by Nick Lloyd
Presently we were held up by one of the eternal traffic blocks. Looking back towards the Aisne, I could see sudden flares of light and hear the sound of distant explosions which seemed to indicate a recrudescence of fighting. Guns would suddenly rumble as if endeavouring to fill the depressing immensity of what seemed stillness after the din of the day. Now and then a machine-gun rat-tatted and was answered by others; the sound of rifle shots in the distance pin-pricked the silence irregularly, sounding more violent and angry than the implacable machine-guns. It was easy to conjure up a picture of what was going on over there in the night full of living shadows each one separated from the world of shadows only by a sharp pang of pain from a bullet in head or heart, or by the few minutes’ or hours’ agony of a fatal wound.10
These sounds were the death rattle of Nivelle’s grand battle of decision. The ‘last Napoleonic offensive in French history’ had failed.11
Photographs of General Nivelle taken after the battle show a distracted figure, with a haunted look in his eyes, as if he had seen things that he could never forget. Because all his charm and affability–so celebrated when he had replaced his predecessor–counted for nothing as the grim casualty returns came into GQG and the realization sank in that the offensive was going nowhere. A staff officer, Jean de Pierrefeu, took a communiqué to Nivelle that evening and found him ‘anxious’ with none of his legendary charm or cheerfulness. ‘His height seemed to grow less, and swellings marred the strong lines of his face’, he wrote. ‘He was wearing heavy artillery boots which rendered his step heavier as though dejected. His eyes were rarely lighted up, and his always grave expression had taken on a look of sadness.’ Nivelle read the communiqué slowly and deliberately. 10,000 prisoners had been taken, but not many villages or towns of note had fallen and few German guns were in French hands. The general, in silence, added a few words to the end of the paper (abridging a passage relating to the strength of the enemy), before initialling it and dismissing Pierrefeu. Nivelle’s spell–one he had cast so successfully since the winter–had been broken.12
Fighting on the Aisne and in Champagne continued, on and off, until 9 May when the Nivelle Offensive was finally cancelled. Although it was true there were gains–some important tactical ground and the capture of 20,000 enemy soldiers–these spoils felt meagre and disappointing when compared to the enormous damage that France had sustained. After ten days of fighting, the French Army had suffered over 95,000 casualties, including 15,000 killed in action.13 So much hope had been invested in Nivelle’s promise of victory that the let-down was shattering. Nivelle was sacked a week later and shunted off to command France’s troops in North Africa. Yet the implications of the battle were far more significant than the humiliation of one general, however senior. The shock of 16 April came like a heart attack to the French war effort. Within days, troop morale, right across the front, began to crumble. While significant sections of the French Army remained steady, an alarming number of divisions began to mutiny, refusing to go into the line and indulging in what the French Official History called ‘collective acts of indiscipline’. For the French nation, this would be the most perilous stage of the war.
The mutinies that rippled through the French Army in the spring and summer of 1917 were the result of many things, not least the appalling cost of trying to defeat an enemy that was in a position of immense strategic strength, and doing so with inadequate resources. The official account blamed it, ‘without a shadow of a doubt’, on the length of hostilities.14 Hailing the Russian Revolution, which had broken out in March, and asking for peace, more leave, and better conditions and food, thousands of poilus from fifty-four divisions decided to oppose their officers. They would defend their lines, if they had to, but they would not attack again; not until their grievances were addressed. The first units began to fail in late April–most coming from the Sixth Army, which had been heavily engaged on the Aisne–and during the following month serious indiscipline threw France’s Army into turmoil, paralysing any possibility of new offensives.
Red flags appeared at railway carriage doors, revolutionary cries could be heard in the stations the trains passed through, windows were broken, locomotives uncoupled, water tanks drained, non-combat soldiers, station police–and occasionally police superintendents–were insulted and struck and shots were fired.15
Had the enemy guessed what was happening, the whole French sector of the Western Front could have collapsed.
Nivelle’s successor was the Army Group commander General Henri Philippe Pétain. He was charged with restoring the health of the Army and doing what he could to maintain France’s dwindling military strength. He may have possessed little of his predecessor’s flair or charm, but Pétain was an exceptional soldier, known throughout France as a man who cared for his troops. Immediately he sprang into action, travelling along the front and visiting up to ninety divisions within a single month. He would spend hours talking to the poilus, speaking to their officers and NCOs, listening to their grievances, before telling them–his eyes blue and ice-cold–that mutiny in the presence of the enemy was ‘a monstrous crime’. He would be merciless towards those who had endangered France’s safety, but would also do what he could to see that the men received better care and attention. Jean de Pierrefeu was an immediate supporter of the new Commander-in-Chief, and lauded Pétain’s ‘prestige, his authority, his masterful attitude’, which rallied the flagging morale of his army. ‘He spoke as a man to men, dominating them with his prestige, without trying to put himself on a lower level… The General derived all his strength, in fact, from his humanity. He loathed sentimentality, but he was never able to meet an ambulance without emotion.’ As Pierrefeu later noted, within a matter of weeks ‘all traces of mutiny were wiped out’.16
Pétain dealt speedily and carefully with his army’s battered morale, but the disasters of the spring had underscored how fragile France’s continued participation in the war had become. There would be more fighting to follow, but from now on the French would require help. As Pétain put it: there would be no more offensives. They would wait for the tanks and for the Americans. The only problem was time. Tank production remained behind schedule and mired in technical and industrial problems, while the Americans, although newly joined in the war, would require months–maybe years–of planning and organizing before they could put an army into the field. For the moment the Allied war effort in the west came to a shuddering halt. There could be no denying it: 1917 was the darkest year of the war.
1.
Manoeuvres of War
The period we were about to enter was full of contradictions, cross-currents, hesitations and doubts.
Edward Spears1
5 December 1916–6 May 1917
Four months before General Nivelle’s ill-fated offensive would flounder on the bloodied slopes of the Chemin des Dames, David Lloyd George became British Prime Minister, promising to deliver a ‘knock out blow’ against Germany. On 8 December 1916, The Times proclaimed him to be ‘the man of the moment’.2 ‘All notion of “crisis” had disappeared from London yesterday long before the official intimation was made that Mr Lloyd George had been received by the King and had kissed hands on his appointment as Prime Minister’, it read. Andrew Bonar Law’s Unionist Party–then the largest party in the House of Commons–pledged its support, while many Liberals now ‘flocked to Lloyd George’s standard’. The widespread impression was that the Government would be a strong one (‘possibly unusual in type’, noted the editorial), ‘but well fitted for the immediate work before it’.3
The accession of Lloyd George to the premier position in British political life was a remarkable achievement. A radical and energetic politician who prided himself on his unconventional approach to life, Lloyd George had long been characterized as wily and untrustworthy. Many in his own Liberal Party had never warmed to him; for the Tories, his opposition to the war in South Africa (1899–1902) had put a black mark against his name that took years to wipe clean. Yet for all
his foibles, there was still something about Lloyd George that made a deep impression on all those who came into his orbit. Sir Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the War Cabinet, described the Prime Minister as emanating ‘an extraordinary sense of power and strength, such as I have never encountered in any other’. He was ‘rather small, but he possessed the stocky solid frame of many of his fellow-countrymen, and his healthy complexion gave evidence of a sound constitution. His head was square and large, with a wealth of black hair gradually turned grey by the cares of office. The dominating feature of his face was his eyes, ever changing, now tender with emotion, now sparkling with fun, now flashing with anger; eyes astute, unfathomable.’4
While other leading figures found their reputations sinking during the war–Herbert Asquith, Winston Churchill and Edward Grey to name a few–Lloyd George enjoyed an enviable rise. By the time he entered 10 Downing Street, he had carved out a formidable reputation as a man of drive, invention and–as Minister of Munitions–‘push and go’. Although he was born in the smoky suburbs of Manchester, his Welsh background (his father was the Baptist pastor of Llanystumdwy in Caernarvonshire) always made him an uneasy fit in the corridors of power and he constantly railed against the drift and muddle that he swore bedevilled Britain’s war effort. He acted almost immediately, forming a new War Cabinet with just five members, including himself and his chief ally, Bonar Law.5 This was supposed to inject a much-needed dose of his legendary action and dynamism into a Westminster that had, for too long, been run on the lines of ‘business as usual’.
There was no doubt that such urgent leadership was required. After two and a half years of war, the Allied war effort seemed to be drifting, steadily and inexorably, towards defeat. The German invasion of France and Belgium in 1914 may have been halted, but repeated Allied offensives throughout the following two years had failed to drive the enemy out of more than a handful of villages and towns, while producing appalling losses. By the end of 1916 the French Army had suffered almost 1.2 million dead or missing in action.6 The British had not suffered anything like French casualties, but found their hopes of a major decision on the Somme being torn to pieces by machine-gun fire and shellfire (at the cost of over 400,000 dead, missing or wounded).7 Elsewhere the Allies had met with what seemed like nothing but disaster. The intervention in Gallipoli, intended to knock Ottoman Turkey out of the war, had been a bloody fiasco, while a joint Anglo-French landing in the Balkans–a gallant if belated attempt to help the Serbs–found itself cooped up in Salonika in an expedition that soon became a byword for strategic incoherency and waste.
Initially, Lloyd George had been deeply sceptical of Nivelle’s plans for a grand attack in the west in the spring of 1917. He doubted whether Germany’s vast and powerful Army could ever be destroyed, and instinctively looked elsewhere. The answer was not to fight on the Western Front, but to defeat Germany’s allies in turn and then, once she was alone and weakened, Britain would wield a great European alliance to vanquish the Kaiser. He had been a staunch advocate of the Salonika expedition and, despite its disappointments, maintained that if the Allies massed sufficient combat power they could knock Bulgaria out of the war. Failing that, it would make sense to send as many men and guns as possible to the Italians, then struggling against the Austro-Hungarians. What was essential, he said repeatedly, was that the Allies must win something, somewhere soon, or else their peoples would not be able to keep going.8 But however eloquently or passionately Lloyd George urged the War Cabinet to alter British strategy and to look elsewhere than France, he constantly came up against the roadblock that was the professional head of the British Army, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson.
Robertson was a rock of a man. A contemporary described him as being ‘solidly built’ and of ‘striking appearance’. ‘He appears to emanate strength; you instinctively feel you are in the presence of a man of iron will and constitution. His sturdy, compact frame gives an impression of tremendous energy.’9 The only man ever to rise through every rank of the British Army–from private to field marshal–Robertson was the son of a Lincolnshire postmaster, and possessed of a mind that was logical, thorough and supremely competent. For Robertson, the war could only be won in France. As he had written in November 1915, victory could only be attained ‘by the defeat or exhaustion of the predominant partner in the Central Alliance’, namely Germany. ‘Every plan of operation must therefore be examined from the point of view of its bearing on this result’–the decisive defeat of the German Armies on the Western Front. Anything that did not contribute to this aim should be discarded.10
Much of what Robertson said was correct, but Lloyd George could never accept it. For him, the CIGS was symptomatic of a military caste that was unimaginative, stupid and incapable of prosecuting the war with any sense of vigour or intelligence. Accusing Robertson of being ‘cowed’ and ‘bullied’ by the commander in France, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (who was, in any case, his senior in the Army List), Lloyd George considered that he had been ‘completely failed’ by the CIGS, who was unable to rise to the ‘full significance and responsibility’ of his great position. Robertson was possessed of qualities, he wrote, ‘which made for speedy promotion in the Army’. He was ‘cautious’ and ‘discreet’; ‘non-committal’ and ‘sternly orthodox’; ‘sound’ but ‘commonplace’. ‘Such mistakes therefore as he committed were all of the negative kind, and as these were always in accordance with Army regulations and traditions they counted in his favour and helped his promotion.’ ‘Such men always get on in any vocation’, added Lloyd George sardonically.11
The problem was that the Prime Minister found it impossible to get rid of his enemies, either Robertson or Haig. In order to ensure backing from senior Unionists, Lloyd George had agreed to retain Haig as Commander-in-Chief in France. Moreover, because Lord Derby (known as ‘the soldiers’ friend’) was Secretary of State for War, it meant that Lloyd George found himself boxed in on more than one occasion by advisers who did not share his strategic outlook.12 It was, therefore, extremely difficult to approach strategic questions with the kind of ‘blank sheet’ that Lloyd George evidently demanded. When he became Prime Minister he found that the game was already in play, moves had been made and strategies adopted, and he could not simply reset the board to his liking.
The Prime Minister remained deeply sceptical of the prospects for any offensive on the Western Front in 1917, but, in spite of himself, found his doubts massaged away by the big, reassuring presence of General Nivelle.13 The French commander’s promise of a ‘smashing victory’ within 24–48 hours may not have been exactly what Lloyd George wanted to hear, but at least the French would shoulder the burden of the offensive. The only problem was making sure that Britain’s armies played their part and, here, Lloyd George was determined to assert his authority. When, in January 1917, Haig expressed concerns over the state of the French railway system, which was under severe strain, and how this might delay taking over much of the French line as had already been agreed with Nivelle, Lloyd George decided to act. Lacking the nerve to take on GHQ directly, he plotted with the French Government to make Haig a subordinate of the French Commander-in-Chief, whereby his independence would be blunted. Lloyd George felt that only by acting as a single, unified army could the Allies operate effectively on the Western Front. Now this reasoning was perfectly sound–a year later Ferdinand Foch would become Allied Generalissimo with some success–but the way he tried to bring this about was symptomatic of a political animal who preferred to operate in the shadows.
Lloyd George’s scheme–to make Haig no more than an Army Group commander under Nivelle–had been unveiled to the British military delegation, including Robertson, at a joint Allied conference in Calais on 26 February (which had ostensibly been called to discuss the railway issue that Haig had raised). At an appropriate moment (and carefully prompted by Lloyd George), Nivelle proposed that from 1 March the French Commander-in-Chief (himself) should exercise full authority ove
r the BEF, particularly in how it conducted operations in the field. To ensure this worked smoothly, a senior British staff officer would be sent to GQG to act as a link between both armies and ensure that French directives were followed.14 That such an incredible proposal could have been entertained was down to Lloyd George, who had made clear to his French counterpart, Aristide Briand, that the British Government wanted such an arrangement. For the French delegation this was excellent news. Now they would be able to control and direct their greatest ally; one, moreover, that had shown itself, from their perspective, to be dangerously and habitually independent. Finally, after two and a half years, the British would have to conform to their plans.
For Robertson and Haig–who had been totally unaware of what Lloyd George was planning–there was exasperated surprise, choked by growing anger. Robertson was amazed that the Prime Minister was seriously considering handing over their armies, ‘within forty-eight hours and for an indefinite period, to a foreign General having no experience in the duties of High Command, and whose optimistic views of the coming campaign were shared by no responsible soldier in the British Army and by few or none in the French’.15 It was fortunate that Britain’s delegation contained staff officers of the highest calibre, including Robertson’s Director of Military Operations, Sir Frederick Maurice, and the ever-present Maurice Hankey; men who had acquired the poise and political antennae of palace courtiers and who went to work, quietly and efficiently, at ‘redrafting’ Nivelle’s note. Throughout the night they clattered away on typewriters in their rooms and mulled over a face-saving compromise that could command general agreement. Eventually, after a herculean effort, a proposal was hammered out that put Haig under Nivelle’s orders, but only for the duration of the forthcoming operation–Nivelle’s push on the Aisne and Haig’s preliminary attack around Arras–and, crucially, included an escape clause allowing Haig to appeal to his own government if he felt the orders of the French Commander-in-Chief ‘endangered the safety’ of his army.16