by Paul Ham
Bedevilling Nivelle’s hopes were reports of the curious absence of the German front line. The enemy seemed to be deserting his posts. The Australian forces first noticed it: a strange silence issuing from various points along the front. Patrols were sent to investigate, and, sure enough, the enemy were abandoning their posts. Word arrived of agricultural work ceasing, and plant and equipment being destroyed. The reports gradually formed a pattern, and the pattern conformed to an order. They had detected the early signs of a massive defensive withdrawal.
All along the entire front, the German forces were pulling back, under Operation Alberich, ordered by Ludendorff on 4 February. Between 9 February and 19 March, the German Army steadily withdrew to the heavily fortified ‘Siegfried Line’ (the Allies would soon call it the Hindenburg Line), a ribbon of steel that German engineers had been constructing for months. It comprised a system of wire, trenches and concrete pillboxes twenty to thirty miles deep and in places extending as far back as fifty miles. The withdrawal, timed to coincide with the resumption of the submarine war, was a shrewd defensive move designed to narrow the German front and ease the pressure on the army.
The scorched earth policy that preceded it brought the opprobrium of the world down on Berlin’s head. The French and British forces witnessed the wretched result, as they moved onto formerly German-occupied territory to get close enough to attack: terrified French villagers disgorged from the rubble of their homes. For two years, these French border towns had hosted the German forces; now the residents had become refugees in their own country. Many women bore the evidence of occupation, in the fair-haired babies of German fathers. ‘Can you love me still, who have loved you always?’ some would appeal to their French husbands on being reunited. ‘No physical suffering I saw or heard of during the war,’ wrote Spears, ‘equalled or even approached that raw agony.’52
The British journalist Philip Gibbs witnessed the gutting of ‘the cottages of the peasants, and all their farms and all their orchards’ across the Somme valley. At Réthonvillers, one village of many, he saw ‘how each house was marked with a white cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ was used to mark the work of the Devil.’ Witnessing the women and children in the streets, and staring at him out of windows, ‘I was stuck with a chill of horror. The women’s faces were dead faces, sallow and mask-like, and branded with the memory of great agonies. The children were white and thin – so thin that their cheekbones protruded. Hunger and fear had been with them too long.’53
The Germans left nothing edible or useable: the fields were devastated; livestock slaughtered; villages and towns depopulated and burned; the wells polluted. ‘Nearly every tree in the Aisne Department has been felled,’ reported one observer.54 Booby traps primed to explode were attached to shovels, doors and displaced duckboards. Delayed-action bombs destroyed buildings, such as the town hall in Bapaume after the British occupied it. A recent environmental study of warfare described the German withdrawal as the ‘cold-blooded and systematic devastation of the countryside’.55
Ludendorff would justify it as a painful strategic necessity – ‘we had no choice’ – admitting that it implied ‘a confession of weakness bound to raise the morale of the enemy’. He claimed his forces had not poisoned the wells, and had salvaged any valuable works of art.56 His objectives were to narrow the front and ‘avoid battle’, salvage German guns and equipment, and destroy ‘highroads, villages, towns and wells’ to prevent the enemy ‘establishing himself in force … in front of our position’.57 In pure strategic terms, the German pullback was a stroke of brilliance: the soldiers’ entrenchment along a slimmer, better-fortified front plugged the gaps in their line and transformed them into a far more dangerous defensive force.
Even as the German Army dematerialised, Nivelle insisted that his plan would triumph. He would outflank the Germans, if necessary, from the other side of the Hindenburg Line: ‘In this respect the German retirement may be entirely to our advantage.’58 Nivelle reckoned on advancing twenty miles in three days. None of his senior commanders, not Pétain or Micheler or the howitzer-shaped General Franchet d’Espèrey, had any confidence in its success: the Nivelle Plan was unravelling before their eyes. On 6 April, beset by doubts, Nivelle presented French president Raymond Poincaré with an ultimatum: approve my plan or accept my resignation. Poincaré gave Nivelle the nod, and the French commander repaired at once to his new headquarters in a chateau near Chantilly, a former residence of Marie Antoinette, trailed by his wine cellar and chefs.
The British ‘diversion’ at Arras followed a week-long artillery barrage. At first light on 9 April, British and Dominion forces surged over the top, in a series of attacks aimed at diverting German reserves from the much bigger action soon to erupt in Champagne. It started well. The Canadian Corps stormed Vimy Ridge and captured it, at the cost of 10,500 casualties, in perhaps the greatest set-piece battle of the war. Further south, General Edmund Allenby’s Third Army advanced three-and-a-half miles in a day, the ‘greatest distance accomplished at a bound since the onset of trench warfare’,59 and pierced the Hindenburg Line in several places. By 11 April, the British, Canadians and Anzacs had taken 11,000 prisoners – a record in so short a time. The War Cabinet were delighted; Haig should receive a telegram of congratulations, they decided.60
Bad news soon arrived, and with it despair. In a pattern that would soon scar battle after battle, German counter-offensives reclaimed much of the lost ground, and dogged trench warfare resumed. While the Canadians held Vimy, the British were forced back and lost most of their gains at Arras. The casualties between 9 April and 16 May were 159,000, a daily average of 4076 killed, wounded and missing, which would prove to be the worst daily casualty rate of any major battle of the First World War.61 If Arras wore down the Germans, taught the British lessons on the ‘tactical learning curve’62 and amounted to ‘a victory of sorts’,63 as some claim, it is hard to imagine what a real setback would look like.
At the same time came news of the Anzac disasters at Bullecourt. The unpopular British general Hubert Gough, who led the attacks, cursed his soldiers’ chances from the start. Exhausted after their long march to the front, the Australians and New Zealanders were sent straight into battle across open ground without artillery cover. To maximise the element of surprise, Gough ordered them to advance behind a dozen tanks, despite the fact they had no experience in tank tactics. The Anzac commander, Lieutenant General William Birdwood, expressed his gravest reservations; Gough overruled him. When only four tanks arrived in time, the attack was postponed and the forward troops streamed back from the jumping-off points, ‘disappointed, exasperated … like a crowd returning from a football match’.64
Bullecourt resumed the next day: Gough made no allowance for the complete loss of surprise. At 3 am on 11 April, the Anzacs again moved into position behind the tanks, over a field drenched in German gas. The tanks advanced slowly, like lumbering tortoises, easy targets for shellfire and armour-piercing bullets. All were out of action by 7 am, and half the crews dead or wounded. Unprotected by tanks or guns, the Anzacs continued advancing. They were mown down. Those who reached the German lines, in scenes reminiscent of Loos, died on the wire. Some briefly penetrated the Hindenburg Line before the Württembergers, fighting ‘like demons’, reclaimed the lost ground.
Thus ended the First Battle of Bullecourt, another heroic failure: the Australian 4th Division lost 3000 officers and men. The Anzacs would never forgive Gough, whose ‘almost boyish eagerness to deliver a death blow’, wrote Charles Bean, ‘broke at every stage rules … recognised even by platoon commanders’.65 Second Bullecourt would further poison relations between the Anzacs and their British commander (though, in fairness, the Anzac generals made their own errors in the second battle). The memory of the Somme and Bullecourt made up the minds of the Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians: they would never serve under Gough again, if they could help it.
Meanwhile, a tragedy of epic proportions was unfold
ing in Champagne. Here, the world was about to witness the spectacular folly of a man whose mind had lost touch with reality and whose obsession with his war-winning plan appeared to intensify with every premonition of its failure. A commander absorbed in his plans must at times take the enemy into consideration, Churchill had icily observed. Schlieffen, Joffre and Holtzendorff had been deaf to this advice. Now Nivelle would join their ranks – on a similarly devastating scale. Every word of dissent, Nivelle had rejected; every plea to reconsider – from Pétain, Painlevé and his own generals – he flung to the wind, wildly confident of his belief in Germany’s imminent defeat. ‘No consideration should intervene of a nature to weaken the élan of the attack,’ Nivelle told Micheler on 1 April. By then, Nivelle was beyond recall to a saner world.
His forces were immense. Nivelle drew on almost a million Frenchmen in the Aisne River valley, supported by 4800 guns and an estimated 1000 aircraft. The Germans on the opposing heights fielded 480,000 men, 2431 German guns and 640 German aircraft. At dawn on 16 April, the first waves of French troops advanced under sheets of sleet into a stretch of the most difficult terrain on the Western Front – steep gorges, swampy river valleys and sandy rock faces. Enemy machine guns commanded every ridge and spur. German intelligence had been precise: the French attacked exactly where and when expected. They were cut to pieces. The Senegalese colonials fled the field. Nivelle’s men gained 600 yards on the first day; he’d promised six miles.66
As the news came in, Nivelle tried to soften expectations. His first reports were models of military obfuscation. Gradually the whole ghastly enterprise revealed itself to the French and British Governments: the much-touted breakthrough, the darling of Lloyd George, had failed according to all its benchmarks. During the first four days, almost 30,000 French troops had been killed, 100,000 wounded and 4000 captured, more than ten times Nivelle’s original casualty estimate for the first day.67
The walking wounded fell back through a great pall of smoke and thunder, their faces disfigured with despair. ‘It’s all over,’ some variously told Spears. ‘We can’t do it. We shall never do it. C’est impossible.’ That day, Spears witnessed something he thought he’d never see in the French lines: ‘These men were broken in spirit as well as body.’68 Nivelle had foolishly promised a breakthrough within 48 hours. His pride would not accept defeat, and he flogged the offensive for three more weeks, exterminating some of the finest units in the French republic. He called it off on 9 May, an absolute slaughter: 187,000 French men killed, wounded and missing, against 163,000 German losses. It was France’s worst casualty rate since November 1914, for a few miles of useless ground.69
Nivelle was sacked and dispatched to North Africa. On 15 May, Marshal Philippe Pétain took command of the French forces, an army on its knees. Pétain moved quickly to salvage what was left of their self-esteem. He spoke personally to the men, anxious to rebuild some of their famous esprit de corps. Yet the French Army were finished as a fighting force, at least for the rest of the year. On 19 May, Pétain decided to postpone future offensives and rest his men in defensive positions until more tanks and the Americans arrived.70
The French Army, Pétain realised, had further to fall. For almost three years, France had been devouring the best of her young men. She had thus far suffered the greatest loss of life in any battle in military history. Verdun had been monstrous, but Nivelle’s fiasco proved the last straw. The soldiers felt ill-used, hungry and furious at their conditions: French soldiers were paid a fraction of the daily rate of factory workers. From 3 May, the growl of mutiny spread through the ranks. Two regiments of a colonial division deserted, brandishing placards in their barracks: ‘Down with the War! Death to those who are Responsible!’71
The mutiny spread like a bushfire. Nivelle’s most damaged divisions led the insurrection. Soldiers singing ‘The Internationale’ threw down their weapons and ransacked their commanders’ headquarters. ‘Sympathy strikes’ erupted among workers in Paris, Soissons and Chalon. In time, 115 regiments from 45 divisions mutinied.72 A record 27,000 French soldiers would desert in 1917. By an astonishing piece of luck, or rare German incompetence, Berlin never discovered the extent of the mutiny, missing a perfect opportunity to attack Paris when just two reliable regiments were guarding the city’s gates.
At the time of Nivelle’s Waterloo, in London, the first sea lord held a finger to the wind. On 23 April, at the height of the U-boat war, Jellicoe presented a paper, ‘The Submarine Menace and the Food Supply’, to the War Cabinet. It warned of an extremely dire situation. An immediate investigation began into food stocks, likely future losses and minimum imports required to sustain the armed forces and the country.73 The government, unaware that April would be the worst month for shipping losses, drew the worst conclusions. Haig’s Flanders Offensive refocused their minds, and a tic of humiliation alighted on Lloyd George’s brow.
Cometh the hour … Haig emerged from the smoke and failure of Champagne like a condemned man who had been granted a reprieve. His powers were now thoroughly restored. ‘Sir Douglas Haig has come out on top in this fight between the two Chiefs,’ noted Lloyd George’s private secretary, in her diary on 12 May. She feared that her boss would ‘have to be very careful in future as to his backings of the French against the English’.74
A rare spectacle then ensued, of Lloyd George feeling obliged to appear humble, even contrite. Insofar as the prime minister was capable of humility, he conveyed less the fawning attentiveness of Uriah Heep than the importunate countenance of a Cheshire Cat. At the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris, 3–5 May, he presented himself as an innocent civilian ignorant of military matters, with ‘no pretensions to being a strategist’, despite his recent barnstorming interventions in strategy. He expressed his complete confidence in his military chiefs, and fully authorised Haig to attack when and where he thought best.
Back in command, Haig seized the reins of the Flanders Offensive with fresh gusto. On 7 May, he presented a new plan for Third Ypres at the army commanders’ conference at Doullens, north of Amiens. It divided the offensive into two stages. First, in early June 1917, he would attack Messines Ridge, the critical high ground to the south of Ypres that the Germans had more or less possessed since 1914. Next, at the end of July – a gap of seven weeks – he would launch the main offensive against the ridges radiating north and east of Ypres: Pilckem, Gheluvelt, Broodseinde and Passchendaele. Two simultaneous operations would assist the march on the coast: General Rawlinson’s forces at Nieuport would attack the Germans at Middelkerke, while an amphibious landing would strike behind the German lines, blocking their retreat. The combined British and Dominion forces would then destroy the U-boat bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge and drive the enemy out of Belgium.
Previously, these two stages – Messines and Passchendaele – had been part of a unified plan. Their separation in time would have immense repercussions, not least because the gap handed the enemy almost two months to prepare their defences for the Passchendaele onslaught.
Haig’s ideas met a mute, sullen response. Robertson thought them over-ambitious; Henry Wilson disapproved of anything Haig did or said. Only the Royal Navy welcomed the infantry’s help in defeating the U-boats. Yet nobody raised a hand against it – certainly not the contrite Lloyd George, who privately detested it and later claimed not to have head of it until June. He did ask the South African General Jan Smuts to review the plan, hoping for an answer that countermanded Haig. Instead, Smuts gave the ‘wrong’ answer: a defensive campaign would be disastrous. Smuts saw ‘more advantage in an offensive intended to recover the Belgian coast and deprive the enemy of their advanced submarine base’.75
In the end, Haig’s was the only plan on the table. The British and Dominion commanders, facing Germany alone on the Western Front, believed they had no choice other than to attack and keep on attacking. As Lloyd George had told his French allies in Paris on 4 May, ‘We must go on hitting and hitting with all our strength until the Germans ended … by crack
ing.’1 (With Nivelle’s failure, however, the prime minister now quietly revived his plan to ‘hit’ them in Italy.)
And so, in May–June 1917, as the mutinous French Army rested, the British and Dominion powers turned their eyes once more to the windswept plains of the Ypres Salient. Though Flanders had been a ‘dormant’ sector for the past two years, the Germans were well aware of Britain’s strategic interest in the Belgian coast, and were reinforcing their positions. On the Allied side, as we’ve seen, Haig had demanded half a million more men.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers now began to pour into this little patchwork of Flemish farmers’ fields, an area far smaller than the Somme and a fraction of the size of the great battlefields on the Russian front. That meant an unusual density of firepower, implying an exceedingly high force to space ratio – i.e. the number of shells fired per square yard – which, every commander knew, would churn up the battlefield and concentrate the casualties.
5
THE BLOODY SALIENT
Of this man little was heard, possibly because he had a habit of going into places a thousand strong and coming out a remnant of a hundred and fifty or so. Dead men tell no tales of their own glory.
Sergeant Charles Arnold, on the British Tommy
You people stop … I can’t take anymore.
The voice of ‘Death’, on the cover of the German magazine Simplicissimus, 19 June 1917
