by Hew Strachan
THE ENTENTE UNDER STRAIN
Pétain planned to wait for the Americans. He put no pressure on the British to take up the gauntlet, and the fact that the British did so was not due to the travails of the French troops: indeed, until very late in their planning the British assumed that they would have more support from the French than they received. Douglas Haig, Pétain’s British counterpart, was not prepared to forgo the offensive. And he was right, both politically and strategically. In May 1917 the French policy of inactivity on the western front implied that the Central Powers would have an unimpeded run against Russia and Italy until at least 1918 and possibly 1919. Lloyd George had wanted to lend artillery to the Italians so that they could take the initiative, but Cadorna feared that an offensive launched in isolation from efforts on other fronts would bring the German army as well as the Austro-Hungarian down on Italy. By then supporting Nivelle, the prime minister had revealed his hand: he was ready to accept an offensive on the western front, provided it was not under Haig’s command. The fact that he had backed the wrong horse undermined his authority in British strategic counsels. Here an unlikely alliance had grown up between Robertson and Admiral Jellicoe, who had moved from the Grand Fleet to be First Sea Lord in December. Jellicoe was anxious to take out the German naval bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. His caution at sea had turned to pessimism in Whitehall. His worries were not simply focused on the threat of the U-boat; they also concerned torpedo boat activity in the Channel and even a cross-Channel attack. On 27 April he wrote a memorandum which was placed before the war cabinet: ‘We are carrying on this war ... as if we had the absolute command of the sea. We have not... Disaster is certain to follow, and our present policy is heading straight for disaster.’30
The execution of a soldier of the French 72nd infantry division, secretly photographed on the Somme in 1916 The size of the parade and particularly the march past the dead man demonstrate the exemplary purpose of such sentences.
Robertson was suitably impressed, and he told Haig. For Haig, it confirmed the need for an offensive in Flanders, the British Expeditionary Force’s most logical area of independent operations given its lines of communication. He had twice - at the beginning of 1916 and of 1917 - been compelled to subordinate his own preference for operations here to the need to cooperate with the French, and the sensitivity of the sector had been exploited by the Germans in a deception operation mounted to cover their withdrawal to the Hindenburg line. The battle that followed, the third battle of Ypres, which culminated in a muddy morass at the village of Passchendaele in November, has become for the British the embodiment of the First World War’s waste and futility. But it had a clear strategic purpose. If the army could advance to Roulers, it would command the key German railway junction in the northern half of the western front. At that stage a daring amphibious operation would outflank the German positions from the sea and secure Ostend and Zeebrugge.
Its very ambition appealed to Haig: it might win the war in 1917. It also worked on the imagination of the prime minister, his most obvious protago nist. A victory on that scale would work political wonders, both domestically and internationally. Lloyd George’s position, as a Liberal prime minister dependent on Conservative backing, would be secured; in alliance terms, Britain would not have to defer to American wishes at the peace talks. But after 1916 Lloyd George’s cabinet colleagues were wary of Haig’s ambition: they did not want another Somme, and when they finally gave the battle their blessing (on 20 July, long after they were committed to it) they specified that it was to be a step-by-step battle, which could therefore be broken off as and when it ceased to deliver results commensurate with its losses.
The Germans too suffered at Ypres Morale slumped in the autumn, and not just among those photographed, wounded and captured, at a dressing station near Zillebeke on 20 September 1917 The steel helmet began to replace the leather Pickelhaube early in 1916
That was an endorsement not for breakthrough but for attrition. ‘The best plan’, Robertson wrote to Haig on 20 April, when Nivelle’s failure to achieve a breakthrough was evident, ‘is to go back to one of the old principles, that of defeating the enemy’s army. In other words instead of aiming at breaking through the enemy’s front, aim at breaking down the enemy’s army, and that means inflicting heavier losses upon him than one suffers oneself.’31 That indeed was how Robertson packaged and sold the offensive in May, both in London and to his allied colleagues. They met in Paris on 4-5 May. The rate at which the Germans were relieving divisions, when compared with 1916, led to the conclusion that the enemy had lost 350,000 men between 9 April and 27 May 1917, and that by 9 July the figure would have risen to over 450,000.32 Allied calculations about a crisis in German morale, even if not on the scale of that of the French army, were not without foundation. Robertson reported that it was agreed that: ‘It is no longer a question of aiming at breaking through the enemy’s front and aiming at distant objectives. It is now a question of wearing down and exhausting the enemy’s resistance, and if and when this is achieved to exploit it to the fullest extent possible.... We are all of opinion that our object can be obtained by relentlessly attacking with limited objectives, while making the fullest use of our artillery. By this means we hope to gain our ends with the minimum loss possible.’33
Pétain was at the meeting and endorsed what Robertson had said. The operational conception of attrition, towards which both had been working since late 1915, was now fully developed. Haig was also present, and both in Paris and London was ready to pay lip-service to the ideas Robertson had articulated. But he did so for the sake of professional unity in the face of political inquisition. He did not believe in them. A rift now opened between the commander-in-chief and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Robertson, like Pétain, thought the war was not winnable in 1917. His intelligence picture, built up from a wider range of sources than that of Haig’s headquarters, offset any positives derived solely from the western front. Haig saw what was in front of him, and interpreted that in the best possible light: his devout Presbyterianism gave him an inner certainty which interpreted setbacks as challenges, a not undesirable quality in a commander. He believed he could achieve a breakthrough in 1917, and would rationalise his battle as attrition only if he failed. By attacking in a sector as vital to both sides as Ypres, where neither could afford to let the other break through, he seemed likely to win either way.
The offensive began well enough. On 7 June the British 2nd Army under Herbert Plumer, whose red face, rotund frame and white moustache were suggestive of David Low’s cartoon character Colonel Blimp, won a crushing victory at Messines. Like the attack at Vimy, it benefited from careful preparation, particularly by the artillery, which by dint of excellent intelligence was able to focus on counter-battery work. Nearly a million pounds of explosive had been placed in tunnels under the German positions, and at 3.10 a.m. ‘nineteen gigantic roses with carmine petals, or ... enormous mushrooms,... rose up slowly and majestically out of the ground and then split into pieces with a mighty roar, sending up multi-coloured columns of flame mixed with a mass of earth and splinters high in the sky’.34 Thus a German observer caught an irony of industrialised war: the beauty in its destructive effects. His own side’s losses included 6,400 prisoners, too dazed to respond to the infantry assault.
The attack also succeeded because it was limited and staged. It gave the British a foothold on the end of the ridge that swept round to the east of Ypres, and it secured the right flank of the main thrust onto the Gheluvelt plateau, launched on 31 July. Here the commander was Hubert Gough, a cavalryman, attractive to Haig because he would aim for more distant objectives. In reality, there was little to choose between him and Plumer. When by the end of August Gough had made only minor gains, Plumer’s army was given the task of getting onto the plateau. Neither commander opposed Haig’s determination not to break off the battle, despite mounting casualties for minimal advantage. The ideal of the staged, leap-frogging battle, set by the artill
ery timetable, had fallen foul of appalling weather. The rain in August was almost continuous. Mist prevented aerial reconnaissance. The drainage system of the flat, well-tilled land was broken up by shellfire, and the mud meant shell supply had to be performed by mules. ‘If animals slipped off the planks into the quagmires alongside,’ E. C. Anstey recalled, ‘they often sank out of sight. On arrival, shells had to be cleaned of the slime coating before they could be used.’35 Every time a gun was fired, its trail sank into the soft ground, thus wrecking its bearing and elevation: rapid, predicted fire was impossible.
By the time the battle petered out in mid-November, the British had suffered 275,000 casualties, of whom 70,000 were dead. ‘Reinforcements of the new armies’, Aubrey Wade reported, ‘shambled up past the guns with dragging steps and the expressions of men who knew they were going to certain death. No words of greeting passed as they slouched along; in sullen silence they filed past one by one to the sacrifice.‘36 In December instances of drunkenness, desertion and psychological disorders among British troops were reported to be on the increase. In fact, the number of shell-shock cases was smaller than on the Somme, a rate of 1 per cent, partly owing to different diagnostic procedures. Nor did the total number of courts martial rise exponentially, particularly when set against the increasing size of the army. An end-of-year report based on 17,000 letters concluded that morale was sound. The traditional paternalism of a long-service army - rest and recreation, food and drink, good officer-men relations - acted as an effective disciplinary tool even for conscripts. The British army did not mutiny - at least, not on a scale which bears comparison with the French.
The village of Passchendaele was the furthest point of the British advance in the battle of Ypres, captured by the Canadian Corps on 6 November 1917.
The grouses the censors picked up were not those of professional servicemen but the anxieties of citizen soldiers: war-weariness, talk of peace, a desire for leave. More united than divided those at the front and at home. In 1917 5.5 million working days were lost in Britain, and as in France they peaked in May, with 200,000 workers out. Real wages were the prime complaint, but the possibility that the complaints might become politicised was reinforced in June, when the Independent Labour Party and the British Socialist Party met in Leeds and resolved to establish a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. It did not happen, but it fed government anxieties. Indicative was John Buchan’s ‘shocker’ for the year. In 1916 Greenmantle had concerned a German plot to spread holy war in the empire; in 1917 Mr Standfast pivoted on German attempts to exploit pacifism and labour discontent to provoke revolution at home. Buchan himself was chosen to head the Department of Information, created in February 1917 under the aegis of the Foreign Office, a recognition of how important to Lloyd George was the battle for ideas. In June 1917 the National War Aims Committee embarked on a programme of political education in factories and workplaces, and in January 1918 the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook was appointed to lead a fully fledged Ministry of Information.
The British army proved adept at entertaining itself. Its regulars, already accustomed to enlivening colonial service with amateur dramatics and team sports, responded warmly to the talents of its wartime soldiers. The Canadians rehearse Cinderella.
At the end of 1917, therefore, the British army and the British people were desperately tired. On 29 November Lansdowne voiced the reservations he had expressed privately a year previously in the Daily Telegraph, calling for a compromise peace. At the front, Haig, who had at first planned to resume the Ypres battle when the weather improved in the spring, realised on 15 November that it would not be possible. However, he couched his decision in terms not of the losses caused by his own operations, but of those inflicted by the government. Initially two - and ultimately five - divisions, together with Plumer and six French divisions, were sent to reinforce the Italians.
Of all the three Entente powers in the west, Italy was the shakiest in its hold on liberalism. First, the extension of the franchise in 1912 was undermined by the fact that 38 per cent of the electorate was illiterate. Second, socialist extremism was stronger than moderate reformism, and the only counter seemed to be the card of nationalism. Third, although entry to the war divided the country rather than united it, parliament was not consulted. Fourth, the economy was still predominantly rural, and it required the war to industrialise it. Moreover, with the war under way, Cadorna treated politicians with a contempt which blocked any alternatives to his own inept, if dogged, generalship. When in January 1916 Salandra suggested the formation of a council of war, combining the wisdom of generals and politicians, Cadorna declared that he was answerable only to the King. Criticised by the minister of war in the following month, he managed to force him to resign. He believed that the individualism of the Italians made them ‘morally unprepared for war’, and therefore saw the war as an opportunity to make peasants into Italians. His tool for doing this was harsh discipline. One in every seventeen Italian soldiers faced a disciplinary charge in the war, and 61 per cent were found guilty. About 750 were executed, the highest number of any army in the war, and Cadorna reintroduced the Roman practice of decimation - the killing of every tenth man - for units which failed to perform in battle.
The four battles on the River Isonzo in 1915 were followed by five more in 1916, and two in 1917. The Austrians on the Italian front had coined the phrase ‘the battle of material’ by September 1915, a full year before it was current in Germany. Normally outnumbered two to one, and unable to trade space for time, they possessed in the Croatian general Svetozar Boroevié a commander who never wavered in his determination to regain ground lost, an objective he generally achieved until the sixth battle of the Isonzo in August 1916. Thus they played into the hands of an enemy resolved on attrition as an operational method. And that is what Cadorna had resolved to do by the beginning of 1916. He knew that, with Austria-Hungary’s army divided over three fronts, he must eventually wear it down. But the result was that he failed to recognise opportunities for breakthrough when they presented themselves. On 10 August 1916 the Italians at last captured Gorizia, on the eastern bank of the Isonzo, and in the same month a year later, in the eleventh battle, Cadorna gained control of the Bainsizza plateau, but in both cases reckless disregard for casualties was accompanied by operational caution. In twenty-seven months’ fighting and eleven battles, the Italians had advanced less than seven miles, a third of the way to their stated preliminary objective, Trieste.37
Cadorna addresses his troops in a style more suggestive of a political dictator than a general. He himself had never seen combat, and his pre-war tactical writings praised the effects of shock over firepower
Italian casualties in the eleventh battle of the Isonzo were 166,000, 25 per cent greater than those of Nivelle on the Aisne. In the month of the battle, August, 5,471 soldiers deserted, as opposed to 2,137 in April. The Ravenna Brigade had mutinied in March and the Catanzaro Brigade in July.38 Even Cadorna recognised that his army needed time to rest and recuperate. But it did little to prepare its defences in depth, keeping its gun line well forward as though simply allowing the winter to pass before resuming the offensive. The Central Powers had no intention of waiting for what could be a devastating blow, and Germany transported seven divisions to reinforce the Austrians on the upper Isonzo. On 24 October, after a short but intense bombardment which targeted the Italian batteries, the German and Austrian infantry achieved a complete breakthrough. ‘The farther we penetrated into the hostile zone of defence’, wrote Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, ‘the less prepared were the garrisons for our arrival, and the easier the fighting. I did not worry about contact to right or left. Six companies of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion were able to protect their own flanks. The attack order stated: “Without limiting the day’s activities in space or time, continue the advance to the west, knowing that we have strong reserves near and behind us”.’39
By mid-November the Germans and Austrians had driven the Italians back sixty miles to
the River Piave. By following the valley floors, they had sustained the momentum of their advance until logistics and command confusion slowed it. Italian losses totalled almost 700,000, of whom only 40,000 were killed and wounded; 280,000 had been captured, many of them as intact units, and about 350,000 had deserted. Cadorna attributed his defeat not to tactical incompetence but to anti-militarism and defeatism in Italy as a whole. A year before, Senator Camporeale had reported after a visit to the south of the country that ‘more than half the land is uncultivated and with us poverty and rebellion and revolt are synonymous ... [The countryside] is swarming with thousands - 20 to 30 thousand - deserters’.40 There were about 100,000 deserters at large before the disaster of Caporetto (as the Italians called the battle; it was Karfreit to the Germans); peasants were ready to give the stragglers protection and to use their labour. The possibility of military collapse leading to revolution seemed real enough.
Violent protest peaked in May 1917, especially in Milan. In August, outbursts over bread shortages in Turin developed into anti-war demonstrations, and the army killed 41 and wounded about 200 more in restoring order. Women were at the forefront of these riots. By the end of the war they formed 21 per cent of the workforce but in 1917 they were 64 per cent of those striking, evidence of the anxiety about food but also of working-class solidarity. They struck because the penalties for them were lighter than for men, who were more subject to military discipline, and they linked the old patterns of rural, peasant protest with the first generation of urban workers in new industries. Although the number of individual strikes fell in 1917 as against 1915 and 1916, those which occurred were bigger in scale.