by John Keegan
Below Vimy the line passed slightly east of Arras, another treasury of medieval wool wealth architecture, battered flat during the war, now restored from cellars upward—cellars that sheltered Allied troops in tens of thousands during the war—to the downlands of the Somme. The Somme is an unappealing river, marshy and meandering, but the countryside that surrounds it appears fondly familiar to an English eye, rising and falling in long, green swells and hollows reminiscent of Salisbury Plain or the Sussex Downs. The British would come to know it well, for by 1916 their length of line, progressively extended southward as their numbers grew, reached almost to the valley of the River Somme at Péronne, which would form their new boundary with the French for the rest of the war.
The French share of the line, even after their transfer of the portions north of the Somme to the British, was always the longer. Immediately south of the Somme it ran through countryside closer and more wooded than that to the north until it reached Noyon on the Oise, its nearest approach to Paris, which lies only fifty-five miles distant; for most of the war the masthead of the newspaper edited by the great radical politician, Georges Clemenceau, would carry the words, “Les allemands sont à Noyon.” There it turned sharply eastward to follow the slope of the ridge between the Aisne and the Ailette rivers—this was the section first entrenched by the Germans after the battle of the Marne and so the original part of the Western Front—a ridge known as the Chemin des Dames after the pleasure path constructed on its crest for the daughters of Louis XV.
East of the Chemin des Dames, the abortive assault on which in 1917 was to precipitate the “mutinies” of the French army, the line followed the heights above Rheims, which was to lie within range of German artillery for most of the war. Onward again, still drawing out to the east, the trenches crossed the dry, stony plateau of the Champagne pouilleuse, ironically one of the French army’s largest peacetime training areas. The absence there of hedges or trees suited the manoeuvre of large bodies of troops and the practice of artillery, in pre-war rehearsals of mobile warfare that the Western Front’s coming into being had wholly frustrated.
At the eastern edge of Champagne, near Ste. Menehoud, the line entered the forest of the Argonne, a tangled wilderness of trees, streams and small hills, in which neither side could mount major operations but where both, nevertheless, kept up a constant bickering. Above the Argonne rise the heights of the Meuse, crowned by the fortifications of Verdun and encircled to the east by German trenches which then dropped down into the plain of the Woevre. The Woevre was critically important to the Germans, for it gave an easy approach to their own great fortress of Metz, and they had fought hard in the opening battles of 1914 to retain it. In late September they had actually secured the advantage of gaining a foothold across the Meuse at St. Mihiel, a salient that provided a bridgehead beyond the most important water obstacle on the Western Front and caused the French endless trouble. It would remain in German hands until retaken by the Americans in September 1918.
Below St. Mihiel the advantage lay with the French. During the battle of the Frontiers they had succeeded in retaining the city of Nancy and such high points nearby as the Ballon d’Alsace, from which commanding views stretch in all directions. Possession of the crests of the Vosges and of the line of the Meurthe river, which makes its way through those mountains, guaranteed to the French the security of the eastern end of the Western Front.13 Over its last fifty miles the front ran generally within German territory—though French before 1871—through the high Vosges, across the Belfort gap until it reached the Swiss frontier near the village of Bonfol. There the Swiss militia army, fully mobilised for war, surveyed the termini of the opposed trench barriers from neutral territory.14
THE STRATEGY OF THE WESTERN FRONT
The strategic geography of the Western Front is easy to read now, was easy to read then and largely dictated the plans made by each side at the start of trench warfare and in the years that followed. Much of the front was unsuitable for the style of major operations both sides envisaged, in which the power of artillery would prepare the way for large-scale infantry assaults, to be followed by cavalry exploitation into open country. The Vosges was such a front, and was accepted to be so by both French and Germans, who held it with second-rate divisions, reinforced by mountain infantry who occasionally disputed possession of the high points. Indeed, south of Verdun, neither side was to make any major effort between September 1914 and September 1918 and this stretch, 160 miles long, became “inactive.” Elsewhere, the Argonne proved unsuited to offensives as, for different reasons, did the Flemish coastal zone. The former was too broken, stream-cut and tree-choked, the latter too waterlogged for the delivery of attacks that required firm, unobstructed avenues of advance for a successful conclusion. Shelling into the Argonne threw the woodland into a jungle of broken vegetation; in the sea-level fens of Flanders, shelling quickly reduced the soil to quagmire. In the centre, the heights of the Aisne and the Meuse, though they were both to be contested in great battles, too much favoured the defender for offensive effort to be profitable. It was therefore only on the dry chalklands of the Somme and Champagne that attacks offered the promise of decisive success. The former stood below the wet Flemish country, the latter above the mountainous forest zone of the Meurthe and Moselle. They were separated from each other by the high ground of the Aisne and Meuse, the bulge in the front to which they formed the shoulders. Military logic therefore required that it was at those shoulders that the attackers should make their major efforts and defenders be best prepared to withstand an assault.
Who would be attackers and who defenders? In August 1914 it was the Germans who had attacked; Schlieffen’s maps showing the “line of the 31st day” coincide in eerie accuracy with the early Western Front. In September the French counter-attacked; the engagements during the “Race to the Sea” follow the course of the stabilised line in Artois, Picardy and Flanders with an equivalent precision. The trace of the railway network explains how these outcomes came about. Early in the campaign of 1914 the Germans took possession of the Metz–Lille line, running north-south within their area of conquest. The French, on the other hand, retained control of the Nancy–Paris–Arras line facing it. The latter is closer to the line of engagement than the former, and that proximity explains why the French were better able than their enemy to deliver reserves to the crucial point in time to win one battle after another.
The “Race to the Sea” is thus best understood as a series of stalemated collisions along the successive rungs of a ladder whose uprights were formed by those vital parallel railways. Amiens, Arras and Lille, near which the principal engagements of the “Race to the Sea” were fought are, as a glance at the railway map shows, all located on cross-country lines linking the two great north-south routes. Since the physical and human geography remained unaltered by the course of the fighting, the strategic advantage rested with the French, though the tactical advantage rested with the Germans, who had chosen the pick of the ground at the final points of contact.15
Since strategic geography is a major determinant of strategic choice, the geographical advantage enjoyed by the French disposed them to attack. Geography did not, however, supply the only argument for such a decision, nor for the complementary German decision to await attack on the Western Front. The real reasons were quite different. France, as the victim of Germany’s offensive of August 1914, and the major territorial loser in the outcome of the campaign, was bound to attack. National pride and national economic necessity required it. Germany, by contrast, was bound to stand on the defensive, since the setbacks she had suffered in the east, in its two-front war, demanded that troops be sent from France to Poland for an offensive in that region. The security of the empire was at stake; so, too, was the survival of Germany’s Austrian ally. The Habsburg army had been grievously damaged by the battles in Galicia and the Carpathians, its ethnic balance disturbed, its human and material reserves almost exhausted. A renewed Russian effort might push it over th
e edge. The real outcome of 1914 was not the frustration of the Schlieffen Plan but the danger of a collapse of the Central Powers’ position in Eastern Europe.
A piecemeal adjustment against that risk had been made as early as the last week of August, when the 3rd Guard and 38th Divisions had been transferred from Namur to East Prussia, as a result of the Tannenberg crisis. They had been followed by ten more between September and December. Moltke had not wanted to let any go. His successor, Falkenhayn, resented the transfer of every one. He believed that the war had to be won by making the major effort in the west. There the French army was recovering from its losses of the opening campaign—thirty-three new divisions were forming—while French industry was gearing up for a war of material. The British were creating a whole new army of volunteers, while training their peace-time militia, the Territorial Force, for active service; together these would produce nearly sixty divisions, besides those from Canada and Australia which were hastening across the Atlantic and Pacific to the motherland’s aid. Of these figures Falkenhayn did not have exact intelligence but his impression of the gathering of a huge reinforcement was accurate enough. It would shortly double the force opposing the Germans on the Western Front, while they were already reaching the limits of expansion open to them from their manpower potential. The number of their divisions could be increased by reducing the infantry strength of each, counting on artillery and machine guns to make good the consequent diminution of firepower, a measure already in hand. The absolute limit of troop availability already stood, nevertheless, in sight.
In the circumstances, Falkenhayn had convinced himself that 1915 must be a year of offence in the west and defence in the east, within the larger policy of bringing Russia to make a separate peace. He lacked, however, the authority to carry his case. Though the Kaiser, as Supreme War Lord, had confirmed him in the appointment of Chief of Staff in January 1915, when he gave up the post of Minister of War, he was acutely aware that the real prestige of office attached to Hindenburg, as victor of Tannenberg, and his chief of the eastern staff (OberOst), Ludendorff. What they did not want, he could not insist upon; conversely, what they wanted he was increasingly obliged to concede. Moreover, Ludendorff was waging an active campaign to undercut his primacy, which the German system in any case did not clearly define. Whereas Joffre exercised the powers of government within the Zone of the Armies, and Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State of War at the outbreak, effectively acted as Commander-in-Chief also, Falkenhayn was neither supreme commander, since that dignity belonged to the Kaiser, nor his immediate subordinate, since between him and Wilhelm II stood the Military Cabinet, a body without executive authority but ample influence.16 It was through the Military Cabinet that Ludendorff began his intrigue. He was assisted by the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, who shared the German people’s admiration for Hindenburg in full measure. During January 1915, the Chancellor approached the Military Cabinet with the proposition that Falkenhayn should be replaced by Hindenburg, so that a major offensive could be opened in the east. When the senior officers of the Military Cabinet pointed out that the Kaiser liked and trusted Falkenhayn, a friend of his youth, and disliked Ludendorff, whom he thought overambitious, the Chancellor withdrew. Shortly thereafter, however, he came into contact with Ludendorff’s agent inside Supreme Headquarters, Major von Haeften, who suggested he approach the Kaiser direct. Bethmann Hollweg did not only that but enlisted the help of both the Empress and the Crown Prince to argue for Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s eastern strategy. Falkenhayn fought back, first confronting Hindenburg with the demand that he resign his post, though that was impossible in the face of German public opinion, then securing Ludendorff’s transfer from eastern headquarters to that of the Austro-German army in Galicia.
When Hindenburg appealed to the Kaiser for his return, he found he had gone too far. Wilhelm II decided that the hero of the day was challenging the authority of the supreme command. He could not, however, find the will to impose his own. Lobbied by his wife and son, the Chancellor, even the superseded von Moltke, he clung to Falkenhayn, while knowing that he must also keep Hindenburg and grant him much of what he wanted. The result was a compromise. Falkenhayn, though affronted, decided not to make the thwarting of his strategy a resigning issue, came to a personal accommodation with Hindenburg and acquiesced in the return of Ludendorff to the OberOst headquarters. Hindenburg, perceiving that Falkenhayn could not be displaced, contented himself with the token of the transfer of troops from west to east that he had already received, and the freedom of action thus granted him to pursue the chance of further victories over the Russians. He had hopes that more troops could be extracted if he could make a convincing case for mounting an offensive that would cripple the Russian army and stabilise the still fluid Eastern Front. In those hopes lay the germ of the plan for a renewal of battle east of Cracow which would result in the great breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow in the coming May. Meanwhile the debate between Germany’s “westerners” and “easterners” would rumble on unresolved.17
There was as yet no such division of opinion on the Allied side. Despite the absence of any supranational command organisation, akin to the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee which so successfully coordinated Anglo-American strategy during the Second World War, the informal understanding between the British and French general staffs was working well. The Russian view was also represented through their liaison officers at both French and British headquarters. Field Marshal French was, in any case, of one mind with General Joffre. Joffre had but one thought: to drive the invader from the national territory. French shared it, if for reasons less burningly patriotic, more calculatedly strategic than those of his brother commander. Curiously, he believed, like Hindenburg, that the war would be settled on the Eastern Front. Nevertheless, “until the Russians [could] finish the business,” he was certain that the right policy for Britain was to commit all the troops available to Western Front operations.18 They were growing rapidly in number. By early 1915 the BEF was large enough to be divided into two Armies, First and Second, the Territorials were reaching France in strength and the first of the volunteer divisions of Kitchener’s New Armies were beginning to appear also. Soon the British would be able to take over stretches of the line from their ally and find a striking force to mount offensives on their own initiative.
The question was, where? An early plan to make a major effort on the Belgian coast, with the Royal Navy supporting a combined Anglo-Belgian army, foundered on Admiralty warnings that its light ships could not stand up to German coastal artillery and that its battleships could not be risked in such confined waters.19 Plans to use troops against the Austrians were shown to be equally unrealistic. Militarily weak though Austria-Hungary was, geographically it was almost unapproachable by a maritime power. The Adriatic was an Austrian lake, denied to the Royal and French Navies by Austrian submarines and its recently built Dreadnoughts. Gallant Serbia could be supported only by use of routes through Bulgaria which, though as yet non-belligerent, was hostile, or Greece, which was prudently preserving her neutrality. If Italy were to enter the war on the Allied side, which seemed increasingly likely, that would heighten the pressure on Austria, but would bring no direct assistance to Serbia nor open the Adriatic, since the Italian Dreadnought bases were in the Mediterranean. Romania, friendly to the Allies, could not risk entering the war unless and until Russia achieved the upper hand on the Eastern Front. The only other region beyond the Western Front where Britain might use its growing strength in independent action was therefore in Turkey, which had joined Germany and Austria as a belligerent ally on 31 October. The only active front Turkey had opened, however, was against Russia in the Caucasus, which lay too far from any centre of British power for an intervention to be contemplated there. Moreover the British government was as yet unwilling to divert troops from France, though it was prepared to consider deploying naval forces, as long as its preponderance in the North Sea was not diminished, if a promising use for them could be f
ound. In January the British War Council began to consider the preparation of a naval expedition to the Turkish Dardanelles, with the object of opening a way to Russia’s Black Sea ports. The mission was to be strictly naval, however; Britain’s commitment to France remained, in every sense, complete.20
Yet the Western Front presented not only militarily but also geographically a strategic conundrum. There was the initial difficulty of how to break the trench line; beyond that lay the difficulty of choosing lines of advance that would bring about a large-scale German withdrawal. During January the French operations staff at GQG, now located at Chantilly, the great horse-racing centre near Paris, began to analyse the problem. It turned on the rail communications which supported the German armies in the field. There were three systems that led back across the Rhine into Germany. The southernmost was short and easily defended. That left the two systems that supplied the Germans holding the great salient between Flanders and Verdun. If either, or preferably both, could be cut, the Germans within the salient would be obliged to fall back, perhaps creating once again those conditions of “open warfare” which, it was believed, alone offered the chance of decisive victory. The French at Chantilly, the British at GHQ at St. Omer, therefore agreed during January that the correct strategy during 1915 was for offensives to be mounted at the “shoulders” of the salient, in the north against the Aubers and Vimy ridges which stood between the Allies and the German railways in the Douai plain behind, in the south against the Champagne heights which protected the Mézières-Hirson rail line. The attacks would, in theory, converge, thus threatening the Germans in the great salient with encirclement as well as disruption of their supplies.