Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

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Haig seemed to get on better with General Nivelle, initially reporting that he seemed ‘straightforward and soldierly’. But his plan for 1917 worried Haig. He proposed to strike a mighty blow on the Chemin des Dames, and to gain the troops required for it he requested that the British should extend their front southwards, from the Somme to the Oise. They were also to launch subsidiary attacks to pin down the Germans and prevent them from concentrating to meet Nivelle.

Haig questioned this strategy. He was in favour of attacking a German army palpably weakened by the Somme, but had long believed that Flanders, where a short advance could bring the German railhead of Roulers within his grasp, offered better prospects than attacks further south. Moreover, he had been warned by Robertson that the government was gravely concerned by the damage being done by German submarines based at Ostend and Zeebrugge on the Flanders coast, and in April 1917 Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the First Sea Lord, told an American colleague that ‘it is impossible for us to go on with the war if [merchant shipping] losses like this continue’.

(#litres_trial_promo) On 6 January 1917 Haig announced that he could not assist Nivelle unless some sort of provision was made for clearing the Flanders coast. He was spectacularly overruled. In late February Lloyd George met Nivelle at an Allied conference at Calais, and agreed to place Haig under his command for the duration of the offensive. Haig wrote to the king, offering to resign, but the monarch’s private secretary replied:

I am to say from His Majesty that you are not to worry; you may be certain that he will do his utmost to protect your interests; and he begs you to work on the most amicable and open terms with General Nivelle, and he feels all will come right.

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As the Allies discussed their strategy, the Germans acted. Successes in the East, and growing war-weariness in Russia, enabled them to shift troops westward, a process which accelerated as the year wore on. And they prepared to fall back from the great apex of the Western Front salient onto a carefully-prepared position known as the Hindenburg line, a shorter length of front which would free some twenty divisions. In the process they devastated the area between the old front line and the new one, in an operation named Alberich, after the spiteful dwarf in the Nibelungen saga. The influential war correspondent Philip Gibbs thought it a telling comment on German national character that destruction like this could be carried out by men who had lived for the past two years with the population they now dispossessed.

‘They were kind to the children … but they burnt our houses.’ – ‘Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away … But he helped smash up the neighbours’ furniture with an axe.’ – ‘The lieutenant was a good fellow … but he carried out his orders of destruction’ …

Gibbs concluded that ‘on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and all that was in them’.

(#litres_trial_promo) John Masefield, not easily persuaded by anti-German propaganda, was shocked by what he saw:

He has systematically destroyed what he could not carry away … Bureaus, mirrors, tables, sofas, have been smashed with axes, fruit trees have been cut, looped or ringed. Beds have been used as latrines, so have baths & basins … Houses, churches, cottages, farms, barns & calvaries have been burnt, blown up, pulled down or gutted … They are the acts of men. They are the acts of beasts.

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One German left a sign in English reading ‘Don’t be angry: Only wonder’ in the wreckage of a town: it can be seen in the Historiale de la Grande Guerre in Péronne. Captain Rudolf Binding, a German staff officer, admitted that: ‘The expulsion of the inhabitants from their little towns and villages was a heart-rending business, more ghastly than murder,’ though he added that it was ‘to the eternal shame of the English’ that they did not inflict losses following up the Germans.

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Such destruction horrified men inured to war. One soldier agreed that, though they might have left the Germans a desert to live in, the British would not have systematically destroyed the orchards, and an officer distinguished between damage done by ‘honest shells’ and arsonists. ‘The ruin was everywhere complete,’ wrote Edward Spears, a liaison officer with French troops who went forward into the liberated area.

Although there were touches which showed that more time had been available at some places than at others; the will was nowhere lacking, but the vandals had been hurried in some villages, that was all. It was as if Satan had poured desolation out of a gigantic watering-can, carelessly spraying some parts of the land more than others … Everywhere in these ruined villages women’s clothing lay about, underwear so arranged as to convey an indecent suggestion, or fouled in the most revolting way.

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Spears’s French driver, distressed almost beyond speech, kept muttering: ‘The swine, the bloody swine.’ Spears saw French soldiers bruised not simply by the physical destruction but also by the inevitable consequence of a long, and not always brutal, occupation. Some men, away from home since August 1914, found anguished wives nursing a new baby or a flaxen-haired toddler. ‘Can you love me still, who have loved you always?’ they begged. ‘No physical suffering I saw or heard of during the war equalled or even approached that raw agony,’ wrote Spears.

(#litres_trial_promo) There is more to the Western Front than ground lost and gained and the evolution of tactics. Just as men changed the front, so it changed them, and both the German gas attack of April 1915 and the destruction levied during the retreat to the Hindenburg line helped set iron into the soul.

The German withdrawal left Nivelle wrong-footed, for part of his offensive, now as passionately oversold to politicians as it was to soldiers, had been aimed at some areas that had been evacuated. On 4 April the Germans captured a copy of the attack plan, and thoughtfully distributed details to their waiting batteries. When French infantry attacked on 16 April, into icy rain which turned to sleet, they were cut to ribbons. Spears saw wounded coming back in despair. ‘It’s all over,’ they told him. ‘We can’t do it. We shall never ever do it. C’est impossible.’

(#litres_trial_promo) When Nivelle called off the offensive on 9 May he had lost some 100,000 men. He did not simply lose the confidence of his government, which replaced him with the big, wintry-faced Philippe Pétain, who had held Verdun in the dark days of early 1916. He did something far worse: he had pushed his men beyond endurance. The army which had endured Verdun had been a matchless amalgam of

steel-skulled Bretons, calm and obstinate men from the Auvergne, clear-eyed men from the Vosges, Gascons talking like d’Artagnan, idle men from Provence who put their back into it at the right moment, wolf-hunting men from the Isère, cynical and dandified Parisians, people from the plain or the mountain, from the city or the hamlet.

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The Nivelle offensive snapped its frayed tendons, and it began to mutiny.

The British contribution to the offensive was an attack at Arras intended to fix the Germans in Artois and prevent them from turning to face Nivelle. On 9 April the Canadians, four fine divisions fighting side by side for the first time, took Vimy Ridge in one of the war’s slickest set-piece attacks. Further south, the remainder of Allenby’s 3rd Army sallied out across the landscape around Monchy-le-Preux, described by James II so long before.

The battle started well, not least because of steadily-improving artillery techniques, and Ludendorff ruefully admitted that British gains were ‘a bad beginning for the decisive struggle of the year’. But as the attackers passed their first objectives, beyond pre-planned artillery fire, they found themselves, as had so often been the case in the past, taking on intact defences without adequate support. Lance Corporal H. Foakes, a medical attendant with 13/Royal Fusiliers, saw the consequences of advancing into observed artillery fire.

Over a wide belt the high explosive and heavy shrapnel came continuously and without ceasing. Amid a terrific din of roars and explosions the high explosives pitched in the ground with a shaking thud, to explode a fraction of a second later with a roar (which I always likened to the slamming of a giant door) throwing up a huge column of earth and stones and blowing men to pieces. Continually, too, came the high explosive shrapnel. A big shell, known to the troops as a ‘Woolly Bear’, bursting with a fierce whipping ‘crack’ about one hundred or two hundred feet from the ground, they rained down red hot shrapnel and portions of burst shell case.

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A battle which had started with great promise was soon stuck fast, but Haig was compelled to continue it to deflect German pressure from the French. It is not a battle that features prominently in British folk memory, but it should. Its average daily loss rate, between 9 April and 17 May, of just over 4,000 men, was higher than that of the Somme.

Haig knew that the French army was in ‘a very bad state of discipline’, and the gossipy Lord Esher drove up from Paris to GHQ and told John Charteris that ‘the morale of the whole nation has been badly affected by the failure of their attack’. But the French, understandably, kept quiet about the full extent of the mutinies, and Pétain – ‘they only call me in catastrophes’ – vigorously wielded stick and offered carrot to restore his army to reliability.

We cannot prove that Haig embarked upon his forthcoming campaign in Flanders simply because the French had mutinied, tempting though it would be to believe it. It is, however, clear that that he had long been committed to attacking in Flanders when the opportunity offered. When the printed version of his dispatches omitted this firm declaration which had formed part of the original, he had it inserted as an addendum:

The project of an offensive operation in Flanders, to which I was informed His Majesty’s Government attached considerable importance, was one which I had held steadily in view since I had first been entrusted with the Chief Command of the British Armies in France, and even before that date.

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An Allied conference in May concluded that a major war-winning offensive would have to wait until the Americans, finally drawn into the war by Germany’s adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, were present in France in strength. There were many who presciently feared that the Germans, now increasingly able to concentrate on the Western Front, might win the war before this happened, and by remaining on the defensive the Allies would hand the initiative to the Germans.

Finally, as we have seen, Haig was under pressure to get German submarines off the Flanders coast. In May he showed Pétain a sketch-map which showed a phased advance from Ypres to Passchendaele, and then out to Roulers and Thorout. As the second phase of the land advance began, there would be an amphibious hook along the coast, with a landing near Ostend. ‘Success seems reasonably possible,’ he told the War Cabinet that month.

It will give valuable results on land and sea. If full measure of success is not gained, we shall be attacking the enemy on a front where he cannot refuse to fight, and our purpose of wearing him down will be given effect to. We shall be directly covering our own most important communications, and even a partial success will considerably improve our defensive positions in the Ypres salient.

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The third battle of Ypres was thus the child of mixed strategic parentage, as soldiers’ bitter descriptions of it so accurately recognised.

As a curtain-raiser to the main battle, entrusted to Sir Hubert Gough’s 5th Army, Sir Herbert Plumer’s 2nd Army was to take Messines Ridge, south of Ypres. Plumer was ‘Plum’ to his contemporaries, ‘Drip’, because of a long-term sinus problem, to irreverent subalterns, but ‘Daddy’ to his men. His hallmark was meticulous planning and careful briefing: it is no accident that the future Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was serving as a staff officer in one of his corps, saw the Plumer method first hand, and learnt much.

On 7 June nineteen mines (nearly a million pounds of high explosive) exploded beneath Messines Ridge. A German observer tells how:

Nineteen gigantic roses with carmine-red leaves, or enormous mushrooms, were seen to rise up slowly and majestically out of the ground, and then split into pieces with an almighty roar, sending up many-coloured columns of flame and smoke mixed with a mass of earth and splinters, high into the sky.

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Plumer’s chief of staff, Sir Charles ‘Tim’ Harington, recalled that the next morning he found four dead German officers in a dugout without a mark on them: they had been killed by the shock. Plumer’s infantry advanced to secure almost all their objectives on the first day. Although Plumer lost 25,000 men, he captured over 7,000 prisoners and killed or wounded at least another 13,000 Germans. It was an impressive victory, marred only by a tendency for the infantry to lack initiative: the German 44th Infantry Regiment, just back from the Eastern Front, regarded the British infantry as lumpier than the Russian.

The local German army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, thought that the capture of Messines Ridge presaged an immediate attack on his vital ground, the Gheluvelt Plateau, crossed by the Menin Road due east of Ypres. But Haig was unable to follow his right hook with a straight left. It took time to swing resources up to 5th Army, further north, the French requested more time to prepare their 1st Army, which was to attack on the British left, and in any event Lloyd George, who had serious doubts about the coming battle, was reluctant to allow it to proceed. Formal permission arrived only six days before the attack began. The delay between the capture of Messines Ridge and the opening of the main battle was ultimately fatal, primarily because the weather broke just as Gough’s men went forward.

Third Ypres, like the Somme, was marked by tensions between GHQ and army headquarters. Gough, selected because he was the youngest and most dashing of the army commanders, did not know the salient well, and later agreed that it had been a mistake to send him to ‘a bit of ground with which I had practically no acquaintance’. However, he hoped ‘to advance as rapidly as possible on Roulers’, and then push on to Ostend: he always believed that this was Haig’s intention too. However, Haig agreed with their opponent that the Gheluvelt Plateau was indeed crucial, and wrote: ‘I impressed on Gough the vital importance of the ridge, and that our advance north should be limited until our right flank has been secured on the ridge.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The French 1st Army would attack on Gough’s left, and Plumer’s 2nd Army would mount smaller diversionary attacks on his right. When the moment was right, Rawlinson, his 4th Army headquarters commanding a much smaller force than it had the previous summer, would launch the amphibious assault.

The bombardment began on 16 July, and in its course the British fired 4,500,000 shells into the carefully-layered German defences opposite Ypres. It began the process which was to reduce the area to an abomination of desolation, doing serious damage to German positions but in the process destroying the land drainage system. The Tank Corps maintained a ‘swamp map’ to show those areas which were impassable to tanks, and whose extent was soon expanding alarmingly. Haig is sometimes accused of wanton disregard for weather conditions in Flanders, but it is clear from John Hussey’s painstaking work that the British were to be extraordinarily unlucky with the weather: both August and October were abnormally wet.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nor is it true that commanders were unaware of the conditions at the front. The story of a senior officer (generally identified as Kiggell, Haig’s chief of staff) asking: ‘Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?’ and then breaking down in tears has been comprehensively debunked, but still retains wide currency.

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On 1 August Haig noted in his diary ‘a terrible day of rain. The ground is like a bog.’ And in October John Charteris, well forward to watch an attack, acknowledged: ‘the saddest day of the year. It was not the enemy but the mud that prevented us from doing better … Yesterday afternoon was utterly damnable. I got back very late and could not work, could not rest.’