by G. J. Meyer
All was not hope and glory on the Allied side, either. The end of the German threat to Paris had ended also any possibility that the Clemenceau government would fall, a development that might have brought to power a government willing to negotiate with the Germans. But Britain and France alike were staggering under the weight of 1918’s cascade of casualties; the British were drafting fifty-year-old men, while the French were organizing combat units made up almost entirely of men over forty. Economic dislocations also were taking a toll. Workers at ammunition factories in Birmingham and Coventry went out on strike, returning only when Lloyd George threatened to draft them into the army. In August Britain’s police declared a one-day strike in protest of inflation’s ruinous impact on their wages. This was followed by a railway strike in several regions. Strikes were even more widespread in France, and the strikers were often at least as intent on pressuring the government to make peace as on winning financial concessions.
Such unrest reflected the fact that, to the uninformed eye, 1918 could still have the appearance of a year of German gains. The map continued to show Germany in possession both of eastern Europe and of more of France and Flanders than it had held at the beginning of March. The breakdown of the German army was not readily apparent behind the front lines as its remnants continued to put up a stubborn defense, hold the Allied advance to a glacial pace, and kill British, French, and Americans.
The German forces too were paying heavily, of course, and the relentlessness of the Allied attacks gave them no chance to rest, reorganize, or throw together adequate defenses. Their casualties in August alone totaled two hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Of this total, a hundred and ten thousand men were listed as missing, a gentle way of saying that many had deserted. German soldiers were celebrating when they managed to surrender without being killed. When newly captured troops arrived at the holding pens created by the Allies for their growing hordes of prisoners, those already inside welcomed them with cheers. By September the number of German divisions on the Western Front would be down to 125, and only forty-seven of those were considered capable of combat. The Allies by then were up to more than two hundred divisions, increasing numbers of them fresh and double-sized American units.
The impossibility of a German victory had become clear to all the senior commanders on the Allied side and to most of their German counterparts. Germany’s only hope, if any hope remained, was to take action on the diplomatic front before it, like Austria-Hungary, had nothing left to offer.
Background: The Gardeners of Salonika
THE GARDENERS OF SALONIKA
THERE IS A NICE SYMMETRY TO THE FACT THAT, AS AUGUST 1918 arrived and the war became four years old, a huge multinational army lay bottled up in the Greek port city of Salonika under the command of French General Louis-Félix-Marie-François Franchet d’Esperey.
The idea of establishing an Entente base in Salonika had originated with Franchet d’Esperey as early as October 1914, when he was commanding the French Fifth Army on the Western Front and had already been nicknamed “Desperate Frankie” by his British allies. He suggested it to President Poincaré, who was interested enough to ask him to draw up a detailed proposal. Franchet d’Esperey did so, explaining that by opening a front in the southern Balkans, France could protect Serbia and drain off German and Austrian troops from other places. But by the time the proposal was ready for consideration, the attention of the French and British was focused on the Dardanelles.
The possibility remained dormant for almost a year. Then, with the Gallipoli campaign in ruins and the Russians driven out of Galicia by the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, Erich von Falkenhayn decided that the time had come to take possession of Serbia and secure an overland route to Constantinople. In October 1915, facing an invasion, the Serbs appealed for help. Paris was eager to respond. It wanted not only to keep Serbia intact but to win over Greece and Romania through a show of force. It also saw an opportunity to give France a strong presence in the Balkans—one that could be valuable after the war. Britain’s leaders, with the exception of David Lloyd George, were skeptical. But they agreed to send one battered division from Gallipoli as junior partner to a much larger French contingent.
The expedition was put under the command not of Franchet d’Esperey, who by then commanded an army group in the west, but of Maurice Sarrail, an able but notoriously political officer who had recently been relieved by Joffre after a German offensive in the Ardennes caught his Third Army off guard. Uniquely among senior French generals, Sarrail was closely affiliated with the socialists in the National Assembly. He had become popular with critics of Joffre’s management of the war. His dismissal created an outcry, the leftists accusing Joffre of trying to eliminate a potential successor. The Salonika assignment was a convenient way of restoring him to command while getting him as far away from Paris as possible.
The first troops arrived at Salonika on October 5, and in short order Sarrail had them on the march toward Belgrade. They had only one single-track railroad to make use of, and the troops had to advance over some of the roughest, most barren hill country in Europe. They were met by Bulgarian troops who had recently been drawn into the war by German promises of rich territorial concessions—everything Bulgaria had lost in the Second Balkan War and more. They were still a hundred miles from Serbia when word arrived that the Serbs had been defeated and were fleeing for the coast through Albania. Sarrail could do nothing to help them. By late November he was pulling his troops back to their starting point.
He began building defenses that turned Salonika into a minature Western Front, practically impregnable. The British wanted out. Even Lloyd George had changed his mind, and Prime Minister Asquith was describing Salonika as “dangerous and likely to lead to a great disaster.” But France, Russia, and Italy all demanded that they not only remain but send more divisions. London complied for the sake of harmony.
Sarrail’s Army of the Orient grew rapidly. It included one hundred and sixty thousand men by January 1916, three hundred thousand by May. French, British, Italian, and Russian troops were gradually absorbed into it, along with Serbs who had been refitted on the island of Corfu. Sarrail involved himself so deeply in Greek politics (which were indescribably confused, with King Constantine leaning toward his brother-in-law the kaiser while leading politicians favored the Entente) that Britain and Russia became suspicious of French ambitions in the Balkans. Rumors circulated to the effect that Sarrail wanted to establish a kind of crusader kingdom in the region with himself as potentate.
The next complication was Romania, which both sides had been courting since the start of the war. When the Romanians agreed to join the Entente on condition that Sarrail attack the Bulgarians, the French government ordered him to proceed. It wanted to expand its reach in the Balkans and to draw German troops away from Verdun. Sarrail was preparing his offensive when the Bulgarians, as part of their role in Germany’s campaign against Romania, seized the initiative and attacked him first. Sarrail counterattacked in September (allowing the Serbs to take the lead and sacrifice a fifth of their army in the process) and took the Serbian city of Monastir before being stopped. Stalemate was restored, and civil war broke out in Greece. Sarrail was actively supporting the king’s political rivals.
The deadlock continued through 1917. The Entente had more than half a million men in Salonika by early that year, and in Europe the enterprise came to be regarded as a bad joke. German generals called Salonika their largest internment camp. Clemenceau, in his newspaper, called Sarrail’s troops “the gardeners of Salonika,” a waste of manpower needed on the Western Front. The place was far from a rural idyll, however. It was humid, swampy, and filled with pestilence. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were stricken with a virulent strain of malaria. The city of Salonika, which had belonged to the Ottoman Empire until four years earlier, was a hellhole. Refugees from the Balkan wars were crowded together in makeshift slums, and unsavory entrepreneurs grew rich by providing amusement for restless Entente troop
s. Venereal disease was epidemic, and a French division that had not had leave in more than a year briefly mutinied.
Sarrail tried an offensive in the spring of 1917, but it quickly failed. The Serbian army became embroiled in rumors of a plot to replace Serbia’s king with a military dictatorship. Colonel Dragutin Dmitrijevic, the same “Apis” whose Black Hand had plotted the assassination of Franz Ferdinand three years earlier, was arrested, convicted of conspiracy, and executed on June 26. That same day King Constantine of Greece was forced to abdicate and move to Switzerland. A provisional government that Sarrail had been fostering in exile took power in Athens, and Greece declared war on the Central Powers. Everything was in confusion, and Sarrail was widely despised.
When Clemenceau became premier, he sent Sarrail into retirement. The new commander was General Adolphe Marie Guillaumat, a veteran of France’s colonial wars and a Western Front army commander who offered the advantage of being determinedly apolitical. Guillaumat began making preparations for a 1918 attack on the Bulgarians; it was to be a limited operation with modest objectives. The Germans, meanwhile, were pulling their troops out of the Balkans for use in Ludendorff’s coming offensive in the west. Even the British generals in Salonika grew optimistic. The Bulgarians, left on their own, seemed unlikely to stand their ground if seriously threatened.
In June 1918, with the Western Front in crisis, Guillaumat was called home to become military governor of Paris. (There was more to this appointment than met the eye. Clemenceau and Foch, their minds made up to sack Pétain if conditions in France continued to deteriorate, had selected Guillaumat as his replacement.) It happened that Franchet d’Esperey was out of work at the time. In May, after the German break-through at the Chemin des Dames, Clemenceau had half-apologetically offered him up as a scapegoat to politicians demanding change. (“I bear you no ill-will,” he had told the general in dismissing him.) Franchet d’Esperey had been offered the Salonika command late in 1917, before Guillaumat. He had turned it down out of fear that, because he was known to be one of the army’s Catholic, even quasi-royalist conservatives, his appointment would outrage the leftists. Invited to succeed Guillaumat rather than Sarrail, however, he felt free to accept.
Almost as soon as he arrived in Greece, he began expanding Guillaumat’s plans. “I expect from you savage vigor,” he told the generals who greeted him when he landed. Two hundred and fifty thousand Greek troops had become available as a supplement to his army, and soon he was cabling Paris, demanding permission for a major campaign. Clemenceau was in favor. With the Germans on the defensive in Belgium and France and masses of Americans in action, there was no longer a need for more troops in the west, and with Austria nearly defenseless southeastern Europe seemed to offer rich opportunities. He got London and Rome to agree.
In September the Army of the Orient began moving north. This was its last chance to show that the whole thing had not been a tragic waste.
Chapter 36
The Sign of the Defeated
“No no no!…You do not finish a war like this!…
It is a fatal error, and France will pay for it!”
—GENERAL CHARLES MANGIN
Forced to accept the impossibility of victory in the west, Ludendorff clung to the hope that he could deny victory to the Allies. He persisted in believing that Germany could emerge from the war in possession of part of Belgium and of France’s Longwy-Briey basin. “The man could escape even now,” Foch said of him on August 28, marveling at his stubbornness, “if he would make up his mind to leave behind his baggage.”
That Ludendorff was living in a fantasy was soon made plain. The British were readying an offensive out of Arras, and Foch was demanding that the Americans contribute divisions to it. Pershing, variously described by frustrated French commanders as “tactless” and even “obtuse,” would not agree. He wanted to concentrate his troops on his own sector of the front, where he could use them to pursue his own objectives. Foch was indignant. Pétain brokered a resolution of the dispute that provided French support for the attack that Pershing was preparing at St. Mihiel. This attack would have three objectives: to drive the Germans out of their salient; to cut the rail line running laterally behind the salient; and to threaten Longwy-Briey. It was to take place in just five days. The Allies were doing everything in a rush now, thinking for the first time that it might be possible to finish the war before the onset of winter.
The push at Arras, with Canadian troops in the lead, was another success for the Allies; they broke through everywhere they attacked. The defense proved so porous that Ludendorff agreed at last to a pullback to the Hindenburg Line—to the surrender, finally, of everything taken in the year’s offensives. His decision came too late, however, for an orderly retreat to be possible. On the British part of the front alone, during the two weeks of the withdrawal, the Germans lost one hundred and fifteen thousand men, four hundred and seventy guns, and stores that they had no means of replacing.
The war had come down to a rapid succession of hard Allied blows that the Germans could only do their diminishing best to contain. A disproportionately large number of these blows were being delivered by the Anzac and Canadian corps, which after four years of hard fighting remained so potent that Haig turned to them repeatedly as a battering ram with which to smash the German line. A strong case can be made that these were the best fighters of the war, their divisions the most effective on either side. This was made possible partly by John Monash, partly by his Canadian counterpart, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie.
Currie, like Monash, came from a background that set him apart from almost all the other BEF generals. He had grown up a farm boy in British Columbia, wanting to become a lawyer but obliged after his father’s death to settle for schoolteaching instead. From there he went into insurance, then into real estate speculation. At twenty-one he joined the Canadian Garrison Artillery, a weekend-warrior operation, as a lowly gunner. A combination of competence and amiability opened the doors to advancement: he was commissioned at twenty-five, promoted to captain a year later, and at thirty-three became a lieutenant colonel commanding a regiment.
He had been keenly disappointed when medical problems kept him out of the Boer War, and when the Great War came he was eager to go. He was as well qualified as it was possible for a Canadian soldier to be at that time and was put in command of one of Canada’s first four brigades. Trouble, however, pursued him. A real estate bubble had burst early in 1914, leaving him deep in debt. He borrowed regimental funds to stave off bankruptcy and might have been charged with embezzlement if not for the intervention of friends. To the end of the war he would be haunted by the obligations he had left behind. In sending $10,000 to a creditor in 1917, he wrote that “for nearly three years the last thing I thought of at night and the first thing in the morning was this”—the money he owed.
By then, however, he was one of the BEF’s most respected commanders. In April 1915 the courage and tenacity of his brigade in holding off a German attack on the village of St. Julien had kept Second Ypres from turning into a disaster for the British. A year later the brilliance with which his Canadian First Division captured Vimy Ridge provoked General Henry Horne to declare it “the pride and wonder of the British Army.” But in June 1917, when the British selected Currie to become the first Canadian commander of the Canadian Corps, politicians back home complained of not having been consulted and proposed other candidates. They urged Currie’s creditors to demand payment in full. His promotion was changed to “temporary” and seemed likely to be rescinded. He had always been a kind of alien among the BEF’s generals; even the Australian Monash was a model of gentlemanly refinement by comparison. “He had a tremendous command of profanity,” his own son would recall. “He didn’t swear without a cause. But boy, when he cut loose he could go for about a minute without repetition.”
Currie was saved—and knighted—when two of his officers advanced him $6,000, and when the veneration in which he was held by Canada’s troo
ps made it clear that his removal would spark protests. At the end of the summer of 1918 those troops were keeping intact a record that is nothing less than astonishing in the context of the Great War. They never once failed to capture an objective, never were driven out of a position they had an opportunity to consolidate, and never lost a gun.
At the beginning of September, Ludendorff’s worst headache was not the Canadians or the Anzacs but the huge numbers of Americans assembling near Verdun. Anticipating an attack, temporarily free of his obsessive determination to hold his ground everywhere, he ordered the abandonment of the two-hundred-square-mile, thirteen-miles-deep St. Mihiel salient. This timely move would disappoint Pershing, who had originally planned to attack at St. Mihiel on September 7 but was forced to delay by difficulties in getting French artillery into position. He wanted not only to capture the salient but to destroy its defenders, and he had the resources to do so: a million U.S. and a hundred and ten thousand French troops, three thousand artillery pieces, absolute air superiority, and unlimited ammunition.
The attack began on September 12 with a four-hour barrage, but when the infantry went in, it encountered not dug-in resistance but merely a rear guard shielding the escape of eight shabby, undermanned German divisions. The entire salient fell in a single day. Fifteen thousand German troops succeeded in getting themselves captured, handing over four hundred and fifty guns in doing so. Pershing and his staff immediately began preparations for another attack in an area bordered by the heights of the River Meuse and the Argonne Forest. Here the Germans would be waiting with a twelve-miles-deep defensive system nearly as formidable as the Hindenburg Line. But Pershing had eight hundred and twenty thousand men to throw against them, six hundred thousand of them Americans, plus four thousand guns and enough shells for those guns to fire at their maximum rate until their barrels burned out. The staff was given fourteen days to get everything ready.
