Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (88 page)

That night, the medieval Cloth Hall of Ypres burned. Quartermaster-Sergeant Gordon Fisher, a Territorial of the Hertfordshires fresh to the war, was being driven by bus towards the battlefield. He gazed in awe upon
the darkness broken by brilliant illuminations and thought, ‘Doesn’t it look pretty! Just like fireworks.’ Only slowly did he grasp the horror of the spectacle he was witnessing. Thirty-one-year-old machine-gunner Lt. John Dimmer was that rare creature, an officer who had risen from the ranks. At Ypres on 12 November his Vickers was firing on the advancing Prussian Guard when it jammed on a sodden ammunition belt. Dimmer repaired the gun with an adjustable spanner, and resumed firing. An enemy bullet hit his jaw, and the gun jammed again. While remedying the stoppage he was shot again, this time in the right shoulder, and received three shrapnel fragments in the same place. He nonetheless continued firing until, when the nearest Germans were fifty yards away, they turned and ran. Dimmer was hit again in the face and almost blinded by his own blood, but he lived to receive a VC. He later also won a Military Cross, only to be killed commanding a battalion in January 1918, three months after getting married. At Ypres, by many such local actions as his did the dwindling units of the BEF cling to their positions.

On the British left, the French fought their own terrific battle to hold the line between Zonnebeke and Bixschoote. Langemarck remained under incessant pressure. That day of 12 November, one of the war’s most notorious official bulletins appeared in many of Germany’s towns and cities, reporting that ‘west of Langemarck young regiments, singing “
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
”, attacked the entrenched line of the English position and took it’. In reality the allies held the line in that sector. Elsewhere on the British front, if there was indeed some singing, by nightfall the attackers had little to celebrate: yet again, they had failed to break through.

On the 16th and 17th the Germans staged further local assaults, and poured more shells onto the town of Ypres. 2nd Grenadiers’ war diary recorded: ‘Attacks repeated with great strength. Battalion fired 24,000 rounds S[mall] A[rms] ammunition.’ But the Germans were now as weary as the allies. Alexander Johnston wrote on 16 November of the exhaustion and demoralisation of many British units, but then added: ‘fortunately I think the German infantry in front of us have very little kick left in them’. He was right. The weather made movement in any direction difficult. Ambulance driver Dorothie Feilding lamented on the 17th: ‘This wet is hell for the poor Tommies in the trenches. It’s awful to see the state they are in from it & it takes the heart out of a man to be frozen & soaked & never able to dry.’

With the onset of successive days of high winds and snow blizzards, the battle of Ypres faded away, leaving both sides to hold their blood-soaked
positions. The most significant territorial outcome was that the Germans had gained the high ground along the Messines ridge, and held it until June 1917. But they had suffered 80,000 casualties around Ypres, many regiments losing two-thirds of their strength or even more. A German wrote home: ‘I have been living through days that defy imagination. I should never have thought men could stand it … Our 1st battalion, which has fought with unparalleled bravery, is reduced from 1200 men to 194. God grant that I may see you again soon and that this horror may soon be over.’ The writer was fortunate enough to be taken prisoner soon afterwards.

The First Battle of Ypres was an undoubted allied victory: the Germans had poured forth blood in the winter’s final attempt to achieve a strategic breakthrough on the Western Front, and they had failed. The French, British and Belgian armies conducted a dogged defensive battle in which they were just able to hold a line against heavy odds. Churchill referred afterwards to ‘ever-glorious Ypres’. He was right about the importance of success, but the inventory of misery and tragedy was so large for victors and vanquished alike that few men afterwards felt minded to celebrate the battle. The British profited from the fact that most of their soldiers were veteran professionals, fighting against ill-trained reservists – Germany’s generals always afterwards blamed Falkenhayn for failing to commit better troops. British leaders displayed no great tactical genius, merely a willingness of their men to stand and die in such a fashion as had characterised the British redcoat for centuries. But the price of Ypres was the destruction of the old army. Losses were 54,105, bringing total casualties between August and the end of November to 89,964 – more than the strength of the BEF’s first seven divisions to take the field. Henceforward, the British in Belgium and France could only aspire to hold their positions until they received large reinforcements from the Empire, and from Kitchener’s New Armies training at home.

Cpl. George Matheson of the Cameron Highlanders wrote to his family: ‘Out of the 1,100 officers and men that came out at the start we have Major Yeadon and about 80 men left. I believe you have plenty of soldiers at home. Well, we could do with a few here.’ The civilian public was slow to grasp the scale of the struggle that had taken place. On 21 November the
New Statesman
reported with bloodless complacency: ‘Apart from gallant incidents – notably the repulse of the Prussian Guard by British infantry – there is nothing to record in the Western theatre of the war
since last week. The movements of the line of contact between the opposing forces have been so slight as to be appreciable only upon a very large-scale map … More and more the struggle in this region is seen as a simple test of relative endurance.’

Though the BEF’s losses seemed very terrible to the public at home, the French sacrifice was tenfold. Among commanders, it was Foch whose energy, intuition and genuinely inspirational leadership made the decisive contribution to allied success in holding the line at Ypres, with some help from Haig. The fighting strength of the Belgian army was halved. During the space of those ghastly weeks between 18 October and 12 November, not only did tens of thousands of men perish, but so too did many hopes. To be sure, the generals did not despair: it was not merely their right, but their duty, to continue to strive for victory. But the men confronting each other in the trenches, not only at Ypres but along hundreds of miles of the line stretching across plains, valleys and hills to the Swiss border, saw the truth. Both armies possessed unbounded power to inflict loss and grief upon each other; but as long as each had men and guns, the defence could be reinforced faster than attackers could exploit local success.

Wilfrid Abel-Smith wrote presciently on 28 October: ‘The noise of the guns and shells has become positively boring. Of course, one is semi-conscious of danger – but the feeling of boredom is uppermost. One would like to get away for a few days from the never-ceasing din. I can’t see how these battles are to end. It becomes a question of stalemate. With a line of this length you can’t get ahead anywhere (or else you get in a dangerous position) and you can’t get on because there are no flanks, and you cannot therefore get round them. As soon as you outflank, an aeroplane gives away the show, and the enemy meets it, and vice versa with us, so it is a never-ending business. You get to within a few hundred yards of each other and dig, and there you stop, sniping all day and shooting all night.’ Here was a vision of the strategic future which appalled both sides’ commanders, who would strive for almost four years until their deadly embrace was belatedly broken in the spring of 1918.

16

‘War Becomes the Scourge of Mankind’

1 POLAND

The Germans on the Eastern Front, in the glow of self-congratulation that followed Tannenberg, were exasperated by the inability of their allies to keep up. ‘Here everything is in good shape,’ wrote Max Hoffmann, Hindenburg’s chief of operations, at Kielce in Poland on 8 October, ‘except the Austrians! If only those wretches – “
Kerle
” – would get moving! They have allowed the success we brought them to slip out of their hands.’ Franz Joseph’s soldiers were indeed exhausted and low-spirited. ‘We have been too long without rest,’ cavalry commander Count Viktor Dankl wrote on 15 October. ‘Every man’s nerves have been exposed to so much that there is nothing to be done with them any more … We set forth full of proud hopes, but now find our spirit broken.’ Dankl added nine days later: ‘The men will not attack any more, we are short of officers and those who remain are shy. It’s over and done with. We have descended to the level of the Russians: the men will only defend positions and empty their weapons into the brown.’

At Conrad’s headquarters Alexander Pallavicini marvelled at the remoteness from battlefield reality of commanders and staff officers sitting at comfortable desks beside their telephones, ‘wasting much paper and ink. Such an institution resembles some international bank except that less of [our] paperwork is probably useful. There are many men here who … have still not heard a shot fired. Yet people say this is how things have to be.’ Across the Hapsburg Empire, a growing number of Franz Joseph’s subjects recoiled in disgust from the horrors for which such gilded warriors were responsible. Slovenian priest Tomo Župan recalled Conrad’s pleas before the conflict began: ‘God grant us a war.’ Now, wrote Župan, not only might the chief of staff’s demented vision bring down the Hapsburg monarchy, but it had already undone European
mankind. He castigated Conrad in his diary: ‘you have destroyed so many flourishing and hopeful lives. Are you in a position to compensate the family of even a single dead man who would never willingly have chosen to sacrifice him in exchange for all the world’s billions?’ Another priest, Ivan Vrhovnik, wrote on 18 October: ‘Many more men left Ljubljana for the front today. The enthusiasm which characterised the first call to arms against the enemy has entirely disappeared; [the newly departing troops] assuage the pain of separation with drink; their faces reveal their despair.’

The reinforcements were right to fear the worst. Conrad retained a boundless capacity for promoting disaster. In mid-October he committed his Galician army to yet another eastward advance. On the 14th, when troops began to cross the San river, they suffered dreadfully from both sides’ artillery fire, so that one assault unit sent back a message, ‘For God’s sake, tell the batteries to shell the Russians, not us!’ Constantin Schneider wailed: ‘our heavy howitzers have already killed a hundred of our own men!’ There were no pontoons, because Russian shellfire destroyed most of the horses bringing forward bridge sections, and thus only boats were available to ferry troops.

Schneider’s divisional commander conceived the idea that the presence of a band playing on the Austrian shore might raise morale. The union of the sounds of shellfire, military music and human anguish convinced many men that they were descending into madness. Most of the assault boats were destroyed by Russian fire. When the survivors were brought back at dawn on the 16th, ‘they walked with shaky steps’, in Schneider’s words, ‘hollow-eyed, haggard men, who until three days ago had been full of lust for life. They had now become so numbed that they were speechless, unable to describe their experiences.’

In the confused fighting that followed during the last week of October, the Austrians again suffered appalling casualties. Rampant defeatism swept the army. In Przemyśl, threatened with a new Russian assault, starving soldiers begged in the streets, offering absurd sums of useless money for bread or potatoes. On 3 November, the garrison was invited to dispatch last letters home before an encircling ring again closed on the fortress. Next day the civilian inhabitants, useless mouths, were ordered to leave. Among crowds of frantic people thronging the station, one woman forced her way into a carriage with two of her children, then as the train pulled out was appalled to glimpse through the window her three-year-old son, abandoned alone on the platform.

A Polish widow, Helena Jabiońska, secured a ride out on a cart, and on 8 November reached the village of Olszan. She found its burned-out ruins smouldering, the surviving inhabitants sitting amid their miserable possessions, shivering uncontrollably. ‘They are ghosts, not people,’ wrote Jabiońska. ‘This place is worse than a desert. There is nothing to make a fire with: all the trees have been chopped down, and even the stumps have been burned.’ Worst of all, the Russians were already beyond them. The fugitives had no choice save to return to Przemyśl, whose five-month siege thereafter became the longest of the war, a nightmare alike for its 127,000 garrison and 18,000 trapped citizens.

The Austrian field army was once more falling back. Faced with a crippling ammunition shortage, Conrad’s artillery was rationed to four rounds a day, even when the infantry were hard-pressed. If nobody gained a big victory in the October fighting, the Central Powers certainly had the worst of it. Cholera spread rapidly through Galicia, causing 3,632 Austrian deaths in a month. At first the War Ministry in Vienna declined to authorise vaccination, and hospitals were too crowded with wounded men to admit cholera cases. Before vaccine was belatedly provided, Austrian troops retreating into Germany’s upper Silesia spread disease among civilians there. As a further consequence of the surge of epidemics, many men and even officers faked symptoms in order to secure a passage to the rear; rigorous examinations had to be introduced, to curb the haemorrhage of malingerers.

On the other side, Alexei Tolstoy was in Kiev one night when a great Russian victory was announced. The news roused special enthusiasm among the substantial number of defectors from the Hapsburg cause who were now in the Tsar’s service. ‘Czech officers were strutting about the hall of my hotel, stroking their red moustaches and dragging their sabres across the floor. Other Czechs were shouting and singing upstairs, celebrating. There are ladies among the Czech volunteers, whom our porters call “the lady reservists”.’ But the city as a whole was not much impressed: the citizenry had grown cautious about tales of alleged successes which afterwards turned sour. Only around two on the following afternoon did a crowd with processional banners gather for a church service in the square in front of the ancient cathedral. They cheered, sang a hymn and for a long time kept tossing caps and lambswool hats into the air.