The First World War

by John Keegan

  The line was held, nevertheless, by the Dorsets’ almost inhuman devotion to duty and the Ypres salient, though pushed back to within two miles of the city, was thereafter never dented. Gas in a variety of forms, the more deadly asphyxiant phosgene, and the blistering “mustard,” would continue in use throughout the war, and chlorine would kill thousands of Russian troops in German offensives west of Warsaw in May. Its intrinsic limitations as a weapon, dependent as it was on wind direction, and the rapid development of effective respirators, ensured, however, that it would never prove decisive, as it might have done if large reserves had been at hand to exploit the initial surprise achieved by the Germans in the Second Battle of Ypres.

  The Allies had no technological surprise with which to inaugurate either of their offensives on the Western Front in 1915, and both failed, with heavy loss of life, for little or no gain of ground. In May, the French and British attacked in Artois, against the high ground from which the Germans dominated their positions, the British against Aubers Ridge on 9 May, the French against Vimy Ridge a week later. Although the French had artillery and ammunition available in quantity—1,200 guns, 200,000 shells—while the British had not, the difference between their achievements was negligible. Haig’s First Army was simply stopped in its tracks. The French, spearheaded by Pétain’s XXXIII Corps, gained the summit of Vimy Ridge, to look down into the Douai plain through which the crucial rail tracks in enemy hands ran, only to be decisively counter-attacked by reserves reaching the summit before their own, positioned six miles in the rear, could join them. It was another example of the structural factors making for failure in trench warfare actually bringing it about.31

  When the offensive was renewed in September, this time in Champagne as well as Artois, the results were scarcely different, though both armies had considerably larger numbers of divisions to deploy than in the spring. Their number had been increased on the French side by reorganisation, which had produced another twelve (numbered 120–132), on the British by further transfers of Territorial divisions to France, and the first appearance there in number of the “New Army” or “Kitchener” divisions of wartime volunteers. The plan of attack had been proposed to Sir John French by Joffre on 4 June. It required as a preliminary that the British take over more of the French line, to free the Second Army, which Pétain had been appointed to command, for the Champagne phase of the offensive. Haig had already in May taken over part of the French front in Flanders; now, in response to Joffre’s request, the new British Third Army moved south to the Somme to relieve Pétain’s army. The British now held most of the line from Ypres to the Somme, leaving a short length near Vimy from which the French Tenth Army would attack as soon as preparations for Joffre’s plan were completed.

  That took time. The will was present—on 7 July, at the first interallied conference of the war, held at Chantilly, the French, British, Belgians, Serbs, Russians and Italians, who had joined the alliance in May, pledged themselves to common action—but the means were not. In late June the French and British munitions ministers had met, when David Lloyd George told Albert Thomas, his opposite number, that both guns and shells were lacking for a major effort by the BEF in France. He wished to postpone the joint offensive until the following spring. Joffre resisted; he wanted urgent action, both to sustain pressure on the Germans and deter the diversion of troops to other theatres. The British government, in which the Conservatives had joined the Liberals to form a coalition ministry on 26 May, recognised that the autumn offensive was a test of confidence and withdrew its opposition. Practical difficulties nevertheless persisted. The British takeover on the Somme took time; so did the preparation of the Champagne battlefield. Both allies were learning that a large-scale attack against trenches could not be launched extempore; roads had to be built, stores dumped, battery positions dug. The date of the opening of what would be called the Second Battle of Champagne was postponed from the end of August to 8 September, then, because Pétain demanded time for a lengthy bombardment, until 25 September.

  The Germans profited from the delay, and the undisguisable signs of impending attack, to strengthen the portions of their line against which they detected the offensive was preparing. Falkenhayn’s instructions of January had laid down that a second position was to be constructed behind the first, with concrete machine-gun posts in between. Despite the enormous labour entailed, the system was complete by the autumn, forming a defensive belt up to three miles deep.32 As experience was already demonstrating that a forward movement of three miles against enemy fire tested an individual burdened with battle-gear to the limit of his physical, let alone moral powers, the German positions in the Western Front were becoming impregnable, certainly against an offensive planned to achieve breakthrough on the first day. Worse still for the attacker, German defensive doctrine required that the second position be constructed on the reverse slope of any height occupied—and the Germans, by careful choice during the retreat of 1914, occupied the high ground—so that it was protected from the Allied artillery fire designed to destroy it. The role of the German artillery was, by contrast, not to bombard trenches but to attack the enemy infantrymen as they assembled and then to lay a barrage in no man’s land once they moved forward; those who penetrated that barrier of fire were to be left to the machine gunners who, experience was showing, could stop an attack at ranges as close as 200 yards or less.33

  The effectiveness of the Germans’ preparations was proved all too painfully on 25 September 1915, at Loos, the site of the BEF’s offensive in Artois, at nearby Souchez, where the French renewed their assault on Vimy Ridge, and at Tahure, la Folie and la Main de Massige in distant Champagne, where the French attacked alone. In both sectors the offensives were preceded by a discharge of chlorine gas. At Loos, the gas hung about in no man’s land or even drifted back into the British trenches, hindering rather than helping the advance. In any case the six British divisions engaged—three regular, 1st, 2nd, 7th, two “New Army,” 9th and 15th Scottish, one Territorial, the 47th—were quickly stopped by machine guns; when two reserve divisions, both New Army, 21st and 24th, were started forward in support, it was from a position so far to the rear that they did not reach the original British front line until dark. They were ordered to resume the advance next morning, which they spent marshalling for the attack. In early afternoon they moved forward in ten columns “each [of] about a thousand men, all advancing as if carrying out a parade-ground drill.” The German defenders were astounded by the sight of an “entire front covered with the enemy’s infantry.” They stood up, some even on the parapet of the trench, and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across the open grassland. The machine gunners had opened fire at 1,500 yards’ range. “Never had machine guns had such straightforward work to do … with barrels becoming hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen falling literally in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption” until they reached the unbroken wire of the Germans’ second position: “Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle the survivors turned and began to retire.”

  The survivors were a bare majority of those who had come forward. Of the 15,000 infantry of the 21st and 24th Divisions, over 8,000 had been killed or wounded. Their German enemies, nauseated by the spectacle of the “corpse field of Loos,” held their fire as the British turned in retreat, “so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy after such a victory.”34 A German victory Loos was; though the British persisted with attacks for another three weeks, they gained nothing but a narrow salient two miles deep, in which 16,000 British soldiers had lost their lives and nearly 25,000 had been wounded. The battle had been a terrible and frustrating initiation to combat for the soldiers of the New Armies, though the Scots of the 9th and 15th Divisions, in particular, seem to have shrugged off casualties and taken setback only as a stimulus to renewed aggre
ssion. Major John Stewart, of the 9th Black Watch, wrote to his wife after the battle, “the main thing is to kill plenty of Huns with as little loss to oneself as possible; it’s a great game and our allies are playing it top hole.”35 His was not a lone voice. The new British volunteer divisions yearned to prove their soldierly qualities and the patriotism of the French still burnt strong. It would be a year or more before the ardour of either army was quenched by the deluge of pointless losses.

  Yet Loos, in strategic terms, was pointless and so, too, were the efforts of Pétain’s Second Army and de Langle’s Fourth in the offensive in Champagne that opened the same day. There twenty divisions attacked side by side on a front of twenty miles, supported by a thousand heavy guns and behind a gas cloud similar to that launched at Loos. The results were equally unavailing. Some French regiments attacked with colours unfurled and the brass and drums of their bands in the front trench. Others, when the advance faltered, found senior officers urging them forward. One of them, the famous colonial general, Charles Mangin, was shot through the chest as he organised an assault, though he returned to duty ten days later. For all his efforts and those of others like him, for all the continuing bravery of the French common soldier, the attempts on the Champagne heights nowhere gained more than two miles of ground. The Germans’ second line was not penetrated and, when the fighting ended on 31 October, their positions remained intact, though 143,567 French soldiers had become casualties.36

  It had been a doleful year for the Allies on the Western Front, much blood spilt for little gain and any prospect of success postponed until 1916. The Germans had shown that they had learnt much about the methods of defending an entrenched front, the Allies that they had learnt nothing about means of breaking through. It was a bitter lesson for the French, all the more so because, in a widening war, their allies seemed bent on seeking solutions elsewhere, leaving the main body of the enemy implanted in their territory. Yet the defeat of the enemy through victories outside France looked no closer a prospect than breakthrough towards the Rhine. In Russia, where German intervention had rescued Austria from collapse, on the new Italian front which had opened in May, in the Balkans, on the Turkish battlegrounds, the course of events favoured the enemy. Only at sea and in Germany’s distant colonies had the Allies established an advantage, and, as they knew, in neither the naval nor the colonial theatres could success bring them victory.

  SEVEN

  The War Beyond the Western Front

  BY THE END OF 1915, none of the original combatants was fighting the war that had been wanted or expected. Hopes of quick victory had been dashed, new enemies had appeared, new fronts had opened. France had the war that most nearly conformed to its General Staff’s peacetime appreciation of strategic contingency, a war against Germany on its north-eastern frontier. Both timetable and costs had gone disastrously wrong, however, and it had unexpectedly found itself involved in subsidiary campaigns in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, as a result of Turkey’s unanticipated intervention in November 1914. Turkey’s entry had also upset Russia’s calculation that it would have to deal with the Germans and Austrians alone; it was now also fighting a bitter and difficult campaign in the Caucasus. Germany had expected a one-front war fought in two stages: first against France, while a token force held its eastern front, then another victorious campaign against Russia. Instead, it was heavily engaged on both the Western and the Eastern Front, on the latter sustaining substantial forces on Austrian territory to prop up its Habsburg ally. Austria, which had thought the war might be limited to a punitive expedition against Serbia, had reaped the whirlwind of its folly, and found itself locked in combat not only with Russia but Italy as well. Serbia had reaped the whirlwind of its intransigence and found extinction as a state. Britain, which had committed itself at the outset only to providing an expeditionary force to widen the French left in Flanders, found itself assuming responsibility for ever longer stretches of the Western Front, while simultaneously finding men to fight the Turks at Gallipoli, in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, to assist the Serbs and to reduce the garrisons of Germany’s African colonies; men had also to be found to reinforce the crews of ships denying the North Sea to the German High Seas Fleet, dominating the Mediterranean, chasing the enemy’s surface commerce raiders to destruction and defending merchant shipping against U-boat attack. The war that men were already beginning to call the Great War was becoming a world war and its bounds were being set wider with every month that passed.

  THE WAR IN THE GERMAN COLONIES

  Germany had had to become an empire itself, the Second Reich, proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871, before it could join Europe’s great powers in the competition for empire. Their extensive conquests left the new state few pickings. North Africa was by then French, Central Asia and Siberia Russian, India British. Heinrich von Treitschke, the ideologist of German nationalism, announced that “colonisation was a matter of life and death.”1 Even so, there was little popular enthusiasm for the acquisition of colonies, perhaps because the only areas still available for exploitation were in the less favoured parts of Africa. It was German traders who supplied the impulse to enter the continent. Between 1884 and 1914, they had established commercial enclaves in Kamerun, Togo, and South-West Africa (Namibia) on the west coast, and what is now Tanzania on the east coast, which the imperial government had then consolidated. Purchase (from Spain) and deliberate imperial effort had meanwhile secured Papua, Samoa and the Caroline, Marshall, Solomon, Mariana and Bismarck Islands in the south and central Pacific. The coastal region of Kiaochow, and its port of Tsingtao, had been seized from China in 1897.

  On the outbreak of war, the British and French at once took action to reduce the garrisons of Germany’s colonies; the Japanese, who had entered the war (on 23 August) on a narrow interpetration of their obligations under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1911, but in practice to improve their strategic position in the Pacific at Germany’s expense, likewise moved against Tsingtao and the central Pacific islands. Japan occupied the Marianas, Marshalls and Carolines during October. Transferred to her by mandate after 1918, they were to form the outer perimeter of her island stronghold in the war against the United States twenty-five years later. Samoa fell to a New Zealand force on 29 August. German New Guinea (Papua) was surrendered unconditionally to an Australian expedition on 17 September, together with the Solomons and the Bismarcks. The reduction of Tsingtao took longer. Heavily fortified, and defended by 3,000 German marines, it presented a formidable military obstacle to any attacker. The Japanese, taking no chances, landed 50,000 men and commenced a deliberate siege. They were later joined by the 2nd South Wales Borderers and the 36th Sikhs from the British treaty port of Tientsin.2 Three lines of defence confronted the attackers. The first two were abandoned by the Germans without resistance. Against the third, the Japanese dug parallels in regulation siege-warfare style and opened a bombardment with 11-inch howitzers, like those which had reduced the Russian defences of nearby Port Arthur ten years earlier. On the night of 6/7 November an infantry assault was delivered, across a no man’s land which had been reduced to 300 yards in width, and the following morning Captain Meyer Waldeck, the naval officer serving as governor, surrendered his force. His marines had lost 200 men killed, against 1,455 Japanese fatal casualties. It had been a brave, if purely symbolic resistance.

  In Africa, the tiny territory of Togo, sandwiched between the British Gold Coast (now Ghana) and French Dahomey (now Benin), was quickly overrun (27 August) by troops of the West African Rifles and the Tirailleurs sénégalais. Kamerun (now Cameroon), a much larger territory, equal in size to Germany and France combined, proved more difficult to conquer. The garrison numbered about a thousand Europeans and three thousand Africans. The Allied force included troops of the Nigeria, Gold Coast and Sierra Leone Regiments under British command, French African infantry and a Belgian contingent brought up from the Congo. Together with tens of thousands of carriers, essential support to any camp
aign in African forest or bush, the army eventually rose to a strength of 25,000. Despite its preponderance of numbers, distance, climate and topography blunted its early efforts. Three British columns were in motion across the Nigerian border by the end of August, each separated from the other by 250 miles of roadless terrain. Near Lake Chad, on the old Central African slave-trading route only recently conquered by the French, one was advancing towards Mora; a second was approaching Yarua, 500 miles from the sea; a third, near the coast itself, was directed at Nsanakang. All three encountered strong resistance and were turned back with heavy losses. The French did better, seizing a coastal bridgehead and winning a small battle at Kusseri, just south of Lake Chad. The arrival of reinforcements then gave the British the advantage and, with the assistance of four British and French cruisers and a fleet of small craft, they secured the coast, captured Douala, the colonial capital and wireless station, on 27 September and started inland up the rivers and the two short colonial railways. The objective was Yaounda, 140 miles inland, where the enemy had an ordnance depot. Skilful German resistance, sustained during the torrential rainy season, delayed the renewal of the advance until October 1915; in the interval, the African soldiers cultivated gardens to supplement their intermittent ration supply.3 Finally, as the dry season opened in November, the Allies pushed forward into the central mountainous region and forced most of the Germans to seek internment in the neutral enclave of Spanish Guinea. The last German post of Mora, where the campaign had opened in the far north eighteen months earlier, surrendered in February 1916.4