A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (92 page)

In November the Austro-Hungarian general staff, in reviewing its options, was forced to the conclusion that its armies would be incapable of mounting offensive operations in 1918. It still had forty-four divisions on the now-quiet Russian front and thirty-seven in Italy, but these were so depleted of men and equipment, typically including between five and eight thousand troops each, as to be barely worthy of being called divisions. Desertion was epidemic, those troops who did not desert were displaying an increasing inclination to revolt (this was especially true of returning prisoners of war), and in rural areas life was reverting to a kind of Dark Ages barbarism. Deserters formed themselves into bandit gangs and preyed on local populations.

Conrad had been displaced as chief of staff but commanded an army on the Italian front. And evidently he had learned nothing in three years of mounting grand campaigns beyond the capabilities of his forces. He began hatching plans for an offensive southward out of the Tyrolean Alps onto the plains northwest of Venice—yet another scheme for punishing the despised Italians, made more attractive this time by the hope of capturing as much territory as possible before the hoped-for German victory. Soon Conrad was peddling his ideas in Vienna. His superiors did their best to ignore him.

All of which left Germany on her own. Even so, the situation seemed far from hopeless. In spite of another year of heavy casualties, in spite too of shortages of many essentials, the end of the war in the east was making it possible to bring Berlin’s military might fully to bear on the Western Front. And if the German armies were no longer what they had been two or three years earlier, they were no more badly damaged than those of Britain and France. If they were wretchedly ill equipped in comparison with their enemies—even Germany’s front-line troops could be given small rations of meat only three or four times weekly, and their trucks and wagons had no rubber tires—in other ways they enjoyed significant advantages.

High on the list of such advantages was the strength of the German defenses in Belgium and France. At all points except where the difficulties of the terrain made enemy attack improbable, these defenses had been improved beyond recognition since 1914. They were massive, sophisticated, ten-mile-deep systems of interconnected and mutually supportive machine-gun pillboxes, moatlike traps for infantry and tanks, and artillery-proof bunkers, all of it guarded by shoals of barbed and razor wire. Hundreds of thousands of laborers, many of them prisoners of war and civilians from captured territory, had been engaged in building this system since the start of the stalemate. The result was a barricade that, once reinforced with troops from the east, promised to be all but impregnable.

In the second half of 1917, first on the northeastern front and then at Caporetto and Cambrai, the Germans had introduced a new offensive system to complement their defenses. Called the “Hutier method” because it was first used by a cousin of Ludendorff’s named General Oskar von Hutier, this system promised to be a way of breaking the deadlock in the West. It involved a new kind of assault unit made up of detachments of only six or eight men, so-called storm troops trained not to try to overwhelm the enemy’s defenses with sheer mass but to make use of whatever cover the terrain afforded, slip around and past the strongest positions (instead of stopping to destroy them), and so move deep into enemy territory with unprecedented speed. The bypassed strongpoints would later be reduced by larger, more heavily armed units following in a second wave. Though such tactics had been tried on only a modest scale on the Western Front, there seemed no reason why they should not prove effective in much larger operations
—if
the Germans took the offensive.

General Oskar von Hutier, at left
First to employ the new offensive doctrine.

That was the question facing the high command: whether to attack or stand on the defensive as in 1915 and 1917. The decision was Ludendorff’s, and from the start he favored the offensive. He was influenced in that direction by what Plumer had achieved with his limited attacks at Ypres late in 1917, but what decided him was the U.S. army. American troops were arriving in France by the scores of thousands every month (the number would grow to a quarter of a million monthly by mid-1918). Though almost all were still in training, they would soon be a force of overwhelming size. Green though they were, the Yanks were well fed, enthusiastic, and equipped with the best of everything. Still unbloodied, they displayed a kind of innocent eagerness that was no longer possible for the British, French, or Germans.

Ludendorff calculated that the Americans could not be a problem until the middle of 1918, but that thereafter they would tip the scales conclusively. If Germany was to win the war in the west, it had only the first half of the year in which to do so. It was with this in mind that a new booklet, “The Attack in Trench Warfare,” a treatise explaining the Hutier method and how to use it, was distributed to the armies of Germany. Selected officers were pulled out of the line for an eight-day retraining course that was soon expanded to four weeks. The best German divisions in the east, along with soldiers under age thirty-five culled from less capable units, were loaded onto trains and moved back to Germany for rest, refitting, and instruction. The goal was to create forty-two elite mobile divisions made up of the best soldiers Germany still had—fit young fighters skilled in the use of grenades, light machine guns, flamethrowers, and trench mortars and schooled in the new system. After years of standing in a defensive posture that offered no chance of victory, after ordeals like Passchendaele, these men wanted to attack. They “pined for the offensive,” Ludendorff said, “and after Russia’s collapse expected it with relief.” Something similar was true of the home front. People not only wanted an end to the war but expected—had been taught to expect by German propaganda—that the end would come soon and in the form of an unambiguous victory.

The remaining question was where to attack. That came down to a question of
whom
to attack—the British or the French? To explore it, on November 11 Ludendorff met with Generals Friedrich von der Schulenburg, chief of staff of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group, and Hermann von Kuhl, chief of staff of the army group commanded by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Both were seasoned commanders (Kuhl had been Kluck’s chief of staff during the 1914 drive on Paris), and both had strong opinions. Schulenburg urged an attack on both sides of the Verdun salient—not as ridiculous an idea as it might at first seem, the French having drastically reduced their defenses in that sector. He saw a possibility of shattering the line around Verdun and driving the French back toward Paris. Kuhl pushed for Flanders, arguing that it was the only place where strategic objectives could be achieved. If the BEF’s line could be pierced, the British would have their backs against the sea and might be destroyed or forced to escape to England. Ludendorff himself laid out a number of other possibilities, giving particular attention to the point near St. Quentin where the British and French lines met. He declared that no offensive could go forward unless three conditions were met. The Russians and Italians must continue to pose no threat. The attack must come at the earliest possible time—in March at the latest, in February if possible. Wherever it came, even if against the French, the objective must be the defeat of the British. The BEF, so tiny at the start of the war, was now the dominant element in the Entente’s strength. If it could be eliminated, the French would be unable to continue. If it could be eliminated by midyear, the Americans would not matter.

Fifteen days later any lingering worries about a possible revival of the war on the Eastern Front were put to rest when three Russian soldiers waving a white flag approached the German line in Courland in the far north. They said they had been sent by General Kirilenko, a new chief of staff appointed by the Bolsheviks. Their mission was to communicate their government’s wish for a negotiated peace. Within days German and Russian delegates, among them Max Hoffmann and German foreign minister Richard von Kühlmann (who had succeeded Arthur Zimmermann), were gathering in the city of Brest-Litovsk.

Many peace feelers were being put forward at about this time, usually secretly and with tangled motives, and the leaders on both sides were speaking publicly about their willingness to make peace on reasonable terms. The Entente was trying to arrange a separate peace with Vienna, which would have been fatal to Germany in the east. The Germans were using intermediaries to see if one member of the Entente or another—now London, now Paris, now Petrograd—might be ready to talk. And the pope, who had regarded the war as madness from the start, continued to rouse the ire of Italian nationalists by looking for some common ground upon which an armistice might be arranged. The story of these pronouncements and initiatives, some of them sincere and others cynical, is complicated, interesting, and at points amusing or sad. But there was never much chance of working out a general peace.

The only conceivable peace, as long as the deadlock continued, was a return to the status quo ante. But at this stage only Russia and Austria-Hungary would have embraced such an idea, and they were willing to do so only because they had failed. Berlin and London and Paris and Rome still saw victory as possible or even likely in the long run, and none would settle for less. In a sense, all were
unable
to settle for less. Having told their peoples that this was a fight of good against evil, they would have found a decision to reconcile with the enemy (not to mention everything sacrificed in fighting that enemy) awkward to explain.

Germany’s leaders were more divided than those of the Entente on the question of war aims. Hindenburg and Ludendorff still expected to win, and therefore they had no interest in peace terms not dictated by Berlin. By contrast, Count Georg von Hertling, the aged Bavarian Catholic and former professor of philosophy who had become chancellor on November 1 after Michaelis resigned, said he wanted a place in history as the “reconciliation chancellor.” But even for him reconciliation meant a peace that brought gains to Germany—Luxembourg and Liège, perhaps, as well as France’s Longwy-Briey basin with its rich deposits of coal and iron. In this he was supported by Richard von Kühlmann, who pursued negotiations in many directions so energetically and ingeniously that Hindenburg and Ludendorff came to regard him as another of their problems. But he never did so with the intention of ending the fighting; his objective was to get any one member of the Entente to drop out of the war, freeing the generals to finish off the others.

If Kühlmann’s activities were less disastrous than Zimmermann’s had been, they were sterile nevertheless. With Lloyd George secure as prime minister in Britain and Clemenceau totally dominant in Paris, separating their two countries was impossible. Both men understood that Europe could not possibly be returned to what it had been at the start of the war. The Russia that had been France’s most important ally in 1914 no longer existed. Postwar Russia, broken and reduced, would be little better than a satellite of Germany—unless Germany too were broken. More than at the beginning, this was now an all-or-nothing war.

It was all or nothing for Ludendorff too. On December 27 he met again with Schulenburg and Kuhl. (It is revealing of Ludendorff’s power that he was free to settle momentous questions without involving the two crown princes to whom Schulenburg and Kuhl formally reported, or Hindenburg or the kaiser, or any member of the government.) Schulenburg continued to want an offensive at Verdun, and Kuhl still favored Flanders. Undecided, Ludendorff instructed army and army group staffs all along the front to develop plans for possible offensives: not only at Verdun and in Flanders but at St. Quentin, Arras, Champagne, and even the all-but-impenetrable Vosges Mountains west of Strasbourg. He feared that an attack at Verdun could be answered and undone by a British response in Flanders. Though he agreed with Kuhl that Flanders was ideal strategically, he feared that the ground there would be dangerously muddy so early in the year. He continued to show particular interest in the St. Quentin option, but his colleagues were not enthusiastic. Kuhl had already sent him a memorandum arguing that although a breakthrough might be fairly easy at St. Quentin, exploiting it would require defeating the British while simultaneously blocking the French from coming to their aid. This, he said, was likely to be asking too much of the troops. Ludendorff’s own operations chief, Major Georg Wetzell, expressed his own fears that the St. Quentin option was too ambitious and that either Flanders or Verdun would be preferable. There was of course nothing unhealthy in open disagreement over such questions; the debate reflected Ludendorff’s ingrained willingness to consider the opinions of those military (as opposed to his civilian) associates whom he trusted. But the fact that he remained undecided about the location of an attack that he wanted to take place within ten or twelve weeks is suggestive of a lack of strategic clarity.