Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  Lloyd George persisted throughout the war in seeing opportunities in the Balkans. On 4 July 1917 Robertson wrote to Lord Curzon:

  It would be valuable if you would kindly explain to the Prime Minister [Lloyd George since December 1916] during the discussion on the Salonika question what the nature of the Balkan country is. He seems quite unable to envisage it and to understand the difficulty of getting heavy artillery forward in an advance and in supplying an army. No one can explain the matter to him as well as yourself. Amongst other things he seems to think that there is a single range of hills between the Salonika forces and Sofia [the Bulgarian capital], whereas the whole country is a mass of mountains. The country is, in short, one in which a small army would be murdered and a large army would starve, and it is of a highly defensible nature. No amount of argument and no amount of heavy artillery will alter it.7

  Initially operating as two separate forces, the French and the British in Salonika were eventually brought under a unified (French) command that included the Serbian army, which arrived via Macedonia and Crete, and the Greek army once Greece had sent King Constantine packing and replaced him with King Alexander, who reinstated Venizelos as prime minister and joined the war on the Allied side. Eventually, after the arrival of the competent French General Louis Franchet d’Esperey (known as Desperate Frankie to the British) in 1918, the Allied army managed to force Bulgaria out of the war on 29 September 1918, and by the time of the Armistice Desperate Frankie’s soldiers were approaching the Danube.

  Bulgaria would have collapsed anyway once German support was withdrawn, and the soldiers tied down in Salonika would have been of far more use on the Western Front. It was an unnecessary campaign, forced on the army by the politicians who refused to heed military advice, and who claimed (spuriously) that it had to be persisted with as an example of Allied solidarity. Although Robertson did not succeed in having the Salonika caper closed down completely, he did at least manage to prevent Lloyd George from making it the major focus of British efforts. This, by fatally weakening the Western Front, would have been disastrous.

  Robertson barely concealed his contempt for Lloyd George’s military opinions. At Cabinet meetings Lloyd George would lean back, fix Robertson with a steely glare and say, ‘CIGS, I have heard...’ before going on to expound his latest flight of strategic fancy. Robertson would listen in silence and then reply bluntly, ‘I’ve ’eard different,’ and slap his ruler on the table to end the discussion. However, there were occasions – a few – when political interference was helpful. The BEF had taken some limited expertise in the management of railways with it to France in 1914, but nobody had realised then how the transport infrastructure needed to supply the war would grow. As Minister of Munitions Lloyd George was instrumental in setting up a commission to examine transport problems on the Western Front; he thought (rightly) that these were causing bottlenecks in the provision and distribution of ammunition. While some generals were opposed to civilians examining military problems, Haig was happy to accept any expert help he could get. The commission, which visited the Western Front in August 1916, was led by Sir Eric Geddes, then in the Ministry of Munitions but up to 1914 the Deputy General Manager of the North Eastern Railway, one of the largest British railway companies. Geddes already had some experience of army transport problems as he had advised on the restructuring of Indian railways in 1904, when there was a (largely unfounded) fear of a Russian invasion via Afghanistan. Geddes’ commission looked at military transport as an entity, rather than dividing it into road, rail and canal as the army did. He found that it was lack of organisation rather than of rolling stock that was the main problem, and produced a number of far-reaching and sensible recommendations. Nearly all of these were accepted by Haig, who began to implement them. Lloyd George now invited Geddes to fill the newly created post of Director General of Military Railways at the War Office, insisting that the army make him a major-general to kill military objections to a civilian giving orders to people in uniform. A day later, on 22 September 1916, came a request from Haig that Geddes should join GHQ of the BEF as Director General of Transport. Lloyd George agreed. Geddes’ position in France was not an easy one to begin with; no doubt there were embarrassing moments when the new general wondered which hand to salute with, and got to grips with the differences between a lance corporal and a colonel, but Haig granted him direct access to himself and gave him his full support. The appointment was a huge success. By 1917 the army was going to have to move 2,200 tons for each mile of front, and Geddes’ reorganisation of the transport system, including the establishment of a light rail network to deliver stores from the standard-gauge railheads to just behind the lines, was to revolutionise the military supply system. Other civilian experts followed.

  Despite some grumbling by soldiers, Haig had no doubts. In his diary for 26 October 1916 he wrote:

  There is a good deal of criticism apparently being made at the appointment of a civilian like Geddes to an important post on the Headquarters of an Army in the field. These critics seem to fail to realise the size of this Army, and the amount of work which the army requires of a civilian nature. The working of the railways, the upkeep of the roads, even the baking of bread, and a thousand other industries go on in peace as well as in war. So with the whole nation at war, our object should be to employ men on the same work in war as they are accustomed to do in peace. Acting on this principle, I have got Geddes at the head of all the railways and transportation, with the best practical and civil engineers under him. At the head of the road directorate is Mr Maybury, head of the Road Board in England. The docks, canals and inland water transport are being managed in the same way, i.e. by men of practical experience. To put soldiers who have no practical experience of these matters into such positions, merely because they are generals and colonels, must result in utter failure.8

  Would that the civilian/military interface always worked so smoothly.9

  After the first experience of using tanks on the Somme in 1916, Haig determined to use the new weapon to fight a decisive battle. On 20 November 1917 nineteen British divisions supported by 378 tanks attacked in the direction of Cambrai over a six-mile front. They advanced nearly three miles, and church bells rang in England. The attack petered out at the end of November, largely because there were no fresh divisions to follow through, and when the Germans counter-attacked the exhausted troops on 1 December, they regained much of the ground they had lost.

  That there were no fresh divisions to reinforce success at the Battle of Cambrai was partly due to the Third Battle of Ypres which had only just been closed down in Flanders, but partly also to another politicians’ wheeze: the removal of five British and six French divisions from the Western Front to prevent an Italian collapse. Italy had been a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria before the war, but had always made it clear that she would not go to war against the British (which, given that Britain controlled the Mediterranean, would have been foolish in the extreme); in any case, the alliance with Austria was unpopular with the Italian public. Once war started in 1914, Italy held out to see what she could extract from the two opposing camps. What she really wanted was Trieste, Italian-speaking but still held by Austria after the wars of Italian liberation between 1866 and 1870. Austria was prepared to grant Italy neither Trieste nor any other territory; but Britain and France were happy to offer concessions at Austria’s expense, and Italy joined the war on the Allied side in May 1915. Italy made some progress against the Austrians, who appealed for German help. Initially this was not forthcoming, but after the Somme offensive and the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in February 1917, Ludendorff relented. Germany sent seven divisions10 to the Italian front, the logic being that if Italy was threatened the French and British would reinforce her, thus weakening the Allied strength on the Western Front. Additionally, if the Italian front could be shortened, this would release some Austrian divisions for the Western Front; and if all went really well, Italy could be knoc
ked out of the war and Germany could occupy northern Italy and threaten the Allies from a new Alpine front. All these prospects except the first were delusions. Austria was already seeking a way out of the war and would have been most reluctant to send anybody to the Western Front; and a glance at the map shows that any meaningful threat to France through the Alps would have taken up far more resources than could justify any potential gain.

  In October and November 1917 the Battle of Caporetto and the subsequent Austrian advance, spearheaded by German troops, pushed the Italians back to the River Piave; requests for British and French help were renewed with urgency. Up to now Robertson had usually managed to resist such pleas, pointing out that the Italians had ample manpower to defend their own frontiers, and he supported Haig’s protests when Lloyd George suggested sending some heavy guns that were sorely wanted on the Western Front.11 On that occasion Lloyd George had his way, and in the spring of 1917 seventy six-inch howitzers were despatched to the Italians, thus reducing the number available to Haig for Third Ypres. It was not the first time that Lloyd George had attempted to be profligate with equipment badly needed by the British: in March 1916, as Minister of Munitions, he had urged the sending of machine guns to Romania. Robertson said that he would certainly send some as soon as there were enough to equip the British army, and the matter was dropped.

  In September 1917 Robertson again managed to dissuade Lloyd George from sending men and guns to Italy; but now, in October, Lloyd George insisted and they went. They spent November trundling to Italy at a stately pace on French railways, and were available neither for Third Ypres nor for Cambrai. In early 1918 the German troops were withdrawn back to the Western Front. The French and British defended successfully against an Austrian attack in the Asiago in June 1918, and participated in the final advance across the River Piave and on to Trento in October and November 1918; but by then the Austrians were near collapse. This again was an unnecessary campaign, initiated by politicians who thought they knew more about waging war than did the professionals. It held down Allied troops who would have been far better employed in France and Flanders. Italy could well have been left on the defensive, but was insistent on taking the offensive in order to capture Trieste, her sole reason for coming into the war in the first place. An offensive could only take place if the Italian armies were stiffened by French and British divisions. As it happened Trieste was captured not by the Italian army, but by a landing by the Allied navies on 3 November 1918.

  Divide and rule has ever been a popular political ploy. While Robertson as CIGS did not always agree with Haig’s ideas about the Western Front, he took care never to let any difference of opinion show. Lloyd George was increasingly distrustful of Haig, but as long as the CIGS supported him there was little that Lloyd George, as Minister of Munitions, War Minister (from July 1916) or Prime Minister (from December 1916), could do. This did not stop him trying, and when Robertson was away from London visiting Haig and the French GHQ in June 1916, Lloyd George was instrumental in setting up a ‘War Policy Committee’ with a brief to investigate the naval, military and political situation and present a full report to the War Cabinet. The members were Curzon, Milner, Smuts and Lloyd George. Curzon and Milner were not on good terms with each other. Smuts had undergone a Pauline conversion to the cause of British imperialism, but his military experience had been gained as the leader of a people’s militia in a very different war. This left Lloyd George to control the committee and to decide from whom to take evidence.

  Lloyd George simply did not accept that the Western Front was the only theatre where the Germans could be beaten. He spoke loftily of ‘knocking away the props’, by which he meant Turkey, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary, while failing to understand that it was Germany that was the prop: defeat her, and all else would crumble. In some ways the removal of Germany’s allies would help the German war effort, for it was German money, German equipment and German advisers that kept them in the war. If Lloyd George could not persuade the generals and the rest of the government to divert attention from the Western Front, he had to find a way of obstructing the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, Haig, and Haig’s supporter and protector, Robertson. So occurred the most dishonourable and underhand attempts ever by a British politician to stab his own commander-in-chief in the back.

  After the Somme offensive of 1916 Joffre and Haig had agreed to mount another joint offensive in 1917, the tentative date being February. Then there was a major change in the French high command. French politicians and the French public were weary of the seemingly endless casualty lists with no victory in sight. They felt that a change at the top was needed, and so Joffre was made a Marshal of France and hustled off to a non-job at Versailles, where he had a telephone that never rang and an in-tray into which no papers ever came. In his place the French government chose General Robert Nivelle. It was Nivelle who had been responsible for the one ray of sunshine amid the gloom of Verdun, the recapture of Fort Douaumont. Nivelle declared that he had the secret: he had devised methods that could break through the German defences in forty-eight hours. The French government seized on this energetic, articulate general who seemed the one man who could break the stalemate and end the war. As a Protestant he was attractive politically; for although France was a Roman Catholic country there was traditional suspicion, going back to the Revolution, of clerical influence – indeed it was said that Joffre had only been appointed Commander-in-Chief because he was known to be a good republican. Nivelle was promoted over the heads of Foch, Pétain and de Castelnau, all considerably senior to him. His first decision was to delay the opening of the 1917 offensive until his own plans were ready.

  Nivelle had an English mother and spoke excellent English, which enabled him to impress Lloyd George and seduce the British Prime Minister, briefly, from his antagonism to the Western Front. Nivelle, thought Lloyd George, could be the saviour of the Allied cause, and the way to rein in Haig and the BEF would be to subject them to Nivelle’s control. The plot was hatched between Lloyd George and the French Prime Minister, Briand, with Nivelle’s full knowledge, and announced in guarded terms at a Cabinet meeting in London on 24 February – a meeting to which neither the Secretary of State for War (now Lord Derby) nor the CIGS, Robertson, were invited to attend. As it was known that the King would never agree to what was being planned, the copy of the minutes normally sent to the palace immediately after Cabinet meetings was delayed, and not sent to the King until 28 February.

  The Calais Conference of 26 and 27 February 1917 was ostensibly called to discuss transportation problems on the Western Front. The French railway system was having difficulties in supplying the trains needed for the build-up of the French and British armies for the forthcoming offensive, and it does look as if the British were asking rather too much (almost twice as many trains as the French, for about half the troops). Present at the conference were Prime Minister Briand, General Lyautey (the Minister for War) and General Nivelle representing the French, and Lloyd George, Field Marshal Haig and General Robertson for the British. Both delegations were attended by technical advisers. After some discussion about transport, Lloyd George pitched his bombshell into the middle of the table. On the pretext of achieving unity of command for the 1917 offensive, he proposed that the BEF should become subservient to Nivelle. A unified command was of course sensible, and had the suggestion been for an overall Commander-in-Chief (who would have had to be French) to whom both Nivelle and Haig would be subordinate, then no one – least of all Haig and Robertson – could have disagreed. What was not acceptable was Lloyd George’s plan for the five British armies to become armies in Nivelle’s command, to be employed by him like any of his French armies. Orders to the British would be transmitted through a British chief of staff (Nivelle had asked for the very dubious Wilson), and Haig would be responsible only for administration and discipline. Not only was this completely unacceptable to Haig and Robertson, it had not even been discussed with them beforehand. This was not an attempt to achieve
unified direction, but an effort to undermine the British chain of command and reduce Robertson and Haig to mere lackeys of the French. Perhaps Lloyd George was hoping that the CIGS and the Commander-in-Chief BEF would resign on the spot, but in the event hard negotiation diluted the proposal – which even the French generals cannot have believed would be accepted. The outcome was that the BEF would remain a distinct entity, with Haig still in command, but would be under Nivelle for the duration of the 1917 offensive only.

  On his return to London Robertson wrote to Haig on 28 February:

  He [Lloyd George] is an awful liar. His story at the War Cabinet gave quite the wrong impression this morning. He accused the French of putting forward a monstrous proposal, and yet you and I know that he was at the bottom of it. I believe he equally misled the Cabinet last Saturday [the meeting at which Lord Derby and Robertson were not present]. Derby [War Minister] is telling Balfour [Foreign Secretary] the whole truth. The former talked of resigning last night. He was furious and disgusted. He spoke up like a man for you this morning and insisted on a letter of confidence and appreciation being sent to you. This will come in a day or two. Meanwhile I pray you and Nivelle may hit it off. These things always happen in war. But they are worse now than ever. Still, I cannot believe that a man such as he can for long remain head of any Government.12 Surely some honesty and truth are required.13