But yes: The United States of America did, indeed, miss the first thirty-two months of the Great War. And a lot did happen in that time. Not a lot changed, though; not a lot even moved. The war that America sat out was a bogged-down stalemate that claimed millions of lives, a fact that did not escape notice Over Here. By the time the American Expeditionary Forces started arriving in France in 1917, the fruitless carnage of 1914 and 1915 and 1916 had convinced AEF leaders to follow a different course, one that altered the way the war was fought in its final year and culminated in a victory over Germany. To understand that new course, though, you first have to understand how terribly the old one had fared.
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Ironically, a war that would become characterized by a deadly inertia was actually quite dynamic at first. That’s because both the Germans and the French were long past ready for it by the time it actually started. They’d been preparing for it for decades; four decades plus three years, to be precise.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, in which the Second French Empire squared off against the North German Confederation, is really the prologue to the First World War. The causes of that earlier war, while perhaps not quite as Byzantine as those of the war it wrought, are difficult to comprehend if your mindset is not stuck in nineteenth-century Europe. Starting at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, in the wake of Napoleon’s extremely destructive military campaigns throughout Europe, an elaborate system was constructed to ensure what was deemed a “balance of power” that would ostensibly prevent future Napoleons from wreaking havoc again. By 1870, though, Prussia, led by its brilliant chancellor Otto von Bismarck, had unified the northern German states under its leadership and was looking to do the same with the southern German states, including the large, populous and resource-rich Bavaria and Württemberg. Bismarck, facing some resistance to unification down south, figured that the one thing that might change their minds about it was a French attack. He knew that France’s emperor, Napoleon III, dreaded the prospect of a unified Germany; many historians believe that Bismarck baited Napoleon III into declaring war on Prussia by altering a diplomatic note, now known as the Ems Dispatch, to give the impression that Prussia’s King Wilhelm I had insulted Count Vincent Benedetti, France’s ambassador to Prussia. Whether or not Bismarck really deserves that much credit, Napoleon III was happy to have the pretense. France’s army was reputed to be the finest in the world; surely, it would make short work of the Prussians. Thousands marched through the streets of Paris demanding war. Their emperor gladly accommodated them.
He would quickly come to regret it. Just six weeks after (it would seem) he let Bismarck trick him into starting a war, Napoleon III was captured by the enemy, along with more than twenty thousand of his men, following a devastating defeat at Sedan in northeastern France. The Prussians then laid siege to Paris; after four months, France requested an armistice. The fighting had lasted a total of six months. When it was all over, the finest army in the world was in tatters, and France was poorer, smaller, weaker, and utterly humiliated. Prussia, on the other hand, unified more than two dozen smaller states under its leadership, creating a much larger and more powerful new nation—Germany. And the peace was equally lopsided: Just as a second world war was all but assured by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the first one was all but assured by the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1871, which awarded the victors a five-billion-franc “war indemnity,” part of the French region of Lorraine, and nearly all of the adjacent French region of Alsace. Worse than all that, though—at least according to one French historian I know—was that the Prussians occupied a large chunk of the country, staging victory parades until they got their five billion francs. A plague of internal upheavals, some of them quite bloody, descended upon France. For a long time, it seemed the only things that united it were a hatred of the Boche—the most common French slur for a German—and a lust for revanche.
The Germans knew that; and if they saw it as a threat, they also saw in it an opportunity to expand their borders even further. The Germans did not lack confidence. Their new unified nation, one of the largest and most populous in Europe, was also quite possibly the most innovative and industrious: It produced the very first automobile, for instance, in 1885, and surpassed both the United Kingdom and the United States in steel production by the turn of the century. But as the victory of 1870–71 receded further and further into history, that confidence was increasingly inextricable from a sense of resentment that Germany was not given its rightful due, that older powers, particularly France and Britain, looked down upon it, denied it the respect, the prestige—and, worse still, the territory—an empire of its might deserved. This was not a grassroots phenomenon; it flowed all the way down from the twisted psyche of Germany’s emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, a profoundly insecure man who believed that his cousins, particularly King George V of Great Britain and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, had conspired to ostracize him. Perhaps, he and many other Germans figured, another lightning victory in France would finish what the first had started. Then no one could question Germany’s primacy among nations.
In short, both France and Germany were primed for war well before August 1914. The Germans had the famous Schlieffen Plan—named for the German Army’s chief of staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, who devised it—which called for the Imperial German Army to sweep into France by way of neutral Belgium and encircle the French armies around Paris. The French had the lesser-known Plan XVII, which called for them, in the event of a German attack, to counterattack Germany through Alsace and Lorraine and march straight on to Berlin. Plan XVII—which really did replace XVI earlier plans—wasn’t even very well known to the French themselves, at least not beyond a handful of generals and their staffs, many of whom thought it was a very bad idea. The Germans, though, anticipated it (one reason many French generals thought it was a very bad idea) and reckoned it would draw French troops away from the path of the Schlieffen Plan. Both were aimed at a quick victory: The Schlieffen Plan allotted six weeks to bring the French to surrender; Plan XVII didn’t get around to setting a timetable, but surely it wouldn’t take long at all.
Unfortunately for Germany, Schlieffen’s successor, Helmuth von Moltke—whom many regarded as an inept strategist who only got the job because his uncle and namesake was the great hero of the Franco-Prussian War—weakened his predecessor’s plan by tinkering with both the number of troops and the course they would take, and certainly failed to anticipate the strength of Belgium’s resistance. On the other hand, France’s Plan XVII helped the Germans tremendously, exactly as they (and some French) had anticipated. The French launched the Battle of the Frontiers, as it is now known, in mid-August 1914. By the end of the month, whatever gains they’d initially made in Alsace and Lorraine were reversed and more, and at great cost: The Germans killed twenty-seven thousand French soldiers on August 22 alone, the deadliest day in all of French military history. Meanwhile, the Schlieffen Plan proceeded, with the Germans closing in on Paris.
The French seemed to be in freefall; the last week of August and first week of September 1914 are still remembered by some—not fondly—as “the Great Retreat.” The horrors of 1870–71 seemed almost upon them once again. Then, just in time, and under the leadership of General Joseph “Papa” Joffre, they managed to regroup, reorganize, and exploit, with the help of some British troops, an unintended breach in the German lines, making a stand at the Marne River, only thirty miles or so from Paris. The battle, which lasted one week, quickly became the stuff of legend; in one of the war’s most famous episodes, thousands of French soldiers—poilus, as they were informally and affectionately known—were shuttled from Paris to the front in taxicabs, which actually kept their meters running the whole trip and were reimbursed for their fares afterward. In the end, the French, with some help from British troops, turned the Germans back at the Marne, foiling the Schlieffen Plan and ensuring that the war would, indeed, last longer than six weeks.
There were ot
her battles to come that fall, with both the Allies and the Germans attempting to take new ground and better their positions, but through it all, the lines stayed more or less where they’d frozen in September 1914, after the German advance was stopped at the Marne and both sides started digging trenches.
And here began the World War I we all think of today: Static. Stuck. Quite literally entrenched.
The war America entered “late.”
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It’s not as though nothing happened on the Western Front between the fall of 1914 and the fall of 1917, when the doughboys—as soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces were, for reasons lost to time, known—started killing and dying at the front. Quite a lot did. For instance, the city of Ypres, in Belgian Flanders near the French border, saw three battles in less than three years, the first in the autumn of 1914, the third in the summer of 1917. Belgium lost tens of thousands of soldiers at Ypres; France and Germany each lost hundreds of thousands. No one knows for sure how many men the British Expeditionary Force—including troops from Australia, Canada, and India—lost there, but the names of nearly fifty-five thousand of them are chiseled into the Menin Gate, their memorial in the city; and those are just the missing.
The battles of Ypres are just a few among many fought on the Western Front in late 1914, and 1915, and 1916, and early 1917. All of them were costly, many extremely so. Millions of soldiers lost their lives. As I said, quite a lot did happen in those years.
But as I also noted, not very much changed. The lines in 1917, when the American Expeditionary Forces started showing up in France, were more or less identical to what they had been in 1914.
No one was happy with the status quo. The British, who had never really feared a German invasion, had plenty of time to wonder what they were doing in France and Belgium. The French, while relieved that they hadn’t had to capitulate like they had in 1871, wanted the Germans off French soil. The Germans, though they’d conquered and occupied a good chunk of France, wanted more, at least enough to force the French to surrender. As 1914 dragged on into 1915, and 1915 into 1916, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men continued to die for a few yards here and there which would soon be lost again.
Which brings us to Verdun.
An ancient fortified city on the Meuse River (Attila the Hun is said to have tried, unsuccessfully, to take it in the fifth century), Verdun sat in one of the parts of Lorraine that the Germans hadn’t annexed in 1871. While it was strategically important as a roadblock on one of the routes to Paris, it was even more important—much more—as a symbol of French resilience and defiance.
The Germans understood this. And they reckoned the French would do whatever they had to in order to keep them from taking it. Sure, the Germans would have liked to have Verdun for themselves; but what they really wanted was for the French to pay such a high price to keep the old walled city that they would no longer be able to prosecute the war—as the German high command put it, to “bleed France white.” On February 21, 1916, having set up their own formidable defense works around Verdun, they attacked it along a front twenty miles long and three miles wide.
Before the Germans had attacked Verdun, many in the French high command had started to question the value of protecting it; indeed, by the beginning of 1916, most of the soldiers and big guns that defended the city had been moved to other positions on the front. But the Germans had read French popular sentiment correctly: As soon as they launched their attack, all of France rose up and demanded Verdun be saved, no matter the cost.
Even so, though the Germans had been right about Verdun’s symbolic importance to the people of France, they failed to anticipate the nature of French resolve, as well as France’s ability to rally its population with symbols—symbols that included not just Verdun itself but men like Colonel Émile Augustine Cyprien Driant, a 60-year-old career soldier and novelist who had pleaded with his superiors not to appropriate Verdun’s guns and reassign its troops, warning that a German attack was imminent. He didn’t have much time to savor his vindication; one of the first French officers to confront the enemy, he was badly outnumbered, quickly outflanked and killed on the second day of the battle near Fort Douaumont, an important part of Verdun’s defense. A small monument—an artistic rendering of a shattered stone wall—stands on the spot where he fell, in a lovely, peaceful wood.
Even the Germans admired Driant; they buried him with full military honors, and took care to notify his widow, through diplomatic channels, that he had fought bravely. And the French—well, they all but canonized him. Before his death, Driant had been a fairly obscure officer, better known for his fiction than his military career; he’d resigned his commission in 1906, frustrated with his lack of advancement, and only reenlisted when the army recalled him after Germany attacked in 1914. Now he was the most mourned man in the country, a combination warrior-martyr who’d given his life for French honor at Verdun. And Verdun, a small city in a poor, often overlooked part of the country, suddenly became the most important place in France. Its defense was now deemed so essential to the war effort that every poilu in France—and there were millions of them—was rotated through that sector at some point.
If that sounds hard to conceive, most everything about Verdun is. The battle would last ten months and claim roughly a million casualties. No one knows exactly how many of those were killed in action, in part because war is chaotic, but also because a large number of those casualties are officially listed as missing in action. Though there was a great deal of hand-to-hand fighting, it is believed that 70 percent of the deaths at Verdun were caused by artillery. More than 150,000 men—perhaps many more—simply disappeared, blown to bits or buried alive.
The Germans were able to lay siege to Verdun, but not to isolate it entirely. Though they had disrupted all rail service to the city, one route lay beyond the reach of their big guns, a forty-five-mile gravel road that ran south from Verdun to the town of Bar-le-Duc. It became the sole lifeline of Verdun and, by extension, the French Army, which soon nicknamed it “La Voie Sacrée”—the Sacred Way. The French quickly organized a system, which they called “Noria,” in which some eight thousand trucks and other vehicles were in almost constant motion, ferrying supplies to the front and carrying the wounded away from it on their return trip. It is said that at Noria’s peak operation, one arrived every fourteen seconds. Special labor battalions worked around the clock to keep the road in good repair; others were stationed at intervals to clear away broken-down vehicles and get them running again as quickly as possible. In the face of such a threat, the French, it turned out, were invigorated. “Ils ne passeront pas!” declared France’s General Robert Nivelle: They shall not pass. The entire country adopted it as a battle cry.
Noria had been the brainchild of a 60-year-old general named Philippe Pétain, a career officer and notorious womanizer (legend has it that when the Germans launched their attack on February 21, he had to be fetched from a mistress’s flat) who had acquitted himself well up to that point but had never undertaken anything like this before. Then again, no one else had, either. He ran the entire operation out of his headquarters in the mairie, or town hall, of Souilly, a small village in between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc; two years later, General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, made his headquarters in the same building. Their portraits hang next to each other inside the mairie today, a sight that can stop you cold if you’re aware of the fact that Pétain went on to collaborate with the Nazis in the next war. He died in exile, imprisoned on the Île d’Yeu, in 1951.
The great hero of Verdun; the great traitor of Vichy: Mentioning Pétain’s name to a French person these days typically evokes an uncomfortable expression. Of course, to some French—mostly younger—he’s just a villain; others feel that his heroism in 1916, and later in that war, cancels out whatever he did afterward. The authorities have disrupted nocturnal plots to exhume his remains f
rom the prison cemetery and reinter him at Douaumont.
The great traitor of Vichy; the great hero of Verdun: A generation before he collaborated with the Germans, he vexed them madly. “Who could have imagined,” one of their official reports groused, “that cut off from all rail service, these damned Frenchmen, rather than abandon the condemned area, would find a way to put into place a two-way caravan of motor vehicles, circulating in a never-ending chain—a gigantic conveyer belt, rolling day and night as if operated by a pulley system, between Bar-le-Duc and the battle site—constantly and tirelessly restocking this horrifically gruesome battlefield with new cannons and ammunition?”
Still, the French—who fought this battle alone, aided only by their own colonial troops—were barely holding on. Despite that gigantic conveyer belt, and all those poilus rotating through the sector, it looked for months as if the Germans would prevail sooner or later. By the spring of 1916, French and British commanders had decided to launch an offensive against deeply entrenched, heavily fortified lines that had remained static for more than a year along the Somme River in Picardy, about 150 miles west of the Meuse, for the purpose of diverting at least some German forces from Verdun.
It was as if the whole thing were planned for maximum dramatic effect: The attack commenced on July 1, promptly at 7:30 a.m.; a few minutes before that, the British detonated a chain of mines that ran underneath the German lines, some packed with tens of thousands of tons of the explosive ammonal. If these stunned the Germans, it wasn’t for long. The British took nearly sixty thousand casualties just on that day, some fourteen thousand in the first ten minutes alone; Newfoundland’s only regiment lost 90 percent of their men at Beaumont-Hamel on July 1, 1916, including every officer they had. The French fared somewhat better—they lost fewer than ten thousand men that day, and took more ground than the British did—and German losses were more or less on par with the French. But for the British, July 1, 1916, would become synonymous with the wasteful carnage of war. It was the worst day in their military’s history. And it was only the beginning.
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