A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Some things went exactly according to Haig’s plan. The troops on Gough’s flanks made good progress, advancing to their objectives with comparatively little difficulty. Even in the center, the forward units managed to fight their way through the first German zone (which was, after all, supposed to yield when pressed) and into the second. They penetrated nearly two miles at a few points, no more than half a mile at others. Six thousand German soldiers, shattered by the frenzied final hours of the bombardment, were taken prisoner in a few hours. But by early afternoon, with a light rain sprinkling the field and the leading British units no longer in contact with their artillery, the Germans opened fire with field guns positioned on elevated ground to the north and south of the salient created by the advance. This was artillery that might have been destroyed if not for the fog of the preceding days. The British, taking heavy losses, were forced to pull back. Of the fifty-two tanks that had advanced with Gough’s troops, twenty-two broke down and another nineteen were put out of action by German fire. By late afternoon the attack was at a standstill and the drizzle had turned to hard rain. Haig, not aware that twenty-three thousand of his men had been killed or wounded, perhaps drawing a comparison with the first day on the Somme, reported to London that the day’s events had been “highly satisfactory and the losses light for so great a battle.”

  On this same day Pope Benedict XV sent a letter to the governments of the Entente and the Central Powers, offering to mediate a peace of no territorial conquests. As before, a clear response from Berlin, an agreement to give up Belgium, would have been the essential next step. Once again the Germans were unable to respond. A young new foreign minister, Richard von Kühlmann, decided to ignore this latest Vatican initiative and approach London directly instead. He hoped to separate the British from their allies with a private promise to withdraw from Belgium in return for a cessation of hostilities. But the new chancellor, Michaelis, destroyed whatever tiny potential this idea may have had. He yielded to Ludendorff’s insistence that Germany must retain effective control not only of most of Belgium but of the coal and iron mines of France’s Longwy-Briey district and must be promised extensive portions of Africa as well. There were other clumsy efforts at arranging talks at about this time—Austria and France became involved in various ways at various points—but nothing could come of them because on both sides the people with the power to decide were determined to dictate any final settlement. The performance of Michaelis was so unimpressive through all of it, and like Bethmann Hollweg he came to be so hated in the Reichstag, that he had to resign after only three months in office.

  Rain was falling in torrents when Haig resumed his attack on August 2. With the Flanders drainage system in ruins, every hole filled with water and the ground became a soupy morass to a depth that no man’s foot could reach. The tanks could not move, the airplanes could not fly, and the German artillery was taking an increasing toll. Still Haig tried to push on. But after two more days, with the rain continuing and the number of French and British casualties up to sixty-eight thousand, he finally ordered a halt until the rain stopped and the ground could dry out.

  For the troops, the break in the fighting was something less than deliverance. One British officer would record the experience of waiting day after day in a bunker taken from the Germans. “Inside it was only about five foot high and at the bottom there was about two foot of water. This water was simply horrid, full of refuse, old tins, and even excreta. Whenever shells burst near it the smell was perfectly overpowering. Luckily, there was a sort of concrete shelf the Boche had made about two foot above ground level. It was on this shelf that four officers and six other ranks spent the night. There wasn’t room to lie down, there was hardly room to sit upright, and we more or less crouched there. Outside the pillbox was an enormous shell-hole full of water, and the only way out was over a ten-inch plank. Inside the shell-hole was the dead body of a Boche who had been there a very long time and who floated or sank on alternate days according to the atmosphere. The shellholes were crowded with dead and dying men, the latter crying out for help as they slowly expired.”

  Haig had to wait until August 10, when at last it became possible to mount a fresh assault aimed mainly at capturing or driving away the German light artillery. This was another limited and costly success. As soon as it ended, Haig began planning for a resumption on August 14. But the rain started again, causing one and then a second postponement of twenty-four hours. When it came, the next attack was more of the same: much death, little to show for it. Haig decided not to give up, which he would have been amply justified in doing and was probably obligated to do under the promises he had made to London. Instead he prepared to change directions.

  Thus ended the first phase of the Third Battle of Ypres. In three and a half weeks Haig’s troops had advanced two miles—not much more than half of his objective for the first day. The amphibious force remained idle, waiting for the capture of Roulers. As it became clear that Roulers was never going to be captured, that force would be quietly disbanded. On both sides divisions too battered to continue had to be replaced. There were twenty-three such divisions on the German side, fourteen on the British. “Blood and mud, blood and mud,” Lloyd George complained back in London, “they can think of nothing better.”

  The weight of the campaign was now shifted away from Gough to Plumer’s Second Army. In two years at Ypres, Plumer had won the loyalty of his troops with a Pétain-like concern for their welfare and a marked unwillingness to waste their lives. The morale of his army was high, the soldiers eager for action. And unlike Gough or Haig, Plumer had paid attention to the Germans’ new defensive methods. He devised a countertactic, one possibly inspired by his experience at Messines Ridge, and was given Haig’s approval and three weeks to get ready. While he was doing so, Haig was called to London for another meeting with Lloyd George and the War Policy Committee. It was an arid repeat of the earlier discussions. Haig, again supported by Robertson, argued the necessity of continuing to pound away at the Germans until they broke, which he was sure they were about to do. He returned to France with his authority unimpaired, leaving behind a most unhappy prime minister.

  At this point Haig had more reason for confidence than he knew. Plumer had in fact found the key to the German defense, one that neutralized its strengths and exploited its inherent weaknesses. Like most truly brilliant military plans, Plumer’s approach was elegant in its simplicity and straightforward in its recognition of the facts on the ground. It began with the premise that relatively short gains—gains of a mile or less—had become available almost for the asking as a result of the thinness and elasticity of the Germans’ forward positions. Premise number two was that gains of several miles—never mind breakthroughs of the kind that Entente commanders had been seeking since 1914—were now more out of the question than ever because of the Germans’ increased ability to counterattack in force. The conclusion was so blindingly obvious that only Plumer and his staff had seen it: the German system could be outsmarted with attacks that stopped upon capturing the easy ground and never went far enough to trigger a counterattack. Cumulatively, a series of such attacks might drive the Germans backward out of their defenses and into a war of maneuver that they lacked the manpower to survive.

  Plumer was too good a general to rely on cleverness alone. He used the first three weeks of September—weeks suddenly, blissfully free of rain—to pull together a mass of artillery even more awesome than those of July and August. At the end of his preparations he had one artillery piece for every five yards of front. The Germans would be subjected to five waves of fire, each a zone of destruction two hundred yards deep. The first zone was shrapnel exclusively, the second high explosives, and the third indirect machine-gun fire (“indirect” meaning that the gunners, unable to see their targets, aimed into the air so as to bring the bullets arcing down on the defenders from above). The last two were more high explosives. Every German position would find itself in one zone after another as the entire
pattern, half a mile deep from front to back, swept over it in a storm that changed its character every few minutes. Plumer’s artillery would fire three and a half million rounds in this way before and on the day of his attack.

  Plumer was able to conceal his preparations behind the slightly elevated ground that he had captured first at Messines Ridge and later in moving forward on Gough’s flank. When he attacked on September 20, his troops advancing behind a creeping barrage, those Germans who had not been killed by the artillery or pulled back from it were subdued almost with ease. Upon reaching their assigned objectives, the attackers stopped and hurriedly began constructing defenses. The main body of German troops, meanwhile, remained in the rear, waiting for the British to come at them. By the time they realized that the British were finished for the day, it was too late for a counterattack to be effective. The whole operation had been quick and clean, and within the limits of its objectives it had been a complete success. Though it did not come cheaply in the end—British casualties ultimately totaled more than twenty thousand, mainly as a result of German artillery fire after the advance—it was clear to both sides that the game had entered a new phase. The Germans were as alarmed by the results of this Battle of the Menin Road as the British commanders were elated.

  The attack had captured not just German ground but part of the German infrastructure—pillboxes and bunkers essential to the new system. This increased the defenders’ vulnerability to further attack. Seeing this, Plumer hurried his artillery forward and on September 26 attacked again in what has gone into the chronicles as the Battle of Polygon Wood. The weather remained clear, so that scores of British and French pilots were able to fly low over the German defenders, strafing them and dropping bombs. After another horrendous barrage the infantry advanced on a front of four miles, dug in after advancing the assigned half-mile, and again left the main German forces looking on helplessly. The Germans had lost another set of strongpoints. If this happened several times, they might be left with no infrastructure at all.

  Desperate, the Germans gave up on their new system. They reverted to older tactics, positioning large numbers of troops in a strong forward line to block the attackers from making easy early gains. Plumer again had his guns on the move, preparing for another strike. The fates seemed to have turned entirely in his favor: the meteorological record contained no evidence of a Flanders September as dry as the last month had been.

  But a light drizzle began on October 3, and it was still falling the next morning when a fresh British assault began the Battle of Brookseinde. Even more than September 20 and 26, this was a day of disaster for the Germans. The men in the new forward line, having had a mere handful of days in which to improvise their defenses, were slaughtered wholesale by Plumer’s barrage. The reserves, positioned too far forward by generals too eager to get at the attackers, were caught in the same inferno. The British troops advanced only seven hundred yards before, maddeningly for the Germans, stopping as before. In the process they killed or wounded thirty thousand of the defenders, taking twenty-five thousand casualties themselves. This rate of loss, painful for the British, was unsustainable on the German side. And conventional tactics plainly were incapable of keeping it from happening again.

  Man and beast, together in war

  A German rider and his mounts, prepared to encounter gas.

  At his headquarters, alarmed by the dispatches arriving from Flanders, Ludendorff cast about for some way to launch an offensive that would draw British troops away from Ypres. No such thing was possible. The necessary troops were not available, in part because Pétain was now launching holding attacks at Verdun and elsewhere with French divisions sufficiently recovered to be trusted in action. Ludendorff ordered the Sixth Army to shift back to the new system. At least this would keep most of the troops out of reach of the British artillery. Beyond that there was nothing for the Germans to do but hope for deliverance. “The fighting on the Western Front became more severe and costly than any the German Army had yet experienced,” Ludendorff would recall of this period. “I myself was put to a terrible strain. The state of affairs in the West appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings, and had exceeded all expectations.”

  Deliverance came literally from the heavens. The drizzle that had started on October 3 turned to a steady rain, and after a few days more it became a downpour that went on and on. Flanders was turning into an enormous shallow lake, every shell hole and piece of low ground filled to the brim. It would have been a sensible time to wrap up Third Ypres, and when the British commanders met on October 7, Plumer and Gough both were in favor of doing so. Haig would not hear of it. Plumer’s advance had left his troops deployed along a line that would be difficult to hold without exceptional hardship through the coming winter. One remedy would have been to pull back to slightly higher and dryer ground—a horrifying prospect for Haig in light of the price paid for his gains and what was sure to be Lloyd George’s reaction. The only acceptable course, Haig declared, was to push forward to the capture of Passchendaele Ridge, the northern extension of the same snakelike strip of high ground of which Messines Ridge was also a part. Virtually every British division in the Ypres salient having been reduced to tatters, the lead role was to be played by divisions from the Commonwealth—from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

  The first attack at Passchendaele, the Valley of the Passion, went off in the rain on October 9 under conditions that were not merely difficult but impossible. Standing water covered almost everything, and what was not under water (the men included) was covered with mud that seemed to go down and down forever. It was impossible to find a foothold, impossible to move the artillery or set it firmly in place where it was, nearly impossible even for men on foot to move. Big guns sank out of sight. So did an entire light railway. The only way to bring shells forward was by pack mule, but many of the mules sank and drowned. When fired, the shells disappeared without exploding because the surface, even the mud beneath the water, had become too soft to activate their fuses. Somehow the Australians and New Zealanders at the center of the attack managed to fight their way forward, but their progress served only to expose them to machine-gun fire from three directions instead of one. Finally they had no choice but to struggle back to where they had begun. The wounded, unavoidably left behind, disappeared into the muck.

  “The slope,” said an Australian officer of a scene he came upon while on reconnaissance, “was littered with dead, both theirs and ours. I got to one pillbox to find it just a mass of dead, and so I passed on carefully to the one ahead. Here I found about fifty men alive, of the Manchesters. Never have I seen men so broken or demoralized. They were huddled up close behind the box in the last stages of exhaustion and fear. Fritz had been sniping them off all day, and had accounted for fifty-seven that day—the dead and dying lay in piles. The wounded were numerous—unattended and weak, they groaned and moaned all over the place…Some had been there four days already.” Moving on again, he came upon another bunker with “twenty-four wounded men inside, two dead Huns and six outside, in various stages of decomposition. The stench was dreadful…When day broke I looked over the position. Over forty dead lay within twenty yards of where I stood and the whole valley was full of them.”

  When the Canadians were selected to lead the next assault, their commander, Sir Arthur Currie, expressed his reservations. He predicted that taking Passchendaele would cost him sixteen thousand men. He did not, however, refuse. When his men attacked on October 26, they took heavy casualties, inflicted equally severe losses on the Germans, and were brought to a halt well short of Passchendaele Ridge and the sorry assortment of low rubble that had once been Passchendaele village. The Canadians tried again four days later, and the results were no different. A shortage of drinking water, ironically, added to the torment of the men. Bringing water forward was as difficult as hauling shells, and the swamp that extended in all directions had been poisoned by huma
n waste and the rotting cadavers of animals and men.

  General Sir Arthur Currie

  Foretold the cost of taking Passchendaele.

  Another of Europe’s battlegrounds was now fully ablaze—the Italian front this time, where the bloodletting that had marked Italy’s entry into the war in the summer of 1915 suddenly soared to new heights. The Italian commander in chief, Luigi Cadorna, had launched two more Battles of the Isonzo earlier in the year, in May and August, and these two fights had cost his armies more than two hundred and eighty thousand casualties. The Austrians too had suffered hideously, and when the two battles were over, both sides were begging their allies for help. The monstrous Cadorna, a kind of savage in uniform who seriously advocated the shooting of every tenth man in units that failed to perform to his satisfaction, feared that the collapse of Russia was going to free Austria-Hungary to send all of its armies against Italy. He turned to the British and French for reinforcements, but found them willing to do no more than continue to send artillery. Austria-Hungary’s young Emperor Karl, warned by his general staff (no longer headed by Conrad, who had been demoted) that the Austrians were unlikely to survive another of Cadorna’s assaults, asked Ludendorff for help. Rebuffed, he appealed directly to Kaiser Wilhelm, who intervened. When a general sent to evaluate the Italian front reported that the Austrians were indeed at the end of their strength, Ludendorff reluctantly created a new German Fourteenth Army out of infantry, artillery, and aircraft taken from the Baltic, Romania, and Alsace-Lorraine. He sent this army southward under the veteran Otto von Below with orders to stabilize the Italian front with the shortest, most limited campaign possible.

  The resulting Battle of Caporetto—also known, inevitably, as the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo—began on October 24 with a joint German-Austrian attack that quickly developed into an unexpectedly far-reaching success. The Germans and Austrians, whose thirty-three divisions faced forty-one divisions of Italians, advanced more than ten miles on the first day, and the retreat that Cadorna attempted to organize soon degenerated into headlong flight and the surrender of hundreds of thousands of his troops. Below’s orders were to proceed no farther than the River Tagliamento, which flows southward into the Adriatic west of the Isonzo, but his forces reached that objective so quickly that they pushed on in hot pursuit. The government in Rome fell, Cadorna was sacked, and the Italian forces continued to run until they were on the banks of the River Piave twenty miles beyond the Tagliamento. There they were able to make a stand. They were helped in doing so by the exhaustion of the pursuing Germans and the onset of winter rains. Below had advanced eighty miles in seventy days, shortening the southern front by a crucial two hundred miles. Italian casualties totaled three hundred and twenty thousand during the retreat to the Piave, including two hundred and sixty-five thousand men taken prisoner, and the stand on the Piave had claimed another one hundred and forty thousand. Tactically, Caporetto had been one of the war’s most spectacularly successful campaigns, and when it ended the war on the southern front seemed almost over. But it was not conclusive. The upheavals that it generated brought the government in Rome and its army under more capable leadership. The gross mistreatment that had destroyed the morale of the Italian troops ended. All this would work to the detriment of the Central Powers.