A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (100 page)

That was where Ludendorff was going when he began to disappear from headquarters: to brood at Erich’s grave. That was also when an army doctor heard “reports of occasional crying.”

Nothing could ever be the same. Margarethe was broken, permanently in the grip of depression, grief, and fear. Ludendorff, in his own words, felt that the war had taken everything.

Chapter 34

An Impossibly Complex Game

“With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each man must fight to the end.”

—S
IR
D
OUGLAS
H
AIG

I
n departing from his plan for Michael, in pursuing Hutier’s breakthrough all the way to Amiens, Ludendorff had used up the resources needed for the next stage of his campaign. Ninety German divisions had been thrown into the fight, and many emerged with only a few thousand of their men alive and unwounded. The scale of the losses, and the fact that he now had a huge new salient to defend, left Ludendorff with only eleven intact assault divisions to commit to Flanders—barely a third of the number originally planned. Nothing that he had originally intended was now feasible in the near term. The dream of winning the war by midyear was losing whatever grounding in reality it might have had at the start.

Probably what should have come next was a diplomatic initiative. The Germans were not in a weak position from which to offer to open negotiations. Brest-Litovsk had sealed their success in the east, and Michael had been if nothing else a persuasive demonstration of their power in the west. Germany could have offered to relinquish vast amounts of what it had won and still, possibly, have emerged from the war with gains. Even if it gave up all of its conquests, the war would still have demonstrated that Germany was at least as powerful as all its European enemies combined. No one could have denied its claim to world power status.

France, meanwhile, had reached a point where it could no longer replace its battlefield losses; it had almost no eligible recruits except those reaching the age for induction. Britain was not notably better off. In the spring of 1918 the Lloyd George government abandoned a pledge never to send boys under eighteen to the front, and it was considering conscription in Ireland. Neither Lloyd George nor Clemenceau had any interest in a peace that would leave Germany undefeated, but if Berlin had addressed the most abrasive issues—agreeing to give up Belgium and to reverse the draconian provisions of Brest-Litovsk—the Entente’s hawks might have been forced to compromise. Certainly they would have been pressured to do so by a public hungry for peace. If improbable, such an outcome was not impossible.

There continued to be Germans in high places, even influential members of the military, who wanted to make peace. Early in 1918 Max Hoffmann had agreed with the idea of trying for a military decision in the west, but when Michael produced nothing but gains of useless territory, he decided that a change of course was necessary. He would write later that the high command, faced with the hard fact “that it could not take Amiens, in other words, that the breakthrough had not succeeded…should also have realized that decisive victory on the Western Front was no longer within reach…It was its bounden duty to tell the government that the time had come to begin negotiations.”

Ludendorff saw no such duty. He was a man for whom, in the words of a longtime member of his staff, “all political questions were military questions.” He had settled the political questions of eastern Europe with his victories, and Michael’s disappointing conclusion did nothing to deflect him from wanting to do the same in the west. It is by no means clear that in the aftermath of Michael he remained an entirely rational man. He became not only bent on but obsessed with victory, impervious to the promptings of reason and reality alike.

Speed—haste—continued to be essential to Ludendorff’s plans. The number of American troops in France was growing explosively. If they or the British and French were given an opportunity to take the offensive, the Germans might never regain the initiative. If the St. George One operation that Ludendorff had planned for Flanders was no longer feasible and St. George Two could go forward only on a reduced scale, Ludendorff would settle for that. The British, after all, had also been weakened by Michael. They had been forced to reduce their reserves in the north to stop the German advance. By late March, even before the end of Michael, Ludendorff was shifting troops and artillery to Flanders. Arrangements were hurriedly made for a scaled-down operation to which Ludendorff’s staff gave the almost derisory name Georgette. It was a feeble substitute for the showdown toward which all of Ludendorff’s changing plans continued to be aimed, but he embraced it as a step in that direction.

While Michael was limping to its close and preparations for Georgette were just getting started, Lloyd George traveled to France for an April 3 meeting at which, with the Americans participating, the Allies agreed to strengthen the authority earlier conferred on Foch. He was given “all powers necessary” for “the strategic direction of military operations” on the Western Front. Haig had by now lost interest in this idea. With the French taking over part of his line and fresh British troops arriving from Egypt and Mesopotamia (Iraq), he no longer saw any need to be strategically directed by anyone. His reluctance fueled Lloyd George’s enthusiasm. His chagrin would reach its peak, as would Lloyd George’s satisfaction, when on April 14 Foch was given the title of General in Chief of the Allied Armies. In terms impossible to mistake, this made the Frenchman Haig’s commanding officer.

Georgette (sometimes called the Battle of Lys, or Fourth Ypres) opened modestly on April 9 with an attack by nine German divisions on an eleven-mile front. As at the start of Michael, there was heavy predawn fog. Again Bruchmüller preceded the advance of the storm troops with a five-hour barrage of crushing intensity, and again the Germans made startling early gains. The British were taken by surprise; Haig’s intelligence specialists, having observed German artillery moving to the north, guessed wrongly that the attack would come at Vimy Ridge. The worst of the barrage fell on the pair of Portuguese divisions that had been more or less donated to the Entente by a Lisbon government, since fallen, friendly to England. The morale of the Portuguese troops was low—they had been left in the trenches far too long and had never understood what they were doing in this war in the first place—and they were to have been rotated out of the line and sent home later that very morning. When Bruchmüller’s fire came down on them, they broke and ran. The storm troops advanced three and a half miles, running into resistance toward the end of the day and beginning to take heavy losses. It happened to be Ludendorff’s fifty-third birthday, and the kaiser was at German headquarters. He gave a little speech celebrating this latest triumph—so he saw it—and extolling Ludendorff’s brilliance. He honored the general by presenting him with a little metal statuette of—Kaiser Wilhelm II!

Georgette’s main objective was Hazebrouck, a railway junction from which, if they captured it, the Germans would be able to disrupt the BEF’s supply lines and shell the Channel ports. The defenders, through the first two days of fighting, were Horne and his British First Army. But by the second night, the Germans having torn a thirty-mile hole in his line, Haig was asking for French assistance and sending in the Second Army under Herbert Plumer, who had just returned from helping to stop the Germans’ Caporetto campaign in Italy. The fighting was ferocious and costly to both sides, and as day followed day it continued to be inconclusive. On April 11 Haig issued an order of the day that would be derided in the trenches and celebrated at home: “Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each man must fight to the end.” These words were marvelous theater, grist for the propaganda mills of London, but otherwise empty. Many of the troops greeted them with sarcasm. The part about holding every position was tactically deplorable, as Plumer would soon demonstrate. As for the BEF having its back to the wall, Haig knew very well that there were doors in that wall, and he was not unwilling to use them. At the time he issued his order, he was discussing with General Wilson a possible removal of his armies from France via the Channel ports.

On April 12 Ludendorff attacked again with an increased number of divisions. This new effort got to within five miles of Hazebrouck but then petered out. On the following day, probing for weak spots, the Germans attacked on the northern edge of the Ypres salient, where Plumer’s defenses were thin. To avoid having his line shattered and his troops overrun, Plumer disregarded Haig’s order of April 11 and began to pull back, abandoning all the ground for which Haig had paid a quarter of a million casualties in 1917. Lloyd George, when he learned of this, sourly rejoiced. He felt vindicated in his criticism of the assault on Passchendaele. “The conquest was a nightmare,” he said. “The relinquishment of it was a relief and inspiration.” He was right on both counts. By shortening his line, Plumer strengthened it enough to make a German breakthrough impossible. Once again he demonstrated to his men that he would not sacrifice their lives in pointlessly heroic gestures.

Shock troops
German soldiers advance over ground pocked with shellholes.

Through two long weeks Plumer slowly fell back and back, giving up ground but inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers and relieving the pressure that otherwise would have broken his line. French help was beginning to arrive—infantry and dismounted cavalry that Foch had taken from Pétain, whose own lines were left even weaker than they had been at the end of Michael. The Germans noted these movements. Ludendorff ordered Crown Prince Wilhelm, whose army group faced Pétain’s forces in Champagne, to complete his preparations for an offensive there. The game was becoming almost impossibly complex.

Meanwhile Ludendorff had no more to show for Georgette than he did for Michael—nothing but more casualties and another salient that increased his vulnerability without providing anything of value in return. He had told the kaiser that he could end the war in 1918, cautioning that it would be “a gigantic struggle beginning in one place, continuing in another, and demanding much time” but promising victory all the same. After so much futile action he needed to capture something, some specific
thing,
that actually mattered. His troops stood just short of Amiens, just short of Hazebrouck, and not far from a pair of high points called Mont Kemmel and Mont des Cats that, if taken, could allow him to dominate Ypres and everything around it. Any one of these would have been a great prize. Instead of making a choice, Ludendorff decided, as at the Michael crisis, to do everything at once.

On April 24 nine divisions of Marwitz’s Second Army attacked on a narrow front in the direction of Amiens. It was a rare instance of the Germans using tanks; Marwitz had thirteen of Germany’s monstrous and cumbersome new A.7.V tanks, each carrying a crew of eighteen. They routed the British until the BEF’s smaller, more agile Whippet tanks met and routed them. The Germans made progress that day, though at high cost, but after nightfall a fierce counterattack by Australian and French troops drove them back to their starting point. Ludendorff gave up on Amiens. The forward edge of the Michael salient became static once again, this time permanently.