Hundred Days : The Campaign That Ended World War I (9780465074907)

by Lloyd, Nick

  The crossing of the Hindenburg Line may have marked the climax of Foch’s sequence of offensives, but fighting continued relentlessly throughout October as the German armies fell back. Debeney’s First Army had been criticized in the ranks of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army for ‘hanging back’ – or what they jokingly called ‘debbing along’ – but it fought a tough series of battles throughout the month, pushing northeastwards from Saint-Quentin as it kept on the heels of von Hutier’s Eighteenth Army. They were up against the same obstacles the British were encountering – machine-guns, delayed-action mines, shell-pitted roads, poisoned wells – and progress was anything but easy, particularly when the weather began to worsen. On 11 October the war diary recorded that the advance had been ‘very hampered by the resistance of the enemy’. The defenders were ‘very vigilant’ and the numerous machine-guns across the front slowed their progress. Five days later they had taken a bridgehead over the Oise River, but ran into fierce German counter-attacks. During October, First Army suffered nearly 15,000 casualties (about three times more than they had sustained in the previous month), but took over 10,000 German prisoners, 1,500 machine-guns and over 100 artillery pieces.29

  French soldiers may have been physically exhausted and tired of life at the front, but they would see it through. Many were undoubtedly sustained by a desire for retribution, which became more marked as they saw the pitiless destruction meted out to their homes and businesses by the Germans. In one of his army orders, Debeney praised his men for fighting through a devastated region and having to see ‘our poor villages in ruins, our mutilated arbres, our houses mined and ransacked’, the sight of which he believed had increased their strength tenfold. An anonymous poilu’s letter, picked up by the postal censor of Fifth Army, spoke for many when he claimed that:

  There is not one single ordinary French soldier who does not have a relative or friend to avenge, not counting those who have had neither house nor family for the last four years . . . We want to avenge the crimes, the assassinations, the fires, the thefts committed by these modern-day Huns. The sight of villages systematically destroyed, fruit trees stupidly cut down, churches blown up with dynamite or turned into stables, inflames our anger and gives rise in our souls to violent desire for vengeance.

  Others were more philosophical. A survey of French Army opinion in mid-October recorded that although an ‘important mass’ of soldiers advocated continuing the war until Germany was completely crushed, the majority supported armistice discussions until they had received sufficient guarantees. Given what France had suffered, and their distrust of the enemy, it was probably unsurprising that only a small number of correspondents wanted an immediate peace, regardless of conditions.30

  The advance may have been tough for Allied soldiers, but the German experience of retreat was little easier. ‘Thank you very much for the parcel you sent with the plum cake – it was nice. I got it on the day of the retreat,’ wrote one German soldier, Josef, from Flanders on 9 October. ‘We are now at Thielt and our division has suffered heavy losses again, but most of them were captured . . . There was a terrific air battle today and a large English fighter plane was shot down in flames close to us. The three occupants jumped out of the burning aeroplane, one after the other. You can imagine how they fell from about a thousand metres up. Then the aeroplane burnt right down the middle and fell down in two parts. Apart from that, there’s no news . . .’31 The pilot Rudolf Stark had been billeted in Maubeuge and ‘day and night’ he watched ‘the tramp of marching columns, they are all going back. With them are long trains of wagons and crowds of refugees who have been evacuated from the front and are drifting eastwards.’ He was so weak with cold that he could hardly move. His temperature was soaring and it gave him terrifying visions of being left alone and captured by the enemy. Fortunately, he was being looked after by a French family who nursed him with wine, fruit juice and books. Every day he would chat about the war with the father of the house, who brought him a map of France and Belgium. Each morning the old man would come into his room and trace the position of the front line. ‘He draws thick lines in ink – always more and more lines to eastward, and each of them is marked with a date.’ Stark was disappointed when the old man drew a ring around Cambrai and told him that it had fallen. ‘His lines are always correct,’ he grumbled. ‘They leer at me from the wall, writhing their way into my brain like black serpents.’32

  For officers and men the retreat soon became part of their daily routine. The infantry would march or be bussed to their new sectors, while gunners hauled their guns out, limbered them up and went off to find suitable ground to pitch them. As soon as they arrived, men began the seemingly endless task of preparing their new positions, digging trenches, building shelters, rolling out coils of barbed wire and hooking up telephone lines with their headquarters. For the gunners, camouflage was particularly vital at this time. Ernst Kielmayer, whose battery had taken a pounding at Cambrai, remembered pulling large sheets of wire over their guns, which would then be covered daily with fresh grass, making them ‘observation proof’ against their worst enemies: aircraft and reconnaissance balloons. ‘We cut down small trees, if there are any left,’ he wrote, ‘and make garden posts out of them. We drive them into the ground around our guns and then put chicken wire over them covered with twigs and grass.’ Attention to detail was vital. Kielmayer knew that their survival depended on remaining unspotted for as long as possible and their precautions included laying the wire over the battery at a precise angle not to throw a shadow, as well as ensuring that their tracks were covered up so as not to give them away.33 It was hard work, but it was important. Sweat would save blood.

  Even if appropriate measures were taken, the sheer scale and ferocity of the Allied bombardments inevitably took a daily physical, as well as psychological, toll on the German Army. On the night of 13 October, an NCO, the 29-year-old Adolf Hitler, was caught in a British mustard gas bombardment at Comines on the Franco-Belgian border. Hitler was serving as a runner with 16 Reserve Infantry Regiment (6th Bavarian Reserve Division), whose troops were already ‘more like ghosts than men’, encrusted with mud, their ranks thinned by the ceaseless attrition of the front. Hitler endured several hours of drumfire ‘with gas shells which continued all night more or less violently’, bursting on to dug-outs, splintering into roads and covering whole sections in sickly clouds of yellow gas. ‘As early as midnight, a number of us passed out, a few of our comrades forever,’ he recalled. By morning, he was feeling the effects of mustard gas exposure, the dreaded symptoms so familiar to Allied soldiers: a violent, hacking cough; the eruption of painful blisters all over the body; loss of sight and an intense pain in the eyes. Hitler was fortunate to have only received relatively minor exposure. His eyes, which had been temporarily blinded, burnt ‘like glowing coals’, but he received no long-term damage and his symptoms seem to have been worsened by his intense psychological reaction to news of the Armistice.34

  Despite the professionalism that many units showed at this time, demoralization and indiscipline were bubbling to the surface and becoming impossible to ignore. The Crown Prince complained that individual divisions now began to fail him more often, partly from exhaustion, but more seriously from what he called ‘contamination by international and pacifist ideas’. This led to them putting up disappointing resistance and having their flanks turned repeatedly. His commanders then had to sanction the premature deployment of over-fatigued but reliable troops who would plug these gaps. And it was these units – the ones who had proven their worth repeatedly – that were now distrusted by the rank and file and known as ‘war prolongers’.35 Even worse, it was evident that German loyalty, so strong throughout most of the war, was now beginning to fracture along state lines. As Cambrai was being evacuated – its shops looted and its buildings pillaged and burnt – fighting broke out between groups of soldiers eager to pocket their gains. In one bloody incident Bavarians and Prussians clashed in the streets, leaving fifteen soldiers dead, inclu
ding an officer who was thrown from a third-floor window and broke his neck.36

  By the second week of October, with the front narrowing by the day, German corps and divisions were moving back on to their last defensive positions, doing everything they could to impede their pursuers. Now that the main section of the Hindenburg Line had been crossed, the Army Groups of Rupprecht, von Boehn and the Crown Prince had no option other than to pull back their forces, occupy the Hermann Line (running north–south along the front behind the River Scheldt) and the Hunding–Brunhild position (from La Fère down to Verdun), and hope for the best. None of these positions were really worthy of the name; they had been marked out on maps, but nowhere had there been the time to construct the concrete dug-outs and pill-boxes and string out the acres of barbed wire that might have held the Allies up for any extended period. Because of this, much emphasis had been placed on siting the line behind ‘natural obstacles’, particularly watercourses (improved by damming), which it was hoped would economize on troops and prevent any large-scale breakthroughs.37 Nevertheless, the shortening length of front meant the German Army was more concentrated now than it had been for months, years even, and when combined with the exhaustion of their pursuers, this meant the front gradually began to stabilize, to recover its equilibrium, which had been disturbed by the great attacks of July, August and September.

  Apart from local, small-scale counter-attacks, the Germans could not muster enough forces to conduct anything larger. On 13 October, Crown Prince Wilhelm wrote to the commander of Eighteenth Army, General Oskar von Hutier, and confirmed his belief that an aggressive defensive should be conducted. But this was impossible because his Army Group only had ‘extremely few reserves’ at its disposal. ‘These are just barely sufficient to fill up the existing gaps even if they are alerted and conducted with the utmost dispatch to the desired point.’ Three divisions were available for immediate deployment, but if they were used the Army would have to ‘abandon any idea of relieving front line divisions’.38 This was the great dilemma that now wracked German commanders. Should they use their reserves strategically, to conduct counter-attacks and spoiling raids – something that their training and doctrine pushed them towards – or should they use what few men they had available to relieve those units at the front? In truth, it was an impossible question, the only logical answer being an end to the war; something that many officers could barely contemplate, but which the German Government was now trying to broker. But, as they would find out in the coming days, peace would come at a price.

  13. ‘A last struggle of despair’

  There can be no conclusion to this war until Germany is brought to her knees.

  General John J. Pershing1

  16–25 October 1918

  President Wilson’s second note arrived in Berlin at 5.20 a.m. on 16 October, a crisp, autumnal morning in the capital. Any lingering hope that Germany could win some kind of diplomatic coup by negotiation was extinguished by Wilson’s reply, in which he made it clear just what Germany would have to do if she wanted an armistice. Whatever Wilson’s indecision in the first note, his reply was the death-blow to the Kaiser’s Germany; a stunning diplomatic punch which dispelled any illusion that Germany could gain her ‘peace of justice’. For President Wilson’s closest adviser, Colonel House, 14 October – when Wilson finalized the words of his second note – was ‘one of the [most] stirring days of my life’. He met the President shortly after breakfast and ‘never saw him more disturbed’. It reminded him of a maze. ‘He said he did not know where to make the entrance in order to reach the heart of the thing . . . If one went in at the right entrance, he reached the centre, but if one took the wrong turning, it was necessary to got [sic] out again and do it over.’2

  Whatever the President’s unease about how to respond, he knew that clear conditions would have to be set down and enforced by the Allies. On 5 October a conference had been held in Paris between Lloyd George, Clemenceau and the Italian Prime Minister, Orlando. They agreed that an armistice could only be concluded with Germany if eight points were fulfilled, including the total evacuation of Belgium, France and Alsace-Lorraine, the retreat of the German Armies behind the Rhine and the cessation of submarine warfare.3 When they heard of the German communiqué to Wilson, all their old fears and suspicions returned. Having not yet been consulted, the Allies, particularly the French, dreaded the Americans dictating a peace without taking sufficient account of their sacrifices and wishes. After all it had been the French who had endured so much since 1914, having to bear the cost of resisting the German Army, which had occupied some of her most valuable industrial areas. Likewise the British may not have suffered as many losses as the French, but they had taken on the burden of the naval war, loaned enormous sums to their Allies, and now looked upon the growing might of their former colony with envy and fear.

  For the moment at least, the Allies need not have worried. While serious disagreements over the fate to be meted out to Germany would emerge later on, Wilson saw through Germany’s obvious deception – that he would be flattered into concluding a favourable peace behind the backs of the British and French – and thwarted it. Having gone to war to defeat German militarism, Wilson could not be seen to countenance anything less, and his response would be heartily approved of in the Allied capitals. In his note Wilson made it clear that no arrangements would be entered into unless they could guarantee the ‘present military supremacy’ of the Allied armies in the field. Neither the United States nor the Allies would consider an armistice ‘as long as the armed forces of Germany continue the illegal and inhumane processes which they still persist in’. Furthermore:

  At the very time that the German Government approaches the Government of the United States with proposals of peace, its submarines are engaged in sinking passenger ships at sea . . . and in their present enforced withdrawal from Flanders and France, the German armies are pursuing a course of wanton destruction which has always been regarded as being in direct violation of the rules and practices of civilised warfare.

  Wilson reminded Berlin that fighting would not cease until these actions were stopped.4

  Prince Max read what he called the ‘terrible document’ alone in his apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse. He was furious, accusing Wilson of bowing to the Allied commanders, of abusing the German Army and Navy, and of appealing for an uprising from the German people. Max feared that the fragile ‘internal peace’ would now be broken, as he put it, ‘like the bursting of a dam’.5 His response, angry and bitter, was typical of how Germany’s leaders, both civilian and military, would react to what one cabinet member called the ‘bombshell’.6 Loudly professing their shock and disgust at Wilson’s note, they raged against this betrayal: that he had dared to demand guarantees from them; that the submarine war should be a subject for discussion; that he had irresponsibly libelled the honour of the Army. The Crown Prince called Wilson’s demands ‘implacable and arrogant’ and accused him of interfering in Germany’s internal affairs and of being pressured into them by Foch.7 But such special pleading was only testament to how out of touch Germany’s leaders were, of how utterly devoid of imagination they were in failing to see how necessary these conditions were to Allied security. Germany’s ruthless bid for European domination and her puritanical search for total victory had only succeeding in uniting her foes against her. It was too late to beg for a compromise peace now.

  Ludendorff arrived for a Council of War the following day. Prince Max told him that a response could only be sent after a full appreciation of what was going on at the front had been made. Therefore a series of questions had been prepared for him to answer on this matter. This was something that Ludendorff typically found distasteful, and he immediately launched into a patronizing defence of his position (that he had borne for ‘four long hard years’) and of the impossibility of predicting what would ultimately happen. This was not particularly helpful, and did nothing to salvage Ludendorff’s declining reputation in Berlin. Various ideas were ai
red about transporting German divisions currently stationed in the east to the Western Front. There were twenty-four divisions in total, including five in the Ukraine and another twelve in Romania, but these were regarded as being so physically and morally weak (being men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age and not possessing sufficient offensive spirit) that the idea did not get very far. Perhaps twelve divisions could be moved, but this would take up to three months and there was a danger that leaving the east without sufficient troops would interfere with German economic exploitation and lead to a resurgence of Bolshevik activity.8

  Turning to the Western Front, Ludendorff stressed that he felt a breakthrough was possible, but not probable, and that more men were required. The Prussian War Minister, Heinrich von Schëuch, said that he might be able to provide a single, strong reinforcement to the Army of about 600,000 men, mainly by combing out more men from industry and by calling up the remaining members of the 1900 class. Ludendorff jumped at the idea and claimed, somewhat ridiculously, that had these men been available then ‘we should have had no crisis’. The situation at the front took up the rest of the meeting, with Ludendorff answering questions about how long the line could be held, whether the Allies would continue with their offensives, how the Americans should be countered, what the morale of the men was like, and so on. Ludendorff shrugged and grimaced his way through it, admitting that he did not know how things would turn out, only that more must be done to provide reinforcements and shore up the men’s morale. Although some of those present came away from the meeting optimistic at the news that the military situation was better than they had expected, or at least not as bad as had been feared at the beginning of the month, it was still a grim story. No matter how many times they asked the same question – could the Army hold out? – the Chancellor and his ministers, Ludendorff and his generals, all came to the same conclusion. The situation at the front may not have been as critical as it was on 28 or 29 September, when Foch’s sequenced offensives had reached their climax, but, as Prince Max realized, it was only going to get worse. They might be able to hold the front for some time yet, they could hope for outbreaks of war-weariness or disease in the Entente, but it was clear that Germany’s powers of resistance were crumbling. Therefore, there was only one thing to do: to continue with the negotiations, to do what Wilson wanted, and if that did not secure a ‘peace of justice’ then let it be so. Prince Max was confident that if it came to the worst, the people could be called upon to make what he called ‘a last stand . . . a last struggle of despair’.