A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (83 page)

Where the system had been tried, however, it proved its effectiveness. The attackers had been allowed to advance into a killing zone where they were raked with artillery and machine-gun fire and then driven back with counterattacks. German losses had been kept at tolerable levels. As soon as this became clear, Falkenhausen was dismissed. Efforts were redoubled to ensure that the new system would be fully in place at the Chemin des Dames by the time the French attacked there.

Nivelle’s attack came at six
A.M.
on April 16. From start to finish it was a contest between an offensive of the most conventional kind—more than a week of intense artillery preparation, massed formations of infantry slogging in plain view toward their objectives—and the Germans’ new defense. Almost immediately it turned into something very like the debacle that Painlevé and so many others had feared. The idea that had governed all of Nivelle’s planning—that the tactics he and Mangin had used to retake Forts Douaumont and Vaux at Verdun would work in this different and much larger theater—proved to be totally inadequate to the occasion. (Nor had Nivelle considered that, by the time of his attacks at Verdun, the Germans were quite prepared to abandon ruined fortresses for stronger positions in the rear.) In many places French troops had to cross the Aisne at the start of their advance, then climb a steep hillside obstructed with trees, a ragged network of ravines, and the inevitable German wire. The entire hillside was studded with German machine-gun nests so well dug in and protected with steel and concrete that they had survived the bombardment; they poured fire on the French as they came forward. The German first line was on the reverse slope, beyond the crest of the ridge. Thus most of the French shells had passed harmlessly over it, and those attackers who reached the crest were exposed against the sky. The German reserves were far enough back to be beyond reach of most of Nivelle’s batteries (he was undersupplied with long-range guns), but not too far back to enter the battle quickly.

In raw manpower terms, the advantage lay entirely with the French. Nivelle had three armies that among them included fifty-three divisions—at least 1.2 million men—and all three were used in the initial assault. But twenty-seven divisions were held back as the Mass of Maneuver, which was to exploit the breakthrough when it came. To absorb this attack the Germans had twenty-one divisions in position on or near the Chemin des Dames, and another twenty-seven as their counterattack force. They had been in possession of the ridge since September 1914, so that they knew every inch of it and had had more than two and a half years to shape it to their needs. And they were commanded by Crown Prince Wilhelm; he and his staff had become well acquainted with the Nivelle offensive formula at Verdun, and they had had the winter to adapt to it. And of course they held the heights.

One hundred and twenty-eight of France’s new tanks participated in the assault but accomplished nothing. As part of the new German tactics, every artillery battery was ordered to direct the fire of one of its guns at any tank that came into view. This tactic proved devastating: fifty-two tanks were blown to bits on the first day, and another twenty-eight broke down. Those that remained either fell into ditches excavated by the Germans or bogged down in mud.

The weather was on the side of the Germans. It had started to rain the night before the attack, and the rain turned to sleet followed by snow—an improbable development at this time of year. At many points the French never got close to their objectives. At others they were able, heroically and at great cost, to advance as much as two and a half miles. “A snow squall swept our position,” a French tank officer wrote after observing the opening of the attack. “Our first wounded soldiers were coming in, men from the Eighty-Third Infantry Regiment. We gathered round them, and learned from them that the enemy positions were very strong, the resistance desperate. One battalion did reach the top of the Cornillet—probably the one whose gallant advance we had watched—but it was decimated by fire from intact machine gun positions, and was unable to withstand the enemy’s counterattack. One of the wounded men, his arm in a sling and patches of blood on his forehead, shouted while driving by:

“‘The Boches are still holding out in the Grille Wood, but we are attacking them with grenades.’

“A helmetless lieutenant, his clothes disarrayed and with a wound in his chest, walked slowly toward our group:

“‘Ah! If only you [the tanks] had been with us! We found nothing but intact barbed wire! If it hadn’t been for that, we’d be far ahead now, instead of killing each other on the spot.’

“‘We just couldn’t keep moving,’ an alert corporal shouted, while using his rifle as a crutch. ‘Too many blasted machine guns, against which there was nothing doing!’

“‘The Boche certainly knew we were going to attack there,’ the lieutenant went on, ‘their trenches were jammed.’”

Even the French gains were in accord with the German defensive system. By midday the Germans were moving both their reserves and their masses of light artillery forward from the rear. They hit the French after they had been wearied and battered, sending them reeling back toward their starting point. As the day ended, the French had succeeded in moving their line forward approximately six hundred yards on average. (Nivelle had forecast gains of six miles on the first day.) The Mass of Maneuver had had no opportunity to go into action. It was another Somme.

Nivelle attacked again on the second day, this time sending his forces off in two directions in a forking maneuver. One army was to move toward the northeast and try to link up with a French force that was at the same time launching a separate, supporting assault in Champagne. This was a complete failure, first absorbed by the German defenses and then forced back. The other tine of the fork, commanded by Mangin, had some success in pushing to the north and west. It captured three towns of no great importance, but finally even Mangin’s relentless aggressiveness could not keep it from bogging down. In the end his men too were driven back. The French were everywhere stymied. Nivelle kept scheduling and canceling and rescheduling attacks by his Mass of Maneuver. The strain of having to prepare again and again to die unnerved the waiting troops.

On April 19 War Minister Painlevé again intervened, trying to get Nivelle to stop. The general, who in demanding approval of his grand plan had promised to call it off if a breakthrough were not achieved within forty-eight hours, refused. The very next day he found to his chagrin, however, that he had no choice but to pause: the divisions at the front were breaking down, both their morale and their supplies of ammunition dangerously low. Late on the day after that, April 21, a new phenomenon appeared. African troops—members of elite units that had often led the assaults of Mangin’s army—shocked and embarrassed their officers by shouting
Vive la paix.
“Peace! Down with war! Death to those who are responsible!” Other units were getting drunk en masse and refusing to march to the front.

On April 25, with Paris awash in rumors that put the casualty figures even higher than they actually were, President Poincaré humiliated the commander in chief by ordering an end to the attacks on the Chemin des Dames. Nivelle reacted ignobly. He blamed Mangin for the failure of the offensive and dismissed him from command of the Sixth Army. He then tried to blame Micheler as well. Micheler, who had regarded the offensive as hopeless from the start and had become almost insubordinate in saying so, responded with witheringly wrathful contempt. “What, you try to make me responsible for the mistake, when I never ceased to warn you?” he demanded. “Do you know what such an action is called? It is called cowardice.”

By the time the offensive was shut down, it had cost the French two hundred and seventy thousand casualties, including tens of thousands killed. Total German casualties have been estimated at one hundred and sixty-three thousand. These were losses that neither side could afford. Nivelle was destroyed, not so much because of his failure but because he had promised so much. On April 28 Painlevé elevated Pétain to chief of staff of the French army and asked Nivelle to resign as commander in chief (a post distinct from chief of staff). Nivelle, astonishingly, refused. Instead he became increasingly reckless in assigning blame. He completed his self-humiliation by refusing to resign even after Pétain was named commander in chief in his stead. By that time Pétain was faced with an entirely new kind of crisis—an army mutiny so widespread that for a while it appeared possible that France might be unable to stay in the war.

The war had reached a point at which several of the belligerent nations were not only in trouble but in danger of breaking down. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was by now well advanced. The Turks, their hard-fighting but weary soldiers chronically low on supplies and reinforcements, had lost the Caucasus to the Russians in 1916. In March 1917 British forces operating out of Egypt had captured the Mesopotamian capital of Baghdad, one of the greatest jewels in the Ottoman crown. The only thing keeping Turkey in the war was the certainty that its empire was doomed if Germany went down to defeat.

Russia’s provisional government too was faced with monstrous problems. It was being financed and generously supplied by the British and French but was increasingly unable to keep either its armies intact or its home front under control. On April 11 an All-Russian Conference of Soviets voted to support a continuation of the war, but it also called for negotiations aimed at achieving peace without annexations or indemnities on either side. On April 15 tens of thousands of Russian troops came out of their trenches to join with their German and Austrian adversaries in impromptu and nearly mutinous Easter celebrations. On the following day Lenin arrived in Petrograd from his long exile in Switzerland; Ludendorff, hoping to foment further disruption inside Russia, had approved his travel by rail from Switzerland via Frankfurt, Berlin, Stockholm, and Helsinki. Upon his arrival the Bolshevik leader began maneuvering his followers into an antiwar stance calculated to take advantage of public discontent. The Russians had promised a May 1 attack in support of the Nivelle offensive and had assembled a massive force for the purpose. The offensive proved impossible, however, to carry out. The troops had become ungovernable, and not enough coal could be found to operate the necessary trains. On May 2 Kerensky became leader of the provisional government. He tried to address the army’s problems, but everything he did ended up making them worse. When he released all men over age forty-three from military service, a transportation system that was already on the verge of collapse found itself mobbed by middle-aged veterans desperate to get to their homes. When he abolished the death penalty for desertion, a million soldiers threw down their weapons. Many were drawn homeward by the hope of getting a piece of land when the great estates of the aristocracy were distributed to the people. Many were simply sick of war.

Austria-Hungary was a broken and empty shell barely held together by the resentful support of Berlin. Its new emperor, Karl I, not yet thirty, was a pious, earnest, and cultivated idealist who had succeeded to his family’s dual thrones after having received no training in politics and no experience in the administration of anything. He desired sincerely not only to hold his empire together but to deliver its people from further carnage. In March he embarked upon one of the most quixotic undertakings of the Great War. He recruited his wife’s two young brothers, the Princes Sixtus and Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, both of whom had served as stretcher-bearers in the Belgian army earlier in the war, to be his emissaries in a secret effort to initiate peace discussions with the Entente. This effort was as naïve as it was well intentioned, its naïveté most apparent in Karl’s failure to tell the Germans what he was doing. When the inevitable happened and Berlin found out, Karl stood convicted in the eyes of his allies of having attempted to save himself while cutting Germany adrift (something that he does not appear to have intended). When the details of his proposal appeared in the Paris newspapers (the Germans were freshly appalled to learn that Karl was offering Alsace and Lorraine to France), he panicked and denounced the story as a malicious fabrication. This persuaded the French that he was not only a fool but a liar.

His effort had been doomed from the start. At first it generated small sparks of interest, especially in London, but by this point a negotiated peace that did not involve the dismantling of Austria-Hungary was hardly possible. Russia, Italy, and Romania had all been promised great pieces of Karl’s patrimony. It was difficult to see how Britain and France could agree to a settlement that did not redeem these pledges. Karl’s initiative had been little more than a last gasp of an impotent and dying regime.

If Germany was a tower of strength when contrasted with Turkey, Russia, or Austria-Hungary, serious cracks were appearing in the tower’s foundations. The German nation was continuing slowly to starve, and when the flour ration was further reduced in mid-April, workers went on strike in hundreds of factories. As prices continued to rise, workers in steel and munitions plants along with miners by the tens of thousands struck for higher wages and more and better food. Behind this unrest was a deepening weariness with an endless war and with all the tragedy the war had brought. Germany’s political parties, which were a barometer of public opinion even if they lacked any role in making policy, began to break apart over how to end the war and how the experience of the war should be translated into reforms. In March the Reichstag created a special committee to study a reform of the German constitution. In April the socialists, echoing their counterparts in Russia, called for peace without annexations or indemnities.

Such ideas were anathema not only to Ludendorff and the rest of the high command but to all the most powerful elements of German society. The Junkers of Prussia, the owners of German industry, and the conservative and center-right parties all were opposed to reforms that might require them to surrender any part of the power that had long belonged to them alone. Nor were they without popular support: ordinary citizens were easily persuaded that any settlement of the war must both repay the nation for its suffering and increase its security through strategic annexations of, for example, Belgium’s Liège. In Germany as in all the belligerent countries, propaganda was contributing to making peace impossible. The German public had been taught that the war had been started by an Entente committed to the destruction of their nation, that in prosecuting the war the Entente had flouted international law, and that the armies of the Entente were guilty of unspeakable atrocities. To people who believed these things, it was inconceivable that Germany could accept a peace in which the aggressors were not held to account or were left with the ability to attack again.