by Barrie Pitt
When the candidate officer was recalled for questioning he was informed (correctly) that the laws of war had in no way forced him to give the information which he had volunteered, but that should his information prove to be false he could be shot as a spy; and if this information came as a surprise to any present who had studied the Hague Convention in detail, it came as a severe shock to the candidate officer, who presumably hadn’t. After a few moments’ reflection he admitted that his previous statements were incorrect, and the floodgates of his mind then opened to let out a remarkably comprehensive description of the military forces about to descend upon the luckless Sixth Army.
It was by now 3 p.m. on May 26th: the attack would commence at 1 a.m. on the morning of May 27th.
The signals went out, those troops not already occupying their battle positions moved into them, and the atmosphere at Sixth Army Headquarters, which had until then – according to the French writer Pierrefeu – been dominated by ‘Une humeur de dogue, un grondement perpetuel’, calmed under the impact of the sudden realization of impending catastrophe.
This must have been a great improvement for everyone there, causing – even amid sorrow – much more contented conditions for the Staff. Another factor which might have contributed to their well-being was the considerable distance which separated them from the front.
Until midnight, the troops lining the ridge and holding the curving right flank counted the hours: after midnight, they counted the minutes. Four French and three British front-line divisions – the latter composed solely of tired or raw troops – faced eighteen fresh German divisions with seven more in close support. A relatively small proportion of the defenders, however, would ever see many of their assailants, for even more fatal to them than the preponderance of enemy troops was the weight of Bruchmüller’s artillery barrages, due to fall soon upon trenches crammed tight with troops as a result of Duchesne’s blind stupidity.
But first of all, before the steel and the high explosive trod them into the ground, all Allied positions between the Ailette and the Aisne were thoroughly drenched with gas. Between 12.45 a.m. and 1 a.m., thousands of gas-shells phut-phutted into the soft ground and spread their choking poison across the face, the crest and the rear slopes of the Chemin-des-Dames, and the saucer at its eastern end which held the British. There was little point in the gas casualties trying to make their way back to the aid posts or to the casualty clearing stations, for they were under no illusions as to the time still available for the journey.
Promptly at 1 a.m., the 3,719 guns of Bruchmüller’s 1,158 batteries opened fire in a bombardment which in the opinion of the few remaining survivors of previous offensives had had no equal in the history of the Western Front. The whole length of the Chemin-des-Dames crest disappeared under a line of erupting fire, while the front face of the ridge was closely pocked with the flame of bursting shells and mortar bombs. Never before had drum-fire been so consistent, so concentrated or so prolonged, and within minutes it seemed as though the whole fifteen-mile-long hill was quivering under the shock of hammer blows and shaking the surface of the valleys around.
Penned inside dugouts which threatened to collapse and bury them, stifling under the pressure of fear and the moist strangulation of sweat-filled gas-masks, the luckless thousands of Duchesne’s army waited for death or action to end their sufferings. For some the ordeal became unbearable, and by the end of the two and a half hours of the barrage, many men had gone mad and either torn off their gas-masks and choked to death, or rushed out into the tumultuous night to be blown to pieces, or ended their torment by their own hand and their own ammunition.
At 3.40 a.m. the German Storm Troops began to move forwards behind the wall of their own bursting shells, through scenes of carnage and destruction beyond even the imagination of a Dante or a Hieronymus Bosch.
The first reports of the assault received by Duchesne and his Staff were to the effect that enemy balloons were rising from the front trenches of the Allied positions, and by midday the Germans were five miles ahead and across the Aisne – aided by the fact that Duchesne had delayed until too late the order to destroy the bridges. The Storm Troops had reached the river across a carpet of annihilated British and French infantry battalions, and through the desperate but feeble resistance of the survivors of those few battalions who constituted what Duchesne had insisted upon regarding, right until the end, as his rear support units.
On each flank, the survivors of the disaster hurriedly rewove a system of defence in order to try to confine the width of the breakthrough, and in this they met with some success – due, however, more to the ever-forward flow of the German assault than to their own efforts.
By the evening the central German spearhead had reached the next river to the south – the Vesle – on both sides of the town of Fismes, and the following morning they crossed the river and surged onwards towards the Marne, at the same time broadening their advance in order to threaten the important rail centre of Soissons on the west flank of their attack front.
In one day therefore, the German assault troops had advanced twelve miles – a feat which had long been considered impossible upon the Western Front by Allied commanders, who were thus thrown into confusion and dismay.
Ludendorff was rather surprised, too.
‘I had believed’, he was later to write – after sufficient time had elapsed for his memory to make those adjustments which flatter the self-esteem of all of us as we grow older – ‘that we would succeed merely in reaching the region of Soissons and Fismes.’
This was undoubtedly the truth, but not quite all of it, for if his original intention for the Blücher attack was merely to attract French troops away from Flanders, it was essential not so much that his own troops should reach the region of Soissons and Fismes, but that they should not reach much farther.
But nothing succeeds like success, and it would have taken a greater man than Ludendorff – and one much more clear-headed than his recent experiences had left him – to rebut the congratulations which poured into his headquarters, and to assert that what everybody was assuming to be a great victory bade fair to develop into utter catastrophe.
There was in any case so little that he could do to arrest the forward surge of his troops – even if the glowing terms of the first reports of the advance did not drive such intentions out of his head. Launching a successful attack is not unlike throwing down a bucket of water: unless one acts with extraordinary rapidity and decision during those vital first few seconds, no attempts to dam or channel the flood are of any avail, and there is nothing to do but wait until the waters lose their impetus and reach the limit of their dispersion.
And though the Allies made attempts to dam the flood – at first futile but as time went on gradually more successful – Ludendorff did nothing. Instead, despite the lessons of the last few weeks, he reinforced his forward divisions during the second day of the attack (by which time they had crossed the Vesle and secured the heights to the south of the river) to such an extent that on the third day, May 29th, they not only captured Soissons, but also made an immense bound forwards to beyond Fère-en-Tardenois, twenty miles from their original start line.
Yet already the form of the trap into which he was being enticed was there for eyes that wished to see: the progress was all in the centre, where an apex was forming to a rough triangle whose height rapidly increased but whose base was only fractionally widening. To the east, the two British divisions originally in the centre, the 50th and the 8th, had been virtually annihilated (the 2nd Battalion of the Devons, for instance, had fought on the north bank of the Aisne until every man was either dead or too badly wounded to stand) but the 21st Division and the 25th in reserve, although badly mauled, had hinged back from the outskirts of Rheims and were holding fast on the flank. They were ably supported by the Algerians of the French 45th Division in the north, and only slightly inconvenienced by the French stragglers and civilians who assailed them with curses and ‘hostile demonstration’. Despite their
weakness in numbers and the growing exhaustion of the survivors, the British divisions even managed to extend their front in order to continue to hold the flank of the German advance, until at last help came in the shape of the 19th Division, which had just arrived from the north for its spell of rest – and was somewhat vexed by its reception at the hands of the local inhabitants, some of whom spat at them.
But this happened on May 30th – during which Storm Troops of General von Böhn’s Seventh Army had reached the Marne: and before Ludendorff’s pale blue and slightly protuberant eyes appeared a vision of Paris, less than fifty miles away and straight up the corridor between the Marne and the Ourcq.
It was enough to blind any soldier in Ludendorff’s position, unless he happened to be a military genius of the calibre of Marlborough, who would have seen beyond the glitter, or Wellington, whose cold common sense would have precluded his interest in any other object than that of a convincingly beaten enemy army.
Carried by the flood of his own success, insensitive to the thrusts which Pétain had all the time been directing at his western flank, Ludendorff rushed every reserve division he could bring to the area through the gap between Soissons and Fismes, wheeled them westwards, and bulged out the side of his triangle towards Paris.
Now indeed it seemed to the watching and unthinking world that the end was near and the chance which had been fumbled by von Moltke in 1914 would be redeemed from virtually the same area by Ludendorff in 1918. There appeared to be nothing between the German armies and the French capital but the few hastily committed reserve divisions which Pétain was flinging before the onslaught, only for them to be swept away like sand-castles before the seventh wave. Victory was surely inevitable.
That essential lightweight, the Kaiser, certainly thought so – as did the Crown Prince whose armies seemed likely to bring it about, thus adding immeasurably to an already pluming self-approbation; and from his actions it can well be assumed that Ludendorff himself was not unhopeful.
Yet the recurring pattern was forming clearly enough: for the attacker – the ever-lengthening supply lines to feed an ever-widening front; for the defender – the falling-back upon his own reserves. After a peak of progress on the 29th, every hour brought the German armies a slackening of impetus – of which there were many signs Ludendorff should have recognized. Perhaps the chief of these was the bout of violent and widespread drunkenness throughout his armies, a reflection of a psychological condition for which Ludendorff had made no allowances, and indeed of which with his limited field of knowledge he may have been completely unaware.
For far too long these German troops had been deprived of everything but the bare minimum necessary for fighting efficiency, and they were all only too well aware that their families at home did not receive even this. The capture of Albert had given them the first taste of luxuries for which they had long yearned and with which they now found themselves surrounded. The same diarist who described the scenes at Albert, Rudolph Binding, later wrote:
Had I not seen yesterday an officer younger than myself sitting beside me in the car suddenly call out to the driver to stop at once, without so much as asking my leave? When I asked him in astonishment what he meant by stopping the car when we were on an urgent mission, he answered, ‘I must pick up that English waterproof lying beside the road’. The car stopped. He jumped out, seized the waterproof, and then jumped joyfully back again, as if refreshed and waked to a new life.
If this lack of restraint can seize an officer, imagine what effect it must have on the private soldier, to have craved and hungered and thirsted for months on end … with the private soldiers, according to taste, it was the coloured picture postcard, the silk curtain, the bottle of wine, the chicken, the cow, but in most cases the wine.
And now they were in the Champagne country, and the cellars of Soissons and Fismes and the surrounding villages, had been full. Soissons, on the evening of May 29th, was thronged with reeling, totally unmanageable troops, while at Fismes on the morning following its capture the roads had to be cleared of the insensible bodies of the weaker-headed of the celebrators in order to let the transport through – transport driven by men only too eager to join and reanimate the tiring revels whose strains came to them from the houses on each side: and this at a time when every moment counted if victory was to be gained.
Not only did the actual time spent in drinking and drunkenness form a loss of thousands of man-hours, but in the sullen inertia of the hangover period it was extremely difficult to get the men moving forward again, and those in action soon afterwards were still suffering a loss of efficiency which must have cost many of them their lives.
While the German troops drank, and slept, and looted until herded back into the line by Feldpolizei suffering the same pangs as themselves, French troops had been working hard under the cold and logical direction of Pétain. The divisions he had flung down before the onslaught had not been sacrificed in vain for they had won him time – the time necessary for the larger part of his reserves to dig a long, curving defensive position between the two rivers, against which the German advance eventually beat with anger and no little force – but with no more effect than tidewaters against the containing harbour wall.
Now followed an event which Sir Winston Churchill has described:
Suddenly the roads between Provins and the front towards Meaux and towards Coulommiers began to be filled with endless streams of Americans. The impression made upon the hard-pressed French by this seemingly inexhaustible flood of gleaming youth in its first maturity of health and vigour was prodigious. None were under twenty, and few were over thirty. As crammed in their lorries they clattered along the roads, singing the songs of the new world at the tops of their voices, burning to reach the bloody field, the French Headquarters were thrilled with the impulse of new life. ‘All felt,’ says Pierrefeu, ‘that they were present at the magical operation of the transfusion of blood. Life arrived in floods to reanimate the mangled body of a France bled white by the innumerable wounds of four years.’ Indeed the reflection conformed with singular exactness to the fact. Half trained, half organized, with only their courage, their numbers and their magnificent youth behind their weapons, they were to buy their experience at a bitter price. But this they were quite ready to do.
They were, indeed, and one can only regret that national pride demanded they should pay this price, rather than profit by the hard-won experience of others.
The first Americans in action as a unit against a still flowing German advance – apart from the isolated engineers who had helped stem the flood at Amiens – were the men of the 7th Machine-gun Battalion, who reached the south bank of the Marne shortly before the Germans reached the north bank, near Château Thierry. These Americans were extremely fortunate. Not only did they have just the right amount of time in which to dig themselves in and site their forty-eight guns to excellent advantage, but they were also in the middle of a section held by a French colonial division of hardened veterans, who were delighted to see them and glad to help.
The result – when the Germans arrived and attempted to cross the river – was a brisk, hard-fought action in which the battalion acquitted itself extremely well, beat off two determined attempts to cross the Marne bridges by the enemy, suffered no casualties, and saw a satisfactory end to the fight when French engineers eventually blew up the bridges. As this had been the first time they had been in action – they were from the 3rd Division which had not occupied even a quiet section of the line before this – they had every reason to feel thoroughly pleased with themselves. They had carried out the task which had been set them, their organization had worked well before the action had commenced, and no one’s nerve had failed after it had been joined.
Neither had neighbouring troops retired without warning and left their flanks exposed, nor had the weather blindfolded them with fog, nor clogged their weapons with snow or mud.
The main American contribution to the halting of the German attack, howe
ver, was provided by the 2nd Division (of marines and regular infantry) who during June 1st were deployed on each side of the Paris-Château Thierry road, on the right flank of the main French defensive position. All through the following day, the Germans attacked along the whole length of the front held by the Americans, only to be beaten back time after time by withering and accurate rifle and machine-gun fire from the American rifle-pits. Keen eyes, cool nerves and exceptional markmanship distinguished the defence, and the enthusiasm and confidence which the Americans felt in themselves as a result of this first success infected the French alongside, until the whole defensive line from Villers-Cotterets in the north down to the Marne itself was fighting with renewed hope and vigour.
Inevitably, the tiring German troops became aware of the new spirit abroad in the Allied lines, and their own despondency communicated itself upwards through the hierarchy. When the belated arrival of their field artillery, and its use against the Americans, failed to breach the line or even to push it back, the Crown Prince, acting on the advice of von der Schulenberg, called off the attacks and instructed his troops to dig in and await events. So far as could be seen, the war of attrition was due to start again, the road to Paris was blocked.
Thus for the third time, Ludendorff had fallen into a trap which he had dug himself. Bitterly, he confirmed the Crown Prince’s orders and made what dispositions he could to repel counterattacks and to hold a line now stretched even further, with reserves once more diminished.
Fortune, he may well have felt, had played him false again.
One can sympathize. But it might be more realistic to say that competence alone can only act within clearly foreseen limits, and that it needs a higher – or at any rate, rarer – quality to recognize true opportunity and to divine the best method for its exploitation. This quality, Ludendorff did not possess.
* Literally, ‘Throughbreak’ Müller.