It was a kind of cultural binge—Lieutenant Colonel Winston S. Churchill afterward wrote, “We seemed separated from the old life by a measureless gulf”—and to the most idealistic youth the world had ever known it came as a crisis of the spirit. They had marched off to the lilt of “Tipperary” or “Die Wacht am Rhein” or “Over There,” dreaming of braid and heroism. When they found that their generation was bleeding to death, with each casualty list redder than the last, the thoughtful among them fled into cynicism and despair. The composer of “Keep the Homes Fires Burning” acquired an exemption and lolled around in a silk dressing gown, burning incense; thrice-wounded young Harold Macmillan retreated into a study of Horace; Siegfried Sassoon flung his military cross into the sea and wrote bitterly,
Pray God that you may never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
They were the sensitive. Most men fought stolidly. They had been bred to valor, taught fealty to the tribal deities of God or Gott or Dieu, and with numb certitude they sacrificed themselves to a civilization that was vanishing with them. They seemed marked by a sense of dedication that could only have been instinctive. In that war, said Dick Diver, touring old trenches in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, “You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers. This,” he said, “was the last love battle.”
That was in 1917, the penultimate year, when the lovelight was glimmering. The Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey—and the Allies—England, France, Russia, Italy—seemed lost in a dark madness. On the Western Front the lines moved a few inches a day, “leaving the dead,” said Dick Diver, “like a million bloody rugs.” In the East, in March of that year, the tormented Russian masses revolted, and in April the United States declared war on Germany.
The Atlantic was very wide then. For three years Americans had stopped their ears against the gunfire, and some time lapsed before they understood what they were in for. On the showery morning of May 28, 1917, three score Army officers in oddly fitting mufti boarded the White Star liner Baltic for Europe. In London they put on their uniforms and looked even odder—they had side arms, which weren’t being worn any more, and no Sam Browne belts, which were. King George V didn’t criticize. He feted them royally and they crossed to Boulogne, where French greeters struggled with the name of the American leader, a rather junior general officer they wound up calling “Puerchigne.”
General Pershing wasn’t offended. He was quite taken with his Gallic welcome, in fact, until he reached Paris, where he was told confidentially that the Allies were at the point of collapse; the French army was in open mutiny. Pershing thus became the second American to discover that his side was about finished. The first had been Pershing’s opposite number in the U.S. Navy, Admiral Sims. In London Sims had learned from Britain’s Admiral Jellicoe that Germany’s submarine campaign had England on her knees. Rations were tight and growing tighter. The British government was doing everything it could—draft notices were being sent to the maimed, the blind, the mad, and in some cases even the dead—but it wasn’t enough. One freighter in four was going down. There was six weeks’ supply of corn in the country. Jellicoe expected an Allied surrender by November 1.
All this was news to Pershing and Sims. They understood, of course, that shipping losses had to be concealed, and that Paris naturally didn’t want Berlin to know that poilus were beating up generals, derailing trains and leaving trenches undefended; but they were amazed that Washington had been given no inkling. Their astonishment showed their naïveté. America’s Western Front Allies weren’t even confiding in each other; each was fighting its own war in jealous secrecy. Together they were defending a snakelike chain of trenches that began on the Swiss border and ended 466 miles away on the Channel, but the joint between them was very weak.
Early in the war English troops couldn’t get French maps, and at one time British hospital trains, imported from England, were being charged two hundred pounds for each trip on French rails. This may seem inhospitable, but it must be remembered that France’s guests were often rude. Not only was Sir Douglas Haig, the starchy British commander, openly disdainful of everything French; his India Army officers called natives “wogs” or “niggers,” babbled Hindustani at them, and sometimes kicked them.
If the Entente was an uneasy one, official Allied distrust of the United States ran deeper. Americans were popular enough—they had been properly shocked by the Huns’ Schrecklichkeit in Belgium, and some 28,000 U.S. volunteers were wearing British khaki and French horizon blue. Their government was something else again. To the belligerent eye it had been insufferably independent, permitting American trade with Germany (until the British Admiralty felt obliged to draw up a blacklist of U.S. shipping) and winking at the buffoonery of Henry Ford, who chartered a “peace ship,” boarded it to the strains of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier,” and announced that he intended “to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.”
All Ford got was a cold and a quick trip home, but he had retained his pious air of superiority, which was also an annoying trait of his President. As a neutral, Woodrow Wilson had damned the Teutonic and Allied power blocs alike, insisted he was “too proud to fight” and loftily suggested a “peace without victory.” Even now, he was delivering sermons demanding that the world be made safe for democracy. European statesmen, who wanted only a world in which they could safely execute their secret agreements, were derisive. “My aim,” said France’s Clemenceau, “is to conquer.”
That sort of remark made Wilson flinch. He knew a little about those agreements, and was to learn more as the revolutionary government in Russia published details. He wanted no part of them. He seemed almost bewildered by his failure to stay neutral, although actually the seed of his failure had been sown in the war’s first year, and by him. The German navy had planned to counter British sea power with unrestricted submarine warfare, and on May 1, 1915, a Käpitän Leutnant Walther Schwieger prowling off the Irish coast in his U-20, had torpedoed the Cunard liner Lusitania. Over a thousand had drowned, a hundred of them American civilians.
In that gentler age, when war was still thought of as chivalrous, the sinking was almost unbelievable. Wilson—who hadn’t known that the Lusitania had carried munitions—had been outraged. He had written a protest so strongly worded that his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, refused to sign it. The note went to Berlin anyhow, a virtual ultimatum. Kaiser Wilhelm brooded over it and called off his subs. The meaning of the incident was clear. The American President had drawn a line. He would fight if Schwieger were let loose again.
The Kaiser was under growing pressure to take that risk. His admirals had a fleet of two hundred subs, and his top generals, von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, wanted them used. Then, early in 1917, he had a bright idea. He instructed his foreign minister to wire the Mexican government, suggesting an alliance with it in the event of war between Germany and the United States and offering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona as a bribe. If America was fighting at home, the Kaiser told his court, it couldn’t take on Germany.
Unluckily for him, the British decoded the telegram; it was published throughout the United States and stirred up resentment, especially in Texas. By now the German high command was crying for action, and the Kaiser told the navy to go ahead. For the next two months the Atlantic churned with torpedo wakes. Wilson tried to dodge the inevitable by arming merchant ships, but when U-boat commanders started sinking homeward-bound American ships, he gave up, and we were in the war.
But not all the way in. Not yet. Our suspicious Allies couldn’t believe we weren’t after something more tangible than Wilsonian ideals, and they kept telling Washington that they could carry on in the field if we w
ould backstop their economies. They needed money; Europe was hemorrhaging gold.
Acting on their advice, we swiftly sent bankers to write loans in London and Paris, while Congress let six weeks pass before an American army was even authorized. The first draftees wouldn’t go to camp for three and a half more months, while Pershing furiously paced the red tile floors of his headquarters at Chaumont and sent back appeals for a million men. All he got that summer were marching units to show the flag to doubting Frenchmen—regular regiments like the Sixteenth Infantry, which paraded through Picpus Cemetery in Paris on July 4 as a colonel declared, in unconscious irony, “Lafayette, we are here.”
What made all this peculiar was that it had happened before in this war. In 1914 the British had no intention of fighting in force. They had a big navy, lots of cash and 160,000 regulars, Kipling’s original Mulvaneys, the acknowledged flower of the world’s assault troops. Wearing their ribbons from the Egyptian, Burmese and South African shows, they marched to meet the Prussian Guard in flawless parade-ground formation. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough of them, and there was that map problem. They went down gallantly, firing “fifteen rounds rapid” at Ypres, gone in a vision of angels at Mons. It was the last hurrah of Tommy Atkins. There weren’t enough survivors even to season recruits.
The Kaiser scorned them as “contemptibles,” and a generation weaned on Soldiers Three flocked to the colors, a million avengers on their way to death for King and Country, Kipling’s own son among them. It was all very disorderly. The worst of it was that university students had been allowed to enlist as privates, which meant the pick of England’s youth—the men who should have been junior officers then and civilian leaders after the war—vanished into the drifting mists of no-man’s-land.
Now in 1917 the United States was being urged to follow the same fatal course. Allied generals were panicky at the thought of a big American expeditionary force. “There must be no thought of staying our hand until America puts an army in the field next year,” Haig wrote anxiously in his diary June 10. There is an explanation for this remarkable attitude, and it is the key to the whole war. In that remote day of derbies, ostrich-plume bonnets and hansom cabs, civilization was in the middle of a profound transition. Culturally it remained gyved to the horsy Victorian past, yet the machine age was coming, and coming fast. Europe lay half in one period, half in the other.
Until the assassination of the Austrian archduke, on June 28, 1914, set off the chain reaction of alliances, it had not been a bad time. Churchill remembered how “the world on the verge of its catastrophe was very brilliant. Nations and empires crowned with princes and potentates rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace.” The flaw was that of all customs, war was the most rooted in the folklore of the past, and its traditional leaders—the princes and potentates and field marshals—were the least capable of understanding the new mechanized war they were to lead.
These fogies distrusted the A.E.F. because, among other reasons, they didn’t want to share the glory—la gloire, the French called it. French yearning for la gloire was almost as great as their talent for self-hypnosis. Even as their soldiers tried to blow up their own munitions dumps and baaed like sheep to show they regarded themselves as lambs marked for slaughter, maréchals spoke glowingly of the natural élan of the poilu. They never stopped dreaming of Murat and Ney and the glint of Austerlitz moonlight on the lance heads of the emperor’s cavalry. Their speech was studded with Napoleonic phrases. They plotted the offensive à outrance, carried out with toujours l’audace by gallant men singing “La Marseillaise” and crying En avant! À la baionette!
Of course this was for the younger men, les jeunes Turcs. The generals stayed out of the chilling rain, in the ballrooms of commandeered châteaux. At their age they had to take care of themselves. When the Germans sprang at Verdun in 1916, the courier who brought the news was told that “Papa” Joffre, the constable of France, was asleep behind a double-locked door and couldn’t be disturbed.
England’s Colonel Blimps were equally convinced that a chap could smash through that barbed wire if he had enough sand. They strode around in gleaming field boots and jingling spurs and toured the lines in Rolls-Royces, cursing bad march discipline. It was a pretty thin time for the regular service, they agreed; so many of the officer replacements weren’t really gentlemen. The new fellows were sharply reminded that they should keep servants in their dugouts, that slack privates were to be struck on sight, and that before going over the top everyone must check to be sure the senior regiment was on the right. In rest camp subalterns actually were required to attend riding school and learn polo, and during the worst fighting on the Somme fussy divisional horse shows were ceremoniously held just behind the front.
The British failed on the Somme, though not for that reason; the German generals were just as bad. Junkers cherished their monocles, spotless white gloves and black-and-silver saber knots. Everywhere the military cliques abused the almost ecclesiastical status they had acquired when prewar diplomacy broke down. Interlopers like Churchill, who spoke bitterly of their “pomp and power,” were looked upon as cads. When the British Prime Minister questioned England’s strategy, Haig said tightly, “I could not have believed that a British minister could have been so ungentlemanly.” The general staffs insisted no one should have a voice in the war unless he had spent forty years in uniform, which, as Liddell Hart acidly observed, would have eliminated Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Cromwell, Marlborough and Napoleon.
American officers were of the same stodgy breed. Theodore Roosevelt noted that some were still too fat to mount a saddle, and others seemed to belong back at Little Big Horn. They sent white horses to France in anticipation of triumphal entries when they had slimmed down a bit; they showed their sympathy with the stale defensive tactics on the Western Front by ordering a hundred million sandbags from India, and they insisted enlisted men wear parade-ground tunics so binding that they were crippling in combat.
Doughboys complained, but by then the more fantastic anachronisms had disappeared from field uniforms. The Germans had shed the impractical spikes on their helmets; the French and British, who had had no helmets at all in 1914, were protected now. French infantrymen no longer wore scarlet trousers and blue coats, and the British had abandoned the practice of having new subalterns visit an armorer to have their swords sharpened, like Henry V, before sailing for France.
This decision wasn’t made lightly. Sword sharpening had been a sentimental ceremony, like Flirtation Walk. The idea of attacking a machine gun with a saber is inconceivable today, but the generals had considered the machine gun before the war, decided it was an overrated weapon, and turned back to what they felt was real soldiering. Each year the mechanical revolution clanked out new engines of death, but the alumni of Sandhurst and Saint-Cyr-l’École accepted them grudgingly or not at all.
They belonged to that older generation which still called electric light “the electric” and distrusted it as newfangled. Joffre wouldn’t use a telephone. Kitchener of England dismissed the tank as a “toy.” Planes and submarines were deplored; poison gas, adopted reluctantly after the Germans had used it, was delicately called “the accessory.” The trench mortar was rejected twice at the British War Office and finally introduced by a cabinet minister who begged the money for it from an Indian maharajah. In the gleaming châteaux this was regarded as both bad form and foolishness. The epauletted marshals placed their main reliance in masses of cavalry—as late as 1918 Pershing was cluttering up his supply lines with mountains of fodder for useless horses—and their staffs rarely visited the front, where a very different kind of war was being fought.
There, by the junk heap of no-man’s-land, amid the stench of urine, feces, and decaying flesh, the great armies squatted on the Western Front year after year, living troglodytic lives in candlelit dugouts and trenches hewn from Fricourt chalk or La Bassée clay, or scooped from the porridge of swampy Flanders. They
had been there since the gray tide of the German right wing—undiscovered by a hundred thousand galloping French cavalry—had made its sweep through Belgium, lapped at the breakwater of Verdun, recoiled on the Marne at the very gates of Paris, and receded to the Aisne. The efficient Prussians had tacked up propaganda signs there (Gott strafe England; Frankreich, du bist betragen) and settled down to teach the children German while the Allies furiously counterattacked.
The titanic struggles that followed were called battles, but although they were fought on a fantastic scale, with nearly two million men lost at Verdun and on the Somme, strategically they were only siege assaults. Every attack found the Kaiser’s defenses stronger. The poilus and tommies who crawled over their parapets, lay down in front of jump-off tapes, and waited for their officers’ zero-hour whistles, would face as many as ten aprons of barbed wire thick as a man’s finger, backed by the pullulating Boche.
A few trenches would be taken at shocking cost—one gain of seven hundred mutilated yards cost twenty-six thousand men—and then the siege would start again. At home newspapers spoke of “hammer blows” and “the big push,” but the men knew better; a soldier’s mot had it that the war would last a hundred years, five years of fighting and ninety-five of winding up the barbed wire.
It was a weird, grimy life, unlike anything in their Victorian upbringing except, perhaps, the stories of Jules Verne. There were a few poignant reminders of prewar days—the birds that caroled over the lunar landscape each gray and watery dawn; the big yellow poplar forests behind the lines—but most sound and color on the front were unearthly. Bullets cracked and ricochets sang with an iron ring; overhead shells wabbled endlessly. There were spectacular red Very flares, saffron shrapnel puffs, snaky yellowish mists of mustard gas souring the ground. Little foliage survived here. Trees splintered to matchwood stood in silhouette against the sky. Draftees arriving from home (“The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs,” said Lord Carson) were shipped up in boxcars built for hommes 40 or chevaux 8 and marched over duck-board to their new homes in the earth, where everything revolved around the trench—you had a trench knife, a trench cane, a rod-shaped trench periscope and, if you were unlucky, trench foot, trench mouth or trench fever.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 12