The First World War

by John Keegan

  Descriptions of zero hour on 1 July abound, of the long lines of young men, burdened by the sixty pounds of equipment judged necessary to sustain them in a long struggle inside the German trenches, plodding off almost shoulder to shoulder; of their good cheer and certainty of success; of individual displays of bravado, as in the battalions which kicked a football ahead of the ranks; of the bright sunshine breaking through the thin morning mist; of the illusion of an empty battlefield, denuded of opponents by the weight of the bombardment and the explosion of twenty-one mine chambers, laboriously driven under the German front lines, as the attack began. Descriptions of what followed zero hour abound also: of the discovery of uncut wire, of the appearance of the German defenders, manning the parapet at the moment the British creeping barrage passed beyond, to fire frenziedly into the approaching ranks, of the opening of gaps in the attacking waves, of massacre in the wire entanglements, of the advance checked, halted and eventually stopped literally dead.

  The Germans (who were fighting for their lives) had practised bringing their machine guns up the steps from their deep dugouts hundreds of times. F. L. Cassell, a German survivor, recalled “the shout of the sentry, ‘They are coming’ … Helmet, belt and rifle and up the steps … in the trench a headless body. The sentry had lost his life to a last shell … there they come, the khaki-yellows, they are not twenty metres in front of our trench … They advance slowly fully equipped … machine-gun fire tears holes in their ranks.”54 The machine guns reached even inside the British front line in places, to hit troops who had not reached no man’s land. A sergeant of the 3rd Tyneside Irish recalled seeing “away to my left and right, long lines of men. Then I heard the ‘patter, patter’ of machine guns in the distance. By the time I’d gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone twenty yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself.”55 The whole of the Tyneside Irish Brigade, of four battalions, nearly three thousand men, was brought to a halt inside British lines, with appalling loss of life. One of its battalions lost 500 men killed or wounded, another 600. In offensive terms, the advance had achieved nothing. Most of the dead were killed on ground the British held before the advance began.

  Appalling loss of life was the result of the first day of the Somme along the whole front of the attack. When, in the days that followed, the 200 British battalions that had attacked began to count the gaps in their ranks, the realisation came that, of the 100,000 men who had entered no man’s land, 20,000 had not returned; another 40,000 who had been got back were wounded. In summary, a fifth of the attacking force was dead, and some battalions, such as the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, had ceased to exist. The magnitude of the catastrophe, the greatest loss of life in British military history, took time to sink in. The day following the opening of the attack, Haig, conferring with Rawlinson and his staff at Fourth Army headquarters, was clearly still uninformed of how great the casualties had been and discussed, as a serious proposition, how the offensive was to be continued, as if it were a possibility for the morrow or the day after. He believed that the enemy “has undoubtedly been severely shaken and he has few reserves in hand.”56 In fact, the Germans had brought up several reserve divisions during the day, while the losses suffered by their troops in line—about six thousand altogether—were a tenth of those of the British. The German 180th Regiment, for example, lost only 180 men out of 3,000 on 1 July; the British 4th Division, which attacked it, lost 5,121 out of 12,000. If the Germans had been shaken, it was by the “amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry courage and bulldog determination” and by their eventual revulsion from the slaughter inflicted; in many places, when they realised their own lives were no longer at risk, they ceased firing, so that the more lightly British wounded could make their way back as best they could to their own front line. There was, for the worse wounded, no early rescue. Some were not got in until 4 July, some never. A young British officer, Gerald Brenan, crossing subsequently captured ground in the fourth week of July, found the bodies of soldiers wounded on 1 July who had “crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets round them, taken out their bibles and died like that.” They were among thousands whose bullet-riddled bodies gave up life that day or afterwards, beyond the reach of stretcher bearers or simply lost in the wilderness of no man’s land. Even among those found and carried back, many died as they lay waiting for treatment outside the field hospitals, which were overwhelmed by the flood of cases.

  If there were any exception to the unrelievedly disastrous results of 1 July, it was that the German high command, as opposed to their front-line troops, had been gravely alarmed by the scale of the British attack, particularly because in one sector, astride the River Somme itself, ground had been lost. Unknown, naturally, to Haig and Rawlinson, Falkenhayn reacted to that loss in peremptory fashion, relieving the Chief of Staff of Second Army, in whose sector it had occurred, and replacing him with his own operations officer, Colonel von Lossberg, the main architect of German defensive methods on the Western Front.57 Von Lossberg imposed the condition, on accepting the appointment, that the attacks at Verdun be given up at once, which they were not. Falkenhayn broke his undertaking and the offensive continued until his own dismissal at the end of August. Lossberg’s arrival was nevertheless significant, for his reorganisation of the Somme front ensured that the results of the first day, the outcome of British over-optimism and German hyper-readiness, would be sustained in the later stages of a battle which blunted the German edge relentlessly even as it taught the British a realism their inexperienced soldiers lacked at the outset. Lossberg’s intervention caused the defenders to abandon the practice of concentrating on the defence of the front line and to construct a “defence in depth,” based not on trenches but on lines of shell holes, which the British artillery created in profusion. The forward zone was to be thinly held, to minimise casualties, but ground lost was to be speedily retaken by deliberate counter-attacks launched by organised reserves held in the rear.58

  This German technique defied all Haig’s efforts to exploit such success as had been achieved on 1 July. Not until 14 July, in the sector astride the Somme where the more experienced French had assisted the British to make a clear break-in to the German positions, was further ground gained. Haig’s suspicion of night attacks was overcome by his subordinates and, in an attack at half-light, four British divisions rolled forward to take Bazentin Ridge, Mametz Wood and Contalmaison. On the map the advance looks impressive; on the ground, where the visitor covers the distance in a few minutes of motoring, less so, though the atmosphere of menace clinging to the sector’s small valleys and re-entrants oppresses. Some of the BEF’s cavalry, still Haig’s preferred arm of decision, was brought up during the day but, after a skirmishing near High Wood at one of the Somme battlefield’s most commanding points, was forced to withdraw. Imperial troops, the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions, veterans of Gallipoli, and the South African Brigade, renewed the advance during the second half of the month, taking Pozières and Delville Wood, the latter the site of a South African epic, but no opportunity for the cavalry to intervene recurred. Like Verdun, the Somme was becoming an arena of attrition, to which fresh divisions were sent in monotonous succession—forty-two by the Germans during July and August—only to waste their energy in bloody struggles for tiny patches of ground, at Guillemont, Ginchy, Morval, Flers, Martinpuich. By 31 July, the Germans on the Somme had lost 160,000, the British and French over 200,000, yet the line had moved scarcely three miles since 1 July. North of the Ancre, or along half the original front, it had scarcely moved at all.

  The offensive on the Somme might have been doomed to drift away into an autumn of frustration and a winter of stalemate had it not been for the appearance in mid-September of a new weapon, the tank. As early as December 1914 a visionary young officer of the Royal Engineers, Ernest Swinton, having recognised that only a revolutionary means could break what was already the stalemate of barbed wire and trench on the
Western Front, had proposed the construction of a cross-country vehicle, armoured against bullets, that could bring firepower to the point of assault. The idea was not wholly new—it had been anticipated, for example, in H. G. Wells’s short story “The Land Ironclads” of 1903, and in an imprecise form by Leonardo da Vinci—nor was the technology: an all-terrain vehicle, using a “footed wheel,” had been built in 1899 and by 1905 caterpillar track vehicles were in agricultural use.59 It was the crisis of war that brought together technology and vision and, through that of Swinton and collaborators, Albert Stern, Murray Sueter, backed by the enthusiasm of Winston Churchill, whose Royal Naval Division’s armoured cars had cut a dash in Belgium in 1914, bore fruit in the tank’s prototype, “Little Willie,” of December 1915. In January 1916 a larger and gun-equipped development, “Mother,” had been produced and by September a fleet of forty-nine similar Mark I “Tanks,” as they had been named for deceptive purposes, were in France and ready to enter battle.60

  The tanks were assigned to the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps, a war-raised formation controlling the BEF’s medium machine guns. Following the attrition battles of August, a new effort was planned to open up the Somme front and the tanks, some armed with machine guns, some with 6-pounder cannon, were allotted to the Fourth and Reserve (future Fifth) Armies, to lead an assault along the line of the old Roman road that leads from Albert to Bapaume between the villages of Flers and Courcelette. The appearance of the tanks terrified the German infantry defending the sector and the armoured monsters led the British infantry onward for 3,500 yards before mechanical breakdowns and ditchings in rough ground brought the advance to a halt; a number, caught in artillery fire, were knocked out. The event brought one of the cheapest and most spectacular local victories of the war on the Western Front thus far, but its efforts were to be frustrated immediately by the disablement of almost all the thirty-six tanks that had crossed the start line. Though the infantry plugged away at the gains the tanks had made, the usual German stubbornness in manning shell holes and reserve lines blocked the potential avenue of advance and restored the stalemate.

  October and November brought no change. Both the British and French attacked repetitively, at Thiepval, Transloy and in the sodden valley of the Ancre, in increasingly wet weather that turned the chalky surface of the Somme battlefield into glutinous slime. By 19 November, when the Allied offensive was brought officially to a halt, the furthest line of advance, at Les Boeufs, lay only seven miles forward of the front attacked on 1 July. The Germans may have lost over 600,000 killed and wounded in their effort to keep their Somme positions. The Allies had certainly lost over 600,000, the French casualty figure being 194,451, the British 419,654. The holocaust of the Somme was subsumed for the French in that of Verdun. To the British, it was and would remain their greatest military tragedy of the twentieth century, indeed of their national military history. A nation that goes to war must expect deaths among the young men it sends and there was a willingness for sacrifice before and during the Somme that explains, in part at least, its horror. The sacrificial impulse cannot, however, alleviate its outcome. The regiments of Pals and Chums which had their first experience of war on the Somme have been called an army of innocents and that, in their readiness to offer up their lives in circumstances none anticipated in the heady days of volunteering, it undoubtedly was. Whatever harm Kitchener’s volunteers wished the Germans, it is the harm they thereby suffered that remains in British memory, collectively but also among the families of those who did not return. There is nothing more poignant in British life than to visit the ribbon of cemeteries that marks the front line of 1 July 1916 and to find, on gravestone after gravestone, the fresh wreath, the face of a Pal or Chum above a khaki serge collar staring gravely back from a dim photograph, the pinned poppy and the inscription to “a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather.” The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.61

  3. The Wider War and the Brusilov Offensive

  While the great dramas of Verdun and the Somme were being played out in France, the war on the fronts elsewhere took a very varied form. In German East Africa, where Jan Smuts, the brilliant guerrilla opponent of the British during the Boer War, had arrived to take command in 1915, four columns set out in 1916—two British from Kenya and Nyasaland respectively, one Portuguese from Mozambique, one Belgian from the Congo—to make a concentric advance on von Lettow-Vorbeck’s black army, encircle it and bring the campaign to a close. The Allied fighting troops numbered nearly 40,000, Lettow’s about 16,000. Dividing his force, he had no difficulty in eluding Smuts with his main body and in beating a fighting retreat southward from Mount Kilimanjaro towards Tanga and Dar-es-Salaam, keeping parallel to the coast and retreating slowly southward across the grain of the country. He fought when obliged to do so but always disengaged before defeat and, destroying bridges and railway lines behind him, evaded encirclement and kept his force intact. His African askaris, moreover, were resistant to most of the parasitic diseases that attack humans in the interior. His enemies, who included large numbers of Europeans and Indians, were not. Their enormously high toll of sickness—thirty-one non-battle casualties to one battle casualty—was the real cause of their failure to run Lettow to earth. At the end of 1916 his little army was as fit, capable and elusive as at the start of the war.62

  The Turks, so underestimated by the Allies at the outset, sustained the success they had achieved at Gallipoli. Though their efforts to revive their offensive against the Suez Canal were repulsed, in a limited campaign that took British forces to the Sinai border of Palestine, and though their army in the Caucasus suffered further defeats at the hands of the Russians, who pushed forward a perimeter from Lake Van to Trebizond on the Black Sea coast by August, in Mesopotamia they inflicted a wholly humiliating defeat on the Anglo-Indian force that had landed at the mouth of the Shatt el-Arab in 1914. During 1915 Expeditionary Force D, as it was known, pushed up the River Tigris towards Baghdad, part of the force moving by land, part by water, until in November 1915 its advance guard was at Ctesiphon. Its situation looked promising, since it was established in the heart of the Ottoman empire at a moment when the nearest Turkish reserves, according to British intelligence, were 400 miles distant in the Caucasus or 350 miles away at Aleppo in Syria. Somehow, however, the Turks managed to scrape together enough reinforcements to send troops down the Tigris and confront the Expeditionary Force. Its commander, Major General Townshend, decided, though he had not been defeated, that he was overextended and accordingly ordered a retreat to Kut al-Amara, a hundred miles down river. There the Force entrenched itself in a loop of the Tigris to await support and the recovery of its soldiers from their ordeal of the long advance and retreat.

  Townshend had supplies for two months and personal experience of conducting defence; in 1896 he had successfully commanded the little North-West Frontier fort at Chitral during a siege that became celebrated throughout the empire.63 The Turks, masters of entrenchment warfare, proved far more dangerous opponents than the Chitrali tribesmen. Having encircled Townshend’s encampment with earthworks, they settled down to repel attacks both by the garrison and by the relieving force which, between January and March, four times attempted to break through their lines. Each effort was unsuccessful and the last, known as the battle of the Dujaila Redoubt, left a thousand dead at the scene of action. Townshend’s headquarters was only seven miles distant from the furthest advance but, immediately after the defeat, the annual floods, fed from the snow-melt off the Zagros Mountains, swelled the rivers and put the surface of the Mesopotamian plain under water. Kut was completely cut off from outside help and on 29 April surrendered. Townshend and 10,000 survivors of the Expeditionary Force went into captivity, harsh for the common soldiers, 4,000 of whom died in enemy hands. Kut was not retaken until the end of the year, when nearly 200,000 British and Indian troops and followers had been assembled, to oppose 10,000 Turks and a handful of Germans. Lik
e Salonika, where the Allies continued to wage an unsuccessful campaign against very inferior forces throughout 1916, Mesopotamia had become a drain on resources instead of a threat to the enemy.

  On the Italian front, though there the defenders were also heavily outnumbered by the attackers, the disparity was not so great. The strength of the Italian army was increasing, and would eventually almost double, from thirty-six peacetime divisions to sixty-five, and during 1916 the Italians would attract thirty-five of the sixty-five mobilised Austrian divisions to their mountains. The consequent weakening of Austria’s capacity to bear a fair share of the burden in the east would largely facilitate Russia’s successful resumption of the offensive in this year. Outnumbered though they were, however, the Austrians both frustrated Italy’s continuing attempts to break into the Austro-Hungarian heartland via the Isonzo route and launched a counter-offensive of their own directed towards the rich industrial and agricultural region in the plains of the River Po. Conrad, the Habsburg Chief of Staff, nurtured an almost personal animus against Austria’s former partner in the Triple Alliance and had fallen out with Falkenhayn over his determination to punish them at the expense of sustaining the joint Austro-German success against the Tsar’s armies which had begun at Gorlice-Tarnow. On 15 May 1916, almost on the anniversary of that victory, Conrad unleashed his own “punishment expedition” (Strafexpedition) from the northern mountain chain of the Trentino, between Lake Garda, the Alpine beauty resort, and the headwaters of the River Brenta, which leads towards the lagoons of Venice. The preliminary bombardment, which opposed 2,000 Austrian guns to 850 Italian, was powerful, but the defenders were forewarned by the evidence of Austrian preparations and then fought with heroic self-sacrifice to hold the invaders at bay. The Rome Brigade was almost wiped out in its defence of Piazza. As a result, the Austrians nowhere advanced more than ten miles and, though their losses were fewer than the Italian—80,000 to 147,000—the punishment expedition neither threatened a breakthrough nor deflected Cadorna, the Italian Commander-in-Chief, from pursuing his relentless offensive on the Isonzo. The Sixth Battle opened in August and secured the frontier town of Gorizia, the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth followed in September, October and November. The bridgehead across the Isonzo at Gorizia was enlarged and a foothold on the harsh Carso upland secured. The Italian infantry, despite heavy losses and the frustration of their offensive efforts, still seemed ready to return to the attack, even under Cadorna’s aloof and heartless direction of the war.