Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (64 page)

British casualties on the Aisne averaged 2,000 a day. One soldier wrote: ‘Troops are beginning to get downhearted here, as the Germans have proven themselves to be a better army than we thought … Germans held this same position and beat the French in the 1870 war.’ A German artillery NCO, Wilhelm Kaisen, wrote on 2 October: ‘I have seen attacks which have caused men to shake their heads in disbelief because they were so mindlessly conducted. Even English officers see that an assault on a front of 6–800 metres against a well-prepared position is a waste of human life.’ He asserted that infantrymen went into attacks carrying far too much equipment, making their movements painfully slow, and deplored the grim repetition of horrors: ‘First, we shell a village for a day, until everything is destroyed. Then infantry advance with bayonets fixed, and a murderous struggle develops. I watched some Bavarians who discarded their tunics and fought in shirtsleeves, reversing their rifles and laying about them with the stocks. Then enemy artillery fire starts, and an impenetrable pall of smoke and flame descends. Anyone who escapes unscathed is blessed with luck.’

A few months later, when field censorship was established, Kaisen’s letter would never have reached its destination, because he asserted that so disastrous were infantry losses that without replacements, neighbouring regiments would have ceased to exist. Within minutes of one lieutenant joining Kaisen’s own battery, the young man received a chance shell splinter in the back which rendered him a corpse. Stocks of ammunition
of pre-war manufacture were exhausted, making gunners of all the armies dependent on hasty wartime production, of much inferior reliability and accuracy. ‘The Germans are brave to the point of utter foolishness,’ Capt. Ernest Shepherd of the BEF wrote to a friend in Alabama – implausibly, although himself British he was a former member of the Alabama National Guard. ‘Fancy a thousand men massed in regimental formation … coming on unfalteringly to trenches manned by the finest shooting soldiers in the world … This is a very ghastly business, and there has never been its like before.’ In truth, of course, there had been its like before – the US Civil War, as Shepherd might have been expected to know. But the collective British consciousness took little heed of the precedent.

Only a few men on either side still affected braggadocio, like a German soldier who wrote home on 4 October: ‘one does not take the Englishman seriously over here … You should have seen how those fellows could run … We popped them in cold blood amid gales of laughter. They went down like flies at ranges of up to 12–1300 metres.’ So did Germans. On 21 September, Dr Lorenz Treplin told his wife that only a third of his regiment remained; six of its officers had been killed and a further thirty wounded: ‘it is terrible how modern war goes on and on’. By now, few men in any army advanced towards the front with any of the illusions of August. German soldier Kresten Andresen, one of the doomed, wrote in his diary on 28 September: ‘We are so benumbed that we march off to war without tears and without terror and yet we all know we are on our way into the jaws of Hell. But clad in a stiff uniform, a heart does not beat as it wants to. We aren’t ourselves. We’re hardly human any longer, at most we are well-drilled automatons who perform every action without any great reflection. O, Lord God, if only we could become human again.’

The Battle of the Aisne officially ended on 16 October, when the BEF relinquished its positions to French territorials. The month-long struggle became a focus of impassioned debate during the years that followed, and indeed after the war. Had Sir John French’s army missed a great opportunity, by its sluggishness in pushing forward to the Aisne, crossing the river and exploiting beyond? Could a breakthrough have been achieved by concentrating force on a narrow front, rather than crossing the Aisne in a dozen places? From the outset of the Marne offensive, the British moved embarrassingly slowly, against weak opposition. They never pressed the retreating Germans, who were able to choose their ground on the Aisne, siting their guns at leisure to punish the allies as they crossed the river and strove to exploit beyond it.

More dash and drive might indeed have enabled the BEF to reach the eastern bank with less exertion and fewer losses. But, that said, it is most unlikely that an important strategic opportunity was lost. On the Marne, the German army had been forced into an untenable predicament, but not shattered. Reinforcements were rushed forward to the Chemin des Dames, even as the British scrambled upwards towards the ridge. British field artillery in the valley below, capable only of flat-trajectory fire, could offer negligible support to the hapless infantry above, while German howitzers enjoyed full play. Attempts to reach the high ground were never likely to succeed when men were required to advance fully exposed across open fields – and the Germans were equally handicapped when attacking the other way. The Aisne battle emphasised the lessons of everything that had happened since August: on favourable ground where other things were more or less equal, defenders were hugely advantaged over attackers.

Strange novelties manifested themselves. Cavalrymen clamoured to be issued with bayonets, because they almost invariably fought dismounted. Some artillery horses had been conscripted from farms, and bucked in terror when first they heard their guns go into action. Drivers struggled to control wildly rearing, kicking beasts through the weeks necessary to master their new role – if they lived that long. British soldiers stopped complaining that they were being mocked when enemy units’ bands played the tune of the British national anthem, as one did on the Aisne front on 18 September. It was explained to them that the music of ‘God Save the King’ was also that of ‘
Heil dir im Siegerkranz
’, the Kaiser’s anthem. Nobody could explain to the soldiers of any army, however, why it was that the heaviest fighting so often took place on Sundays.

On 16 September, Sir John French visited in hospital a group of wounded British officers who asked him what was happening. The commander-in-chief replied: ‘at present, stalemate in our favour’, which caused one of his hearers to write home in some bewilderment, ‘whatever that means’. The C-in-C wrote to King George V, in a letter which gained widespread post-war attention: ‘I think the battle of the Aisne is very typical of what battles in the future are most likely to resemble. Siege operations will enter largely into the tactical problems – the spade will be as great a necessity as the rifle, and the heaviest calibres and types of artillery will be brought up in support on either side.’

French’s view, and his gloom, were shared on the other side of the hill. Schlieffen had always feared that a campaign of movement might give way to paralysis: ‘all along the line the corps will try, as in siege warfare, to
come to grips with the enemy from position to position, day and night, advancing, digging in, advancing again, digging in again, etc., using every means of modern science to dislodge the enemy behind his cover’. Now, Schlieffen’s apprehension had become reality. ‘This trench- and siege-warfare is horrible!’ lamented Prince Rupprecht’s chief of staff. Grenadier George Jeffreys wrote wearily, shortly before his battalion was relieved by French Territorials: ‘One day very like another. There is nearly always shelling.’ Freddie Guest, one of Sir John French’s ADCs, described the incessant German attacks to a friend at home: ‘It beats me how they can get their men to do it,’ but added bleakly: ‘I am afraid you will see another big casualty list soon.’

The BEF could take pride in the stubbornness with which it held its ground on the Aisne through a month of savage fighting, which gravely depleted many units. But, if the allies had not lost the battle, nor had they won it. Both sides now strove desperately to identify ground somewhere between Switzerland and the sea where manoeuvre might achieve a decision in the vast contest to which they were committed.

11

‘Poor Devils, They Fought Their Ships Like Men’

The clash of armies in continental Europe dominated the First World War, at least until Germany launched its major U-boat campaign in 1917. Yet the British people nursed a persistent delusion that the Royal Navy would fight a great battle against the German High Seas Fleet, because this was what their heritage – and vast expenditure on dreadnoughts – had conditioned them to expect. They wanted a naval showdown, because they believed this would suit their interests, and nursed lasting resentment that they were not allowed to have it. A ‘Trafalgar complex’ dogged British thinking in 1914, in defiance of the simple logic that the Germans were unlikely to accept an engagement they could not expect to win, because so heavily outnumbered. In the first months of war every detail of the activities of the Royal Navy excited the British public more than anything their soldiers did, though the sailors’ role was much less immediately significant.

The English Channel on the morning of 30 July presented a strange spectacle, following the eastward night passage of the Grand Fleet towards its war station at Scapa Flow. Tables, armchairs, even pianos bobbed in its wake: crews had hurled overboard from the columns of great warships every kind of inflammable furniture and fittings, in anticipation of an imminent collision with the enemy. A similar purge was conducted in the German High Seas Fleet. Admiral Franz von Hipper noted in his diary: ‘The living spaces look bad. Everything that might burn has been torn out. Cosiness suffers severely from that.’

Junior officers on both sides, and even some senior ones, sustained for more than four years an eagerness to fight which was all the stronger because almost untested. Europe’s soldiers quickly learned that war was a ghastly matter for mankind in general and themselves in particular. Sailors did not. Naval cadet Geoffrey Harper of HMS
Endymion
expressed adolescent delight at the expiry of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany: ‘Very good
news.’ Lt. Francis Pridham of
Weymouth
noted on 4 August: ‘Very great excitement and enthusiasm on board.’ Commander John McLeod wrote to his mother: ‘If it comes off, it is for me personally what I joined the Navy for. I feel perfectly placid and free from care.’

Filson Young, a journalist who served on the wartime staff of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, principal ornament of the battlecruiser squadron, wrote: ‘One profound difference between the Navy and the Army was … [that] when war broke out the life of the Army was revolutionized; it was bodily transferred to a different country, its whole organization and environment were profoundly changed. But the Navy continued to move in its familiar element; its peace routine was so entirely designed for war conditions that the imminence of tremendous issues hardly affected its daily life; instead of having to be ready to fight at twelve hours’ notice, it was ready at a moment’s.’ Britain’s seamen, fortified by sublime professional confidence, sought an early opportunity to demonstrate in action their superiority over the enemy.

Yet this did not come. Through the weary months that followed, occupants of the wardrooms and messes of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe’s squadrons and flotillas sheepishly replaced the fixtures and fittings they had precipitately ditched in the excitement of taking up war stations. As early as 17 August, Geoffrey Harper lamented: ‘The German “High Seas Fleet” has stowed itself away in some port in a blue funk and our own ships can’t find anything to blow up – except mines.’ He categorised the enemy as ‘skulking cowards’.

No British admiral since Lord Howard of Effingham in 1588 had held under his command Britain’s entire battlefleet strength. Churchill famously wrote that Jellicoe could ‘lose the war in an afternoon’ if he blundered on a scale that permitted the Germans to gain dominance of the seas around Britain. Such a belief exercised a critical influence on his contemporaries, and on many historians afterwards. In truth, however, and not for the first or last time, the First Lord employed peerless language to overstate a case. It is unlikely that any stroke by the German surface fleet could have changed the face of the conflict; it lacked the means to impose a blockade on Britain, even if Jellicoe had suffered severe losses. The Royal Navy’s grip upon the northern and southern exits from the North Sea precluded serious German interference with Atlantic trade, until U-boats became a major menace in 1917.

The navy, and especially Rear-Admiral Sir Edmund Slade, the economic warfare expert who served as director of naval intelligence from 1907 to
1909, had long feared a surface campaign against British commerce, which seemed a more realistic option for the Germans than a direct challenge to the Grand Fleet. The Admiralty sought to pre-empt such a threat by preparing a fleet of ‘defensively-armed merchant carriers’ – civilian ships modified to carry guns – of which forty were in service by 1914. Ironically, given the howls of outrage when
Lusitania
was sunk by a U-boat in 1915, both that Cunard liner and her sister ship
Mauretania
had received large government subsidies for their construction because they were earmarked for war service as armed merchant cruisers, though never employed in the role. Following the outbreak of war, the Admiralty expressed fears that some of the twenty-one German liners sheltering in neutral New York might be fitted with guns and sally forth into the Atlantic, wreaking havoc upon trade and vulnerable to destruction only by British battlecruisers. But Grand-Admiral Tirpitz was slow to explore the potential of an economic warfare campaign: British merchantmen were molested by only a handful of German surface raiders, which were soon hunted down and sunk.

The guardians of Britain’s naval mastery, the crews of scores of warships anchored in serried ranks inside Scapa Flow, would have preferred to fulfil their duties against a more rewarding backdrop than the Orkney Islands, chosen as the only anchorage in the eastern British Isles large enough for the Grand Fleet that could be protected from hostile intrusion. Treeless Scapa appealed chiefly to bird-watchers, with its summer profusion of guillemots, terns, kittiwakes, skuas, razorbills. For sailors allowed ashore, there was a muddy football pitch, a dismal canteen and an officers’ golf course on the island of Flotta, where each battleship maintained an assigned hole. Even some captains and admirals were to be found assuaging boredom by tending little vegetable gardens. Below decks, illicit gambling flourished.