The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  One of the causes of the transport problem was insufficient fuel. Some locomotives were fired by wood or peat, reducing their carrying capacity. Because of labour shortages and falling output per worker, Russia’s coal output did not increase to meet rising demand. Moving coal by rail from the Donets basin and the Urals to factories in the north-west further depleted what was available to the end user. Blast furnaces fell idle for lack of fuel. By December 1916 many war industries had to cease production for a week or longer, and the workers, with nothing to do, returned along icy, unlit streets to slums they could not heat.

  In January 1917, an agent of the secret police reported that ‘Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word. A revolution’, he concluded, ‘if it takes place will be spontaneous, quite likely a hunger riot.’ So far strikes had been driven largely by falling real wages, but on 22 January 150,000 workers marched through Petrograd, and tens of thousands did so in other Russian cities. Although most were doing so to protest their hunger, a significant minority bore banners which linked social distress to political calls: ‘Down with the war’, or ‘Down with the autocracy’.18 Revolutionary socialists wanted delay in order to coordinate these protests. But on 8 March women textile workers took to the streets to demand bread. By the afternoon they had been joined by metal-workers from the war industries, and now the targets were the government and the war. Within two days 200,000 workers were on strike. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, must have felt some ambivalence on hearing the strains of the Marseillaise. At Tsarskoye Seloye the Tsarina wrote one of her tender, loving letters to her ‘own priceless, beloved treasure’, fortifying him and blaming the Duma: ‘It’s a hooligan movement ... But this will all pass & quieten down.’19

  The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison pose for their photograph On 14 March the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies issued its Order Number 1, instructing military units to obey only those orders that did not conflict with those of the Soviet

  Her husband was relying on the Petrograd garrison to restore order. That, after all, was what it was there for. However, its Cossacks were already frater nising with the strikers. There were five regular regiments in the city, but compared with the rest of the Russian army they were disproportionately urban, and their off-duty socialising had alerted them to the grievances of the working-class population. On Sunday, 11 March soldiers in the Pavlovskiy barracks mutinied. By the following morning 20,000 of them were on the streets. The instrument of the Tsar’s authority had not exactly broken in his hand, as Nicholas himself was unable to get to Petrograd. Let down by the railways, he was stranded at the headquarters of General Nikolay Ruszkiy, commander of the northern front. Ruszkiy urged the Tsar to establish parliamentary government. General Mikhail Alekseyev, the chief of staff, on whose advice the Tsar had depended but who had been sick in the period immediately preceding the revolution, endorsed Ruszkiy’s view. But by now the situation was irrecoverable. The Duma had established a provisional committee, which called on the monarch to abdicate, advice which Ruszkiy seconded. Faced with the choice between loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the nation, the Russian army opted for the second. ‘Your Majesty must remember’, Buchanan had sagely advised the Tsar in their last interview two months earlier, ‘that the people and the army are but one.’20 Not much had united the Tsar and the Duma in the past, and the former still misinterpreted the situation sufficiently to blame the latter for the revolution. However, both now rallied to the idea that by going the Tsar would enable Russia the better to wage the war. The Tsar, as ever, did his duty.

  Russia’s Western allies may not have welcomed the revolution but they were hardly surprised by it. Representatives of all three powers, Britain, France and Italy, had conferred with the Russians in Petrograd at the end of January. At one level this was a high point of Entente collaboration: the meeting ranged over strategy, finance and production, and it gave coherence to the idea that simultaneous attacks on all fronts was the best policy. But both the British and French military representatives came away convinced that the Russian army would not be able to mount a major offensive in 1917. The hope that it would come good in 1918 was one which optimists clung to after the revolution: if, as a result, ‘efficient people’ took charge, Christopher Addison, the British minister of munitions, wrote in his diary on 16 March, ’it is the biggest blow to the Germans since the beginning of the War.‘21 Others who knew Russia better, and recognised the challenges faced by its Provisional Government, appointed by the Provisional Committee of the Duma pending the election of a Constituent Assembly, found their faith that the war could be won through liberalism wavering.

  THE NIVELLE OFFENSIVE

  ‘Don’t forget’, Paléologue had communicated in a message to the Provisional Government on 13 March, ‘that the French army is making preparations for a great offensive and that the Russian army is bound in honour to do its share.’22 But even before the revolution, at the Petrograd conference, the Russians had made it clear that they could not support the offensive in the west. The Anglo-French plan for the spring of 1917 was therefore unravelling at two levels. First, the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line had upset its operational assumptions: the left wing of the French offensive on the Aisne now had no opponent. Second, it would not be part of a coordinated assault on Germany’s central position.

  The logical conclusion was to call the whole thing off. But the Tsar’s abdication in Russia coincided with a succession of governmental crises in France, the result in part of the reassertion of civilian controls over the army. Meeting in secret session, the Chamber of Deputies had blamed Joffre not only for France’s military ills at Verdun but also for the overrunning of Romania and the neglect of the Salonika front. In December he was replaced by the bumptious Nivelle, who was convinced that he could scale up the tactics he had used in the Verdun counterattacks to achieve a breakthrough on the western front in forty-eight hours. After that, he asserted, ‘the ground will be open to go where one wants, to the Belgian coast or to the capital, on the Meuse or on the Rhine’.23 But with Joffre’s departure power had flowed from general headquarters to a ministerial war committee, and its principal strategic adviser was not the commander-in-chief but the minister of war. The conqueror of Morocco, the royalist Louis Lyautey, whom Briand appointed to the post in the December reshuffle, loved neither Nivelle nor parliamentary accountability. His distaste for democracy, expressed publicly once too often, brought Briand down.

  On 18 March a former finance minister, seventy-five-hear-old Alexandre Ribot, reshuffled the ministerial pack and appointed a civilian and a socialist, Paul Painlevé, minister of war. Painlevé’s military thinking was shaped by the defensively minded Pétain, who in turn was unconvinced by Nivelle. In a series of meetings in late March, Nivelle argued that his principal worry after the Germans’ withdrawal to the Hindenburg line was that they would do the same again before he had a chance to attack. By carrying on, he would save Russia. The strategic logic was now the reverse of that adopted in December: the Italians were also not ready to attack, so that now the western front offensive was justified precisely because there were not going to be attacks on the other fronts. So fraught had the situation become, with Painlevé caught in a crossfire of competing professional advice, that a meeting was convened at Compiègne under the chairmanship of the president of the republic, Poincaré. Nivelle threatened to resign if the offensive did not go ahead. The Ribot government was caught. It felt that it had to attack somewhere, if only in response to the German declaration of unrestricted U-boat warfare. It was too weak to survive Nivelle’s departure, especially when he had not yet lost a battle: the military still had that much leverage over the civilians. And it was boxed in by its alliance obligations. Lloyd George, himself only just in office and not yet fully established, had taken to the English-speaking Nivelle with so much enthusiasm that he had attempted to have the British army subordinated to French command. He had been stopped, but for this operation Hai
g was answerable to Nivelle and was loyally cooperating with his plan.

  Three days after the meeting at Compiègne, on 9 April the British launched their attack round Arras, at the northern extremity of what would have been the German salient. Its role was strictly limited: to pull German reserves away from the River Aisne. Well planned and well executed, it revealed that the learning curve on which the army had embarked in 1915 was now bearing fruit. Restricted to a front of 24 km, the battle was fought as a series of limited and staged attacks, leap-frogging each other, and with pauses to consolidate after each. The artillery now had both the equipment and the expertise to fight the sort of battle to which it had aspired on the Somme and which was to shape the nature of allied successes for the rest of the war. Nearly 2.7 million shells were fired, over a million more than on the Somme, and 99 per cent of them detonated. Fast-acting graze fuses meant that shells did not bury themselves in the ground, breaking it up and losing their force, but exploded on impact, and in particular cut barbed wire. This firepower was used more discriminatingly: bombardments elsewhere along the line deceived the enemy as to the true point of attack, and intelligence focused the guns on the key sectors. Of nearly 1,000 heavy guns, 377 were concentrated on a 6-km front facing Vimy Ridge, a high point commanding the plain to Douai and the east. Its capture was the task of the Canadian corps, which spent the winter training at platoon and section level for the assault, familiarising itself with models of the ground, and learning to advance in close conjunction with the creeping barrage of the artillery. ‘All you have to do’, one sergeant instructor explained, ‘is to hang on to the back wheel of the barrage, just as if you were biking down the Strand behind a motor ’bus; carefully like, and not in too much of a hurry.‘24 Above the ground, aerial reconnaissance provided the photographic images on which the planning could be based, and later reported progress as the attack went in; beneath it engineers tunnelled into the chalk to lay charges beneath the German front line.

  Directing indirect fire British observers, equipped with binoculars and a periscope, spot the fall of shot and relay corrections by telephone

  The Canadians breasted the crest at 1.18 p.m., having penetrated 4,000 yards of German defences. The capture of Vimy Ridge was a national triumph for Canada, a more auspicious coming of age than the mismanaged landings at Gallipoli had been for Australia. It was also proof that combined arms tactics and careful preparation could successfully link fire and movement to break into the enemy’s position. As well as the integration of artillery support, each Canadian brigade had eighty machine-guns, including a Lewis-gun section for every platoon. Donald Fraser was in the last phase of the attack but still found that as a result of the rehearsal ‘I had absolutely no difficulty in making for my objective without the least deviation’. As the day developed, ‘sleety snow driven by gusts and squalls soon melted making the ground extremely muddy and slippery’. 25 The deterioration in the weather slowed the attack in subsequent days, but so did the impossibility of progressing beyond the range of effective artillery support: in the case of field artillery cutting wire, this was about 2,000 yards. However, the battle of Arras achieved its principal strategic objective: the Germans doubled their strength in the sector within a week.

  It proved of no assistance to Nivelle on 16 April. As a result of the German evacuation of Artois, his front had moved to his right, and he was now attacking out of a cul-de-sac, going from south to north, towards the River Oise. Few roads and railways ran in that direction. The towns on the south bank of the Aisne were small for the infrastructure now required of them. On the north bank the intersected slopes rose steeply to the ridge, along which ran the Chemin des Dames. The Germans had been here since September 1914, and their positions were both strong and deep, the main line hidden on the reverse slope, and behind that and out of artillery range a fourth line was under construction. Nivelle had collected enough guns on his 40-km front to allocate one field gun and one trench mortar for every 23 metres and one heavy gun for every 21 metres. But the depth of the German positions meant that the number of guns per metre of enemy trench was half that. The Germans had ample intelligence of French intentions, and they had 100 machine-guns for every 1,000 yards of front.

  Despite the enemy fire, the gradient and the atrocious weather, the infantry had been set a rate of advance of up to 2 kph, with only the briefest of pauses. Nivelle intended to be on positions 8-9 km deep by the end of the first day. In anticipation of a major breakthrough, the infantry carried rations for three days, and were so encumbered that those with light machine-guns frequently ended up dumping their weapons. At Berry-au-Bac and Juvincourt, tanks, used in numbers for the first time by the French, carried so much petrol that some caught fire, and the remainder outstripped the exhausted infantry meant to accompany them. By the end of the first day, of 132 tanks 57 had been destroyed and 64 had become bogged. None the less, the Nivelle offensive was not as big a disaster as its aftermath suggested. By 20 April, the French had advanced up to 7 km on the west of the front; they had taken 20,000 prisoners and only sixteen of the fifty-two German divisions available had not been through the battle. But in relation to Nivelle’s own declared objectives, trumpeted throughout the army as well as in allied councils, the effects were disastrous. On the rest of the front the gains were negligible, and within a week the hospitals, told to expect 10,000 wounded, were coping with 96,000. Across the army as a whole casualties by 10 May had reached 20 per cent, and in those units directly engaged they were at least double that: one Senegalese division, its soldiers already suffering from frostbite, lost 60 per cent of its strength.

  Rest and recuperation In March 1917 Nivelle cut leave, releasing 5 per cent of the French army at any one time On 29 July Pétain responded to the mutinies by establishing a norm of 13 per cent or ten days’ leave every four months.

  ‘We decided not to make another attack. We expressed our extreme exhaustion, our miseries, our suffering. The high command will doubtless conclude something else.’26 Mutinies began in late April, grew in May, and peaked in June. In all, sixty-eight divisions were affected, and about 40,000 troops. Concentrated in the sector from Soissons to Reims, many of them involved units which refused to return to the line, having had too little opportunity to recover and rebuild. They can be characterised as soldiers’ strikes, reactions to bad command, inadequate officers and poor conditions of service. The French army, it seemed, was still ready to defend France, but on its own terms.

  The mutinies seemed to be a very precise episode, linked to the fiasco on the Chemin des Dames. However, they need to be set in a context which is both chronologically longer and socially broader. Verdun had taken its toll. Desertion rates were already rising in the first three months of 1917. And the after-shocks continued into 1918. On the military side of the equation, therefore, the consequences of Nivelle’s offensive represented the culmination of a process begun in 1914. Moreover, France’s generals, while ready to address the problems with military palliatives, were quick to blame them on the mood of pacifism and political uncertainty at home. In doing so, they were of course side-stepping their own responsibilities, but they were also reflecting the fundamental social truth of a mass army in a major war - the truth that the Tsar had been slow to grasp. Citizens who had become soldiers for the duration of the war had not thereby lost their civilian identities. They would become conscious of the degree to which that had happened only when they got home (if they got home) after it was over.

  French civilian morale also drooped in the first half of 1917. Strikes in January and May 1917 spread from textile workers to munitions factories. For all Halévy’s concerns about the influence of the radical socialist, Alphonse Merrheim, most of the protests were reflections of the cost of living rather than of revolutionary sentiment. By January 1917 food prices in Paris had risen 40 per cent since July 1914, and by July 92 per cent: real wages had fallen 10 per cent. A survey conducted in June 1917 on the orders of the ministry of the interior found morale g
ood in three departments, fairly good in thirty, indifferent in twenty-nine, and bad in eight.27 Significantly in those regions with low morale, the behaviour of soldiers on leave was cited as a factor. The Gares du Nord and de l‘Est, the railway stations in Paris through which most troops going to and from the front passed, became a focus for pacifist agitators, and symbolised this link between feeling at the front and in the civilian population. The general mood may not have been pacifist, but it was certainly defensive rather than aggressive. Joseph Caillaux, prime minister in the 1911 Moroccan crisis, who had condemned the war in 1914 and was rumoured to have German contacts, was canvassed as a possible prime minister. Caught between socialist demands for a negotiated settlement and the publication of an extensive war aims package agreed with tsarist Russia, Ribot’s government collapsed at the end of August. He was replaced by Painlevé, a compromise candidate, but a compromise to which the socialists refused to subscribe; the union sacrée of 1914 was broken.

  On 31 May 1917 Bandsman Poitou wrote home to his wife that he had seen a train bringing soldiers back from leave in Paris to Château Thierry: ‘the poilus were singing the Internationale, crying down with the war, long live the revolution[.] I believe it is the portent of an imminent revolt.’28 It was not, but that was not evident at the time, and it worried more significant players than Poitou. On 8 May Pétain was appointed to succeed Nivelle as commander-in-chief. He responded to the complaints about leave and rest. He handled the mutinies with restraint: of 629 soldiers condemned to death between May and October 1917, only 43 were executed.29 But he also embarked on a programme of political education for the troops, emphasising the wider strategy of the war and the contribution to its purpose that the United States’s entry would make. His solutions, in other words, were both military and political. His closeness to Painlevé reunited the strategic outlooks of general headquarters and the government, and confirmed that France would adopt the defensive for the time being.