by Lloyd, Nick
Men, caught off balance, were hurled to the earth, which shook against the guns. Minds, stupefied, refused all function for a moment and reeled. Everything within a hundred yards was gnawed in bitter, tearing bites at men and trees and wire. The stately forest melted beneath a raging storm of fire and steel. Heavy branches and trunks crushed the life from men who cowered among the roots for shelter. One heard a furious, awful screaming as the shell fire rolled away. Then mad waves of charging infantry came after it, mopping up.9
Private Ralph Williams was one of the combat engineers detailed to help the infantry get forward. ‘No one could hear an order, so word was passed on from man to man, “Combat packs and follow in line!” This led to ammunition dumps where four bandoliers were given to each man plus hand grenades.’ Five minutes later the leading infantry started moving out. ‘The Germans were in the other half of this forest. With our rolling barrage, they either had to evacuate, or hole up. There was very little resistance the first half hour as this was a surprise attack and caught them off-guard.’10
Moving through the wheat, supported in places by the lumbering shapes of the tanks, the Allied infantry crept forward, rifles and grenades at the ready. The German defenders, crouching in thinly scraped trenches or sheltering in sunken lanes, were taken by surprise by the intensity of the bombardment, which made coordinating any kind of organized response almost impossible. In many cases, the only thing to do was to sit tight, check your weapons, and wait for the Allied infantry to appear – the bowed attackers that filtered towards your positions in the wake of the creeping barrage. In many sectors, machine-gunners were the backbone of the defence. The 08 German heavy machine-gun could fire up to 400 rounds per minute, meaning that unless they were taken out quickly, they could cause horrendous casualties to infantry moving in the open. When Captain Malcolm Helm, of 5th Machine Gun Battalion (2nd US Division), went forward that morning through fields ‘loaded with wheat’, he noticed several ‘cleared out spaces’ with a wrecked German machine-gun in the centre surrounded by a bunch of enemy corpses. ‘Paths radiating from the centre like spokes of a wheel showed where our infantrymen had converged on the machine gun crew from every direction and had shot or bayoneted those who did not escape.’11
In line with the infantry were the tanks, in which so much faith had been invested. Lieutenant Chenu was the commander of a Schneider medium tank, attached to 1st US Division. Weighing over 13 tons with a crew of six, the Schneider was cumbersome and slow, although it packed a powerful punch with a 75mm howitzer housed in its box-like chassis. Chenu’s men were in the second wave and as they chugged forward, their tracks grinding along the dusty ground, they could see the black explosions of the barrage up ahead. ‘The second wave of tanks has moved off. I go on foot, like all the battery commanders, to try and have an overview for as long as possible,’ he wrote. ‘We get closer to the Hell of a barrage. It has, fortunately, regular gaps. My battery, in twos, worm swiftly in to the left. That’s done: not a single tank damaged.’ Unfortunately that was where Chenu’s luck ran out. As he approached another tank, a little up ahead, a shell struck it, and it exploded in a flash of yellow flame. Within seconds the driver emerged from the burning sheets of metal, terribly wounded, running to the rear, hands covering his bloody face.12
Chenu’s battery of tanks advanced seven kilometres that day, driving through the wheat fields, supporting American infantry, firing at machine-gun nests and engaging the enemy wherever they were seen. In their sector, German soldiers gave themselves up freely. Tired and demoralized clusters of prisoners shuffled to the rear, confused at what had happened and in awe of the iron monsters that had driven over their positions. Although enemy reinforcements would eventually stem their advance, they had delivered a crushing blow to the German right flank. General Fayolle, the French Army Group commander, crowed that ‘the elan of the troops was superb. Surprise was complete.’ North of the Ourcq River, where Mangin’s army was deployed, the Allies had gained up to ten kilometres along a twenty-five-kilometre front and taken 10,000 prisoners.13 To the southwest, the French Sixth Army had encountered heavy resistance, but advanced between four and five kilometres and took over 1,500 prisoners and fifty guns.14
The Allied counter-attack stunned the German High Command. Walther Reinhardt, Chief of Staff of Seventh Army (which bore the brunt of the counter-attack), remembered how ‘hell broke loose’ along the front southwest of Soissons just after five o’clock that morning. What he called ‘terrifying’ artillery fire fell on their sector, cutting telephone wires, tearing up trenches and smashing roads and tracks leading to the front. It would be another two hours of tense waiting before they received word that a large attack had been launched with ‘whole fleets of tanks’ and that their front-line infantry had been overrun almost everywhere. Given the precarious situation within the salient, Reinhardt knew that it was essential to hold on for as long as possible, to redeploy their artillery and bring up ammunition, and ensure that the enemy was beaten back.15 General Erich von Ludendorff, at the German Supreme Command, thought the same. In his memoirs he admitted that ‘Our infantry had not stood firm at all points’, and lamented the ‘deep dents’ that had been gouged out of the line.16 He did what he could; sending volleys of telegrams to all available reserve units to march to the threatened sectors and alerting other commands that they might have to send further reinforcements in the coming days. There was nothing else he could do but wait, and hope.
The Marne fighting would place an enormous strain on the German Army. One veteran, Herbert Sulzbach, wrote in his diary on 23 July, five days after the Allied counter-attack had gone in: ‘Your nerves have taken a heavy beating now, you feel physically run down, you haven’t slept a second all night, you’ve been standing in this witches’ cauldron for days . . . If someone asked me today when we had anything to eat in the last few days, I could only answer that I didn’t know; because all that sort of thing just happens mechanically, and the whole of our thought and our concentration is only turned towards victory.’17 But victory now seemed a long way off, perhaps further away than ever. The German Supreme Command knew this as well as anyone. Within days of the counter-attack they had suspended all plans for future offensives and were preparing for what the Allies would do next; waiting anxiously and hoping that they would have enough time to rest their shattered divisions and restock their depleted supplies before fighting broke out again. But there could be no denying the gravity of what had happened. It was more than just losing the Marne salient or having to break up ten divisions, it was about something much more important. They had lost the initiative.
1. Decision on the Marne
It remains for the living to finish the glorious work of the dead.
Georges Clemenceau1
18–25 July 1918
The retreat from the Marne began on 20 July. In the coming days three German armies trudged northwards in long grey columns; giving up the ground they had gained during the spring and occasionally looting French villages. One observer, Rudolf Binding, remembered being ‘sick at heart’ after seeing soldiers running around taking everything they could get their hands on; a dangerous illustration of the disorder and ill-discipline that was beginning to grip the German Army after four long years of war. ‘In the twinkling of an eye everything was turned upside-down, as if the looters were professionals,’ he wrote. ‘The soldiers hacked whole beds to pieces for the sake of a length of sheeting the size of a towel and worth about one-fiftieth of their value; thousands of sheets of paper were thrown into the mud for the sake of a single picture postcard, and whole cupboards burst open for the sake of a reel of cotton.’2 And it was not just the property of the enemy that was being grabbed; German supply trains and depots were increasingly being targeted by groups of deserters and looters desperately searching for food. ‘This conduct on the part of German soldiers,’ so one report read, ‘constitutes a defiance of discipline, and must be repressed with the utmost vigour.’3 Even worse, it was anything b
ut an isolated incident and was happening right across the front. The German war effort, it seemed, was rapidly coming apart.
The morale of the Army remained steady, but it was increasingly fragile. Hope in victory was now being replaced by disillusion and weariness. Georg Bucher, a soldier who fought throughout 1918, remembered that life was viewed with ‘a crazy indifference’. ‘We had become hard – a frozen, inarticulate hardness which was yet an agony when, thinking ourselves unobserved, we allowed our faces to betray our thoughts.’ Many had long since ceased to hate the enemy and looked upon the ‘terrified agitation’ of recruits – who seemed to become younger and younger with every passing week – with distrust and unease. ‘We had nothing left to hope for,’ he wrote, ‘even our last desperate hope, the hope of victory, had deserted us.’ There was nothing left to do but keep going.4 Even the Army Group commander, Crown Prince Wilhelm, began to notice that things were not as they should have been. ‘I entered every morning the office of the Army Group,’ he wrote. ‘I was always prepared for bad news and received it only too often. The drives to the front, which had previously been a pleasure and recreation for me, were now filled with bitterness. The staff officers’ brows were furrowed with care. The troops, though still almost everywhere perfect in discipline and demeanour, willing, friendly and cheerful in their salutes, were worn to death. My heart turned within me when I beheld their hollow cheeks, their lean and weary figures, their tattered and dirty uniforms . . .’5
The growing problem of looting, poor discipline and desertion could be traced back, in some respects, to a simple lack of food. By 1918 the German nation and its army were starving. During the great offensives earlier in the year, in March and April, German troops had been amazed by the amount and variety of food and drink they found in British and French supply dumps; things like tinned stew and jam that had disappeared from the German diet years ago. Officers would stumble across groups of men gorging on captured rations or drunk on whisky, and unconcerned about the urgent need to press on. This lack of appropriate nutrition also meant that German soldiers were unable to resist the influenza pandemic that swept across the front during the summer. A number of divisions could only muster company strengths of around sixty men, about 30 per cent of their manpower being sick with flu, and this seems to have been entirely typical of what the German Army suffered in this period. In the Army as a whole a staggering 135,000 men were taken ill with influenza in June; the following month another 375,000 men had to be excused duty for this reason.6
Given the extent of the problems facing the German Army – which had sustained nearly 800,000 casualties in the last six months – it was little wonder that a growing number of senior officers were advocating a withdrawal from exposed and over-extended lines to a shorter, more easily defensible position. Many argued that they should retreat to the Siegfried Stellung (or Hindenburg Line as the Allies called it), the formidable series of defences that had been prepared in 1916 as a kind of German insurance policy in the west. Here, they argued, their armies should rest and reform, and then let the Allies break themselves upon it. Major-General Friedrich Karl ‘Fritz’ von Lossberg, Chief of Staff at Fourth Army and one of the best defensive tacticians, admitted in the days after 18 July that the position on the Marne should be given up immediately.7 Others advocated even more radical action. Crown Prince Wilhelm reported to OHL that the front should be immediately withdrawn to the so-called Antwerp–Meuse position, which lay far behind the Hindenburg Line. This would give their troops a breathing space, shorten the front considerably, and free precious reserves.8 These concerns were eminently sensible and a valuable recognition of Germany’s dangerously exposed position in the west, having gained large amounts of territory that was difficult to defend and strategically useless, but they would not be received well by the men who ran the German war effort: the Kaiser, Wilhelm II; the Chief of the General Staff, Paul von Hindenburg; and his right-hand man, General Erich von Ludendorff.
The Kaiser was a man who – as he would have painfully admitted – never achieved his own ambitions or truly lived up to the promise of his inheritance. He had been born in January 1859, the son of Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and his wife, Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria. Despite his privileged upbringing, he was always tormented by a deep-seated insecurity, particularly towards the British and his royal relatives, who were always, he would swear, scheming against him. When the war broke out, he was also increasingly sidelined by Germany’s military leaders, who now held the Fatherland’s destiny in their hands; something that bordered on abject humiliation and resulted in no end of frustration. He had a withered left arm, which was probably the cause of much of his insecurity, and it had become symptomatic of a man who was petty, prone to rages and hysteria, and aware that he was not what he had once seemed destined to become. His eldest son, the Crown Prince (who would command an Army Group in France), was well aware of his father’s failings, even if he did his best to overlook them. The deepest characteristic of his father was, he wrote, summed up in the word noble.
The Kaiser is noble in the best sense of the word; he is full of the most upright desire for goodness and piety, and the purity of his intellectual cosmos is without a blemish and without a stain. Candour that makes no reservations, that is perhaps too unbounded in its nature, ready confidence and belief in the like trustworthiness and frankness on the part of others, are the fundamental features of his character.
Yet this was not without its problems. The Crown Prince admitted that ‘He has always allowed his thoughts and convictions to gush forth instantaneously and immediately without prelude and without prologue, an incautious and noble spendthrift of an ever fertile intellect which draws its sustenance from comprehensive knowledge and a fancy whose only fault is its exuberance.’9 It was this exuberance that had tipped Germany over the edge in 1914.
Wilhelm may have nominally led Germany, but real power lay in the hands of his two military commanders: Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich von Ludendorff, the legendary duo who had run the war effort since the late summer of 1916. Hindenburg was the Chief of the General Staff, the pinnacle of a career that had spanned the life of the Second Reich and seen him rise to become the ersatz Kaiser, the most powerful man in the kingdom. His reputation as a gifted commander had been assured after his decisive victory over the Russians at Tannenberg in August 1914, when two Russian Armies had been counter-attacked in the marshes of East Prussia and been almost completely destroyed. Hindenburg’s face was a mask of Prussian granite, with clipped grey hair, a hard stare and a fierce, upturned moustache; perfectly embodying the seemingly iron will of an empire and the uncompromising warrior ethos of Prussia. If anyone could do it, they would say, then surely Hindenburg could. He was known for his thoughtful composure, one German commander noting that ‘If he spoke, the effect was heightened: one was then impressed not merely by the statuesqueness of his tall, broad shouldered figure, but by the depth and timbre of his voice and the easy flow of his measured, thoughtful, and deliberate speech; the conviction was confirmed that the speaker was absolute master of the situation and expressed views that could be thoroughly relied on.’10 But there was more to him than the image of the peerless commander would suggest. By 1918 Hindenburg had lost touch with the war. His legendary calmness and composure had ossified into inaction and lack of interest. He was approaching his seventy-first birthday and spent his days either safely ensconced in the elegant surroundings of the Supreme Command at Spa in Belgium or out hunting in the forests of the east. And if Germany suffered during the war, then Hindenburg never did. Beneath his grey army tunic covered with decorations – his favourite being the Iron Cross with Golden Rays that he had received in March 1918 – was the portly gait and reddened skin of a man who enjoyed good food and helped himself to the best brandy and champagne of the pre-war years. Not that it mattered anyway, particularly when his right-hand man possessed such boundless energy and spirit.
The First Quartermast
er-General was Erich von Ludendorff. He was slightly shorter than Hindenburg, with a bald head and small grey eyes, with jowls hanging over his tight collar; his mouth seemingly always turned down in a permanent scowl. He may have been Hindenburg’s Chief of Staff – and at fifty-three years of age was considerably younger – but he shared his responsibility fully, and took an increasingly senior role in devising and conducting operations throughout 1918. He was a notoriously cold and serious man; even his wife, Margarethe, called him Ludendorff. Although she would claim that before the war he was often cheerful and free from anxiety – that he did not always have the expression ‘of a man whose feelings had turned to ice’ – by 1918 the pressure was telling. He ‘never possessed any knowledge of human nature’; a serious flaw in so important a figure and which would become ever more damaging in the final months of the Great War.11 Nevertheless, Ludendorff was a brutally effective soldier. He had begun the war as a senior staff officer who won a Pour le Mérite during the storming of Liège, before being transferred to the Eastern Front, where he came into contact with Hindenburg. Although the two men were great friends and formed an effective partnership (‘together like one man, in the most perfect harmony’12), they possessed striking dissimilarities. Whereas Hindenburg was notoriously relaxed and self-possessed, Ludendorff was a fountain of energy and nervousness, a man always seemingly on the edge of a thunderous rage which scattered his attendants and required the calming influence of the Chief of the General Staff. ‘Come on,’ Hindenburg would say – surely and deliberately – ‘I should like a word with you.’13
Two years had passed since Hindenburg and Ludendorff had taken command of the German war effort; now, victory, it seemed, was still as far away as ever. Her armies may have defeated Tsarist Russia, dismembered Poland, and kept the Allies at bay in the west, but Germany’s strategic situation was full of danger. Bit by bit, Germany was dying; bleeding more and more every day. The great series of offensives that Ludendorff had conducted since March 1918, which had been intended as a final masterstroke to win the war in the west, had failed. The maps in the Supreme Headquarters may have shown pleasing advances into French territory and great sweeps of newly captured ground, but they could not disguise the fact that the war went on and the Allies continued to resist. Indeed, they may have been bloodied but they were unbowed, and judging from the furious pronouncements of the French President, Georges Clemenceau, were as eager for victory as ever. And they had found a powerful new ally in the United States of America, whose military power was now undeniable. Even worse, the heavy fighting had used up Germany’s dwindling reserves of manpower and squandered her best troops, most of whom had been concentrated in elite storm divisions and been killed or wounded earlier in the year, at places of evil memory: trampled in the mud of the Chemin des Dames, floating in the currents of the Marne, or scattered across the fields of Flanders.