A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (52 page)

Chapter 17

The Ground Shifts

“Success will come in the final analysis to the side which has the last man.”

—H
ENRI
-P
HILIPPE
P
ÉTAIN

B
y the end of April the Germans had scraped together enough troops to form yet another new eastern army, the Eleventh. They accomplished this through a general reorganization in which the number of battalions per division was reduced from twelve to nine, compensating for the reduction in manpower by giving every division more machine guns. Command of the Eleventh was given to August von Mackensen, a ferocious-looking general who had figured importantly in the Tannenberg victory and offered Falkenhayn the advantage of being no friend of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

The question facing Falkenhayn would have seemed familiar in London: how should the new army be used? Giving it to Hindenburg was out of the question. Transferring it to the Western Front was impossible because contrary to the wishes of Kaiser Wilhelm, who though declining in influence remained hereditary All-High Warlord with the power to set strategy. The fact that not a single offensive on the Western Front had achieved its intended results reinforced the kaiser’s belief that victory could be achieved only in the east.

Falkenhayn had to do
something,
he was going to have to do it in the east, and he strongly preferred that it not happen in the northern sectors where Hindenburg was in command. A simple process of elimination pointed him toward the southeast—toward the Austrians and their endless problems. And though he still had powerful political enemies, Falkenhayn also had a new ally: Crown Prince Wilhelm, the kaiser’s heir. This far-from-incapable young officer, now developing into a seasoned army commander, suggested how Falkenhayn might satisfy the skeptics and at the same time prepare the way for the Western Front offensive that he wanted. The prince’s idea was simple and sensible. Germany’s prime objective should be not to defeat the Russians conclusively—an unrealistic goal, in light of the enemy’s manpower and the vast distances of the eastern theater—but to damage them so badly that in 1916 the Germans would be free to turn their attention to the west.

Falkenhayn was thus disposed to pay heed when Conrad reported from Vienna that he saw an opportunity to break through the momentarily static Russian line between the Galician towns of Gorlice and Tarnow, and thereby preempt the inevitable resumption of Russia’s Carpathian offensive. Conrad, however, remained desperately short of troops and shells, and so he added that he would be incapable of executing his plan without the assistance of at least four German divisions. Falkenhayn’s answer was surprising from a man who had so long been incapable of enthusiasm where the east was concerned. He told Conrad that he was sending not just the four requested divisions but twice that many: all four of the corps that made up Mackensen’s new army. Conrad, formally in charge of the campaign, was required to promise that he would do nothing without the approval of Falkenhayn or, in Falkenhayn’s absence, of Mackensen. Mackensen, along with the Army of the South that was already operating with Conrad under the command of General von Linsingen, would be reporting not to the two giants of the north but to Falkenhayn himself.

Over a ten-day period Mackensen’s army was moved into place, surreptitiously so as not to alert the Russians, behind a thirty-mile expanse of front facing Gorlice and Tarnow. Falkenhayn himself went east to oversee the deployment, while Hindenburg and Ludendorff remained on the sidelines. Pointedly declining to give them any direct role in the impending offensive, Falkenhayn asked them to undertake a diversionary action to draw as many Russians as possible away from Galicia. Ludendorff, interested not in diversions but in conquest, took Falkenhayn’s request as justification for sending a large cavalry force into Russian-controlled territory on the far northern Baltic coast, a remote and desolate region called Courland that the war had not yet reached. At first this probe did not produce the result that Falkenhayn, at least, was hoping for: the Russians didn’t regard it as important enough to require a strong response.

The southern offensive, with Conrad and his troops in a distinctly subordinate role, began on May 2 with a brief but fantastically intense artillery barrage and almost immediately turned into a success unlike anything seen in the west. In four hours fifteen hundred German and Austrian gun crews dropped seven hundred thousand rounds of high explosives, shrapnel, and poison gas onto a twenty-eight-mile front occupied by the Russian Third Army, which had not troubled to construct strong defenses and was short not only of artillery but even of rifles. Worse, the Russians’ five and a half divisions—sixty thousand men—had been worn down by the winter fighting in the Carpathians and had been left in an isolated position that no other Russian force would be able to reach quickly. When the bombardment ended and Mackensen’s ten divisions and Conrad’s eight moved forward, the Third Army collapsed. The attackers pushed it back beyond Gorlice in less than twenty-four hours. They advanced eight miles in forty-eight hours, Tarnow fell on the fifth day, and within a week a hundred and forty thousand Russians and two hundred guns had been captured. Two other Russian armies came forward to rescue the Third, but their movements were poorly coordinated and accomplished little beyond feeding more bodies to the German gunners. General Radko Dimitriev, commander of the Third Army, was begging for approval to begin—so far as his troops were still capable of such a thing—a retreat across Galicia to the River San. This would have required abandoning the great prize of Przemysl. Grand Duke Nicholas, unable to accept the surrender of everything he had won, refused. He ordered Dimitriev to do what the German artillery made an impossibility: to stand his ground.

With winter finished, the war was heating up everywhere. A week after the start of the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, Joffre and French launched in the Artois region directly south of Ypres (where the fighting had never entirely died down) a massive attack that both men expected to produce great results—that Joffre said could “finish the war in three months.” The thinning of the German line had gone too far to remain secret. Knowledge of it helped make Joffre and French as confident as ever that the eternally hoped-for great breakthrough was at hand.

The bloody mess called the Second Battle of Artois began on May 9. After only forty-six minutes of shelling (the brevity of this bombardment was made necessary by a scarcity of high-explosive shells), three corps of Haig’s recently formed British First Army hit two sectors of line defended by only two German regiments. The Germans had constructed parallel lines of defense, including dugouts reinforced with timbers that, when topped with layers of dirt-filled sandbags, could not be penetrated even by high explosives. Only eight percent of the British shells had contained high explosives, and their shrapnel hadn’t been sufficient even to cut away the barbed wire in front of the trenches.

The defenders emerged from the barrage almost untouched, their machine guns so positioned as to be able to direct a heavy fire into the flanks of the two formations of British attackers. The target of the offensive was Aubers Ridge, which rose up abruptly behind the Germans’ first line. Once there, the attackers were to move southeast along a line of ridges until they linked up with French troops who, according to the plan, would by then be on the march toward the town of Lens. Beyond Lens lay a flatland called the Douai plain, the wrecked Belgian fortress of Namur, and (so Joffre hoped) victory.

On that first day British casualties totaled 11,600, more than four hundred and fifty officers included, with so little result that the offensive was brought to a halt. The stop was temporary; three more divisions were thrown at the Germans May 16 through 18, suffering seventeen thousand additional casualties while gaining no ground.

The French had much greater initial success, in part because their attack was preceded by six
days
of bombardment during which twelve hundred guns poured seven hundred thousand shells onto the Bavarians of Crown Prince Rupprecht’s Sixth Army. In the four hours before the infantry’s advance, the gunners fired enough rounds to put eighteen high-explosive shells on every yard of front; most of their guns were 75mm field pieces with low trajectories ill suited to the shelling of trenches, but the cumulative effect was devastating. Though both flanks of the attack force were butchered by machine-gun fire, the center quickly penetrated three miles into enemy territory. For three days the center continued its advance, taking possession of three German lines.

Then heavy rain began to fall, turning the ground to a gluey mud that made further progress impossible. In the end the early success of this assault led to losses so severe that it would have been better for the French if they had been checked at the beginning as completely as the British. The attackers made no breakthrough, finally, just an impressive but temporary bending-back of the German line. Ultimately they found themselves blocked by a last-ditch line of machine-gun nests that alone stood between them and the German artillery. As usual, the fight went on long after any chance of success had evaporated, with repeated French and British attacks neutralized by German counterattacks, casualties piling up, and nothing of importance accomplished. When the battle came to its end on June 18, the French had lost more more than a hundred thousand men, the Germans just under fifty thousand.

Joffre remained undaunted. He was already making plans not only to restart the Artois offensive in the fall but to combine it with a simultaneous, even bigger attack in Champagne, thereby swamping the ability of the Germans to respond. If only in numerical terms, Joffre’s optimism had a rational basis: by early summer the British and French outnumbered the Germans on the Western Front by fully half a million men. Sir John French was as confident of success as Joffre and as eager for more offensives.

But the costs of Artois did affect people whose minds were not impervious to reality. Across France this latest torrent of death produced shock, though complaint was muted by Joffre’s assurances that German losses had been immensely greater. The government in Paris was deeply troubled, all the more so as some of Joffre’s subordinate generals grew restive, and the humble poilus, the “hairy ones,” were beginning to display an unwillingness to participate in the most suicidally hopeless assaults. Joffre was still the savior of France, but the ground under his feet was no longer quite so solid.

At the same time the prestige of Henri-Philippe Pétain, who less than a year earlier had been an obscure colonel preparing a country home for retirement, was rising rapidly. It was a corps under Pétain’s command that had made all the early gains in the Artois offensive, its advance units getting to the top of Vimy Ridge before being driven off by arriving German reserves. Pétain’s painstaking preparations and efficient execution had been essential to this success, limited and temporary as it was. He was a hard disciplinarian but nearly unique among the high-ranking generals of the time in the concern he showed for the living conditions of his troops and his willingness to share their risks. (He would move forward into the combat zone when his men were under bombardment.) The disdain for the cult of the offensive that had crippled his peacetime career was beginning to look like wisdom. In the crucible of combat he was emerging as a model of professional competence and common sense. Above all he was a commander who got results, and so in the immediate aftermath of the Artois campaign he was promoted to command of the French Second Army.

Plainspoken as always, he produced a report on Second Artois in which he declared that this war was not going to be won by some breakthrough, some great and brilliantly executed conclusive battle. This, he said, was a war of attrition, and it required keeping casualties at tolerable levels. “Success will come in the final analysis,” he said, “to the side which has the last man.” In this regard he was much closer in his thinking to Falkenhayn than to Joffre, French, and Haig. He was also ahead of his fellow French generals, and almost abreast of the best German thinking, in his understanding of how to use artillery and infantry together. It was the big guns that took enemy ground, he said. The infantry’s job was to occupy what the artillery had conquered.

In London too the ground was shifting. Kitchener, as potent a national symbol in Britain as Joffre was south of the Channel, was as baffled as his French counterpart by this terrible new kind of warfare and far more prepared to admit that no solutions were at hand. Behind the scenes he was losing the iron-hard self-assurance that had for so long been an essential element of his public persona. He had lost faith in the Gallipoli campaign, where the British and French were bogged down on their landing beaches and were beginning to be ravaged by dysentery and the fly-plagued miseries of the Turkish summer. But he could see no way of extracting Hamilton’s force without losing tens of thousands of men in the process. He could see no alternative to pushing ahead to victory (one of his fears was that defeat in Turkey would provoke a revolt by Britain’s Muslim subjects in Egypt) and seemed prepared to pay almost any price in doing so. Early in May there had been talk of trying again to use the Entente’s Mediterranean fleet to force the Dardanelles, but all such planning came to an end with the sinking at Gallipoli of the British battleship
Goliath.
The mighty
Queen Elizabeth,
crown jewel of the Dardanelles task force, was withdrawn to safer waters. Three days later, on learning that Churchill was sending still more warships to the Dardanelles, Admiral John Fisher resigned as first sea lord and sent a wildly emotional letter to the leader of the Tory opposition. Calling Churchill “a real danger,” he warned that “a very great national disaster is very near us in the Dardanelles!” On May 25 the first U-boat to reach the Aegean torpedoed and sank the battleship
Triumph.
A day later it sank the
Majestic,
at which point the six British battleships remaining near the Dardanelles were sent away. With that, even the possibility of a naval attempt on the strait disappeared.