The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  The static nature of the front line enabled the armies to lay down light railways to transport shells and other supplies to the front lines. But horses were still basic to their transport systems Britain sent more oats and hay (by weight) to France than ammunition.

  Haig’s belief that offensives should be fought on broad, not narrow, fronts, and be preceded by long, not short, bombardments was born at the battle of Neuve Chapelle, the first of the British spring offensives in 1915. But Neuve Chapelle also highlighted the intractabilities of communication, and the consequent difficulty of knowing when and where to commit reserves. On 10 March 1915, at 8.05 a.m., after a short (thirty-five-minute) bombardment, the infantry launched a surprise attack. In the centre the German front line was taken in ten minutes and the village of Neuve Chapelle itself was in British hands before 9 a.m. Reports of these initial gains reached Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, the corps commander, within an hour. Douglas Haig, by now commanding one of the two armies into which the expanding British Expeditionary Force had been divided, ordered a cavalry brigade to ready itself and harboured hopes of his whole army beginning a general advance. But the artillery had been less effective on the left, and there the attack came under fire from its flank. The British did not take the German front line until 11.20, and therefore the lead units on the right. were in danger of being isolated, and were told to wait for further instructions. Communications went up the command chain from battalion to brigade, from brigade to division, and at last reached corps headquarters five miles back. At 1.30 p.m. Rawlinson issued instructions for a fresh advance at 2.30 p.m., but the supporting units were not ready, and at 3 p.m. he set the attack for 3.30. Orders had to be transmitted back down the line of command, acquiring more detail as they went. Those passing between division and battalion had taken between one and two hours throughout the day. At 3.30 the artillery opened fire; and hit its own infantry. By 4 p.m. both the forward brigades were attacking but without artillery support or effective lateral communications between themselves. The light was failing, surprise had been lost and enemy defence was hardening.

  Neuve Chapelle confirmed that the biggest constraint on the conduct of land war was the lack of real-time communications. Infantry in fixed positions could bury telephone wire from the front line back to their supporting artillery and higher commands. However, as they went forward to attack they lost contact. They could unroll wire as they advanced but it was frequently cut by shellfire. Wirelesses were still too heavy to be man-portable; they were the preserve of higher commands and navies. Pigeons could do the job if the wind and weather conditions were right, but they were reluctant to fly on the damp, still days which tended to prevail on the western front. Drizzle or mist prevented other forms of observation - the firing of rockets or flares, or the waving of flags in order to indicate progress. The Germans used dogs to carry messages, but the usual method of communicating progress or of calling for support was human. Runners had to renegotiate the open ground they had just crossed in the attack. Even if they survived, their information was old by the time it was in the hands of those for whom it was destined.

  Accordingly, generals could do little to intervene in the immediate decision-making of a battle. The creation of mass armies and the necessity of dispersion in the face of modern firepower meant that the battlefield had extended, while at the same time apparently emptying. The supreme commander could not take in the situation with a sweep of his field glasses from some vantage point. Now his tasks were more managerial than inspirational. He found ‘himself further back in a house with a spacious office, where telegraphs, telephones and signals apparatus are to hand’, Schlieffen had written before the war. ‘There, in a comfortable chair before a wide table, the modern Alexander has before him the entire battlefield on a map.’16 Linear, positional warfare exacerbated this trend, forcing the commander to place himself behind his troops. The German response to the problem was to delegate command forward, confining instructions to general directives and avoiding detailed orders. British officers were used to smaller forces and more hands-on command in colonial campaigns. Moreover, mobile warfare in 1914 had briefly kept alive the notions of a more heroic age. In the course of the entire war seventy-one German and fifty-five French generals lost their lives, and it is reasonable to assume that most of those who did so in battle were killed in the opening months. British generals proved almost foolhardy by comparison: between 1914 and 1918 seventy-eight were killed in action, an enormous total given that the army did not really expand until the front had stabilised and startling confirmation of the assertion of Cyril Falls, himself a staff officer, that British generals were in fact ‘too eager to get away from their desks’.17 What they found hard to accept was that vital decisions were being taken at lower levels of authority. At the beginning of the war the corps of, say, 30,000 men was the key operational command. But the corps was squeezed from the top by the creation of army and army group commands, and from the bottom by the division of about 12,000 men. The latter took the corps’ place as the lowest all-arms operational formation, and acquired an identity which was more lasting and cohesive than that of the corps. The task of heroic and inspiring leadership passed even lower down the command chain to junior officers, the commanders of companies, platoons and even sections.

  One reason why activity on the ground became nocturnal. German soldiers mount a camera on to an observation balloon Although the balloon would float behind German lines, it was still vulnerable to attack by enemy aircraft

  In 1915 Entente strategy had an ad hoc quality. The western front represented an irreducible minimum. That was particularly the case for France, although it did not prevent the French from pursuing other options in the eastern Mediterranean, at Gallipoli and Salonika. The British seemed still to have a measure of choice. Some Liberals, particularly Reginald McKenna, Lloyd George’s successor as chancellor of the exchequer, cleaved to the notion that Britain’s primary contribution should be naval and economic: it should be the arsenal and financier of the Entente. McKenna argued that British manpower would be best used if it sustained home production and thus ensured the flow of exports that would fund Britain’s international credit and its ability to buy arms overseas and supply them to its allies. But McKenna’s hopes were ill founded. When Kitchener was appointed secretary of state for war in August 1914, he set about the creation of a mass army for deployment on the continent of Europe. By July 1915 the War Office was talking of seventy divisions, a tenfold increase on the army’s size a year before. Although originally raised through voluntary enlistment, such an army could be kept up to strength only by conscription. Many of the men McKenna wanted on the factory floor were needed by the army, and the produce of those that remained went to equip that army, not to support Britain’s overseas balance of trade.

  Kitchener himself suggested Britain should delay its major effort until 1917, by which time the Continental armies would have fought each other to a standstill and the British could take the credit for ending the war. The New Armies’ training and equipment was a lengthy process, but they could not realistically be held back for that long. In the short term the obvious reserves of manpower lay in Russia, but if the Russians were to do the hard fighting in 1915-16 they - not Kitchener’s New Armies - should get the fruits of Britain’s war industries. The retreat of the Russian armies in the summer of 1915 and the defeat at Gallipoli confirmed that Kitchener’s notion of choice was as illusory as McKenna’s. The Russians had now even greater need of British munitions, but they were also desperate for direct military support from the west to draw off the Germans. Furthermore, in France Joffre faced hardening political opposition. By sacking the most republican of his army commanders, General Maurice Sarrail, for perfectly proper military reasons, he provided a focus for the left’s criticisms of the army’s independence of political control. The government of René Viviani came under threat, and with it the national cohesion embodied in the union sacrée. Britain feared the upshot of a dom
estic political crisis in France. Their worst nightmares embraced a government under Joseph Caillaux and the possibility that he might seek an accommodation with Germany. Kitchener reversed his views of Britain’s role on the western front: on 19 August 1915 he told Haig that ‘we must act with all our energy, and do our utmost to help the French, even though by so doing, we suffer very heavy losses indeed’.18 British strategy was tied to that of its allies, and of France especially.

  A senior French officer, said to be Joffre, wearing a helmet borrowed from an artilleryman, concludes a tour of inspection as he comes out of a communication trench

  Thus, as the Central Powers began to pull apart, those of the Entente converged. On 29 June 1915 Joffre warned of the dangers of allowing the Germans to pick off one power at a time: ‘An energetic combined offensive, involving all the allied armies other than the Russian, is the only means of warding off this danger and of beating the enemy’.19 Attacking on the western front was vital not just for strategic reasons: if on the defensive, he argued, ‘our troops will little by little lose their physical and moral qualities’.20 He had been planning an attack in Champagne since late June. The president of the republic, Poincaré, was among those opposed to further offensives, but British support gave Joffre the leverage over his political masters that he needed in order to go ahead. Operations in Artois in May had convinced the French, like the British, that if they had enough artillery and attacked on a sufficiently broad front they could break through; the key was to have supporting formations ready to carry the attack beyond the first line and so to enable the breakthrough to be achieved in one bound. On a front of 35 km, the French had 900 heavy guns, over 1,000 field guns, and thirty-seven divisions: at the point of attack the Germans could match nineteen divisions with five. On 24 September, after five days of French artillery preparation, Karl von Einem, commanding the German 3rd Army, got Falkenhayn to come to the telephone: ‘I spoke to him for a moment, and so was able to tell him that personally everything was going very well. One must always show these people a serene countenance and a confident spirit, otherwise one would be deemed nervous - whether with good reason or not would not matter.’ At 11 a.m. on the following morning, von Einem spoke to Falkenhayn again. Von Einem had just been told that the French had broken in at Souain, and asked for at least four divisions as reinforcements. ‘He answers me that the British are attacking in the north, and that His Majesty therefore relies on every man to do his duty.’21

  The British attack was part of a second and simultaneous allied offensive, in Artois, and running from the slag-heaps of Loos in the north to the dominating ground of Vimy Ridge in the south. Joffre later calculated that fifty-four French divisions and thirteen British were engaged on a total front of 90 km. But Falkenhayn’s and von Einem’s sang froid was justified: the Germans had constructed a second position, five to six miles behind the front line, beyond the range of the French artillery, and on a reverse slope so that it was out of direct observation. Total Entente losses reached a quarter of a million for minimal gain. Foiled in his attempt at breakthrough, Joffre fell back on another rationale for his attack: ‘We shall kill more of the enemy than he can kill of us’.22 It was to become a familiar justification for the failure to break through. But in this case German losses were only 60,000.

  Joffre did not fall; Viviani did, albeit over developments in the Balkans rather than on the western front. A new government under Aristide Briand fended off the threat from the left, which was appeased by Sarrail’s appointment to the Salonika command. In the event Loos affected the British running of the war more profoundly than did the failures in Champagne that of the French.

  Both British and French generals were agreed that the breakthrough would be achieved not by the first wave of troops, who would break into the enemy front line, but by the second, who would pass through the first wave once it was on its objectives and carry the attack forward. Traditional notions of generalship dictated that the reserve should be in the hands of the supreme commander, who would decide when to commit it in the light of the overall situation. But the delays in communication and in getting forward over a shelled and fractured battlefield in muddy weather argued that control of the reserves - and therefore command authority - should be delegated. Charles Mangin, commanding a French division at Vimy on 25 September, waited thirty-five hours for two battalions to get forward: ‘For fifteen days I have said that it is necessary’, he fulminated three days later, ‘not only to place the reserves near the front, but to put them in the hands of those who have to employ them, the divisional commanders.’23 In the British case, Douglas Haig, commanding the 1st Army at Loos, had asked his commander-in-chief, Sir John French, to release two reserve divisions before the battle. French had refused, perhaps in part because unlike Haig he could not persuade himself that the attack was going to succeed. He did commit the two divisions by 9.30 a.m. on the 25th, within forty-five minutes of Haig requesting them, but the disorganisation and the distance of their march meant that they did not enter the battle until the following day. Haig used the episode and his influence with King George V to have French recalled and himself installed as commander-in-chief.

  Haig brought to the responsibility he now exercised more than royal favour and a capacity for intrigue. He possessed an inner certainty, buttressed by his Presbyterian faith, which gave him resolve and direction. His biggest difficulty was that which confronted all his colleagues in an army which had expanded so quickly: used to exercising personal command in small formations, he did not know how best to lead a mass army or how to get the best from his staff. He none the less created a team at General Headquarters in France to whom he proved exceptionally - and even excessively - loyal. He also used his position to lobby in London for a change in the strategic direction of the war. The army in France, like the cabinet at home, had lost faith in Kitchener. His insights were not matched by organisational ability, and his enthusiasms could be at variance with the consistent support that French had needed but had not necessarily received. Under Kitchener, the army’s general staff, newly formed just before the war, had been allowed to wither. Haig wanted Sir William Robertson, whose career had blossomed thanks to the opportunities staff-work afforded, appointed as its chief. Robertson had served in France as quartermaster-general and then chief of staff, and ‘contained in his cylindrical person a quite unusual proportion of character and common sense to the cubic inch’. The King not only backed Robertson’s appointment but also agreed that he should be responsible not to the secretary of state for war but to the War Council, the committee of the cabinet responsible for the formulation of strategy. Thus in early December 1915, six months before he was drowned when en route to visit Russia on board HMS Hampshire, Kitchener was being bypassed in the formulation of policy.

  Robertson is too often remembered simply as the doughty defender of Haig and the supporter of the western front. He was both those things, in that he saw it as his job to enable the commander-in-chief of the principal British army in the field to get on with the conduct of operations in Britain’s major theatre of land war. But he was far from being simply Haig’s puppet. Robertson had joined the army as a private soldier and lacked the obvious social graces of those with whom he now had to deal: ‘Arrogant, aitchless when excited, and flat-footed (figuratively and physically), he lurched down Whitehall, an ambu- lating refrigerator’.24 His difficulties were compounded by the fact that he said not what the politicians wanted to hear but what his professional judgement indicated was right. He could not promise a quick victory. His message on 8 November 1915 was one of realism: the defeat of the Central Powers ‘can only be attained by the defeat or exhaustion of the predominant partner in the Central Alliance - Germany’.25

  By 1917 the key word here was to be exhaustion, but in December 1915 Robertson, like other Entente commanders, was less sure. Writing to Kitchener on the 27th of that month, he said that ‘we can only end the war in our favour by attrition or by breaking through the German li
ne’.26 In having it both ways Robertson reflected Joffre’s response to the Champagne battle: designed to achieve breakthrough, it was explained as ‘grignotage’, or nibbling, when it failed. But ambiguity vitiated clear planning. At Neuve Chapelle, Haig had scented the opportunity for breakthrough and had readied his cavalry accordingly, but General Rawlinson had set more limited objectives from the outset. Rawlinson argued that, as a well-prepared and well-supported attack could break into an enemy position but not could not break clean through, this reality should be reflected in planning. Attacks should aim to take a ‘bite’ out of the enemy line, and then hold it; that would force the enemy to counterattack and so confer the tactical advantages of the defender on the attacker.

  Rawlinson’s method promised to exhaust the enemy, but it faced two significant imponderables. First, it passed the initiative to the enemy: he might decide he did not need to regain the lost ground, and so call the attacker’s bluff. Rawlinson could guarantee only that this would not occur where it was important for the enemy to regain the ground he had lost. Vimy Ridge, with its commanding height, was an example, as was the ring of hills to the east of Ypres: the town screened the Channel ports and the pivot of the British Expeditionary Force’s supply system, and the high ground guarded the Roulers railway junction and the hub of Germany’s transport network behind the western front. A breakthrough at either Vimy or Ypres might have major operational consequences. As a result attritional battles tended to occur at locations where breakthrough battles also were likely to occur. And that was the second imponderable implicit in ‘bite and hold’. It was only a method, a means to exhaust the enemy; the point would come when that had been accomplished and an allied attack would be able to break through. Haig, both at Neuve Chapelle and at Loos, had persuaded himself that the exhaustion of the enemy and the breakthrough could be part of the same battle. Neither Rawlinson nor Robertson shared that assumption.