by Paul Ham
The German padres similarly went forth with their Lutheran bibles to console the wounded and deliver last rites to the dying. Feldgeistlicher K. Foertsch, padre with the 234 Infantry Brigade, witnessed the terrible scenes at Passchendaele on 26–27 October. ‘All I could do was offer words of comfort,’ he recalled.
He saw a Bavarian, ‘deathly pale, with his arms folded across his chest. I whispered a short prayer of comfort to him … and over there was anther man from near Würzburg. Wracked with pain, he called repeatedly [for] Our Lady, “Mary, Help!” I sat a long time with him until he became quiet and resigned to his fate. Then there was another man, cold as ice. I laid my hands on his forehead and cheeks … Yet another cried out for thirst. I went and fetched him some water …’
The wounded found their voices. One young man pleaded, ‘Don’t leave me Padre.’ So Foertsch dropped to the ground and took his hand. ‘There was a short roar and another thunderclap … Quite involuntarily I ducked down toward the wounded man who lunged up and threw his arms around me. Finally he lay still, but he would not let go of my arm. As I crouched next to him he talked to me about his home, his parents, his relations with his God … We managed a really intimate discussion despite the fact that all hell had broken loose around us.’74
Scores of little monuments to the fallen rise out of the windswept fields of Flanders. The rows of white headstones flash white against the green land, like ancient tablets bearing a message for our times: 169 cemeteries were built here, in an area of 140 square kilometres, a density of at least one cemetery per square kilometre or three per square mile.75
Here is the New Zealand Division’s memorial at Gravenstafel Junction, commemorating their breakthrough at Broodseinde. Here, the monument to the Scots, with the inscription, ‘It is in truth not for glory nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom …’ Every few hundred metres, another cemetery appears.
And here, on the plain beneath Passchendaele, lies the largest Commonwealth graveyard, the Tyne Cot Cemetery, named after the workers’ cottages along the river Tyne, with which the British nicknamed the German pillboxes. The cemetery is the final resting place of 11,956 British and Dominion servicemen, more than 8300 of whom remain unidentified and whose stones bear the inscription, ‘A Soldier of the Great War – Known Unto God’. Four German soldiers are also buried here. On the eastern boundary stands the Tyne Cot Memorial to the missing, listing the names of 34,857 men (33,690 British, 1166 New Zealanders and one Canadian). Their bodies could not be found or identified. Several famous and exotic regiments adorn the walls: the Black Watch, the Northumberland Fusiliers, the Auckland and Otago Infantry Regiments. Most of the men listed were killed during Third Ypres, but many also died in the 1918 Spring Offensive.76
Other nations lost many more over the course of the war than the Anglo-Saxon nations. The vast French ossuary at Verdun, for example, holds the remains of 130,000 soldiers; while the German mass grave at Langemarck contains about 44,000, including 3000 boys of school age killed in the ‘Kindermort’ of 1914.
Such quantitative judgements end at the point where individual grief begins. Walking among the graves, past the lists of names, one feels helpless to explain losses on this scale. Here are the names of a father and son, inscribed in the panel to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry; here a little cluster of head stones, set apart, signifying men killed by the same shell, their remains mixed up. Occasionally a Star of David or the absence of any religious symbol reminds the visitor that the dead were sometimes Jewish or atheist or held another belief.
The families were invited to choose the inscriptions. They often drew from the Bible, or hymns. The most popular Anglo-Saxon epitaph was taken from John 15:13: ‘Greater Love Hath No Man than This, that he may lay down his life for his friends’ – that their son had sacrificed himself, Christ-like, so that others may live in freedom. Or they accepted their loss as an act of God: ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away’ (Job 1:21). Or it was all a great mystery: ‘God holds the key of all unknown’. Or they chose lines from poetry. To remember Captain Clarence Smith Jeffries VC, his family applied the mysterious line from Theodore O’Hara’s poem ‘Bivouac of the Dead’: ‘On fame’s eternal camping ground their silent tents are spread’. Paper poppies pinned to little wooden crosses throng the base of Jeffries’ headstone, as they tend to do at the graves of other recipients of the Victoria Cross.
Perhaps the most moving, however, are the parents’ or wives’ own personal messages:
‘One of the best of sons’
‘Though wounded in the morning he fought till evening when he fell’
‘You have left behind some broken hearts that never can forget you’
‘My husband and pal so dearly loved’
Further on is the epitaph, which one sincerely wants to believe, to a young Australian private called H. R. Sloggett, killed in action on 21 October 1917, aged twenty: ‘Here lies the noblest work of God.’77
16
FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT
We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilized world and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon us … What will be the value of the blessings of peace to a nation so exhausted that they can scarcely stretch out a hand with which to grasp them?
Lord Lansdowne, in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, 29 November 1917
With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, 11 April 1918
Stopping in Paris on 11–12 November 1917 on his way back from Italy, Lloyd George expressed his displeasure with the course of the war. ‘We have won great victories,’ he famously said. ‘When I look at the appalling casualty lists I sometimes wish it had not been necessary to win so many.’1 The prime minister was in vintage, coruscating form: ‘When we advance a kilometre into enemy lines, snatch a small village out of his cruel grip, capture a few hundred of his soldiers we shout with unfeigned joy.’2 How, he wondered, would the press celebrate a genuine military triumph?
Conservatives were appalled. In their eyes, Lloyd George had not only attacked Britain’s field commanders, he had also gravely damaged the country’s morale. The press brayed at this meddling ‘amateur strategist’. The Spectator demanded Lloyd George’s dismissal: ‘a man capable of such levity, such irresponsibility, such recklessness, such injustice, is beyond endurance’.3 An outraged House of Commons forced the prime minister into a humiliating retreat: days later, he told Parliament that he had complete faith in his top soldiers and denied that he had intended to damage the general staff. Soon, however, the prime minister would commit another volte-face: the terrible news issuing from Flanders had him raging once more for Haig’s head.
If he could not sack Haig, Lloyd George would diminish him. The disaster of Third Ypres made another command reform inevitable. In October, he had set in motion a scheme to create another French-led command structure. That had been the main purpose of his trip to Rapallo in November: to forge a Supreme War Council, which he had warned Haig he intended to do in Paris in early October. The Council, approved by the War Cabinet on 2 November, would coordinate British, French, American, Dominion, Italian and Belgian forces in Europe. Leaders of the Allied governments would have a seat on the Council and joint command of the direction of war; a French commander would lead all Allied units on the Western Front. As Maurice Hankey wrote of the prime minister’s motives, ‘he would not go on unless he obtained control of the war’.4
The Council first met in Versailles at the end of 1917; not until March 1918 would it appoint the formidable Ferdinand Foch as supreme commander. Foch would be responsible for assembling the greatest army the world had seen, in a united will against Germany. His appointment was a body blow to Haig and Robertson, who on
ce again found themselves sidelined. They railed against the new command structure as unnecessary and likely to fail; and kept the press fully abreast of their opinions. Wully Robertson’s ‘resignation’ soon followed. Lloyd George offered him General Sir Henry Wilson’s job on the Supreme Council in Versailles, a technical demotion, and all the more wounding in light of Wilson’s eager acceptance of the CIGS job in return. Robertson’s was the most powerful ‘scalp’ in Lloyd George’s assault on his commanders – and it was to Haig’s personal discredit that he failed to defend the man who had supported him so faithfully and for so long.
The new command structure, a great improvement upon the dismal Nivelle arrangements a year earlier, married a respect for the independence of national armies with a broad vision of how they should be cooperatively deployed. Its formation occupied a long and tedious debate in Parliament, on 19 February 1918, punctuated by the plaintive voice of James O’Grady, the little known Labour member for Leeds East, whose message hauled everyone back to reality: ‘Men are dying at the front while all this is going on.’5
While Lloyd George was abroad, Haig made his own inquiries about casualties. On 15 November, he visited Lieutenant General Sir Sidney Clive, head of the British Mission at French Army headquarters, at Bavencourt, to examine the numbers. ‘D.H. interested in the graphics of losses of resource,’ Clive noted in his diary on 15 November 1917. ‘Looking at our figures he said very quietly: “Have we lost 500,000 men!”’6
Haig had not lost that many, but he had lost enough to horrify the War Cabinet. And he wanted hundreds of thousands more to fill their places and to continue his offensives into 1918. The Flanders campaign would resume in the spring, he told Robertson on 10 November, at the end of Third Ypres: ‘I pointed out the importance of the Belgian coast to Great Britain, and urged that nothing should be done to stop our offensive next Spring.’7
Into this distempered atmosphere, Haig sent his report for 1917. It brought Lloyd George’s simmering rage to boiling point. Haig had known since early August that the Flanders Offensive would fall well short of his goals, ending at best with the capture of Passchendaele. Here was the grim result: the ridge could not be held, and Haig had gained a few miserable miles at a staggering cost.
Hope in the outcome of Cambrai overshadowed the perception of failure in the Ypres Salient. For several months, Haig had been reluctantly planning this new offensive near the French village, using General Julian Byng’s Third Army and the largest massed tank attack yet deployed. The question of how the new tanks would perform transfixed generals, politicians and war reporters.
Cambrai began well, on 20 November: 378 Mark IV combat tanks and two corps of infantry (against Germany’s one), supported by 1000 guns (against Germany’s 54) and fourteen squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps, broke though the German wires and rolled over their front lines, gaining 7000 yards.8 The Germans had no answer to this shocking spectacle at first, no tanks of their own and limited anti-tank weapons. English church bells tolled a brilliant victory, prematurely: within days, a fierce German counter-attack drove the British off most of their gains, destroying scores of tanks and forcing the battle into another attritional stalemate. By the end, each side had lost about 45,000 men. British euphoria faded with another stalemate. It was an excruciating outcome so soon after Passchendaele, and demonstrated once again that the Germans were far from a spent force.
The Cabinet were in shock and Lloyd George apoplectic. After some 760,000 casualties in twelve months, Haig’s huge drafts on manpower had plumbed the depths of the nation’s reserves. The Cabinet had deep reservations about approving hundreds of thousands more, if Haig meant to stake their lives on biting off the next shell-shattered ridge. ‘To political leaders,’ Bean writes, ‘fired to accept his plans, but shocked by the result, the obvious moral was: “Keep back the men!”’9
Enough, Lloyd George said: that month, the War Cabinet devised a plan that aimed to halve the British casualty rate in the coming year. In January 1918, the government approved just 100,000 ‘A’ class recruits, a sixth of what the War Office had demanded.10 Volunteers would never make up the shortfall: the horrors of 1917 had impaired morale at home, and the enlistment rate had plunged. December set a new low in British recruitment, at 24,923 men. Haig thus entered 1918 facing a serious shortage of men, well below what he deemed necessary to meet the replacement rate. All this was the direct harvest of Third Ypres.
Military exigencies crowded Haig’s mind: if the government demanded victory, only more men could deliver it. He failed to see that the government’s determination to thwart his demands reflected the mood of a people experiencing a crisis of faith in the war.
On 29 November, Lord Lansdowne, spurred to action by the events in Flanders, reissued his plea for an armistice. This time, it appeared in a newspaper, The Daily Telegraph – after The Times refused to publish it – outraging the government and Conservatives, and garnering much public support. ‘We are not going to lose this war,’ Lansdowne wrote, ‘but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilized world and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon us … What will be the value of the blessings of peace to a nation so exhausted that they can scarcely stretch out a hand with which to grasp them?’11
Auckland Geddes, the director of national service, made his feelings known in less apocalyptic, melancholy terms, in his review of the manpower situation after Passchendaele and Cambrai (tabled in June 1918). ‘The heavy casualties which accrued …’ he wrote, ‘the effect of what was in common belief the unfruitful pouring out of life, upon the moral of the people and upon the willingness of the men to serve dogged for many years the war effort of the nation.’12
As for Cambrai, the Cabinet came close to accusing Haig of misleading the government over its prospects. According to one baleful minute, on 4 December, the enemy ‘had gained a success which was inconsistent with the advice in regard to the strength and condition of the German army’, which Haig had given the War Cabinet.13 An inquiry would be held into why such overwhelming British superiority in guns, aircraft and men had been so swiftly repulsed.
Haig’s star fell in December 1917. Lloyd George was determined to crush his authority and deny him men; senior military staff were privately calling for his removal; and even his press champions, the media barons Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere, sensing the popular mood, abandoned him. ‘There is the memory of a dead man, or the knowledge of a missing or wounded man, in every house,’ Northcliffe replied to a letter seeking support for Haig. ‘I doubt whether the Higher Command has any supporters whatever.’14 His papers The Times and The Daily Mail mauled the general staff as serial blunderers who had squandered British lives.
Haig held on to his job thanks to his conservative backers in government, a lack of suitable replacements and, most importantly, the prime minister willing that he should stay (exactly why is a murky matter, which we shall get to). And yet, whatever his enemies said about him, they all tended to agree that only Haig had the inner steel needed to lead, and endure the loss of, the numbers of men required to win the war.
The new French-led command structure was enacted just in time to confront Germany’s revival. At the end of 1917, far from being demoralised, the German commanders were in high spirits. In their eyes, it had been a year of victories, albeit with terrible casualties: they had crushed Nivelle’s offensive, signed a peace treaty with Russia, and held the line at Flanders. Mars had aligned in Berlin’s favour: the bulk of the American Army would not start arriving until mid-1918; the French forces were still reckoned unfit; and the British and Dominion armies were battered and disheartened.
This confluence of events opened a window on victory, encouraging Ludendorff to stake all on a massive counter-blow that might win the war. At a meeting on 11 November, the day after the end of Third Ypres, Ludendorff, Hindenburg and their generals began planning the first major German offensive since 1915. The Spring Offensive – Operation Michael – was s
cheduled to start in March 1918, by which time Germany would have amassed 192 divisions on the Western Front, opposing 156 Allied divisions. For the first time since October 1914, Haig was forced to fight a defensive battle, with fewer men and guns than Germany – a complete reversal of the situation at the start of 1917.
On 21 March 1918, this mighty German arsenal rolled across France and Belgium in a spectacular reprisal of August 1914. Passchendaele fell within three days; Messines and Hill 60 were quickly overrun. All the gains of the past two years, on the Somme, at Arras and the Aisne, yielded to Ludendorff’s juggernaut.
Denied the manpower needed to resist this typhoon, the British and Dominion forces fell back, sustaining casualties that ‘dwarfed the “butcher’s bill” of Passchendaele’.15 Not quite: some 254,740 British and French soldiers were killed or wounded or missing in the Spring Offensive, almost 20,000 fewer than the Allied casualties of Third Ypres.16 Gough’s Fifth Army nearly cracked: in the greatest mass capitulation in British history, 21,000 of his 90,882 casualties were taken prisoner. Gough was sacked, in the richest irony of his career: of all the sackable offences that fastened to his name, March 1918 should not have been one of them. The Fifth Army’s surviving formations bravely held. Had they broken, ‘the Germans would probably have won the First World War’.17