The First World War

by John Keegan

  It was thus agreed between the French and British. There was to be a spring offensive, jointly British and French in Flanders and Artois, French alone in Champagne.21 Indeed, this first agreement was to set the pattern for much of the Allied effort on the Western Front throughout the war. The pattern was to be repeated in the coming autumn, during 1917 and, finally with success, in 1918. Only in 1916 would the Allies attempt something different, in the offensive against the centre of the great German salient to be known as the battle of the Somme.

  This, however, is to anticipate the failure of the spring offensive of 1915. Fail it did, however, for reasons to become tragically familiar with every renewal of the French and British efforts. There was, indeed, warning of failure before the spring offensive ever began, in the miscarriage of a minor and preliminary attack by the British at Neuve-Chapelle in March. All the contributing factors that were to bedevil success in trench offensives for much of the war were present, both the functional and structural. The functional were to be cured, in time, the structural persisted, even after the development and large-scale deployment of the tank in 1917. Among the functional were inadequacy of artillery support, rigidity of planning, mispositioning of reserves and lack of delegation in command. Among the structural were the relative immobility and total vulnerability to fire of advancing infantry and absence of means of speedy communication between front and rear, between infantry and artillery and between neighbouring units. The unfolding of action at Neuve-Chapelle demonstrates the operation of all these factors as if in a military laboratory.

  THE WESTERN FRONT BATTLES OF 1915

  Neuve-Chapelle was launched partly because Sir John French was unable to comply with Joffre’s request that the BEF assist the preparation of the coming Artois offensive by taking over more of the French line, partly, it seems though never stated, because the Field Marshal was anxious to restore his army’s reputation, damaged in French eyes by its failure to win ground during the December fighting. The plan was simple. Neuve-Chapelle, a ruined village, twenty miles south of Ypres in the Artois sector into which the British had been extending their position as fresh troops arrived in France during the winter, was to be attacked on 10 March by the British 7th and 8th Divisions and the Meerut and Lahore Divisions of the Indian Corps. The front of attack was about 8,000 yards, behind which 500 guns had been assembled, to fire a stock of 200,000 shells, mainly light-calibre, into the enemy trenches, the barbed wire protecting them and certain strongpoints in the rear.22 There was also to be a “barrage”—the term was French, meaning a dam or a barrier—of bursting shells fired behind the German trenches, parallel to the front of attack once it was under way, to prevent German reinforcements reaching their stricken comrades. The British and Indians, as they advanced, would be supported by reserves moving forward to take further objectives, but only on the receipt of orders from General Sir Douglas Haig, at First Army, through the subordinate corps, divisional, brigade and battalion headquarters.

  The bombardment, which opened at seven o’clock in the morning, took the Germans by complete surprise. That was an achievement, rarely to be repeated; even more of an achievement was First Army’s success in having assembled the leading waves of an attack force of sixty thousand men within a hundred yards of the enemy in complete secrecy, a fact scarcely ever to occur again. The defenders, belonging to two infantry regiments and a Jäger battalion, about one-seventh in strength to their assailants, were overwhelmed. Their wire had been extensively cut, their front trench destroyed. When the British infantry assaulted at five past eight, they were not opposed and within twenty minutes a breach 1,600 yards wide had been opened in the German line. The makings of a victory, local but significant, had been won.

  Then the functional factors making for failure started to set in. The British plan stipulated that, after the first objective 200 yards inside the German wire was taken, the infantry was to pause for fifteen minutes while the artillery shelled the ruins of Neuve-Chapelle village in front of them. The intention was to disable any remaining defenders waiting there. In fact there were none. Those that had escaped the initial bombardment were hurrying rearward towards the strongpoints which had been built precisely to check such a break-in as the British had now made. After this second bombardment the British followed fast, into open country beyond the bombardment zone and scenting triumph. Orders, however, now required that they should wait for a second time. The commander of the battalion in the centre, 2nd Rifle Brigade, managed to send back a message requesting permission to disregard the order and continue the advance. Surprisingly—there were no telephone lines and this was the pre-radio age—it was received; even more surprisingly an answer was returned from brigade headquarters speedily enough to affect the situation, wholly for the worse. Permission to move forward was refused.

  It was now about half past nine and the Germans were recovering their wits. Falkenhayn’s tactical instruction of 25 January had laid down that, in the event of an enemy break-in, the flanks of the gap were to be held and immediately reinforced, while reserves were to hurry forward and fill the hole. That was what was beginning to happen. On the British left, where the bombardment had left the German positions intact, two machine guns were brought into action, by the 11th Jäger Battalion, killing hundreds of soldiers of the 2nd Scottish Rifles and 2nd Middlesex; on the right, the attackers had lost their way, an all too common occurrence in the broken ground of the trench zone, and stopped to get their bearings. During the delay, the Germans there hastily organised the defence of that flank. Meanwhile, according to plan, fresh British battalions were crowding into the gap opened by the leading waves. By ten o’clock, “roughly nine thousand men [were squeezed] into the narrow space between Neuve-Chapelle village and the original British breastwork [where] they lay, sat, or stood uselessly in the mud, packed like salmon in the bridge pool at Galway, waiting patiently to go forward.” Fortunately, the German artillery batteries within range had little ammunition available.23

  The British artillery, which had ample stocks, could not rapidly be informed of the deteriorating situation, one of the structural defects contributing to failure. Without radio, communication depended on flag signals or runners, the first usually obscured, the second slow and vulnerable. At half past eleven a bombardment was organised against the 11th Jäger’s machine-gun positions, and an officer and sixty-three men came out to surrender, having killed about a thousand British soldiers. Precise and timely bombardment of their and other strongpoints could not be attempted because the gunners could not be informed. All the while the local German commanders, junior but determined and well-trained officers, were hurrying reserves to the flanks by bicycle or on foot. By contrast, and here the functional contribution to failure was at work, the British junior officers were passing their observations of the local situation, as the plan required, back up the chain of command so that authority could be granted for any alteration of the all-defining plan they requested. Behind the battle zone, telephone lines speeded communications but it was still painfully, indeed lethally, slow. “The Corps commander in some room five miles or more from the battle had to make a decision on the flimsiest and often false information, and the necessary orders had then to travel back, along the same chain, to be considered and written out in greater detail at each stage (divisional headquarters, brigade headquarters, battalion headquarters), till finally they reached the front-line companies.”24 What all this meant, in terms of the actual rather than planned timetable in this particular trench battle, was that between nine o’clock in the morning, when the German line had been broken and a way forward lay open for the taking, and the writing of firm orders to exploit the success at ten to three in the afternoon, nearly six hours elapsed. By the time those written orders had filtered down, via telephone and runner, another three hours were lost. The time the advance was resumed on the ground was between half past five and six.25

  Dark was drawing in and so were the German reserves. The flanks of the break-in had be
en secured before midday. By nightfall fresh German troops, hurried forward from battalions in rearward support, were filling the open gap and bending their flanks forward to join up with the positions at the edges which had never been lost. Next morning the British renewed the offensive but thick mist prevented their artillery from locating targets and the attack soon stopped. It was now the turn of the Germans to discover that structural defects could impede the operation of a well-laid plan. On the day of the original attack, 10 March, a fresh division, the 6th Bavarian Reserve (in which Adolf Hitler was serving as a battalion runner) had been ordered forward to deliver a counter-attack in the early morning of 11 March. On a dark night and across country, however, the troops simply could not march fast enough to reach their designated jumping-off positions. The attack was therefore postponed for a day, at the order of Prince Rupprecht, commanding Sixth Army in whose sector Neuve-Chapelle lay, after he had come to see the situation for himself. When, on the morning of 12 March, the attack did go in, it was immediately stopped with heavy German losses. The British front-line commanders had used the pause imposed by the mist the day before to consolidate their foothold and site twenty machine guns in commanding positions.

  As a result, the “exchange ratio” of casualties, as it would now be termed, at Neuve-Chapelle, was eventually almost equal: 11,652 British killed, wounded, missing and prisoners to about 8,600 German.26 That was to become a familiar outcome of trench-to-trench offensives, large and small, throughout the course of the war, whenever an initial assault was followed by an enemy counter-attack. The reasons, in retrospect, are easy to identify. At the outset, the advantage lay with the attackers, as long as they could preserve a measure of secrecy, a diminishing possibility as the war prolonged and defenders learnt how greatly survival depended upon surveillance and alertness. Almost as soon as the attackers entered the enemy’s positions, however, the advantage tended to move towards the defenders, who knew the ground, which the attackers did not, had prepared fall-back positions, and were retreating towards their own artillery along, if lucky, intact telephone lines. The attackers found themselves in exactly the opposite situation, moving into unknown and confusing surroundings, and away from their supporting artillery the further they advanced, thus progressively losing contact with it as telephone lines were broken or left behind. Then, when the defenders counter-attacked, the advantage reversed. The attackers had familiarised themselves with the ground taken, organised its defences, to their advantage but the enemy’s confusion, and re-established telephonic communication with their artillery. In this seesaw, functional and structural weaknesses disfavoured first one side, then the other, to the eventual frustration of all effort to break through to open country or break back to the original line of defence. The physical product of offence and counter-offence was an ever thicker and more confused trench line, resembling a layer of scar tissue, picked at and irritated, over the site of an unsuccessful surgical operation.

  The British nevertheless judged Neuve-Chapelle a partial success, if only because it restored the fighting reputation of their army in French eyes. It was unfair that it should ever have been doubted. What was at issue was not the combativeness of the British soldier but the still colonial outlook of their commanders, who expected decisive results for a comparatively small outlay of force and shrank from casualties. French generals, from a different tradition, expected large casualties, which their soldiers still seemed ready to suffer with patriotic fatalism. The British soldier, regular, Territorial, wartime volunteer, was learning a similar abnegation, while their leaders were coming to accept that operations in the new conditions of trench warfare could succeed only with the most methodical preparation. The qualities of dash and improvisation that had brought victory in mountain and desert for a hundred years would not serve in France. The only dissentients from this new and harsher mood were the Indians, for whom Neuve-Chapelle marked their swansong on the Western Front. They would fight again, in the coming battles of Festubert and Loos, but not as a striking force. Losses already suffered had crippled many battalions and the sepoy, raised in a tradition of warrior honour quite different from the European, could not understand that a wound did not exempt the recipient from a return to the trenches. “We are as grain that is flung a second time into the oven,” wrote a Sikh soldier to his father the week after Neuve-Chapelle, “and life does not come out of it.” A wounded Rajput had written home a little earlier, “This is not war, it is the ending of the world.”27 By the end of the year the two Indian infantry divisions would have been transferred from France to Mesopotamia where, in a desert campaign against the Turks, they rediscovered a more familiar style of warmaking.

  Neuve-Chapelle was significant also because it anticipated in miniature both the character and the course of the spring offensive in Artois, to which it was a preliminary, as well as its renewal in Artois and Champagne in the autumn. For a moment, indeed, during Neuve-Chapelle, the leading waves of British and Indian troops had glimpsed the way open to the crest of Aubers Ridge, which was to be the British objective during their part of the Artois attack. Before that could be launched, however, the British had undergone an offensive in the reverse direction, in Flanders, which came to be known as the Second Battle of Ypres. The First, which had secured the “Salient” at the end of 1914, had petered out in confused and ineffective fighting, largely conducted by the French, in December. By the beginning of April, however, Falkenhayn had decided, in order partly to disguise the transfer of troops to the Eastern Front for the forthcoming offensive at Gorlice-Tarnow, partly to experiment with the new gas weapon, to renew pressure on the Ypres salient. The attack was to be a limited offensive, since Falkenhayn’s hopes of achieving decision in the west had, he knew, to be postponed as long as Hindenburg and Ludendorff could effectively divert the movement of strategic reserves to the Eastern Front; nevertheless, he hoped to gain ground and secure a more commanding position on the Channel coast.

  Gas had been used by the Germans already, on the Eastern Front, at Bolimov, on 3 January, when gas-filled shells had been fired into the Russian positions on the River Rawka west of Warsaw. The chemical agent, known to the Germans as T-Stoff (xylyl bromide), was lachrymatory (tear-producing), not lethal. It appears to have troubled the Russians not at all; prevailing temperatures were so low that the chemical froze instead of vaporising.28 By April, however, the Germans had a killing agent available in quantity, in the form of chlorine. A “vesicant,” which causes death by stimulating over-production of fluid in the lungs, leading to drowning, the material was a by-product of the German dye-stuff industry, controlled by IG Farben, which commanded a virtual world monopoly in those products. Carl Duisberg, head of IG Farben, had already rescued the German war effort from collapse by his successful drive to synthesise nitrates, an essential component of high-explosive obtainable organically only from sources under Allied control. Simultaneously he was co-operating with Germany’s leading industrial chemist, Fritz Haber, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, to devise a means of discharging chlorine in quantity against enemy trenches. Experiments with gas-filled shells had failed (though, with a different filling, gas shells would later be widely employed). The direct release of chlorine, from pressurised cylinders, down a favourable wind, promised better. By 22 April, 6,000 cylinders, containing 160 tons of gas, had been emplaced opposite Langemarck, north of Ypres, where the trenches were held by the French 87th Territorial and 45th Divisions, the latter composed of white Zouave regiments from Algeria, African Light Infantry (white punishment battalions) and native Algerian riflemen. Next to them was the Canadian Division, first of the imperial divisions to reach the Western Front; the rest of the Ypres salient was held by three British regular divisions, the 5th, 27th and 28th.

  The afternoon of 22 April was sunny, with a light east-west breeze. At five o’clock a greyish-green cloud began to drift across from the German towards the French trenches, following a heavy bombardment, and soon thousands of Zouaves and
Algerian Riflemen were streaming to the rear, clutching their throats, coughing, stumbling and turning blue in the face. Within the hour, the front line had been abandoned and a gap 8,000 yards wide had been opened in the Ypres defences. Some of the gas drifted into the Canadian positions but their line was held and reinforcements found to stem the advance of the German infantry who, in many places, dug in instead of pressing forward. Next day, on the Allied side, there were hasty improvisations. The gas was quickly identified for what it was and, as chlorine is soluble, Lieutenant Colonel Ferguson, of the 28th Division, proposed that cloths soaked in water be tied round the mouth as a protection. The Germans attacked the Canadians with gas again on 24 April, but the effect was less than on the first day and more reinforcements were at hand. Efforts at counter-attack were made both by the French and British. On 1 May there was another gas attack in the jumble of broken ground known to the British as Hill 60, the Dump and the Caterpillar, south of Ypres, where a railway line runs through the spoil heaps of the cutting near Zillibeke. Today the pockmarks and tumuli of this tiny battlezone still exude an atmosphere of morbidity sinister even among the relics of the Western Front. On 1 May, when the soldiers of the 1st Battalion the Dorset Regiment clung to the firestep of their trenches as gas seized their throats and the German infantry pounded towards them across no man’s land, the scene must have been as near to hell as this earth can show. The situation was saved by a young officer, Second Lieutenant Kestell-Cornish, who seized a rifle and, with the four men remaining from his platoon of forty, fired into the gas cloud to hold the Germans at bay.29 Another officer who devoted himself to those gassed reported that “quite 200 men passed through my hands … some died with me, others on the way down … I had to argue with many of them as to whether they were dead or not.” In fact, “90 men died from gas poisoning in the trenches; [and] of the 207 brought to the nearest [dressing] stations, 46 died almost immediately and 12 after long suffering.”30