Apart from some social forays into no man's land on Christmas Day, to exchange gifts and greetings with their German opponents and bury their dead, the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) spent the New Year in muddy, waterlogged trenches south of Ypres. Drenched by rain, frozen by the nightly frosts, hanging on grimly to their crumbling positions, they waited stoically for the daily rum ration, the equally welcome deliveries of mail and whatever tribulations the coming months would bring; no end to their current miseries was remotely in sight.
No understanding of the First World War is possible without a firm grip of the basic misunderstanding with which the European powers entered into it at this time. Without exception, every nation entered the war in the firm belief that this sudden and unfortunate conflict would be short - 'over by Christmas', in the words of the British public. This war had long been anticipated and war was somehow welcome and even glorious - at least if the dense crowds cheering the departing units in the streets of Berlin, Paris and London are any yardstick. This general misapprehension that the war would be short and glorious was also widely shared by most public figures, the two notable exceptions being Britain's Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, and the current commander of I Corps in the BEF, Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Haig.
In most parts of the public and political spectrum the military prognosis in the summer of 1914 was favourable. There would be a war, certainly, a brief exchange of gunfire on the frontiers followed by a ceasefire. There would then be a negotiated peace in which the various stresses that had brought the European powers to the battlefield would be resolved and peace restored to a chastened continent. This being so, the important thing for any patriotic young man in August 1914 was to get into the war quickly and so enjoy the excitement of battle before it ended; within days of the outbreak of war the queues outside the recruiting and enlistment offices were both long and impatient. Nor was this belligerent mood confined to the young; Keith Robbins comments that 'Most literate and intelligent men in Europe during the summer of 1914 considered that, in the circumstances, it was rather sensible to go to war.' (2)
The 'circumstances' in question were numerous, and varied from country to country. The French wished to retrieve the 'lost provinces' of Alsace and Lorraine, occupied by Germany since the FrancoPrussian War of 1871. The Germans wished to break the subsequent Franco-Russian alliance and so end the 'encirclement' on their western and eastern frontiers. The Russians wished to protect the interests of Serbia and the Balkan Slavs, now threatened by AustriaHungary. The Austrians wanted to absorb Serbia into their empire and put an end to insurrection or open revolt in the Balkans. The British wished to maintain or restore the neutrality of Belgium, guaranteed by a general European treaty since 1839 - but were also quietly determined that Germany should not establish a military presence on the Channel coast.
Other nations now in the war, such as Turkey, or about to enter the war, such as Italy, soon had their own agendas, but the underlying cause of this war - the one cause fuelling every circumstance - was fear. Fear of aggression, fear of encirclement, fear of civil insurrection, fear of Germany's growing power and belligerence had gradually led to a general European tension which, many felt, only war could release. As a result, this war in 1914 was not unpopular.
In Britain alone the call to arms produced an immediate and overwhelming response. More than a million men flocked to the colours in the first five months of the war, far more than there were arms to equip, uniforms to clothe, instructors to train or officers to command. These men would be needed later on, to fight the battles of 1916, but by the end of 1914, with the original BEF virtually destroyed in the early battles between Mons and First Ypres, Britain's contribution to the struggle was provided by the remaining units of the Regular Army, recalled from their distant garrisons throughout the empire and, increasingly, by units of the Territorial Force. This current contribution could not be large and was further inhibited by the fact that the arms industry supplying Britain's small army was also small.
By the New Year of 1915, those early hopes of a short war and an agreed peace settlement had seemingly disappeared; the casualty figures alone had seen to that. The British Expeditionary Force that had marched so proudly and willingly to France in August had been destroyed, losing some 89,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, at Mons and Le Cateau, on the Marne and the Aisne, and during the weeks of battle on the Franco-Belgian frontier in October and November that became known as the first battle of Ypres.
These losses, heavy as they were to the small, eleven-divisionstrong British Regular Army, were a drop in the ocean compared with the losses sustained by the French. Between entering the war on 1 August and 31 December 1914, the French had lost some 300,000 men, an average of 2,000 men killed per day - without counting the hundreds of thousands more young men who had been wounded or taken prisoner. (3) Nothing on this scale had been anticipated when the nations went to war in the golden days of the summer of 1914.
Had the French known that the total of their dead in this war would eventually amount to 1.3 million men they might have been more ready to contemplate a peace settlement, but, if anything, the rising casualty list actually stiffened a national resolve. More than a million Frenchmen had been killed or wounded in five months of fighting; surely something worthwhile must come out of such a sacrifice? In any event, after sustaining such heavy losses in so short a time, to abandon the war now was unthinkable.
Losses of a similar, rising dimension had been inflicted on the Germans. The Kaiser had lost hundreds of thousands of men in the first five months of war - some 840,000 casualties, of whom 150,000 had been killed; Germany would lose nearly 2 million men by the time the war ended in defeat four years later.
Nor was this all; at Christmas 1914 the German military and political position may well have seemed precarious. With the failure of the vital Schlieffen Plan at the battle of the Marne in September, the German armies were now fighting a war on two fronts - the very situation the Schlieffen Plan had been designed to avoid - and their original commander, General Helmuth von Moltke, had suffered a nervous breakdown and been relieved of his command. On the other hand, the German armies had enjoyed considerable success on both fronts since the previous August, crushing the Russians at Tannenburg and overrunning Belgium and large areas of northern France. If peace proposals were to be the next game in this war, the Germans would come to the conference table with plenty of cards to play.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that the best option open to the combatants at the end of 1914 was a peace conference, but there was a clear, political snag. With Germany holding several strategic cards and plenty of French and Belgian territory, such a conference could not be easily contemplated. Both sides had anticipated a short war with small losses and quick victories, but such a conflict had not materialized.
The war in which they were now engaged was not remotely the kind of war the belligerents had anticipated, a war of movement, cavalry charges, artillery bombardments and infantry assaults, open warfare of a long-familiar kind. That had briefly been the pattern in 1914, when the Franco-British and German armies had fought a war of movement from the Belgian frontier to the Marne. A war of movement would continue in the east, where advances or retreats of hundreds of miles were not uncommon, but in the west the rapid development of the trench system had changed all that. In the west the war had degenerated into a stalemate, with the opposing armies increasingly locked into a trench system which, if still primitive, was proving unbreakable to any frontal assault - and getting stronger by the day.
Nor was this all; the war was growing in size as well as intensity. It was already clear that when modern industrialized nations commit millions of men to battle, no war can be either short or inexpensive, and this war was rapidly spiralling out of control. Total war, with all its costs and uncertainties, was spreading across the world and would continue to spread unless the warring nations accepted tha
t the struggle so gladly entered into would be unacceptably costly, not least in lives, and quickly sought a peaceful solution to their grievances. Sadly, common sense and wars do not fit easily together.
This is especially sad, for a path to the peace conference already existed. It had been marked out by Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, even before the war began, when Wilson sent his personal emissary, Colonel House, scurrying about the courts and chancelleries of Europe, urging the leaders of Germany and France to settle their differences before it was too late. The snag was that it was already too late when Colonel House's efforts began, and various events in the first few weeks of fighting soon put the colonel's timing out of joint.
When House was pleading with the Kaiser in August, the German armies were surging across Belgium and into France. Their success offered Wilhelm II the entrancing vision of imposing his own harsh terms on the French, possibly in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where his grandfather had been proclaimed Emperor of Germany in 1871. That done, the Kaiser could at last lead a triumphant procession through Paris, a city barred to him since his accession in 1888, in spite of constant hints that an invitation to the Ville Lumiere was his dearest wish. In light of such a prospect, the colonel's plea for peace was swiftly rejected.
Colonel House met with a similar response from the French a few weeks later when their military star was in brief ascendant. In September 1914, the French government had no difficulty in refusing any negotiated settlement, for in the last weeks the German advance had run out of steam and the enemy armies were now facing defeat on the Marne. From these joint rejections Colonel House learned a hard lesson of international diplomacy: no nation will discuss peace when it thinks it is winning the war.
Colonel House was to try again in early 1915, when American involvement appeared more likely following Germany's introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare for the first time, in the waters round Great Britain and Ireland, and the sinking of the liner Lusitania, with great loss of life. Then US government policy and public opinion again swerved in favour of isolation, with President Wilson campaigning for re-election in 1916 as 'The man who kept you out of the war' and telling other, more belligerent politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt that 'there is such a thing as being too proud to fight'. In early 1915, therefore, any hopes of effective US intervention in favour of peace seemed doomed to failure.
In January 1915, three months since the end of the Marne campaign, matters had changed somewhat - and not for the better - for the armies of the Anglo-French Entente. Having halted the Germans on the Marne in September, the Franco-British forces had driven the enemy back to the Aisne. There the trench system had first begun to appear as the Germans dug in on the heights of the Chemin des Dames and the Allies, attempting to outflank this position, edged around it to the north and west, constantly attacking and as constantly repulsed. Then followed the so-called 'Race to the Sea' during October and November, the Allied armies attempting to get round the far end of the German line, the Germans shifting ever farther to the north in order to thwart them - and both sides digging in when halted.
And so, from this series of outflanking manoeuvres, the trench system of what came to be called the Western Front gradually came into existence. It was a fairly primitive construction to begin with, but one that grew stronger and deeper all the time as a war of movement gradually gave way to a war of position. Within months the Western Front defences would be increasingly deep and stretch all the way from the North Sea coast to Switzerland.
This trench system offered distinct advantages to the German armies defending it and to their new commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn. At fifty-three, von Falkenhayn was one of the younger Great War generals, and had taken over the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff from Helmuth von Moltke on 14 September, just six weeks after Germany entered the war. One advantage was that Falkenhayn's armies could defend the trench system with far fewer men than the French or British armies needed to break it, so freeing German troops for the war of movement against Russia in the east. Falkenhayn was a shrewd soldier and saw no particular need to advance deeper into France at this time; far better to end the Russian campaign while the western armies wasted their men and resources in costly and futile attempts to breach the Western Front.
The recently concluded first battle of Ypres marked the final attempt of both the Allied and German armies to outflank this front before it closed up on the North Sea. Now it had closed, and the advantages arising from that fact rested with the Germans; they occu pied much of northern France, including some prime industrial areas, and the cost of evicting them, be it political or military, would be heavy. Writing to Field Marshal French on 2 January 1915, Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, summed up the current situation on the Western Front with his usual precision:
‘I suppose we must now recognize that the French Army cannot make a sufficient break through the German lines to bring about a retreat of the German Armies from Northern Belgium. If that is so, then the German lines in France may be looked on as a fortress that cannot be carried by assault and also cannot be completely invested, with the result that the lines may be held by an investing force while operations proceed elsewhere.’
The French and British had - albeit narrowly - won the battle of First Ypres in November and so prevented Falkenhayn's attempt to restage the Schlieffen Plan, but that was all. The Western Front trench line had now been established and the two sides now glared at each other across the shell-pitted waste of no man's land, counting their losses, wondering what to do next, their political and military masters brooding on what operations might be launched elsewhere.
The options were not numerous. The armies could sit tight and wear each other down until one side or the other sued for terms, but that might take years. They could appeal for President Wilson's arbitration and talk peace, but on what basis? They could try to find some way to outflank the opposing trench lines or they could attempt to breach them with frontal assaults. All these options were duly considered but every one presented difficulties.
As briefly related, a peace conference was judged impossible, for Germany held all the negotiating cards. Even if the Schlieffen Plan had failed to deliver its promised defeat of the French and Russian armies in six weeks, it had still endowed Germany with vast amounts of foreign territory. German armies now occupied Belgium and Luxembourg and large areas of northern France, including the important industrial and mining centres around Lille, and were digging in to retain them. These possessions created a powerful bargaining chip for any negotiations.
Moreover, Germany's terms for a peaceful settlement were known to be excessive. They included the setting up of German trading and political hegemony over central Europe - 'Mitteleurope' - the annexation of Belgium, secure possession of Alsace and Lorraine and much other French territory, including the occupation of the French coast as far south as the River Somme, and the ceding to Germany of the French Mediterranean naval base at Toulon. Belgian possessions in the Congo would be used to found a German empire in Africa - Mittelafrika - and further demands would surely appear at any sign of weakness among the Entente.
The French could never agree to any of this, but what had the Entente powers left to bargain with? All that the French and British had to show for five months of total war was a long casualty list, ever expanding military cemeteries and the prospect of further losses as the war continued. Granted, the cost to Germany in terms of lives lost had also been high, but the large German population - 66 million Germans to 37 million French - was able to absorb this. The stark choice - the only apparent option - was to continue to fight and attempt to kill as many German soldiers as possible; perhaps, as German losses mounted, the prospect of victory would gradually grow dim or the steps to a peaceful solution would start to appeal to them - in either case that outcome would take time.
With peace not currently an option, the war would therefore continue. The questions that now arose w
ere 'where' and 'how', but those questions did not permit of easy answers - except to the French. To M. Raymond Poincare, the French president, to General Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, and to the French nation, in or out of uniform, the answers were simple. France had been invaded and large parts of her territory now laboured in the grip of the Boches. This was an intolerable situation which must be ended - and ended without delay - with the rapid expulsion of the enemy from the sacred soil of France, whatever the cost. Any attacks elsewhere, any diversion of Allied strength to other fronts, were seen in France as intolerable distractions from this main task.
It was clear to the French that the war must be fought in France and Belgium and prosecuted by a series of strong Franco-BritishBelgian offensives. These offensives would break the trench system and drive the Hun back across the Rhine in short order, overwhelmingly defeated. According to the French the only requirement necessary to achieve the prompt arrival of this desirable end was the British commitment of every man and gun the British Empire could provide, all of it preferably operating under French command and control.
For their part, the British were not at all sure that this was the only option, let alone the best one. Besides, even after five months of war they were not remotely ready for the kind of all-out, total, European war they had now got involved in. The BEF - the Old Contemptibles that had marched to war in August 1914 consisted of just five divisions, four infantry and one cavalry, and was a fine fighting force - up to a point. The snag was that the BEF and indeed the entire British Regular Army of the pre-1914 years had been manned and equipped for campaigns on the fringes of empire, probably and preferably against opponents armed with spears.
The Old Contemptibles Page 39