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

by Gordon Corrigan

  As it happened not too much harm was done, except in the relations between Lloyd George and Haig: the latter never trusted the Prime Minister again. Nivelle moved the focus of the 1917 campaign south, to the River Aisne, requiring the BEF to mount only subsidiary attacks around Arras. The Arras battles were successful, showing that the British army had indeed learned from the Somme; the main offensive was a total disaster, and Nivelle ceased to trouble historians thereafter.

  Lloyd George had failed to reduce Haig’s powers by placing the BEF under the French, but he had not given up hope of defeating the Western Front advocates. He now turned to his War Policy Committee. As might have been expected, the committee was able to place other theatres back on the agenda. Russia, the Balkans, Palestine and Italy all raised their heads again. Robertson was able to head off a proposal to make Palestine the major focus of British offensive operations in 1917 and 1918 only by telling Allenby, commanding in that theatre, to ask for another thirteen divisions in order to strike the decisive blow. As this was manifestly impossible, the plan was not proceeded with.

  Lloyd George now decided to seek alternative military advice. While constitutionally the military adviser to the Cabinet was the CIGS, a committee could seek advice from whom it liked. Claiming that a terminally ill patient is entitled to seek a second opinion, Lloyd George and the War Policy Committee heard evidence from elsewhere. The evidence was selective, to say the least, for two of the principal witnesses were Sir John French, still smarting over his supersession as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, and Sir Henry Wilson, clever, sociable, and regarded with great suspicion by most soldiers as an inveterate intriguer.

  Lloyd George could not persuade these two to recommend a diversion from the Western Front – as professional soldiers they knew only too well that it was there that the Germans must be defeated – but they did recommend moves towards much closer coordination of the war effort. Thus arose the Inter-Allied Supreme War Council. On the face of it this was a sound proposal, agreed at the Rapallo Conference on 7 November 1917. A body made up of senior Allied politicians and soldiers would sit at Versailles to oversee Allied strategy. They would advise Allied governments directly and would be able to take a joint decision with greater speed than could be achieved by discussions between the various capitals. The devil was in the Supreme War Council’s direct access to governments, or more properly in the senior British military representative’s being in direct contact with Lloyd George without going through the CIGS. Again, this was not unity of command, but division of direction: the old politicians’ ploy of playing one off against the other. Robertson saw it for what it was: an attempt to sideline his increasingly unpalatable but realistic opinions in favour of advice from a more congenial source. If Lloyd George could direct British strategy through the Supreme War Council rather than through the CIGS, Robertson could find himself implementing plans with which he disagreed, and which he had had no part in formulating. He was in an impossible position.

  This disagreement between Lloyd George and Robertson very nearly caused an open breach between the Cabinet and the army. Little was hidden from the press, and newspapers took sides for or against Robertson. Robertson’s reply to the proposal for a Supreme War Council was to suggest that he (or anyone else appointed as CIGS in his stead) should also be the British Military Representative on the council, thus avoiding conflicting advice. If this was not acceptable then the council representative should be a deputy to the CIGS, thus preserving the chain of command. Lloyd George would have none of it and Robertson submitted his resignation, being persuaded to stay on while the politicians wheeled and dealed to find a successor. The original suggestion had been for Henry Wilson to sit on the council, and when Robertson demurred Lloyd George offered Robertson the post on the council while Wilson became CIGS. Again Robertson refused: the principle had not altered, whoever was CIGS and whoever went to the council. Plumer was invited to become CIGS, and he (probably wisely) turned the offer down. Inevitably the politician won. Robertson left the War Office and replaced French as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces;Wilson became CIGS, and Rawlinson went to Versailles. Fortunately for the conduct of the war, Haig was persuaded not to add his resignation to that of Robertson, and Haig had a good working relationship with Rawlinson, the erstwhile commander of the Fourth Army.

  While the manoeuvrings to set up the Supreme War Council were going on, Lloyd George saw another way to hobble Haig. The casualties of the Third Ypres battles (about which more later) had horrified the Prime Minister, who told Haig that he was considering telling the soldiers that ‘the attacks in Flanders were a useless loss of life and all the sufferings and hardship they had endured were unnecessary’.14 Lloyd George was convinced that the failure to capitalise on the initial successes of the Cambrai battle was not due to the lack of the five divisions and the heavy guns sent to Italy on his orders, but that ‘this action was grossly bungled and the tank success was thrown away by the ineptitude of the high command’. He particularly blamed Brigadier General Charteris, Haig’s Chief of Intelligence, for failing to predict the German counter-attack of 1 December 1917 that recaptured much of the ground taken at Cambrai. He made a speech critical of the generals at a lunch in Paris during the negotiations for the Supreme War Council, and when he agreed to executive powers for the military representatives on the council (Wilson and Foch), this was the last straw for Robertson. Lloyd George still believed that the men who fought the Third Ypres battles should have been transferred for use against the Turks; one shudders at the consequences had his thinking prevailed.

  While Lloyd George did not feel sufficiently confident to sack Haig – the press was already running articles headed ‘Hands off the Generals’ – he decided that the way to stop Haig wasting yet more lives was not to give him any more lives to waste. The year 1917 had cost the BEF around 160,000 men killed up to the end of November, and another 400,000 or so wounded in various degrees. Reinforcements were badly needed to bring battalions and divisions back up to war establishment. There were men available in garrisons in England, and industry had not been combed out for those men medically fit and of military age who were not essential to the war effort. Some drafts were sent, but they were nothing like sufficient to fill the gaps. If Lloyd George could not get rid of Haig, he would make it impossible for him to launch another offensive. In fact, by the end of 1917 Haig had come to the conclusion that what mattered now was to keep the French army in the war, and that it would be the Germans who would do the attacking in 1918. Pétain, now commanding the French army in place of Nivelle, thought that his army would not be ready to go onto the offensive until 1919. Haig regarded the German logic as based on the following premisses: that although the Americans were now in the war, it would be some time before they were capable of doing very much; that Russia was all but out of the war, which would allow German divisions to be transferred from the Eastern Front; that Germany’s allies were showing strong signs of war-weariness; and that the Allied blockade was biting as never before. All this being so, the Germans had no option but to try to win the war, or at least put themselves in a position for a favourable peace, by an offensive in 1918 before American troops were ready to take the field. It would be a gamble of Napoleonic proportions, but it was Germany’s only hope. While the BEF could go on the offensive if enough reinforcements were forthcoming (but Lloyd George was ensuring that there would not be), the French most certainly could not. This, thought Haig, led inevitably to an Allied defensive posture for the beginning of 1918, and on 19 December 1917 Charteris predicted that the German onslaught would fall in March 1918.15 Lloyd George refused to believe in a German offensive. He tried to persuade Haig that his fears were groundless and that ‘the German army was done – there would be no German offensive’.16 Haig was unmoved.

  If the politicians could not replace Haig – there was no one else willing and able to assume the mantle, and such a step would have led to an almighty row in Parliament and in the press – they could chip
away at some of the lesser lights. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell had been Chief of the General Staff of the BEF since Haig assumed command in December 1915. He was a highly experienced staff officer, a graduate of the Staff College and its commandant prior to the outbreak of war. He tended to be over-optimistic and was somewhat of a plodder, but Haig had tremendous confidence in him. Now Lloyd George and his henchmen wanted rid of him. As the doctors had reported that Kiggell was suffering from nervous exhaustion, Haig was prepared to let him go and wanted to appoint his deputy, the forty-seven-year-old Major-General Richard Butler.17 The government refused to accept Butler, and the job went to Herbert Lawrence. Butler was given command of a corps, which he probably very much preferred. Charteris, the head of intelligence, was forced out in favour of Brigadier General Edward Cox from Intelligence Branch in the War Office, and even the Quartermaster General, Maxwell, had to go, replaced by Lieutenant General Travers Clarke, previously Deputy Adjutant General. All of these new brooms were competent staff officers; they did a good job and Haig was happy with them. But for the politicians to attack the chief by axing his closest colleagues was pure spite, and to refuse him the man whom he knew, whom he had groomed and whom he had requested as Chief of the General Staff, was petty interference on a grand scale.

  Haig did not get his reinforcements. Even Churchill, another opponent of the Western Front strategy, thought this was inexcusable, but the government continued to search for other less expensive ways to win the war. The Head of the Air Board, Lord Rothermere, demanded that Major-General Trenchard, commanding Haig’s air forces in France, be sent back to London to become Chief of Air Staff. Rothermere knew a great deal about newspapers, very little about aircraft and nothing at all about fighting a war. Trenchard thought that Rothermere and others who thought that the war could be won from the air were ‘off their heads’.

  With insufficient reinforcements to keep the BEF up to strength, and with Lloyd George agreeing to take over more and more sectors of the front from the French, the only options open to Haig were to disband divisions or restructure the existing ones. Haig elected to follow the German practice, and by February 1918 each brigade had been reduced from four infantry battalions to three, giving each division nine battalions in place of twelve. Divisional artillery was also reduced. Although the deficiencies were to some extent compensated for by an increase in machine-gun support and by the augmentation of corps and army artillery, divisions had to cover the same – and in some cases an increased – length of front with a reduction of one-third in the men available to man the trenches. Only the Canadians opted out, and to the end they continued to man four divisions, each with three four-battalion brigades.

  As the generals had predicted and as Lloyd George stubbornly refused to believe, the Germans did launch a massive offensive in March 1918. The strength of the German army on the Western Front had increased by a quarter since November 1917, mainly through transfers from the Eastern Front following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, while that of the British had decreased by the same percentage thanks to Lloyd George. Operation ‘Michael’ fell on the British Third and Fifth Armies in the Somme area from 21 March to 5 April 1918, while ‘Georgette’ hit the Second Army in Flanders from 9 to 11 April. ‘Blücher’ and ‘Yorck’ went for the French Sixth Army from the Chemin des Dames on 27 May; ‘Gneisenau’ attacked the British Fifth Army again on 9 June; and ‘Marne’ and ‘Reims’ took on the French Sixth Army and the junction of the French Second and Fourth Armies between Dormans and Reims from 15 to 17 July. Paris was bombarded by long-range German artillery, which achieved little militarily, but the killing of eighty-eight worshipers, including three children, in the church of Saint-Gervais on Easter Sunday handed Allied propagandists another example of German beastliness.

  The aim of the German offensive was to split the British from the French and drive to the Channel ports. The French army had largely recovered from its experiences of 1917, but there was still little enthusiasm for a fight. The British were short of men and their divisions were spread far too thinly. The Allies had no choice but to retreat. The German storm troopers came on, and the Allies went back. The Franco-British elastic stretched and stretched but never broke, and the German offensive ran out of steam and ground to a halt. The Royal Navy can take some credit for this, as the Germans, very short of rubber owing to the blockade, were running their motor transport on wheels without tyres, and could not resupply their forward troops along the French roads. For a brief period the Germans occupied Albert, headquarters of the British Fourth Army during the Somme offensive of 1916. Having been told that the British were starving and that one more push would win the war, the German infantry were astounded to uncover dumps of British rations containing delights that the Germans had not seen for two years. The appropriation of stocks of British rum did not assist German officers in their efforts to prevent looting and persuade the troops to keep going. The ‘Kaiser’s offensive’ failed. The German army had shot its bolt and there would not be another to fire, but it was a close-run thing. Lloyd George’s attempt to save lives had actually had the opposite effect, for if the British divisions had been up to strength the offensive would have been stopped long before it actually was.

  Politicians, like most of us, do not like to admit having been wrong, but a prime minister with an ounce of grace might have confessed to error in his misappreciation of German plans for spring 1918. Far from doing so, Lloyd George tried to fudge the issue and put the blame back onto the generals. In a speech in the House of Commons on 9 April 1918 he announced that the British army in France was ‘considerably stronger’ on 1 January 1918 than it had been on 1 January 1917, and that when the ‘Kaiser’s offensive’ began the combat strength of the German army on the Western Front was less than that of the Allies. Lloyd George’s extraordinary contention was that a numerically greater force, in defensive positions, had been beaten by a smaller force attacking it.

  Not only did the Prime Minister fail to emphasise that the Allies had in fact brought the German army to a complete standstill, he was making positive assertions that were nonsense. On 1 January 1917 the total strength of the BEF was 1,532,919 and on 1 January 1918 it was 1,750,892, on the face of it an increase of almost 218,000 men. What Lloyd George knew perfectly well, however, but did not tell the House, was that of the 1918 figure 335,454men were not soldiers at all but in the Labour Corps, which had not existed before June 1917 and whose ranks were filled largely by coloured labour from South Africa, China and India. A Chinese coolie, for all his admirable qualities, is not the equivalent of an infantry soldier with a rifle or a Lewis gun, and the fighting strength of the army was thus 117,481 men smaller on 1 January 1918 than it had been a year before. Worse still, the infantry, the arm most needed for a successful defence in the event of a German offensive, had diminished from fifty-nine per cent of the BEF, or 904,422 men, on 1 January 1917 to thirty-six per cent, or 630,321 men, on the same date in 1918, leaving nearly a third fewer infantrymen to cover a longer sector of front.18 All this because the government would not send out the reinforcements needed and available in England (where there were 92,000 infantry alone), or agree to withdraw divisions from Palestine to bolster the Western Front (which could have been done without detriment to operations in that theatre). On 21March 1918, when the German offensive began, there were 191 German divisions on the Western Front compared with an Allied total of 165, with many of the British divisions severely under strength.

  This announcement by the Prime Minister appalled Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, who had until recently been Director of Military Operations at the War Office and knew exactly what the true picture was. Maurice had visited the BEF in France and found that the speech had caused a great deal of annoyance amongst officers and soldiers, who saw that Lloyd George was blaming them for something they had warned the Prime Minister about, but which he had ignored. Maurice had now finished his tour in the War Office and was on leave pending a new appointment (probably to
Chief of Staff of one of the armies in France). When on 23 April Andrew Bonar Law, now Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons, gave misleading answers to questions in the House arising from the Prime Minister’s speech of the 9th, it was too much. On 6 May 1918 General Maurice sent a letter to The Times, the Morning Post, the Daily News, the Daily Chronicle, and the Daily Telegraph. All except the Telegraph published it. The letter described Bonar Law’s answers to questions, and the original facts as given by the Prime Minister, as containing ‘mis-statements’ which were ‘misleading‘ and ‘incorrect’. Maurice concluded his letter by saying that his reason for wishing it published was the hope that Parliament might order an investigation into its allegations.

  ‘Communicating with the press’, as the army calls it, was and is a serious offence for a serving officer. The army is rightly seen as the servant of government, and soldiers are forbidden from public expression of any opinion with a political connotation. Maurice did not get his investigation, and was forced to resign. Only many years later did Lloyd George admit that he had misinformed the House, but the letter did raise enough eyebrows to help prevent Haig being dismissed.19

  No commander-in-chief in the field should have been subjected to the sort of interference, distrust and undermining that Haig had to suffer at the hands of his own government. A democratic government is fully entitled to reject the military advice it is given and to replace the advisers. What is not acceptable is for a government to send its generals off to war and then make it as difficult as possible for them to win it. No one suggests that Lloyd George, Churchill, Derby, Rothermere, Curzon, Carson, Balfour, Bonar Law and the other frocks did not want to win the war; but by refusing to accept the price of winning that war, and by constant obstruction and interference in matters which they did not understand, and by their constant search for a strategy that fudged the issue of the Western Front, they in fact prolonged the slaughter.