A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (106 page)

—G
ENERAL
C
HARLES
M
ANGIN

F
orced to accept the impossibility of victory in the west, Ludendorff clung to the hope that he could deny victory to the Allies. He persisted in believing that Germany could emerge from the war in possession of part of Belgium and of France’s Longwy-Briey basin. “The man could escape even now,” Foch said of him on August 28, marveling at his stubbornness, “if he would make up his mind to leave behind his baggage.”

That Ludendorff was living in a fantasy was soon made plain. The British were readying an offensive out of Arras, and Foch was demanding that the Americans contribute divisions to it. Pershing, variously described by frustrated French commanders as “tactless” and even “obtuse,” would not agree. He wanted to concentrate his troops on his own sector of the front, where he could use them to pursue his own objectives. Foch was indignant. Pétain brokered a resolution of the dispute that provided French support for the attack that Pershing was preparing at St. Mihiel. This attack would have three objectives: to drive the Germans out of their salient; to cut the rail line running laterally behind the salient; and to threaten Longwy-Briey. It was to take place in just five days. The Allies were doing everything in a rush now, thinking for the first time that it might be possible to finish the war before the onset of winter.

The push at Arras, with Canadian troops in the lead, was another success for the Allies; they broke through everywhere they attacked. The defense proved so porous that Ludendorff agreed at last to a pullback to the Hindenburg Line—to the surrender, finally, of everything taken in the year’s offensives. His decision came too late, however, for an orderly retreat to be possible. On the British part of the front alone, during the two weeks of the withdrawal, the Germans lost one hundred and fifteen thousand men, four hundred and seventy guns, and stores that they had no means of replacing.

The war had come down to a rapid succession of hard Allied blows that the Germans could only do their diminishing best to contain. A disproportionately large number of these blows were being delivered by the Anzac and Canadian corps, which after four years of hard fighting remained so potent that Haig turned to them repeatedly as a battering ram with which to smash the German line. A strong case can be made that these were the best fighters of the war, their divisions the most effective on either side. This was made possible partly by John Monash, partly by his Canadian counterpart, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie.

Currie, like Monash, came from a background that set him apart from almost all the other BEF generals. He had grown up a farm boy in British Columbia, wanting to become a lawyer but obliged after his father’s death to settle for schoolteaching instead. From there he went into insurance, then into real estate speculation. At twenty-one he joined the Canadian Garrison Artillery, a weekend-warrior operation, as a lowly gunner. A combination of competence and amiability opened the doors to advancement: he was commissioned at twenty-five, promoted to captain a year later, and at thirty-three became a lieutenant colonel commanding a regiment.

He had been keenly disappointed when medical problems kept him out of the Boer War, and when the Great War came he was eager to go. He was as well qualified as it was possible for a Canadian soldier to be at that time and was put in command of one of Canada’s first four brigades. Trouble, however, pursued him. A real estate bubble had burst early in 1914, leaving him deep in debt. He borrowed regimental funds to stave off bankruptcy and might have been charged with embezzlement if not for the intervention of friends. To the end of the war he would be haunted by the obligations he had left behind. In sending $10,000 to a creditor in 1917, he wrote that “for nearly three years the last thing I thought of at night and the first thing in the morning was this”—the money he owed.

By then, however, he was one of the BEF’s most respected commanders. In April 1915 the courage and tenacity of his brigade in holding off a German attack on the village of St. Julien had kept Second Ypres from turning into a disaster for the British. A year later the brilliance with which his Canadian First Division captured Vimy Ridge provoked General Henry Horne to declare it “the pride and wonder of the British Army.” But in June 1917, when the British selected Currie to become the first Canadian commander of the Canadian Corps, politicians back home complained of not having been consulted and proposed other candidates. They urged Currie’s creditors to demand payment in full. His promotion was changed to “temporary” and seemed likely to be rescinded. He had always been a kind of alien among the BEF’s generals; even the Australian Monash was a model of gentlemanly refinement by comparison. “He had a tremendous command of profanity,” his own son would recall. “He didn’t swear without a cause. But boy, when he cut loose he could go for about a minute without repetition.”

Currie was saved—and knighted—when two of his officers advanced him $6,000, and when the veneration in which he was held by Canada’s troops made it clear that his removal would spark protests. At the end of the summer of 1918 those troops were keeping intact a record that is nothing less than astonishing in the context of the Great War. They never once failed to capture an objective, never were driven out of a position they had an opportunity to consolidate, and never lost a gun.

At the beginning of September, Ludendorff’s worst headache was not the Canadians or the Anzacs but the huge numbers of Americans assembling near Verdun. Anticipating an attack, temporarily free of his obsessive determination to hold his ground everywhere, he ordered the abandonment of the two-hundred-square-mile, thirteen-miles-deep St. Mihiel salient. This timely move would disappoint Pershing, who had originally planned to attack at St. Mihiel on September 7 but was forced to delay by difficulties in getting French artillery into position. He wanted not only to capture the salient but to destroy its defenders, and he had the resources to do so: a million U.S. and a hundred and ten thousand French troops, three thousand artillery pieces, absolute air superiority, and unlimited ammunition.

The attack began on September 12 with a four-hour barrage, but when the infantry went in, it encountered not dug-in resistance but merely a rear guard shielding the escape of eight shabby, undermanned German divisions. The entire salient fell in a single day. Fifteen thousand German troops succeeded in getting themselves captured, handing over four hundred and fifty guns in doing so. Pershing and his staff immediately began preparations for another attack in an area bordered by the heights of the River Meuse and the Argonne Forest. Here the Germans would be waiting with a twelve-miles-deep defensive system nearly as formidable as the Hindenburg Line. But Pershing had eight hundred and twenty thousand men to throw against them, six hundred thousand of them Americans, plus four thousand guns and enough shells for those guns to fire at their maximum rate until their barrels burned out. The staff was given fourteen days to get everything ready.

The rest of the world was falling apart for the Germans. The Serbian, British, French, Greek and Italian troops of Franchet d’Esperey’s Army of the Orient, though weakened by malaria and influenza, unleashed their attack on strong Bulgarian and German entrenchments outside Salonika. For several days the defenders held their ground so successfully that yet another effort to break out of Salonika seemed doomed to end in failure. But then, their confidence flagging because of shortages of ammunition and supplies, the Bulgarians attempted a limited retreat aimed at drawing the attackers into an ambush. It proved a fatal mistake: Franchet d’Esperey’s aircraft began to attack almost as soon as the Bulgarians were out of their defenses. The withdrawal turned into a rout. The Bulgarian troops, weary of a long war that had accomplished nothing and disaffected from the king who had consigned them to the Central Powers, abandoned the fight. Franchet d’Esperey’s advance units reached a position from which the Hungarian interior lay open to them. German troops were dispatched to salvage the situation, but they had no real hope of doing so. “We could not answer every single cry for help,” Ludendorff would lament later. “We had to insist that Bulgaria must do something for herself, for otherwise we, too, were lost.” On September 25 the Bulgarians asked for an armistice; it was granted five days later. The Turks, having been defeated by an Allied force under British General Edmund Allenby in Palestine, were in retreat toward Damascus and could do nothing about Bulgaria without leaving Constantinople unprotected. The war in the Balkans was over.

On September 28, meeting at their headquarters at Spa, Ludendorff and Hindenburg abandoned their illusions. They admitted to each other that not only the Balkans but the war itself was lost. A few days later Hindenburg would write that this admission had been made unavoidable in large part “as a result of the collapse of our Macedonian front” and Germany’s consequent exposure to attack from the east. In the long story of the war, there are few greater ironies than the fact that this was accomplished, after years of disease-ridden idleness, by the gardeners of Salonika.

Ludendorff, all options exhausted, sent his army group commanders a message of desperation. He told them (it is unlikely that they were comforted by his words) that there would be no more withdrawals in the west. Once again he was demanding that every position be held, even against impossible odds. He told his staff that something called pneumonic plague had broken out in the French army—he had heard a rumor of such a development and, he would recall, “clung to that news like a drowning man to a straw.” It was nonsense.

The BEF and the French were attacking the Hindenburg Line, capturing soldiers by the thousands and guns by the hundreds, and the Americans and French were attacking on a forty-mile front in the Meuse-Argonne. The war had rarely been bloodier—the British took a hundred and eighty thousand casualties between August 28 and September 26, and the Americans would have twenty-six thousand killed and ninety-five thousand wounded in approximately the same period. But for the Allies such losses were made bearable by the hope that a satisfactory end was coming within sight. Obviously the Germans could not possibly stand up against all the blows being directed at them without collapsing eventually. “I have seen prisoners coming from the Battle of the Somme, Mons and Messines and along the road to Menin,” a British sergeant wrote home. “Then they had an expression of hard defiance on their faces; their eyes were saying: ‘You’ve had the better of me; but there are many others like me still to carry on the fight, and in the end we shall crush you.’ Now their soldiers are no more than a pitiful crowd. Exhaustion of the spirit which always accompanies exhaustion of the body. They are marked with the sign of the defeated.”

The end of the story is as much a tale of politics as of combat. The fighting continued on its immense scale, with the dominance of the Allies increasingly undeniable. Though the best of the surviving German units continued to resist with a determination that at times almost defies belief, they were obviously sacrificing themselves in a lost cause. The Allies now had six million men in the west, but as their artillery and tank advantage became overwhelming and the tactics pioneered by Monash were widely adopted, not all those men were needed. Guns, tanks, and aircraft rather than the bodies of the troops became the hammers with which the Germans were destroyed and driven back. The French now had nearly 40 percent of their army—more than a million men—assigned to the artillery. They had nearly six thousand medium and heavy guns, compared with three hundred in 1914. When the Canadians finally broke through the Hindenburg Line on September 28 and 29, they were able to do so in large part by firing almost nine hundred and forty-four thousand artillery rounds in those two days. Early in October twelve thousand
tons
of munitions were being fired every twenty-four hours. France’s 75mm light field guns were firing two hundred and eighty thousand rounds daily. To be a German soldier on or near the front was to live under a round-the-clock Bruchmüller barrage.

Though the German line was being punctured with increasing regularity—on October 5 each of Haig’s four armies broke through the Hindenburg Line at one or more points—none of these successes turned into a rout. Low on food and ammunition, never able to get a day’s rest, the hard core of the German army continued to give up its ground grudgingly, to take a heavy toll of the advancing Allied troops, and even to counterattack at critical junctures. In some places the German line was manned only by officers with machine guns, but still it never dissolved. Amazingly, the number of British, French, and American troops being killed in combat continued to exceed German fatalities.

Almost 90 percent of the men in an American Marine battalion were killed or wounded in an ultimately successful effort to drive the Germans off a hill in Champagne—a region, as one of the attackers would recall, that years of fighting had reduced to “blackened, branchless stumps, upthrust through the churned earth…naked, leprous chalk…a wilderness of craters, large and small, wherein no yard of earth lay untouched.” This same Marine left a vivid account of how horrifically difficult it could be to advance against the German defenders even at this late and, for them, hopeless stage in the war: “All along the extended line the saffron shrapnel flowered, flinging death and mutilation down. Singing balls and jagged bits of steel spattered on the hard ground like sheets of hail; the line writhed and staggered, steadied and went on, closing toward the center as the shells bit into it. High-explosive shells came with the shrapnel, and where they fell geysers of torn earth and black smoke roared up to mingle with the devilish yellow in the air. A foul murky cloud of dust and smoke formed and went with the thinning companies, a cloud lit with red flashes and full of howling death. The silent ridge to the left awoke with machine guns and rifles, and sibilant rushing flights of nickel-coated missiles from Maxim and Mauser struck down where the shells spared. An increasing trail of crumpled brown figures lay behind the battalion as it went. The raw smell of blood was in men’s nostrils.”