I Have Not Changed

YOU COULD SAY that, just now, it all became a bit more anti-climactic — in the West, anyway.

The Germans were a long way from throwing down their rifles, but the direction of battle had now moved against them and that showed no signs of stopping. In a series of local actions, the French seized Belval and the Lassigny Massif, and began fresh attacks between the Oise and the Aisne. The British crossed the Ancre on 15th August and retook Merville four days later. The previous day, the German retreat from the river Ancre had begun and Beaumont-Hamel, Serre, Puisieux and Bucquoy were evacuated.

Our appraisal of these actions is inevitably coloured by the knowledge that, within three months, the war would all be over. But Allied commanders were not privy to such information, and the bitter lessons of the past forty-eight months did not incline them to complacency.

Least of all, Haig. After the blistering success at the Battle of Amiens, there was no shortage of voices urging him to press home his advantage. But the British troops were exhausted and that thought, and the fact that he had only forty tanks at his disposal which were operational, ensured he was not anxious to launch another huge offensive in a hurry.

He was also far from sure what the Germans would do next. Precedent suggested that, after a short period of licking their wounds, fierce counter-attacks could be expected. On 17th August, he set down these concerns — perhaps in an effort to clarify his own mind:

But has he [the enemy] the necessary force? and will they fight? In any case we cannot expect the Germans to own defeat, until they have played their last card! So we ought to be prepared for numerous counter-attacks.

A visit from General Rawlinson had also done nothing to reassure him:

Sir Henry… came to see me and brought photographs showing the state of the enemy’s defences on the Roye-Chaulnes. He also showed me a letter which he had received from General Currie commanding the Canadian Corps stating that to capture the position in question would be a very costly matter. He (Currie) was opposed to attempting it. I accordingly ordered the date of the attack to be postponed, but preparations to be continued with vigour…

Monash, commander of the Australian Corps, was of the same mind, but Marshal Foch was not. The Supreme Commander wanted to press home the advantage and, at their meeting on 15th August, Haig found himself listened to icily as he explained his plan to transfer reserves to General Byng and the Third Army and attack north of the Somme. He recalled that he:

spoke to Foch quite straightly, and let him understand that I was responsible for the handling of the British forces. Foch’s attitude at once changed and said all he wanted was early information of my intentions, so that he might coordinate the operations of other armies, and that he thought I was quite correct in my decision not to attack the enemy in his prepared position.

Foch’s willingness to concede the point suggests he was a pragmatist, rather than a convert. Haig confided to his diary:

…notwithstanding what he now said, Foch and all his Staff had been most insistent for the last five days that I should press on along the South bank and capture the Somme bridges above Peronne, regardless of German opposition and British losses.

In practical terms, the significant decision was an agreement to change tactics: no longer would an offensive be pursued regardless of the troops’ exhaustion or of the costly casualties, as had happened in the past. From now on, swift, time-limited strikes would be made. Haig’s point seems to have been that the Allies no longer needed to pin all their hopes on one huge offensive, but on the accretion of smaller successes — an option made possible by the fact that they were winning.

German soldiers in captivity, August 1918

Haig and Foch mainly got along well. It was among the politicians that the keenest rivalries surfaced. On 18th August, Haig gave a luncheon for Clemenceau, at which he was presented with the French Médaille Militaire. The British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Derby, admitted to Haig that Lloyd George was very jealous of Clemenceau and squabbled with him often, perhaps because both were men conscious of their public charisma. Derby had no doubts that he himself stood high in the esteem of Le Tigre, if only because the old man’s dog had recently died and, to assuage his loss, the Ambassador had presented him with an Aberdeen terrier.

Foch may have conceded the point to Haig, but he remained impatient. After some successful separate sorties by both British and French troops on 18th and 19th August he wrote to him again:

The enemy has everywhere been shaken by the blows already dealt him. We must repeat these blows without losing any time… Therefore I assume that the attack of your Third Army, postponed already until August 21, will be launched that day with the utmost violence, carrying along with it the divisions of the First Army lying next to it and your Fourth Army in its entirety.

The British and French were accustomed to each other by now. At this exalted level, they usually understood one another’s difficulties, even if they could easily be made impatient by them. It was harder with the Americans, who they saw as neophytes.

Pershing’s insistence that US troops must fight only under US command rankled badly. In retrospect, it is not hard to see why. The American nation was still new in the eyes of Europe, and the instinct to patronise it, or to treat it as a neo-colonial resource, was one of which both the British and French were guilty. Pershing would not allow that: America’s formidable fighting power was an illustration of its greatness.

US soldiers in France, 1918 — not merely an asset to the war, but right at the forefront.

At the time, however, his British and French counterparts feared his obstinacy could lose them the war. The tensions this created surface in Pershing’s diary which, at this time, can sound rather justificatory:

13th August  [Clemenceau said] that when I first began insisting on using American divisions in an American Army under an American command he frankly did not agree with me, but that he wished to say to me now that I was right and everyone who was against me on this proposition was wrong; that he fully agreed with me now that the Americans should operate separately as an American Army.

14th August  …the French have changed completely, and now their attitude is one of tremendous enthusiasm and respect…

On 19th August, he received a cable from Washington, asking for his views on the War Department’s proposal to lower the age for the draft from twenty-one to eighteen. The thought seems to have agitated him, and he urged that no man should be called up before the age of twenty, explaining that:

Men under this age cannot stand the hardship over here and I think it is not wise for many other reasons to call them before that age.

“Many other reasons” may have been an oblique allusion to his fears about the spread of STIs. Pershing was always worried about his troops contracting these. Perhaps he viewed very young men, so far from home, as especially susceptible to temptation.

The Central Powers seem to have been preoccupied by military and diplomatic dangers, rather than those arising from the sins of the flesh. Ernst Junger insisted:

By this time there was not a man who did not know that we were on a precipitous descent… Every man knew that victory could no longer be ours. But the enemy should know that he fought against men of honour.

Junger’s perceptions should be treated with some caution but, as an officer serving on the front line, there is no reason to doubt this is what he believed. The Kaiser and his military chiefs seem to have been still clinging to the hope that the tide might yet turn in Germany’s favour. Hindenburg and Ludendorff arrived at Spa on 13th August. In their meeting with the new Foreign Minister, Paul von Hintze, both argued that a defensive strategy would weaken the enemy’s spirit and bring him to terms.

Ludendorff seems to have been especially concerned about morale back home. He already had earned a reputation as someone who submerged into panic when the going got tough, and perhaps for that reason, his counsel of despair was taken less seriously. General Hindenburg, an altogether more stolid character, reminded them that Germans were “still standing deep in the enemy’s territory”.

Hindenburg, 1918

On the following day, 14th August, the meeting was joined by the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. Foreign Minister Hintze, probably trying to inject some reality into the occasion, felt constrained to point out that

The enemy is more confident of victory and more willing to fight than ever.

This unambiguous reminder that time was running out for Germany and her Allies seems to have nettled the Kaiser. He insisted that England too was suffering problems, including food shortages, suggesting she would “gradually begin to think of peace as the result of these difficulties”.

As well as clutching at straws, there were moments when these desperate men also sought to grasp nettles. Yes, the Kaiser agreed: Germany “must find a suitable moment in which to come to an understanding with the enemy” and suggested using the King of Spain or the Queen of the Netherlands as intermediary. At that point, the awfulness of the thought seems to have overcome him and the conversation retreated into fantasy, with much huffing and puffing about any approach being made from a position of strength, ideally after another success on the Western Front. Hindenburg was clearly trying to look on the bright side:

I hope, in spite of everything, that we will be able to stay on French soil and thus eventually enforce our will upon the enemy.

That was too cautious for official purposes. In the minutes of the meeting, Ludendorff deleted the word “hope” and the amended version instead read:

We will see to it, in spite of everything, that we will be able to stay on French soil and thus eventually enforce our will upon the enemy.

Thus did the generals clutch at straws. Emperor Karl of Austria rather doused them all with cold water when he arrived that afternoon and demanded immediate diplomatic steps to end the war. If these did not happen jointly, he said, Austria, he would initiate them unilaterally. The meeting ended inconclusively, but nobody could doubt the truth of things: the two Allies were falling out, and falling apart.

The Kaiser’s thoughts and feelings at this time are not easily disentangled. A few days later, on 19th August, he left Spa for Wilhelmshohe, near Kassel, ostensibly to care for his sick wife, Dona, a highly uncongenial woman even in rude health. His decision to search out her company rather suggest that the tension at military headquarters was crackling.

For the Germans, the cost of disintegration was felt everywhere. Part of the collateral damage emanated from the new confidence of Allied airmen in low-level flying, a dangerous but devilishly effective way of bombing and strafing infantry columns and trenches. One airman described how the congestion of troops and supply vehicles in the roads behind enemy lines

gave us an opportunity of doing greater damage to his morale and materiel by attacks on moving infantry and transport than we could ever have accomplished by devoting all our attention to his scouts [fighters]. Ground attacks were undertaken without cessation… shooting up convoys that became a wild confusion of broken lorries and runaway horses, and scattering infantry from the roads into the fields, inflicting on them many casualties.

Flying low — British airmen, 1918

German soldiers, perhaps because few of them were exactly upbeat, were often inclined to blame their own air force. One soldier wrote bitterly:

During the day one hardly dares to be seen in the trench owing to the English aeroplanes. They fly so low that it is a wonder that they do not pull us out of the trench. Nothing is to be seen of our German hero airmen… One can hardly calculate how much additional loss of life and strain on the nerves this had cost us.

However, the Allies had their griefs too. In a perfect illustration of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum of any kind, fighting in the east now took a particularly ugly turn, as the Allies intervened more decisively in the Civil War which had opened up in recent months. On 15th August, relations between the USA and the Bolsheviks were severed. Following the arrival of American troops at Vladivostok two days later, rumours swirled in the west that Lenin and Trotsky had fled from Moscow.

These, of course, were wildly optimistic. From a Western perspective, however, the implosion of the Bolsheviks seemed more probable than not. The previous day, the Japanese commander, General Otani, had reached Vladivostok. Given the presence of the USA and Japan in the far eastern corner of the country, and the arrival of British troops at Baku on the Caspian Sea on 15th August, many believed that the Bolsheviks were on their way out. Four days later, however, came a reality check: the Reds mounted a successful attack on the Ussuri front, forcing the Allied line to be withdrawn by six miles.

The increased presence of Western nations was a clear indication of an underlying confidence that the war in the west no longer demanded their complete attention. It also hints that they believed Lenin and his gang of cutthroats were opportunists who had risen to power only because the rest of the world had been diverted by war. Now a reckoning beckoned: on 13th August, Britain recognised the Czecho-Slovaks as an Allied nation, and the latter immediately declared war on Germany — an inflammatory step which enraged the Germans. Typically, British newspapers celebrated by declaring it was now fine to drink Pilsner beer — since it was Czech and not German.

Reaching the parts that others wars cannot reach

The travails of the Germans in France also did nothing to alleviate the dangers on the high seas. This week was much like so many others: at least thirty-three ships were lost. A particular awfulness accompanied the sinking of the Balkan, sunk en route from France to Corsica. It was carrying around 300 troops but also 150 civilians including women and children, and a crew of thirty-two. When, on 16th August, it was hit by a torpedo in the small hours, fired from UB48, the radio mast was destroyed and no distress call could be sent. It sank within minutes: although ninety passengers and twelve crew managed to scramble aboard the seven lifeboats and to find their way to rescue, a further 400 did not.

Here is a reminder — there were so many! — that loss and suffering remained the staple. Sister Edith Appleton, nursing gamely at Le Tréport, rejoiced as heartily as anyone on the Allied side at the accumulating signs of military success, but there was no abatement in the suffering of soldiers:

14th August …Everywhere is crowded out, and those fit to travel go almost straight on to Blighty, but we are accumulating a heavy residue of those ‘unfit’. In my ward I have ten DI [dangerously ill] and SI [seriously ill], including three bad spine cases and one fractured skull, so the work if anything becomes heavier.

16th August My ward is rather a sad place just now — so full of extremely badly wounded. There is plenty of gas-gangrene and two fractured spines dying in a room which is very difficult to ventilate. One feels the horrible smell in one’s throat and nose all the time..

One died yesterday — an Australian. His leg was very gangrenous and had to be taken off high up, but it was too far gone. His constant cry was to get up and go out — that he was quite all right — then about half an hour before he died he settled down and said ‘I’m done. I’m dying fast.’ And he was quite right. It is very sad for these colonials with their people so far away, but when he was off his head I think he thought I was his mother, from the way he hugged and kissed my hand.

And then came a mention of what would later become known as mustard gas:

19th August  The gassed patients all say they are using a new sort of gas. Their eyes are all swollen, bloodshot and streaming — and their skin and tender parts of their bodies are burnt a copper colour. The gas does not take effect at once, but comes on by degrees. As a preliminary symptom they may be sick after their first meal — then their eyes begin to prick. By the time they reach the base they are extremely ill, breathing like a person dying from bronchitis with a horrible discharge pouring from nose and mouth, a temperature of about 104 degrees and pulse of about 140.

Lest we forget: British mustard gas victim, 1918

Princess Evelyn Blucher in Krieblowitz, contemplating Germany’s probable defeat in the war, was alert also to the winds of political change:

‘A victorious army never rebels,’ people say, but an army in retreat is very liable to be seized by the spirit of mutiny, and certainly the mass of the population here would be ready to back any definite movement.

Capitalist and large landowners are beginning to talk in earnest of the possibility of their land being confiscated and their property divided up in the Bolshevik manner. The whole public spirit is so depressed and the universal suffering so great, that the people are threatening to take matters into their own hands…

Most perceptive observers knew only too well that, whoever won or lost, most citizens would never be content to return to the social and economic divisions which had characterised Europe before 1914. In Britain, women transport workers, demanding the same “war wage” paid to male workers, went on strike. Debates also raged over a proposed luxury tax. Lloyd George left for Criccieth on 17th August and began planning election strategy.

At this point, he expected to go to the country quite soon, certainly by December, which he assumed would be before the end of the war, and the condition of the working class was an enduring source of anger and resentment to the old firebrand:

The… physique of the people of this country is far from what it should be, particularly in the agricultural districts… That is due to low wages, malnutrition and bad housing. It will have to be put right after the war. I have always stood during the whole of my life for the underdog. I have not changed, and am still going to fight his battle. Both parties [of the coalition] will have to understand that.

Righteous sentiments — but one senses in them the antennae pricking of a man who was shortly to give his full attention to party politics and electoral calculation. Even in a world at war, there was more to the world than the war.

Lloyd George meeting munition workers at Neath, August 1918

 

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