A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (90 page)

Desperate, the Germans gave up on their new system. They reverted to older tactics, positioning large numbers of troops in a strong forward line to block the attackers from making easy early gains. Plumer again had his guns on the move, preparing for another strike. The fates seemed to have turned entirely in his favor: the meteorological record contained no evidence of a Flanders September as dry as the last month had been.

But a light drizzle began on October 3, and it was still falling the next morning when a fresh British assault began the Battle of Brookseinde. Even more than September 20 and 26, this was a day of disaster for the Germans. The men in the new forward line, having had a mere handful of days in which to improvise their defenses, were slaughtered wholesale by Plumer’s barrage. The reserves, positioned too far forward by generals too eager to get at the attackers, were caught in the same inferno. The British troops advanced only seven hundred yards before, maddeningly for the Germans, stopping as before. In the process they killed or wounded thirty thousand of the defenders, taking twenty-five thousand casualties themselves. This rate of loss, painful for the British, was unsustainable on the German side. And conventional tactics plainly were incapable of keeping it from happening again.

Man and beast, together in war
A German rider and his mounts, prepared to encounter gas.

At his headquarters, alarmed by the dispatches arriving from Flanders, Ludendorff cast about for some way to launch an offensive that would draw British troops away from Ypres. No such thing was possible. The necessary troops were not available, in part because Pétain was now launching holding attacks at Verdun and elsewhere with French divisions sufficiently recovered to be trusted in action. Ludendorff ordered the Sixth Army to shift back to the new system. At least this would keep most of the troops out of reach of the British artillery. Beyond that there was nothing for the Germans to do but hope for deliverance. “The fighting on the Western Front became more severe and costly than any the German Army had yet experienced,” Ludendorff would recall of this period. “I myself was put to a terrible strain. The state of affairs in the West appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings, and had exceeded all expectations.”

Deliverance came literally from the heavens. The drizzle that had started on October 3 turned to a steady rain, and after a few days more it became a downpour that went on and on. Flanders was turning into an enormous shallow lake, every shell hole and piece of low ground filled to the brim. It would have been a sensible time to wrap up Third Ypres, and when the British commanders met on October 7, Plumer and Gough both were in favor of doing so. Haig would not hear of it. Plumer’s advance had left his troops deployed along a line that would be difficult to hold without exceptional hardship through the coming winter. One remedy would have been to pull back to slightly higher and dryer ground—a horrifying prospect for Haig in light of the price paid for his gains and what was sure to be Lloyd George’s reaction. The only acceptable course, Haig declared, was to push forward to the capture of Passchendaele Ridge, the northern extension of the same snakelike strip of high ground of which Messines Ridge was also a part. Virtually every British division in the Ypres salient having been reduced to tatters, the lead role was to be played by divisions from the Commonwealth—from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

The first attack at Passchendaele, the Valley of the Passion, went off in the rain on October 9 under conditions that were not merely difficult but impossible. Standing water covered almost everything, and what was not under water (the men included) was covered with mud that seemed to go down and down forever. It was impossible to find a foothold, impossible to move the artillery or set it firmly in place where it was, nearly impossible even for men on foot to move. Big guns sank out of sight. So did an entire light railway. The only way to bring shells forward was by pack mule, but many of the mules sank and drowned. When fired, the shells disappeared without exploding because the surface, even the mud beneath the water, had become too soft to activate their fuses. Somehow the Australians and New Zealanders at the center of the attack managed to fight their way forward, but their progress served only to expose them to machine-gun fire from three directions instead of one. Finally they had no choice but to struggle back to where they had begun. The wounded, unavoidably left behind, disappeared into the muck.

“The slope,” said an Australian officer of a scene he came upon while on reconnaissance, “was littered with dead, both theirs and ours. I got to one pillbox to find it just a mass of dead, and so I passed on carefully to the one ahead. Here I found about fifty men alive, of the Manchesters. Never have I seen men so broken or demoralized. They were huddled up close behind the box in the last stages of exhaustion and fear. Fritz had been sniping them off all day, and had accounted for fifty-seven that day—the dead and dying lay in piles. The wounded were numerous—unattended and weak, they groaned and moaned all over the place…Some had been there four days already.” Moving on again, he came upon another bunker with “twenty-four wounded men inside, two dead Huns and six outside, in various stages of decomposition. The stench was dreadful…When day broke I looked over the position. Over forty dead lay within twenty yards of where I stood and the whole valley was full of them.”

When the Canadians were selected to lead the next assault, their commander, Sir Arthur Currie, expressed his reservations. He predicted that taking Passchendaele would cost him sixteen thousand men. He did not, however, refuse. When his men attacked on October 26, they took heavy casualties, inflicted equally severe losses on the Germans, and were brought to a halt well short of Passchendaele Ridge and the sorry assortment of low rubble that had once been Passchendaele village. The Canadians tried again four days later, and the results were no different. A shortage of drinking water, ironically, added to the torment of the men. Bringing water forward was as difficult as hauling shells, and the swamp that extended in all directions had been poisoned by human waste and the rotting cadavers of animals and men.

General Sir Arthur Currie
Foretold the cost of
taking Passchendaele.

Another of Europe’s battlegrounds was now fully ablaze—the Italian front this time, where the bloodletting that had marked Italy’s entry into the war in the summer of 1915 suddenly soared to new heights. The Italian commander in chief, Luigi Cadorna, had launched two more Battles of the Isonzo earlier in the year, in May and August, and these two fights had cost his armies more than two hundred and eighty thousand casualties. The Austrians too had suffered hideously, and when the two battles were over, both sides were begging their allies for help. The monstrous Cadorna, a kind of savage in uniform who seriously advocated the shooting of every tenth man in units that failed to perform to his satisfaction, feared that the collapse of Russia was going to free Austria-Hungary to send all of its armies against Italy. He turned to the British and French for reinforcements, but found them willing to do no more than continue to send artillery. Austria-Hungary’s young Emperor Karl, warned by his general staff (no longer headed by Conrad, who had been demoted) that the Austrians were unlikely to survive another of Cadorna’s assaults, asked Ludendorff for help. Rebuffed, he appealed directly to Kaiser Wilhelm, who intervened. When a general sent to evaluate the Italian front reported that the Austrians were indeed at the end of their strength, Ludendorff reluctantly created a new German Fourteenth Army out of infantry, artillery, and aircraft taken from the Baltic, Romania, and Alsace-Lorraine. He sent this army southward under the veteran Otto von Below with orders to stabilize the Italian front with the shortest, most limited campaign possible.

The resulting Battle of Caporetto—also known, inevitably, as the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo—began on October 24 with a joint German-Austrian attack that quickly developed into an unexpectedly far-reaching success. The Germans and Austrians, whose thirty-three divisions faced forty-one divisions of Italians, advanced more than ten miles on the first day, and the retreat that Cadorna attempted to organize soon degenerated into headlong flight and the surrender of hundreds of thousands of his troops. Below’s orders were to proceed no farther than the River Tagliamento, which flows southward into the Adriatic west of the Isonzo, but his forces reached that objective so quickly that they pushed on in hot pursuit. The government in Rome fell, Cadorna was sacked, and the Italian forces continued to run until they were on the banks of the River Piave twenty miles beyond the Tagliamento. There they were able to make a stand. They were helped in doing so by the exhaustion of the pursuing Germans and the onset of winter rains. Below had advanced eighty miles in seventy days, shortening the southern front by a crucial two hundred miles. Italian casualties totaled three hundred and twenty thousand during the retreat to the Piave, including two hundred and sixty-five thousand men taken prisoner, and the stand on the Piave had claimed another one hundred and forty thousand. Tactically, Caporetto had been one of the war’s most spectacularly successful campaigns, and when it ended the war on the southern front seemed almost over. But it was not conclusive. The upheavals that it generated brought the government in Rome and its army under more capable leadership. The gross mistreatment that had destroyed the morale of the Italian troops ended. All this would work to the detriment of the Central Powers.

Not until November 6, under nightmarish conditions, did fresh Canadian troops finally drive the Germans off a large enough portion of Passchendaele Ridge for Haig to claim victory. The price had been almost exactly what Currie had predicted: nearly sixteen thousand men. A final attack four days later allowed the Canadians to consolidate their new positions and brought the Third Battle of Ypres to an end. In three months and one week the forces of the Entente had advanced all of four and a half miles, taking ground that Haig described as a splendid starting point for further fighting in 1918 but that less ecstatic generals dismissed as worthless. The British, Canadians, Anzacs, and French between them had taken a quarter of a million casualties, the Germans nearly as many. The Germans had used—and in many cases used up—118 divisions. The British, whose divisions were considerably larger than their German counterparts at this point, had used forty-three, the French six. Both sides were exhausted, the BEF nearly as broken as the French army had been after the Chemin des Dames.

Haig, however, was not satisfied. On November 20, near Cambrai east of the old Arras battlefield, he sent nineteen divisions and the largest force of tanks yet assembled into an attack on a thinly defended section of the Hindenburg Line. Like Caporetto, this was a tremendous success for the attackers from the start, but unlike Caporetto the success was short-lived and soon reversed. Of the 216 new Mark IV tanks used in the initial assault, seventy-one broke down mechanically, sixty-five were destroyed by enemy fire, and forty-three bogged down. Some of them, however, bulled their way through the forward defenses, terrifying the Germans and putting them to flight. But Haig had intended Cambrai as a mere demonstration, a year-ending morale-booster. No follow-through had been planned, and none was attempted. The British found themselves with enemies on three sides—always the curse that followed success on a narrow front—and on November 30 a counterattack by twenty German divisions recovered almost all the lost ground.