The First World War

by John Keegan

  The British, hurried to Ypres in October 1914 to stop the open gap in the Western Front, had got below ground level wherever and as best they could. Shelter pits, which one man could dig at the rate of one cubic foot of earth removed in three minutes, or enough to give him cover in half an hour, became trenches when joined up.4 More often, the first shelter was an existing ditch or field drain; when deepened, or as rain fell, these ready-made refuges filled with water and proved habitable only at the expense of great labour or not habitable at all, as the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers discovered south of Ypres in October 1914. “The roads and many of the fields are bordered by deep ditches … the soil is clay, mostly, and sand … The Company Commanders set their men to dig behind covering parties [holding the front from the Germans opposite] … C and D [Companies] dug regulation traversed trenches by sections. A [Company] dug by platoons … B Company dug a support trench … and left one platoon to man it. The other three platoons went to a willow-lined dry ditch behind Cellar Farm … and improved it with their trenching tools.”5 In December, on a nearby sector, they took over a similar sector: “Within twenty-four hours it was ‘rain, rain, rain.’ The winter floods had come, the ditch turned out to be a stream which opened into the river; it was one of the main drains in this much-drained low country. The parapet fell in right and left; the ditch-trench ran with a rapid current and had to be abandoned by day.” With the help of the Royal Engineers and timber from a local sawmill, the trench was eventually revetted and built up above water level. “[The timber] had to be driven into a moving mass of mud … by men working in two feet … of water, within shouting distance of the enemy … Two weeks of hard labour produced a dry trench with a floor above the ordinary flood-water level … In 1917 it was still the driest trench in the sector.”6

  The longevity of this trench was unusual; static though the Western Front was to become, few stretches endured in their original state from 1914 until 1917. The Fusiliers’ experience in January 1915 in a position near the River Lys, south of Ypres, explains why:

  the Lys was still rising, so it was decided to let the trenches go and build a breastwork. Work began today [January 25] … On land where water lay so near the surface it was often difficult to find earth solid enough to fill sand-bags, so during the following weeks the battalion toiled building breastworks out of liquid mud. The wooden frames for the parapet were made in sections by the [Royal] Engineers. These sections, large brushwood hurdles, sheets of corrugated iron, and innumerable sand-bags, formed the load of the nightly carrying-parties … On the left of the Battalion front a gap was found through which much of the trench there could be drained for occupation … While breastwork and trench were in the making the company wiring sections worked in rivalry … in time, belts of barbed wire several yards across, fixed on stakes, stretched across the entire front. Until the line was completed, and that was not for weeks, it remained disconnected. To get along a company front, parts had to be taken at the double or by a flying leap, running the gauntlet of German snipers, who accounted for most of the casualties during the first months of the year.7

  Bit by bit, battalions like the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers turned the British sector of the front into a defensible and moderately habitable line. The Germans, whose decision to retreat from the Marne to ground of their own choosing allowed them to avoid the wet, low-lying, overlooked sectors they left to their enemies, were better established. Theirs had been a deliberate strategy of entrenchment, as reported by the commanders of the pursuing French formations which were stopped in sequence as they advanced from the Marne. On 13 September, Franchet d’Esperey signalled in his evening report to Joffre at GQG that Fifth Army had encountered a new phenomenon, an organised trench system extending beyond the city of Rheims on both sides, which his advance guards could neither turn nor penetrate. In the few days following, each of the other army commanders transmitted similar intelligence. On 15 September, Foch reported from Ninth Army that he had been stopped by an entrenched line stretching eastward from Fifth Army’s flank. On 16 September Sarrail, from Third Army, signalled that it was in continuous contact with the enemy who had “surrounded Verdun with a network of trenches” which he could not carry by infantry assault. Castelnau, on his right, found the same day that his Sixth Army was faced by a continuous trench line he could not outflank, while on 17 September Dubail, First Army, reported that his front was crossed by a continuous line of trenches thrown up by labourers the Germans had impressed from the local population.8 From Rheims to the Swiss frontier, therefore, the Germans had already succeeded in carrying out Moltke’s order of 10 September to “entrench and hold” the positions reached after the retreat from the Marne, while from the Aisne northwards towards the English Channel a line of entrenchments was being dug piecemeal as the series of short-range outflanking movements failed one after the other. The last of these stages of the “Race to the Sea” ended in episodes of ditch-deepening, scraping, scrabbling, pumping and rough field-carpentry, as described by the officers of the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, all under the fire of an enemy dug into higher, drier ground on the ridges that overlook Ypres and its surroundings from the east.

  The British, who had learnt recent and important lessons in South Africa, where the Boers had taught them at the Modder and Tugela rivers the value of complicating any trench system, compensated for the inferiority of their overlooked positions in Flanders by digging in duplicate and triplicate, an insurance both against sudden infantry assault and artillery damage. The Germans, who had last dug earthworks around Paris in 1871 and otherwise derived their knowledge of trench warfare from indirect studies of the Russo-Japanese War, had a different doctrine. In two instructions, issued on 7 and 25 January 1915, Falkenhayn ordered that the western armies were to fortify the front in a strength sufficient to assure that it could be held with small numbers against attack by superior forces for a long time.9 Falkenhayn’s insistence on this point derived from his pressing need to find reinforcements from France and Belgium for the campaign in the east, where the demands of the fighting in Masuria and the battles on the Vistula, together with the necessity to prop up the Austrians in Galicia, exerted a growing drain on his resources. He had already sent thither thirteen divisions, and another seven, excluding locally raised formations, would go before the crisis in the east would pass. Those transferred, moreover, were among his best, including the 3rd Guard and six other peacetime divisions and four first-line reserve divisions, including the 1st Guard Reserve. They represented over one-tenth of his western field army and a third of its peacetime Prussian formations, those most counted upon for their offensive qualities.

  The army in the east was growing into a formidable striking force. That remaining in the west, though continuing to include an elite, thenceforth comprised a disproportionate number of non-Prussian formations, Bavarians, Saxons and Hessians, of weaker Reserve and of undertrained war-raised divisions. It is not surprising, in the circumstances, that the doctrine of defence Falkenhayn laid down was draconian. The front line was to be the main line of resistance, built in great strength, to be held at all costs and retaken by immediate counter-attacks if lost. Secondary positions were to be dug only as a precaution. Some German generals, including Prince Rupprecht, commanding Sixth Army opposite the British in Flanders, objected even so to the digging of a second line, believing that the front troops would hold less firmly if they knew there was a fall-back behind them. Not until 6 May 1915 was a binding order issued by OHL for the whole of the German front to be reinforced by a second line of trenches, two to three thousand yards to the rear.10 By then, however, the main line of resistance was becoming a formidable fortification. In the chalk of Artois and the Somme, on the heights of the Aisne and the Meuse, the German infantry were burrowing deep beneath the surface to construct shell-proof shelters. Concrete machine-gun posts were appearing behind the trenches, which were heavily walled with timber and iron. Parapets were thick and high, trench interiors floored with wooden walkways. Mil
itarily, the German front grew in strength week by week. Domestically, it was even becoming comfortable. Electric light was appearing in the deeper dugouts, together with fixed bedsteads, planked floors, panelled walls, even carpets and pictures. Rearward from their underground command posts ran telephone lines to their supporting artillery batteries. The Germans were settling in for the long stay.

  The French permitted themselves no such comforts. The occupation of France by the enemy—the departments of Nord, Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Oise, Aisne, Marne, Ardennes, Meuse, Meurthe-et-Moselle and Vosges lay partly or wholly under his hand by October 1914—was an intrusion to be reversed at the earliest moment. Occupation was worse, moreover, than a violation of the national territory. It was a grave disruption of French economic life. The eighty French departments not directly touched by the war were largely agricultural. The ten occupied by the Germans contained much of French manufacturing industry and most of the country’s coal and iron ores. If only to prosecute the war, it was urgent that they be recovered. Joffre therefore deprecated the construction of an impermeable front line on the German model, since he wanted to use the positions his soldiers held as a base for decisive offensives across no man’s land. In a sense, however, he was bound with Falkenhayn by the imperative to economise forces. Whereas his German opponent, however, wanted to turn the whole of the Western Front into a passive sector, so as to find troops for the east, Joffre wanted to subdivide it into passive and active sectors, the former providing attack forces for the latter. Geography dictated where the subdivisions should fall. The wet and the hilly sectors—Flanders in the north, the heights of the Meuse and the Vosges in the south—should be passive. The active sectors should be those intervening, particularly those shouldering the great German salient in the Somme chalklands at Arras and in Champagne near Rheims.

  Two offensives in those sectors in December proved premature. The First Battle of Artois, 14–24 December, ended without any result. The Winter Battle in Champagne, which began on 20 December, dragged on, with long pauses, until 17 March, costing the French 90,000 casualties and bringing them no gain in territory at all. There was also local and quite inconclusive fighting further south, in the Argonne, near Verdun, in the St. Mihiel salient, and around Hartmannweilerkopf in the Vosges, a dominant point to which both sides sent their specialised mountain troops, Jäger and Chasseurs Alpins, to engage in fruitless assaults against each other; “le vieil Armand,” as the French called it, was to be the grave of many of their finest soldiers. Joffre, brought to recognise that the French army was as yet too ill-equipped, the German trenches too strong, for any decisive result to be gained, reconstituted his plans. During January he issued two instructions laying down how the front was to be organised. In the first, he ordered that the active sectors were to consist of strongpoints sited to cover the ground to the front and to the flanks with fire. The passive zones in between were to be garrisoned only with lookouts, and to be heavily wired but held by fire from the active zones. Across the whole front, active and passive, two belts of wire were to be constructed, twenty yards or so apart and about ten yards deep, with gaps for patrols to pass through. Behind the line of strongpoints there were to be secondary positions with shell-proof shelter for counter-attack companies.11 A survey of the fronts of the eight French armies revealed that most of the work Joffre required had already been done. In his second January letter he therefore stipulated that the front be strengthened by the digging of a second line some two miles to the rear, resembling the first, as a precaution against local break-ins. Such work had already been completed in the Verdun and Rheims sectors. Joffre added the general instruction that fronts were to be held as thinly as possible, to economise manpower and avoid casualties, and that local commanders should avoid pushing outposts too close to the enemy’s positions, a practice he thought wasteful of lives.

  That was the exact opposite of developing British policy, which was to “dominate no man’s land” by redigging trenches closer to the enemy’s and staging frequent trench raids. The first trench raid appears to have been mounted on the night of 9/10 November 1914 near Ypres by the 39th Garwhal Rifles of the Indian Corps.12 Fierce irruptions into enemy positions under cover of darkness was a traditional feature of Indian frontier fighting and this first murderous little action may have represented an introduction of tribal military practice into the “civilised” warfare of western armies. The event set a precedent of which the British were to make a habit and which the Germans were to copy. The French, despite their long experience of tribal warfare in North Africa, never found a similar enthusiasm for these barbaric flurries of slash and stab. Disposing of many more field guns in their corps reserves than either the British or Germans did, they preferred to dominate their defensive fronts from a distance with artillery fire, for which, after the solution of the shell shortage of the winter of 1914–15, they were amply supplied.

  These three different methods of holding the Western Front, along the line on which it had settled in November, would not have been much apparent to an overflying observer in the following spring. From the air it had a drably uniform appearance, a belt of disturbed earth, ravaged vegetation and devastated buildings some four miles across. Later, as the power of artillery increased and local infantry fighting conferred advantage on one side or the other, the zone of destruction would widen. What would scarcely change for the next twenty-seven months was the length of the front or the geographical trace which it followed. That remained apparently unalterable by the effort of the armies on either side until, in March 1917, the Germans voluntarily surrendered the central Somme sector and retired to shorter, stronger, previously prepared lines twenty miles to the rear. Until then the Western Front stood the same, month after month, for almost every yard of its length, running in a reversed S shape for 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border. It began at Nieuport in Belgium, where the sluggish Yser discharges seaward between high concrete embankments thirty yards apart. The eastern bank was held by the Germans, the western—since Joffre could not bring himself to entrust this critical hinge to the Belgians, even as defenders of their own territory—to the French. Below Nieuport’s complex of locks, and behind its high rampart of holiday hotels that front the coastal dunes, in 1914 quickly gapped and broken by artillery exchanges, the front followed the line of the Yser southward through a perfectly flat landscape of beetfields and irrigation channels, above which the roads run on causeways, as far as Dixmude, where a spur of slightly higher ground runs out from the Flemish ridges towards the sea. After November 1914, much of this territory was under water, the inundations forming a barrier impassable to the German naval troops who held the breastworked trenches on the eastern side.

  Below Dixmude the line again ran just above sea level to Ypres, which it skirted in a shallow loop—“the Salient”—overlooked from November 1914 until October 1918 by the German trenches on the higher ground at Passchendaele and Gheluvelt. The medieval wool trade had brought wealth to Ypres, displayed by a fine cathedral and a magnificent cloth hall. Both were far advanced in ruin by the spring of 1915, together with the seventeenth-century ramparts and nineteenth-century barracks at the rear of the town, past which so many thousands of British troops were to march southwards, along a route best judged to spare them from shelling on their way to and from the trenches. Behind Ypres the ground rises towards “Flemish Switzerland,” Kemmel, Cassel and the Mont des Cats, where British generals had their headquarters and troops released from duty in the line found recreation in the little towns of Poperinge—“Pop”—and Bailleul. “Pop” became a place of mixed attractions to the BEF: the famous Talbot House, Toc H, run by the Reverend Tubby Clayton for the high-minded and churchy who were prepared, as he insisted, to shed rank once inside its doors; the infamous Skindles for officers who wanted a good meal and the company of loose women. Skindles today is scarcely identifiable, but Toc H survives, its attic chapel, “the Upper Room” breathing the Anglican religiosity of suburban volunteer so
ldiers pitched headlong into the hell of early twentieth-century warfare. The dim, stark chapel under the eaves remains a deeply moving way-station to any pilgrim to the Western Front.

  South of Ypres the geographical advantages enjoyed by the Germans become more evident in the ridges of Aubers and Messines, frequent objectives of British offensives, and in the coalfields around Lens, where spoilheaps provided vantage points and pitheads, too, until they were destroyed by shelling. Nearby, at La Bassée, the line entered France and began to ascend the chalk ridges of Artois. Here early hydraulic engineers, seeking the aquifers that lie deep beneath the surface, had first developed the artesian well—the well of Artois—and here the soil provided for the German defenders the best conditions for defensive positions they were to find on the Western Front. The chalk belt extends southwards, through the Somme, into Champagne, but nowhere did the Germans better dominate their enemies than at Vimy, where to the east the dip slope of the ridge falls suddenly and dramatically into the plain of Douai, which thence runs towards the great north-south strategic railway, the “ligne de rocade,” linking Lille with Metz. Because the division between upland and plain at Vimy is so radical, it was a feature which the Germans had to hold and they were to do so against repeated Allied assaults until it was taken in an epic Canadian assault in 1917.