The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (91 page)

What remained of both armies settled down to sit out the winter in trenches opposite one another. There they would remain in growing numbers for the next three and a half years. By the end of the war German and English soldiers had begun playing football with one another at Christmas, so surreal had the situation become. The trenches–the form of warfare which most characterized the First World War–were a visible stalemate. The two sides, the allies and the central powers, opposed each other in two continuous lines of soldiers sheltered in deep ditch dugouts. These trenches ran from the coast of Belgium, dipped south into industrial northern France and skimmed the French border with Alsace and Lorraine until they reached the frontier of Switzerland.

In December 1914 the war became real to the people of Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool, when they were bombarded by German warships. It was the first enemy assault on British civilians since Charles II’s reign, when the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway. By Christmas one million men of all shapes and beliefs had volunteered for the British army to defend their homeland. They were inspired by Lord Kitchener’s recruiting campaign, not least the famous poster of Kitchener pointing his finger at the observer with the legend beneath, ‘Your country needs YOU’.

By 1916, when conscription was brought in, as many as two and a half million Britons had volunteered to fight. After a short training in how to handle a gun they crossed the Channel to reinforce the trenches–often organized in neighbourhood battalions. For the first time ever Britain put an enormous land army into the field to prevent the Germans overrunning France. The Kitchener armies were indispensable. By the end of 1915 the old professional army, 150,000 soldiers, had been wiped out.

Over the next three years more than a million French, British and empire troops died in the trenches, often for just a few feet of land. Keeping the line steady took a terrible toll in lives. The only way the French and British could move forward and drive the Germans out, or the Germans move forward into France, was by colossal artillery barrages to clear the enemy. Then the infantry would leap out of their trenches and charge ‘over the top’. The line never moved more than about twenty miles east or west, and it never really broke until 1917. It merely bulged until other men were rushed in to close the gaps.

The flower of the rising generation died and were hastily buried in the earth of Flanders. Those battlefields, or slaughterfields, destroyed many of the best and bravest who had volunteered early, unhappily for Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The number of junior officers killed–that is, the ablest young soldiers–was especially high because so much of the action required leading from the front to take out machine-gun nests.

On the eastern front, on the other side of Europe, things did not look more promising despite the enormous numbers of Russian troops and their proverbial stoicism. The gallantry of the Russian attack on East Prussia helped save Paris and the allies, but during battles at Tannenberg at the end of August 1914, and then in early September by the Masurian Lakes, 250,000 Russians were killed. The strategy of two brilliant German officers, Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, produced a triumph for their armies. Though the Russians overran the Austrian province of Galicia, by the summer of 1915 the Germans had thrown them back to the Duna river.

The Ottoman Empire had entered the war in the hope of retrieving Egypt and Cyprus from Britain. It thus posed a threat to the Suez Canal, and an additional 250,000 empire troops had to be sent to guard it. British and French troops began attacking the Turks all over their Middle Eastern empire. Indian troops provided the bulk of the soldiers for the campaign in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) which began in 1915, though they were forced to surrender in 1916 after being besieged at Kut-el-amara on the Tigris.

In May 1915 Italy declared for the allies, after weighing up what she would get out of the war and having already had her differences with the Ottoman Empire when she seized Tripoli. She had always had close links with England and she intended after the war to consolidate her Risorgimento by taking more territory from Austria. In the secret Treaty of London of 26 April the allies had assured Italy that she would gain the southern Tyrol, the Trentino, Istria and the Dalmatian coast. Bulgaria, which might have joined the allies, came in on the German side and successfully invaded Serbia in October.

Nineteen-fifteen was not a good year for the allies. Britain, which was so entirely dependent on her colonies for food, began to have her shipping sunk by German torpedoes and submarines. Submarine warfare was a naval innovation in whose development Germany had taken the lead. The first Zeppelins, pneumatic grey airships in the sky, appeared over London in May and thereafter became one of the features of the war, attacking many British cities. A mass onslaught was carried out by fourteen German airships from the Humber to the Thames in September 1916.

There were also raids by aircraft. The first British plane had flown in 1908 and the Frenchman Louis Blériot crossed the Channel in 1909. Although it was not until the next war that the Royal Air Force was to come into its own, by 1912 its predecessor–the Royal Flying Corps–had been established, and by 1914 around 120 aircraft, divided between the army and navy, were being used for reconnaissance. In April 1918 in response to the air-raids the Royal Air Force came into existence as a separate service.

Meanwhile the British public, already appalled at losing their sons, husbands and brothers in such numbers, were scandalized when commander-in-chief of the BEF, General Sir John French, announced that his men were dying for lack of shells. This was so whipped up by the press that it came to be widely believed that it was government inefficiency that was losing the war, and the Liberal administration was forced to enter a coalition in May 1915 with the Conservatives and some Labour MPs. But with the coalition’s appointment of Lloyd George as minister of munitions the production of shells increased dramatically. The energy and ingenuity of the Welsh Wizard made him the dominant figure in the government, and he soon began running the war effort more or less single-handed. In a coup effected with the help of the Conservatives he would replace Asquith as prime minister at the end of the following year.

Lloyd George’s rule of thumb, as he candidly revealed, was that all generals underestimated their soldiers’ needs and never ordered enough shells: one should take what the generals ordered and multiply it by three. Thanks to enterprising manufacturers, many of whom were friends of Lloyd George, munitions factories were set up all over the country. Though unionized labour was inadequate for the numbers of shells required, unions were reluctant to allow dilution–that is, to have unskilled workers brought in. But Lloyd George made a deal with the unions: for the length of the war they would accept women and unskilled workers, provided that the position returned to normal at the end of the war. He also promised to restrict profits while the war was on and union rights were temporarily in abeyance; and the unions were to participate in deciding how their industries were run via workers’ committees. The trade unions thus vastly increased their role, and doubled their membership, during the war. These arrangements–what Lloyd George called ‘the great charter for labour’–were a stroke of genius. He had reassured factory workers, and the resulting enthusiasm for the war and for the government had the effect of increasing productivity. The charter lessened the danger from strikes, which might have bought about Britain’s defeat–for the pre-war influence of syndicalism continued, even if it was temporarily overcome by patriotism.

But, despite the increased number of shells less than a year after Ypres the Battle of Loos between 25 September and 13 October 1915 killed 50,000 British soldiers. Britain was stunned. The nation was not used to deaths on this scale. The Germans began nerve-gas warfare using mustard gas. Gas masks became a feature of the war, something else to load down the poor Tommy, as the British soldier was nicknamed. Its victims frequently had to be sent home and often became lifelong invalids racked by uncontrollable nerve-storms.

The worst setback of 1915 was the Dardanelles catastrophe. The static nature of the western front and the troubles besetting Russia’s armies, which were running low in munitions and food in the early part of the year, prompted Churchill and Lloyd George to conclude that another front should be opened somewhere to break the deadlock in the west. Lloyd George had hopes of a Balkan front based on Salonika to strike north against Austria–Hungary, but it was Churchill’s proposal to land in the Dardanelles on the Gallipoli Peninsula that was taken up. The expeditionary force should seize Constantinople, remove the Ottoman Empire from the war and from there run supply lines to Russia through the Black Sea.

But this ingenious attempt to break away from the stalemate of the western front was poorly executed. Mines prevented British and French warships forcing the Dardanelles, and it was decided that only by landing troops could the peninsula be taken. That operation became the province of the British army. The naval attack which could have backed up the assault was, astonishingly enough, called off–as the entire operation should have been. Since it was quite obvious to the Turks what was about to happen, they moved their guns forward on to the cliffs above the allied soldiers. The 75,000-strong force, many of whom were Australian and New Zealanders, the Anzacs, were landed at the far end of the Gallipoli Peninsula. There they stayed, unable to advance because of the Turkish gun emplacements above them. For seven months, from 25 April (later designated Anzac Day) until December, when they were at last evacuated, the soldiers were stuck at Gallipoli. Many of them never managed to get off the beach, dying there as the Turkish guns picked them off like flies. The blame for their ordeal fell on Churchill, who fell from office.

The argument was to continue throughout the war between westerners–who believed that the main war effort should be concentrated on the western front, where the war would be won after a long siege–and the easterners–who believed that the western front was taking an intolerable toll on lives with very little to show for it. The catastrophe of Gallipoli gave a great fillip to the western-fronters.

The western front remained the chief arena of the world war, to which troops from the other theatres of war, the sideshows like the Middle East, would often be seconded when major force was needed. Nevertheless, throughout the war what Lloyd George called knocking away Germany’s props–her allies Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria–Hungary–continued to be almost as important a strategy. Although Lloyd George became disenchanted with Salonika, in Macedonia, as a base for the allied armies attacking Austria–Hungary on her weakest frontier from the south, he was a keen supporter of an Italian front which thrust at Austria–Hungary from the north. It would be the knocking away of the props that finally forced the German high command to accept that the central powers had lost.

But if the non-western-fronters were unpopular and Churchill’s reputation was under a cloud, Lloyd George’s inventive spirit continued to transform the war effort. The government became a major employer. By the end of the war the Munitions Ministry was employing three million people in the new factories. A superb state-run war economy was pouring out so many munitions that Britain could provide shells for her allies as well as for her own troops.

After Kitchener was drowned on the way to Russia in early June 1916, Lloyd George took his place as secretary for war. It was a low moment. Kitchener’s death had deeply affected British morale, and there continued to be fears about Irish stability after the failure of the Easter Rising, a republican attempt to seize power in Dublin. Ireland, always Britain’s Achilles’ heel, had decided to make the most of her neighbour’s travails. The majority of the rebels, incluiding the Gaelic schoolteacher Padraic Pearse who had founded the Irish Volunteers, were shot. One of them, a mathematics teacher named Eamon De Valera, who went on to be the first president of the Republic of Ireland, could not be executed because he had an American passport. Sir Roger Casement, the former British consul who had landed from a submarine with German arms and German money, was tried at a summary hearing and subsequently shot. The trial dismayed many as not living up to the highest standards of British justice. On the other hand, to side with Germany was treasonous when Britain was involved in what continued to be a life-and-death struggle against the central powers.

Nineteen-sixteen was also the year of the Somme. This battle, which lasted from 1 July to 18 November, changed the British people’s attitude to the war. Kitchener was not alive to see 20,000 of ‘his’ soldiers, who had volunteered for the war, die together in their neighbourhood battalions on the first day of the campaign. The new British commander-in-chief Sir Douglas Haig believed that he could make Britain’s breakout against the German trenches across the Somme river in north-eastern France. All the powers had hoped to make 1916 the year that changed the war. The Somme campaign was intended to distract the Germans’ attention from their major offensive against the French at Verdun, which had begun in February.

Verdun, south of the Ardennes, was one of the most important fortresses protecting the French frontier. It had enormous historical and patriotic resonance; the German commander General von Falkenhayn believed that the French would throw everything into defending it. Attacking Verdun would attract Frenchmen from all over the western front and the Germans would then be able to bleed France to death. Germany now perceived Britain, whose fleet was completing a blockade of German ports, as her chief enemy. Although she had abandoned the idea of invading Britain, her commanders believed that, if they could knock out France at Verdun, Britain would have lost her ‘best sword’ on the continent.

The Somme offensive was a disaster–the breakout never happened. Yet the offensive continued for five months, during which around 400,000 British soldiers died or were wounded. Haig did not seem to care how many there were of them. Every day from 1 July thousands of men, many of whom were inexperienced youths in their teens, were sent out of their trenches without sufficient use of artillery beforehand. They were picked off by the Germans as they came. The losses were so great that the British army decided to introduce the tank as a last-chance experiment in September to flatten the German defences.