A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Pétain and Foch were surprised that Ludendorff had attacked in such force at the Chemin des Dames. As the attack resumed on May 28 and continued to progress, they puzzled over how he was sustaining his momentum, not knowing how many troops he had taken from the north. For once they were in agreement: Reims must be held, along with a wooded plateau just beyond Soissons. This would keep the mouth of the new salient from opening wider. Neither general thought Paris was in danger. To threaten the capital, the Germans would have to shift their attack toward the west. If they did so, the French Tenth Army that was part of Foch’s reserve was in position to fall on their flank. Pétain ordered one of the armies north of the Oise to come south. He also asked Foch to send reserves but was refused. Clemenceau, never one to leave military operations in the hands of the generals, traveled to Foch’s headquarters and was surprised to learn of this refusal. When Foch explained that he believed the new offensive to be intended not to capture Paris but to drain the Flanders reserve, Clemenceau declined to interfere.

  By the end of the second day, the Germans were in possession of high, easily defended ground south of the Vesle. They had reached nearly all the objectives that Ludendorff had set for their offensive, and in doing so they had captured huge quantities of desperately needed supplies. The familiar pattern was once again emerging. At one end of their line, around Soissons, the Germans had succeeded more easily and completely than they had expected. But at the other end, in the attempt to take Reims, they had failed. As before, the question was what to do next—whether to push on where the troops had been so successful, or try again where they had failed, or simply call the whole thing off. German intelligence was watching keenly for evidence that Entente reserves were moving out of Flanders. Thanks to Foch, no such evidence existed: the reserves were staying put. The entire effort had to be judged a failure. At an evening meeting at Crown Prince Wilhelm’s headquarters, all the generals in attendance, Ludendorff among them, agreed that the offensive had to continue. Once again losing sight of what he had originally intended, Ludendorff ordered seven of the divisions being saved for Flanders to be brought south to join in the attack. He was like a roulette player trying to recoup his losses by putting chips on more and more numbers.

  Background: The Women

  THE WOMEN

  ONE OF THE STAPLES OF GREAT WAR PROPAGANDA WAS the poster showing a nurse (always beautiful and composed, always immaculate) bending over a handsome young soldier (calm and alert, seriously but not mortally wounded, never injured in ways unpleasant to the eye) who gazes up at her in gratitude and admiration.

  Such art had always been a fantasy, and by the war’s climax it was an affront to truth. Many thousands of female nurses were doing heroic service near the front lines in the summer and autumn of 1918, but there was nothing romantic about their experience. The avalanche of casualties on both sides had turned field hospitals into places of horror.

  “Hundreds upon hundreds of wounded poured in like a rushing torrent,” an American nurse remembered. “The crowded, twisted bodies, the screams and groans, made one think of Dante’s Inferno.” Men came in with parts of their faces missing, with their sexual organs gone, with limbs reduced to dripping shreds.

  Things were even more terrible on the other side. “We are supposed to care for up to three hundred wounded here, but there are absolutely no supplies!” a German nurse recorded in her diary. “In the morning helpful soldiers found us some mattress ticking. We began by tearing it up for bandages, since there was no material for dressings. Later we took down the curtains and made bandages of them. Our charges are starving, and all we can give them is dry army bread.”

  There was the stink of gangrene, and the pathetic shell-shock cases. Dying boys cried out for their mothers, and, in the second half of 1918, more and more fevered men were dying of influenza.

  More than fifteen thousand women were with the American Expeditionary Force and auxiliary organizations such as the Red Cross by that time. (Ten thousand American nurses had volunteered to serve with the Entente forces before the end of 1914.) The BEF had twenty-three thousand nurses and fifteen thousand nurses’ aides, the armies of France sixty-three thousand, the Germans ninety-one thousand. They performed magnificently—a hundred and twenty American nurses died in Europe, and two hundred were decorated for bravery under fire—but they were only a tiny percentage of the women whose lives were affected by four years of war.

  The start of the conflict, and the outburst of patriotism to which it gave rise, had brought out masses of women volunteers in all the belligerent nations. At first their governments scarcely knew what to do with them. Women had few rights in those days. (New Zealand had granted them the vote in 1893, but two decades later it remained almost alone.) Women of “good” family had little access to careers and almost none to the world of public affairs. Nurses were obviously essential and quickly put to work, but in other respects things continued—for a time—in the old familiar ways. The volunteer associations of women that sprang into existence in Britain, France, and Germany were not only dominated but monopolized by the upper and middle classes. If working-class women had been accepted, many would not have been able to afford the required uniforms.

  But soon, with so many millions of men at the front, women were needed badly. The volunteers were put to work as clerks, cooks, drivers, canteen workers, telephone operators—in nearly any job, as time passed, where they could free a man for combat. The British would ultimately have a hundred thousand women in service in this way—all carefully screened to ensure that they came from the right kind of background. For young women who had expected the future to be limited to marriage and child-bearing, it all could be wonderfully thrilling. “For the first time I was going to be someone,” said a French girl. “I would count in the world.”

  Russia’s Tsarina Alexandra, seated at right, in a hospital far from the front

  Members of Britain’s Auxiliary Ambulance Corps making a morning milk delivery

  For the women of the lower classes, millions of whom were employed before the war began, more than adventure was involved. The pay of common soldiers was minuscule, allowances for dependents not sufficient to sustain life. (The allowance for a wife was one and a quarter francs per day in France, nothing for a dependent mother or sister.) And ironically, the war destroyed many women’s jobs. In France 85 percent of women in industry when the war began were employed in textile manufacturing. As many of the factories were shut down, 60 percent of those women were thrown out of work. Sixty-seven percent of garment industry jobs disappeared. In France and elsewhere many of the women who went into the munitions factories were no doubt motivated by patriotism. But for many it was also a matter of survival.

  The resulting changes were dramatic. In Germany more than five million women entered the labor force, rising from 35 to 55 percent of the total employed. In Britain the comparable total was more than one and a half million, with seven hundred and fifty thousand women taking jobs previously held by men, three hundred and fifty thousand moving into new war-related positions, and almost a quarter of a million becoming agricultural laborers. In France, whose population was more heavily rural than Britain’s or Germany’s, food production became increasingly the work of women. Female employment in French munitions factories rose from fifteen thousand early in 1915 to six hundred and eighty-four thousand in 1917. The French railways, which had employed six thousand women before the war, had fifty-seven thousand on their payrolls by the end. Female employment in the Paris subways rose from 124 to more than three thousand.

  Neither France nor Germany integrated women into its armed forces, though the Germans were preparing to do so late in 1918. The British were pioneers, creating women’s branches of their army, navy, and air force in 1917. Female officers were called “administrators” rather than given military rank. Noncommissioned officers were “forewomen,” the privates “workers.” In what was a bold innovation by British standards, the army began to accept women from
the working class. Traditionalists were shocked. A letter to an English newspaper complained of women “making themselves and, what is more important, the King’s uniform, ridiculous.”

  The Americans followed Britain’s example and soon went further. As early as March 1917 the U.S. Navy was enlisting female clerks as “yeomanettes,” who were barred from sea duty but given formal naval rank. In the summer of 1918 the Marine Corps advertised for female volunteers, got two thousand responses just in New York City, and eventually accepted three hundred.

  All this took place against a background of vast suffering for the women of Europe. In Germany alone more than a million and a half soldiers were dead by late 1918, and nearly a third of them had been married. Widows, many of them living in severe deprivation and struggling to support children, had become a significant element of every country’s population. Little better off were the families of prisoners of war. Hundreds of thousands of unmarried young women would never find husbands.

  In western Europe the new roles assumed by women proved to be surprisingly short-lived. Women’s suffrage movements had been gaining strength up to 1914—had appeared to be on the verge of success in places—but the war brought them to an end. In January 1918 Britain granted the vote to women, but only to women who owned property. Later in the year, in an odd twist, it allowed women to hold elective office while continuing to deny them the vote. Women who had expected to be given the vote and other rights in return for their service and sacrifice learned that they were mistaken.

  The changes wrought by the war proved to be most permanent in the most improbable places. In Turkey, before the war, women had been virtually excluded not only from employment but from education and even social life beyond the walls of their homes. The lynching of women deemed to be of bad moral character was accepted practice. The war turned Turkey’s women into office workers, organizers of charities, teachers, nurses, and even transporters of ammunition. The veil was abolished, and schools for girls appeared in surprising numbers. Things later reverted to the traditional pattern in rural areas, but in Constantinople the changes stuck.

  Change was most dramatic in revolutionary Russia. Huge numbers of women had gone to work in war factories where conditions were even more abominable than in the west. This and the severe deprivations of the long conflict—never enough food or fuel, vast numbers of men killed—radicalized the women of Russia’s cities. They figured importantly in the uprisings that brought down the tsar. When the Bolsheviks took power late in 1917, equal pay and rights for women became the law of the land. The final irony is that civil rights in Russia soon became once again meaningless for women as well as for men.

  Chapter 35

  The Black Day of the German Army

  “The scale and nature of operations required a ‘big business’ type of commander, a great constructing and organizing brain.”

  —BASIL H. LIDDELL HART

  On a morning at the end of May, for the first time in more than three and a half years, German soldiers stood on the banks of the River Marne barely fifty miles from Paris. They were bone-weary and threadbare, and in days of moving south some had made themselves sick gorging on captured enemy stores. Still, the return to this place must have felt like triumph. Since the start of the Chemin des Dames offensive, they had rolled over or swept aside every enemy unit in their path. They had wrecked seven French and British divisions, taken fifty thousand prisoners, and advanced thirty miles. And the way ahead looked clear: the troops retreating before them were thin on the ground, almost without artillery, and unable to find a place to stop and turn and fight. The Germans must have felt that, if they found the strength, they could keeping on walking to the Eiffel Tower.

  It is unlikely that many of them understood how empty their triumph was. Their advance was creating an enormous salient, the biggest yet, a kind of sack with a narrow mouth. They were inside the sack, and every step they took made it deeper or wider. But the mouth was not growing at all. It was in danger of becoming smaller. If it were closed altogether—if the French held on to Reims and retook Soissons—the German assault troops would be trapped.

  The Allied side too (with the Americans in the fight, the term Allies becomes appropriate as a substitute for Entente) had little appreciation of how vulnerable the Germans were. They had taken Soissons, they appeared to be on the brink of taking Reims, they had advanced so far between the two cities that they were starting to cross the Marne, and they appeared to be unstoppable. The crisis bore all the earmarks of a disaster, and a contagion of panic set in. At the eastern end of the front, south of St. Mihiel, French General Castelnau began laying out a plan for a withdrawal to the west—for abandoning the fortresses that had long made his sector all but impregnable. To the north Haig’s staff was dusting off its plans for an evacuation back to England. Even the irrepressible Foch was infected. He suggested that Clemenceau prepare the government to leave Paris, whose citizens were fleeing by the hundreds of thousands, and talked of fighting all the way to the Pyrenees. Franchet d’Esperey, the “Desperate Frankie” of 1914 fame, ordered the French Fifth Army to give up Reims. Lloyd George, having returned to Versailles, yielded at last to Foch’s appeals for more troops from England. (They were desperately needed; Haig was disbanding 145 battalions to replenish those that remained.) Only Pétain, the supposedly overcautious pessimist, remained untroubled. He felt certain that the Germans had fatally overextended themselves and that their ruin was inevitable if the Allies just held on.

  But then, just as everything seemed to be unraveling for the Allies, the situation began to turn around. Two of Pershing’s big divisions, ordered to converge where the Germans were crossing the Marne, linked up with French units and met the enemy at Château-Thierry. It was the Americans’ first major engagement, and it brought the German advance to a stop. The commander at Reims disobeyed Franchet d’Esperey, stayed in place, and stopped the Germans there as well. When the Germans pulled themselves together for another assault on Reims, they had to do so without storm troops or Bruchmüller’s artillery and failed miserably.

  Ludendorff, thwarted again, turned to the next phase of his plan: the attack at the River Matz west of Soissons. The goal here—it had become an urgent need—was to broaden the mouth of the salient at its western end, pushing the Allies far enough back that they could no longer threaten the one rail line carrying German supplies and troops southward toward the Marne. The attack was to begin on June 9, with Hutier’s army taking the lead. Everything had to be done so hurriedly that secrecy was impossible. As the preparations proceeded, American Marines launched an attack at Belleau Wood to block one of the Germans’ approaches to Paris. They did so artlessly, advancing shoulder to shoulder in a way rarely seen since the slaughter of the British at the Somme in 1916, but their high morale and the sheer weight of their numbers kept them inching forward. It would take them almost three weeks and many casualties to secure the wood, but the process consumed German troops that Ludendorff could ill afford to lose.

  Hutier’s preparations at the Matz were so rushed and unconcealed that the French began to suspect a German ruse designed to draw their attention away from some other, more secret operation elsewhere. German deserters even told the French the exact times when the bombardment and the infantry’s advance would come. Nevertheless, when the attack began—another Bruchmüller barrage, a forward rush by experienced troops who had been allowed to rest since Michael—it was a complete success, and for the least excusable of reasons. Once again the defenders were commanded by a Foch disciple who had scorned Pétain’s instructions and put his main force on or near the forward line, where the German artillery devoured it. Hutier’s troops advanced six miles that day, demolishing three French divisions and taking eight thousand prisoners.

  But then on June 11, as if from out of nowhere, the French counterattacked west of Soissons. Their advance was directed by Charles Mangin, “the Butcher,” the almost maniacally aggressive French general who throughout the war h
ad alternately been glorified for his ferocious offensives and censured, even removed from command, for carrying things too far. Thanks to Foch, he was back in command of a corps, and he was unquestionably the right man for the job at hand. This time it was the French who were concealed by fog. Rushing eastward, they caught Hutier’s troops on open ground without prepared defenses. The Germans were thrown back with such shocking force that Ludendorff immediately called off the Matz operation.

  There followed a month of comparative quiet that the armies on both sides used to catch their breath and pull themselves together. Not only the Germans but now the French as well were preparing fresh attacks. Something new made its appearance on the Western Front during this period: the first cases of the Spanish influenza that would spread around the world and in eleven months kill more people than the war itself. All the armies were affected, but chronic malnutrition made the problem worse on the German side. Thousands of men all along the front became too sick for duty—as many as two thousand per German division. By the end one hundred and eighty-six thousand German soldiers would die of the disease along with four hundred thousand German civilians.

  The quiet was interrupted on July 4 by the Battle of Hamel, one of the most remarkable (if largely forgotten, perhaps because comparatively bloodless) operations of the war. It took place near Amiens, its aim was to clear away the German threat to that city, and it was planned and executed by John Monash, who in April had been knighted by King George, promoted to lieutenant general, and made the first non-English commander of the BEF’s Australia–New Zealand Corps.