Hundred Days : The Campaign That Ended World War I (9780465074907)

by Lloyd, Nick

  Whenever Ludendorff was handed reports from his senior officers advocating withdrawal, he would undoubtedly have given his usual scowl or snapped at his staff officers. A full-scale retreat was not possible for a number of reasons. Firstly, it would send a particularly painful signal of weakness, which might have unforeseen effects at home. It would be difficult to carry out owing to the lack of adequate (lateral) rail lines. It would mean abandoning newly won territory and great amounts of supplies. Therefore, it was unacceptable. Ludendorff’s solution revealed perhaps the greatest flaw in his approach to war, his insistence that only another new offensive would do. Throughout the last days of July and the first week of August, as the Marne line was abandoned, he assiduously worked on yet another plan to shatter the British position in Flanders. Ludendorff clung to this new operation, which he called Hagen (after a character from Wagner’s Ring cycle), like a drowning swimmer clings to a lifebuoy; fearing that if he gave it up he would cede the initiative to the Allies and never get it back. But as events moved rapidly throughout the summer, Ludendorff was forced to postpone and then cancel his cherished offensive. The unfortunate truth was that there were no military solutions to Germany’s problems, only political ones. Ludendorff would come to realize this, but only when it was too late.14

  The military situation may have been unedifying, but that was not all Hindenburg and Ludendorff had to consider. The home front, in particular, was beginning to collapse. If food could be difficult to get in Paris, with its wartime restrictions, it was much worse in Berlin. The summer of 1918 was a depressing time to be in the capital. It was always a grey, sprawling industrial city, noted for its wide streets and imposing stone buildings, but now it had a haunted, besieged feel. News of what was happening at the front was always difficult to come by so rumours and half-truths filled the vacuum. Its citizens had endured difficult periods before, the so-called ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 had been a warning that Germany could not endure for ever, but this was much worse. The Central Powers were dependent on imports of food and raw materials, supplies that had now dried up almost entirely owing to the vice-like grip of the Allied naval blockade. It may not have been possible to see the blockade, but through the mist and the grey wastes of the North Sea its effect was certainly being felt. It had taken several years for the Royal Navy to put significant pressure on Germany and Austro-Hungary, but with the entry of the US into the war in the spring of 1917, the few remaining loopholes were swiftly closed. The noose was getting tighter.

  Gradually the German people entered a dark world of ersatz food; substitutes that were as unappetizing as they were imaginative: coffee made from acorns; tobacco made from beech leaves; bread stuffed with sawdust; sausages made from horseflesh or rabbits. The bread ration had been reduced from seven to five and a half ounces in June and malnutrition was now becoming impossible to ignore.15 ‘You have no idea what life costs in Berlin,’ moaned Leutnant Richard Schütt to his father on 12 August, echoing a common complaint. Schütt was an infantry officer based in Potsdam and was increasingly worried by how bad things were getting. In peacetime 1,000 Deutschmarks may have been a lot of money, but now in Berlin it did not go very far. ‘Everything is five to ten times more expensive,’ he noted. His apartment cost almost twice what it would have in 1914 and laundry was almost four times as expensive, but food remained the central problem. Before the war, he needed only fifty Deutschmarks a month to buy food – about a fifth of his salary – but now he had to pay half that amount every day. ‘There are many people who have much less than me,’ he wrote. ‘They eat in people’s kitchens, middle class kitchens or cook themselves what they can get on food stamps.’ He would have liked to go to smaller, cheaper restaurants, but as an officer one had to frequent the more expensive ones (‘as befitting their social standing’). He told his parents that without their weekly parcel he would have ‘half starved’.16

  For too long the German people had been fed on stories of victory, of military triumphs that surpassed Napoleon, of crushing offensives that would split the Entente. Now, as the summer of 1918 wore on – a wet, damp summer that seemed to hint at an approaching deluge – dissatisfaction with Germany’s position grew. On 8 July, ten days before the Allies would counter-attack on the Marne, Richard von Kühlmann, the Foreign Secretary and man who had concluded peace with Russia at Brest-Litovsk, was forced to resign. Two weeks earlier, he had risen before a packed Reichstag and made an impassioned speech in which he had expressed doubts that victory could be achieved by arms alone. ‘Without some such exchange of views, given the enormous extent of this war of coalitions and the numbers of powers involved in it,’ he said, ‘an absolute end is hardly to be expected from military decisions alone, without recourse to diplomatic discussions.’17 Although von Kühlmann was right – and many in the higher echelons of Wilhelmine Germany agreed with him – the speech seemed to undermine the Supreme Command at a crucial moment, and Ludendorff panicked, shouting down a hot telephone line from Spa that the Foreign Secretary must go. The Kaiser meekly agreed, replacing von Kühlmann with Admiral Paul von Hintze, a quiet naval officer who had little of his predecessor’s sense or integrity. It was a fateful decision. Germany would once more place her faith in a decision on the battlefield. Now there could be no negotiated peace, no declaration on Belgium or the League of Nations; there was only war.

  The German retreat from the Marne left a nightmarish zone of devastation in its wake. Burnt-out tanks littered the countryside; trench lines lay across the landscape like huge, manmade scars; bodies lay clumped together in the wheat, which was trampled down and blown ragged by artillery fire. A French medical officer, serving with Mangin’s Tenth Army, recorded the horrific sights he saw as they followed up the enemy. ‘Everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘golden wheat and pale-gold oats hide the dead amongst the cornflowers and the poppies. We give a mental salute and pass by; inwardly very moved.’ From a distance the region seemed untouched, but up close it was a different matter: ‘trees broken in two, fields churned up, little dug-outs for machine-guns, abandoned munitions, dead horses, legs in the air, ridiculous and heart-breaking, with great disgusting wounds covered with enormous flies, millions of bluebottles which make a noise like an aircraft engine as they fly off.’ The flies were particularly bad. ‘I have never seen so many of them, you just can’t imagine,’ he complained. They killed hundreds with formalin poured into sweetened water, but ‘just as many’ were back again the next day.18

  Casualties in the Marne sector had been enormous. The French, who had borne the brunt of Allied casualties, had lost over 2,500 officers and nearly 93,000 other ranks.19 They had captured 25,000 German soldiers and 600 officers, and seized 3,300 machine-guns, 221 Minenwerfer and over 600 artillery pieces, the vast majority by Mangin’s Tenth Army, but it had come at huge cost.20 Figures for German dead, wounded and missing have never been calculated with any precision, but were, if anything, even worse. Medical reports show that the German Army suffered 165,000 casualties during the month of July, the majority of which would have been sustained in the heavy fighting on the Marne.21 It was little wonder that many Allied soldiers would remember the battle for only one thing: the wheat fields, which were ‘dotted with many rifles, the bayonets of which were stuck in the ground’. According to an American, Private Ralph Williams, who had gone over the top on 18 July, ‘These were swaying in the breeze, marking spots where our fellows had fallen. It was a sickening sight. There seemed to be hundreds of them in just the small area we had covered.’22

  As well as the thousands of broken and bloodied men that came from the front, there was a frightening surge in cases of influenza across Western Europe. This was the first wave of the great ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic that wreaked such havoc and caused such fear, with up to fifty million people dying worldwide before the end of 1919.23 Influenza had always been present, but the number of admissions suddenly surged up during the last summer of the war. In the UK there had been somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 cases each mo
nth during the spring, but over 30,000 were registered in June alone. This epidemic took the form of the so-called ‘three day fever’, which was extremely infectious, and, as the British Medical History noted, would strike suddenly ‘so that barrack rooms which the day before had been full of bustle and life would now be converted wholesale into one great sick room’. Patients would experience a high fever, often up to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, before gradually returning to health within a short time.24 This strain was particularly virulent in the German Army. In the two months of June and July 1918, over half a million soldiers would contract the disease, most of whom were treated in specialized ‘flu infirmaries’ behind the lines. The illness usually began with chills and general malaise, before a fever took hold for 48–72 hours. This ‘lighter’ type of flu was usually not fatal – patients would generally recover within eight or ten days – and had died down by the late summer, and should not be confused with the much more lethal and dangerous strain that emerged over the winter of 1918 and into the following year.

  This second strain of influenza was the killer. As the year progressed, Allied and German doctors began to notice new, more terrifying symptoms in their influenza cases. They would soon become familiar with a list of complaints that included bodily weakness and a throbbing headache, chest pains and a hacking cough. Usually blood-stained froth would be brought up and the patient would then show the usually fatal signs of cyanosis – the blue discoloration of the face that meant death was only hours away. ‘Among the worst forms,’ the German Medical History reported:

  the symptoms that dominated were not the often severe pneumonia that affected several lobes . . . but rather general infection and toxaemia. Severe exhaustion, cyanosis, shortness of breath, slightly quickened pulse, a high, ragged fever, dizziness, and confusion were signs of these. That is why the means of circulation often failed, and pulmonary oedemas resulted in death. Bronchitis and even the melting of the lung structure, both characterized by pus, were found. The spleen was enlarged. Serious relapses and mixed infections ensued.

  The appearance of infected lungs was so distressing that surgeons compared them with the victims of pneumonic plague – the dreaded ‘Black Death’.25

  It was remarkable that this latest horror only produced a kind of grim resignation among the populations of Europe. For the Allies, four years of slaughter and of hopes dashed had drained their people of any optimism or élan they once possessed. Their armies may have marched proudly to war in 1914 confident that victory would come by Christmas, but by the summer of 1918 there were no such thoughts. The armies of the last year of the war – bar only the Americans – did not, and could not, share the illusions of their predecessors. Eyewitness accounts from this time contain little of the enthusiasm and excitement that were shown in the frantic days of August 1914; they are, on the contrary, notable for their glassy-eyed exhaustion, cynicism and depression. To some, it seemed, the war would go on for ever; a bitter joke that was lampooned by the British humorist Bruce Bairnsfather in a cartoon featuring his favourite character, ‘Old Bill’. He was still in the trenches in 1950, now with a long, white beard, noting that the ‘war babies’ battalion was coming out’.26 Everyone, it seemed, was reaching the end of their limits, both physical and emotional, and if victory was to be achieved in 1918, then it would have to come quickly.

  The counter-attack on the Marne may have saved Paris and snatched the initiative away from the German Army, but the war remained to be won. For the leaders of the Allied powers, the summer of 1918 was an anxious and difficult time. The French Premier, Georges Clemenceau, was, at seventy-six years old, the oldest of the major leaders of the war; a symbol of French resistance and devotion to victory that brought his homeland through the dark days of the spring.27 His counterpart in London, David Lloyd George, was in many respects similar: outspoken, wily, untrustworthy, yet devoted to winning the war. Both men were outsiders and radicals, the kind of offbeat politicians that Western democracy often throws up in times of crisis. They had risen to power because, at times, there seemed no one else who could do the job; no one else who still had any fight left within them. For the time being they kept the flame of defiance alive, whatever the cost, hoping that Germany had overreached herself. They would put their faith – what was left of it – in four remarkable soldiers; men who now had the task of winning the war on the Western Front.

  The Allied Generalissimo was General Ferdinand Foch. He was not at first glance a particularly impressive figure. Foch was not notably tall and had deep-set eyes, a large moustache and a high forehead. He usually wore a blue-grey French Army tunic with little adornment, and was often to be seen smoking a cigar, mainly cheap varieties. But beneath the rather unimpressive exterior was a man of quite incredible character. The words used by one biographer, ‘resilient as a rubber ball’, were an apt description of a man who simply would not accept defeat, no matter what.28 Sir William Orpen, the esteemed British portrait artist, painted Foch in 1918 and in the swift, jerky movements of his brush managed to convey something of the energy and mercurial temperament of the Allied Generalissimo. One British officer who knew Foch described him as ‘a man of relentless energy and determination. In conversation he often employed gestures to emphasize his words; two blows in the air with his fists, followed by two kicks, used to show the fate which he reserved for his enemies.’29 He spoke in short, sharp sentences, which may have given some the impression of arrogance or impatience, but was, to those who knew him, typical of a man who was used to command and wanted things to be done quickly, without fuss. Despite his reputation as a habitual optimist, Foch knew the cost of war. In August 1914, his only son, Germain, an infantry subaltern, had been killed in action on the Meuse. After being told the news, Foch allowed himself only half an hour of sorrow, before recovering and, like a rubber ball, getting back up to fight. He straightened his uniform and emerged from his office, urging his staff, ‘Now let us get on with our work.’30

  Foch had been appointed Generalissimo in the dark spring of 1918 when the British and French Armies had tottered on the brink of separation, and thus defeat in detail, under the hammer blows of the great German offensive that had returned manoeuvre to the Western Front. Cooperation and coordination between the British and French had been patchy and ad-hoc since 1914, but with disagreements and defeatism now threatening to leave the Allies at the mercy of their enemies, it was essential to put in place some kind of unity of command. At a fraught meeting at Doullens Town Hall on 26 March, the British and French governments hammered out a decision that was to have immense repercussions. General Foch, the French representative on the Allied Supreme War Council, was commissioned to coordinate the actions of the Allied armies on the Western Front. He was a man renowned for his energy, decision and aggression, and had to do whatever it took to maintain contact; to make sure that the British and French commanders, Haig and Pétain, worked together in the common interest.31

  There was never any question that Foch was the right man for the job. The only other candidate would have been the head of the French Army, General Henri Philippe Pétain, but he was not keen. In any case, there were concerns that his temperament and character were unsuited to the role because no one better epitomized French weariness than Pétain. If Foch represented the passionate Gallic spirit par excellence, then Pétain symbolized the earthier, resigned outlook of the French peasant. A staff officer who served at his headquarters, Jean de Pierrefeu, later remarked that ‘The guiding principle of his mind, and one rarely found among soldiers, pragmatists though they be, was a sort of philosophic background, a noble fatalism.’32 Pétain had always faced the storms of war with a calm serenity and an even temperament, unlike the more mercurial Foch. One distinguished French officer illustrated the difference between the two men by drawing a zigzag for Foch and a straight line for Pétain. While Foch went up and down, Pétain continued, serenely as ever, in a line straight as a die.33 He had been appointed Commander-in-Chief in the bitter aftermath of the f
ailure of the Nivelle offensive in the spring of 1917 and promised that no more large-scale attacks would come. They would wait, he said, for the tanks and for the Americans. Pétain knew that his army was a pale shadow of its former self, a gaunt and bloodied shell of an army that had fought for too long against a superior enemy. Only his dour realism could have kept it going, harbouring its strength for one final push.

  Despite his impressive-sounding brief, Foch’s authority was limited, and crucially he could not order anyone to do anything. The full tactical control of Allied armies was left to their national commanders, who could appeal to their governments if they felt endangered by any of his instructions. But Foch could inspire and suggest, push and prod. His position meant that he had to take a wider view of the war, above and beyond mere national contingents, and almost immediately the Allied war effort began to assume a more coordinated and focused aspect. His appointment lifted some of the crushing pressure from Haig and Pétain and meant that, at long last, Allied operations would be conceived from the brain of one man, his wishes executed by his commanders. According to Joseph Hellé, Chief of Staff to the French Tenth Army, the choice of Foch was ‘singularly felicitous. Through his writings, his teachings, his expert knowledge and his optimism, Foch had made a deep impression on everyone.’ He was, Hellé also admitted, ‘perhaps the only French general from whom the British were willing to take orders’.34