The First World War

by John Keegan

  South of Dixmude the line of the Yser and the Ypres canal was held by a brigade of French sailors, stalwart regulars of the fusiliers-marins, then by Territorials and cavalry as far as Langemarck, on the outskirts of Ypres. From Langemarck southward the arriving British had pegged out an advanced line that ran in a circle around Ypres towards the low ridge of higher ground at Passchendaele and then southward again across the River Lys to La Bassée canal. The length of their line was thirty-five miles, to hold which Sir John French had available six infantry divisions, with one in reserve, and three cavalry divisions, unsuitable as cavalry was, given its low scales of artillery and machine-gun equipment, for defensive operations. The only reinforcements on which he could count were another infantry division, the 8th, some additional regular cavalry and volunteer horsed yeomanry and, en route from India, the advance guard of four infantry and two cavalry divisions of the Indian Army. These, composed of British and Indian units in a ratio of one to three, though they included a high proportion of hardy Gurkhas, were scarcely suitable for warfare in a European winter climate against a German army.125 Weak in artillery and without experience of high-intensity operations, their arrival did not promise any enhancement of the BEF’s offensive capacity.

  Yet, at the outset of what would swell into the First Battle of Ypres—in which Indian units would fight gallantly and effectively both in defence and attack—Field-Marshal French still preserved hopes of mounting an attack that, in company with the French armies, would carry the Allies to the great industrial centre of Lille and thence to Brussels.126 His hope was shared by Foch, who now commanded the northern wing of the French armies and had convinced himself that the enemy could not find the strength to hold what he still believed was an open front on the coastal plain. Both deluded themselves. Falkenhayn, the new head of OHL, not only disposed of the relocated Sixth Army, with its eleven regular divisions, and of Beseler’s III Reserve Corps, which had conquered Antwerp, but of an entirely new collection of war-raised formations, eight divisions strong.

  These belonged to a group of seven Reserve Corps, numbered XXII to XXVII, raised from volunteers who had not previously undergone military training. Because Germany had needed to conscript only 50 per cent of the annual class of men of military age to fill the ranks of the peacetime army (France had conscripted 86 per cent), a pool of five million men aged from twenty to forty-five was available to Germany for war service.127 Of those the best were students exempted while they pursued their studies. They had responded to the outbreak by volunteering in huge numbers, together with high-school boys preparing for university, and other young men ineligible for the draft. The later-to-be-famous writer Ernst Jünger, who had just completed his school-leaving certificate, fell into the second category; Adolf Hitler, an Austrian citizen living in Munich, into the third. Jünger, after waiting for three days at the recruiting office, managed to find a place in the 44th Reserve Division.128 Hitler, who had written a personal appeal to the King of Bavaria, was eventually embodied in the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division.129 The recruits received two months’ training, under sergeants who were mostly schoolmasters recalled to the colours, and then left for the front.130 Of these thirteen new divisions, two went to Russia, one to the front in Lorraine, ten to Flanders. It was those which, in the third week of October, would open the assault on the BEF between Langemarck and Ypres.

  The battle that ensued raged almost continuously from early October, while the British and French were still attempting to push forward round the imagined German flank, until late November, when both sides accepted the onset of winter and their own exhaustion. Geographically it divided into four: a renewed offensive by Beseler’s corps against the Belgians on the coast, nullified by the inundations; an attempt by the French under Foch to drive north of Ypres towards Ghent, deep inside Belgium, an over-optimistic project checked by the Germans’ own offensive; the battle of Ypres itself, between the BEF and the German volunteers; and, to the south, a defensive battle conducted by the right wing of the BEF against the regular divisions of the German Sixth Army. Fighting on the three latter sectors merged effectively into one battle, so confused was combat and so unrelenting the German effort. British survivors were content to say they had been at “First Ypres,” a battle honour that denoted both a crucial success and the destruction of the old regular army.

  Arriving in stages from the Aisne, II Corps on 10 October, III Corps on 13 October, the BEF began by pressing forward east of Ypres towards the ridges that swell some five miles beyond. The names of these low heights—Passchendaele, Broodseinde, Gheluvelt, Messines—were to recur, had the first assailants but known it, throughout the four coming years of war and to resound with menace. As the British arrived, so did fresh German corps to meet them, the XIV on 15 October, then the VII and XIX, on 19 October the XIII Corps. Under pressure, the British fell back. The British IV Corps, composed of the 7th Division and 3rd Cavalry Division, was driven close to the ancient ramparts of Ypres. The arrival of I Corps, commanded by General Douglas Haig, on 20 October secured Ypres itself, but that exhausted the army’s strength on hand; reinforcements from the empire, including the Indians, were all that were promised, and they were as yet only on their way. It was on 20 October that a general German offensive began against the whole front from La Bassée canal in the south to the estuary of the Yser in the north, twenty-four divisions against nineteen, though the latter total included the six terribly weakened Belgian. The real contest was between fourteen German infantry divisions against seven British, with three British cavalry divisions fighting as infantry, and a collection of French sailors, Territorials and cavalry holding the river line between the British and the Belgians on the sea.

  The line was held by the superiority of the British in rapid rifle fire. In artillery they were outgunned more than two to one, and in heavy artillery ten to one. In machine guns, two per battalion, they were equal with the enemy. In musketry, still quaintly so called in the BEF, they consistently prevailed. Trained to fire fifteen aimed rounds a minute, the British riflemen, of the infantry and cavalry alike, easily overcame the counter-fire of the attacking Germans who, coming forward in closely ranked masses, presented unmissable targets.131 That the British were defending, the Germans attacking might be thought to explain the extraordinary disparity in casualties suffered during the October and November fighting around Ypres—24,000 British dead to 50,000 German—but it does not. The BEF’s trenches, at best hasty scratchings three feet deep, at worst field ditches, both frequently knee-deep in rain- or groundwater, were as yet unprotected by barbed wire. At the wettest places the defenders crouched behind sandbag mounds or brushwood barricades. In the absence of strong physical barriers to hold the enemy at a distance, it was the curtain of rifle bullets, crashing out in a density the Germans often mistook for machine-gun fire, that broke up attacks and drove the survivors of an assault to ground or sent them crawling back to cover on their start lines. “Over every bush, hedge or fragment of wall floated a thin film of smoke,” wrote the German official historian, “betraying a machine gun rattling out bullets”—mistakenly.132 The smoke was the signature of individual British soldier’s marksmanship.

  By the end of October the wider German offensive had failed, at enormous cost, particularly to the German volunteer corps. At their cemetery at Langemarck today, beyond a gateway decorated with the insignia of every German university, the bodies of 25,000 student soldiers lie in a mass grave; others lie in threes and fours under headstones inscribed to Volunteer Schmidt and Musketeer Braun. Dominating the hecatomb are sculptures by Käthe Kollwitz, herself a bereaved parent of 1914, of a mother and father mourning their lost son.133 They represent tens of thousands of bourgeois Germans whom this phase of the battle, the “Kindermord bei Ypern,” the Massacre of the Innocents at Ypres, disabused of the belief that the war would be short or cheap or glorious, and introduced to the reality of attrition, of mass death and of receding hope of victory.

  This brutal disillus
ionment was the work of the last Tommy Atkinses, working-class, long-service regulars, shilling-a-day men of no birth and scanty education. They shared nothing of the mystical patriotism of their German enemies who “had left lecture rooms and school benches [to be] melted into a great inspired body, [longing] for the unusual, for great danger … [and] gripped [by war] like an intoxicant.”134 Their patriotism was to the little homeland of the regiment, their first loyalty to barrack-room friends. “After a while,” recalled Corporal William Holbrook of the Royal Fusiliers, separated from his platoon during confused fighting, “I came across some more of our fellows and one officer … Once we’d got together and were deciding what to do, a German officer came crawling through the bushes. When he saw us he said, ‘I am wounded’—perfect English … [our officer] said to him, ‘You shouldn’t make those bloody attacks, then you wouldn’t get wounded.’ It gave us a laugh! Anyway we bandaged him up, waited on there and shortly afterwards [our officer] was killed by a stray bullet, so we had no officers then. All you could hear was some firing going on, but I didn’t know where the devil I was really.” Holbrook found a friend, “name of Cainici, he was a London Italian, he was a real Cockney he was, I used to like him,” took shelter with him from shelling, dug a shrapnel ball out of his friend’s knee when he was hit, saw him off to the rear, then crawled off to look for “a better place,” found a dying German, tended him, saw him die, “covered him over with leaves and twigs, anything I could scoop up just there” until, eventually, when he could “hear where the firing was [and] knew which direction [to go], crawled back” to rejoin his unit.135 Holbrook’s Cockney matter-of-factness—the Royal Fusiliers was a London regiment—epitomises the spirit of the old British Expeditionary Force, whose soldiers died in their thousands at Ypres not because of an ideal of self-sacrifice but because it was expected of them and, in any case, there was no alternative.

  On 31 October Falkenhayn renewed the offensive on a narrower front, astride the road that leads from Menin, on the higher ground the Germans occupied, to Ypres. The attack was mounted by the specially assembled Group Fabeck, named after its commander, which consisted of a mixture of regular and volunteer corps, six divisions in all. Pressing down into the low ground, through a belt of vegetation the British would continue to call “woods”—Polygon, Shrewsbury, Nuns’ Wood—long after the trees had disappeared, the Germans secured territory everywhere, and at the height of the attack broke through at Gheluvelt. Their thrust was repelled by the hasty assembly of bits and pieces of broken and exhausted battalions, Worcesters, Gloucestershires, Welch, Queen’s, 60th Rifles, Loyals, Sussex, Northamptonshires, Gordon Highlanders, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantrymen, and some Royal Dragoons fighting on foot. The German history speaks of “the enemy reserves being too strong” and of the British “bringing up two new divisions.”136 The reality was of tiny parcels of tired men stopping gaps in the line, stuffing fresh clips into their Lee-Enfields and firing “mad minutes” at the onpressing field-grey ranks. The arrival of some French units, begged by French from Foch, thickened the defence, but the crucial sector was held by British rifle fire.

  The Germans renewed their offensive on 11 November, by their calculation the twenty-second day of a battle “in which death had become a familiar comrade.”137 The point of pressure was Nuns’ Wood (Nonnenboschen), just north of the Menin road and only four miles from Ypres itself. Already the magnificent Gothic buildings of the ancient wool town, the Cloth Hall, the Cathedral, the merchant weavers’ houses, were falling into ruin under the weight of heavy German artillery fire. The outlying country, too, was taking on the pockmarked, denuded look that would characterise its landscape for years to come. Its villages and farmsteads were broken by shelling, the little chateaux of the Flemish nobility already stood roofless and forlorn; a direct hit on Hooge chateau, two miles from Ypres, had killed many of the staff of the British 1st and 2nd Divisions on 31 October.138 Hooge was the target of a concerted attack by the Prussian Guard and the German 4th Division on 11 November and the battle raged all day. The initial assault by the 1st Foot Guards, premier regiment of the German army, was stemmed by a collection of cooks and officers’ servants from the 5th Field Company, Royal Engineers. Later part of the 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, a few dozen strong, counter-attacked and drove the 1st and 3rd Foot Guards back whence they came.

  Fighting around Ypres would flicker on until 22 November, the date chosen by the official historians to denote the First Battle’s termination. The British survivors, whose unwounded numbers were less than half of the 160,000 which the BEF had sent to France, were by then stolidly digging and embanking to solidify the line their desperate resistance over the preceding five weeks had established in the face of the enemy. The French, too, were digging in to secure the territory for which they had fought both north and south of the city. At best the line ran a little more than five miles to the eastward; elsewhere it stood much closer. Everywhere the Germans held the high ground, dominating the shallow crescent of trenches the British, who were to be its guardians for most of the coming war of attack and defence, would call “the Salient.” Its winning had cost uncountable lives, French as well as British. The Germans, “whose vanguards had known in the plains of Flanders life and purpose for the last time,” had lost even more heavily.139 At least 41,000 of the German volunteers, the Innocents of Ypres, had fallen outside its walls.

  They represented but a fraction of all the dead of the Battles of the Frontiers, of the Great Retreat, of the Marne, of the Aisne, of the “Race to the Sea” and of First Ypres itself. The French army, with a mobilised strength of two million, had suffered by far the worst. Its losses in September, killed, wounded, missing and prisoners, exceeded 200,000, in October 80,000 and in November 70,000; the August losses, never officially revealed, may have exceeded 160,000. Fatalities reached the extraordinary total of 306,000, representing a tenfold increase in normal mortality among those aged between twenty and thirty; 45,000 of those under twenty had died, 92,000 of those between twenty and twenty-four, 70,000 of those between twenty-five and twenty-nine.140 Among those in their thirties, the death toll exceeded 80,000. All deaths had fallen on a male population of twenty million and more particularly on the ten million of military age. Germany had lost 241,000, including 99,000 in the 20–24 age group, out of a male population of thirty-two million.141 Belgium, out of 1,800,000 men of military age, had suffered 30,000 dead, a figure that was to recur with gruesome consistency in each succeeding year of the war.142 The total was the same as that for British deaths, with the difference that the British dead had almost all belonged to the regular army and its reserve of time-expired volunteer soldiers; those outside its ranks who had died, citizen soldiers of the few Territorial Force regiments, such as the London Scottish, which had reached Ypres before the end of the battle, and sepoys of the Lahore and Meerut Divisions, were few in number.143 Their casualties would soon rise grievously, for the Indians held long stretches of the line throughout the coming winter, suffering casualties of a hundred per cent in some battalions before the year of 1915 was out, while it was the arrival of the Territorial Force in strength in 1915 that alone allowed the British army to sustain its share of the war effort in France and to participate in the offensives mounted by Joffre in the Artois and Champagne sectors of the Western Front.144

  The prospect of any offensive, either by the Allies or the Germans, looked far away as winter fell in France at the end of 1914. A continuous line of trenches, 475 miles long, ran from the North Sea to the mountain frontier of neutral Switzerland. Behind it the opposing combatants, equally exhausted by human loss, equally bereft of re-supplies to replace the peacetime stocks of munitions they had expended in the previous four months of violent and extravagant fighting, crouched in confrontation across a narrow and empty zone of no man’s land. The room for manoeuvre each had sought in order to deliver a decisive attack at the enemy’s vulnerable flank had disappeared, as flanks t
hemselves had been eaten away by digging and inundation. The hope of success in frontal attack had temporarily disappeared also. The experience of the French in Alsace and Lorraine in August, of the British in the Aisne in September, of the Germans in Flanders in October and November had persuaded even the most bellicose commanders that offensives unsupported by preponderant artillery would not overcome and, for the meanwhile, the artillery of all armies was short of guns and almost wholly without ammunition; at the end of the First Battle of Ypres British batteries were limited to firing six rounds per gun per day, scarcely enough to disturb the parapets of trenches opposite and wholly inadequate to support infantry in an advance against machine guns.145 A sort of peace prevailed.

  The war in the west had come full circle. In the four months between mobilisation and the stabilisation of the front, it had moved from hostility without action to hostility with quietus, with an intervening passage of intense aggression. Hindsight supplies a strong sense of similarity between the campaign of 1914 and that of 1870. Both had begun with French attacks in Lorraine towards the Rhine. Both had developed as German counter-offensives which resulted in grievous French defeats. Both had continued with a German advance to the outskirts of Paris, which failed to secure victory in the face of revived French resistance. Both had culminated in each side constructing entrenched positions too strong to be carried by sudden assault and in the attacker’s decision to wait out events until the defender’s powers were overcome by the pressure of events. The comparison fails beyond that point. In 1870 the Germans succeeded in surrounding the capital and consigning the French field armies of the interior to haphazard and uncoordinated local operations. In 1914 the French army had ridden out defeat in the field, sustained its cohesion, driven the invader from the environs of the capital, won a sensational defensive victory and dictated that a war of entrenchment would be fought not in the heart of the country but at the periphery of the national territory. In 1870 German armies roamed northern, central and western France at will. At the end of 1914 the French army still controlled seventy-seven of the republic’s ninety departments, remained firm in spirit, potentially strong in material force, and was supported by a great imperial and maritime power determined to see through the ordeal of an alliance war until the invader was defeated. These were the conditions that would assure Germany would enjoy no repetition of the quick and easy victory it had won forty-three years earlier.