The First World War

by John Keegan

  The April weather at Arras was atrocious, rain alternating with snow and sleet, the temperatures relentlessly low; wet and shelling had turned the chalky surface of the attack zone into gluey mud, everywhere ankle-deep, in places deeper. For once, however, the long period of preparation did not arouse fierce German counter-measures. The commander of the Sixth Army, occupying the Vimy-Arras sector, von Falkenhausen, kept his counter-attack divisions fifteen miles behind the front, apparently believing that the seven in line—16th Bavarian, 79th Reserve, 1st Bavarian, 14th Bavarian, 11th and 17th and 18th Reserve—had sufficient strength to resist the assault.26 That was a mistake. Allenby and Horne, commanding Third and First Armies, had eighteen attack divisions, and a vast artillery superiority, while the local German commanders, knowing that Falkenhausen was holding his strategic reserves far away, also held their tactical reserves to the rear, with the intention of committing them only if the front broke.

  These dispositions proved calamitous for the Germans. Their unfortunate infantry were pinned in their deep dugouts by the weight of the British bombardment, which had also torn their protective wire entanglements to shreds. Though their sentries heard the sounds of the impending assault two hours before it began, the cutting of their telephone lines meant that they could not communicate with their artillery, which had in any case been overwhelmed by British counter-battery fire.27 When the British and Canadians appeared, plodding behind their creeping barrage, the defenders were either killed or captured below ground or, if they were lucky, had just enough time to run to the rear. Michael Volkheimer, in the 3rd Bavarian Reserve Regiment at the southern end of Vimy Ridge, saw the advancing waves almost on top of his trench, shouted to a comrade, “Get out! The English are coming!” and then ran to warn his regimental commander that “unless strong reinforcements were available to be thrown in from our side, the entire regiment would be taken prisoner … no such reinforcements were available, so the entire Ridge … fell into the hands of the enemy and of our regiment [of 3,000] only some 200 men managed to get away.”28

  The first day of the battle of Arras was a British triumph. In a few hours the German front was penetrated to a depth of between one and three miles, 9,000 prisoners were taken, few casualties suffered and a way apparently cleared towards open country. The success of the Canadians was sensational. In a single bound the awful bare, broken slopes of Vimy Ridge, on which the French had bled to death in thousands in 1915, was taken, the summit gained and, down the precipitous eastern reverse slope, the whole Douai plain, crammed with German artillery and reserves, laid open to the victors’ gaze. “We could see the German gunners working their guns, then limbering up and moving back. Transport waggons were in full retreat with hundreds of fugitives from the Ridge. There appeared to be nothing at all to prevent our breaking through,” wrote a Canadian lieutenant, “nothing except the weather.”29 In practice, it was not the weather but the usual inflexibility of the plan that deterred progress. A predicated pause of two hours, after the objectives had been gained, prevented the leading troops from continuing the advance. When they did so, the day was shortening and impetus ran out. On 10 April the first German reserves began to appear to stop the gap and when, on 11 April, an attempt was made to widen the break-in by an attack on the right at Bullecourt, an Australian division found uncut wire which the handful of accompanying tanks could not break. An intermission was then ordered, to allow casualties to be replaced and the troops to recover. Losses by then totalled nearly 20,000, one-third of those suffered on the first day of the Somme, but the divisions engaged were exhausted. When the battle was resumed on 23 April, the Germans had re-organised and reinforced and were ready to counter-attack on every sector. As a result, attrition set in, dragging on for a month, and bringing another 130,000 casualties for no appreciable gain of ground. The Germans suffered equally but, after the humiliation at Vimy, quickly rebuilt their positions and were in no danger of undergoing a further defeat on the Arras front.

  They had meanwhile inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the French. Their setback at Vimy had had two causes: first, an expectation that the British bombardment would last longer than it did, and a consequent failure to bring their counter-attack divisions forward in sufficient time to intervene, but second, an absolute deficiency in divisions on the Vimy-Arras sector. The compensation for that was to be felt by the French at the Chemin des Dames, where fifteen German counter-attack divisions had been assembled behind the twenty-one in line. If the Germans had been surprised at Vimy-Arras, it was to be the other way about on the Aisne, where evidence of a great offensive in preparation had alerted the Germans to what Nivelle intended.30 Then, too, there had been failures of security. Documents had been captured and there had been loose talk behind the lines. Nivelle, son of an English mother, spoke the language fluently and as early as January 1917, on a visit to London, “explained his methods in the most enchanting way across the dinner-table to enthralled and enraptured women who dashed off to tell their friends as much of the talk as they had understood.”31

  One way or another, the Germans had got ample warning of Nivelle’s plan for “rupture.” They had also put in place their own new scheme for “defence in depth,” devised by Colonel von Lossberg, which left the front line almost empty, except for observers, while the “intermediate zone” behind was held by machine gunners dispersed either in strongpoints or improvised shell hole positions. The supporting artillery, meanwhile, was deployed not in lines but in a haphazard pattern to the rear, while the real strength of the defence lay in the reserves deployed outside artillery range 10,000 and 20,000 yards from the front. The arrangement spelled doom to Nivelle’s plan, which required the French infantry to cross the first 3,000 yards of the Chemin des Dames front, a steep, wooded slope, pitted by natural cave openings, in three hours, the next 3,000 yards, on the reverse slope, where they would pass out of sight of their supporting artillery, in the next three hours, and the final 2,000 yards in two hours. Quite apart from the difficulties to be encountered in contesting those 8,000 yards—initial German resistance, wire entanglements, by-passed machine guns, local counter-attacks—the intrinsic weakness of Nivelle’s plan was that the energy of its initial stage was to be expended in an area that stopped 2,000 yards short of the real German defences. However successful, therefore, the French assault, and that was problematical, the attackers, when and if they achieved their final objectives, would immediately confront fresh troops whom, in their exhausted state, they would be hard-pressed to resist.

  Nevertheless, something of Nivelle’s confidence in “rupture” had communicated itself to his soldiers. General E. L. Spears, a British liaison officer, described the scene at dawn on 16 April on the start line, “A thrill of something like pleasure, excited sanguine expectation, ran through the troops. I was surrounded by the grinning faces of men whose eyes shone. Seeing my uniform, some soldiers came up to me eagerly. ‘The Germans won’t stand here … any more than they did before you at Arras. They fairly ran away there, didn’t they?’ The effect of the cheerful voices was enhanced by the sparkles of light dancing on thousands of blue steel helmets.” As zero hour approached, the waiting infantry fell silent, while the artillery, which was to jump its barrage forward in enormous leaps, purportedly to carry the infantry onward, crashed into action. “The start seemed good,” Spears thought. “The German barrage gave the impression of being ragged and irregular. Hundreds of golden flares went up from the enemy lines. They had seen the French assaulting-waves and were calling their guns to the rescue … Almost at once, or so it seemed, the immense mass of troops within sight began to move. Long, thin columns were swarming towards the Aisne. Suddenly some 75s appeared from nowhere, galloping forward, horses stretched out, drivers looking as if they were riding a finish. ‘The Germans are on the run, the guns are advancing,’ shouted the infantry jubilantly. Then it began to rain and it became impossible to tell how the assault was progressing.”32

  It was not only the rain—and slee
t, snow and mist, weather as bad and cold as on the first day of the battle of Arras—that made it impossible to chart the progress of the assault. The line of battle itself was disintegrating as the German defence sprang into action. “The headlong pace of the advance was nowhere long maintained. There was a perceptible slowing down, followed by a general halt of the supporting troops which had been pressing steadily forward since zero hour. German machine guns, scattered in shell holes, concentrated in nests, or appearing suddenly at the mouths of deep dugouts or caves, took fearful toll of the troops now labouring up the rugged slopes of the hills.”33

  The over-rapid pace of the barrage, by which the infantry should have been protected, was leaving the foot soldiers behind. “Everywhere the story was the same. The attack gained at most points, then slowed down, unable to follow the barrage which, progressing at the rate of a hundred yards in three minutes, was in many cases soon out of sight. As soon as the infantry and the barrage became disassociated, German machine guns … opened fire, in many cases from both front and flanks, and sometimes from the rear as well … On the steep slopes of the Aisne the troops, even unopposed, could only progress very slowly. The ground, churned up by the shelling, was a series of slimy slides with little or no foothold. The men, pulling themselves up by clinging to the stumps of trees, were impeded by wire obstacles of every conceivable kind. Meanwhile the supporting troops were accumulating in the assault trenches at the rate of a fresh battalion every quarter of an hour. As the leading waves were held up, in some cases a few hundred yards and seldom as much as half to three-quarters of a mile ahead, this led to congestion … Had the German guns been as active as their machine guns, the massacre that was going on in the front line would have been duplicated upon the helpless men in the crowded trenches and on the tracks to the rear.”34

  The massacre was comprehensive enough. Mangin, the hard colonial soldier commanding Sixth Army assaulting the left-hand end of the ridge, on hearing that his troops, who included his own colonials and the veterans of the XX “Iron” Corps, were held up, ordered that “where the wire is not cut by the artillery, it must be cut by the infantry. Ground must be gained.” The order was entirely pointless. Tanks might have broken the wire but none of the 128 little two-man Renault tanks, the first to be used by the French in battle, reached the German front line, almost all bogging in the churned-up approaches. The infantry by themselves could but struggle forward as long as they survived. On the first day they penetrated no more than 600 yards; on the third day the Chemin des Dames road, crossing the ridge, was reached; on the fifth day, when 130,000 casualties had been suffered, the offensive was effectively abandoned. There had been compensatory gains, including 28,815 prisoners, and a penetration of four miles on a sixteen-mile front, but the deep German defences remained intact. There had been no breakthrough, no realisation of Nivelle’s promise of “rupture.” On 29 April he was removed and replaced by Pétain. The French losses, which included 29,000 killed, could not be replaced.35

  Nor could, for a time at least, the fighting spirit of the French army. Almost immediately after the failure of the offensive of 16 April, there began what its commanders would admit to be “acts of collective indiscipline” and what historians have called “the mutinies of 1917.” Neither form of words exactly defines the nature of the breakdown, which is better identified as a sort of military strike. “Indiscipline” implies a collapse of order. “Mutiny” usually entails violence against superiors. Yet order, in the larger sense, remained intact and there was no violence by the “mutineers” against their officers. On the contrary, a strange mutual respect characterised relations between private soldiers and the commissioned ranks during the “mutinies,” as if both sides recognised themselves to be mutual victims of a terrible ordeal, which was simply no longer bearable by those at the bottom of the heap. Soldiers lived worse than officers, ate inferior food, got less leave. Nevertheless, they knew that the officers shared their hardships and, indeed, suffered higher casualties. Even in units where there was direct confrontation, as in the 74th Infantry Regiment, the “mutineers” made it clear that they wished their officers “no harm.” They simply refused to “return to the trenches.”36 That was an extreme manifestation of dissent. The general mood of those involved—and they comprised soldiers in fifty-four divisions, almost half the army—was one of reluctance, if not refusal, to take part in fresh attacks but also of patriotic willingness to hold the line against attacks by the enemy. There were also specific demands: more leave, better food, better treatment for soldiers’ families, an end to “injustice” and “butchery,” and “peace.” The demands were often linked to those of participants in civilian strikes, of which there was a wave in the spring of 1917, caused by high prices, resentment at war profiteering and the dwindling prospect of peace.37 Civilian protesters were certainly not demanding peace at any price, let alone that of a German victory, but they complained that “while the people have to work themselves to death to scrape a living, the bosses and the big industrialists are growing fat.”38

  Civilian discontent fed military discontent, just as the soldiers’ anxieties for their families were reinforced by the worries of wives and parents for husbands and sons at the front. The French crisis of 1917 was national. It was for that reason that the government took it so seriously, as did its nominee to replace Nivelle, Philippe Pétain. For all his outward abruptness, Pétain understood his countrymen. As the crisis deepened—and five phases have been identified, from scattered outbreaks in April to mass meetings in May, and hostile encounters in June, followed by an attenuation of dissent during the rest of the year—he set in train a series of measures designed to contain it and return the army to moral well-being. He promised ampler and more regular leave. He also implicitly promised an end, for a time at least, to attacks, not in so many words, for that would have spelled an end to the status of France as a war-waging power, but by emphasising that the troops would be rested and retrained.39 Since retraining would take divisions away from the front, he also introduced a new doctrine, akin to that already in force on the German side of the line, of “defence in depth.” Instructions he issued on 4 June were to avoid “the tendency to pack together the infantry in the front lines, which only augments casualties.” Instead, the first line was to be held only in strength enough to keep the enemy at bay and provide artillery observation.40 The majority of the infantry was to be kept in the second line, with a reserve in the third to mount counter-attacks. These instructions were strictly defensive in purpose. While the front was being reorganised for these new tactics, the army’s officers, with Pétain’s approval, were attempting to win back the men’s obedience by argument and encouragement. “No rigorous measures must be taken,” wrote the commander of the 5th Division’s infantry. “We must do our best to dilute the movement by persuasion, by calm and by the authority of the officers known by the men, and acting above all on the good ones to bring the strikers to the best sentiments.” His divisional commander agreed: “we cannot think of reducing the movement by rigour, which would certainly bring about the irreparable.”41

  Nevertheless, the “movement”—indiscipline, strike or mutiny—was not put down without resort to force. Both high command and government, obsessed by a belief that there had been “subversion” of the army by civilian anti-war agitators, devoted a great deal of effort to identifying ringleaders, to bringing them to trial and to punishing them. There were 3,427 courts-martial, by which 554 soldiers were condemned to death and forty-nine actually shot.42 Hundreds of others, though reprieved, were sentenced to life imprisonment. A particular feature of the legal process was that those sent for trial were selected by their own officers and NCOs, with the implicit consent of the rank and file.

  Superficially, order was restored within the French army with relative speed. By August, Pétain felt sufficient confidence in its spirit to launch a limited operation at Verdun, which restored the front there to the line held before the German offensive of Februa
ry 1916, and in October another operation on the Aisne drove the Germans back beyond the Ailette, the first-day objective of Nivelle’s ill-fated offensive. In general, however, the objects of the mutinies had been achieved. The French army did not attack anywhere on the Western Front, of which it held two-thirds, between June 1917 and July 1918, nor did it conduct an “active” defence of its sectors. The Germans, who had inexplicably failed to detect the crisis of discipline on the other side of no man’s land, were content to accept their enemy’s passivity, having business of their own elsewhere, in Russia, in Italy and against the British.

  “Live and let live” was not a new phenomenon, either of the First World War or any other. It had prevailed in the Crimea and in the trenches between Petersburg and Richmond in 1864–5, in the Boer War, where the siege of Mafeking stopped on Sundays, and on wide stretches of the Eastern Front in 1915–16. Soldiers, unless harried by their officers, have always been ready to fall into a mutual accommodation in static positions, often to trade gossip and small necessities, and even to arrange local truces. There had been a famous truce between the British and the Germans at Christmas, 1914, in Flanders, repeated on a small scale in 1915, while the Russians had organised Easter as well as Christmas truces as late as 1916. More generally, both sides on the Western Front, once they had properly dug themselves in, were content on those sectors unsuitable for major offensives—and they included the flooded zone in Flanders, the Belgian coal-mining area, the Argonne forest, the Vosges mountains—to fall into an unoffensive routine. In places the proximity of the enemy made anything but “live and let live” intolerable; legend describes a sector of “international wire,” defending trenches so close that each side allowed the other to repair the barrier separating them. Even in places where no man’s land was wide, opposing units might unspokenly agree not to disturb the peace. The British high command fiercely disapproved of “live and let live” and sought by many means—the ordering of trench raids, the despatch of trench-mortar units to particular sectors, the organisation of short artillery bombardments—to keep sectors “active,” with tangible results.43 The Germans found trench duty opposite British units, which consistently accepted casualty rates in trench warfare of several dozen a month, unsettling. The French, by contrast, were less committed to raiding than the British, rewarding those who took part in “patrols” with leave (whereas the British regarded raiding as a normal duty), and generally preferred to reserve their manpower for formal offensives. After the Nivelle offensive, though divisions which had been affected by indiscipline took trouble to organise raids and report their activity to higher headquarters, the majority in practice relapsed on to the defensive.44 The cost of their effort to win the war—306,000 dead in 1914, 334,000 dead in 1915, 217,000 dead in 1916, 121,000 dead in 1917, mostly before the mutinies, altogether a million fatalities out of a male population of twenty million—had deadened the French will to fight. Defend the homeland the soldiers of France would; attack they would not. Their mood would not change for nearly a year.