It will be seen from all this that the BEF situation at the start of 1915 was far from happy. The BEF had coped well with the situation it had been flung into in August 1914 but had suffered severely in the subsequent campaign and full recovery was still a long way off. This war called for numbers of men and equipment that Britain did not currently possess and it would take years - certainly until 1916 - before the army had either the necessary numbers or the essential equipment - especially heavy artillery. Various options were on the table but other than an immediate commitment to battle in France or Flanders, none of them was likely to appeal to the French.
Herein lay another problem. If unity of command on the Western Front was desirable, as it certainly was, then the post of allied commander would certainly go to a French officer - most probably General Joffre, the hero of the Marne. The British commanders were firmly opposed to any such appointment and for precisely that reason - the Supreme Allied Commander would be French. The French generals may have regarded themselves as the heirs of Napoleon but the British saw little current evidence to support this claim - quite apart from the fact that the Duke of Wellington had defeated the Emperor Napoleon back in 1815. The solution adopted by Field Marshal French, of regarding Joffre as the Allied generalissimo and meeting his requests wherever possible, was as far as they were willing to go and probably the best solution in the circumstances.
The 'de haut en bas' French attitude to the BEF and British military ability in general created another problem. In spite of the stout fight put up by the BEF at First Ypres, in early 1915 the French had come to regard the British Army and its officers as fundamentally useless. The French conceded that the BEF was perhaps employable for defending sections of the line and so freeing French divisions for those costly attacks, but they regarded the BEF as of no particular use as a fighting force, not least because the British seemed unwilling to adopt the French practice of making all-out assaults - the 'offensive a outrance' on the enemy line, whatever the resulting casualties.
This is not the place to debate this French contention, which time and some appalling British casualty figures would eventually dispel. The point is that the French held this view of the British Army, and it was an opinion that the British commanders were most anxious to refute. Why this should be, why the British commanders paid the slightest attention to this French attitude, remains a mystery, but one of the underlying reasons for the British assaults on the German lines during 1915 was an attempt to correct this impression.
The points raised in this chapter will at least serve to put the 'donkeys' allegation in context. It will be seen that the situation at the start of 1915 presented the British generals with more problems than opportunities and that the root cause of all these problems was time. If the British wanted to help the French in the coming year in any meaningful way, then the steps to create a suitable force for this war should have been taken long before the war began. To create a large, powerful and well-equipped army suitable for this spreading Continental struggle in five months was simply not possible and no amount of carping from Paris or Chantilly or later historians could or can alter that fact. As the Official History points out: 'For the British nation the period was one of grave anxiety but tireless preparation; the forging of material and the raising and training of new forces. The Old Army had been practically annihilated and the New Armies were not ready; the vast material resources required were only in the course of production.' (7)
Nevertheless, something had to be done and done quickly. Doing nothing to prosecute the war on the Western Front was definitely not an option, but again the problem was time. The New Armies - or the 'Kitchener Armies' as they also came to be called - could not take the field before 1916. The tank, which was to provide one answer to the defensive combination of wire, trenches and automatic weapons, was not yet even at the prototype stage and, again, would not be ready before 1916 - always assuming it was a viable weapon anyway.
For the next year the options for the Anglo-French alliance rested on either finding some way around the German positions on the Western Front or striking on some combination of force and tactics, some reworking of the old tried and proven methods, that would enable the Entente armies to break through the German line. The outcome of the first option led to Gallipoli. The search for the second solution in 1915 would lead to further catastrophes on the Western Front.
2. The British Armies in France
What a year this had been! The prophets were right when they said that there would be an Armageddon.
Brigadier General Sir Archibald Home, diary entry, 31 December 1914
On Christmas Day, 1914, orders were issued for the formation of two armies from the sixteen British divisions - eleven infantry and five cavalry - now comprising the BEF on the Western Front. This formation would take place on the following day, Boxing Day, 26 December. The First Army, under General Sir Douglas Haig, would consist of the I, IV and the Indian Corps. The Second Army, under General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, would contain II Corps, III Corps and the 27th Division, until more divisions arrived in February to create a full corps, V Corps, under Lieutenant General Sir H. C. Plumer. The cavalry divisions were formed into a Cavalry Corps under Lieutenant General Sir Edmund Allenby and an Indian Cavalry Corps under Major General Rimington.
More divisions, including the last three Regular Army divisions, the 27th, 28th and 29th, were also forming in the UK and were due to arrive shortly, as was the 1st Canadian Division, a newly arrived force of over 25,000 men which had been training in England since the autumn and would shortly deploy to France. This development, the formation of armies from the original if muchexpanded two BEF corps, indicates that the BEF was becoming richer in manpower. In the five months since the start of the war no fewer than 1,186,337 men had enlisted for war service in the UK.
Thousands more had enlisted in the empire and colonies, though it would be another year before these new recruits reached the front line.
All this was to the good, but the current problem was not manpower but supply, especially artillery supply ...and kit. The BEF was still woefully short of artillery, high-explosive shells and trench stores of every kind, from duckboards and sandbags to hand grenades, trench mortars, picks and shovels. Many of these shortages were due to the simple fact that the British Army had not anticipated a trench war, but the artillery problem had its roots in the scale of equipment laid down by the War Office long before the war began.
In 1914 each infantry division had a support scale of just four 60pounders, the heaviest gun then in service, which allowed about sixty heavy guns for the entire British Regular Army - plus a few more for training establishments and coastal defences. The much larger German Army had some two thousand heavy guns with the field divisions and as many more in frontier fortresses, guns that could quickly be transferred to the front. A significant number of these heavy guns were very heavy indeed and had recently been employed in reducing the defences of Liege and other Belgian fortresses.
As for the French, most of their heavy guns were deployed in fortresses along the Franco-German line. Although many of these, most notably the guns of Verdun and other fortress positions, would gradually be removed from these fixed positions and used by the field armies, the main French artillery piece was the famous '75-mm' - the Soixante-Quinze, a quick-firing field gun, very useful against enemy infantry moving in the open but quite inadequate for reducing entrenched positions and dugouts.
Nor were the British any better endowed with field artillery. As the armies expanded, some two thousand field pieces were ordered, but a year after the war began fewer than half of these, just 803 in all, had yet been delivered. The same story held true for howitzers, of which only 165 out of the 530 ordered had reached the units in the field before the middle of 1915. This last shortfall was particularly serious, for only the plunging fire of howitzers could penetrate narrow trenches and deep dugouts.
So short were the British of plunging-fire weaponry
that during 1915 they were forced to borrow some ancient 'Coehorn' mortars, dating from the reign of Louis Philippe in the 1830s; these weapons, known as 'Toby' mortars, were soon to be used in the upcoming battles at Neuve Chapelle and Aubers Ridge.
If the shortage of guns was serious, however, the shortage of artillery ammunition for the guns now in service was little short of disastrous. Here the problem can be related, at least in part, to one of scale. The pre-war 'scale' - the calculated amount of ammunition held by the artillery batteries and regiments, and in reserve - soon proved totally inadequate for the consumption required by a European war. In the early battles of 1914 the BEF artillery expended more ammunition than it had fired in the entire South African War and would have fired more if sufficient shells had been available.
It was also necessary to provide an adequate scale of high-explosive shell for the field artillery, but this need had not been appreciated by the General Staff in the pre-war years. They had concentrated on providing shrapnel ammunition, the kind most useful against mounted Boers in the South African War or infantry in the open, rather than high-explosive shell, which could have been used against troops in trenches.
Nor was it simply a matter of shells. The army had plenty of shells, more than 2 million in base stocks, but these could not be used as none of them had fuses. This shortage of fuses was to continue throughout 1915 and contributed to the 'Shell Shortage' scandal in midsummer. The Official History devotes several pages (1) to the problem of arms and ammunition, and these pages reveal just how complex and widespread the problem was.
The Great War was becoming, and remained, an artillery war. In such a war an adequate artillery supply was essential, but at present, if there was enough ammunition, it was of the wrong kind of calibre or without fuses. With two BEF armies going over to the offensive the great need in 1915 was for high-explosive ammunition, to shatter enemy trenches and dugouts, rather than shrapnel shells for use against infantry. There was also the need for a shell that could cut wire, but that had yet to be invented; barbed-wire entanglements were currently subjected to fire from heavy guns and the effectiveness of this fire varied considerably.
These shortages extended to more mundane matters. Trench warfare demanded many kinds of stores: duckboards, to keep the men out of the mud, gumboots for where this method failed and, when it did in winter months, gallons of whale oil to rub on wet and chilled feet in a bid to prevent the prevalent and crippling form of frostbite called trench foot.
On the First Army sector of the BEF front, in the low-lying dreary country south of Ypres, the water table was very high, barely half a metre below the surface in many places. Deep trenches could not be dug here and even shallow ones filled rapidly with water. The only solution was to build up defences from sandbags, but sandbags were also in short supply, as were picks and shovels and barbed wire. For offensive operations, the troops also needed hand grenades, but the British Army did not possess a hand grenade of any kind in 1914 or early 1915. As a result the troops were obliged to improvise such weapons, creating primitive hand grenades by cramming guncotton and nails into jam tins. Another weakness was a shortage of medium machine guns, the Vickers belt-fed MMG, while the new, portable if heavy - drum-fed Lewis machine gun was only just coming into service.
Nor were the arrangements complete for training the troops in the basics of trench warfare. A handbook on Drill and Field Training, produced for the forces in 1915 by the publisher John Murray and based on the army's 1914 infantry training manual, contains no references whatsoever to hand grenades or barbed wire; the use of such kit and the problems caused by its absence were simply not addressed - the men had to be trained in trench warfare when they arrived at the front.
Given that these shortages in scale and kind still existed five months after the war began and would continue to exist for another year at least, it is only fair to enquire how the BEF generals were to engage in major offensive operations in 1915. They barely had sufficient kit and stores to maintain their own lines and keep the enemy at bay, but it was certain that when the weather improved, further offensive operations would be undertaken; the nature of the Franco-British alliance would see to that.
The root of the problem can be traced to two harsh pre-war facts.
The first has already been touched upon; because the British Army was small, the munitions industry created to supply it was also small and could not be quickly expanded. Before the supply of guns and shells could be increased, factories had to be found or built, machine tools created or installed and workers trained in using them. This last task would not be easy either: the trade unions were anxious to use the war situation to improve the wages and conditions of their members and determined to resist the employment of unskilled or non-union labour; attempts by the employers to alter this situation led to a rising number of industrial disputes and strikes. Shell production actually fell in January1915 because the munitions workers insisted on having their New Year holiday with the usual post-party absenteeism.
In such circumstances the wisest course for the BEF in 1915 was to hold its line in the forthcoming year and hang on until the necessary assets were available for further offensive action in 1916 - unless peace fortunately intervened in the meantime. That course of action was put out of court by the second fact, the existence of that Anglo-French alliance, the Entente Cordiale, which has also been touched on but requires further clarification.
The original 1904 Entente was an agreement that Anglo- French disputes would in future be settled by debate rather than war and included various agreements settling current Anglo-French disputes along the North African shore. The French, however, were not happy with these limitations. They wanted to transform the Entente Cordiale into a full-scale military alliance and pressed the British government repeatedly to take this further step, aided in this quest by Brigadier General Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office. (2) This French pressure was not simply for a political commitment; it included demands for pre-war steps that the British were extremely reluctant to take, such as national conscription for compulsory military service and the creation of a large, well-equipped army, ready for a European war.
Not wishing to indulge in such a war - or be dragged into one the British government prevaricated. The outcome of that prevarication was a growing French conviction that the British had somehow agreed to support the French in the field when war came but were quite unwilling to take the necessary prior steps to make that support effective. In spite of the fact that the British had made no promise of direct military support whatsoever, when the war came the French were quickly convinced that Britain had let France down.
Britain's reasons for entering the war in 1914 had nothing to do with the Entente Cordiale. On 3 August, the British government declared that it had sent an ultimatum to Berlin demanding the withdrawal of German troops from Belgium, because of the 1839 treaty, signed by Britain, France, Prussia and other European powers, guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. This treaty - a 'scrap of paper' to the German government - and the protection of 'poor little Belgium' to the British Parliament and public, was only the official reason. Of more strategic relevance was the British determination that the powerful German Army must not be allowed to establish itself on the Channel coast of France and Belgium, from where it could be conveyed to Britain in a matter of hours, protected by the powerful modern warships of the High Seas Fleet. British self-interest, not French demands or any notional alliance between the two Entente powers, sent the BEF to France in August 1914.
The BEF did well in the fighting of1914 and suffered grievously during it, but this sacrifice did not impress the French, who were making even greater sacrifices. In the early days of the war they became convinced that the British Army and its generals were either reluctant to fight or simply no good at it. The Official History confirms this point: 'The failure of the British to accomplish anything in the December battles in Flanders had impressed the French very unfavoura
bly. Until the battle of Neuve Chapelle was fought there is small doubt that they were of the opinion that the BEF might be helpful to hold the line but would be of little use to drive the Germans out of France.' (3)
This conviction had been further strengthened by the failure of the BEF's December attacks on the southern edge of the Ypres salient.
No progress was made and even the British Official History describes these attacks as 'half-hearted'.
This impression, that the BEF was reluctant to fight, was one that the British government and the generals were most anxious to correct when they looked ahead to the spring of 1915. That underlying fact should be remembered, for it has a bearing on most of the BEF actions of 1915. Whatever benefit they might offer tactically or strategically should these attacks succeed, or whatever disasters might befall and lead to failure, these actions would still be useful if they demonstrated to the French that the British were totally committed to victory in this European war. It was therefore inevitable that the battles of 1915 would be fought in line with French wishes; the two army commanders, Haig and Smith-Dorrien, would be obliged to support the French attacks, however unprepared and ill equipped their forces might be.
Having previously analysed the limitations of Sir John French, at this point it would be as well to examine the character, expertise and reputation of these general officers and the man currently at the head of the British military establishment, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War.
For a serving officer to occupy a political post was unusual, but then Herbert Kitchener was a most unusual man. He had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1871, but made his name as a field commander in the wars against the forces of the Mahdi in the Sudan, culminating in the defeat of the Kalifa, the Mahdi's successor, at Khartoum in 1898. From then on Kitchener of Khartoum, 'K of K', was a British icon, famed for his military sagacity and his prowess in the field. This reputation was apparently confirmed during the last stages of the South African War (1899-1902) when forces under Kitchener finally defeated the Boer commandos and brought that costly conflict to a close.
The Old Contemptibles Page 41