A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  The rest of the world was falling apart for the Germans. The Serbian, British, French, Greek and Italian troops of Franchet d’Esperey’s Army of the Orient, though weakened by malaria and influenza, unleashed their attack on strong Bulgarian and German entrenchments outside Salonika. For several days the defenders held their ground so successfully that yet another effort to break out of Salonika seemed doomed to end in failure. But then, their confidence flagging because of shortages of ammunition and supplies, the Bulgarians attempted a limited retreat aimed at drawing the attackers into an ambush. It proved a fatal mistake: Franchet d’Esperey’s aircraft began to attack almost as soon as the Bulgarians were out of their defenses. The withdrawal turned into a rout. The Bulgarian troops, weary of a long war that had accomplished nothing and disaffected from the king who had consigned them to the Central Powers, abandoned the fight. Franchet d’Esperey’s advance units reached a position from which the Hungarian interior lay open to them. German troops were dispatched to salvage the situation, but they had no real hope of doing so. “We could not answer every single cry for help,” Ludendorff would lament later. “We had to insist that Bulgaria must do something for herself, for otherwise we, too, were lost.” On September 25 the Bulgarians asked for an armistice; it was granted five days later. The Turks, having been defeated by an Allied force under British General Edmund Allenby in Palestine, were in retreat toward Damascus and could do nothing about Bulgaria without leaving Constantinople unprotected. The war in the Balkans was over.

  On September 28, meeting at their headquarters at Spa, Ludendorff and Hindenburg abandoned their illusions. They admitted to each other that not only the Balkans but the war itself was lost. A few days later Hindenburg would write that this admission had been made unavoidable in large part “as a result of the collapse of our Macedonian front” and Germany’s consequent exposure to attack from the east. In the long story of the war, there are few greater ironies than the fact that this was accomplished, after years of disease-ridden idleness, by the gardeners of Salonika.

  Ludendorff, all options exhausted, sent his army group commanders a message of desperation. He told them (it is unlikely that they were comforted by his words) that there would be no more withdrawals in the west. Once again he was demanding that every position be held, even against impossible odds. He told his staff that something called pneumonic plague had broken out in the French army—he had heard a rumor of such a development and, he would recall, “clung to that news like a drowning man to a straw.” It was nonsense.

  The BEF and the French were attacking the Hindenburg Line, capturing soldiers by the thousands and guns by the hundreds, and the Americans and French were attacking on a forty-mile front in the Meuse-Argonne. The war had rarely been bloodier—the British took a hundred and eighty thousand casualties between August 28 and September 26, and the Americans would have twenty-six thousand killed and ninety-five thousand wounded in approximately the same period. But for the Allies such losses were made bearable by the hope that a satisfactory end was coming within sight. Obviously the Germans could not possibly stand up against all the blows being directed at them without collapsing eventually. “I have seen prisoners coming from the Battle of the Somme, Mons and Messines and along the road to Menin,” a British sergeant wrote home. “Then they had an expression of hard defiance on their faces; their eyes were saying: ‘You’ve had the better of me; but there are many others like me still to carry on the fight, and in the end we shall crush you.’ Now their soldiers are no more than a pitiful crowd. Exhaustion of the spirit which always accompanies exhaustion of the body. They are marked with the sign of the defeated.”

  The end of the story is as much a tale of politics as of combat. The fighting continued on its immense scale, with the dominance of the Allies increasingly undeniable. Though the best of the surviving German units continued to resist with a determination that at times almost defies belief, they were obviously sacrificing themselves in a lost cause. The Allies now had six million men in the west, but as their artillery and tank advantage became overwhelming and the tactics pioneered by Monash were widely adopted, not all those men were needed. Guns, tanks, and aircraft rather than the bodies of the troops became the hammers with which the Germans were destroyed and driven back. The French now had nearly 40 percent of their army—more than a million men—assigned to the artillery. They had nearly six thousand medium and heavy guns, compared with three hundred in 1914. When the Canadians finally broke through the Hindenburg Line on September 28 and 29, they were able to do so in large part by firing almost nine hundred and forty-four thousand artillery rounds in those two days. Early in October twelve thousand tons of munitions were being fired every twenty-four hours. France’s 75mm light field guns were firing two hundred and eighty thousand rounds daily. To be a German soldier on or near the front was to live under a round-the-clock Bruchmüller barrage.

  Though the German line was being punctured with increasing regularity—on October 5 each of Haig’s four armies broke through the Hindenburg Line at one or more points—none of these successes turned into a rout. Low on food and ammunition, never able to get a day’s rest, the hard core of the German army continued to give up its ground grudgingly, to take a heavy toll of the advancing Allied troops, and even to counterattack at critical junctures. In some places the German line was manned only by officers with machine guns, but still it never dissolved. Amazingly, the number of British, French, and American troops being killed in combat continued to exceed German fatalities.

  Almost 90 percent of the men in an American Marine battalion were killed or wounded in an ultimately successful effort to drive the Germans off a hill in Champagne—a region, as one of the attackers would recall, that years of fighting had reduced to “blackened, branchless stumps, upthrust through the churned earth…naked, leprous chalk…a wilderness of craters, large and small, wherein no yard of earth lay untouched.” This same Marine left a vivid account of how horrifically difficult it could be to advance against the German defenders even at this late and, for them, hopeless stage in the war: “All along the extended line the saffron shrapnel flowered, flinging death and mutilation down. Singing balls and jagged bits of steel spattered on the hard ground like sheets of hail; the line writhed and staggered, steadied and went on, closing toward the center as the shells bit into it. High-explosive shells came with the shrapnel, and where they fell geysers of torn earth and black smoke roared up to mingle with the devilish yellow in the air. A foul murky cloud of dust and smoke formed and went with the thinning companies, a cloud lit with red flashes and full of howling death. The silent ridge to the left awoke with machine guns and rifles, and sibilant rushing flights of nickel-coated missiles from Maxim and Mauser struck down where the shells spared. An increasing trail of crumpled brown figures lay behind the battalion as it went. The raw smell of blood was in men’s nostrils.”

  Heavy autumn rains also slowed the Allied advance. So did the difficulty of the terrain and the strength of the remaining German infrastructure, especially along the eastern sections of the front where the Americans were attacking. Still another problem was the sheer size of the Allied forces—the difficulties of keeping so many men and guns deployed, supplied, and in motion. Things became so complicated in the Argonne that Pershing suspended his offensive for most of a week to get them sorted out.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Salonika disaster, Ludendorff met with Admiral Paul von Hintze, who had become foreign minister after the forced resignation of Kühlmann. Ludendorff, echoing what he had already acknowledged to Hindenburg, outlined the truth of the situation. He said an armistice was not only advisable but needed immediately. Hintze was shocked to discover that Ludendorff thought a cease-fire could be secured within a few days. More astonishingly, he wanted an agreement that would allow the German armies to pull back to their own border, rest their troops and build their defenses, and later resume the fight if they chose to do so. The conversation was not a calm exchange of views
; at one point Ludendorff, in one of his rages, collapsed to the floor.

  Hintze’s objectives were to save Germany and the Hohenzollern dynasty. To this end, once he and Ludendorff had agreed to approach Woodrow Wilson about an armistice based on his Fourteen Points, he made a surprising proposal. He suggested something that he called “revolution from above.” This was to be a transformation of the German political system that would demonstrate to the Allies that Germany was now under progressive, even democratic leadership, and that the change had been accomplished by, rather than in spite of, Kaiser Wilhelm. Actually, the plan was far from revolutionary; its most radical innovation was giving representatives of the Reichstag a place in the cabinet. This made it possible for Ludendorff, and later the kaiser, to assent. Modest as the changes were, however, in the context of Prussian and Hohenzollern history and in the eyes of the conservatives they were a shocking violation of tradition. Even Hertling, not a Prussian, resigned the chancellorship rather than accept what Hintze proposed. On September 27 the kaiser—a “broken and suddenly aged man,” according to one officer, but doing everything possible to salvage something of his inheritance—signed a proclamation of parliamentary government, a thing that, as he knew, every one of his forebears except his own father would have considered an abomination. His signature was the strongest imaginable evidence of how desperate the German leaders now understood their situation to be. It was also, sadly, a way of maneuvering the liberals and socialists in the Reichstag into taking a share of the blame for the disaster that was unfolding.

  Hintze insisted that, to demonstrate that the proclamation was not mere empty rhetoric, he must join Hertling in resigning. The kaiser and Ludendorff tried to dissuade him but failed. The situation was unraveling rapidly. On September 30 a member of Ludendorff’s staff, a mere major, was dispatched to Berlin to inform the Reichstag of what was happening on the Western Front. The truth so totally contradicted everything that the Reichstag deputies (and the public) had been told previously that it dealt a mortal blow to the credibility of government and military alike. Three days later “the one prominent royalist liberal in the empire,” Prince Max of Baden, succeeded Hertling as chancellor and was charged with arranging a peace. He was a man of ability though in poor health, and the fact that he was well known within the German establishment for reformist sympathies was supposed to show the Allies that a new kind of government, one with which the democracies could come to terms, was in place in Berlin. The Allies saw only the elevation of a man who was both a relative of the kaiser’s and a member of Baden’s royal house. The choice of Prince Max was ill conceived not because of who he was but because of how he appeared to Germany’s enemies: as simply more of the same.

  On the day he took office the prince signed a note that had been drafted by Hintze and was addressed to Woodrow Wilson. It requested an immediate armistice, accepting the peace terms that the president had been issuing through the course of 1918. Wilson replied promptly and in firm but almost friendly terms, advising the Germans to confirm their acceptance of the Fourteen Points and their willingness to withdraw from all occupied territory. Prince Max’s government, encouraged, signaled its agreement. The Allied armies, meanwhile—this was the second week of October—were briefly stymied on the Western Front. The Americans were finally clearing the Argonne (a dashing young brigadier general named Douglas MacArthur constantly exposed himself to enemy fire), but they had taken heavy casualties during a hard, protracted fight at the end of which they found themselves facing still stronger defenses farther east. Ludendorff found new straws to clutch at. He began to talk of line-shortening measures that could, he insisted, enable the Germans to hold out through the approaching winter, wear down the Allies through attrition, and extract acceptable terms.

  Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur

  A dashing—and risk-taking—young division commander.

  But Wilson was under pressure at home. The American public, after a year and a half of propaganda and patriotic oratory, had become so passionately anti-German as to be in a state resembling mass hysteria. Members of Congress responded in ways calculated to enhance their own popularity. The president had been severely criticized for what was seen as the gentle tenor of his response to the German request, his party had only a thin majority in both houses of Congress, and the midterm elections scheduled for November 5 threatened to give control to his Republican foes. Everything and everyone, the French and British not least, were pushing him to take a harder line.

  Then on October 12 a young U-boat commander fired two torpedoes into the hull of the steamer Leinster as it plied its usual course between Ireland and the west coast of England. Almost four hundred and fifty people perished, a hundred and thirty-five women and children among them. Once again the war was repeating itself. It was the Lusitania revisited, though this time with even more devastating political consequences. All the Allies seized the opportunity to toughen the peace terms that they had proposed earlier, when the outcome of the war had been less certain. Wilson extricated himself from his domestic problems by sending a new note to Berlin. He not only demanded an end to submarine warfare but adopted an entirely new tone. He made reference to the “arbitrary” power of Germany’s military elite and the threat it posed for the world. He declared that any armistice terms must be settled not with him, not even with the Allied governments acting jointly, but with the commanders in the field. With this he took himself off the hook.

  Ludendorff’s talk of holding the line in the west, meanwhile, was being rendered meaningless by events in the east. Hungary had separated itself from the Austro-Hungarian empire, declaring itself an autonomous nation. Emperor Karl, attempting to save something from the wreckage, issued a manifesto that transformed what remained of the empire into a federation in which all the members, even nationalities as obscure as the Ruthenians, would have their own national councils. No one paid attention. All the pieces of Karl’s empire were going their own ways. The remnants of his army were breaking up as well. Various non-Austrian units—Croatian, Czech, Magyar, Romanian, and others—were marching home. The road to central Europe lay open to Franchet d’Esperey’s Army of the Orient. Romania, the source of oil supplies without which the Germans could not have continued the war beyond several months, was his for the taking.

  October 17 brought a gathering of the German Council of War—Kaiser Wilhelm, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the new government’s leading officials. Ludendorff was at his least rational, not only repeating his determination to hold out through the winter (that very night he would learn that the British had made a new breakthrough and were again advancing) but threatening to resign if other generals were allowed even to express their opinions. He demanded that the pointless submarine campaign be continued in defiance of Wilson. The kaiser, somehow, found it possible to agree. Prince Max alone dissented. He adopted Ludendorff’s old tactic, threatening to resign if Wilson’s terms were not accepted in every detail. He carried the day—letting him go so soon after attaching such importance to the creation of his “liberal” government was impossible. In so doing, he broke Ludendorff’s power at a single stroke.

  Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, still commanding the German army group in the north, sent a warning (no longer to Ludendorff, significantly, but to Prince Max) that if an armistice were not arranged soon the enemy could not be kept from invading Germany. General Wilhelm Gröner, who had started the war as head of the German railway system and held other important positions since, finding himself at odds with Ludendorff along the way, reported that at least two hundred thousand troops, possibly as many as a million and a half (it was no longer possible to keep track), were missing, many of them having deserted.

  Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria

  Descendant of English kings, left by the war without a home to return to.

  The blood continued to flow—one hundred and thirty-three thousand French troops were killed, wounded, or reported missing in October—but always the Allies
were attacking and always the Germans were slipping deeper into disorder. The Germans were without replacements, almost without reserves, while the Allies had grown so rich in manpower that they were able to pull the Anzac Corps out of the line. Monash’s troops were near the breaking point. Monash himself had adopted the habit of keeping his left hand pocketed because he could not keep it from trembling.

  On October 22 Admiral Franz von Hipper, newly appointed chief of the German High Seas Fleet, tried to execute what he called Operation Plan 19, according to which his ships were to put to sea and engage the British and American fleets in a final, suicidal Götterdämmerung. Learning of this plan, the crews of three dreadnoughts mutinied at Kiel and ran red banners of revolution up their masts. The Kiel army garrison joined the revolt, which quickly spread, and the kaiser’s prized fleet ceased to exist even as a potential fighting force.

  On October 23 the Germans were shocked to receive a third note from Wilson, who was now only two weeks from the congressional elections. “If the Government of the United States must deal with the military masters and monarchical autocrats of Germany,” the president declared, “…it must demand not peace negotiations but surrender.” Wilson’s harsh new tone provoked a message to the German troops, written by Ludendorff and signed by him and Hindenburg. “Our enemies merely pay lip service to the idea of a just peace in order to deceive us and break our resistance,” it said. “For us soldiers Wilson’s reply can therefore only constitute a challenge to continue resisting to the limit of our strength.” Ludendorff traveled from his headquarters to Berlin, where his purpose was to terminate Prince Max’s dialogue with Washington. Upon arrival he found that his message had created a furor. It had aroused the indignation of a public hungry for peace, of a large part of the Reichstag, of Prince Max, and even of the military. It had provoked so many protests from the army’s field commanders that it had to be withdrawn—a fresh humiliation for Ludendorff. Members of the Reichstag were demanding his removal. Some were saying that if peace was impossible as long as Kaiser Wilhelm remained on the throne, then Wilhelm too must go.