A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman’s men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing—the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his first intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler’s exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.

  The Germans found progress against the British and French as hard as it had been against the Belgians. But when the BEF and Foch launched their own attacks, they too were quickly thwarted. Along this part of the line, however, there were no dikes to be opened, so that the opposing forces could be separated and their misery brought to an end. The fighting continued day and night, the two sides taking turns on the offensive, and as the casualties mounted companies were reduced to the size of platoons and the tattered remnants of units were mixed together helter-skelter. Officers were all but annihilated, so that young lieutenants found themselves in command of what remained of battalions and regiments.

  The rain continued, the nights grew colder, men lay on the surface of the earth because any holes they dug immediately filled with water, and still somehow the fighting went on. The landscape, though almost uniformly flat, was broken by villages and patches of woodland and by rivers and canals and hedgerows and fences extending in every direction. This was far better for defense than offense, and practically impossible for cavalry (which in any case was proving to be helpless against machine guns). The British were often outnumbered, sometimes by margins that seemed impossible, but time after time they held off attacks or came back to recapture lost ground. One thing that saved them was the skill of their cavalry, acquired in the guerrilla fighting of the Boer War, in dismounting and fighting as infantry. What ultimately saved them, at Ypres as earlier at Mons and Le Cateau, was the accuracy and speed (and of course the courage) of the ordinary British rifleman. Here again the fire laid down by the Tommies was often intense enough to convince the Germans that they were advancing not against rifles but against machine guns.

  The devastating effectiveness of the British fire, coupled with the inexperience of some of the German reserves thrown into the Ypres meat-grinder, led to perhaps the most poignant of the many butcheries of late 1914. Thousands of schoolboy recruits, many of them as young as sixteen, followed almost equally inexperienced reserve sergeants and officers in heavily massed formations directly at the waiting BEF. They formed a wall of flesh—British soldiers recalled them advancing arm in arm, singing as they came, wearing their fraternity caps and carrying flowers—that blind men could hardly have missed. They were mowed down in rows. Where they somehow succeeded in driving back their enemies, they often didn’t know what to do next and so milled around aimlessly until hit with a counterattack. Many thousands of these youngsters lie in a single mass grave a short distance north of Ypres. At the site is a sculpture, the figures of a pair of parents kneeling in grief, created after the war by the mother of one of them.

  Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides, and horror after horror. One evening, at the end of a day of murderous infantry gunfights under constant artillery fire, one of the German reserve units managed at tremendous cost to drive the British out of the village of Bixshoote. Later they received word that they were to be relieved overnight. In their lack of experience they assembled and marched away before their relief arrived. Observing this, the British moved in and again took possession. In the following two weeks the Germans would try again and again to retake what they had given away, failing repeatedly and always with even more casualties than before.

  Losses were no less shocking on the other side. When Scotland’s Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was taken out of action, only about thirty men remained of the thousand-plus who had come to France at the start of the war. The BEF was moving toward annihilation. In some places along the line the British were stretched so thin that the Germans, observing, outsmarted themselves. They decided not to attack at those points, thinking that such a tempting target must be a decoy behind which lay masses of British or French reserves. There were no such reserves.

  Somehow, the Germans and British again launched simultaneous attacks on October 30, and again they ran head-on into each other and grappled in a struggle in which the losses were almost insupportable on both sides. The next day the Germans alone were still attacking, and this time, at the village of Gheluvelt, another of their green reserve units broke through the defensive ring. Nothing lay between them and Ypres, but this sudden success after so much failure apparently was more than they could believe. While they waited for instructions, a British brigadier general found the only troops in the vicinity, the seven officers and 357 enlisted men who remained of the Second Worcester Regiment, and ordered them to retake Gheluvelt. To get to the village, these men had to cross a thousand yards of open ground, and during the crossing a hundred of them were cut down. The survivors, when they reached the edge of the village, darted into a grove of trees, fixed their bayonets, and attacked. Twelve hundred confused and frightened German soldiers, thinking that this ragged little gang must be the advance of some powerful force, ran for their lives. The Worcesters, with nothing between them and Ypres but open country, had sealed the hole.

  That night Falkenhayn called a halt. He had no idea that the BEF was at the point of breakdown—out of reserves, nearly out of ammunition, at the limits of endurance. He still thought that a breakthrough was possible, but he wanted to assemble more trained and experienced troops before trying again.

  Things became briefly quiet both in Flanders and in Poland in the early days of November, but almost daily the war continued to grow in size and change in shape. The first Canadian troops were in England now, being readied to cross the Channel and link up with the British. An entire corps of Indian troops, tough Gurkha units among them, was with the BEF in Flanders, and black troops from France’s African colonies were arriving at the front as well. In the east, Hindenburg was named commander in chief of all German forces on the Russian front. Ludendorff continued as his chief of staff, and Hoffmann stayed with him as well. When word came from Istanbul that the Ottoman Empire was entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, in Berlin and Vienna it must have sounded like a gift from heaven.

  Before November was a week old, the Eastern and Western Fronts were heating up again. Grand Duke Nicholas put two armies on the march through Poland toward Silesia, and other Russian armies were moving southwestward to the Carpathians. And Falkenhayn was almost ready to try again to take Ypres. The kaiser was still at Supreme Headquarters, and his presence was as big a headache for Falkenhayn as it had been for Moltke. Wilhelm was constantly demanding a victory, a reason to don one of his most gorgeous uniforms and be paraded in triumph through some conquered city. In his protracted disappointment he was like a petulant adolescent, and no more useful.

  During the lull in the Flanders struggle, Falkenhayn received a hurried visit from Ludendorff. As usual, and with Hoffmann’s help as always, Ludendorff had an ambitious plan ready for execution. Also as usual, his plan was aimed not just at stopping the Russian armies advancing into Poland but at destroying them. He proposed to do this by allowing the Russians to advance beyond the railheads that were their source of support until they ran out of momentum. Then the Germans would descend on them from the north, taking them in the flank and rear, cutting them off from Warsaw and safety. But more troops were needed. This was what Ludendorff had come for: reinforcements. Falkenhayn refused; he had been assembling all the divisions he could find for the new attack in Flanders, and the kaiser was hounding him. Ludendorff
departed in a fury. Another war, this one within the German general staff, began at about this time. It was between Falkenhayn and the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team, and it was over the question of whether the Germans’ best hope of victory lay in the west or the east.

  Denied the manpower their original plan required, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann did not give up. They moved their Ninth Army, the one that had had such a narrow escape from the Russians near Warsaw, back into East Prussia by train. There they combined it with the Eighth Army to form a mass of troops extending across seventy miles. They then waited as the Russians moved across Poland toward the west. When, as expected, the advance began to show signs of bogging down under its own tremendous weight and the difficulties of resupply, they sent their two armies down on it like a hammer. At the main point of contact the Germans actually had a numerical advantage, and the Russians were staggered. After four days of hard fighting they began to retreat. The Germans pursued, hitting at the Russians repeatedly.

  Falkenhayn was attacking again in Flanders, this time using more experienced troops and limiting himself to a narrower front. What he got was not victory but another series of inconclusive battles all along the ridge outside Ypres, which was slowly being destroyed as the Germans shelled the ancient towers being used by the defenders as observation posts. Large and small groups of soldiers dashed from village to woodland, from canal to hedgerow, settling into firefights, advancing with bayonets, being thrown back and counterattacking while artillery from both sides rained shrapnel and high explosives down on every target their spotters could find. The nature of the struggle is captured in the official account of First Ypres later prepared for the German general staff:

  The enemy turned every house, every wood and every wall into a strong point, and each of them had to be stormed by our men with heavy loss. Even when the first line of these fortifications had been taken they were confronted by a second one immediately behind it; for the enemy showed great skill in taking every advantage of the ground, unfavorable in any case to the attacker. To the east and south-east of Ypres, even more developed than in the north, there were thick hedges, wire fences and broad dikes. Numerous woods also of all sizes with dense undergrowth made the country almost impassable and most difficult for observation purposes. Our movements were constantly being limited to the roads which were swept by the enemy’s machine-guns. Owing to the preparatory artillery bombardments the villages were mostly in ruins by the time the infantry reached them, but the enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks before abandoning them. In the few village streets that remained worthy of the name the fighting generally developed into isolated individual combats, and no description can do adequate justice to the bravery of the German troops on such occasions.

  Nor, of course, is it possible to do justice to—perhaps even to understand—the bravery of the British and French troops who were defending those piles of stones and bricks. Even the barest chronology of how the villages near Ypres were taken and surrendered and taken again is enough to show why, in the end, hardly a stone was left standing upon a stone. Lombartzyde was captured by the Germans on October 23, retaken by the French a day later, recaptured by the Germans on October 28, taken yet again by the British and French on November 4, recaptured by the Germans on November 7, only to change hands twice more before finally and permanently ending up in the possession of the Germans.

  Gradually, village by village, the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the Ypres Salient, the semicircle held by the French and British east of the town. But time after time they failed to break through. On several occasions various French and British generals suggested that a retreat might be in order. Always it was Foch who refused. Before the war he had written that an army is never defeated until it believes itself to be defeated. Now, with considerable help from the Tommies, he appeared to be proving his point.

  The German offensive crested on November 11 when the most elite unit in the entire German army, the First Guards Regiment led by the kaiser’s son Prince Eitel Friedrich, drove the British troops out of Nonnebosschen. It was a repeat of Gheluvelt. Once again nothing separated the Germans from Ypres, and once again a ragtag assortment of the only British soldiers in the neighborhood (not combat troops at all but cooks, drivers, staff officers—anyone who could pick up a rifle) mounted a seemingly hopeless counterattack. Once again the Germans thought that the mysteriously absent Entente reserves must be moving into action at last and fled. That turned out to be the last time the Germans came close to breaking through.

  The fighting went on until November 22, with more attacks, but increasingly it was an obviously futile struggle in rain and cold mud by half-crazed and hungry men desperate for rest. Even the old lion Kitchener was horrified. “This,” he exclaimed, “is not war!” Whatever it was, it finally came to an end when the rains turned to snow and the mud froze hard and the impossibility of achieving anything became too obvious to be ignored. Both sides claimed victory, the Entente because they had held on to Ypres and kept the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, the Germans not only because they had kept the enemy from breaking through but because by the end they had captured so many of the strongpoints around the destroyed town that the British and French no longer had an adequate base from which to launch new offensives.

  By the time the Flanders front shut down for the winter, the British had taken fifty thousand casualties there. More than half of the one hundred and sixty thousand men that Britain had by then sent to France were dead or wounded. France’s Ypres losses are believed to exceed fifty thousand, Germany’s at least one hundred thousand. Burke’s Peerage, the registry of Britain’s noble families, had to postpone publication of its latest edition to make the editorial changes required by the death in combat of sixty-six peers, ninety-five sons of peers, sixteen baronets, eighty-two sons of baronets, and six knights.

  The Russian retreat across Poland continued, with the Germans in pursuit. First the Russians tried to withdraw behind an expanse of wet lowland marshes, but the Germans drove them out. Then they tried to make a stand at the city of Lodz, but on December 6 they were again forced to move on. They had lost another ninety thousand men at Lodz, the Germans thirty-five thousand. The Germans were thirty miles east of Lodz, and in possession of a hundred and thirty-six thousand Russian prisoners, when their drive finally came to a stop. Winter made the stop necessary—the killing Russian winter. “Only about half had overcoats,” an English war correspondent observed of German soldiers captured in a Russian counterattack. “And these were made of a thin, shoddy material that is about as much protection as paper against the Russian wind. When you know that the prison camps are all in Siberia, try and think of the lot of prisoners. Yet for the moment the Germans were content. They were allowed to sleep. This is the boon that the man fresh from the trenches asks above all things. His days and nights have been one constant strain of alertness. His brain has been racked with the roar of cannon and his nerves frayed by the irregular bursting of shell. His mind is chaos…But when a soldier is once captured he feels that this responsibility of holding back the enemy is no longer his. He has failed. Well, he can sleep in peace now.”

  Both sides settled down to hacking makeshift defenses out of the frozen earth. The Germans had lost a hundred thousand men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting the astounding total of five hundred and thirty thousand casualties on the Russians. Their success, however, was of discouragingly limited value. As winter arrived, the Russians had 120 divisions on the front, and each division included twelve battalions. The Germans and Austrians together could muster only sixty divisions of eight battalions each.

  For Conrad and his armies, December was a month of high drama, of brief glory followed by final humiliation. As it opened, one of the Russian armies advancing against the Carpathians had taken possession of a mountain pass that gave it a gateway into Hungary. The commander of this Russian Eighth Army, a talented general named
Alexei Brusilov, was in position to advance on Budapest and begin the conquest of the Hapsburg homeland. But at just this moment Conrad tried something that worked. He learned of a gap between Brusilov and the Russian army on its right, assembled an attack force, and on December 3 drove it into the gap. The Russians were thrown off balance. In four days Conrad drove them back forty miles. Though the masses of reinforcements sent forward out of the Russian reserve brought him to a halt by December 10, the victory was an important one. It spoiled the Russians’ hopes of crossing the Carpathians. It also rendered them incapable of executing a newly hatched plan to send a force from Krakow toward Germany. In combination with Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s November successes in Poland, it left the Russians bogged for the winter far from Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna.

  Conrad poisoned his own hour of triumph by launching a year-end invasion of Serbia, his third since the start of the war. This newest incursion started as promisingly as the others, with the Austrians quickly taking possession of much of the Serbian interior along with Belgrade. Just one day after the fall of Belgrade, however, in a moment of Balkan high drama, the mustachioed King Peter of Serbia, rifle in hand, announced to his soldiers that he was releasing them from their pledge to fight for him and the homeland but that he for one was going to the front, alone if necessary. This gesture rallied every doubting patriot to the cause. A counterattack organized by Serbian General Radomir Putnik—the same old soldier who had been caught vacationing in Austrian territory when the war began but was allowed to return home in an act of almost medieval courtesy by Emperor Franz Joseph—sent two hundred thousand Serb troops down on the overextended Austrians. The Austrians, who had gone days without food and were freezing in summer uniforms, fled back across the border. Again their losses were outlandish: twenty-eight thousand dead, a hundred and twenty thousand wounded, seventy-six thousand taken prisoner. The Serbs too had been badly hurt, with twenty-two thousand killed, ninety-two thousand wounded, nine thousand captured or missing, and the survivors ravaged by dysentery and cholera.