by John Mosier
The surprisingly high number of those soldiers in the category of missing should have set off alarm bells. “Missing” is an interesting category, since it includes both the living and the dead. Some soldiers are missing because they’ve fallen into enemy hands, and are very much alive. Others are missing in the sense that their bodies have not been recovered, while still others—a small number—are missing in the sense that they deserted.
In one sense the breakdown is irrelevant. In any brief time period, soldiers who are dead, who are missing, or whose wounds have caused them to be evacuated are no longer available for combat. But by February 1915, the army should have been able to reduce the number of the missing considerably, that is, to assign them to one of the three groups, at least provisionally.
Doing so is not simply an exercise. The number of prisoners lost is generally regarded as an important indicator of your enemy’s success. Either your soldiers have given up, or they’ve been caught by surprise, surrendered to keep from being slaughtered. One of the first questions General Grant always asked after an engagement was how many prisoners had been taken.
When there are more men missing than dead, there are two highly probable conclusions to be drawn, neither of them very encouraging. Either your army can’t keep track of its casualties, or a good many of your men are surrendering.
Now, in the case of the French army, we have a good deal of evidence to establish the former, from the astoundingly high number of men still in the category of the missing well after the war (nearly a quarter of a million), to the candid admission that the number of wound cases in the opening months is simply unknown, to the incomplete identifications on the grave markers in the cemeteries.29
The French army did a rather poor job of keeping track of its soldiers, just as it did a terrible job of caring for them. The observation is really indisputable, and has never been questioned.
But then, although the army couldn’t count its own losses accurately, the cabinet was being asked to believe that their estimates of enemy losses were highly accurate. There was, in other words, a failure in the short term to connect the dots.
So what exactly were the relative loss figures? We now know that by the end of 1914, French casualties came to 528,000 dead and missing.30 As the French at this point did not separate out the dead and the missing, we’ll combine the two categories simply for the sake of the comparison. Doing that, we get a figure for the British of 115,333, and for the Belgians, 62,000. So the total Allied dead and missing for 1914 came to 708,000 men.
For the same period, the German medical services reported 223,766 dead and missing, a figure for the Western Front only.31 So if we express the casualty exchange ratio, restricting it only to the dead and the missing, the advantage is slightly over three to one for the Germans.
Now, before proceeding further, it should be observed that in these figures the wounded have been omitted. The reasons are simple, but the failure to realize them is a difficulty that has dogged historians and analysts for most of the century.
The medical services did not count individuals, but evacuations (the actual word the French used), and the German medical services were quite explicit that their data was compiled the same way: cases, not people.
Logic suggests the reason why: a soldier can be wounded more than once. In fact, he can be treated for his wounds and then eventually either get killed or go missing. We know, from the wound analyses conducted by the United States medical services, that this idea is not simply theoretical; the army actually tabulated the number of men who were wounded more than once, and discovered that the figure was significant. The same is true for other armies as well.
Michel Huber sums the situation up perfectly for his own army.
The evaluation of the number of wounded and sick is much more uncertain than that of the dead or the missing, because the statistics for admissions to medical facilities contain numerous examples of double counting, most often owing to multiple transfers from one facility to another (France, 429).
In fact, if we simply add up the number of wound cases for each year, the resulting number (9,382,000) is much greater than the total number of men inducted into the army during the entire war. When the French went over their admissions figures, they reduced the nine million figure down to 3,481,000 wounded, which gives a good idea of how misleading the figures can be.
Lumping the dead, the missing, and the wounded together is reasonable when discussing the losses in any one engagement, particularly for the commanders of the units involved, since it gives them an idea of how many soldiers they have left at that point. But when longer time periods are considered it becomes a considerable distortion, since a certain percentage of the wounded are patched up and sent back to their units.
That may seem a rather obvious point, but what it sometimes disguises is that a wounded soldier’s chances of recovery were significantly higher if he was treated by the German medical services than by the French. The author of the official Australian medical services report discussed this differential in detail, so again, we have the data to support the idea.
However, given the importance of the issue, here are the relevant figures for 1914: French wounds cases came to 635,000, British to 52,969, Belgian to 15,000, for a total of 702,969 wounds cases. German wounds cases were 471,923.
Given the Allied deficiencies in heavy artillery, we should expect the Germans to have a higher ratio of wounded cases to deaths, because more of them would be exposed to bullets than to shells, which would also mean a lower rate of mortality. A comparison of the wounds sustained, conducted by the medical services involved, supports this notion: there were significantly more Allied casualties caused by shell fire than there were German.
Sven Hedin, the famous Swedish explorer, provides us with anecdotal evidence that confirms this idea. He visited the Argonne in 1914, courtesy of the German government, and recorded that the wounded German soldiers he observed had much less serious wounds than their French counterparts.32
This asymmetry is important, but before going into it further, here are the figures for the next period of the war. At the end of 1915, French casualties were as follows: 439,000 dead and missing, and 696,000 wounded cases. British losses were 90,971 dead and missing, and 224,963 wounded, for a total of 529,971 dead or missing and 920,963 wounded. We have no figures at all for the Belgians, although during at least half of the year, their forces were actually larger than the British. So the Allied totals are clearly on the low side.
The corresponding German figures for the Western Front were 186,306 dead and missing, and 660,618 wounded cases, which gives a ratio of almost three to one, again favoring the Germans.
Of course, the total German casualties were higher than these figures, since there were German troops fighting in Russia and the Balkans. As we have already seen, the Germans were quite energetic in shifting their units around, and the Allies were generally wrong in their estimates of who was where and how many (to put it crudely).
So obviously they also had grave difficulties in assigning casualties to the various fronts, which is probably one reason their estimates were so wildly wrong: they ended up counting German losses on all fronts, and comparing those with Allied losses just on the Western Front.
However, without going any further into these calculations, it is pretty clear that the Allied notion that they were slaughtering the Germans, who would soon run out of men, was not only wrong, but it was actually the other way around. So one of the most important assumptions on which the direction of the war was based, the warrant on which virtually everything else depended, was completely backward.
For the French the consequences of this fundamental failure were catastrophic. France was smaller than Germany. Before the war, it had maintained a standing army of an equivalent size by applying the principle of universal military service much more rigorously than was the case in Germany and Austria-Hungar
y. But once the fighting started, there was a ghastly arithmetic at work. The French had a smaller pool of men to draw from, so they could not afford to lose them at the same rate as their opponents. Already, as 1915 came to a close, their depots were emptying out.
At the start of hostilities, France had been able to mobilize about three million men to add to the existing peacetime army.33 The next draft into the depots, concluding in January 1915, was therefore much smaller, slightly over a million. Then came the ominous part: the draft that concluded in January 1916 was only 850,000. It was not terribly difficult to predict the numbers available for successive drafts, and the actual figures are scary: 505,000 for the next period, and only 219,000 were available for 1919.
To a certain extent the implications of this were masked by various factors, so the actual size of the army was not decreasing so dramatically, or even within the same time frame. Demographic analysis of this sort is always confusing, so the failure of the government to grasp it is understandable. But the bottom line makes the situation clear enough: once the war started, millions of men were called up and put in uniform, but the actual size of the army only increased by about 10 percent—and then it slowly began to decline.
By contrast, not only were the Germans not running out of men, but the size of their army was increasing. Not just in divisions, but in terms of men. So the Allies had that estimate backward as well. The basic reason the Germans were creating more divisions was that they had more men. That the divisions were, in terms of infantry, smaller was really irrelevant.
Here are the numbers. In October 1914, 1.7 million men were in arms, and the ration strength in the west was 1.633 million. By May 1915, the ration strength was nearly 2.2 million, and by the end of the year, it was 2.6 million.34
So the Allies had the situation absolutely backward. Abel Ferry’s gloomy prediction was absolutely correct. But the GQG persisted in its illusions, the British command in France drank from the same bottle, and across the channel in London, the cabinet perforce believed them.
Now, the reader who has carefully studied the various English-language accounts of this war will find these numbers perplexing, because they contradict almost everything that has been written. In fact, after the war, the assumption that the Allies were winning the casualty exchange was incorporated into all the standard accounts of the war.
Initially, there was a good reason for this. On the one hand, by the end of 1918, Germany had basically dissolved, owing to the collapse of the Kaiserreich and the ensuing civil war. There was no agency around to issue any figures, so historians were still largely dependent on Allied estimates.
Very reliable French data was available early on—by 1919, in fact—and the British War Office published a very thorough statistical summary in 1922. By contrast, it took the Germans a very long time to sort through the data, and their voluminous and typically Germanic report appeared only in 1933, by which time the Great War was a distant memory indeed, given the state of Europe.
This report therefore vanished into almost complete obscurity. One never finds it mentioned in any of the standard accounts of the war, either in French or English, with one exception.
Now, the disinterested reader will surely find this exception exceptionable: Winston Churchill.
When Churchill set out to write his account of the war, which he called The World Crisis, he realized that the casualty exchange ratio was a vital component in any assessment of what had actually happened. So he did the most obvious thing that any competent researcher would surely do: he asked the Germans what their figures were, as he had found out that they were compiling away.
He had a particular interest in this issue, since the man writing the British Army’s official history of the war had made a rather astonishing claim, to the effect that the Germans didn’t count their lightly wounded, and so their claimed totals were deliberately misleading.
Of course, this notion more or less flies in the face of our general idea of German behavior, so Churchill, not surprisingly, asked Edmonds what the basis was for his claim. Where was the evidence?
The answer he got really transcends the casualty issue, as it reveals the mind-set of several generations of historians. The thing was so obvious he hadn’t bothered to inquire, was the answer. Everybody knew the Germans were lying.
And indeed, given the success of Allied propaganda, the notion was certainly feasible. Indeed, in the concluding chapter of this book, we will take a cursory glance at the various myths and distortions that have passed into the historical record, simply to point out that the general idea of Verdun is only one among the many. The depressing thing about these distortions and misrepresentations is that they were not confined to the uneducated. On the contrary, the totally false claims made by distinguished historians are on a par with the crudest sorts of wartime propaganda. And they are the most destructive, given the reputation of the person making them.
So Edmonds had plenty of company, and when Churchill published his account, he was roundly smeared by his fellow countrymen. We tend to forget that in the 1920s and 1930s, the reputation of the man who became his country’s greatest wartime leader was truly abysmal.
Although the Second World War either salvaged Churchill’s stature or established it, his reputation as a competent historian was never truly accepted by British historians, and to this day, the notion that the German army was much more efficient in combat than the British or the French is guaranteed to be met with withering scorn.
A grimly amusing book could be written about the torturous logic, ad hominem arguments, and sneering innuendo that are used when the myth of how the British Army won the First World War is in any way challenged. The casualty exchange situation is only one facet of this fairy tale, and facts have nothing to do with the case.
Understanding the outright denial and the torturous explanations of the clear German superiority on the battlefield by successive generations of historians is not simply an excursion into historiography.
It allows us to comprehend the mind-set of the Allied high commands, who simply dismissed the criticisms and misgivings of men like Driant and Ferry with withering condescension. The false emphasis and the rhetoric also allow us to grasp the atmosphere inside London and Paris, to understand the extent to which they were helplessly adrift.
When we grasp that blindness, that denial, we can then begin to comprehend the effect of the German offensive of February 1916 at Verdun on the military leadership of France. Suddenly, the light at the end of the tunnel was revealed to be the headlight of the oncoming locomotive.
DISQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
We have already observed how, as reports filtered up from the front, the news became progressively changed, until finally, at headquarters, it began to look like the complete opposite of reality. Even President Poincaré had noticed this, and had complained to Abel Ferry about it. This progression is worth repeating, because it allows us to understand how it was that the GQG failed to comprehend the nature of the struggle.
At the GQG, they tell me “Everything is going well in the Argonne: success!” At the army group headquarters, they tell me, “We’re advancing, but with trouble.” At the army corps headquarters, General Gérard tells me, “We’re losing 100 meters a month, the Germans are gnawing us, and the letters from the soldiers are discouraging” (Ferry, Carnets, 35).
Seen from Chantilly, the war seemed to be going well. Seen from the viewpoint of the combatants, it was going very badly indeed. The idea of being gnawed on, with its unpleasant connotation of rats, is not a pleasant idea—for those who feel they’re being gnawed.
But at the headquarters of the two commands—and hence in London and Paris—almost everyone clung to the opposite notion with the determination of a shipwrecked sailor holding on to a piece of driftwood. True, they couldn’t penetrate the German defensive system in the west. True, Serbia, Italy, and Russia had all failed to gi
ve them the relief that they had anticipated. True, the expeditions in the Balkans and the east were bringing them the eagerly expected results. However, they naturally clung to the idea that they were winning a war on the most basic level: through attrition, what the French called the guerre d’usure.
Colonel Repington, the correspondent for the Times, a man with access to every level of both governments, recorded in his diary a highly reliable estimate that the Germans to date had lost 3.5 million men.35
If President Poincaré was suspicious, General Fayolle, who had to live with Joffre’s staff, and saw the results of their complacency on a daily basis, was bitter. Here he is commenting on the situation at the start of 1915.
An extraordinary thing, that must be held to the account of the GQG and its inexactitudes, is that the official bulletins of information recount nothing but jokes. They say, and all newspapers repeat, that we took 500 meters of German trenches. However, we didn’t take anything at all. The generals want at any price to have successes, so they invent what they want to believe. Do they even understand the situation? I doubt it.36
Indeed, Fayolle’s concluding sentence hits the proverbial nail on the head: it was not as though the GQG was openly and consciously lying. They believed what they were saying, and failed to realize the extent to which their eagerness—and the inexperience of Joffre’s subordinates at Chantilly—not only precluded their understanding, but warped the information they were receiving.
Fayolle, already a corps commander, was skeptical. Abel Ferry, a lowly infantry lieutenant who happened to be a member of the Chamber of Deputies, was outraged. Like everyone else in the government, the only figures he had were the ones the GQG had provided, but he knew what he had seen—and it flatly contradicted the rosy picture. Here is the key part of his June 1915 discourse to the secret committee.
One speaks of a “war of attrition,” but we have not lost fewer men at Les Éparges than the Germans. In Champagne we have lost more than they did. In front of Marcheville, since 18 March, 3,000 men fell: 500 Germans were casualties. Even more than an avowal of our strategic impotence, and a preview of a devastated France, the war of attrition, a journalistic rather than a military formula, the war of attrition goes against us. Fifty voices have told me. I have reviewed my regiment. On 18 March, an heroic folly animated them. Out of my company of 250, 20 men returned. In the 8th company, it was the same. They found, in the German trench they seized, then abandoned, not a single dead German. . . . As this wastage continues, the day is near when the offensive value of our army, already fatally weakened, will be destroyed.37