1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  In early May therefore, the preparations in the south received encouragement, and the possibilities of an attack there hardened into certainties: the battering train was transhipped yet again, reserve divisions were concentrated around Laon, and definite orders issued for an attack by the Seventh and First Armies under Generals von Böhn and von Below respectively, to take place at the end of the month against that sector of the front lying between a point north of Soissons, and Rheims. With an understandable lack of continued faith in the practice of naming his operations after saints, and scorning the classical and religious proclivities which had dubbed the originally conceived attacks in this area Archangel and Achilles, Ludendorff turned this time with fervent hope to his Prussian precursor, and christened what he had good reason to believe might be his last chance, ‘Blücher’. Perhaps he hoped for an Iron Cross with Golden Rays himself.

  Even as the preparation for the attack proceeded, however, it would seem that fortune began mischievously to speed it onwards, towards exactly the same stages of beckoning success and final disaster as had attended Michael and Georgette. The very qualities which had brought Ludendorff to his eminence and which he had developed and given in unqualified measure to his country’s service, now served in part to bring his plans to ruin. For although he desired only a limited advance across the Chemin-des-Dames – and that solely in order to attract French reserves south and thus leave the Flanders plain vulnerable to his main design – he could not restrain the professional competence developed by both himself and his Staff, largely as a result of their efforts and experiences during the previous few weeks.

  If the preparations for Michael had been imaginative in concept and efficient in execution, those for Blücher were brilliant in both. Bruchmüller (now nicknamed ‘Durchbruchmüller’*) was given sole charge of the artillery, and produced schedules and directives for the barrages which were masterpieces of the gunner’s art; assault and reserve divisions moved to their allotted areas with the smoothness and precision of the wards of a mortice deadlock, and perhaps most fatal of all for the essential limitations to Ludendorff’s plans, the precautions for ensuring surprise were elaborated to an extent unprecedented since the episode of the Trojan Horse.

  Military ingenuity and endeavour could hardly have reached greater heights had Blücher been intended as a final triumphant victory over enormous odds, and infinite trouble was taken to conceal the movement of all troops and supplies. No vehicle on road or rail bore a label or distinguishing mark, axles of all transport were well-greased and even fitted with leather coverings, iron-rimmed wheels were padded with tyres of wood-wool or rags, and every piece of loose metal on harness or equipment was wrapped in straw. No troops moved by day, and if at night they were spotted on the open road by enemy aircraft, their officers or NCOs had strict instructions to turn them about as though marching them to billets in the back areas instead of to the front. This might mean that they then had to march twenty miles to cover five – but they slept on arrival, and each night as the divisions moved closer to the front, the woods, the villages, the barns and isolated farms filled up with troops forbidden to leave cover during the day, or to light fires at any time.

  And even Nature provided a gratuitous contribution, for the marshes and river bottom of the Ailette swarmed with frogs, which at night kept up such a deafening chorus that no one on the heights of the Chemin-des-Dames above heard any of the accidental or completely unavoidable sounds of preparation.

  Any further elements required to ensure an initial sweeping success for the Blücher offensive were contributed by the Allies.

  Both Haig and Foch – supported in their view by British and French Intelligence – were convinced that Ludendorff’s offensive schemes would be directed against the front north of the Somme, and in this they were of course basically correct: where they were mistaken was in believing that he would attack there next. Even Pétain’s objections to strengthening the Arras sector at the expense of his own seems to have been motivated more by a disinclination to part with his divisions than to any genuine belief in the imminence of an attack upon his front – and as such they met with a certain amount of disregard. It was as a sop to his complaint, far more than as a genuine replacement of strength, that the exhausted British divisions were sent down to him after the Lys battle.

  The only factor needed to confirm the senior partners of the Alliance in their view that no danger threatened south of the Somme was provided by the junior partner – America – who had been proclaiming with increasing vociferousness ever since April 23rd that the next German attack would be across the Chemin-des-Dames.

  To be fair, the first suggestion by the Americans to this effect would appear to have been based far more upon a shrewd guess than upon reasoned premises. When put to it, however, they produced a logical argument in support of their opinion and in mid-May placed it before the French: it was the work of the chief of the ‘Battle Order’ sub-section of Intelligence, a certain Captain Hubbard, and was in itself a remarkable piece of inductive reasoning.

  The offensives delivered so far by the Germans, Hubbard argued, had all been distinguished at their outset, firstly by striking use of the element of surprise, secondly by strong concentrations against weak fronts. No present sector of the Allied front offered Ludendorff the chances of further exploitation of these factors to such an extent as did the Chemin-des-Dames, as evidenced both by the certainty of British and French opinion that danger threatened elsewhere, and also by the presence of the exhausted divisions recuperating on the front.

  Basically, of course, what Hubbard was trying to do was to persuade the French CQG that the next blow would fall on the Chemin-des-Dames, precisely because they thought that it wouldn’t; and it is conceivable that the attempt was not made with the greatest degree of tact or diplomacy. Whether it was or not, the American view was rejected out of hand, in the first instance on grounds which cannot be said to have been either objective or even rational: pique, it would seem, played a major part in French reaction. That the Americans would not submit their improvised and amateur armies to French direction and control was bad enough. That their juvenile Intelligence organization should have the effrontery to disagree with one which had already experienced four years of actual warfare, preceded by forty years of preparation, and belonging to an army with a tradition firmly based upon the longest unbroken series of military blunders that history could show, was just not to be borne.

  This was a pity, for Hubbard had supporting evidence for his theories. For instance, a large group of German ‘Storm Divisions’ had been identified around Hirson, just behind the Ailette, and a Guards Division which had not apparently been employed since March 26th, had also made its appearance in the neighbourhood. Moreover, American assessments of Ludendorff’s available reserves showed that he had almost exactly the required strength to deliver an adequately mounted offensive on a front corresponding in length to that of the Chemin-des-Dames, that this strength was moving towards that area, and that all these individual divisions would be ready for offensive action at about the same time. By dawn on May 27th, proclaimed Hubbard and his colleagues, a German attack would be poised for a sweep southwards to at least as far as the Aisne.

  But it was no use, for they were not only talking to offended dignity but were also up against a mood of deep disappointment, and indeed distrust, of American promises and intentions. Haig’s diary entry of April 3rd seemed to have been justified.

  The honeymoon consequent upon Pershing’s generous offer of his troops to the Allies in their dire emergency lasted only as long as the mood in which he made it – which was not very long for he appears to have been prone to second thoughts. As a result of these, despite the publicity which his offer received and the grandiloquent terms in which it had been reported in the French press, Pershing still would not allow his troops to be used in less than divisional strength. It takes some time and organization to transport full divisions – especially the double-size Ame
rican divisions – and it was thus three weeks before even one of them made its appearance in any part of the line which might have been described as active, and this was only at Cantigny on the southern flank of the Michael salient – eight days after the commencement of Georgette.

  There were also many bitter arguments between the British and French civil and military chiefs on one side, and Pershing on the other, upon the subject of the employment of the American troops now being shipped by the British in increasing numbers and due very shortly to arrive in French ports. As soon as the glad tidings of Pershing’s gesture of support had reached Lloyd George and President Wilson, they had very quickly reached an agreement whereby 120,000 American infantry and machine-gunners would be shipped each month for the four months of April, May, June and July, in battalions to be brigaded with British or French divisions. In order to provide the shipping for this, Britain would forgo large cargoes of food and raw materials, and in consequence be forced to lower the rations of her population to something not far above starvation level.

  Having accepted this risk and put the necessary administrative machinery into motion, all parties concerned were provoked to considerable anger when on April 7th General Pershing repudiated the arrangements, insisted that only the first 60,000 Americans to arrive should be used to buttress the sagging Anglo-French front and that all the shipping made available should then be used only to bring across full American divisions to join the army under his command.

  The British and French troops, he argued, were inferior in physique and morale to the Americans – and he did not wish his troops to be infected with European scepticism by too close a contact with their armies. ‘Moreover,’ he declared, ‘the American people themselves would not have approved even though the President and his advisers should lean that way.’

  Colonel MacArthur must have been following this exchange with close interest, and the fact that Pershing won all along the line cannot have escaped him.

  All through the latter half of April the arguments wrangled back and forth. At a conference held at Abbeville on May 1st and 2nd, Pershing crisply agreed that he was quite prepared to stand by and watch the British Army pushed into the sea and the French Army driven back south of the Loire, confident that when the American Army was formed to his own specification, it could then take on the Central Powers and defeat them single-handed. To the combined pleas of the British, Italian and French Prime Ministers, he replied, ‘Gentlemen, I have thought this programme over very deliberately and I will not be coerced’ – banging the table with his fist as he spoke.

  © CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962

  This being so, one cannot but feel sympathy for those who wished that Pershing had not taken the trouble to drive to Clermont on March 28th and raise everybody’s hopes with his announcement of a programme of co-operation. The true value of that announcement, however, was to be felt in the future when the American armies began to swell at the astonishing rate of a quarter of a million men every month, as a result of the shipping programme initiated because of it.

  But this could not be foreseen in early May, and the cavalier treatment accorded to Hubbard’s appreciation of Ludendorff’s intentions was a reflection of a not unnatural distrust of American thought: for even if the prognostications of his Intelligence service were accepted, Pershing made it quite clear that he would not contribute American divisions to reinforce those now standing in daily increasing danger of annihilation, along the heights of the Chemin-des-Dames.

  Four French divisions held the greater part of the Chemin-des-Dames ridge, as far east almost as the village of Craonne where they met the flank of the first of the British divisions, the 50th Northumbrian, which had been cut to pieces in the battle for the village of Estaires in the opening days of the Georgette offensive and then forced to remain in action until the lull ten days later. The front from the 50th Division’s right flank around to the outskirts of Rheims was held by the 8th and the 21st Divisions, which had fought at Villers-Bretonneux and Voormezeele respectively in the immediate past, and at Albert and below the Flesquières Salient just beforehand. In reserve was the 25th Division, recovering from its experiences at Ploegsteert and Bapaume. The 19th Division was still to arrive.

  When the men of these divisions had first arrived in this delightful Champagne country, blossoming now in the warm spring sunshine, the contrast from the drab mists and mud of the Flanders plain had been to them a blissful revelation. The verdant countryside was broken by hills among which nestled charming villages untouched by war, and soft valleys lush with cornfield and vine. And if the trenches were shallow and insanitary to a degree, they were nevertheless so screened in foliage as to resemble more the brambled hideouts of childhood games, than the fortifications of more adult pursuits. Not that this mattered, for peace reigned here. This was a cushy front.

  At first.

  But after a week or more they began to wonder, for in addition to glorious weather, May brought an increasing feeling of tension along the entire front coupled with – or possibly caused by – an almost imperceptible daily increase in the amount of German artillery fire to which the front was subject. And if the troops felt uneasy, the battalion commanders, once their nerves and muscles had relaxed sufficiently for them to notice phenomena other than the euphoric quiet which now surrounded them, were horrified at the manner in which their men were arbitrarily disposed along a shallow defensive line. They reported their dismay to brigade and thence divisional commanders, who after due consideration forwarded their reports to the corps commander.

  Unfortunately there was nothing he could do about the situation, for these British divisions were now in the command area of the French Sixth Army, and as such came under the control of a certain General Duchesne, whose choleric disposition was such that he fiercely resented any criticisms of, or divergence from, his own ideas – even when inspired by superior officers of his own nationality. Pétain himself had given orders that all defensive arrangements were to be based upon a system of depth and elasticity – but Duchesne had been Chief-of-Staff to Foch in the early days of the war when the military creed had been based upon the offensive, the massing of infantry in the front line and immediately behind it, and the rigid refusal to give up a yard of ground; and four years of warfare had not served to modify his ideas.

  Having completely disregarded Pétain’s orders, it was thus unlikely that he would be amenable to suggestions from subordinates; and when the subordinates were British – and those moreover who had disgracefully retired in the face of the last two German attacks – their suggestions were met with flat rejection worded in the most insulting terms. When they remonstrated further, he dismissed them with a basilisk stare and breathed a curt ‘J’ai dit!’

  All troops, then, British and French, were herded up towards the front line, in trenches not conspicuously suited to withstand heavy bombardment, and given orders which were in flat contradiction to the lessons learned during the last few weeks. The French frontline divisions and the British 50th and 8th Divisions were ordered to sandwich their infantry, and even their guns, between the Ailette and the Aisne, giving them a maximum depth of five miles, and on the 8th Division’s front an average depth of only three miles.

  Thus did French autocratic intransigence combine with German efficiency and Nature’s collaboration, until there was really nothing lacking to ensure Blücher’s sweeping success. Knowing the strict limitations which Ludendorff not only desired but upon which he was also basing his future plans, it is almost possible to feel sorry for him were one’s sympathies not otherwise fully engaged.

  During the last week before the attack two events occurred which might have eased the fate of the defenders of the Chemin-des-Dames. The first was the conversion of Colonel de Cointet, Chief of the French Intelligence, to the American view of the imminence of the attack, but this was negated both by the French Operations Section which refused to believe their own Intelligence, and by Duchesne’s attitude, which was nothing short
of contemptuous.

  The second event was the escape of three French prisoners-of-war from their camp not far behind the German lines, as a result of the massive reorganization of life there consequent upon the preparations for the attack. They reached the British lines just before dawn on May 25th, where they were admitted, fed, and closely questioned upon the conditions existing on the far side of the Ailette. Any doubts still existing in the minds of those conducting the interrogation as to the precariousness of their position were quickly dispelled, and a strongly worded report was forwarded to Sixth Army Headquarters.

  But Duchesne’s reply read coldly: ‘In our opinion there are no indications that the enemy has made preparations which would enable him to attack tomorrow’ – and in any case, when light did at last dawn upon his shadowed mind, his reaction to the army’s danger was merely to compress it even tighter into its sepulchre.

  This occurred on the afternoon of May 26th, as a result of the capture early that morning of two German soldiers on the front of one of the French divisions. One of these soldiers was a candidate officer, and he declared effusively to his interrogators at Duchesne’s headquarters, that so far as he knew there were no intentions of any German attack in that area in the immediate future. The second soldier, however, a private in a Jäger battalion, revealed that assault and Guards battalions had already moved up into attack positions, that grenades and ammunition had already been distributed and that so far as he could judge the offensive would be launched in a matter of days if not hours.