounted and victory seemed more and more distant, the legislature separated into two irreconcilable camps. On one side were those who believed in the possibility of negotiating an acceptable peace. This group was led by the same Joseph Caillaux who would have become premier in the summer of 1914 if his wife had not chosen that moment to buy and use a pistol. The other, convinced that no peace could be tolerable that was not preceded by the defeat of Germany, lined up behind the Tiger.
The Chamber was so polarized that it became impossible to put together the kind of coalition with which France had been muddling through. War Minister Paul Painlevé became premier in September 1917 when the six-month-old Ribot government fell, but within weeks he too was tottering. The socialists were indignant about sudden food shortages, the conservatives bewailed the state of the army and the war, and in November the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd shocked everyone. Painlevé, neither experienced nor skillful enough to manage it all, had to go. Poincaré as president had to find someone to form a government. At this point only two men could have done so: Caillaux or Clemenceau. Selection of the former would have meant a search for compromise with the Germans. Clemenceau, by contrast, represented la guerre à l’outrance, total war to the end. For Poincaré, the choice was obvious.
The new premier brought many advantages to the job. He knew America, spoke English, and was almost the patron saint of the alliance with Britain. Best of all, from the perspective of the conservatives who were now his strongest supporters, his first term as premier had proved beyond doubt that he was no socialist, that under his administration France need not fear Bolshevik contamination, that he would use any means necessary to maintain order. He had become the establishment’s Tiger, and from the day he took office he behaved more tigerishly than he ever had in his life. He took charge completely, filling his cabinet with capable but minor figures who lacked a political base from which to challenge his authority. Instead of naming a war minister, he took that position himself and made it plain to the generals that he, not they, would have the final word. Ironically in light of his own history, he suppressed publications that questioned government policy. Dissenters were sent to prison. Stunningly—years later Clemenceau would express some remorse about this—even Caillaux was charged with disloyalty and put behind bars. Clemenceau embraced the elites—the bankers, the manufacturers, the leaders of the haute bourgeoisie—that he had reviled all his life. Talk of limiting or confiscating excess war profits was extinguished as completely as talk of a compromise peace. The moneyed classes could help to win the war, and therefore they were Clemenceau’s friends. Anyone expressing doubt was his enemy.
Making decisions was easy in the Clemenceau government. Whatever could cont
ribute to victory was done. Whatever might make victory more difficult was, whenever possible, stamped out. Anything irrelevant to the war no longer mattered.
“Home policy?” Clemenceau declared when questioned about his plans.
“I wage war! Foreign policy? I wage war!”
Chapter 30
Passchendaele
“Blood and mud, blood and mud, they can think of nothing better.”
—DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
July was exactly half finished when the British began their bombardment in advance of the great offensive that Haig had been waiting so long to undertake at Ypres. In intensity and duration the barrage dwarfed what the Germans had done in opening the Battle of Verdun, dwarfed what the British themselves had done at the Somme almost exactly a year before. Along fifteen miles of front, more than three thousand guns, more than double the density at the Somme, began pouring a day-and-night deluge of high explosives, shrapnel, and gas onto the Germans opposite. During the two weeks ending on July 31 they would fire four million rounds, a hundred thousand of them gas, compared with a mere million during the Somme preparation. These shells had a total weight of sixty-five thousand tons and would inflict thirty thousand casualties on the German Fourth Army even before the British infantry was engaged.
The landscape, already a barren expanse of shell holes and rubble, was rearranged again and again and again, burying the living while excavating the dead. Not incidentally, the rearrangement process destroyed what remained of the area’s intricate drainage system. If rain came—and rain was almost certain to come to Flanders at this time of year—there would be no place for the water to go.
Douglas Haig was now in much the same position that Nivelle had put himself in earlier in the year: proceeding in the face of alarmed skepticism (Foch had called Haig’s plan “futile, fantastic and dangerous”) and refusing to be dissuaded. His goal, once the infantry and the tanks that had been assembled for the offensive went into action, was to drive the Germans back at least three miles on the first day, fifteen miles in eight days. As soon as the railway junction at Roulers had been captured, a meticulously trained division with its own tank force was to be landed on the coast behind the German lines. The Fourth British Army, positioned near where the River Yser enters the sea, was then to move eastward under the protection of the Royal Navy’s shipboard guns and link up with the landing force. The Germans, at the end of their strength, would not have enough troops to form a new defensive line once they were forced to withdraw from the coast.
That was the plan. One of its problems—by no means the only problem, but one of the most serious—was that the Germans knew what was coming. Haig appears to have resigned himself to the impossibility of concealing anything except the amphibious landing, which was put under such tight security that the men training for it in the Thames estuary on the north side of the Channel were not allowed to write home. The Germans, from the air and from their observation points on the low ridges circling Ypres, had a clear view of the gathering of the greatest concentration of soldiers and weapons in the history of the British army. And of course they reacted. Fourteen German divisions were transferred to Ypres, four of them from the Eastern Front, while the British were making ready. A week after the Germans were blown off Messines Ridge, Ludendorff sent Fritz von Lossberg, the originator of the new system of flexible defense in depth, to Ypres as chief of staff of the German Fourth Army. This gave Lossberg more than fifty days to prepare. As he did so, the confidence of the German commanders grew. “My mind is quite at rest about the attack, as we have never possessed such strong reserves, so well trained for their part, as on [this] front,” Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, head of the army group in Flanders, observed in his diary.
On July 10 the Germans had launched a preemptive raid on the Yser bridgehead from which the British Fourth Army was to move eastward to join the landing force. This raid, in addition to driving most of the British back to the west side of the river, led to the discovery of a tunnel they had planned to use to blow up key German positions at the start of their advance. The discovery confirmed that something big was being planned for the coast, and the Germans’ capture of the high ground (high as such things are measured in Flanders) just east of the Yser left the British in a far less advantageous position.
On both sides the preparations were on the vast scale that industrialized total war was making commonplace. Just the construction of the concrete pillboxes that were Lossberg’s first line of defense and the underground bunkers being installed behind the lines to shelter his counterattack troops required a seemingly endless supply of gravel. It was purchased in Holland and carried across Belgium on a stream of trains.
Hanging over everything was the question of whether, his enthusiasm notwithstanding, Haig was preparing anything really different from what the generals of the Entente had been trying without success since the end of the Battle of the Marne. Lloyd George thought not. Winston Churchill thought not as well and said so. Lloyd George had appointed him minister of munitions in July, and though at the insistence of the Conservatives he was not allowed to join any of the government’s key war committees, he never hesitated to express himself on policy matters. Pétain, no less than Foch, also thought not. If the immensity of Haig’s resources justified his confidence, if his barely concealed contempt for the French made him feel certain that he could succeed where Nivelle had failed, the bloody futility of all previous Western Front offensives provided equal justification for the doubts of the skeptics.
Then there was the weather. It continued to be unusually dry, but this was unlikely to continue, and Haig was determined not to waste time. Tensions rose as one rainless day followed another and the pieces of the plan failed to fall into place. Haig had decided, to the disappointment of older and more senior generals, to assign responsibility for the main part of his offensive to the youngest of his army commanders, the forty-seven-year-old Hubert Gough. Gough was chosen for his boldness, for his eagerness for action, and probably in part for his being, like Haig, a cavalryman by origin. He was also an indifferent executive who had gathered around himself a staff better known for its arrogance than for its ability to perform. At Ypres the ability to manage enormous numbers of men and matériel mattered a good deal more than dash, and difficulties were not slow to appear. On July 7 Gough reported that his preparations were not on schedule and that he was concerned about the readiness of the French forces on his left. He said he needed more time. Haig (who would have been justified in remembering what Napoleon had said to his generals—“ask me for anything but time”) replied with a flat no. Six days later the two generals met, and again Gough asked for a postponement. He said he needed five days. Haig granted him three, moving the start of the attack from July 25 to July 28. On July 17, with the bombardment under way but fog now impeding preparations, yet another delay of three days was found to be unavoidable. The danger of rain made every one of those days a painful loss, and Haig, increasingly anxious, knew it.
Lloyd George and his War Policy Committee, caught between their fears of what this offensive could turn into and the political risks of forbidding it, seemed paralyzed. Five days into the barrage, they still had not approved the offensive. Finally on July 20, having through their own inaction left themselves with almost no choice, they informed Haig that he was free to proceed. They did so grudgingly at first, warning him that he would have to stop if his attack were not quickly successful and asking him to specify his objectives. Haig was offended, and when he said so he received another message assuring him that he had the committee’s “wholehearted support.” From that point everything began to move rapidly. On July 22 the barrage was raised to a higher level of intensity. On July 26 seven hundred British and French aircraft took to the air and cleared it of Germans. Two days later came the final stage of the bombardment, a counterbattery barrage intended to knock out the German artillery, which had been inflicting heavy damage on British positions. It came to a premature end as f
og returned and made it impossible for the gunners on either side to find their targets. The weather continued to hold. The British would be advancing over terrain that artillery had made a mad jumble of shell holes, but at least the surface was dry. The last two weeks had been punctuated with showers but not to a troublesome extent.
The offensive went off at 3: 50 A.M. on July 31, with seventeen Entente divisions advancing and seventeen waiting in the rear. At the northern end were two French divisions whose mission was to protect Gough’s flank. At the other end were five divisions of Plumer’s Second Army. Their objectives too were modest: to capture a few strongpoints but mainly to stand in place and hold the Messines Ridge as a pivot point for Gough’s advance. Ten divisions of Gough’s Fifth Army were the battering ram, their assignment to force the Germans back and set the stage for the reserves to come forward. Gough had almost twenty-three hundred guns on his seven-mile section of front, one for every six yards. Together he and Plumer and the French had nearly half a million men.
Waiting for the attack was a hornets’ nest of German machine-gun nests arranged in a rough checkerboard pattern. Behind them the Fourth Army’s twenty divisions were arranged in four clusters: nine nearest the front, six behind them, two more to their rear, and the last three even farther back. Almost anywhere the British or French succeeded in making a hole, German reserves would be in position to move forward and seal it.
