The First World War

by John Keegan

  On 9 June Ludendorff renewed the offensive, in an attack on the River Matz, a tributary of the Oise, in an attempt to draw French reserves southward but also to widen the salient that now bulged westward between Paris and Flanders. He was still undecided whether to press his attack force against its upper edge, and strike against the British rear, his original intention, or against the lower and drive on the capital. The Matz, in any case a limited attack, was quickly broken off on 14 June when the French, with American assistance, counter-attacked and brought the initial advance to a halt. The German inability to sustain pressure was also hampered by the first outbreak of the so-called “Spanish” influenza, in fact a worldwide epidemic originating in South Africa, which was to recur in the autumn with devastating effects in Europe but in June laid low nearly half a million German soldiers whose resistance, depressed by poor diet, was far lower than that of the well-fed Allied troops in the trenches opposite.

  With his troop strength declining to a point where he could no longer count upon massing a superiority of numbers for attack, Ludendorff now had to make a critical choice between what was important but more difficult of achievement—the attack against the British in Flanders—and what was easier but of secondary significance, a drive towards Paris. He took nearly a month to make up his mind, a month in which the German leadership also met at Spa to review the progress of the war and the country’s war aims. Shortage at home was now extreme, but there was nonetheless a discussion of introducing a “full war economy.” Despite the near-desperate situation at the front, the Kaiser, government and high command all agreed, on 3 July, that, to complement the acquisition of territories in the east, the annexation of Luxembourg and the French iron and coal fields in Lorraine were the necessary and minimum terms for concluding the war in the west. On 13 July, the Reichstag, to express its confidence in the direction and progress of strategy, voted war credits for the twelfth time.82 The Foreign Secretary, who had warned it that the war could not now be ended by “military decision alone,” was forced out of office on 8 July.83

  Ludendorff remained wedded to military decision and on 15 July committed all the force he had left, fifty-two divisions, to an attack against the French. The temptation of Paris had proved irresistible. At first the offensive made excellent progress. The French, however, had had warning, from intelligence and observation experts, and on 18 July launched a heavy counter-stroke, mounted by the fiery Mangin with eighteen divisions in first line, at Villers-Cotterêts. It was the day Ludendorff travelled to Mons to discuss the transfer of troops to Flanders for his much-postponed offensive against the British. The French attack brought him hurrying back but there was little he could do to stem the flood. The French had five of the enormous American divisions, 28,000 strong, in their order of battle, and these fresh troops fought with a disregard for casualties scarcely seen on the Western Front since the beginning of the war. On the night of July 18/19 the German vanguards which had crossed the Marne three days earlier fell back across the river and the retreat continued in the days that followed. The fifth German offensive, and the battle called by the French the Second Marne, was over and could not be revived. Nor could the Flanders offensive against the British be undertaken. Merely to make good losses suffered in the attacks so far, the German high command calculated, required 200,000 replacements each month but, even by drawing on the next annual class of eighteen-year-olds, only 300,000 recruits stood available. The only other source was the hospitals, which returned 70,000 convalescents to the ranks each month, men whose fitness and will to fight was undependable. In six months, the strength of the army had fallen from 5.1 million to 4.2 million men and, even after every rear-echelon unit had been combed out, its fighting strength could not be increased. The number of divisions was, indeed, being reduced, as the weaker were broken up to feed the stronger.84

  The army’s discontent with its leadership was beginning to find a voice. Though Hindenburg remained a figurehead above reproach, Ludendorff’s uncreative and repetitive strategy of frontal attacks now attracted criticism from within the General Staff. Lossberg, the great tactical expert, responded to the failure of the Second Battle of the Marne by arguing that the army should withdraw to the Siegfried Line of 1917, while on 20 July Major Niemann circulated a paper calling for negotiations with the Allies to be initiated at once. Ludendorff theatrically offered to resign but then recovered his nerve when the Allies did not move to exploit their success on the Marne. There was, he said, nothing to justify Lossberg’s demands for a withdrawal and no sign that the Allies could break the German line.85

  Had the material circumstances of the war been those of any of the previous years, Ludendorff’s analysis might have been proved correct; but they were not. A German army unable to make good its losses was now confronted by a new enemy, the U.S. Army, with four million fresh troops in action or training. More pertinently, its old enemies, the British and French, now had a new technical arm, their tank forces, with which to alter the terms of engagement. Germany’s failure to match the Allies in tank development must be judged one of their worst military miscalculations of the war. Their own programme, undertaken too late and with little imagination, had resulted in the production of a monstrosity, the A7V, manned by a crew of twelve, in which soldiers of the pioneers ran the engine, infantrymen fired the machine guns and artillerymen operated the heavy gun. Moreover, industrial delays limited output to a few dozen, so that the German tank force chiefly depended on 170 tanks captured from the French and British.86 They, by contrast, had by August 1918 several hundred each, the French fleet including a 13-ton Schneider-Creusot model mounting a 75mm gun, while the British, besides a number of light “whippet” tanks, possessed a solid mass of 500 medium Mark IV and Mark V machines, capable of moving at 5 mph over level ground and of concentrating intense cannon and machine-gun fire against targets of opportunity.

  Ludendorff’s belief during July that he retained the option of striking alternatively against the British or French was even more of a misconception than he might have imagined at worst. While his increasingly battle-worn infantry and horse-drawn artillery plodded forward over the worn battleground of the Marne, Foch and Haig were concentrating an enormous force of armour, 530 British tanks, 70 French, in front of Amiens, with the intention of breaking back into the old Somme battlefield through the extemporised defences constructed by the Germans after their advance in March and driving deep into their rear area. The blow was struck on 8 August, with the Canadian and the Australian Corps providing the infantry support for the tank assault. Haig had now come to depend increasingly on these two Dominion formations, which had been spared the blood-letting of 1916, to act as spearhead of his operations. Within four days most of the old Somme battlefield had been retaken and by the end of August the Allies had advanced as far as the outworks of the Hindenburg Line, from which they had been pushed back by the German offensive in March. Some of their progress was facilitated by deliberate German withdrawals, the enemy lacking both the strength and the confidence to defend steadfastly outside the strong and prepared positions of 1917. On 6 September, indeed, Ludendorff was advised by Lossberg that the situation could only be retrieved by a retreat of nearly fifty miles to a line established on the Meuse. The advice was rejected, however, and during the rest of September the Germans consolidated their position in and forward of the Hindenburg Line.

  Meanwhile the ever-stronger American army was taking an increasingly important part in operations. On 30 August, General John Pershing, who had reluctantly lent formations and even individual units piecemeal to the Allies, despite his determination to concentrate the American army as a single and potentially war-winning entity, achieved his purpose of bringing the First American Army into being. It was immediately deployed south of Verdun, opposite the tangled and waterlogged ground of the St. Mihiel salient, which had been in German hands since 1914, and on 12 September launched the first all-American offensive of the war. The Germans opposite were preparing to aban
don the salient, in conformation with general orders to retire to the Hindenburg Line, but were nevertheless taken by surprise and subjected to a severe defeat. In a single day’s fighting, the American I and IV Corps, attacking behind a barrage of 2,900 guns, drove the Germans from their positions, captured 466 guns and took 13,251 prisoners. The French, while paying tribute to the “superb morale” of the Americans, ungraciously attributed their success to the fact that they had caught the Germans in the process of retiring. It was true that many Germans were all too ready to surrender but Pershing’s army had nevertheless won an undoubted victory.87

  Ludendorff paid a tribute the French would not. He attributed the growing malaise in his army and the sense of “looming defeat” that afflicted it to “the sheer number of Americans arriving daily at the front.” It was indeed immaterial whether the doughboys fought well or not. Though the professional opinion of veteran French and British officers that they were enthusiastic rather than efficient was correct, the critical issue was the effect of their arrival on the enemy. It was deeply depressing. After four years of a war in which they had destroyed the Tsar’s army, trounced the Italians and Romanians, demoralised the French and, at the very least, denied the British clear-cut victory, they were now confronted with an army whose soldiers sprang, in uncountable numbers, as if from soil sown with dragons’ teeth. Past hopes of victory had been predicated on calculable ratios of force to force. The intervention of the United States Army had robbed calculation of point. Nowhere among Germany’s remaining resources could sufficient force be found to counter the millions America could bring across the Atlantic, and the consequent sense of the pointlessness of further effort rotted the resolution of the ordinary German soldier to do his duty.

  It was in that mood that, during September, the German armies in the west fell back to their final line of resistance, the Hindenburg Line, most of which followed the line of the original Western Front marked out by the fighting of 1914, though enormously strengthened in subsequent years, particularly in the central sector fortified after the retirement for the Somme in the spring of 1917. On 26 September, in response to Foch’s inspiring cry, “Everyone to battle,” the British, French, Belgian and American armies attacked with 123 divisions, with 57 divisions in reserve, against 197 German; but of those only 51 were classed by Allied intelligence as fully battleworthy.

  Ludendorff had called 8 August, when the British and French tank armada had overwhelmed the front at Amiens, the “black day of the German army.” It was 28 September, however, that was his own black day. Behind his expressionless and heavily physical façade, Ludendorff was a man of liquid emotions. “You don’t know Ludendorff,” Bethmann Hollweg had told the chief of the Kaiser’s naval cabinet earlier in the war. He was, the German Prime Minister said, “only great at a time of success. If things go badly, he loses his nerve.”88 The judgement was not wholly fair. Ludendorff had kept his nerve with decisive effect in the critical days of August 1914. Now, however, he lost it altogether, giving way to a paranoid rage “against the Kaiser, the Reichstag, the navy and the home front.”89 His staff shut the door of his office to stifle the noise of his rantings until he gradually regained an exhausted composure. At six o’clock he emerged to descend one floor of headquarters to Hindenburg’s room. There he told the old field marshal that there was now no alternative but to seek an armistice. The position in the west was penetrated, the army would not fight, the civilian population had lost heart, the politicians wanted peace. Hindenburg silently took his right hand in both of his own and they parted “like men who have buried their dearest hopes.”90

  The domestic consequences were swift to follow. On 29 September, a day when Germany’s ally, Bulgaria, opened negotiations with the French and British for an armistice on the Salonika front, the high command received the Kaiser, the Chancellor, von Hertling, and the Foreign Secretary, von Hintze, at headquarters in Spa to advise them that Germany must now make terms of its own. On 8 January 1918, President Wilson of the United States had presented Congress with fourteen points on which a peace honourable to all combatants and guaranteeing future world harmony could be made. It was on the basis of the Fourteen Points that the German leadership now decided to approach the Allies. Hintze proposed that any successful conclusion of negotiations, given the turmoil between the parliamentary parties within Germany, would require the establishment either of dictatorship or full democracy. The conference decided that only democratisation would persuade the Allies to concede the conditions for which the leadership still hoped—they included the retention of parts of Alsace-Lorraine and a German Poland—and accordingly accepted the resignation of Chancellor Hertling. In his place the Kaiser appointed, on 3 October, the moderate Prince Max of Baden, already known as an advocate of a negotiated peace and a major figure in the German Red Cross. He was also an opponent of Ludendorff and, as a first act, secured from Hindenburg a written admission that “there was no further chance of forcing a peace on the enemy.”91 That was prudent, for during early October Ludendorff began to recover his nerve. While Prince Max persuaded a wide range of parties to join his government, including the Majority Socialists, and while he secured for the Reichstag powers always denied it by the monarchy, including those of appointing the Minister of War and of making war and peace, Ludendorff began to talk of sustaining resistance and of rejecting President Wilson’s conditions. Those were restated on 16 October, in terms which appeared to demand the abolition of the monarchy, as one of those “arbitrary powers” menacing “the peace of the world,” to which the American President had declared himself an implacable enemy.

  The army at the front, after its brief moral collapse in late September, when troops returning from the trenches had taunted those going up with cries of “strike breakers,” had indeed recovered something of its old spirit and was contesting the advance of the Allies towards the German frontier. In Flanders, where water obstacles were plentiful, the French were held up, to Foch’s irritation, for some time. It was in these circumstances that Ludendorff composed a proclamation to the army on 24 October, which effectively defied the authority of the Chancellor and rejected the Wilson peace proposals, which it characterised as “a demand for unconditional surrender. It is thus unacceptable to us soldiers. It proves that our enemy’s desire for our destruction, which let loose the war in 1914, still exists undiminished. [It] can thus be nothing for us soldiers but a challenge to continue our resistance with all our strength.”92

  An officer of the General Staff managed to suppress the proclamation before it was issued. One copy, by mistake, however, reached the headquarters in the east, Ober Ost, where the signal clerk, an Independent Socialist, conveyed it to the party in Berlin. By noon it had been published, setting the Reichstag in uproar. Prince Max, enraged by the insubordination—which, characteristically, Ludendorff had attempted to retract—confronted the Kaiser with the demand that he must now choose between Ludendorff and himself. When Ludendorff arrived in Berlin on 25 October, with Hindenburg—both had left headquarters against the Chancellor’s specific instruction—he was told to report to Schloss Bellevue, where the Kaiser was in residence, and there forced, on 26 October, to offer his resignation. It was accepted with the briefest of words and without thanks. Hindenburg’s, also offered, was declined. When the two soldiers left the palace, Ludendorff refused to enter Hindenburg’s car and made his way alone to the hotel where his wife was staying. Throwing himself into a chair, he sat silent for some time, then roused himself to predict “In a fortnight we shall have no Empire and no Emperor left, you will see.”93

  THE FALL OF EMPIRES

  Ludendorff’s forecast was exact to the day. By the time, however, that Wilhelm II abdicated, as he would on 9 November, two other empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg, would have sued for peace also. The imminence of the Turkish collapse had been evident for some time. After the army’s victories at Gallipoli and Kut, its vital energy had ebbed away. The continuing campaign in the Caucasus against the
Russians had sapped its strength and chronic administrative inefficiency had deprived it of replacements. Though the number of divisions doubled during the war, from thirty-six to seventy, no more than forty existed at any one time and by 1918 all were weak, some scarcely as strong as a British brigade. The loyalty of the Arab divisions, moreover, was to be doubted after the Sherif of Mecca, Hussein, raised the standard of revolt in 1916. His Arab Army, operating against the flanks of the Turks in Arabia and Palestine, under the direction of the later famous liaison officer, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, distracted sizeable forces from the main battlefronts. The principal fighting was carried on, however, by the largely Indian army in Mesopotamia and, in Palestine, by an Egyptian-based British army which came to include large numbers of Australian and New Zealand cavalry.

  Mesopotamia, south of Baghdad, the Turkish administrative centre, had been conquered by the British during 1917, and late in 1918 they had advanced to the oil centre of Mosul. The real focus of their effort against the Turks, however, was in Palestine, where they established a foothold on the other side of the Sinai desert at Gaza in 1917. Several attempts to break the Turks’ Gaza line resulted in a Turkish evacuation of the position and the fall of Jerusalem on 9 December. During 1918 the British commander, Allenby, re-organised his forces and pushed his lines forward into northern Palestine where, by September, they opposed those of the Turks at Megiddo, site of the first recorded battle in history. Allenby’s breakthrough on 19–21 September brought about the collapse of Turkish resistance. On 30 October, five days after Ludendorff’s dismissal, the Turkish government signed an armistice at Mudros, on the Aegean island of Lemnos, from which the Gallipoli expedition had been mounted forty-two months earlier.

  Austria’s nemesis came on the soil, if not wholly at the hands, of its despised enemy, Italy. After the triumph of Caporetto, which had driven the Italians down into the plains of the Po, so that at one moment even Venice seemed threatened, the Habsburg effort had petered out. The Italians reorganised and, rid of the pitiless dictatorship of Cadorna, gained heart. The real defence of their country, however, passed to the British and French, who had transferred sizeable contingents to the Italian front immediately after the Caporetto disaster and succeeded in sustaining a substantial force there, despite withdrawals to cope with the crisis in the Western Front, throughout 1918. On 24 June the Austrians, who had been able to build up their own numbers after the Russian collapse, attempted a double offensive out of the northern mountains and on the River Piave, the stop line of the Italian retreat from Caporetto. Both attacks were swiftly checked, that on the Piave by the assistance of an unseasonal flood which swept away the Austrian pontoon bridges. The intervention of nature was not an excuse accepted by the Habsburg high command for the failure. Conrad von Hötzendorf was removed from command and the young Emperor, Karl I, began to look for means to preserve his empire by political rather than military means. On 16 October, two weeks after he had already sent President Wilson word of his willingness to enter into an armistice, he issued a manifesto to his peoples that, in effect, transferred the state into a federation of nationalities.