The Germans, who had been feeding men into Moreuil Wood from the south-east, had to be prevented from advancing out of the wood, and if possible driven from it. The two cavalry brigades crossed the River Avre and the Canadians advanced at the trot against the north-west corner of the wood. They came under heavy machine-gun fire but, supported by their own machine-gun squadron armed with Hotchkiss guns, the lead squadron got as far as the edge of the wood, although they could not penetrate far through the trees. The second squadron galloped along the west side of the wood, dismounted, formed a firing line and opened fire into the wood, while the third squadron did the same along the northern edge. The 4th Hussars followed up and made contact with the French to the south, while the 5th and 16th Lancers reinforced the Canadian firing line. Fighting went on all day on 30 March and on one occasion a squadron of Lord Strathcona’s Horse, working its way round the north-east end of the wood, came upon a German infantry battalion that had left the cover of the trees and was attempting to press forward towards the Amiens road. There was no time to dismount or to draw rifles; the squadron commander ordered his bugler to blow ‘charge’, and the men lowered their lances and kicked their horses into a canter. The Germans had no time to form a firing line and were caught flat-footed. Many were killed by sword and lance thrusts and the rest disintegrated and fled back into the trees.11 The cavalry held the line until relieved by infantry in the small hours of 31 March. The Germans never did manage to advance beyond the woods, and this was as far as the ‘Kaiser’s offensive’ got in that part of the line. Had the cavalry, and their horses, not been available, it is quite possible – indeed probable, given the state of the French army in the area – that the Germans would have been able to press on over the railway and the main road, and bring up significant reinforcements to Moreuil village long before Allied infantry could reach it.
There were occasions when lack of cavalry made a difference to the result. In January 1917 the Italians – who had entered the war on the Allied side because the Allies had offered them more in territorial concessions than the Central Powers could offer to keep them neutral – were making progress against the Austro-Hungarians. Germany, previously reluctant to take troops away from the Western Front to help her Austrian under-strapper, now had troops to spare as a result of withdrawing to the Hindenburg Line. A new Fourteenth Austrian Army was formed, of thirty-five divisions. The army commander and seven of these divisions were German, as was most of the artillery. On 24 October the Fourteenth Army, spearheaded by German units, erupted out of Tolmino, captured Caporetto, poured across the River Isonzo, and established itself on the foothills of the main Italian defence line, the Kolvorat Ridge. Small German mountain infantry units, including one led by Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, penetrated the Italian positions in thick mist, and by 26 October the Italians were in full retreat to the River Tagliamento, thirty-five miles to the rear. Here was an opportunity for the German cavalry to pursue, and had they done so the Italians could never have reached and crossed the Tagliamento; but there was no German cavalry to be had. Most of it was on the Eastern Front, and those cavalry units that were available had been left far behind as being unlikely to be needed. It was a close-run thing for the Italians, but they eventually managed to retire from the Tagliamento in some order, and by 10 November were reasonably safe behind the River Piave, a further sixty-five miles to the rear. It was a great victory for the Germans, who took 180,000 prisoners of the Italian Second Army, but it could have been greater – it might even have forced Italy out of the war altogether, if only there had been cavalry to cut off the retreat to the Tagliamento.
During the ‘Kaiser’s offensive’ on the Western Front in 1918 there were many occasions where the timely and speedy use of cavalry could have helped the German cause, particularly when the French and British had withdrawn from their forward defence positions and were in full retreat. That there was then no cavalry available to the Germans was due to greed. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 saw Russia withdraw from the war, and the whole of the Ukraine, Russian Poland, Finland, the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus were effectively annexed by Germany. To control this huge tranche of territory the Germans left a million men in the east, including most of their cavalry. A little less greed and that cavalry could have been deployed to the Western Front, where they might have made a difference.
Germany’s offensive of 1918 ran out of steam and depleted her resources without achieving its aim of splitting the Allies. Now the Allies went over to the offensive, and by September had pushed the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line, from where the ‘Kaiser’s offensive’ had been launched. This was accomplished by a series of attacks all along the German line. It was a new concept, made practicable by more and better mechanical transport that allowed the shifting of Allied resources along the front at a pace that would have been impossible a year earlier. It was still hoped that once a gap had been created the cavalry could pour through, but as long as the Allies were advancing over ground that had already been fought over many times, the debris of war, and particularly the wire, prevented mass cavalry operations. On 27 September 1918 the British launched an attack between Cambrai and Saint-Quentin, and after nine days had crossed the formidable Canal du Nord, pierced the Hindenburg Line and penetrated into open country beyond the last German defences. Soon there would be a chance for the cavalry. Squadrons were detached to the leading infantry divisions while the rest of the Cavalry Corps followed close behind. By now the much-vaunted German system of command and control was breaking down, morale amongst the troops was low, the home population was not far from starvation, and the American First Army was in the field. It was apparent to even the most rigid Prussian that Germany had lost the war. The Armistice followed, and the cavalry never did get their chance.
By the end of the war there had been staggering advances in the reliability and cross-country performance of mechanically propelled vehicles. Lorries could carry men and supplies; light tanks and armoured cars mounted with machine guns could do most of the work of the cavalry. Between the wars the horse would be all but banished from the battlefield. The horse had been essential in 1914, and while its usefulness had diminished as the war went on and technology improved, it had been far from a useless encumbrance to modern war.
The British army was fully mechanised by 1939, but in the wet and cold winter of 1939–40 it was found impossible for lorries to supply many of the forward troops along narrow Belgian and French lanes whose surfaces had been cut up and damaged by heavy rain and blocked by snow. The answer? Mule companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps.
NOTES
1 Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, War Office, London, 1922.
2 Horses are traditionally measured in hands, one hand equalling four inches. Measurement is done from the highest point of the withers (the area of the spine just in front of the saddle) vertically to the ground, without shoes. Polo ponies were then limited to 14 h. 2, so the army often bought animals that had been intended for polo but which grew too big, and were sold off cheaply.
3 The Indian cavalry retained their swords, except for sergeants and above, who were issued with revolvers.
4 As this author discovered when he first took up tent-pegging.
5 The Marquess of Anglesey, A History of the British Cavalry, Vol. 7, Leo Cooper, London, 1996.
6 Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, War Office, London, 1922.
7 An Indian cavalry brigade had one British regiment and two Indian regiments.
8 The USA in the World War 1917–19, Vol. 4, United States Army Center of Military History, Fort McNair DC, 1988–92.
9 A so war was a private soldier of Indian cavalry.
10 Indian squadrons of cavalry, like companies of infantry, had one British officer in command. A second British officer, usually a lieutenant or second lieutenant, was attached as a ‘squadron officer’ to assist the commander and t
o learn his trade. It was these squadron officers who were borrowed by the Guards. The thought of guardsmen being led by officers of Indian cavalry is intriguing, but it obviously worked.
11 The Canadian cavalry, unlike the British, had retained swords for all ranks.
6
FRIGHTFULNESS
One of the abiding images of the Great War is of lines of soldiers, eyes bandaged, shuffling along in a slow crocodile, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Tales abound of thousands of young men drowning with lungs full of fluid, choking to death, bodies covered in angry blisters, or permanently blinded. Gas was, and is, regarded as a barbaric way of making war; it is uncivilised, unsporting, and somehow unfair. Death by shooting, bayoneting, bombing or shellfire is acceptable; death by insidious and undetectable vapour is not. The first use of gas, by the Germans, was a deliberate breach of the laws of war and typical of a savage and unprincipled enemy.
This was the conception propagated by the British and French when gas was first used on the Western Front, and it has remained with us ever since. In fact, gas was never a war-winning weapon, casualties were far less than has been stated, and the British – not the Germans – became the masters of its use.
The first recorded use of gas in the war was at what became known as the Second Battle of Ypres, in 1915.1 In the spring of that year the Ypres salient was a relatively quiet sector. North of the salient to the Channel coast the line was held by the Belgian army, determined to remain on the defensive and hold what little remained of unoccupied Belgium. The Belgians’ task was made easier by their flooding of the sluices at Nieuwpoort on the River Ijzer, which created an almost insuperable water obstacle between their positions and the Germans’. The north of the salient itself was held by a French Territorial division, and the defence was then taken up by the French 45th Algerian Division from the canal as far as Langemarck, where the newly arrived Canadians held the line as far as Passchendaele. From Passchendaele round the salient and then south to the La Bassée Canal, the remainder of the British sector was held by British and Indian divisions. French Territorials, Algerians and Canadians had been placed where they were precisely because things were quiet – it was a good area for them to learn about trench warfare and to adapt to life on the Western Front. As far as the French were concerned there was no defence in depth: most of the troops were strung out along the firing line, with the artillery – mainly the 75-mm standard French field gun – close up behind.
On 22 April 1915 – a fine spring day, with a mild south-westerly breeze, according to the weather reports – there was heavier than usual German shelling of the Ypres salient, particularly in the northern sector. All German shelling then suddenly stopped, and at about 1700 hours the men of the Algerian Division saw what appeared to be a bank of greenish-yellow smoke moving slowly towards them from the German lines, all along the French front. British observers, some way behind the French lines, thought the cloud looked like a bluish-white mist, and felt a tickling in their throats and a watering of the eyes. The cloud gradually enveloped the French lines and then, quite suddenly, men could be seen running back out of the cloud coughing and spluttering, many without weapons. In a very short time the whole of the Algerian Division – twelve battalions and ten batteries of artillery – broke, and a disorganised mob streamed rearwards, finally rallying about a mile and a half north of Ypres. At the northern tip of the salient a French Territorial battalion stood fast on the bridge over the canal, and the Canadians too, with a battalion of French Tirailleurs (light infantry), held their ground for the moment. There was now a gap about three miles wide in the Allied lines, with very little to prevent a German advance on Ypres itself.
Fortunately for the defenders, the Germans were almost as surprised as the Allies by the success of the new weapon. German infantry, some equipped with a very primitive protective mask, and some with nothing at all, followed up for about two and a half miles, but they lacked the reserves to mount a major offensive, and their soldiers were wary of moving too fast lest they too became affected by the gas.
The Germans had installed nearly 6,000 cylinders of chlorine in their front-line positions, waited until the wind was favourable, and then turned on the taps. The Algerians, with no warning and no protection, understandably ran. Later investigations showed that those men who dived into bunkers or lay in the bottom of trenches, and the wounded lying on the ground, were particularly badly affected, as were those who fled, keeping pace with the gas and gulping it in as they ran. Those who remained on the fire-step (not many) and those who stood up on the parapet (even fewer) were less affected as the heavier-than-air gas swirled round them and moved on.
The Allied reaction was one of public indignation and private panic. The Germans were accused of a flagrant breach of the laws of war, and the Allies exaggerated their casualties to demonstrate German beastliness. The Daily Mail of 26 April 1915 thundered:
His methods of warfare do not bear comparison with those of even a savage but high-minded people like the Zulus, but rather recall the hideous and unbridled violence of the Mahdi’s hordes. His savagery, however, is not of the assegai and shield order. It is the cold-blooded employment of every device of modern science, asphyxiating bombs, incendiary discs and the like, irrespective of the laws of civilised warfare. When baffled his malice is that of an angry gorilla, senselessly slaying and destroying everything in its path.
As the gorilla is a mild-mannered vegetarian, this was not perhaps the best comparison to make, but the thrust is clear.
In fact the casualties suffered by the Algerians were very much fewer than was stated at the time. Unfortunately, what really happened and what was said to have happened have become confused, and even in 1939 Major-General Sir Henry Thuillier, formerly Director of Gas Services at GHQ of the BEF, was claiming 20,000 casualties including 5,000 deaths on that first day of gas warfare.2 This figure seems to have been accepted without question, but as a French division at full strength numbered barely 15,000 it is clearly an exaggeration. The German chemist Fritz Haber visited the ground an hour after the attack and reported that he saw some men killed by gas, but ‘not many’.3 The Chief Medical Officer of the German Fourth Army visited the trenches on 23 April and found a number of men with breathing difficulties due to the effects of gas. The majority recovered. Altogether around 200 French soldiers were treated in German Fourth Army hospitals, of whom twelve died. The German XXIII Reserve Corps reported that forty gas casualties were treated in their hospitals, of whom eighteen were Germans who showed no medical symptoms at all, four were Germans who were severely affected, five were French and were recovering, and eight were French who were badly affected and of whom one died.4 One German officer gas casualty, Leutnant Telle, stated that there were no French dead in their trenches, but that they had run away ‘like a flock of sheep’. It was also reported that of 800 French gas-affected soldiers in a German prisoner-of-war camp on 22 April, all were coughing badly and some were very ill. Haber cites a French record that shows that of 625 gas casualties undergoing treatment on 24 April, three died of congestion of the lungs.5 A reasonable estimate for the gas casualties of the attack on 22 April is around 1,500 at most, of whom around 200 may have died.6
The laws of war regarding gas were contained in the Hague Convention of 1899 (modified in 1907), to which Britain, France and Germany were signatories, and which prohibited ‘the use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating gases’. Germany could – and did – argue that this prohibition applied to shells, not to the diffusion of gases by other means such as cylinders. The Allies maintained that this was mere trifling with words and that the intent of the clause was to prohibit the use of gases in war, however delivered. Allied protests were, of course, partly motivated by the discovery that the enemy had a weapon which they had not; but that the Germans felt at least some ambivalence is suggested by their (untrue) claims that the British had used gas shells against them to the east of Ypres i
n April, and by the lack of any mention of the use of gas in German official news releases about the battle. The Germans also claimed that the French army had frequently used gas grenades before the war (they were actually tear-gas grenades, not prohibited by the convention, and they were used by the French police, not the army).
There do appear to have been some intelligence indications as to what the Germans were planning: shortly before the April attack a German prisoner was found in possession of a cloth bag containing a piece of cotton waste impregnated with chemicals, and a British report mentioned some cylinders found in German trenches after the capture of Hill 60, to the south of the salient, on 17 and 18 April, but although a warning about the possible use of gas was issued by the British V Corps (General Plumer), no protection was available and the intelligence was sketchy anyway.7
Chlorine attacks the respiratory organs, and if no preventative action is taken, death is by asphyxiation. The immediate problem for the Allies was to provide some protection for the troops. A party of chemists arrived from England, pronounced that the gas was indeed chlorine, and recommended the use of a pad of cotton waste dipped in hyposulphite and carbonate of soda. The pad was to be sewn to a gauze veil and tied over the mouth and nose with tapes. This would provide some protection until something more soldier-proof could be introduced. Manufacture of this first gas mask began, many of them sewn by the women of England who used the veils from their hats and provided jolly red, white and blue ribbons. By 15 May all soldiers were issued with the mask, contained in a waterproof bag; in the intervening period they made do with old socks, handkerchiefs or any other piece of cloth soaked in bicarbonate of soda or chloride of lime. Some adopted the simple precaution of urinating on a cloth and using that as a mask– unpleasant, but as urine contains ammonia, which is alkaline, and as chlorine is acidic, it did provide some protection. The Indian Sappers and Miners were convinced that chewing tobacco provided protection, but this may have been a joke directed against the Sikhs, to whom tobacco is forbidden.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 18