A Patriot's History of the Modern World (18 page)

Meanwhile, the French saw themselves threatened with encirclement and had already hurled in their reserves. From their side, defeat appeared imminent, but Hentsch became pessimistic while talking with von Bülow and decided the German forces needed to retreat and reposition themselves at the Aisne River. Hentsch blinked: von Bülow ordered a general retreat, and Hentsch informed von Kluck, who believed he was handling the British and nearing a decisive victory over the French 6th Army. Von Kluck acquiesced with a heavy heart and accepted defeat.
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In the German 5th Infantry Division, the unit that had held up the British Expeditionary Force and the French Cavalry Corps all by itself for five days in the gap between the 1st and 2nd armies, the order to retreat was incomprehensible. The men did not feel defeated, although they had been fighting against nearly ten times their number. With tears rolling down their cheeks, the fighting men plodded northeastward in columns.
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Von Moltke was replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, the minister of war who had been sniping at von Moltke behind his back, but already things were out of the hands of such men. Both sides now raced to extend their lines to the English Channel, lest they be
flanked: “Division by division, corps by corps, army by army they spread out virtually due northward, meeting, clashing violently, then forced to dig in and lie motionless….”
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In one such fight, the British Expeditionary Force stopped the Germans at Passchendaele near the Belgian town of Ypres, benefiting from the Belgians' opening their sluice gates and allowing the Yser River to end the German advance. A major German attack resumed on October 22, and on October 29, at the crossroads of Gheluvelt, the Germans launched a powerful thrust by Army Group Fabeck, which contained a new division of young, zealous volunteers. After reaching the town of Gheluvelt—and threatening to puncture the Allied line (orders were even drafted for a general retreat)—the 364 men of the 2nd Worcesters, including cooks and orderlies, counterattacked and despite being outnumbered five to one, regained the town and pushed the Germans out, with heavy losses. Particularly devastated were the fresh volunteers, who were completely outclassed by the veterans of the Boer War, and whose slaughter was eulogized in Germany as the
Kindermord bei Ypern
(the “Massacre of the Innocents” or literally the “murder of the innocents near Ypers”). Britain was also greatly aided by Indian troops. It would not be the last time Dominion troops saved the Allies.

The Chemists' War

An informal Christmas soldiers' truce occurred in Flanders on December 25, 1914, when British, French, and German troops spontaneously left their lines by the thousands to meet the enemy in no-man's-land, as if they had suddenly had enough. In this unofficial cease-fire, they exchanged tobacco, gloves, watches, cigarettes, chocolate, biscuits, and other items. Each unit thought it was somehow unique, yet this practice occurred up and down the front. The Lancashire Fusiliers traded beef tins to the Germans for helmet badges: the “bargain is complete,” recorded the divisional diary, “except for the slight disagreement as to who shall come out of his trench first….”
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When the German concert singer Walter Kirchhoff made a front-line appearance for the 130th Württembergers, French troops across Flanders quietly climbed to the tops of their parapets, applauding so long at the end that Kirchhoff performed an encore.
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On Christmas Day, the British 6th Gordons, discovering the Germans had a barber in their ranks, arranged for shaves and haircuts right in the middle of the battlefield. When reports of the spontaneous truce reached the rear, they were dismissed as fantasy, but in some sectors, the truce lasted until New Year's Day. Although General
Horace Smith-Dorrien, head of the British II Corps, issued orders forbidding consorting with the enemy, the end of the truce came naturally as the holiday passed. After that time, anyone leaving the lines was warned back by opposing troops, and, shortly thereafter, the shooting started again.

Following a fierce but unresolved French/British offensive at Champagne and Loos in March, the Germans were reinforced and counterattacked in April, when they introduced chlorine gas on the Canadian, Moroccan, and Algerian French colonial troops. Prying open a four-mile hole in Entente lines, the Germans flowed through until units from the Commonwealth of Canada plugged the gap at the Second Battle of Ypres, where casualties exceeded 100,000 on both sides. By late May 1915, the Ypres salient was substantially eliminated, marking a turning point. Along with the elimination of the Ypres salient came a grim understanding of what the Germans were in for—it was a war against an empire that spanned the globe. A writer in
Der Tag
recorded:

In fact, Britain had drawn on her empire for 16 percent of all troops in the war—the last time some of the colonies would overwhelmingly support British military aims. Only Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and, to a limited extent, India, would send forces to fight in British armies in the Second World War. Great Britain held back over 1,500,000 British soldiers in England during 1918 (to keep Field Marshal Haig from using them up on futile offensives) while continuing to put its Commonwealth troops into battle and calling for the United States to assume an ever-heavier burden.
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This did not go unnoticed either by the commander of the American Expeditionary Force or by the Commonwealth nations.

It proved somewhat ironic that soldiers from the colonies would be some of the first victims of a new weapon of war on the Western Front, poison gas. The use of gas helped characterize World War I as “the chemists' war,” in that chemistry was critical—whether in the production of gas, ammunition, or medicines. In all its iterations, including tear gas, chlorine gas, and mustard gas, the new weapon struck terror into the hearts of soldiers. Although first used on Russian positions in the East, large-scale introduction of gas on the Western Front occurred in April 1915 north of Ypres against positions held by French colonial forces from Martinique. The fear it involved was not confined to the Allied troops, as German soldiers hesitated to move forward to exploit the gap it made in the Allied line. Defenses and counters to gas were developed rapidly (even horses had gas masks), and after initial horrific encounters with chlorine gas, troops learned to respond with hurried, but effective, donning of gas masks. For the side using gas, the wind was fickle, making gas a potential weapon for the enemy. Though gas remained in use throughout the war, it was not the miracle weapon hoped for by the Germans. On the propaganda front, however, it was the use of poison gas, even more than the Zeppelin bombings and U-boat attacks, that seemed to set Germany apart as particularly barbarous, even though the Allies developed and experimented with poison gas before the war as well and the British used it in September 1915, only five months after the Germans.

Both the Hague Declaration of 1899 and the Hague Convention of 1907 had prohibited the use of poison gas weapons, but Germany's manpower disadvantage led it to repudiate the international agreements. When a nation perceives its survival to be threatened, previous treaties signed by a politician become, in the words of German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, just a “scrap of paper.” Chemist Fritz Haber thought chlorine gas in particular could offset the Allies' superiority in numbers. But it was in fact the French who first used gas (though tear, not chlorine, or “poison,” gas) in August 1914. Germans employed T-Stoff tear gas against the Russians in January 1915, with no results, as it froze before it could affect the enemy. In April 1915, however, when chlorine gas was deployed at Ypres, it quickly became known that men who ran suffered more; those who stayed on the parapet, less, as the heavy gas fell quickly. The greenish cloud could be easily spotted, and by July the British had already introduced a “smoke helmet” that was moderately effective.

Of course, the British immediately adopted their own gas shells, which
were often as ineffective as the Germans' had been. A French chemist refined phosgene gas, which was colorless, in 1915, providing a more powerful killing agent, in that effects often did not show up for twenty-four hours. Mustard gas, introduced by the Germans in 1917 (also known as “HS” or “Hun Stuff” by the British), had a delayed reaction that was every bit as deadly, causing skin blisters before showing up in the lungs. Gas could be delivered by artillery, and its psychological impact was often greater than its physical harms. Lieutenant Colonel G. W. G. Hughes, of the Medical Corps, wrote, “I shall never forget the sights I saw by Ypres after the first gas attacks…. Men [were] lying all along the side of the road…exhausted, gasping, frothing yellow mucus from their mouths, their faces blue and distressed.”
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In the end, a British report on chemical warfare in 1919 concluded that “gas is a legitimate weapon in war.”
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Each new implement—gas, the flamethrower, the U-boat, the airplane—was rolled out with the grand hope that it would overcome the trench, the ideas being that the U-boats would outflank the trench network entirely, while airplanes would punish them from above. None succeeded. Networks of earthen cuts that disfigured northern France and Belgium remained, mocking each army's attempts to go around, over, or through them, in the process absorbing the blood of a generation as new reinforcements arrived daily.

War on a Global Scale

New technology could change the casualty rolls, but could not end the war. Nor could the insertion of hundreds of thousands of colonial troops—actions that made the war truly global. By 1915, Britain had, including colonials, 750,000 men on the Continent (up from under 100,000 in 1914, when the Germans first attacked). Life in the trenches imposed a surreal existence on all, from clean-shaven recruits to grizzled veterans. Conditions were so horrid and unbearable that troops came to unwritten agreements not to fire at one another during mealtimes. Once constructed, trenches changed warfare entirely, and were ultimately rendered ineffective only by the combination of a technological breakthrough—the tank—and innovative tactics. Neither was ready before 1918, although tanks made their first appearance in September 1916. Thus, short of merely holding their ground, both armies repeatedly attempted costly, nineteenth-century offensives (although marginally modified with drab uniforms for cover, and by the introduction of squad- and platoon-level tactics).

Further, both sides came to believe that all that stood between them and the eternally evasive breakthrough was more artillery, more shells. Since few European powers had sent observers to the American Civil War, none except the British had seen the ineffectiveness of massed artillery in eliminating troops in fixed positions, especially if entrenched. At Chemin des Dames in April 1917, both sides would fire a staggering
eleven million shells
over a thirty-mile front during a ten-day exchange, without a clear advantage to either side.
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As soon as the shelling stopped, soldiers ran to the parapets, set up their machine guns, and put up a wall of small-caliber fire. Memoir after memoir recorded the suicidal futility of infantry advancing against troops entrenched with machine guns. A German: “When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them.”
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A Frenchman: “The Germans fell like cardboard soldiers.”
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A Brit likened the Germans to targets in a shooting gallery.
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After only one year of fighting, the carnage was such that most front-line regiments were manned by reserves. Britain's 11th Brigade of the British Expeditionary Force had been almost wiped out, reduced to 18 percent of its officers and 28 percent of its men. The 7th Division, which arrived in France after Ypres, lost 356 of 400 officers and 9,664 of 12,000 men.

Trenches, however, were torture to endure even for the defenders. Rain, mud, and constant drizzle, all exacerbated by the cold French climate, had men shivering twenty-four hours a day and left soldiers miserable even when not being shelled. Sausage turned to ice, potatoes were frozen, and even hand grenades became stuck together in the cold. Vermin of all sorts attacked the soldiers, especially lice and rats (some the size of cats). The rats ate through haversacks and ration bags, springing to life at night, provoking battles that were nearly as fearsome as those against the Germans during the day. Percy Jones of the Queen's Westminster Rifles wrote in his diary, “I am addicted to rat hunting,” and his weapons of choice were the spade and the pick handle.
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On one occasion, Jones and his comrades chased a rat back to the second trench line, where a sentry almost shot them, and a year later, near Ypres, he recorded, “We had a great battle last night [against the rats] and killed nearly a hundred. [We] ran out of ammunition and had to come back for more bricks.”
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Another English soldier described a night in the trenches during the battle of Verdun: “Lights out. Now the rats and the lice are masters of the house. You can hear the rats nibbling, running, jumping, rushing from plank to plank, emitting their little squeals…a noisy
swarming activity that just won't stop.”
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The only relief to be gained from the rats came from something even worse—gas, which purified the trenches of all vermin for a while.