The First World War

by John Keegan

  There was to be one last action before the pause, on 27 August, to attempt the capture of two long vanished woods, Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, just north of the remains of Gheluvelt village. The official history admits that the ground was “so slippery from the rain and so broken by the water-filled shell holes that the pace was slow and the protection of the creeping barrage was soon lost” by soldiers who had been marched up during the night and kept waiting ten hours for the battle to start. When it did, just before two in the afternoon, the advance was soon held up by impassable ground and heavy German fire. Edwin Vaughan, a wartime officer of the 1st/8th Warwickshire Regiment, describes the effort of his unit to get forward:

  Up the road we staggered, shells bursting around us. A man stopped dead in front of me, and exasperated I cursed him and butted him with my knee. Very gently he said, “I’m blind, Sir,” and turned to show me his eyes and nose torn away by a piece of shell. “Oh God! I’m sorry, sonny,” I said. “Keep going on the hard part,” and left him staggering back in his darkness … A tank had churned its way slowly behind Springfield and opened fire; a moment later I looked and nothing remained of it but a crumpled heap of iron; it had been hit by a large shell. It was now almost dark and there was no firing from the enemy; ploughing across the final stretch of mud, I saw grenades bursting around the pillbox and a party of British rushed in from the other side. As we all closed in, the Boche garrison ran out with their hands up … we sent the 16 prisoners back across the open but they had only gone a hundred yards when a German machine gun mowed them down.

  Inside the pillbox Vaughan found a wounded German officer. A stretcher bearer party appeared with a wounded British officer “who greeted me cheerily. ‘Where are you hit?’ I asked. ‘In the back near the spine. Could you shift my gas helmet from under me?’ I cut away the satchel and dragged it out; then he asked for a cigarette. Dunham produced one and he put it between his lips; I struck a match and held it across, but the cigarette had fallen on to his chest and he was dead.” Outside the pillbox he came across a party of Germans eager to surrender.

  The prisoners clustered around me, bedraggled and heartbroken, telling me of the terrible time they had been having, “Nichts essen, Nichts trinken,” always, shells, shells, shells … I could not spare a man to take them back, so I put them into shell holes with my men who made a great fuss of them, sharing their scanty rations with them.

  From other shell holes from the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks. It was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell holes, and now the water was rising about them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning. Horrible visions came to me with those cries, [of men] lying maimed out there trusting that their pals would find them, and now dying terribly, alone amongst the dead in the inky darkness. And we could do nothing to help them; Dunham was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries.

  This was almost the end of Lieutenant Vaughan’s experience of 27 August. Just before midnight his unit was relieved by another, and he led his survivors back to the lines they had left on 25 August.

  The cries of the wounded had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell holes … I hardly recognised [the headquarters pillbox], for it had been hit by shell after shell and its entrance was a long mound of bodies. Crowds [of soldiers] had run there for cover and had been wiped out by shrapnel. I had to climb over them to enter HQ and as I did so a hand stretched out and clung to my equipment. Horrified I dragged a living man from amongst the corpses.

  Next morning, when he awoke to take a muster parade,

  my worst fears were realised. Standing near the cookers were four small groups of bedraggled, unshaven men from whom the quartermaster sergeants were gathering information concerning any of their pals they had seen killed or wounded. It was a terrible list … out of our happy little band of 90 men, only 15 remained.103

  Vaughan’s experience was typical of what the Third Battle of Ypres was becoming. Despite losses lighter than those suffered on the Somme in a comparable period, 18,000 killed and missing (the dead drowned in shell holes accounting for many of the missing), and 50,000 wounded since 31 July, the fighting was assuming for those caught up in it a relentlessly baleful character: constant exposure to enemy view in a landscape swept bare of buildings and vegetation, sodden with rain and in wide areas actually under water, on to which well-aimed shellfire fell almost without pause and was concentrated in lethal torrents whenever an assault was attempted against objectives which, nearby in distance, came to seem unattainably remote as failure succeeded failure. On 4 September, Haig was summoned to London to justify the continuation of the offensive, even in the limited form proposed by the prudent Plumer. Lloyd George, reviewing the whole state of the war, argued that, with Russia no longer a combatant and France barely so, strategic wisdom lay in husbanding British resources until the Americans arrived in force in 1918. Haig, supported by Robertson, insisted that, precisely because of the other Allies’ weakness, Third Ypres must continue. His case was bad—Ludendorff was actually withdrawing divisions from the Western Front to assist the Austrians—but because Lloyd George advanced worse arguments of his own, in particular that there were decisions to be won against the Turks and on the Italian front, Haig got his way. Henry Wilson, the superseded sub-chief of the General Staff and a fanatical “Westerner,” commented with characteristic cynicism to his diary that Lloyd George’s scheme was to give Haig enough rope to hang himself. The assessment that the Prime Minister wished to relieve his principal military subordinate, but dared not until he was compromised by overt failure, was probably accurate.104 There was, however, no obvious successor to Haig and so, however ill-judged his strategy and harmful its effect on his long-suffering army, it was to be continued for want of a better man or plan.

  Plumer’s “step-by-step” scheme, for which the pause in early September was the preparation, was conceived in three stages. In each, a long bombardment was to precede a short advance of 1,500 yards, mounted by divisions on a frontage of 1,000 yards, or ten infantrymen for each yard of front. After three weeks of bombardment, the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions, with the 23rd and 41st British, attacked up the Menin Road east of Ypres. The accompanying barrage fell on a belt a thousand yards deep and, under that devastating weight of fire, the Germans fell back. The same results were achieved in the battle of Polygon Wood, 26 September, and of Broodseinde, 4 October. “Bite and hold,” Plumer’s tactics, had been successful. The Gheluvelt Plateau had at last been taken, and the immediate area in front of Ypres put out of German observation (troops, nevertheless, continued to march out of the ruined town through its western end and circle back to reach the battlefield, as they had done since the Salient had been drawn tight around it in 1915, to escape long-range shelling on the only roads that rose above the waterlogged plain). The question was whether the next series of “bite and hold” attacks could be justified. The first three, particularly that on Broodseinde, had hit the enemy hard. Plumer’s massed artillery had caught the German counter-attack divisions massed too far forward on 4 October and had caused heavy casualties, particularly in the 4th Guard Division.105 As a result, the Germans once again decided to refine their system of holding the front. Before Broodseinde they had brought their counter-attack divisions close up into the battle zone, to catch the British infantry as they emerged from their protective barrage. As the result had been merely to expose them to the ever heavier weight and deeper thrust of the British artillery, Ludendorff now ordered a reversal: the front was to be thinned out again and the counter-attack divisions held further to the rear, in positions from which they were not to move until a deliberate riposte, supported by a weighty bombardment and barrage, could be organised.106

  In essence, British a
nd German tactics for the conduct of operations on the awful, blighted, blasted and half-drowned surface of the Ypres battlefield had now been brought, as if by consultation, to resemble each other exactly. The attackers were to shatter the defenders with a monstrous weight of shellfire and occupy the narrow belt of ground on which it had fallen. The defenders were then to repeat the process in the opposite direction, hoping to regain the ground lost. It was, if decisive victory were the object, a wholly futile exercise, and Haig might, from the evidence with which events almost daily confronted him, have declined to join the enemy in prolonging the agony the struggle inflicted on both sides.

  Even the most enthusiastic technical historians of the Great War, ever ready to highlight the overlooked significance of an improvement in the fusing of field-artillery shells or range of trench-mortars, concede that Haig should have stopped after Broodseinde.107 He determined adamantly otherwise. Before Broodseinde he told his army commanders, “the Enemy is faltering and … a good decisive blow might lead to decisive results.”108 Immediately after, at a time when Lloyd George was surreptitiously trying to limit the number of reinforcements sent to France to make good losses suffered at Ypres, he wrote to Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, “the British Armies alone can be made capable of a great offensive effort [so that] it is beyond argument that everything should be done … to make that effort as strong as possible.”109

  THE WAR IN AFRICA

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck

  SMS Seeadler leaving Dar-es-Salaam for Germany, 1914; the band of the Schutztruppen in the foreground

  THE WAR AT SEA

  The Grand Fleet in the North Sea, 4th Battle Squadron (Iron Duke, Royal Oak, Superb, Canada) in the foreground

  SMS Blucher sinking at the battle of the Dogger Bank, 24 January 1915

  The battlecruiser Invincible, broken in half by internal explosion, battle of Jutland, May 1916; H.M. Destroyer Badger approaching to pick up the six survivors

  The torpedo room of a V-boat

  American armed merchant ship Covington, sinking off Brest, 2 July 1918, after torpedoing by U-86

  THE WAR IN THE AIR

  Fokker triplanes. Richthofen, Germany’s leading ace, scored many of his victories in this machine.

  A Sopwith Camel, Noyelles-sur-l’Escaut, 8 October 1918. A highly manoeuvrable fighter, it had a rotary engine that made it difficult to handle on take-off and landing.

  A squadron equipped with the SE 5a, the most successful British fighter of the final period of air fighting

  ARMISTICE

  A French soldier welcomed in the liberated zone

  A Hessian regiment marching back across the Rhine at Coblenz, November 1918, displaying the Grand Ducal instead of the Imperial colours

  WAR’S AFTERMATH

  A burial party at Windmill Cemetery, Monchy-le-Preux, begun for soldiers killed in the battle of Arras, April 1917

  Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendaele, today. The largest of the Commonwealth war cemeteries, it contains the bodies of 12,000 soldiers killed in the Third Battle of Y pres and commemorates 35,000 whose bodies were not found.

  The battle of the mud at Ypres—Passchendaele, as it would become known, after the smear of brick that represented all that remained of the village which was its final objective—would therefore continue. Not, however, with British soldiers in the vanguard. Some of the best divisions in the BEF, the Guards, the 8th, one of the old regular divisions, the 15th Scottish, the 16th Irish, the 38th Welsh, the 56th London, had fought themselves out in August and early September. The only reliable assault divisions Haig had left were in his ANZAC and Canadian Corps, which had been spared both the first stages of the battle and the worst of the Somme a year earlier. In what was called the “First Battle of Passchendaele,” the New Zealand and 3rd Australian Divisions tried on 12 October to reach the remains of the village on the highest point of ground east of Ypres, 150 feet above sea level, where the Germans’ Second Flanders Position of trenches and pillboxes marked the last obstacle between the BEF and the enemy’s rear area. “We are practically through the enemy’s defences,” Haig told a meeting of war correspondents on 9 October, “the enemy has only flesh and blood against us.” Flesh and blood, in the circumstances, proved sufficient. Caught in front and flank by machine-gun fire, the ANZACs eventually retreated to the positions from which they had started their advance on that sodden day. So wet was the ground that shells from their supporting artillery buried themselves in the mud without exploding and the New Zealanders alone suffered nearly 3,000 casualties in attempting to pass through uncut wire.

  Having consigned the II ANZAC Corps to a pointless sacrifice, Haig then turned to the Canadians. General Sir Arthur Currie, commanding the Canadian Corps, had known the Ypres salient since 1915; he did not want to lose any more of his soldiers there and his precise, schoolmaster’s mind forecast that the assault Haig requested would cost “16,000 casualties.” Though he had means of recourse to his own government, and might have declined, he nevertheless, after protest, complied with Haig’s order. The early winter had brought almost continuous rain and the only way forward towards the top of the ridge was along two narrow causeways surrounded by bogs and streams.110 On 26 October, the first day of the “Second Battle of Passchendaele,” the Canadians broke the First Flanders position and, at heavy cost in lives, advanced about 500 yards. The 11th Bavarian Division, defending the sector, also lost heavily and was taken out of the line. On 30 October the battle was resumed, and a little more ground taken, three soldiers of the 3rd and 4th Canadian Divisions winning the Victoria Cross. The 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions took over the front of attack for a fresh assault on 6 November, which captured what was left of Passchendaele village, and a final assault was made on 10 November, when the line was consolidated. The “Second Battle of Passchendaele” had cost the four divisions of the Canadian Corps 15,634 killed and wounded, almost exactly the figure Currie had predicted in October.111

  The point of Passchendaele, as the Third Battle of Ypres has come to be known, defies explanation. It may have relieved pressure on the French, in the aftermath of the mutinies, though there is no evidence that Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew enough of Pétain’s troubles to plan to profit by them. They had too much trouble of their own, in propping up their Austrian allies and in settling the chaos of the Russian front, to mount another Verdun; moreover, by the autumn of 1917, Pétain’s programme of rehabilitation was having its effect on the French army, which staged an attack near the Chemin des Dames, on 23 October, that recaptured over seven miles of front, to a depth of three miles, in four days, a result equivalent to that achieved with such effort and suffering at Ypres in ninety-nine. Edmonds, the official British historian, justifies Haig’s constant renewal of the Passchendaele battle with the argument that it attracted eighty-eight divisions to the Ypres front, while “the total Allied force engaged was only 6 French divisions and 43 British and Dominion [Australian, New Zealand and Canadian] divisions.”112 Context puts his judgement in perspective: eighty-eight divisions represented only a third of the German army, while Haig’s forty-three were more than half of his. What is unarguable is that nearly 70,000 of his soldiers had been killed in the muddy wastes of the Ypres battlefield and over 170,000 wounded. The Germans may have suffered worse—statistical disputes make the argument profitless—but, while the British had given of their all, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had another army in Russia with which to begin the war in the west all over again. Britain had no other army. Like France, though it had adopted conscription later and as an exigency of war, not as a principle of national policy, it had by the end of 1917 enlisted every man that could be spared from farm and factory and had begun to compel into the ranks recruits whom the New Armies in the heyday of volunteering of 1914–15 would have rejected on sight: the hollowchested, the round-shouldered, the stunted, the myopic, the over-age. Their physical deficiencies were evidence of Britain’s desperation for soldiers and Haig’s profligacy with men.
On the Somme he had sent the flower of British youth to death or mutilation; at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond.

  THE BATTLE OF CAMBRAI

  There remained one means of offence against the Germans that the mud of Flanders had denied its potentiality: machine warfare. The main reserve of the Tank Corps, built up incrementally during 1917, therefore remained intact. Its commander, Brigadier General H. Elles, had been seeking an opportunity to use it in a profitable way during the summer and had interested General Sir Julian Byng, commanding Third Army, in the idea of making a surprise attack with tanks on his front, which ran across dry, chalky ground on which tanks would not bog. One of Byng’s artillery officers, Brigadier General H. H. Tudor, of the 9th Scottish Division, had meanwhile been devising a plan of his own to support tanks with a surprise bombardment, thus denying the enemy forewarning of an attack. Byng accepted both Elles’s and Tudor’s plans in August and Haig’s headquarters approved them on 13 October, in principle at least. By early November, with the battle at Passchendaele lapsing into futility, Haig was anxious for a compensatory success of any sort and on 10 November, at Byng’s urging, gave his consent to the Elles-Tudor scheme.

  The offensive was to be launched at the earliest possible moment at Cambrai with over 300 tanks. They were to be followed by eight infantry divisions and supported by a thousand guns. The nature of the artillery plan was crucial to success. Conventionally, artillery bombardments and barrages commenced only after all the batteries had “registered,” that is, established the accuracy of their fire by observing their fall of shot, a lengthy process which always alerted the enemy to what portended and allowed them to call reserves to the threatened sector. Tudor had devised a method of registering guns by calculating the deviation of each from a norm by electrical means; when the deviations were transferred mathematically to a comprehensive map grid, the artillery commander could be confident that his batteries would hit their designated targets without any of the preliminary registration which had always hitherto given offensive plans away.113