A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig Commander of the British Expeditionary Force

  Attacked often—and continued his attacks too long.

  Facing them all, bracing for the attack that was all too obviously coming, was a stripped-down German Second Army under General Fritz von Below. Below had only seven divisions along the entire front, five north of the river and two to the south. Because they were so few, all of them were up on the front line—a dangerous arrangement, but an unavoidable one in light of how badly the Germans were outnumbered. The particular thinness of the German line opposite the French was Falkenhayn’s doing: confident that Verdun had left the French incapable of attacking anywhere else, he had instructed Below to deploy his troops accordingly. But the German preparations had been superb, and Falkenhayn was responsible for that too. Under his instructions the Germans had been doing much more than merely digging trenches. The infrastructure they had put in place was a marvel of engineering, designed so that all the strongpoints protected each other and any enemy penetration could be quickly isolated. Beneath and behind the trenches, thirty feet and more deep in the chalk that underlay the rich topsoil of Picardy, the Germans had created what was almost an underground city, a long chain of chambers and passageways reinforced with concrete and steel. This human beehive was equipped with electric lighting, running water, and ventilation and was impervious to all but the most powerful artillery. Above it, slowly crumbling under Haig’s barrage but still largely ready for use when the time came, were three (and in some places more) lines of trenches that together formed a defensive zone up to five miles deep.

  Haig’s plan called for five days of bombardment, but when rain began to fall on June 26 and continued into June 28 a two-day postponement had to be ordered to allow the ground to dry. The intensity of the barrage was reduced so that the supply of shells would not run too low. Still, it remained a staggering display of power. By the time the troops went over the top on July 1, more than 1.5 million shells had descended upon the German lines—a quarter of a million on the morning of the attack alone. A ton of munitions had been dropped on every square yard of German front line with the same spirit-crushing results that both sides had been experiencing at Verdun for more than four months. “Shall I live till morning?” one of Below’s soldiers wrote in his diary. “Haven’t we had enough of this frightful horror? Five days and five nights now this hell concert has lasted. One’s head is like a madman’s; the tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth. Almost nothing to eat and nothing to drink. No sleep. All contact with the outer world cut off. No sign of life from home nor can we send any news to our loved ones. What anxiety they must feel about us. How long is this going to last?”

  The Tommies and poilus looked on happily, rejoicing in the thought that nothing could survive such an inferno. And indeed the Germans were hurt, and badly. Nearly seven thousand of them died under the shellfire, and many of their guns were destroyed. Even for the survivors, the underground city became a chamber of horrors in which they could only cower in the dark, unable to bury the dead bodies around them, waiting for death. But tens of thousands survived, especially opposite the British lines. Somehow they remained sane, watching through periscopes for signs of movement on the other side. Their artillery was likewise invisible. Weeks before, the German gunners had taken the range of the British and French trenches and likely lines of advance. Then they too had gone underground, their weapons concealed in woods and covered with camouflage. Their unbroken silence made it seem certain that they too had been destroyed.

  The attack, when it came, could scarcely have been less of a surprise. The area through which the front snaked is open, rolling farmland. Though the landscape was studded with woods, there were none in no-man’s-land, which was clear at almost every point, open to view. Late on the afternoon of June 30 the British units chosen to lead the assault were mustered out of the villages where they had been waiting and started toward the front. As they filled the roads, they became obvious to German observers on high points behind the front. Great columns of cavalry came forward as well. It took no Napoleon to perceive the meaning of it all. As the Germans settled in for another night of agony, they did so knowing that the hour of truth was at hand.

  Midsummer nights are short in the north of Europe, and in July in Picardy the sky is dimly alight by five A.M. This is also a region of predawn mists and low-lying fog. Haig could have kicked off his offensive in the early light; had he done so, his troops might have crossed no-man’s-land almost unseen. But the French had insisted on a later start, and Haig found it necessary to comply. At exactly 6: 25 A.M., as on all the days preceding, the British ended their usual early-morning cease-fire and started blasting away as usual. They had established this routine as a way of lulling the Germans into thinking that July 1 was going to be just another day. But this was an unlikely conclusion for them to reach, considering what they had seen the evening before.

  Ten minutes before the start of the attack, at 7: 20 A.M., the British detonated a huge mine that they had excavated under a German redoubt at Hawthorne Ridge, near the village of Beaumont-Hamel. “The ground where I stood gave a mighty convulsion,” a distant British observer reported. “It rocked and swayed…Then, for all the world like a gigantic sponge, the earth rose in the air to a height of hundreds of feet. Higher and higher it rose, and with a horrible grinding roar the earth fell back on itself, leaving in its place a mountain of smoke.” Terrifying and deadly as the explosion was, it was too limited in its effects to justify the final alert that it sent to the Germans up and down the line. And now it was the turn of the British to receive a signal—a chilling one. The supposedly extinct German artillery suddenly opened up, its fire falling with stunning accuracy on the trenches in which the British soldiers waited. Obviously the Germans were still out there. Obviously they still had guns, and obviously those guns were registered for maximum effect. Ten remaining British mines, none of them as big as the one at Hawthorne Ridge, went off at 7: 28. Two minutes later whistles blew and scores of thousands of British troops hauled themselves up onto exposed ground and started toward what every one of them must have hoped was nothing more than the dirt tombs of their enemies.

  British troops amid the mined landscape of the Western Front

  At this same moment the British artillery, which on every previous morning had continued until 7: 45, was lifted off the German front line and shifted to more distant targets. There was supposed to be a creeping barrage for the infantry to advance behind, but it was badly managed and moved too quickly. In short order most of the British shells were falling in the German rear. The shift provided the defenders with yet another alert. As soon as they saw—felt, heard—that the barrage had moved beyond them, they scrambled up out of their hidden chambers, took their positions, and unlimbered their machine guns.

  Even up on the surface, the extent of artillery damage turned out to be astonishingly limited. What seemed most inexplicable, the German barbed wire and the wooden posts from which it was strung remained in place almost everywhere. It provided the defenders, as wire always did where it was left uncut, with a nearly impenetrable protective barrier.

  For the attackers, who were forced to converge wherever they could find openings, it was a death trap. At this point certain hard truths about the fantastic British bombardment became apparent. Huge numbers of shells—as many as a third by some estimates, almost certainly hundreds of thousands—had been duds that failed to detonate. Too many of the shells that did explode contained shrapnel rather than high explosives, and more than half of the others were too small to penetrate the German dugouts. Even the fuses had turned out to be defective. Part of the problem was a collapse of quality control as Lloyd George rushed the British factories, many of them employing unskilled workers, to increase shell production. Another was Haig’s decision to keep many of his heaviest guns in Flanders, where he continued to hope for a coastal offensive. What turned these misfortunes into a scandal was the refusal of senior B
ritish commanders, in spite of repeated warnings from observers up on the front lines, to believe that the wire had not been destroyed.

  The Tommies knew nothing of this as they set out. Their inexperience and ignorance of what lay ahead helped to keep their enthusiasm high. They had also been fortified—steadied, dulled—by extra rations of rum. (In some units the men were given as much as they would drink.) To the extent that further motivation was required, it was provided by warnings that any man who failed to advance would be shot by his sergeants. Such practices were common and often backed up with action, though the orders were never put into writing. Nor were any officers foolish enough to put into writing the orders they issued with respect to the taking of prisoners. For a number of the units attacking at the Somme, these orders were simple beyond possibility of misunderstanding: no quarter was to be given. Any Germans attempting to surrender were to be dispatched forthwith.

  The Germans were astonished by what they saw. Instead of coming forward in a rush, instead of ducking and dodging and making use of whatever cover the terrain offered, the British were lined up shoulder to shoulder in plain view. Instead of running, they were walking almost slowly, as if to demonstrate their skill at close-order drill. Rifles and bayonets at the ready, they were like a vision out of the era of flintlock musketry. If this was little short of insane, it was also exactly what had been ordered: a high-precision advance by soldiers in tidy rows. This was Rawlinson’s idea. He thought that his troops, inexperienced as they were, would be incapable of advancing in any other way. “The attack must be made in waves,” he said, “with men at fairly close interval in order to give them confidence.” This would have made perfect sense if the Germans had in fact been wiped out. Each row was to proceed at a pace of exactly one hundred yards every two minutes, with everything timed to the second and all of it made tolerable by a creeping barrage that turned out not to be there.

  According to the immensely detailed British plan of the day, the advancing soldiers were not to break into a run until within twenty yards of the enemy. Running would in any case have been nearly impossible: every man in the first wave carried some seventy pounds of weaponry, ammunition, and gear, so that even getting out of the trenches had been a challenge. The men in the later waves were more heavily burdened still. Their assignment was to consolidate the ground taken by the men ahead of them, and they had been equipped accordingly. They carried all the same things as the first wave plus everything needed to construct a new defensive line: boards, rolls of barbed wire, bundles of stakes, machine guns. If ordered to run, they would have been unable to do so, especially over ground that the bombardment had turned into an obstacle course. “Fancy advancing against heavy fire,” one survivor would recall, “carrying a heavy roll of barbed wire on your shoulder!”

  No-man’s-land was a mile across at some points, a few hundred yards at others. The ground sloped downward toward the Germans in some places, more commonly upward, but everywhere it left the advancing troops as exposed as tin figures in a shooting gallery. Wherever they found themselves approaching uncut wire, as happened to unit after unit, they had no choice but to search out gaps and try to crowd through. Thus their slow-moving lines, or the parts of them that reached the wire, had to jam together in clusters barely able to move at all.

  The Germans simply pointed their machine guns at these knots of flesh and cut them down in swaths. “We were surprised to see them walking,” said a German machine-gunner. “We had never seen that before…When we started to fire we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. We didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”

  “The infantry rushed forward with fixed bayonets,” another of the German defenders remembered. “The noise of battle became indescribable. The shouting of orders and the shrill British cheers as they charged forward, could be heard above the violent and intense fusillade of machine guns and rifles and the bursting bombs, and above the deep thunderings of the artillery and the shell explosions. With all this were mingled the moans and groans of the wounded, the cries for help and the last screams of death. Again and again the extended lines of British infantry broke against the German defense like waves against a cliff, only to be beaten back. It was an amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry, courage and bulldog determination on both sides.”

  Of the sixty-six thousand men in the first wave, few got close to the German line. More than half were killed or wounded, including three-quarters of the officers. Some did make progress: the Thirty-fourth Division captured all of twenty acres, losing three of four men in the process. At Beaumont Hamel nine out of every ten members of a Newfoundland battalion advancing toward the Hawthorne Ridge crater were shot down in forty minutes. Injured men streamed back to their own lines, throwing the later waves into deeper disorder, but as the day went on still more long rows of troops were sent forward one after another.

  At day’s end perhaps a third of all the units involved in the attack had reached what were supposed to be their objectives for the first hour. Few had gone farther. Not one of the five villages that were supposed to be taken in an hour had fallen. The units at the British center and left had accomplished nearly nothing. Three divisions of cavalry, having stood poised for action throughout the day, were still blocked and idle when the light failed. The number of casualties had reached sixty thousand, and almost twenty thousand of them were dead. It was the worst day in the history of British warfare. (England’s casualties at Waterloo a century earlier had totaled eighty-four hundred. A generation later, at the Normandy invasion, the British and Americans together would be in combat for twenty days before their dead, wounded, and missing totaled twenty thousand.) German losses for the first day on the Somme totaled approximately eight thousand, including two thousand men taken prisoner—not by Rawlinson’s army.

  Before it was over the German gunners, at points in the center where the carnage had been most terrible, found themselves unwilling to continue firing. Shutting down their guns, they watched in silence as the British departed with whatever wounded they were able to take with them. Later, though, when some of the wounded left behind began to shoot from where they lay, the Germans too resumed firing.

  There had been two successes, neither of them expected. South of the river, what was supposed to have been a holding action by units of Foch’s battle-hardened “Iron Corps” turned into exactly the kind of breakthrough that Haig had planned for his own line. It had torn open the defenses, capturing several villages and losing only two thousand men. This happened in part because German troops were so sparse in the area, in part as a result of an effective creeping barrage. It happened mainly, however, because of what Great War historian Cyril Falls would call the “speed, dash, and tactical brains” of the French infantry. Foch and his generals made none of the British mistakes. Their poilus, when they advanced, were allowed to leave behind everything not required for the day’s fighting. They were able to run and were encouraged to do so. They advanced not in marching lines but helter-skelter, platoon by platoon, darting from one shell hole to another, encircling the German machine guns rather than hurling themselves frontally against them. Foch was unable to use his gains to swing around and help out farther north, however. He was blocked by the Somme and its marshy banks.

  The French corps north of the river, using the same tactics, made almost equal gains. Its advance shielded the flank of the southernmost British unit, a corps commanded by General Sir Walter Congreve, enabling it to drive northward two thousand yards and reach its objective, the village of Montauban. This was a startling achievement in comparison with what was happening elsewhere on the British line. It led, however, only to more frustration. Beyond Montauban, the countryside was open and undefended—ripe for the taking. But Rawlinson, in keeping with his bite-and-hold approach, had told his commanders that “no serious advance is to be made until preparations have been completed for entering the next phase of the operations.” Congreve reported his success, requesting permiss
ion to resume his advance, but he received no answer. The French on his right were then likewise unable to advance farther, because doing so alone would have exposed their flank. Congreve had opened a path through which Haig’s cavalry could, that very afternoon, have charged unobstructed into the German rear. But Haig and Rawlinson were fighting different wars, and the opportunity was lost.

  When darkness finally descended, the Battle of the Somme was already deadlocked. Verdun remained deadlocked too. So did the Italian front, and the east.

  Background: Farewells, and an Arrival at the Top

  FAREWELLS, AND AN ARRIVAL AT THE TOP

  THE EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA AND APOSTOLIC KING OF Hungary developed a cough. Soon he had a fever that went up and down and up again. Franz Joseph was eighty-six years old in November 1916, and the sixty-ninth anniversary of his coronation lay just weeks ahead. Among all the monarchs in European history, only Louis XIV of France had had a longer reign.

  Narrow and backward-looking and rigid though he was (he refused to use the telephone or ride in automobiles), Franz Joseph was in many ways a good and simple man. All his life he had done his best to be faithful to the code in which his strong-willed mother had raised him. Every night he got down on his knees to pray before retiring, and every morning he knelt down again as soon as he was out of bed. His dedication to what he saw as his duty almost surpasses understanding, especially in light of how little benefit he had derived from being so faithful. Even now, aged and coughing and fevered, he had himself awakened at three-thirty in the morning and was at his desk long before sunrise. With brief interruptions he would stay at that desk until after nightfall, struggling to manage the empire that his ancestors had built up over a thousand years and that was falling in around him.