The First World War

by John Keegan

  The transition from normality to the place of death was abrupt, all the more so because prosperity reigned in the “rear area”; the armies had brought money, and shops, cafés and restaurants flourished, at least on the Allied side of the line. In the zone of German occupation, the military government ran an austere economic regime, driving the coal mines, cloth mills and iron works at full speed, requisitioning labour for land and industry and commandeering agricultural produce for export to the Reich. For the women of the north, lost for news of husbands and sons away at the war on the wrong side of the line, managing by themselves, the war brought hard years.1 Only a few miles distant, in the French “Zone of the Armies,” a war economy boomed. Outside the ribbon of destruction, the roads were full of traffic, long lines of horsed and motor transport going to and fro, and in the fields, ploughed by farmers right up to the line where shells fell, new towns of tents and hutments had sprung up to accommodate the millions who went up and down, almost as if on factory shift, to the trenches. Four days in the front line, four in support, four at rest; on their days off, young officers, like John Glubb, might take a horse and ride “down old neglected rides, while all round my head was a dazzling bower of light emerald green. Underfoot crunched the beech nuts, while the ground was everywhere carpeted with anemones and cowslips. Pulling up and sitting quietly on my horse in the heart of the forest, it was impossible to catch a sound of the outside world, except the jingling of my own bit and the murmuring of the trees.”2

  If the front did not change, either in its course, its routine, or its strange intermingling of the everyday and the abnormal, the end of the first full two years of war brought great changes in its management. The year of 1917 would begin with new directors at the head of the British, French and German armies. In Russia, soon to be shaken by revolution, prestige, if not authority, had moved from the Stavka to General Brusilov, the Tsar’s only successful general. Change of command in Britain had been brought about by an accident of war. On 5 June 1916, Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, en route to Russia on an official visit, was drowned when the cruiser Hampshire struck a mine north of Scotland. He was succeeded by Lloyd George who, becoming Prime Minister on 7 December, appointed Lord Derby to replace himself. In France the long reign of Joffre also came to an end in December and he was replaced by Nivelle, the fluent expositor of new tactics; the dignity of Marshal of France was revived to spare Joffre humiliation. Since August 1916, the German armies had been under the control of the Hindenburg-Ludendorff partnership, the combination that had proved so successful on the Eastern Front. Their reputation undimmed by the setback of the Brusilov offensive, they, or more particularly Ludendorff as effective head of operations, would bring to high command a genuinely new strategy: the rationalisation of the Western Front, to economise troop numbers for action elsewhere, the mobilisation of the German economy for total war and a determination, through the politically contentious strategy of an unrestricted submarine offensive, to carry blockade to the enemy.

  Would changes in command, however, change anything? The generalship of the First World War is one of the most contested issues of its historiography. Good generals and bad generals abound in the war’s telling and so do critics and champions of this man or that among the ranks of its historians. In their time, almost all the leading commanders of the war were seen as great men, the imperturbable Joffre, the fiery Foch, the titanic Hindenburg, the olympian Haig. Between the wars their reputations crumbled, largely at the hands of memoirists and novelists—Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse—whose depiction of the realities of “war from below” relentlessly undermined the standing of those who had dominated from above. After the Second World War the assault on reputation was sustained, in that era by historians, popular and academic, particularly in Britain, who continued to portray the British generals as “donkeys leading lions,” as flinthearts bleeding the tender flesh of a generation to death in Flanders fields, or as psychological misfits.3 There were counter-attacks, particularly to salvage the reputation of Haig, who had become an Aunt Sally to playwrights, film directors and television documentary makers committed to the view that the First World War exposed the oppressiveness of the British class structure. Little ground, however, was won back.4 By the end of the century the generals, who had stood so high at the end of its Great War, had been brought, it appeared, irredeemably low by a concerted offensive against their names and their works.

  It is difficult today not to sympathise with the condemnations, worse or better informed as they have been, of the generals of the First World War. In no way—appearances, attitude, spoken pronouncement, written legacy—do they commend themselves to modern opinion or emotion. The impassive expressions that stare back at us from contemporary photographs do not speak of consciences or feelings troubled by the slaughter over which those men presided, nor do the circumstances in which they chose to live: the distant chateau, the well-polished entourage, the glittering motor cars, the cavalry escorts, the regular routine, the heavy dinners, the uninterrupted hours of sleep. Joffre’s two-hour lunch, Hindenburg’s ten-hour night, Haig’s therapeutic daily equitation along roads sanded lest his horse slip, the Stavka’s diet of champagne and court gossip, seem and were a world away from the cold rations, wet boots, sodden uniforms, flooded trenches, ruined billets and plague of lice on, in and among which, in winter at least, their subordinates lived. Lloyd George, admittedly a radical and certainly no lover of his own high command, seemed to strike a just contrast when he wrote that “the solicitude with which most generals in high places (there were honourable exceptions) avoided personal jeopardy is one of the debatable novelties of modern warfare.”5

  There are three grounds on which Lloyd George’s and, by extension, all criticism of the war’s generals may be held unfair. The first is that many generals did expose themselves to risk, which it was not necessarily or even properly their duty to accept. Among British generals, thirty-four were killed by artillery and twenty-two by small-arms fire; the comparable figure for the Second World War is twenty-one killed in action.6 The second is that, though the practice of establishing headquarters well behind the lines was indeed a “novelty” in warfare—Wellington had ridden the front at Waterloo in full view of the enemy all day, while several hundred generals were killed in the American Civil War—it was one justified, indeed necessitated by the vast widening and deepening of fronts, which put the scene of action in its entirety far beyond the field of vision of any commander; indeed, the nearer a general was to the battle, the worse placed was he to gather information and to issue orders. Only at the point of junction of telephone lines, necessarily located behind the front, could he hope to gather intelligence of events and transmit a considered response to them. Thirdly, however, the system of communication itself denied any rapidity, let alone instantaneity, of communication when it was most needed, which was in the heat of action. The most important of the novelties of modern warfare in our own time has been the development of surveillance, targeting and intercommunication in “real time,” which is to say at the speed at which events unroll. Thanks to radar, television, other forms of sensoring and, above all, radio, commanders in the most recent large war of the twentieth century, the Gulf War, were kept in instant communication with the front, receiving and transmitting word-of-mouth information and instruction with the immediacy of person-to-person telephone conversation, while simultaneously orchestrating fire support for their troops by similarily rapid means against targets that could be observed in “virtual reality.”

  Absolutely none of these means, including radio, was available to a Great War commander. He depended, instead, once the trench lines had been dug, on a fixed and inflexible grid of telephone cables leading back through the chain of intermediate headquarters—battalion, brigade, division, corps, army—to the high command. Further from the front, the cable could be strung above ground; in the “beaten zone” where shells fell, it had to be buried. Experience proved that a “bury” of less than six
feet was broken by bombardment, so trench floors were laboriously excavated to provide the necessary protection. By 1916 the British army had developed a sophisticated system of branching at each intermediate command level, so that headquarters could communicate in three directions—forwards, rearward, and laterally, to neighbouring headquarters—from the same exchange.7

  All worked excellently, until fighting began. Then the system broke down, almost as a matter of routine, at the point that mattered most, the front. In defence, under the enemy’s bombardment, the points of transmission were smashed up and the key personnel, forward artillery observers, were killed trying to do their job. In offence, as the troops moved forward from the heads of the cable grid, they automatically lost contact with the rear. Unwound telephone cable broke as a matter of course and expedients—signal lamps, carrier pigeons—were haphazard. To the unsatisfactory outcome in either situation there is ample and repetitive testimony. In defence on the Somme in 1916, for example, it was found by Colonel von Lossberg, OHL’s tactical technician, that eight to ten hours were needed on average for a message to reach the front from divisional headquarters and so, reciprocally, to pass in the opposite direction.8 In offence, communication could break down completely, as the reports at six levels of command—battalion, brigade, division, corps, army and general headquarters—during the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, reveal.

  The reports from one battalion, the 11th East Lancashire, the unit actually in contact with the enemy, begin with the commanding officer writing at 7:20 a.m. that “the first wave crossed into no man’s land.” At 7:42 he “reported by runner [NB not telephone] intense fire of all descriptions.” At 7:50, “I sent Lt. Macalpine to establish telephone communication … [he] returned and informed me all communication was cut … it was not re-established all day.” At 8:22 a.m. “no information from my waves; at 9 a.m. “saw no sign of 3rd or 4th wave”; at 10:01 a.m. “no report from my waves”; at 11:25 a.m. “no information from my waves”; at 11:50 a.m. “no reports from my waves except statements of wounded men”; at 3:10 p.m. “[neighbouring unit] not in touch with any of their waves”; at 3:50 p.m. “urgently require more men”; at 9:20 p.m. “I have no rockets … or any Verey Lights [the only emergency means of communicating with the supporting artillery]”; at 9:40 this commanding officer himself was “knocked out by a shell.”

  The brigadier, at the next level of command upward, 94 Brigade, watched the battalions advancing but then lost word of them; “the telephone wires up to his Headquarters remained working well throughout, but from his Headquarters forward they were all cut, although the line was buried six feet deep.” He reported that a runner from a battalion “was buried three times on the way back and yet successfully delivered his message,” presumably one of few, if not the only one, the brigadier received during the day. The headquarters of the 31st Division, to which the brigadier was reporting, recorded at 8:40 a.m. that he “had telephoned that his line got across German front trenches but it is very difficult to see what is going on. He has no definite information”; at 6 p.m., nearly eleven hours after the attack had begun, the divisional commander was reporting to the level above, VIII Corps, “I have had my signalling people trying to get into communication [with the troops] but cannot get any sign at all.” Nevertheless, at the level above VIII Corps, at Fourth Army headquarters, the Chief of Staff that evening confidently wrote out an operation order for the morrow, prefixed by the statement that “a large part of the German Reserves have now been drawn in and it is essential to keep up the pressure and wear out the defence,” while, at more or less the same time, Douglas Haig was recording that the VIII Corps “said they began well, but as the day progressed their troops were forced back … I am inclined to believe from further reports that few of VIII Corps left their trenches!!” Two hours later the War Diary of the 31st Division records that the 11th East Lancashire Regiment, whose wounded commander had seen “my waves” depart into no man’s land and enter the enemy positions before eight o’clock in the morning, had “30 all ranks available for holding front line tonight.” Complete casualty returns, taken later, would establish that the 11th East Lancs, the “Accrington Pals,” had lost 234 killed that day, of whom 131 found “no known grave,” and 360 wounded, leaving only 135 survivors.9

  It is easy to rail against the apparent heartlessness of Haig’s diary entry, written in the comfort of his chateau at Beaurepaire after a day spent in the ordered routine of his Montreuil headquarters or on chauffeured drives around the safe rear area of the battlefield. While 20,000 soldiers died, or awaited death from wounds in overwhelmed hospitals or the loneliness of a battlefield shell crater, their supreme commander worked at his desk, lunched, paid calls on his subordinates, dined and prepared for a comfortable bed. The contrast can be made to seem truly shocking, particularly if it is remembered that Wellington, after a day at Waterloo in which he had shared every risk, rode home on a weary horse to a makeshift billet and there gave up his bed to a wounded brother officer.

  Yet the contrasts are unfair. Wellington had seen every episode of the battle with his own eyes and precisely directed its stages. Haig had not even been a spectator. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, except the distant roar of the bombardments and barrage, and done nothing. There was nothing for him to do, any more than there was anything for him to see; even one of his most junior subordinate commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Rickman, saw no more of his Accrington Pals once they had entered the German trenches than “sun glinting on their triangles,” the metal plates fixed to their packs as an identification mark. The iron curtain of war had descended between all commanders, low and high alike, and their men, cutting them off from each other as if they had been on different continents. High commanders, of course, had the material with which to bridge the gap, the vast numbers of guns arrayed behind the lines. What they lacked was the means to direct the fire of the artillery on to the positions of the enemy who was killing their soldiers. In an earlier war, the gunners would have seen the targets with the naked eye; in a later war, artillery observers, equipped with radio and moving with the infantry, would have directed the fire of the guns by word of mouth and map reference. In the First World War, though the front was mapped in the closest detail, almost daily updated, the radio that might have called down the fire of the guns in “real time,” in real need, did not exist. A “trench set” was under development but it required twelve men to carry the apparatus, largely heavy batteries, and, while spotter aircraft could correct by radio the artillery’s fall of shot, they could not communicate with the infantry who alone could indicate where fire was really needed.10 Since the only method of making rapid progress through a trench system, before the appearance of the tank, was by closely and continuously co-ordinating infantry assault and fire support, it is no wonder at all that the battle of the Somme, like the battles that had preceded it and most that would follow, did not work as a military operation.

  Most of the accusations laid against the generals of the Great War—incompetence and incomprehension foremost among them—may therefore be seen to be misplaced. The generals, once those truly incompetent, uncomprehending and physically or emotionally unfit had been discarded, which they were at the outset, came in the main to understand the war’s nature and to apply solutions as rational as was possible within the means to hand. Robbed of the ability to communicate once action was joined, they sought to overcome the obstacles and accidents that would inevitably arise in the unfolding of battle by ever more elaborate anticipation and predisposition. Plans were drawn which laid down minute-by-minute manoeuvre by the infantry and almost yard-by-yard concentration of artillery fire, in an attempt not so much to determine as to predestine the outcome. The attempt was, of course, vain. Nothing in human affairs is predestinable, least of all in an exchange of energy as fluid and dynamic as a battle. While battle-altering resources—reliable armoured, cross-country vehicles, portable two-way radio—lay beyond their grasp (and they did so, tanta
lisingly, only in a development time to be measured in a few years), the generals were trapped within the iron fetters of a technology all too adequate for mass destruction of life but quite inadequate to restore to them the flexibilities of control that would have kept destruction of life within bearable limits.

  THE MOOD OF THE COMBATANTS

  Is destruction of life ever bearable? By the beginning of 1917, this was a question that lurked beneath the surface in every combatant country. Soldiers at the front, subject to discipline, bound together by the comradeship of combat, had means of their own to resist the relentless erosion. Whatever else, they were paid, if badly, and fed, often amply. Behind the lines, the ordeal of war attacked senses and sensibilities in a different way, through anxiety and deprivation. The individual soldier knows, from day to day, often minute to minute, whether he is in danger or not. Those he leaves behind—wife and mother above all—bear a burden of anxious uncertainty he does not. Waiting for the telegram, the telegram by which ministries of war communicated to families word of the wounding or death of a relative at the front, had become by 1917 a never-absent element of consciousness. All too often, the telegram had already come. By the end of 1914, 300,000 Frenchmen had been killed, 600,000 wounded, and the total continued to mount; by the end of the war, 17 per cent of those mobilised would be dead, who included nearly a quarter of the infantrymen, drawn in the majority from the rural population, who suffered a third of the war’s losses. By 1918, there would be 630,000 war widows in France, the majority in the prime of life and without hope of remarriage.11