by Lloyd, Nick
Groener did what he could. He lacked the manic energy of his predecessor, but was a calm, organized and realistic presence. He understood the degree to which the German Army had been exhausted and the difficulty of securing its lines of communication as it fell back. He arrived at Spa on 30 October and was met by Hindenburg, who told him what had happened. They spent the day in discussions over the state of the Army, the amount of materiel that would need to be pulled back, as well as the difficulty of evacuating the scores of wounded from the front. On the evening of 1 November, Groener left Spa and travelled on to Brussels, Charleville and Charleroi to meet his Army Group commanders. Groener found Crown Prince Rupprecht in a serious mood and well aware of the dangers facing the monarchy. At Charleville – the headquarters of Crown Prince Wilhelm – there was less clarity. ‘Here,’ he wrote, ‘one simply lived in the war, all the other considerations played no role, and Berlin was a frightful lair in which the politicians chatted and did useless things’; an attitude particularly noticeable in the Chief of Staff, Count Schulenburg. Groener soon realized that – contrary to the mood prevailing at Spa – the retreat to the Antwerp–Meuse Line could no longer be delayed. According to Rupprecht, they could wait for eight days, but most of his army commanders believed that they could not sustain more than one day of heavy fighting. At Charleroi, Gallwitz informed him that Fifth Army was no longer capable of maintaining ‘sustainable resistance’ and advocated retreating behind the Meuse as soon as possible. Therefore, it was agreed that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s armies should fall back along the line Hirson–Mézières–the Meuse, in conjunction with the embattled Fifth Army north of the Argonne. On the evening of 4 November, with the German Armies buckling under renewed Allied attacks, Groener finally gave the order to begin the retreat.9
The Kaiser may have acted against Ludendorff, but after Wilson’s third note, which had demanded constitutional change to the role of the ‘King of Prussia’, his own position was becoming increasingly precarious. The cabinet member Philip Scheidemann remembered how ‘The number of letters reaching me at the time, saying that the Kaiser must be got rid of, was legion. I had calls from every class of the population: officials and soldiers told me plainly that the Kaiser could not remain.’10 Even so, Prince Max was loath to press the Emperor to make such a step and preferred to wait in the hope that a decision would be taken out of his hands. For his part, the Kaiser tried to be bullish and was convinced that he was beloved by the German people. He was buoyed by the somewhat ridiculous hope that the British and Americans were ‘at loggerheads’ with each other and that it would be possible to make an agreement with Japan to ship her troops over to the Western Front and join the English in a grand coalition against America.11 On 29 October he went to Spa – without Prince Max’s knowledge – and toured the front in his Royal Train, spending his evenings waxing lyrical about life and death and how his soldiers adored him. On one occasion, when some bombs had fallen near the train, the Kaiser apparently quoted some lines from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.12
But in Berlin there was no question of simply waiting for events to take their course. On Prince Max’s orders, Dr Drews, the Prussian Minister of the Interior, was sent to Spa on 1 November to tell the Kaiser (gently) of the growing demands for his departure and of the potential difficulties that would arise if he remained on the throne. The Kaiser was nonplussed.
‘How comes it that you, a Prussian official, one of my subjects who have taken an oath of allegiance to me, have the insolence and effrontery to appear before me with a request like this?’
Dr Drews said nothing, just bowed slightly and stared at His Majesty.
‘Very well then, supposing I did,’ continued the Kaiser. ‘What do you suppose would happen next, you, an administrative official? My sons have assured me that none of them will take my place. So the whole house of Hohenzollern would go along with me.’
Drews made another bow.
‘All right then, let me tell you the form chaos would take. I abdicate. All the dynasties fall along with me, the army is left leaderless, the front-line troops disband and stream over the Rhine. The disaffected gang up together, hang, murder and plunder – assisted by the enemy. That is why I have no intention of abdicating. The King of Prussia cannot betray Germany.’13
The Kaiser would repeat the substance of this conversation many times. His aides would repeat it back to him and assure him of the esteem in which he was held. It was a perfect, circular argument that comforted Wilhelm as October turned to November. The argument depended upon one thing, however: that the Army remained loyal to him and would desert if he abdicated, and this assumption would come under increasing pressure as the German Army fell back from the Western Front and as the fires of revolution took hold in the Fatherland, from Kiel to Munich, from Hamburg to Berlin. If the Kaiser had felt that his staunch rebuttal of Dr Drews would be the end of the matter, he was to be disappointed because the question would be asked again and again. Prince Max caught a punishing bout of influenza in late October and was increasingly unable to control the situation in Berlin and the growing clamour for the Kaiser to go. As Drews had said to the Chancellor before he set out for Spa, what slogan at the moment could be more effective against their efforts than ‘The war must go on because the Kaiser will not sacrifice his personal interests in the cause of peace’?14
Rumours of an armistice passed through all the armies on the Western Front with remarkable speed, but they were not always greeted with relief and happiness. On the contrary, the US Marine Elton Mackin remembered that whenever talk of peace came, ‘You saw men take a deep, full breath at the thought of it. You watched them look away beyond the front and picture hope. You watched men curl their lips in bitter disbelief, remembering the promises of rest camps, winter quarters, and other things. You heard them curse disinterestedly at men who dared to dream, and call them fools.’15 It was not uncommon for the British, who had long specialized in dry, graveyard humour, to dismiss the whole thing as a conspiracy to undermine their morale. They knew how dangerous it was to think too much of peace. When the men of A. J. Turner’s battalion heard that an armistice would probably be signed the following day, they received it, he wrote, ‘with the usual scepticism’; one man quipping that ‘of course’ it would happen, ‘and Lloyd George will be bringing each of us a nice hot steak and kidney pie’.16
The increasing likelihood of peace, or at least some form of temporary ceasefire, weighed heavily upon Allied commanders. They knew that their armies, drawn from every corner of their societies, many of whom were wartime volunteers or conscripts, would only keep going for so long. The French had already mutinied in 1917 so there was little chance that Pétain could push them much harder, no matter how many times Foch pestered him. By the last weeks of the war the length of active front held by the French Army had narrowed dramatically – down to just forty kilometres – in part owing to the convergent advances of the British and Americans on either wing, but also because it was rapidly running out of manpower.17 As for the BEF, it was, as Haig had told Lloyd George on 19 October, ‘never more efficient, but has fought hard, and it lacks reinforcements’.18 Even the Americans, who had no shortage of men, were beginning to tire. When Hunter Liggett took command of the US First Army in late October (Pershing having been elevated to the same authority as Haig and Pétain), he found, to his despair, that ‘some signs of discouragement were beginning to appear among both men and officers, the most conspicuous evidence of which was the great number of stragglers’, which he estimated to be as high as 100,000 men. Because American casualties had been so heavy, and because so many divisions were filled with raw recruits, a loss of cohesion an
d discipline was probably inevitable, but it was shocking nonetheless.19 There was only one thing to do: continue to push on and ensure that operations were conducted with as much care and attention to detail as possible.
Heavy fighting continued in the Franco-American sector in the south. By the last days of October, First Army had chewed its way through twenty-one kilometres of some of the worst ground on the Western Front, and had secured a good jump-off line for what Pershing hoped would be the final, decisive push. On 1 November, in conjunction with Gouraud’s forces on the left, three American corps launched a major offensive to secure the third German position on the Barricourt Heights. Once this had been achieved, the Americans would then be able to cross the Meuse and head up to the city of Sedan, severing the German rail links that supplied the rest of the front. The Americans may have tried to do too much too soon in earlier offensives, but they had learnt remarkably quickly, and the November offensive was noticeable for the care and attention to detail that preceded it. It was also helped by the disastrous state of the German defences. Along an eighteen-kilometre front there were barely seven divisions in the line, and they had long been worn out. There were a handful of reserve units, but they were unable to move up because of the shelling of the road network, and the collapse of the telephone system (also due to shelling) meant that their commanders were cut off.20 At Fifth Army headquarters, General von der Marwitz wanted to pull back behind the Meuse; a sensible and prudent manoeuvre that would have given his tired men a breathing space and allowed them to hold the river line. Instead OHL had forbidden any retirement because of its effect on the negotiations and compelled Marwitz to stand and fight where he was.21
At 3.30 a.m. the preliminary shelling began, an agonizing two-hour ‘hurricane’ bombardment that pulverized the German defenders in their shell holes and trenches. Herbert L. McHenry, serving with 1st US Division, and in reserve that day, remembered watching the guns open fire – what he called ‘the real roaring sound of war’. ‘Then each of those “big babies” let go, it shook the earth, and as the “letting go” was continuous the earth was in a constant state of tremble.’ By noon the first lines of German prisoners were filing past their positions, the usual cowed young boys and stumbling old men.22 The Americans achieved remarkable success that day. Although some enemy regiments resisted stubbornly, most did not and US troops swept over the German lines, secured the high ground, and mauled whatever units they engaged. Hunter Liggett was mightily pleased with the results of the day’s fighting. ‘We had caught Von der Marwitz as I expected to – braced for the attack on his right. His weakened centre broke before the Fifth and Third Corps and these corps drove through to the Barricourt Ridge, as ordered, overrunning his entire defensive system . . .’23
On the same day that Pershing’s corps had reached the Meuse, the Canadian Corps was in action on the outskirts of Valenciennes, attacking a fortified hill called Mont Houy that commanded the town. Furious attacks by British forces in the last days of October had come to nothing, so Arthur Currie had agreed to mount an operation to secure it. In what was a masterpiece of preparation and care, Currie’s gunners, led by the tireless Andrew McNaughton, went to work. ‘Owing to the fact that the German Army was approaching a defeat on a grand scale and that there was much peace talk in the air,’ a report on the operation stated, ‘it was decided that all restrictions concerning the economical use of supporting arms . . . were now out of place, and it was therefore the proper time to neglect economy.’ Six brigades of field artillery and 104 heavy guns, supported by nine batteries of heavy machine-guns (totalling seventy-two barrels), were brought up to the front. They were to launch a massive creeping barrage on the German positions at Zero Hour. Because of the layout of the ground, it was possible to deploy a great deal of artillery forward and allow a combination of not only frontal artillery fire, but also oblique, enfilade and, incredibly, reverse fire. It would not only be a startling demonstration of the effectiveness of Currie’s policy of ‘neglect nothing’, but a brutal illustration of the sheer weight and accuracy of firepower that the British and French Armies could wield in the closing months of the war.24
On the cold, wet morning of 1 November, just one Canadian brigade, the 10th, went forward, supported by what historians have judged to be one of the most intensive fire plans of the war. During the attack seven tonnes of high explosive were fired every minute on a front of less than two miles, completely pulverizing the dazed defenders and tearing apart any defences they had made.25 If anywhere on the Western Front epitomized the Dante’s Inferno-like conditions faced by the German soldier in this period then it was Mont Houy. When Andrew McNaughton examined the cratered, smoking ground after the battle he noted that enemy dead were everywhere, ‘in rifle and machine gun pits, in trenches and sunken roads, in the open, in the rows of houses demolished by the siege howitzers; the concentrations, particularly those in enfilade on railway cuttings and other defiles, had left a shambles . . .’ In total the Germans had suffered 800 dead. Another 1,400 prisoners were being shepherded to the rear. The Canadians had suffered only 420 casualties, with just 60 fatalities, an astonishingly light figure given the strength of the enemy defences and the limited numbers of attackers.26 The German Army had no answer to this kind of punishment. Its soldiers, many still bravely led and well-trained, always took a toll on the attacking forces, but under such fire they could do little but retreat or die. If they decided to hold any position, they did so at a terrible risk and in the knowledge that it would only take a matter of days – sometimes hours – before the Allies pushed them off.
By the first week of November the German Army was in full retreat across the Western Front. From the air ‘we saw all the roads crowded with columns of men marching back,’ wrote one German pilot.27 Endless lines of weary troops splashed and shuffled their way eastwards, bowed down with their equipment, looking over their shoulders in fear, half expecting to see Allied aircraft or cavalry squadrons ready to scatter them again. It was an awful sight: the faces of young boys overshadowed by the steel helmets that were too big for them, or hobbling along in boots that had been worn away long ago; old veterans who had seen too many battles marching along with glassy eyes and a grim acceptance of death or wounding. It was by now a motley army; the exact opposite of the legions of proud feldgrau that had marched across Europe in the summer of 1914 on their way to enact Count von Schlieffen’s great war plan. The German Army had reached its end; worn down by four years of merciless slaughter and pounded into dust by the brutal Allied artillery bombardments. Some still believed in victory, in some divine intervention – a catastrophic outbreak of flu in Paris or London; a devastating fallout between the English and Americans perhaps – but most realized there was little they could do. How could they defeat the endless power of the Allied guns or their swarms of tanks? How many Americans would they have to kill before they too gave in? And in any case, was it really worth fighting and dying for any more? Did anyone really care whether Alsace-Lorraine was French or German?
Casualties were nothing short of catastrophic. Fritz von Lossberg estimated that by the time the German Army reached the Antwerp–Meuse Line it had lost over 400,000 men and 6,000 guns.28 Other authorities put it higher, and it is possible that between 18 July and 11 November the Army suffered 420,000 dead and wounded with another 385,000 men being taken prisoner. Such a magnitude of loss was simply unsustainable, and when this was combined with the thousands of casualties from Germany’s spring offensives earlier in the year – perhaps as high as a million – it meant that her army was bleeding to death.29 The strength of many units was now a fraction of their full establishments. According to Major-General von Kuhl, by the end of October most German battalions could muster only 450 men, and of them barely half were fighting troops, and this was almost certainly an overestimation.30 There were not enough men to man the trenches, not enough men to bring up the guns, and fewer and fewer reliable NCOs. For example, against the British Third Army, 111th Division
registered company strengths of between fifty and sixty men. Likewise in 21st Reserve Division, one of its regiments was now down to three companies, each numbering around sixty soldiers, and this seems to have been entirely typical of the German Army in the West by this point, its ranks ravaged by the endless Allied attacks and stalked by the merciless influenza pandemic.31
Given the chronic shortages of manpower, morale quickly declined. When rumours spread through units of the increasing rate of desertion, of how more and more men were simply giving up and heading for home, those at the front understandably asked why they should continue to suffer when others declined to do the same. Reinforcements would occasionally turn up, but they were always far fewer than had been promised and often surly and unhappy, always muttering about ‘war prolongers’ and doing nothing for unit cohesion. Adolf Hitler later complained that the arrival of recruits from home meant not a reinforcement but ‘a weakening of our fighting strength’, with the young ones being ‘mostly worthless’.32 Such was the toxic mixture of exhaustion and ill-discipline that was crippling the German Army. It was now nothing more than a collection of units, some good, mostly bad, but all lacking organization and structure. Commanders tried their best to explain to their men the importance of continuing to resist, but it was an almost hopeless task. Tales would be spread of the horrific consequences of peace with the Allies; of how the land would be exhausted and the people taxed beyond anything they had ever known. Second Army even issued a message to its troops in late October warning them that any peace would bring worse devastation to Germany than the struggle against Napoleon had in the last century. ‘Only when the enemy’s guns are silent forever is peace in sight,’ it read. ‘Until that happens we HAVE GOT TO FIGHT ON. Every man has got to do his duty, unless the enemy is to snatch victory at the eleventh hour. Only by setting our teeth and holding on to the end are we to get peace. THE FATHERLAND FOREVER.’33