The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (92 page)

At the Somme the British wounded alone amounted to half a million. The poppies sold before Remembrance Day were chosen as a symbol of the dead because men were cut down as easily as the poppies which had first covered the Flanders fields. So complete was the slaughter of the first day of the Somme that there was no one left to dispose of the corpses. The soldiers’ rotting bodies had to lie where they fell, often in no-man’s land, the area between two armies–a reminder of what lay in store for those sitting in the trenches tensely waiting for the order to go. The trenches were often knee deep in water, giving rise to a disease named trench foot.

Day after day men dutifully went over the top as they were ordered, yet their deaths seemed to make no perceptible difference. A feeling of futility and anger set in against the generals who were so careless of their soldiers’ lives. It proved hard to shake off, even if by 1917 it was clear that the Somme had succeeded in its objective of preventing the French war effort from collapsing and had weakened the German line. The Germans were forced to retreat to what was called the Hindenburg Line, a fortified zone behind the western front designed to halt any allied breakthrough. Nevertheless, to those who lived through the battle, it seemed that their friends had lost their lives for something as paltry as a few more miles of French land. The cost was too high. An anti-war feeling developed, in which a substantial element was hostility to Haig.

To put extra vim into the war effort, in 1916 Lloyd George cut the nation’s public drinking hours. Pubs had to close at two o’clock in the afternoon, which they continued to do until the end of the century. British losses finally forced Lloyd George that year to bring in conscription. So strong was the British tradition of anti-militarism that it was not until then, two years into the war, that the authorities dared take this step, though almost every other continental government assumed that it had a right to call up its nation’s citizens for the army. Again unlike anywhere else in Europe, once conscription had been introduced, against the wishes of the Liberal party, conscientious objectors were allowed to go before special tribunals and explain why they would not fight. Many of them drove ambulances as a way of contributing to the war without killing people. Conscription was part of a dawning realization that different rules applied during total war, that there was no place for British individualism, that the whole nation had to contribute to the war effort if Britain was going to win. Until that point the British had been confident that the war would end before such a move became necessary.

The superior quality of the Royal Navy, the best fleet in Europe since Cromwell, unbeatable since Trafalgar, told for the most part. In most of the battles around the globe between German and British fleets, Germany generally came off worse. However, the first big-ship encounter between the two fleets off Coronel in Chile in November 1914 was won by Germany’s Pacific Squadron. This was the first British naval defeat for a hundred years and, like the bombardment of the east coast of England, greatly shocked public opinion. But the British got their revenge when Germany’s Pacific Squadron was destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a few weeks later.

The two High Seas Fleets whose naval race had contributed so signally to pre-war tensions were kept out of the way until May 1916. Then, in their only engagement, they fought the Battle of Jutland. Although it confirmed British naval superiority in the North Sea this was really just a skirmish. German ships caused greater losses among the British fleet than they sustained themselves, but by the evening the German fleet was hurrying back to the Baltic. It did not venture out into the North Sea again for the rest of the war, but was kept pinned down by the threat of the British ships awaiting them.

As we have noted, the First World War saw the first use of submarines, on both sides. The Germans earned the condemnation of the world in the spring of 1915 when they began to sink ships on sight without warning, regardless of whether they were warships or unarmed vessels. The sinking of the transatlantic liner the
Lusitania
in May 1915 at the Old Head of Kinsale off Cork, with the loss of 1,201 lives, some of whom were mothers with babes in arms, created extraordinary revulsion. Many of the
Lusitania
’s passengers were Americans, and by chance some were friends of President Woodrow Wilson. Alarmed by an official US protest, for America was strictly neutral, Germany announced that henceforth she would attack only warships.

America remained outside the war until April 1917 when she came in on the allied side. It was just in time, for the eastern front collapsed when the Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia that autumn. There were powerful pro-German influences at work in America. As in the War of 1812, much of American opinion continued to see Britain as the enemy. Moreover, Britain’s blockade of Germany violated the principle of the freedom of the seas, and Americans believed that it was typical of Britain’s imperialist desire for world domination. They also objected to the British navy searching neutral ships and seizing contraband. Nevertheless, as a sign of the even-handed United States attitude to both sides, by the end of 1916 President Wilson was suggesting that he should broker a negotiated peace.

This angered the allied powers. They did not like being seen as the moral equivalent of Germany: they too wished for a negotiated peace but one based on victories over Germany. However, it was expedient to bring America’s overwhelming financial and industrial weight into the war on the allies’ side and to end the stalemate, so Wilson’s ideas could not be treated brusquely. Discussions with the Americans about war aims had to be couched in terms that would please the then strongly anti-imperialist American people and their leaders in Congress. A doctrine of national self-determination for small countries began to be evolved which had not been the original purpose of the war at all.

The entry of America into the war on the allied side became more certain at the beginning of 1917, up to which point she had continued trying to get food to Germany via Scandinavian ports. The German high command was now desperate to take Britain out of the war and believed that it could be done by starving the British into submission. Unarmed civilian shipping was no longer to be excluded from submarine warfare; instead on 1 February 1917 a campaign of ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ was begun against any vessels visiting British ports. With a hundred U-boats operating in British waters the German high command reckoned that Britain would be forced to pull out of the war after five months. In the face of this threat Lloyd George, who had become prime minister of the coalition government the previous December, once again showed his peerless executive qualities. He overrode the Admiralty and revived the convoy system which had been a feature of the Napoleonic Wars. Royal Navy destroyers accompanied merchant shipping and enough food got to Britain to keep her going despite the lethal creatures lurking off her coast.

And help was now at hand from across the Atlantic. Wilson had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany on 3 February because America could not approve unrestricted submarine warfare. And on the 23rd a telegram intercepted by British Naval Intelligence from the German foreign minister, Dr Alfred Zimmermann to the German embassy in Washington revealed that Germany was negotiating with the two threats to America’s backyard, Japan and Mexico. Mexico was asked to invade the United States if the Americans declared war on Germany. Coming into the war on the allied side, as an independent or associated power, and thus not subject to allied command, was made easier for Wilson when in March the first stage of the Russian Revolution began. The reactionary tsar abdicated and was replaced by a republic which the American republic could support.

The advent of America into the war in April 1917 boosted the sinking allied morale; it also considerably shortened the length of the conflict. The British Empire’s blockade of Germany was no longer being breached by America. That in the end would bring Germany to her knees, just as the prospect of unlimited manpower from North America meant that the allies must eventually defeat the central powers in the field. The arrival of 300,000 American recruits in the spring put fresh strength into the allied armed forces.

However, the second Russian Revolution of October 1917 almost undid all the advantage to the allied cause that America’s entry had brought. The communist-inspired Bolshevik Revolution orchestrated by Vladimir Lenin persuaded the starving Russian soldiers to desert their theatres of war to return home from what they called the capitalist war and seek ‘bread, peace and land’. The central powers therefore no longer needed half a million men stationed on the eastern front. But the Bolshevik Revolution rekindled the old revolutionary ideas which had been so prevalent in Europe before the war. Strikes increased in Britain as blue-collar workers were reminded of their historic antipathy towards their masters. In a moment of great danger for France, anti-war revolutionary propaganda and the army’s carelessness with soldiers’ lives in the Nivelle offensive on the Aisne in 1917 persuaded perhaps as many as 100,000 soldiers in the French army to mutiny. They were overcome only with difficulty.

Fortunately England’s government was in the deft hands of Lloyd George, who with the help of the Labour MPs managed to surmount the political and industrial unrest in the country. Though there were calls for peace, and one with ‘no annexations and no indemnities’, the support of the trade unions–which under Lloyd George enjoyed what was in effect a partnership with government–ensured that these voices never amounted to much.

There was better news, too, from the Middle East by 1917. The Ottoman Empire fragmented rapidly under the impact of the British army based in Egypt. Jerusalem was captured under the enterprising cavalryman General Allenby. Hussein the hereditary Grand Sharif of Mecca, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, had already brought the desert tribes on to the allied side with great effect, getting the Arabs to rise against their Turkish overlords whom they had detested for six centuries. The high commission at Cairo was run by scholarly and romantic orientalists. One of them, an archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence who was soon to become famous as Lawrence of Arabia, became the military adviser of Hussein’s son Prince Faisal.

Lloyd George might be able to encourage the British to pull together by attending to the soldiers’ needs, by promoting managerial improvement in industry, and by introducing universal suffrage in February 1918 for men over the age of nineteen and women over thirty. But the generalship of the war on the western front continued to create anxiety. The hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties and the absence of results seemed to mean nothing to Haig. On 31 July 1917 he began another offensive in Flanders, known as Passchendaele, intended to make up for the catastrophic French campaign earlier that year and free Belgium. It lasted until 6 November and only compounded his unpopularity.

By moving north-west the British were to fight out of the Ypres triangle through Passchendaele, reach the Belgian coast and then turn on the German army. Haig had been given warnings about drainage problems in the area. He chose to ignore them. The wettest August for years turned the countryside to mud. The ‘mud of Flanders’ was an all-too literal expression to describe conditions which made it impossible to move forward at all. Even the new weapon, the tank, did not work. It sank. The offensive died in the mud, along with 240,000 British casualties. The pessimistic War Cabinet, whose members were anxious that there should not be a second Somme, had asked Haig to cancel the campaign if its first efforts showed no likelihood of success. But Haig persisted with the Passchendaele offensive for three long months, before he would accept that it was pointless.

There was discontent at home with food and fuel shortages; rationing would be invented in the last year of the war. The consensus in the national government was breaking down, and only Lloyd George’s adroit management kept Labour in the Cabinet. The Italians were roundly defeated by their old enemy the Austrians at the Battle of Caporetto, so French and British troops had to be diverted from the western front to help them. By now Britain was blithely lending her allies huge sums of money to finance the war, and no less blithely borrowing similar quantities from America. In many countries the war effort was in danger of faltering completely. British convoys made sure the allies got food while the Germans began to starve.

The beginning of 1918 was Germany’s last chance to achieve a breakout on the western front and overrun France. For three months the dice were loaded in their favour: the need for an eastern front had come to an end in March 1918 after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war. Though units of the central powers’ forces remained behind to supervise the transfer of food and oil supplies from the important Romanian oilfields, the surplus eastern front troops would reach the western front long before the American troops landed to replenish the sagging allied lines.

On 21 March 1918 German troops began a massive offensive along a huge front of four miles, almost destroying an entire British army, the Fifth, in the process. But, although the line of the western front was pushed in, gallant troops under an excellent French commander-in-chief, General Foch, who now had sole command of allied troops, rushed in to fill the gaps. Eventually in July and August a counter-offensive was begun by the British and French, whose efforts were better co-ordinated now that the two armies were united under a single command.

As the summer drew to an end, the British in the north began to push the German armies back. It was the end of trench warfare. In late September the British finally broke through the Hindenburg Line. In the Middle East Allenby’s victories in Syria and Palestine continued. The British army had not only reached Mosul but was marching west towards Constantinople to be joined by troops from Aleppo. Meanwhile victories in the Balkans allowed the allies based on Salonika to fan outwards like a plume. Bulgaria had surrendered on 30 September. Allied forces reached the lower Danube, the Hungarian Plain and central Europe further west, as well as threatening Constantinople. Caught in a pincer movement the Turks signed an armistice on 30 October. That same month Austria–Hungary, which was rapidly disintegrating into ethnic groups, was defeated by Italy. She surrendered on 3 November. Germany’s armies were still undefeated in the field, though they were beginning to crumple under the vigour of the American troops. But at last the German high command concluded that Germany could not continue, with her armies and people at the end of their tether. As well as being exhausted and demoralized, the German people were starving as a result of the British blockade.