Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  It became a day of desperate local actions in a dozen places, of attack and counter-attack, a steady drain of losses to German riflemen who sniped from vantage points in tree branches. The Coldstream and then the Irish Guards arrived to give support. Men of four battalions fought sporadically through the day, bewildered about everything save the need to shoot at the enemy wherever he appeared. At one point, just as the Grenadiers started an attack some two hundred Germans lying in a root field north of the farm suddenly rose to their feet, put up their hands, and advanced waving a white flag. British soldiers were marshalling these dejected figures as prisoners when another enemy infantry unit began firing on the mingled men without discrimination. George Jeffreys of the Grenadiers wrote: ‘I don’t believe there was any intentional treachery on the part of the Germans. Their leading line had had enough and meant to surrender. Incidentally they had hardly any ammunition left. Their supports in rear, however, had no intention of surrendering and opened fire when they got a good target. I had no idea what good cover a root field could give to men lying down; they were as invisible in it as partridges.’

  No general directed the Soupir battle – battalions and companies simply fought as best they could. Officer losses were crippling. In the Guards regiments which boasted so many aristocrats, blue blood flowed freely: as Lord Guernsey spoke to Lord Arthur Hay, both fell dead to bullets fired by a single skilful German rifleman. The Connaught Rangers suffered 250 casualties, the Grenadiers 120, the Coldstream 178. A young Grenadier private named Parsons collected twelve stragglers of another battalion lacking an officer or NCO, and commanded them all day with notable efficiency, a performance which won him promotion and a mention in dispatches. But Parsons, like so many others, would be dead within weeks.

  That evening the Guards dug in, while shells fell on British billets behind the front, half a mile down the hill in Soupir village. Of that night Jeffreys wrote: ‘I tried to sleep, but it was too cold, and a row of German wounded … continuously calling out “Kamerad” also kept me awake – I had never before realized the meaning of “My wounds stink and are corrupt.” These undressed wounds did stink and were corrupt!’ When a Connaught Ranger offered Jeffreys a mug of tea, the major was so disgusted by recollections of the Connaughts’ alleged poor showing during the retreat that he was tempted to decline, but eventually succumbed to temptation.

  The fighting at Cour de Soupir continued through the days that followed, as did the losses. The Germans launched big attacks and made small gains, from which they had to be dislodged. Each clash cost lives, and the British in their turn achieved no important advance. On the afternoon of 16 September, a German shell landed in a quarry on the lip of which a Grenadier company was deployed; all the British wounded lay inside. More than half the Grenadiers, fifty-nine men, were killed immediately, along with eleven men of other units and the only medical officer on the position – Dr Huggan, a celebrated Scottish international rugby player. Class distinction prevailed even in death. The Grenadiers’ George Jeffreys read the burial service by torchlight over the British and German other ranks, who were committed to large pits dug by a crossroads. Meanwhile the bodies of the fallen British officers were dispatched down the hill, to be interred in Soupir churchyard.

  Capt. Lionel Thurston of the Oxf & Bucks, which joined the Soupir battle, wrote to his family on 20 September: ‘A week ago … we came up against the Germans in a prepared position and since then we have not budged an inch, it has been HELL … The place here is a regular cockpit; 150 oxen were roasted to death two days ago, and all the cows have been shot and yesterday, out of the remaining five pigs only two escaped.’ Capt. Rosslyn Evelegh was killed by a shell when he rashly exposed himself to put a wounded pig out of its misery. Thurston concluded fastidiously: ‘There are about 500 dead Germans lying about 800 yards from our trenches and I really think something should be done about it as they have been there for four days.’

  Bernard Gordon-Lennox wrote: ‘We were subject to a hell of a bombardment all day … We could from the trenches see a good deal of the German position and could see them digging like blazes too, but their guns are awful hard to find. Throughout the day shrapnel was bursting right over and on us. Ma [Jeffreys] and Doctor Howell, short and fat, came round. Howell says he is giving up “going for strolls”.’ Some British gunners made a bourgeois little calculation that the afternoon’s bombardment of their sector had cost the Germans £35,000 in shells. The new CO of the Grenadiers, Wilfrid Abel-Smith, wrote to his wife: ‘The men are splendid and I think their bravery in disregarding danger is largely due to British stupidity. I don’t think they realize their danger, which is a great blessing, and makes them stand like rocks, when the highly-strung foreigners can’t stick it. But the men are tired, I can see that.’

  Though Soupir became especially notorious as a scene of British frustration and blood-letting, the BEF suffered similar experiences along the length of the Chemin des Dames, as did the French on their right. The sugar factory at Cerny became a place of special ill-repute. Casualties bore notably heavily on a handful of regiments. Between 15 and 17 September, the Loyal North Lancashires attacking Troyon lost nine officers killed and five wounded, together with five hundred other ranks. One company, which crossed the Aisne two hundred strong, found itself reduced to two officers and twenty-five men. On the 20th the West Yorkshires were outflanked in a disastrous little action which caused most of the battalion to surrender. The Germans suffered in like measure. Warrant Officer Ernst Nopper recorded on 23 September that his company had shrunk from two hundred men to seventy-four: ‘Major Zeppelin wanted to shoot himself when he heard of these losses.’

  The men who fought on the Aisne found the experience far worse than anything that had happened to them at Mons or Le Cateau, because the battle was so protracted. On the Chemin des Dames, they began to explore the new nature of warfare, in which operations were continuous and battles went on for weeks on end without respite or decision. Barrages sometimes persisted for hours, with shells landing around a given position at intervals of seconds. A German officer wounded in September said presciently, ‘in this war the last word will be spoken by the artillery’. The occupants of the trenches appeared men of mud: baths were a distant memory; few even among the officers contrived to shave; much of the BEF had been wearing the same clothing since Mons.

  The character of the struggle was changing, as men grasped a simple message: those who wished to survive must make themselves invisible. Soldiers newly arrived on the Aisne battlefield were struck by its apparent emptiness, at all times save when an attack was in progress. Only the crack and whizz of bullets, the crump of shells, showed that a war was being carried on. At night, they learned to curse the single jumpy soldier, on one side or the other, who fired a shot which provoked a storm of musketry and shelling along the front. Haig asserted on 14 September that ‘it was impossible to rely on some of the regiments in the 3rd Division which had been so severely handled at Mons and Le Cateau’. On the 20th he described how the West Yorkshires ‘ran away’ and had to be forcibly restrained and herded forward again by dragoons.

  Back in Britain on 22 September The Times wrote: ‘“Are the Germans giving way?” is the question on all lips.’ No, they were not. When Julian Grenfell scowled at a German officer and some men whom they took prisoner, thinking of his own men killed by them, the German looked him in the face and saluted. Grenfell repented of his own anger: ‘I have never seen a man look so proud and resolute and smart and confident, in his hour of bitterness. It made me feel terribly ashamed of myself.’ Capt. John Macready of the Bedfords wrote:

  Had we but known it, this was the beginning of trench warfare … There was, of course, no wire, and trenches were far apart, the intervening ground being covered with fire. Patrolling went on nightly, through the Boche’s lines and back again. We lost many men through sniping, so much so that in one of Allason’s forward platoons, no movement whatsoever could be made in daylight. The morale of this post wa
s definitely down … The weather became hot and the smell of dead bodies in the woods was dreadful, both Germans and our own had fallen in odd places and not been discovered. Carcasses of horses and cattle were even worse. Bit by bit we got them buried, but it takes some doing to bury a cow which has swollen to three times its normal size.

  British casualties on the Aisne averaged 2,000 a day. One soldier wrote: ‘Troops are beginning to get downhearted here, as the Germans have proven themselves to be a better army than we thought … Germans held this same position and beat the French in the 1870 war.’ A German artillery NCO, Wilhelm Kaisen, wrote on 2 October: ‘I have seen attacks which have caused men to shake their heads in disbelief because they were so mindlessly conducted. Even English officers see that an assault on a front of 6–800 metres against a well-prepared position is a waste of human life.’ He asserted that infantrymen went into attacks carrying far too much equipment, making their movements painfully slow, and deplored the grim repetition of horrors: ‘First, we shell a village for a day, until everything is destroyed. Then infantry advance with bayonets fixed, and a murderous struggle develops. I watched some Bavarians who discarded their tunics and fought in shirtsleeves, reversing their rifles and laying about them with the stocks. Then enemy artillery fire starts, and an impenetrable pall of smoke and flame descends. Anyone who escapes unscathed is blessed with luck.’

  A few months later, when field censorship was established, Kaisen’s letter would never have reached its destination, because he asserted that so disastrous were infantry losses that without replacements, neighbouring regiments would have ceased to exist. Within minutes of one lieutenant joining Kaisen’s own battery, the young man received a chance shell splinter in the back which rendered him a corpse. Stocks of ammunition of pre-war manufacture were exhausted, making gunners of all the armies dependent on hasty wartime production, of much inferior reliability and accuracy. ‘The Germans are brave to the point of utter foolishness,’ Capt. Ernest Shepherd of the BEF wrote to a friend in Alabama – implausibly, although himself British he was a former member of the Alabama National Guard. ‘Fancy a thousand men massed in regimental formation … coming on unfalteringly to trenches manned by the finest shooting soldiers in the world … This is a very ghastly business, and there has never been its like before.’ In truth, of course, there had been its like before – the US Civil War, as Shepherd might have been expected to know. But the collective British consciousness took little heed of the precedent.

  Only a few men on either side still affected braggadocio, like a German soldier who wrote home on 4 October: ‘one does not take the Englishman seriously over here … You should have seen how those fellows could run … We popped them in cold blood amid gales of laughter. They went down like flies at ranges of up to 12–1300 metres.’ So did Germans. On 21 September, Dr Lorenz Treplin told his wife that only a third of his regiment remained; six of its officers had been killed and a further thirty wounded: ‘it is terrible how modern war goes on and on’. By now, few men in any army advanced towards the front with any of the illusions of August. German soldier Kresten Andresen, one of the doomed, wrote in his diary on 28 September: ‘We are so benumbed that we march off to war without tears and without terror and yet we all know we are on our way into the jaws of Hell. But clad in a stiff uniform, a heart does not beat as it wants to. We aren’t ourselves. We’re hardly human any longer, at most we are well-drilled automatons who perform every action without any great reflection. O, Lord God, if only we could become human again.’

  The Battle of the Aisne officially ended on 16 October, when the BEF relinquished its positions to French territorials. The month-long struggle became a focus of impassioned debate during the years that followed, and indeed after the war. Had Sir John French’s army missed a great opportunity, by its sluggishness in pushing forward to the Aisne, crossing the river and exploiting beyond? Could a breakthrough have been achieved by concentrating force on a narrow front, rather than crossing the Aisne in a dozen places? From the outset of the Marne offensive, the British moved embarrassingly slowly, against weak opposition. They never pressed the retreating Germans, who were able to choose their ground on the Aisne, siting their guns at leisure to punish the allies as they crossed the river and strove to exploit beyond it.

  More dash and drive might indeed have enabled the BEF to reach the eastern bank with less exertion and fewer losses. But, that said, it is most unlikely that an important strategic opportunity was lost. On the Marne, the German army had been forced into an untenable predicament, but not shattered. Reinforcements were rushed forward to the Chemin des Dames, even as the British scrambled upwards towards the ridge. British field artillery in the valley below, capable only of flat-trajectory fire, could offer negligible support to the hapless infantry above, while German howitzers enjoyed full play. Attempts to reach the high ground were never likely to succeed when men were required to advance fully exposed across open fields – and the Germans were equally handicapped when attacking the other way. The Aisne battle emphasised the lessons of everything that had happened since August: on favourable ground where other things were more or less equal, defenders were hugely advantaged over attackers.

  Strange novelties manifested themselves. Cavalrymen clamoured to be issued with bayonets, because they almost invariably fought dismounted. Some artillery horses had been conscripted from farms, and bucked in terror when first they heard their guns go into action. Drivers struggled to control wildly rearing, kicking beasts through the weeks necessary to master their new role – if they lived that long. British soldiers stopped complaining that they were being mocked when enemy units’ bands played the tune of the British national anthem, as one did on the Aisne front on 18 September. It was explained to them that the music of ‘God Save the King’ was also that of ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz’, the Kaiser’s anthem. Nobody could explain to the soldiers of any army, however, why it was that the heaviest fighting so often took place on Sundays.

  On 16 September, Sir John French visited in hospital a group of wounded British officers who asked him what was happening. The commander-in-chief replied: ‘at present, stalemate in our favour’, which caused one of his hearers to write home in some bewilderment, ‘whatever that means’. The C-in-C wrote to King George V, in a letter which gained widespread post-war attention: ‘I think the battle of the Aisne is very typical of what battles in the future are most likely to resemble. Siege operations will enter largely into the tactical problems – the spade will be as great a necessity as the rifle, and the heaviest calibres and types of artillery will be brought up in support on either side.’

  French’s view, and his gloom, were shared on the other side of the hill. Schlieffen had always feared that a campaign of movement might give way to paralysis: ‘all along the line the corps will try, as in siege warfare, to come to grips with the enemy from position to position, day and night, advancing, digging in, advancing again, digging in again, etc., using every means of modern science to dislodge the enemy behind his cover’. Now, Schlieffen’s apprehension had become reality. ‘This trench- and siege-warfare is horrible!’ lamented Prince Rupprecht’s chief of staff. Grenadier George Jeffreys wrote wearily, shortly before his battalion was relieved by French Territorials: ‘One day very like another. There is nearly always shelling.’ Freddie Guest, one of Sir John French’s ADCs, described the incessant German attacks to a friend at home: ‘It beats me how they can get their men to do it,’ but added bleakly: ‘I am afraid you will see another big casualty list soon.’

  The BEF could take pride in the stubbornness with which it held its ground on the Aisne through a month of savage fighting, which gravely depleted many units. But, if the allies had not lost the battle, nor had they won it. Both sides now strove desperately to identify ground somewhere between Switzerland and the sea where manoeuvre might achieve a decision in the vast contest to which they were committed.

  11

  ‘Poor Devils, They Fought Their Ships L
ike Men’

  The clash of armies in continental Europe dominated the First World War, at least until Germany launched its major U-boat campaign in 1917. Yet the British people nursed a persistent delusion that the Royal Navy would fight a great battle against the German High Seas Fleet, because this was what their heritage – and vast expenditure on dreadnoughts – had conditioned them to expect. They wanted a naval showdown, because they believed this would suit their interests, and nursed lasting resentment that they were not allowed to have it. A ‘Trafalgar complex’ dogged British thinking in 1914, in defiance of the simple logic that the Germans were unlikely to accept an engagement they could not expect to win, because so heavily outnumbered. In the first months of war every detail of the activities of the Royal Navy excited the British public more than anything their soldiers did, though the sailors’ role was much less immediately significant.

  The English Channel on the morning of 30 July presented a strange spectacle, following the eastward night passage of the Grand Fleet towards its war station at Scapa Flow. Tables, armchairs, even pianos bobbed in its wake: crews had hurled overboard from the columns of great warships every kind of inflammable furniture and fittings, in anticipation of an imminent collision with the enemy. A similar purge was conducted in the German High Seas Fleet. Admiral Franz von Hipper noted in his diary: ‘The living spaces look bad. Everything that might burn has been torn out. Cosiness suffers severely from that.’

  Junior officers on both sides, and even some senior ones, sustained for more than four years an eagerness to fight which was all the stronger because almost untested. Europe’s soldiers quickly learned that war was a ghastly matter for mankind in general and themselves in particular. Sailors did not. Naval cadet Geoffrey Harper of HMS Endymion expressed adolescent delight at the expiry of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany: ‘Very good news.’ Lt. Francis Pridham of Weymouth noted on 4 August: ‘Very great excitement and enthusiasm on board.’ Commander John McLeod wrote to his mother: ‘If it comes off, it is for me personally what I joined the Navy for. I feel perfectly placid and free from care.’