by Lloyd, Nick
In spite of the increasingly shrill exhortations from its leaders, the Army gradually ceased to function. Orders would go missing; supporting artillery fire would never come; reports would not be written; supplies would never turn up. Alfred Mahncke, a staff officer with the German Air Force at Verviers, was tasked with organizing supplies to the front-line squadrons. ‘Considering the many shortages at this late stage of war,’ he wrote, ‘it was a thorny and almost hopeless task which could not be solved to everyone’s satisfaction.’ Lack of coal and strikes in the factories had a devastating effect on the number of engines, guns and ammunition he received, but getting enough fuel to the squadrons was his greatest challenge. By November, fighter squadrons were limping by on just 150 litres of aviation fuel a day – barely enough for a handful of individual sorties – which meant that the Air Force could no longer contest control of the skies. ‘I toiled at the centre of it all – compromising, balancing, reconciling and pacifying.’ The disintegration was noticeable even at OHL. Mahncke went to Spa for a meeting in early November and noticed that the atmosphere at the Hôtel Britannique was ‘tense and charged; nervous individuals rushed around, seemingly without purpose’.34
Fritz von Lossberg was glad to leave Spa on 1 November. He had been shocked by the decline in efficiency and order. ‘Under Ludendorff there was a regime of strict discipline and deference,’ he wrote. ‘Now strong leadership was lacking. Now all the many self-important people were bragging. Everyone had his own opinion and liked to air it.’ As he was climbing into his car that morning, intending to travel to Strasbourg to take up his position as Chief of Staff to the Duke Albrecht of Württemberg (who commanded the southern sector of the German line in France), he was handed a telegram from the senior doctor of a military hospital in Antwerp. ‘Your son is ill with an infection in both lungs,’ it read. ‘His life is in grave danger.’ Lossberg’s son had already been wounded four times and had been employed as a desk officer at the Supreme Command until his fitness improved. Now, it seemed, his health had failed him again. Lossberg travelled on to Strasbourg, but as soon as he arrived he telephoned his wife and asked her to go to Antwerp. Unfortunately, by the time she reached Holland, mutiny had broken out and was spreading quickly behind the lines. ‘In order to return to Stuttgart she had to travel for five days in trains crammed with riotous soldiers,’ he remembered. ‘The transportation of our son from Antwerp ran into difficulties because the hospital trains were stormed and occupied by lawless people from behind the lines. It was not possible to evacuate the sick and wounded in an organised manner.’ Fortunately they managed to get on another hospital train that took them to safety in Germany.35
By the last days of October the German Seventeenth, Second and Eighteenth Armies – those that had borne the brunt of British and French attacks since August – had occupied the line of the Sambre–Oise canal that ran from La Fère northeastwards up past Guise and Le Cateau. On 4 November the Allies would attack this line in what became one of the last great offensives on the Western Front: the Battle of the Sambre. Three British armies attacked along a twenty-mile front; pushing towards Avesnes and Mons, marching through difficult wooded terrain, hedgerows and orchards, and over numerous water obstacles ranging from canals and streams to irrigation ditches. To the south, the French were also on the move, extending the frontage of attack for another twenty miles, with Debeney’s First Army aiming for the town of La Capelle.36 Against them was an assorted collection of divisions from the battered Army Group of General von Boehn. The German positions were just hastily dug foxholes or rifle pits. There was not the time or the manpower to convert them into something more substantial, leaving the men in the open to face the oncoming storm. The history of 3rd Westphalian Regiment (holding the line at Raucourt near the Forest of Mormal) complained that:
The whole position consisted of rifle-pits connected up irregularly. There were no dug outs. There was no field of view owing to hedges, houses, walls and gardens. The battle headquarters were in small cellars, hardly splinter proof. In these inadequate positions weakened and used up troops awaited the attack of an overwhelming enemy.37
The feelings of those soldiers can well be imagined as they crouched in the dirt under their steel helmets, clutching their rifles and breathing heavily through their foul-smelling rubber gas masks, waiting nervously for the bombardments to begin or the tanks to rumble forward.
Wilfred Owen would write what would turn out to be the final letter to his mother on 31 October, just after six in the evening. His battalion had moved up to the front several days earlier, taking up a position on the heavily wooded west bank of the Sambre canal, north of the village of Ors. Owen had been billeted in a stone cottage known as the ‘Forester’s House’. ‘So thick is the smoke in this cellar that I can hardly see by a candle 12 inches away, and so thick are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges and jolts. On my left the Company Commander snores on a bench: other officers on wire beds behind me.’ Despite the discomfort, Owen seemed more content than he had been for many months. He ended by saying that he was perfectly safe and that ‘I hope you are as warm as I am; as serene in your room as I am here . . . you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.’38 Owen may not have said much about the forthcoming attack, but it must have weighed heavily on his men. All the bridges had been demolished by the retreating Germans, leaving the British with little option other than to swim the seventy-foot canal or improvise boats or bridges. On the far bank, the ground rose steadily away, giving enemy observers a clear view of the British lines. It was just like Bellenglise again, and many men shivered in apprehension at going over the top here, particularly when peace seemed so tantalizingly close.
The battalion attacked at 5.45 in the foggy, dew-stained morning of 4 November. Owen was in one of the assaulting companies. They went forward after a five-minute ‘hurricane’ bombardment fell on the far bank, before lifting 300 yards into the enemy defences, where it would remain for a further half an hour; more than enough time, staff officers had said, for the men to establish themselves across the canal, and push on eastwards. Unfortunately, as at Gouzeaucourt and at scattered places across the front throughout the Hundred Days, here the Germans were determined to stay put, and greeted the attackers with heavy machine-gun and rifle fire, pounding shells and mortar rounds that dug into the damp earth or splashed into the murky waters of the canal. The engineers and bridging specialists who had been called in to get the Manchesters over the obstacle could make little progress against such lethal fire. Thirty of the forty-two engineers tasked with putting pontoon bridges into place were killed or wounded, which left the battalion’s junior officers with no choice but to secure the bridges as best they could.39
One of those who fought in this sector was Leutnant Erich Alenfeld, serving with 280th Field Artillery Regiment, whose batteries were dug in about 600 metres from the far bank. They were woken shortly before 6 a.m. when a heavy bombardment opened on their position. They immediately fired off flares to warn the other batteries and commenced firing ‘like the devil’. ‘The battle has broken out,’ he remembered. ‘We continuously shoot protective barrages in waves, that is, allowing the artillery to increase and decrease. The enemy is no less active. There are howls and crashes, a grey wall spreads out before us, and the enemy shrouds us in smoke. Machine gun fire can be heard from close by.’ News reached Alenfeld that the British were coming.
I know what this means; there’s a reason we are here. I fasten on my sling and pistol, bag and water, give my luggage to my batman and just want to give the new order, when I’m told that I should engage the enemy on the banks of the canal. I call Jacoby to my side, explain the situation to him, leave the third gun to him (on the left flank), say goodbye with a handshake and assume command of the right column, gunners at the ready! I tell them what is going on in a few words, and ask them to hold on with me until the end.40
Alenfeld fought along the canal all morning, beating o
ff attacks and organizing protective fire from his guns, before eventually being wounded. ‘I am the first to be hit in the left thigh and the right upper arm – I throw myself on the ground; next to me the brave telephone operator Herten falls to the ground screaming.’ Alenfeld could now see British troops about 300 metres from where he was lying, but fortunately one of his gunners dragged him back to the battery, where he was attended by a medical orderly. ‘The arm wound is nothing, a scrape on my skin, the leg is bleeding quite a bit.’ Alenfeld then had to make a decision, whether to hold on until reinforcements arrived or retreat. In the end, seeing that the main road to Landrecies was already in British hands he ordered his men to fall back.
The Manchesters suffered heavily that day. One of their most promising officers, Second-Lieutenant James Kirk, was killed operating a Lewis gun on the far bank of the canal, after having paddled a raft across under heavy fire. He kept up a constant fire, vainly attempting to suppress the incoming machine-gun rounds so that his men could survive. He would later be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, his citation commending his ‘supreme contempt for danger and magnificent self-sacrifice’ that he showed that day.41 It was an awful scene: heavy machine-gun bullets scything through the dark waters and shredding the thin lines of infantry; artillery fire on the banks; smoke; confusion. His fellow officer, Wilfred Owen, was last seen on a raft in the water with some of his men when he came under murderous machine-gun fire. At one point he comforted two members of his platoon – green young boys – telling them ‘well done’ and ‘you’re doing well’, hoping to instil some courage into them, even as it became clear that the battalion would not be able to cross here. Shortly afterwards Owen was shot and killed. Thus, on 4 November, seven days before the Armistice, ended the life of the most promising English poet since Keats.
Despite the carnage at Ors, 4 November had been a day of good returns for the Allies with most divisions taking their objectives on time without running into heavy resistance. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army had crossed the Sambre–Oise canal across a fifteen-mile front and taken over 4,000 prisoners.42 To the south, Debeney’s French troops had also encountered ‘energetic resistance’ in getting over the canal – footbridges could not be secured and the troops had to raft themselves across – but they would march into the village of Guise the following day.43 For the Germans, however, it was the same dispiriting story of crushing bombardments, heavy attacks and panicked retreats. Leutnant Alenfeld and his men fell back at 2.30 p.m., marching away from the fighting with their wounded on stretchers, trying to escape the attention of passing aircraft. Although British shellfire continually harassed them, it was the aircraft that they really hated; flying low, shooting and throwing bombs and grenades at anything they saw. By the time darkness fell they were in Maroilles, four miles from the canal, getting their wounded treated while they snatched quick mugs of coffee. There were no horses or trucks available, so they spent the next six hours continuing the retreat, marching on dead feet towards Avesnes (‘countless columns march beside us’), which only two months before had housed the Advanced Headquarters of the Supreme Command. Alenfeld’s battery had lost two dead, seventeen wounded, five missing, and a number of guns and horses. When they reached their destination, they could rest for the time being and reflect upon what had happened. ‘Since the Englishman is cowardly,’ he raged, ‘he attacks only if he finds no opposition. His artillery shoots well. The airmen are too many for us to deal with. They have absolute control of the air, they simply go for a flight and do a lot of damage . . . Germany is defeated and the conditions of peace are dreadful. With Austria’s collapse everything becomes much worse still . . .’44
A question was on everyone’s lips: how long could this go on?
15. Armistice at Compiègne
A successor of Frederick the Great does not abdicate.
Kaiser Wilhelm II1
5–11 November 1918
Shortly after 7 a.m. on 8 November, Foch’s Chief of Staff, Maxime Weygand, noticed a red light moving slowly through the mist. It was all he could see of the train that was carrying the German Armistice Commission, and thus the fate of Germany, to the small station of Rethondes in the forest of Compiègne.2 The delegation had been hastily cobbled together by Prince Max two days earlier after he had received a note from President Wilson confirming that he was willing to make peace. Because the Allies had accepted the Fourteen Points (apart from reservations on the clause relating to freedom of the seas and over reparations), Foch was now authorized to communicate those terms with any German delegates.3 Groener told Max that they could no longer delay direct armistice talks and, with the Army threatening to collapse at any moment, they would have to cross the lines with a white flag. Prince Max baulked at doing this so soon, fearing that any terms would be too severe, but in the end he agreed, managing to persuade the leader of the Catholic Party in the Reichstag, the Secretary of State, Matthias Erzberger, to lead the delegation. He hoped that by sending Erzberger, a man of courage and integrity with a track record of working for peace, the terms could be softened.
Gradually the train came into view and then stopped with a hiss of steam. Shortly afterwards Weygand saw them. There were six of them in total, led by Erzberger, who was dressed in a long black coat. He was accompanied by a military representative, Major-General Hans von Winterfeldt, a diplomat, Count Oberndorff, and three military advisers.4 The men were already exhausted, but knew that hours of tense and detailed negotiation lay ahead of them. They had spent the night travelling and had been much delayed, such was the traffic on the roads leading to and from the front. They had crossed no-man’s-land under a white flag the previous evening and been picked up by a French patrol outside La Capelle in General Debeney’s sector. From there they had driven through the town of Guise, avoiding the shell holes and dead horses, and past the columns of troops – the grey-faced poilus – and trucks moving up to the front ready to continue the offensive. At the appointed time a guard showed them the way, along a boardwalk through a grove of trees, to the Marshal’s personal train, where they boarded and prepared to see what was on offer, to see whether Germany would receive her ‘peace of justice’ or not. The German Armistice Commission had arrived.
Foch was waiting for them. He was dressed in a long horizon-bleu coat and képi, leaning heavily on a cane, with a stern look upon his face. Beside him was Weygand, his loyal, attentive ghost, followed by Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, Chief of the British naval detachment (who was accompanied by two other Royal Navy officers) and their interpreters. When they were settled, the Generalissimo began. His tone was sharp, his manner severe. He asked, what was the purpose of their visit? Erzberger looked across at Foch and replied that they had come ‘to receive the proposals of the Allied Powers looking to an armistice on land, on sea and in the air on all fronts’. Foch replied that he had no proposals to make and when Count Oberndorff queried this, with a confused look on his face, the Generalissimo snapped back.
‘Do you ask for an armistice? If you do, I can inform you of the conditions subject to which it can be obtained.’
Yes, Erzberger and Oberndorff nodded, they asked for an armistice.
Foch ordered the terms, which had been agreed at Versailles four days earlier, to be read aloud. Although the reading only included the principal clauses, this took some time. The Allies demanded the cessation of hostilities within six hours of any agreement, the evacuation of occupied France and Belgium (including Alsace-Lorraine) within two weeks, and the surrender of thousands of machine-guns, artillery pieces and aircraft, as well as rolling stock and military stores. Weygand, who read these terms aloud, found this the most emotional part of the proceedings. When he explained that the Allies would also march into the left bank of the Rhine and occupy Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne, he noticed that General von Winterfeldt’s face turned ‘deathly pale’ and Captain Helldorf’s eyes filled with tears.5 Once the conditions had been read, Erzberger asked for an immediate suspension of military operations. He cite
d the growth of revolutionary spirit in Germany and the urgent need to prevent more people from suffering in these final hours. If the fighting could stop, he pleaded, the German Army could reform and re-establish discipline in the Fatherland. But Foch was unimpressed. Bolshevism was, he said, ‘the usual disease prevailing in beaten armies’ and Western Europe would look after itself. Therefore, there would be no suspension of military activity, no let-up in the offensives, until Germany had accepted the Allied demands. One of the German delegation, Captain Helldorf, was handed a copy of the armistice conditions, and then set out, on the long road back to Spa, to deliver them in person to the Supreme Command.6
As Erzberger’s team were getting to grips with the Allied demands, the German war effort began to collapse with alarming speed. In Berlin, Philip Scheidemann noted that ‘If hitherto one had only heard the cracking of the main joints of the Empire, now a cracking of the smaller ones was distinctly audible.’7 On 4 November, the day Wilfred Owen was killed, sailors mutinied at Kiel. Revolution then began to spread across Germany’s northern coast and within days Lübeck, Cuxhaven, Hanover and Hamburg fell to sailors flying the red flag of Bolshevism, demanding an immediate armistice and an end to military dictatorship. What troops there were on hand remained sullen and immobile, unwilling to fire upon their fellow Germans and waiting, uneasily, for the response from Berlin. On 8 November, as Prince Max tried desperately to hold the country together at the end of telegraph and telephone lines that flickered and failed like the struggles of a dying man, the Social Democrats issued their ultimatum. Unless the Kaiser and the Crown Prince went, they would walk out of the Government. That night Prince Max received word that the revolution was continuing to spread. Brunswick and Munich had already gone. The authorities in Stuttgart had handed over power to Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and Cologne was expected to fall into revolutionary hands that night. It was even rumoured that sailors were marching on Berlin.