World War One: A Short History (10 page)

Such was Falkenhayn’s thinking, and in some ways it made
sense. There was a German salient at St Mihiel, to the south, from which Verdun’s communications could be bombarded, and if he took the heights east of the river, his guns could bombard Verdun itself. German communications were much better than the defenders’, which consisted mainly of a single winding and uphill road. Besides, the winter mists and the forests meant that an attack could gain surprise, and air superiority had been attained. The French would have to counterattack in exceedingly unfavourable circumstances, had already suffered greatly during Joffre’s doings in 1915, and would be bled to death. The Fifth Army was placed under the command of the Crown Prince, with a von der Schulenburg, from one of the historic Prussian military dynasties, as chief of staff, and matters began as Falkenhayn had foreseen. Verdun had been quiet, and French positions had not been properly prepared. Inspection in January created some alarm, and the generals would probably just have abandoned the position, but the politicians supervened, and said that the glory of France forbade withdrawal. The Crown Prince needed to muster only nine divisions, because the essentials lay with the artillery – 1,300 munitions trains in seven weeks. There was a delay, caused by weather conditions, and this allowed French preparations to be intensified – perhaps decisively. On 21 February 1,220 guns, half of them heavy or high-trajectory, fired off two million shells in eight hours on an eight-mile front. In the first three days, the Germans advanced several miles, with new tactics and new weaponry, such as flamethrowers. The symbol of the battle was a great fort, Douaumont, which the French had had the sense to abandon (its concrete was extremely thick, but of course it made an obvious target for the heaviest of guns, though, after its capture, it was a French gun that smashed it). The Germans took it in a lucky probe, the French having opted to use trenches outside it.

But Falkenhayn’s ideas were defective. Two million shells
could of course obliterate anything living on an eight-mile front, but the front was not long enough to deal with the French on the west bank of the Meuse, and they fired at the flank of the Germans advancing on the right bank. The defending commander, Philippe Pétain, knew what he was about, and German momentum slowed. Falkenhayn had to try and deal with the left bank problem, and in the meantime on the right bank had to fend off suicidal counter-attacking by a general determined to make his name, Nivelle. The French did not collapse – quite the contrary – and the decisive heights east of the Meuse, after Douaumont, were not taken. Meanwhile, Verdun became transformed into a national epic, something like the Battle of Britain in 1940, and France was galvanized. Public opinion was whipped up on both sides, and Falkenhayn’s limited aims were forgotten.

Three quarters of a million casualties ensued, French and German. The single road, the ‘sacred way’ as it was rather blasphemously named, was improvised, and lorries went by every fourteen seconds, at night, their lights dimmed, to supply the Verdun line. French divisions were rotated, almost all of them spending two weeks at least in line. Falkenhayn realized that he would have to silence the artillery on the western bank of the Meuse, and in March and April he concentrated his efforts there. He himself would probably have preferred to break off the operation, but it had become a matter of prestige, the Kaiser himself visiting to celebrate the fall of Fort Douaumont, and urging on his son. The Germans did capture two of the western heights – Mort Homme and Côte 304– and then turned their attention to the east bank again, in May and June, taking Fort Vaux, but this had not been the point of the exercise at all – it had been the French who were supposed to do the attacking. To begin with, French losses had been much greater than German, but now the figures were equalized. When on 23 June the final great German effort came, it was too weak
to prevail. Thereafter, the energetic new commander, General Nivelle, organized well-planned counter-strokes, re-taking the forts (there is a scene in Renoir’s great film
La Grande illusion
when the French prisoners of war go mad, shouting ‘
Douaumont est à nous
’). Verdun also gave France a slogan, ‘
ils ne passeront pas
’. But in a sense it broke the French army, or at any rate strained it to such a degree that the country never really recovered: France’s last moment as a Great Power. When she did fall in 1940, this was partly because her people did not want to go through Verdun again.

Perhaps, if Falkenhayn had helped the Austrians, Italy might have been knocked out of the war, and that was the Austrian aim. In mid May, the Austrians attacked from the Trentino, hoping to break out onto the Venetian plain, and even cut off the whole Italian army on the Isonzo, north-east of Venice. It was a very bold plan, and in weather that was still wintry the Austrians performed prodigies, hauling heavy guns with ski-lift cable cars. This gave them a threefold advantage in heavy artillery, and by shifting six of his best divisions from the eastern front, Conrad gained a slight superiority. Within days the Austrians were near the edge of the plateau, but as usual the defenders’ communications were better, while the attackers were exhausted; reserves came up by Fiat lorries, for counterattack. This was the only real might-have-been in the war. If Falkenhayn had supported Conrad, then Italy could easily have been knocked out altogether, with dramatic consequences for the other fronts. The option was never seriously considered; Falkenhayn did not even tell Conrad about his plans, nor did Conrad tell Falkenhayn: the two men were on very bad terms.

There was one decisive battle on the Russian front – decisive in the sense that it deprived most Russian generals of their stomachs. They had to do something, according to the Chantilly agreements, to assist the French over Verdun. On 18 March, in White Russia, near Lake Narotch, the northern Russian armies
therefore began an offensive, reckoning, with some justification, that earlier supply problems had been overcome. It was a copy-book example of how not to do things. The troops were marched over snow, easily spotted by German aircraft; even the cooks in headquarters were discussing when the offensive would take place. The thaw had begun: icy mud during the day, frozen mud during the night, which meant that shell was either swamped or it bounced off. On top of everything else, there was a row between light artillerists and heavy artillerists, with no cooperation, and the initial bombardment was ineffective, dismissed as ‘General Smirnov’s
son et lumière
’. After 100,000 casualties and no gains, the attack was called off – probably, and with considerable competition, the worst-managed battle of the entire war. Educated Russia was starting to look on the Tsarist establishment with derision. The press department of
Stavka
was run by a Mikhail Lemke, the translator of Hegel, and his diaries, published in 1918, are a record of mockery – General Smirnov, far too old, appointed because some painted old granny had intrigued at the court, General Bezobrazov, pop-eyed and log-legged, even worse. General Kuropatkin thought up a wheeze by which, in the middle of the night, searchlights would suddenly be switched on, supposedly to dazzle the Germans. It had not occurred to him that the attackers would be silhouetted and be easy targets. He was dismissed. However, the Tsar, to spare his feelings, did not want him to think that he had been sacked for being too old; he was kindly told that he had just been incompetent, and was replaced by someone even older. Lemke titters in disbelief, but a much greater disaffection was under way. After Lake Narotch, the Russian northern armies did next to nothing for a full year and a half – bored, badly fed, drinking on empty stomachs foul stuff brewed in secret: the very prescription for a mutiny, which was duly to happen on an enormous scale.

*

There was a further non-battle at this time, decisive in much the same way. The Tirpitz navy and the British Grand Fleet had become book-ends, one in Bremen and the other in Scapa Flow, at the northern edge of Scotland, both more or less immobilized by threats of mines and submarines. Before the war, that this would happen had been clear enough, and the British had tried to drill it into German heads: both sides wasted enormous amounts of money on ships that would never do anything. On 31 May, in the context of Verdun, the Germans sailed forth, the intention being to destroy the fast British battle-cruisers, which deterred attacks on the cross-Channel troop-traffic or the sending of commerce raiders into the wider ocean. Through intelligence work, the British were not taken by surprise. The two fleets had to move with much caution, for fear of mines and torpedoes, and since the newest British battleships were diesel-powered and had enormous guns, the range was such that the ships hardly even needed to see each other (though the accuracy of shooting was low, and most rounds missed). In a sense this was the same story as on the Western Front – enormous weight but a hopelessly limited capacity of control. The British were dependent on old-fashioned signal flags: it was difficult simply to know what was going on, and the British commander, Jellicoe, behaved with great caution, knowing that, if an action went wrong, he could lose the war in an afternoon. This battle of Jutland lasted only a few hours, with 150 ships on the British side, 100 on the German. Losses were 14 to 11, before the Germans prudently retired. They had obviously had the better of the day, British ships being less well armoured and having fewer watertight bulkheads: but the Germans reckoned that they had had a narrow escape, and that there was no way of eliminating the British naval superiority by fleet action. Their Admiralty now proposed submarines instead, and the High Seas Fleet remained in port, indeed becoming a ‘risk fleet’ in the sense that the
German empire itself was at risk, realized two and a half years later, of being overthrown by the resentful and drunken sailors.

The British had not expected to have to produce a land army, and at first the authorities had been overwhelmed by the great numbers of men who volunteered. However, they were now in a position to do something with their ‘new armies’ (as they were called) and the French emergency gave some urgency to this. Chantilly had agreed that there was to be a Franco-British effort, the French, originally, to have taken the lead. The new British commander, Douglas Haig, would have preferred an attack in Flanders, which might at least clear the Belgian coast, but the simple fact was that the French and British armies adjoined around Amiens, the chief place in Picardy, astride the river Somme – an area where poppies grow in profusion. They have become the symbol of the British war dead.

There was no particular strategic significance for an attack on the Somme. True, Haig still imagined that the German line could be breached and cavalry could pour through the gap, but it could have been poured more effectively elsewhere, in so far as it could be poured at all. As the German line solidified in 1914, it had done so along ridges, not substantial in absolute terms but certainly substantial in relative terms, which allowed their guns a greater advantage, and also gave them the benefit of earth less likely to turn into mud, because further from the water-table. The most that Haig could do would be to take those ridges. However, the British war industry was now able to make thousands of guns and millions of shells and so, as in other armies, the general idea was to launch an enormous bombardment, with an attack on twenty miles of front (long enough for the advancing troops not to be enfiladed).

Haig did not trust his men’s capacity, and therefore relied on crushing bombardment. True, for any pre-war soldier, the quantities of mateáriel available seemed enormous, but that was
not really the case, given the scale of the task. There were other problems – firstly that a considerable number of the shells were ‘duds’ or fell short, and secondly that the artillery were not adequately trained for their task. One war-winner was the ‘creeping barrage’, a curtain of fire that advanced steadily some fifty yards ahead of the infantry, forcing the defenders to keep their heads well and truly down. However, that meant a degree of communication and control quite beyond the British army’s capacity at this time. Telephone and radio were liable to break down, carrier pigeons were inadequate, and the barrage had to be directed by an observation officer, perched, a very obvious target, in a tree or on a tall building. But the army’s learning curve was in any case still in its early stages. Haig’s artillery expert was moved in at the last minute, expected to share his office with two other men, and allowed no reference manuals, let alone any of the foreign literature on the subject. The British manual gave the game away when it grandly stated that ‘accuracy is a new demand in this war’. But the infantry themselves were also hardly trained, and (as with the French in 1914) were expected only to perform the simplest of tactics – advancing in rigid long lines, officers striding out front. A final problem lay with the ministry of munitions: it still produced shrapnel, which exploded in the air above a defensive position, scattering projectiles, maybe useful for cutting barbed wire but not against the deep dug-outs that the Germans were now constructing as a matter of course. There was not enough high-explosive shell, which exploded on or just after impact (special fuses could delay the explosion for some seconds as the shell buried itself, which did real damage to barbed wire). A further problem was amateurishness in managing trains: a jam, eighteen miles long, between Amiens and Abbeville, was not sorted out until the usual peppery Scotsman arrived and sacked everyone responsible.

The British bombardment began on 24 June, just as the last
German effort at Verdun was ebbing away, and went on for a week: the expectation being that everything would be wrecked. But 400 heavy guns and 1,000 field guns were not enough to deal with a defensive system of three miles’ depth and twenty miles’ length. The fact of its start gave the Germans ample warning of an attack, and it churned the front line into mud that was often quite impassable. The Germans on their ridges had dug very deeply, lining the defences with concrete, and these systems were not knocked out at all: the artillery was still active, and there were lines of machine guns to deal with the ‘waves’ of infantry that emerged from the British trenches on 1 July, the officers sometimes kicking footballs to inspire confidence. The names on the war memorials of Eton and Oxford and Cambridge and Edinburgh go on and on (to the credit of New College, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge, they include German and Hungarian names). On that day, there were 20,000 British dead, the worst disaster in the whole of British military history. There were 37,000 other casualties, and there was almost no gain at all – on the right, at Mametz, a section of the German front line was taken, but elsewhere, nothing. The French, to the south-east, overran the entire front line and advanced towards the second line, but they employed many more guns per mile of front, and their tactics had been learned in the hard school of Verdun.