1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  ‘Wire me today whether and how much you speak, read, and write French’ – to which he made a suitable reply which he was later to admit was ‘rather optimistic’. But, he added with delightful candour, it seemed ‘justified by the possibilities to be implied.’

  There were, in fact, four generals whose names were considered for command of the first American forces to be sent to Europe, but two of these were found to be in doubtful health for such an important and probably arduous task, and the third, Major-General Leonard Wood, had given no indication during his military career that he appreciated advice, help or control from civilian politicians. These therefore chose Pershing, who had shown a quite unexpected ability in reconciling political and military expediencies whilst in command in Mexico.

  From America’s point of view it is probable that no better choice could have been made. Pershing’s appearance and manner, for one thing, was the direct antithesis of the European picture of the American soldier, who it was fully expected would be reckless, braggart and extravagant. Haig immediately appreciated Pershing’s qualities, and wrote in his diary after their first meeting: ‘I was much struck with his quiet, gentlemanly bearing – so unusual for an American’, adding later: ‘The ADC is a fire-eater, and longs for the fray’ – a remark concerning a Captain Patton, whose spirit apparently was not to be affected by the passage of time.

  If the French were impressed, however, they avoided showing it. Perhaps they were disappointed that the American Commander-in-Chief gave early indication that he would prove intractable to their somewhat exigent demands, or perhaps they felt that neither he nor his officers showed the correct degree of appreciation of or subservience to their own military experience and superiority. It finally became necessary for General Pétain to issue a broadsheet to the French Staffs to the effect that ‘the Americans are a proud and sensitive people who will not tolerate the patronizing attitude commonly displayed towards them.’

  Despite their differences in the military field, however, the three Allied Commanders-in-Chief, Haig, Pétain and Pershing, maintained excellent relations, all thoroughly misunderstanding the others’ points of view without being particularly conscious of any basic divergencies, and appreciating their personal qualities. Reserve, autocracy and martial determination distinguished all three, for they were cast in virtually the same mould, and it is noteworthy that later biographers of two of them each made the same claim for their subjects – that they were the possessors of the most imposing chins in Europe. It is curious how rarely military biographers point with pride to the physiognomy of intellect in those they portray.

  This then, was the man who commanded the American forces in Europe as the immense threat of Ludendorff’s offensive grew ever larger before the alarmed eyes of the Intelligence Staffs of the British and French Commands. They could only hope that if their danger became acute, General Pershing would give a wider interpretation to his official instructions than he had shown any likelihood of doing so far, and possibly even to pay specific attention to the end of that paragraph whose beginning he had so far invariably invoked. For the paragraph concluded: ‘But, until the forces of the United States are in your judgement sufficiently strong to warrant operations as an independent command, it is understood that you will co-operate as a component of whatever army you may be assigned to by the French Government.’

  Not that this was likely to be of much assistance to the British.

  There was very little that was going to be of much assistance to the British, other than their own fortitude. In front of the Michael attacks, the men of the right wing of the Third Army and the whole of Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army, had been valiantly endeavouring to carve a coherent defensive system into the devastated waste intentionally created by the Germans in 1917, when they retreated to the Hindenburg Line. In places this was proving far more difficult than Ludendorff could have hoped for, even in his most optimistic moments, especially in the St. Quentin area and southwards along the stretch recently taken over from the French.

  The chief problem was one of transport. Every necessity of life itself, plus those for holding the line whilst trying to build sound defensive positions behind it, had to be brought forward for miles across a flat but cratered surface, at night. There was by early March a labour force of nearly forty-eight thousand men available behind the Fifth Army front, in addition to the men of the army, but so difficult was the problem of transport that the greater part of this force was necessarily employed laying roads and railways leading up to the proposed Rear Zone (the Green Line) while the defences of the Battle Zone were finally undertaken largely by the men who would have to fight in them – and there were just not enough of them to carry out this Herculean task in the time available.

  Every building, every tree and natural barricade had been methodically flattened by the enemy, so there was nothing in the area to assist or afford a short cut in the construction of the defences. Villages had been reduced to the foundations of their buildings – which invariably lay across the best line for the trenches – trees and orchards had been cut down so that their trunks were just high enough to obstruct fields of vision and fire without offering the slightest cover. What trenches remained had crumbled and were half-full of debris – inchoate, isolated and incomplete. Only where wire belts were not wanted, it seemed, had any ever been constructed solidly enough to withstand the passage of time.

  Across this desert of apparently wilful unhelpfulness had by early March been laid the outlines – they would never be much more – of the defensive Battle Zone. There were wire belts with no trenches behind them, half-finished switch lines with no wire, lengths of trench working towards each other but not yet connected.

  In view of the obvious impossibility of building and manning continuous trench systems, it had been decided to form a series of wired-in redoubts (the ‘Blob’ system as it was derisively named by those whose military development had not passed the ‘thin red line’ stage), all in theory with mutually supporting fields of fire. But even with the consequent economy of labour that this would yield, it had been calculated that for the defences behind the Fifth Army front nearly three hundred miles of trench with appropriate wire belts would be needed, and that it would take five hundred men two to three months to bury the essential telephone wires alone. ‘No amount of labour – nothing short of a fairy wand – could have prepared all those defences in a few weeks.’ So wrote Sir Hubert Gough in after years.

  But the effort was made, for the men knew that their lives would depend almost solely upon their own endeavours. By now, everyone sensed the approaching battle. Almost every night, the enemy raided the front trenches and took from the Fifth Army one or two prisoners; and every day it became more and more dangerous to loiter anywhere in the open, as the enemy shell-fire – although never continuous – grew increasingly active. By the middle of March, the men were feeling the strain of the back-breaking manual labour combined with accumulating sleeplessness.

  Their condition was not eased by the fact that their commander, Sir Hubert Gough, did not enjoy a lucky reputation.

  He was, like Haig, a cavalryman. Like the Commander-in-Chief he was also a man of immense determination; he was charming, ebullient, and psychologically inclined and fitted for the attack, and one gathers the impression from his writings that he viewed the preparations for defence with glum reluctance. By himself he would have made a popular commander, for his manner was gay and friendly and he felt a genuine sympathy for the plight of his troops, to which that tiny percentage which came into personal contact with him responded with affection; but he had in the past retained about him a Staff which had made itself bitterly disliked and with whom many of the fighting officers were not even on speaking terms. His command had also suffered such severe casualties – sometimes through sheer misfortunes, but at others through crass administrative inefficiency – that many men feared and hated to be appointed to the Fifth Army.

  Some of his Staff had in fact been
recently removed to other spheres of action (at Haig’s instigation) but as a result of the new faces at Army Headquarters, the troops merely felt that their destinies were now controlled by devils they did not know.

  As the days went by and the offensive loomed nearer, Gough did as much as it was humanly possible to do to dispel the results of past misfortunes; but he was himself faced with gigantic problems, and could thus spare little time for meeting and heartening his troops. This was unfortunate, for all men before battle like to feel that the apparent arbiter of their destiny is at least somewhere in the neighbourhood.

  A week previous to the attack, it became evident that it would fall on March 21st. Evidence suggesting that Gough’s Fifth Army would have to bear the brunt of the attack had so accumulated that Haig had reluctantly – for he was suspicious of a feint here – sent three more divisions to the Fifth Army area; but only under the condition that they were held in reserve in places specified by his Staff. One of these divisions was fifteen miles behind the front and another twenty-five miles – this in circumstances where it was doubtful if they could move forward much quicker than ten miles in twenty-four hours – and on the evening of March 19th, Gough rang up GHQ to request that he be allowed to move them some eight miles nearer to the enemy.

  For his pains, he was read a lecture upon the conduct of military operations by Haig’s Chief-of-Staff, Sir Herbert Lawrence, and specifically forbidden to move a man; it was also suggested that Gough had been both unwise and temeritous in moving his own reserves nearer to the front during the previous week, without seeking guidance from the speaker – a grim-visaged man, two stages junior to Gough in rank, who had only held his post for two months and who now – to quote the General – ‘purred on the telephone like a damned pussy-cat.’ But however soft his voice, the Chief-of-Staff’s insistence that the reserve divisions remained where he ordered them was unyielding.

  It had been raining on and off during that day and the hopes of Gough’s Intelligence Staff had risen as a result, although in view of their insistence nine months before that the bucketing downpours then persisting should not affect the advance of really determined troops, this spirit of optimism over a few warm showers seems unreasonable. Perhaps it was due to a real need for a crumb of comfort, for there was little to be found elsewhere. Every hour brought them evidence of the almost inconceivable detail with which the German offensive had been planned, and of the massing of men and arms along the short length of front.

  Prisoners recently taken had revealed that assault troops in the forward positions had been there for ten days while others moved up close behind them, but food and a moderate degree of comfort had been so excellently organized that there was no drop in morale. For weeks past, ammunition had been hauled into position and was now piled in mountains around the guns. A German trench-mortar section which had deserted en bloc (it had just been transferred from the Italian Front, and its members were frankly appalled by the extent of the preparations and the holocaust it foreshadowed) supplied details which gave a clear and fairly accurate picture of divisions lying one behind another to an unprecedented depth, of vast accumulations of rations, ammunition, bridging materials and the thousand other essentials of war. Three German armies – the Eighteenth, the Second and the Seventeenth – were wedged into position along an infinitesimal front, their forty-two divisions having all been brought up to full strength with fit, eager troops, well-trained and confident. A large proportion of them, moreover, would be fighting over ground they already knew, either from the Somme battles or as a result of having taken part in the retreat to the Hindenburg Line.

  So there was little for the British Intelligence Staffs to do but to issue carefully and noncommittally phrased warnings, and pray for a renewal of the torrential rains in which they had watched their own hopes founder nine months previously. But the following morning (of Wednesday, March 20th) was damp with white fog, not sodden with cloudbursts, and although later there was a little more rain, it was only heavy enough to mix with the dry and powdery earth surface, to form a thin slick over everything.

  There was no deep mud.

  The troops in the British front line had little need of the Intelligence warnings that an attack was coming. They had lain in forward listening posts too long and counted the number of German raids on their lines during the last weeks too accurately to have any doubts on the subject. The date was the only detail of which they were uncertain and they were prepared to accept the Staff’s forecast, as no observations of their own denied it.

  They waited in their positions during that last day, cold, contemptuous, isolated from all the world except themselves – and Brother Hun across the silent, shattered earth.

  During the afternoon, they either volunteered or drew lots for the various obviously suicidal tasks, and in due course as evening fell (it was raining softly again) some of them moved along the front trench to the saps, and out towards the isolated forward posts. Each man carried a Very pistol: when he fired his green flare he would be signalling his own death or defeat, and those behind could expect the enemy in ten minutes or less. As the last man reached the post, the sap trench was blocked with knife-rests and wire entanglements behind him; if there was an officer or senior NCO in the forward post, he usually occupied the rearmost position in order to block the retreat of any whose nerve, in the face of an inescapable destiny, should fail.

  During the early part of the night it was not completely dark; faint stars shone mistily through light clouds, and the rain ceased. From in front came still the never-ending rumbles of transport, an occasional stammer of machine-gun fire, the boom and crash of an isolated German battery firing a few rounds in order to give the impression that all was as usual, that tonight would end as ail others had – with stand-to, and rum, and tea, and early morning ‘hate’. It is doubtful whether many were deceived: only the young, the prisoners of hope.

  Just before midnight it was noticed that the flares from the enemy lines were not quite so bright, that the crack of explosion was losing its edge. Cloud cover was solidifying and closing down; mist was rising. By two o’clock visibility all along the front had been reduced to a few yards, fog was thickening and nothing could be seen of enemy activity except occasionally a silvered glare in the whiteness above, refraction from a flare which had soared above its ceiling.

  In a hundred isolated posts pushed out in front of twenty miles of trench, men watched the increasing pearly density with emotions ranging from a sickly and unfounded hope that it might cloak them from the wrath to come, to cold anger. There was little enough religious feeling left in these men after four years of war, but there were many who questioned that night whether the motto ‘Gott mit Uns’ on German belt buckles, might not after all have some basis in fact. That Jerry could conjure weather to defeat British attacks had been a wry, half-accepted belief for many months. Now it appeared that Ludendorff could order conditions for his own attack.

  So that no element might be missing from their condition, platoon officers in the section opposite St. Quentin received telephoned instructions from Headquarters to the effect that in view of information just brought in from a raid, all gas cylinders in their trenches were to be turned on. The gas mixed thickly with the fog, remained static, and caused considerable discomfort to those in its immediate vicinity – and German units in St. Quentin twice complained of the unpleasant smell.

  At 3.30 a.m. British artillery began sporadic bombardment of trench and road junctions behind the enemy lines in the hope of catching troop concentrations and traffic jams, and a few shells came back over in reply. But beyond this, the enemy line was silent – and owing to the fog, invisible. But the British infantry knew it was there, and as they lay in their shallow ditches or leaned against their parapets, they listened for the thunder that all were sure was coming.

  They said their prayers, or they swore softly to themselves as they wiped the condensation from the metal parts of their weapons, or they kept silent; each in
his own solitude of hope or despair, of fear or disregard, of acceptance or bitterness.

  And they waited for the battle to start.

  Canadians in the Wotan Line, September 2nd, 1918

  German machine-gun post

  Americans in the Argonne

  German trench, summer 1918

  Concrete defences in the Siegfried Line, under attack

  British artillery crossing the Canal du Nord

  Canadian patrol in Cambrai, October 9th, 1918

  Prince Max of Baden

  General von Seckt

  Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa

  The Kaiser (fourth from left) and his suite on Eysden railway station, November 10th, 1918

  Birdwood Rawlinson Plumer The King Haig Home Byng

  The King and his Generals

  4. Peal of Ordnance:

  St. Quentin

  JUST before five o’clock on the morning of Thursday, March 21st, began the most concentrated artillery bombardment the world had ever known. Nearly six thousand German guns opened fire almost simultaneously along a forty-mile front between the Sensée river and the Oise, and when the two thousand five hundred guns of the British artillery answered, the additional noise was hardly noticeable even to the men who fired them.