Following a fierce but unresolved French/British offensive at Champagne and Loos in March, the Germans were reinforced and counterattacked in April, when they introduced chlorine gas on the Canadian, Moroccan, and Algerian French colonial troops. Prying open a four-mile hole in Entente lines, the Germans flowed through until units from the Commonwealth of Canada plugged the gap at the Second Battle of Ypres, where casualties exceeded 100,000 on both sides. By late May 1915, the Ypres salient was substantially eliminated, marking a turning point. Along with the elimination of the Ypres salient came a grim understanding of what the Germans were in for—it was a war against an empire that spanned the globe. A writer in Der Tag recorded:
We expected that…India would rise [against Britain] when the first shot was fired in Europe, but thousands of Indians came to fight with the British against us. We thought the British Empire would be torn to pieces, but the Colonies appear to be united closer than ever with the Mother Country. We expected a triumphant rebellion in South Africa; it was nothing but a failure. We thought there would be trouble in Ireland, but instead, she sent her best soldiers against us. We anticipated that the “peace at any price” party would be dominant in England, but it melted away in the ardour to fight Germany. We regarded England as degenerate, yet she seems to be our principal enemy.52
In fact, Britain had drawn on her empire for 16 percent of all troops in the war—the last time some of the colonies would overwhelmingly support British military aims. Only Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and, to a limited extent, India, would send forces to fight in British armies in the Second World War. Great Britain held back over 1,500,000 British soldiers in England during 1918 (to keep Field Marshal Haig from using them up on futile offensives) while continuing to put its Commonwealth troops into battle and calling for the United States to assume an ever-heavier burden.53 This did not go unnoticed either by the commander of the American Expeditionary Force or by the Commonwealth nations.
It proved somewhat ironic that soldiers from the colonies would be some of the first victims of a new weapon of war on the Western Front, poison gas. The use of gas helped characterize World War I as “the chemists’ war,” in that chemistry was critical—whether in the production of gas, ammunition, or medicines. In all its iterations, including tear gas, chlorine gas, and mustard gas, the new weapon struck terror into the hearts of soldiers. Although first used on Russian positions in the East, large-scale introduction of gas on the Western Front occurred in April 1915 north of Ypres against positions held by French colonial forces from Martinique. The fear it involved was not confined to the Allied troops, as German soldiers hesitated to move forward to exploit the gap it made in the Allied line. Defenses and counters to gas were developed rapidly (even horses had gas masks), and after initial horrific encounters with chlorine gas, troops learned to respond with hurried, but effective, donning of gas masks. For the side using gas, the wind was fickle, making gas a potential weapon for the enemy. Though gas remained in use throughout the war, it was not the miracle weapon hoped for by the Germans. On the propaganda front, however, it was the use of poison gas, even more than the Zeppelin bombings and U-boat attacks, that seemed to set Germany apart as particularly barbarous, even though the Allies developed and experimented with poison gas before the war as well and the British used it in September 1915, only five months after the Germans.
Both the Hague Declaration of 1899 and the Hague Convention of 1907 had prohibited the use of poison gas weapons, but Germany’s manpower disadvantage led it to repudiate the international agreements. When a nation perceives its survival to be threatened, previous treaties signed by a politician become, in the words of German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, just a “scrap of paper.” Chemist Fritz Haber thought chlorine gas in particular could offset the Allies’ superiority in numbers. But it was in fact the French who first used gas (though tear, not chlorine, or “poison,” gas) in August 1914. Germans employed T-Stoff tear gas against the Russians in January 1915, with no results, as it froze before it could affect the enemy. In April 1915, however, when chlorine gas was deployed at Ypres, it quickly became known that men who ran suffered more; those who stayed on the parapet, less, as the heavy gas fell quickly. The greenish cloud could be easily spotted, and by July the British had already introduced a “smoke helmet” that was moderately effective.
Of course, the British immediately adopted their own gas shells, which were often as ineffective as the Germans’ had been. A French chemist refined phosgene gas, which was colorless, in 1915, providing a more powerful killing agent, in that effects often did not show up for twenty-four hours. Mustard gas, introduced by the Germans in 1917 (also known as “HS” or “Hun Stuff” by the British), had a delayed reaction that was every bit as deadly, causing skin blisters before showing up in the lungs. Gas could be delivered by artillery, and its psychological impact was often greater than its physical harms. Lieutenant Colonel G. W. G. Hughes, of the Medical Corps, wrote, “I shall never forget the sights I saw by Ypres after the first gas attacks…. Men [were] lying all along the side of the road…exhausted, gasping, frothing yellow mucus from their mouths, their faces blue and distressed.”54 In the end, a British report on chemical warfare in 1919 concluded that “gas is a legitimate weapon in war.”55
Each new implement—gas, the flamethrower, the U-boat, the airplane—was rolled out with the grand hope that it would overcome the trench, the ideas being that the U-boats would outflank the trench network entirely, while airplanes would punish them from above. None succeeded. Networks of earthen cuts that disfigured northern France and Belgium remained, mocking each army’s attempts to go around, over, or through them, in the process absorbing the blood of a generation as new reinforcements arrived daily.
War on a Global Scale
New technology could change the casualty rolls, but could not end the war. Nor could the insertion of hundreds of thousands of colonial troops—actions that made the war truly global. By 1915, Britain had, including colonials, 750,000 men on the Continent (up from under 100,000 in 1914, when the Germans first attacked). Life in the trenches imposed a surreal existence on all, from clean-shaven recruits to grizzled veterans. Conditions were so horrid and unbearable that troops came to unwritten agreements not to fire at one another during mealtimes. Once constructed, trenches changed warfare entirely, and were ultimately rendered ineffective only by the combination of a technological breakthrough—the tank—and innovative tactics. Neither was ready before 1918, although tanks made their first appearance in September 1916. Thus, short of merely holding their ground, both armies repeatedly attempted costly, nineteenth-century offensives (although marginally modified with drab uniforms for cover, and by the introduction of squad- and platoon-level tactics).
Further, both sides came to believe that all that stood between them and the eternally evasive breakthrough was more artillery, more shells. Since few European powers had sent observers to the American Civil War, none except the British had seen the ineffectiveness of massed artillery in eliminating troops in fixed positions, especially if entrenched. At Chemin des Dames in April 1917, both sides would fire a staggering eleven million shells over a thirty-mile front during a ten-day exchange, without a clear advantage to either side.56 As soon as the shelling stopped, soldiers ran to the parapets, set up their machine guns, and put up a wall of small-caliber fire. Memoir after memoir recorded the suicidal futility of infantry advancing against troops entrenched with machine guns. A German: “When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”57 A Frenchman: “The Germans fell like cardboard soldiers.”58 A Brit likened the Germans to targets in a shooting gallery.59 After only one year of fighting, the carnage was such that most front-line regiments were manned by reserves. Britain’s 11th Brigade of the British Expeditionary Force had been almost wiped out, reduced to 18 percent of its officers and 28 percent of its men. The 7th Divisi
on, which arrived in France after Ypres, lost 356 of 400 officers and 9,664 of 12,000 men.
Trenches, however, were torture to endure even for the defenders. Rain, mud, and constant drizzle, all exacerbated by the cold French climate, had men shivering twenty-four hours a day and left soldiers miserable even when not being shelled. Sausage turned to ice, potatoes were frozen, and even hand grenades became stuck together in the cold. Vermin of all sorts attacked the soldiers, especially lice and rats (some the size of cats). The rats ate through haversacks and ration bags, springing to life at night, provoking battles that were nearly as fearsome as those against the Germans during the day. Percy Jones of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles wrote in his diary, “I am addicted to rat hunting,” and his weapons of choice were the spade and the pick handle.60 On one occasion, Jones and his comrades chased a rat back to the second trench line, where a sentry almost shot them, and a year later, near Ypres, he recorded, “We had a great battle last night [against the rats] and killed nearly a hundred. [We] ran out of ammunition and had to come back for more bricks.”61 Another English soldier described a night in the trenches during the battle of Verdun: “Lights out. Now the rats and the lice are masters of the house. You can hear the rats nibbling, running, jumping, rushing from plank to plank, emitting their little squeals…a noisy swarming activity that just won’t stop.”62 The only relief to be gained from the rats came from something even worse—gas, which purified the trenches of all vermin for a while.
Whether death and mutilation came by artillery shell, machine gun bullet, gas, or the bayonet, the result was the same. It was even more tragic when the shells were fired by one’s own artillery: “friendly” artillery treated all men alike: the French reported 75,000 troops killed by their own artillery, and Major Charles Whittlesey’s “Lost Battalion,” unable to radio distress signals, was repeatedly subjected to shelling from Allied guns. Regardless of the origin of the ordnance, the casualties piled up, bringing with them the reality, even the inevitability, of dying. A French soldier, a month before being killed, wrote “Death! That word which booms like the echo of sea caverns…. Now we die. It is the wet death, the muddy death, death dripping with blood, death by drowning, death by sucking under, death in the slaughterhouse.”63
Victory Through Attrition
After the Marne, Ypres, and the Gallipoli debacle—in which British, Australian, New Zealand, and French Senegalese soldiers were sent to seize a point on the Dardanelles defended by entrenched Turks, producing a slaughter—the dominance of the trench was confirmed in blood. At the Battle of Sari Bair near the original Gallipoli landing zones, one New Zealand battalion saw 711 of its 760 men killed or wounded. Trenches snaked across France and Belgium, the Turks held the Dardanelles, the Russians verged on collapse, and the Austrians proved only slightly more capable than the Italians. New commanders now led each army in the West: Sir Douglas Haig for the British and General (later Marshal) Ferdinand Foch for the French Northern Army Group in 1915, General (later Marshal) Philippe Pétain commanding the French Army Group Centre in 1916, and Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the German General Staff. By 1916, convinced the French were on the verge of collapse and the British exhausted, von Falkenhayn ordered a fresh offensive at Verdun, the linchpin of the Allied line. For the first time, there was no real strategic objective, other than simply killing enemies economically in a war of attrition (von Falkenhayn calculated his forces could exact five enemy dead for every two of their own). A disputed Christmas memo to the Kaiser, appearing only in von Falkenhayn’s memoirs, argued that a breakthrough was beyond Germany’s means, but was unnecessary at any event.64 France would either attempt to cling to Verdun or surrender the town and its location as a jumping-off point for Paris, while at the same time forcing the British to mount a counteroffensive in their sector. Either way, the result was the same: a massive German assault could be undertaken with the hope of ending the war.
Beyond that, von Falkenhayn had not selected the salient capriciously. A German railhead was only twelve miles away, while French lines were supplied by only the Voie Sacrée, the single road still available to the French to supply Verdun. As with many Great War offensives, the plan looked good on paper. In practice, once the German troops advanced outside of their artillery cover, and into the range of French guns, each additional mile came at fantastic cost. Nor did the French supply train, coming up the “Sacred Road,” fail. During a single push into the village of Douaumont, four German regiments were eliminated through a crossfire from each side of the Meuse valley. At the peak of the fighting, 100,000 shells poured into the Verdun salient every hour. After capturing Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux, the Germans were forced to retreat in October–November 1916 after the French brought up heavy 400 mm railway guns, directed by aircraft spotters. By December, von Falkenhayn’s offensive had failed.
The bloodletting eclipsed anything seen up to that time, which, given the casualty lists, says a great deal. France lost half a million men, the Germans 434,000. England, in the Somme counterattack, suffered another 420,000 casualties (including a staggering 58,000 killed or wounded on the first day). Von Falkenhayn’s promise to “bleed France white” proved only partially true: now, all the combatants were bled white and warfare became a battle of accounting. “Here,” wrote Ernst Jünger of the Somme counterattack, “chivalry had disappeared for always…. Here the new Europe revealed itself for the first time in combat.”65
Just as von Falkenhayn believed Germany was close to winning, so too did the British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, think that a summer offensive at Ypres (or Passchendaele) could succeed. Capture of the Messines Ridge in June 1917 suggested that Haig might be correct in his view that the Germans were nearing collapse. Haig dawdled, insisting on waiting until the end of July. Typical heavy shelling to break up the wire tipped off the Germans that an attack was coming, but more important, once the attack was in progress, torrential rainstorms turned the battlefield into a mud pit. Soldiers stumbled into shell craters and drowned, tanks became trapped, and infantry could barely move.
War in the West proved a bloody slugfest, and dragged on seemingly endlessly. The Schlieffen Plan had specifically called for a rapid victory over France in order to deal with the expected larger threat of the Russian armies. But while the Russian forces were large, they also were largely inept. Stretching over one thousand miles from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the eastern theater of war pitted about 1.2 million Russian soldiers at the outset against the German 8th Army (166,000 men) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s 1 million troops, plus 117,000 Turks on the southern flank. In August 1914, the Germans smashed the Russian 2nd Army at the Battle of Tannenberg, with the Russians suffering more than ten times more casualties and prisoners than the Germans. The German victory more than offset an Austrian loss at the Battle of Galicia in Ukraine, where the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost one third of its forces (including more than 130,000 prisoners). Despite success at Tannenberg, the collapse of the Austrians forced Germany to keep the newly created 9th Army in the eastern theater, denying those troops to the encirclement wheel of the Schlieffen Plan. By 1915, the German/Austrian forces had advanced through Russian Poland and secured the Eastern Front—but at the cost of desperately needed men in the West.
Mexico’s Robin Hood
While Europe convulsed in seas of blood, combat of a different sort became common in America’s southern neighbor, Mexico, where multiparty gangs battled constantly. This Mexican interlude would soon play an important part in America’s entry into the European conflict. In August 1914, just before World War I broke out, Sonora governor Adolfo de la Huerta had briefly seized power, but the U.S. government under Taft had refused to recognize him. Incoming president Woodrow Wilson promised to continue Taft’s policy, announcing, “I will not recognize a government of butchers.”66 Using the chaos in Mexico as an excuse, Wilson landed troops in Veracruz in April 1914 to produce “an orderly and righteous government” (and oust Huerta), and after the Americans s
eized the city in a sharp fight, Huerta resigned. Wilson then recognized Venustiano Carranza, a former pro-American general every bit a butcher like Huerta, as president, whereupon Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who felt betrayed by the American support of Carranza, led his army of banditos on a raid of Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916.
Alternately described as animalistic, magnetic, shrewd, cruel, catlike, and tough, the stocky Pancho Villa (born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula in 1878) was the embodiment of the macho bandit. A womanizer of epic proportions and an excellent gunfighter, Villa was also so renowned for his horsemanship that he was nicknamed “The Centaur of the North.” His mood swings were instantaneous and complete, hurtling from rage to tears in seconds, and (as Hitler later would) he acquired praise and admiration from Americans, including John Reed and William Jennings Bryan, who called him the “Mexican Robin Hood,” or “a Sir Galahad.” Pro-American until Wilson decided to ally with Carranza, allegedly because Carranza “looked honest” with his long, white beard, Villa himself had once supported Carranza before Carranza decided to ditch his bandito element—which included Emiliano Zapata—in an attempt to gain respectability in American eyes.
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