The First World War

by John Keegan

  The worst of the French losses had been suffered in 1914–16, years in which the novelty of cash allowances paid direct to the dependants of soldiers had palliated anxiety; the allowances were described by an official opinion-taker as “the main cause of domestic peace and public calm.”12 The good wages paid in the emergent war industries helped, also, to suppress anti-war feeling, as did the satisfaction of responsibility for tilling the land assumed by wives, suddenly become heads of families, or resumed by grandfathers with sons at the front. France was still overwhelmingly an agricultural country in 1914. Its communities adapted to the absence of the young men and food was nowhere short. In 1917, nevertheless, the accumulated strains were starting to become apparent to those whose duty it was to monitor the public mood, mayors, prefects, censors: in the towns, where many male workers were exempt or had actually been recalled from military service to do factory work, morale was satisfactory; but “morale has fallen considerably in the countryside, where the original fortitude and resolution are no longer evident.”13 Loss of fortitude and resolution by June 1917, when this report was returned, was already widespread in the French army.

  In Germany the resolution of the army and the people remained strong. Although over a million soldiers had been killed by the end of 1916—241,000 in 1914, 434,000 in 1915, 340,000 in 1916—the successes at the front, which had brought the occupation of Belgium, northern France and Russian Poland and the defeat of Serbia and Romania, showed a return on sacrifice. The economic cost of waging what appeared to be a successful war was becoming however, hard to support. Female mortality, for example, increased by 11.5 per cent in 1916, 30.4 per cent in 1917 above pre-war rates, a rise attributable to diseases of malnutrition.14 While France fed well on home-grown produce, and Britain maintained peacetime levels of food imports until mid-1917, when the German U-boat campaign began to bite hard, Germany, and Austria also, had felt the privations of blockade from 1916 onwards. During 1917 the consumption of fish and eggs was halved, so was that of sugar, while supplies of potatoes, butter and vegetables declined steeply. The winter of 1916/17 became the “turnip winter,” when that tasteless and unnutritious root appeared as a substitute or an additive at most meals. Luxuries, particularly coffee, which had become a German necessity, disappeared from the tables of all but the rich, and real necessities, like soap and fuel, were strictly rationed. “By the end of 1916, life … for most citizens … became a time of eating meals never entirely filling, living in underheated homes, wearing clothing that proved difficult to replace and walking with leaky shoes. It meant starting and ending the day with substitutes for nearly everything.”15 In Vienna, largest city of the Habsburg empire, hardship was even more severe. Real wages had halved in 1916 and would halve again in 1917, when the poorer in the population would begin to starve. Worse, with 60 per cent of men of breadwinning age at the front, families were dependent on a state allowance that in no way substituted for a father’s income; by the end of the war, it bought less than two loaves of bread a day.16

  The mood of all subjects of the Habsburg empire, moreover, had been altered by the death of Franz Josef, Emperor since 1848, in November 1916. Even among the least imperial of his peoples, Czechs and Serbs, many had held him in personal reverence. To the Kaisertreu Croats, to the Germans and to the Hungarians, whose King he was, he had stood as a symbol of stability in their increasingly ramshackle polity. His departure loosened such bonds as still held the ten main language groups—German, Magyar, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Italian and Romanian—in Austria-Hungary together. Though his successor, Karl I, brought youth to the imperial throne, he could not begin, in the circumstances of war, to establish a strong imperial authority of his own. His own instincts, indeed, like those of his Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, were for peace and one of his first acts as Emperor was to announce that he would seek urgently to bring it about. In March 1917, through the agency of his wife’s brother, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon, he opened indirect negotiations with the French government, to identify the terms under which a general settlement might be achieved. As his principal motive, however, was to preserve his empire intact, and he was prepared to offer much German but little Austrian territory to achieve his object, his diplomatic initiative quickly foundered. The “Sixtus affair,” besides infuriating Germany, merely exposed Austria’s war weariness to the Allies, without inducing them in any way to moderate their policy of fighting for a final victory.

  They, moreover, had already rejected a disinterested attempt to mediate peace made by President Wilson of the United States on 18 December 1916, by which, as a preliminary, he asked each side to set out the terms necessary to its future security. Germany replied in anticipation, making no concessions at all and emphasising its belief in impending victory; the tone of the reply was much influenced by the recent capture of Bucharest and the collapse of the Romanian army. The Allied response was equally uncompromising but precisely detailed. It demanded the evacuation of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro and of the occupied territory in France, Russia and Romania, independence for the Italian, and Romanian, and Czechoslovak and other Slav subjects of the Austrian and German empires, the ending of Ottoman rule in southern Europe and the liberation of the Turks’ other subjects. It was, in short, a programme for the dismemberment of the three empires which constituted most of the Central Powers’ alliance.17

  Only states that retained a high degree of political unity could have responded with such confidence to a call for an end to hostilities in the twenty-eighth month of a terrible war. Such unity prevailed, in France and Britain alike, despite radical changes of personnel in both their governments. At the outbreak, the French assembly had renounced pursuit of party difference in a Union sacrée dedicated to national survival and eventual victory. The Union, despite a change of ministry, had been preserved. The Viviani administration had resigned in October 1915 but the new Prime Minister, Briand, had held office in the old government and sustained the coalition. The parties in the British parliament had also entered into coalition in May 1915, following criticism of the Liberal cabinet’s capacity to ensure an adequate supply of munitions to the front in France, but Asquith remained Prime Minister and succeeded in maintaining an outward show of unity for the next year. In Lloyd George, the Minister of Munitions, he had, however, a colleague relentlessly and rightly dissatisfied with his undynamic style of leadership and, at the beginning of December 1916, he found himself outmanoeuvred in a scheme to re-arrange the war’s higher direction. Agreeing at first to his own exclusion from a War Committee which would have draconian powers, he then declined to accept the new arrangement and forced Lloyd George’s resignation. In the fracas that followed he offered his own, mistakenly expecting it to be rejected by a majority in parliament. Recognising Lloyd George’s superior ability at a time of national crisis, his leading colleagues, Liberal and Conservative alike, overcame their dislike of his egotistic and devious personality and agreed to serve in a new coalition government over which the War Committee would rule with almost unlimited authority. Lloyd George’s government would remain in office until the end of the war.

  If these political changes sustained the coalition process in both countries, they did not, however, solve the difficulty which lay at the root of the dissatisfactions with the Viviani and Asquith ministries: their relationship with the supreme command. In Germany, command could be altered at the word of the Kaiser, who, as supreme commander, had all military posts in his gift. He had already, by the end of 1916, removed Moltke and Falkenhayn. In Britain, too, a change of command required in theory only a decision by the responsible authority, though there it lay with government rather than monarchy. In practice, however, concern for public confidence made such changes difficult, as evidenced by the failure to relieve Sir John French long after his unsuitability for the direction of operations in France had become obvious to the cabinet. In France the situation was complex and more difficult still. Joffre, as Commander-in-Chief, exe
rcised powers within the Zone of the Armies that had constitutional force. Even parliamentary deputies lacked the right to enter the Zone without his permission, while he had authority not only over the armies on French soil but had been given similar powers over those in the “theatres of exterior operations” as well. As a result, commanders in France and Britain and, as would soon appear, Italy also, enjoyed a security of tenure to be shaken neither by casualty lists nor lack of success at the battlefronts.

  In Britain, Haig would survive in high command to the very end of the war, despite a loss of confidence in him by Lloyd George that, by the end of 1917, was almost total. In France, loss of confidence in Joffre, which had been growing since the beginning of the Verdun battle, did lead to his elevation to empty grandeur in December 1916. No satisfactory readjustment, however, of the relationship between political and military authority was devised—General Lyautey, the Moroccan proconsul appointed Minister of War at the time of Joffre’s removal, was given enlarged administrative powers without rights of command in France—neither could a satisfactory substitute for Joffre be found. The politicians’ choice, Nivelle, was intelligent and persuasive and had transformed the situation at Verdun, once the Germans had desisted from the offensive, his recapture of Fort Douaumont crowning with success two years of rapid ascent from colonel’s rank. As events would shortly prove, however, the confidence he had in his own capacities was exaggerated, while that placed in him by the government was misjudged. How easy it is, in retrospect, to see that that was so, how difficult at the time to accept the fallibility of governments and general staffs. The fundamental truth underlying dissatisfaction with systems and with personalities in all countries was that the search for anything or anyone better was vain. The problem of command in the circumstances of the First World War was insoluble. Generals were like men without eyes, without ears and without voices, unable to watch the operations they set in progress, unable to hear reports of their development and unable to speak to those whom they had originally given orders once action was joined. The war had become bigger than those who fought it.

  In Germany, in Britain and even in France, so grievously wounded by loss of life in defence of the homeland, the popular will nevertheless remained intact. Durchhalten, “see it through,” had become the watchword of the Germans. Terrible though the nation’s sufferings were, there was still no thought of accepting an unsatisfactory outcome.18 Belief in glorious victory might have gone; concessions remained as unthinkable as defeat. In Britain, which had begun to suffer mass loss of life only in 1916, the determination to see it through held even stronger. The year of 1916 had seen the voluntary impulse, which had brought millions into the ranks, attenuate and conscription laws passed which, for the first time in British history, compelled civilians into the army. Nevertheless, as the Annual Register recorded with apparent accuracy, “The prospect of … sacrifices … appeared to be quite powerless in effecting any modification of the national resolution to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion.”19 Even in France, the idea of the “sacred union” as a bond not only between politicians but between classes and sections also persisted until the end of 1916, on the basis that “France had been the target of foreign aggression and had therefore to be defended.”20 Illogically, the belief that the war might be ended quickly, by a German collapse or a brilliant French victory, persisted as well. The hope in success of a French victory was about to be brutally shattered.

  THE FRENCH MUTINIES

  A great offensive had been planned for 1917 at the meeting of Allied military representatives at Chantilly, French general headquarters, in November 1916, a repetition of the Chantilly conference of the previous December which had led to the battle of the Somme and to the Brusilov offensive. As before, the Italians were to resume their offensives against the Austrians on the Isonzo and the Russians promised a spring offensive also; they were imprecise about details, although enthusiastic about its potentiality, for Russian industry was now fully mobilised for war and producing large quantities of weapons and munitions.21 The great effort, however, was to be made in the centre of the Western Front, on the old Somme battlefield, by the French and British, to be followed by an offensive in Flanders aimed at “clearing” the Belgian coast and recapturing the bases of the U-boats which were operating with increasing effect against Allied shipping.

  Two events supervened to overtake these plans. The first was the replacement of Joffre by Nivelle, whose operational philosophy did not marry with a scheme for the resumption of the Somme battle. The Somme had degenerated into a struggle of attrition and the landscape bore the scars; broken roads, long stretches of broken ground, shattered woods, flooded valley bottoms, and labyrinths of abandoned trenches, dugouts and strongpoints. The Somme offered no terrain suitable for an abrupt breakthrough, of which Nivelle believed he had the secret. Nivelle was an officer of artillery, by 1917 the premier arm of trench warfare, and he had convinced himself that new artillery tactics would produce “rupture.” Under his control, a vast mass of artillery would drench the German defences with fire “across the whole depth of the enemy position,” destroying the trenches and stunning the defenders, so that the attackers, advancing under a continuous barrage and by-passing surviving pockets of resistance, would pass unopposed into open country and the enemy rear area.22 Since the Somme was unsuitable for such tactics, Nivelle proposed to return to the terrain and the plan of 1915. He would attack at the “shoulders” of the great German salient on either side of the Somme. The French would take the southern Aisne sector, the Chemin des Dames, as their front of assault, while the British, by inter-Allied agreement, would reopen an offensive on the northern shoulder of the Somme salient, at Arras and against Vimy Ridge.

  Had Nivelle not changed the plan for 1917, a German decision would in any case have nullified the Allied intention to resume the Somme offensive. On 15 March it was noticed that the enemy were beginning to withdraw from his positions along the whole front between Arras and the Aisne. This was the second eventuality unforeseen when Joffre had convened the Chantilly conference in November. Plans in war rarely coincide. While the Allies were agreeing to reopen the offensive on ground already fought across, the Germans were making the necessary preparations to give up that ground altogether. In September 1916 work had been set in hand to construct a “final” position behind the Somme battlefield, with the object of shortening the line and economising force, to the extent of ten divisions, for use elsewhere.23 By January the new line, consisting of stretches named after the saga heroes, Wotan, Siegfried, Hunding and Michel and collectively known as the Hindenburg Line, was complete and by 18 March it was fully occupied. Once the British and French realised that the countryside in front of them was empty, they followed up, through a devastated landscape, and by early April were digging their own trenches opposite defences more formidable than any yet encountered.

  Fortunately for Nivelle’s plan, the Hindenburg Line stopped just short of the Chemin des Dames, where he planned to deliver the blow, as it did also of the Arras-Vimy Ridge sector where the British and Canadians were to attack a little earlier; the Hindenburg Line exactly bisected the base of the salient between them. Unfortunately for the French, the defences of the Chemin des Dames, built up over the previous three years, since it was first entrenched during the German retreat from the Marne in September 1914, were among the strongest on the Western Front and, from the crest line, the Germans commanded long views into the French rear area. German artillery observers could overlook the positions in which the French infantry were to form up for the assault, as well as those of their supporting artillery. Moreover, a new German defensive doctrine, introduced as a result of Nivelle’s own success in recapturing ground at Verdun in December 1916, ensured that the front line would be held in minimum strength, but with counter-attack (Eingreif or “intervention”) divisions held just beyond the range of the enemy’s artillery, so as to be able to “lock in” (another meaning of eingreifen) as soon as the lead
ing waves of the enemy’s attacking infantry had “lost” their own artillery’s fire.24 As Nivelle’s plan foresaw a “hard” and “brutal” offensive, lasting not more than forty-eight hours, during which the whole of the German positions would be overwhelmed in three successive advances 2,000 to 3,000 yards deep, close co-operation between infantry and artillery was necessary for success.25 Nivelle’s plan, however, made no provision for the rapid pushing forward of the French artillery, which, on the steep and broken terrain of the battlefield and in the circumstances likely to prevail, was in any case infeasible.

  While the French Sixth, Tenth and Fifth Armies, together constituting the Group of Armies of Reserve and including some of the most successful formations in the army, with the I, XX and II Colonial Corps in the front line, awaited the day of attack, eventually fixed for 16 April, the BEF prepared for its own supporting offensive, due to begin a week earlier. Its particular objective was the crest of Vimy Ridge, to be attacked by the Canadian Corps, from which the way led down into the Douai plain and thence, it was hoped, into the un-entrenched German rear area across which a rapid advance by cavalry could link up with Nivelle’s vanguards once they had cleared the Aisne heights at the Chemin des Dames eighty miles to the south. An enormous weight of artillery and stock of munitions—2,879 guns, one for each nine yards of front, and 2,687,000 shells—had been assembled, to prepare an assault shorter in duration but double in weight to that delivered before the Somme the previous July. Forty tanks had also been got together, while the VI Corps of Third Army, the formation making the main assault, was able to shelter its infantry in the great subterranean quarries at Arras and bring them under cover to the front line through tunnels dug by the Army’s tunnelling companies. Similar tunnels had been dug opposite Vimy Ridge for the infantry of the Canadian Corps, four divisions strong, which was there to make the first major offensive effort by a Dominion contingent on the Western Front.