Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  The methods of transport available to the armies at the outbreak of the war explain the paradox which the railways created. They allowed for much faster movement – until the tracks ran out. As A. J. P. Taylor puts it: ‘Hence the extraordinary contrast of the war: fast in delivering men to the battlefield; slow once they got there.’ 17 When the soldiers disembarked from the trains, they were in the same position as Napoleon’s troops or even Roman centurions. Or actually, as he explains, it was worse: because armies in the twentieth century were so much bigger and carried so many more supplies, they were far more unwieldy. Horses were, as usual, the trouble: ‘In every army, forage for the horses took up more space than ammunition or food. They had to be fed from their homeland. In this way, the very size which had been designed to bring victory made it impossible for the armies to win or even to move.’ An entrenched army well served by a railhead was therefore at a huge advantage in repelling an invader because ‘reinforcements could always arrive by rail to a threatened position before the attacking side could break through on foot. Railway trains go faster than men walking.’ Taylor stressed that it was the railways, together with the machine gun, that gave defenders the advantage: ‘This is the strategic reason why the defence was stronger than the attack throughout the First World War. Defence was mechanised, attack was not.’ Yet, as we have seen, all the participants in the First World War had been under the impression that they had to hurtle headlong into war in order to gain the initiative. They were not just proved wrong: it was one of the great mistakes of history.

  During the brief mobile war, the French railways had performed heroically and they now settled into a routine. As in Germany and Britain, the military had taken over their operation as soon as war broke out. Vast numbers of freight wagons were prepared for troop transport with the installation of benches and were marked ‘8 chevaux, 40 hommes’, which fortunately for the soldiers were alternatives, not totals. (Strangely, a couple of thousand miles to the east, Russian wagons were emblazoned with the same instruction.) As planned, the major French railway companies were each handed over to a commission du réseau run by a four-person team composed of a senior officer from the general staff, a regional army commander, the head of the railway company and one of his technical advisers. This balance of two military and two civilian members should not be taken to suggest there was parity between the two sides. The Ministry of War made all the strategic decisions and ‘authority over the railroads now resided in the hands of the central state and military officials’.18 The lessons of 1870 had sunk in and the mobilization saw none of the scenes of chaos that had effectively cost the French that war.

  Soldiers were expected to report to a depot and were then transported with the rest of their regiment to the front. The call-up had started on 31 July 1914 and took up the first week of the war, and the deployment was carried out in the two weeks starting 6 August, during which a million men and 400,000 horses were transported to the border. The French standardized their trains to have one passenger coach for officers, thirty covered trucks (for the men and horses), seventeen flat wagons for equipment and two brake vans, far longer and consequently slower than their British equivalents: thus in England, an infantry battalion was carried in two trains scheduled to run at an average 25 mph, while in France they would be squeezed into one that travelled at half that speed.19

  Military traffic was prioritized with clear allocations for troop movements and other military requirements. The commissions determined the track capacity and generally allowed for twenty-four troop trains per day on single-track lines and double that on those with twin tracks. In addition there would be the military trains journaliers, which were mixed trains of troops, government officials, small consignments of goods and so on. The rest of the capacity would be allocated to supply trains and the mail service, which frequently resulted in the routine commercial traffic being squeezed out. Typically, a double-track route on the Nord network would be scheduled to take a train every ten minutes, or 144 a day, but this theoretical maximum allowed for no mishaps, errors or breakdowns, and, in the early days, was therefore rarely attained. Later, towards the end of the war, improvements, both technical and operational, sometimes enabled a throughput of more than 150 daily trains. Throughout the war, however, the limiting factor for troop movements was frequently not so much the shortage of track capacity but the lack of stations that could handle the arrival of a fifty-car train.

  The French railways did not only have to cope with the deployment of their own troops but were also responsible for carrying the 115,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force to a very narrow area of the front. Amazingly, the British accepted without demur that the entire railway system be manned and controlled by the French. This unity of command prevailed throughout the war, although, as we shall see below, from 1916 the British took an increasing share of the work of construction and operation.

  The British started arriving in France just three days after the declaration of war and were immediately deployed by rail from the disembarkation ports at Boulogne, Rouen and Le Havre through Amiens to fight the Germans invading through Belgium. Just as the railways had worked effectively in bringing them to Southampton, the movement of troops to the front on the French railways was carried out with surprisingly little difficulty. There were practical issues for soldiers, most of whom had never been abroad, such as the fact that French platforms are at a much lower level than in Britain, making getting on trains with heavy kit difficult, and instructions were being shouted in a foreign language few could understand. As a whole, though, the operation was successful, with barely 10 per cent of the 343 trains arriving half an hour or more late, showing that the railways could adapt quickly to sudden flows since the French had not expected the British to join the war so early.

  The key to the success of the operation was the idea of appointing railway transport officers at principal stations which had been so effective in the transport of troops to the ports in the Boer War, as mentioned in Chapter Five. These officers headed teams of men, mostly with railway experience, and were crucial to the smooth running of the railway. Where possible, French-speaking officers were selected and they were widely deployed by the British through the French railway system. During the first couple of years of the war, they were carefully selected not just for their railway knowledge, but their ability to deal diplomatically with all kinds of demands and to liaise with the French railways. According to J. A. B. Hamilton, who served in the war and later wrote a book about railways during the conflict, initially the railway transport officers had been selected by the Royal Engineers but later, when the War Office took over the process, the rail service suffered badly because ‘the R.T.O.’s job became a dumping ground for the dimmer sort of officer or a bolt-hole for the one who could “wangle” himself a “cushy” billet’. Even though they were not always officers – sometimes even lowly lance corporals were allocated the task if they were experienced railwaymen – they had the final say over all traffic movements. That was crucial, as Hamilton recalls: ‘in those early days, it was not uncommon for some newly-appointed military jack-in-office to ring up the local stationmaster and demand a special train, sometimes for a single officer’.20

  As well as being the British advanced base, Amiens was a gare régulatrice, the key to the way that the French successfully operated their railways. These regulating stations, sited safely away from the front to ensure they were not in the range of enemy fire, were the crucial railway junctions from which the military controllers ran the supply operation and were provided with all the requirements needed for the enormous logistical operation, such as vast sidings, a base for railway troops and their repair trains, and depots for artillery. These stations would act as depots where trains full of, say, fuel or food would unload and then new mixed trains would be formed carrying a mixed array of goods and personnel, and despatched towards the front line.

  The importance of Amiens made its evacuation particularly difficult aft
er the retreat from Mons, the British Expeditionary Force’s first major engagement. Even the official report on the supply operation in the war emphasizes that the process tested the logistical skills of the Army to the extreme: ‘The lines were congested with a rearward flow of civilians, railway establishments from the north, military material and evacuated Belgian locomotives and rolling stock. Only by putting French-speaking officers on the trains were supplies and other requirements got through to the troops to ever varying railheads, often with the loss of a few trucks en route.’21 For the most part, however, thanks to the static nature of the subsequent war, the location of the gares régulatrices remained the same for the duration of the conflict, obviating this kind of chaotic scene. After the battle of the Marne, Amiens was safely back behind Allied lines and remained the key junction for the despatch of British troops for the duration of the war.

  The end of the short war of movement left the railways with a different but equally daunting logistical brief: supplying the front-line troops in their trenches. The scale of the operation was extraordinary, and far from offering an easier task for the railways, their difficulties were compounded. In fact, while the prospect of delivering millions of troops to the front may seem to offer insuperable problems, it is actually an easier job than providing those troops with regular supplies once they are entrenched in static lines, especially given the conditions and the proximity of the enemy. The official history of the supply operation is unequivocal on this point: ‘Experience showed that the maintenance of a force in the field was a more complicated traffic problem than a strategic troop movement. Besides the daily despatch of food for men and animals to the force at the front, new depots were constantly being established or shifted from place to place on the line of communication – supply, ordnance and remount depots, reinforcement camps, hospitals for men and animals in each of them required daily supplies of food… every day produces a new crop of demands.’22 That last point was crucial: each day was different and the system had to be adapted. Railways are inherently inflexible, and new stations had to be created, extra sections of line built and a series of important cross-country links strengthened on a network which, as mentioned above, spread out like a bicycle wheel from Paris. According to the official account, ‘no one base was capable of supplying an army with all its needs. Railway traffic began to increase far beyond the maximum needs of peace time and placed an ever increasing strain on the French rolling stock and personnel.’23

  The end of the war of movement and the arbitrary nature of the front line which emerged – at one point it split an abandoned brickyard down the middle – left the Allies with a truncated railway system. The front was served by two north-south routes. One was the Calais-Paris main line, which was a well-equipped double-track railway, while the eastern one, running perhaps ten to fifteen miles behind the front, was far less satisfactory as it was in effect a hotchpotch of cross-country branches, mostly single track, running from Dunkerque on the coast through Hazebrouck and Béthune to Amiens. There were various east-west lines connecting the two, notably the heavily used route from Boulogne through to Hazebrouck, and most of these, too, were single track and not built to carry the level of traffic required in wartime.

  The demands placed on the system were now far more complex than a simple one-way flow and the requirements of troops, except of rations and forage, were irregular. The overall figures of the thousands of tons of supplies required and millions of mouths to feed are impressive enough but it is the detail that shows the enormity of the task. The official French report24 on the performance of the French railways during the war stated, for example, that because the entrenchment, which had started in the autumn, had not been anticipated, supplies of warm clothing had to be issued to all the troops as a matter of urgency. Two blankets, two sweaters, three flannel shirts, two pairs of gloves, socks, a pair of waterproof boots and much else for each soldier had to be sent to the front. Troops who were at listening posts near the front, where it was impossible to heat any food because of the proximity of the enemy, required extra sustenance, which was either 200 grammes of cold sausage, 150 grammes of sardines or 250 grammes of tuna. For all the French soldiers, there was one essential that could not be neglected: on average every poilu (squaddie) consumed 750 litres of wine – three whole barrels each – during the course of the war and, as the report emphasizes, there were millions of soldiers. The British did not, of course, share this taste of the fruits of the vine, but had other demands such as the need to brew up tea or have a fry-up as often as possible.

  As the entrenched armies grew bigger, the demands from both the relief and replacement of tired troops and the equipment requirements meant the railway was over-extended. It was not only that the numbers of soldiers at the front increased, peaking at 6 million, but that their needs became ever greater. The authors of the French official report25 calculated that whereas in 1914 a French division (around 12,000 men) required around 70-140 tonnes per day to ‘meet all its needs’, which could be provided by ten to twenty wagons, by 1918 that had grown around tenfold to 1,000 tonnes, necessitating two full supply trains of fifty wagons each. Even the 1914 figure was, as van Creveld points out, around double the requirements of the wars of the mid-1800s, demonstrating an almost exponential growth in the logistics of war which resulted from the construction of the railways and placed a near intolerable burden on them. Partly, of course, that was due to the very existence of the railways, since they offered a remarkable increase in the scale of the transport capability of a nation. For example, the two front-line railways, the Nord and the Est, both of which had lost sections of their networks to the invasion, had to cater for around eighty supply trains daily in 1914, a total which soared nearly threefold to 230 a day by 1916.

  A logistical exercise of this scale inevitably created idiocies. Trying to sort out the problem of small parcels and deliveries took up a disproportionate amount of thinking at headquarters. There was a tendency for officers to mark all their particular consignments as ‘urgent’ and even to despatch a man with them to ensure they arrived because such small packages had a tendency to get lost. Whole wagons were on occasion taken up with just one parcel. The official report on transport on the Western Front cites the discovery of a sealed wagon labelled ‘urgent’ with no clue as to its contents. When forced open, the wagon was found to contain ‘one small package on which was seated a convoyman with his blankets and rations for three days’.26 The hapless fellow was removed to the brake van with his precious package and his wagon replaced by a fully loaded one.

  The year 1915 saw a series of failed offensives which were undermined by the absence of a surprise element. The railways were both hero and villain. They were essential for the logistics of any attack but that very dependence on the railways ensured that none of these attacks ever took the enemy by surprise. The activity on the railways necessary to prepare the attacks could not fail to be seen by scouts from the air or balloons or even from nearby vantage points on hilltops. For example, the Champagne offensive scheduled for September 1915 required preparations on the railways behind the lines starting in July. It was to be an attack broadly aimed northwards and a new line was built parallel to a crucial single track running east-west between the villages of Saint-Hilaire and Sainte-Menehould which was within range of the enemy. Both lines, too, were fitted with signalling equipment to increase capacity. Several extensive platforms, 400 metres long, were built along this new section to transship goods to the smaller 60cm-gauge railways which themselves were extended throughout the area. Signalling on various other sections of line was improved and, further back, storage tracks were laid for artillery and hospital trains, and to accommodate the large rail-mounted guns that would launch the offensive.

  Not surprisingly, all this activity came to the notice of the Germans, who, in response, reinforced their defences. Like many attacks during the long stalemate on the Western Front, there was an initial breakthrough, with some units advancing two mi
les on the first day, but soon the breach was blocked, the Germans successfully defended their territory and by mid-October it was clear that the offensive had failed to make a significant breakthrough. The railways themselves, centred around the gare régulatrice of Troyes, had again carried out their duties efficiently and the absence of success of the attack could not be ascribed to any logistical failure.

  The Germans were better prepared for the stalemate, having anticipated fighting on two fronts and perhaps expecting a siege of Paris, as had happened in their last war with France. There is no doubt that they had planned more efficiently for any eventuality. They had anticipated the problem of connecting fronts with railheads and equipped themselves with portable 60cm-gauge field railways. Edwin Pratt suggested that this was the result of the thoroughness of the Germans’ planning for war: ‘Feldeisenbahnabteilung, the Field Railway Section, developed into a comprehensive scheme of preparation for war by organising every possible phase of military rail-transport and leaving nothing to chance that could be foreseen. Acting along these lines with her characteristic thoroughness, and profiting by some unsatisfactory experiences at the outset, Prussia gradually perfected a system for the efficient utilisation of railways in war which became no less complete in itself than the actual network of her strategical railways.’27 These field railways used a tiny 60cm gauge and were designed to supply the front line from railheads without the need for road or animal transport. As a result of this diligence, the Germans had stockpiled vast quantities of equipment for the construction of a network of these light railways. They had gained knowledge of building this type of railway to establish military control over their African colonies, notably in South-West Africa (now Namibia), where over the previous decade they had built the Otavi Railway. It was the longest 60cm railway in the world, stretching an impressive 350 miles across a vast emptiness of savannah and hills to serve the massive Tsumeb minefields of copper, lead and zinc. This experience gave the Germans an edge in the use of such technology, even though the main manufacturer was a French firm called Décauville, and they entered the war already prepared to make use of these Feldbahnen. Within a few days of the start of the war, the Germans were laying light-railway track to help in their successful attack on Liège. Although they looked like oversized Hornby sets, the 60cm railways were eventually to play a major part in the conflict on both sides, especially in the later stages of the war.