World War One: A Short History (13 page)

It was there because it was there: the front lines back in 1914 had frozen, as the two sides dug trenches, and all sides held positions that were vulnerable and expensive, purely and simply for reasons of prestige. British Ypres and French Verdun were surrounded on three sides, and the defenders suffered from enfilading fire, but the entire German position was unnecessarily long – troops were needed just to man it who could have been used for better purposes if the line was shortened. It ran, to no strategic value, in a great bulge from the Somme battlefield to the Chemin des Dames on a ridge north-east of Paris. Attacks from there, and from Arras to the north-west, in the British sector, could squeeze the sides of this useless salient.

The sensible thing was to shorten the line and use the troops for something more positive. From 9 February to 18 March the Germans withdrew – operation ‘Alberich’, named after Wagner’s nasty dwarf, because cottages were booby-trapped, wells were poisoned and trees were ‘ringed’. The Allies moved into shattered territory, with no opportunity for its reconstitution. The withdrawal also wrecked Nivelle’s original plans, which had been based on careful calculation of German gun positions. Now, he had to do the homework all over again, and he had placed his reputation on the line: he was a newcomer, with a reputation to keep up, and to give up there and then would have been a shattering blow. The nightmare had to follow its course. In an effort to keep front-line morale high, he had decided to inform the troops directly of his plans. A copy of them was found on a sergeant whom the Germans captured in a trench raid.

The British were supposed to drain off German reserves in the first instance, by an attack at Arras, and there was a considerable success on 9 April, when the Canadians captured Vimy ridge, the British emerging from concealment in the old cellars of the Burgundian town, and surprising a German defence that had ineptly allowed much of its strength to be shattered by careful bombardment of the front positions. Then Haig, as was his wont, battered on on foot as the Germans arrived by train, and failed to make any progress – even, for six weeks, keeping cavalry hanging around, clogging the roads, in the hope of some glad morning. Arras was a sign that a new type of warfare was emerging, in that the gunners now disposed of formidable quantities of shell, and knew how to use it. However, there were considerable problems with rear organization, and Nivelle’s relations with Haig became poor, the former intimating in contemptuous language that the British army was demanding too much of the railway network and squandering resources. In this, he was probably right, but picking
a quarrel was not a sensible thing to do at that moment. Lloyd George, who mistrusted Haig, exploited the affair to put him under Nivelle’s orders, and was himself discredited when Nivelle’s own doings proved calamitous.

This they duly did. The attack on 16 April against the Chemin des Dames meant driving Senegalese troops into a sleety blizzard, with a bombardment that the Germans had foreseen enough to keep their troops away from the dangerous zones. Nivelle had promised, as part of the formula, that he would break off the attack if he did not succeed in the first two days. He failed everywhere, except east of Rheims, and persisted with the attack, with predictable effect. By now, well-connected junior officers were able to tell deputies of the National Assembly how things were at the front, and the politicians had anyway only really accepted Nivelle because they thought he could play the British. And then came one of twentieth-century France’s encounters with reality: the troops rebelled – refusing to go any more into the charnel houses that their generals were expecting them to confront. Later on, when Communists were using certain episodes of the First World War as propaganda, the French mutinies of 1917 (like the Italian collapse somewhat later) became evidence that the working classes and the peasantry were rebelling. The matter was not so simple: a careful French historian, Guy Pedroncini,
¹
reckoned that about 40,000 of the men had been involved, those closest to the front, and had resumed discipline when talked to by sensible officers. Nivelle himself was soon dismissed, and the new commander, Philippe Pétain, had some sense of how morale might be restored: only forty-nine men were executed, and matters regarding leave and supply were made more humane. Did they want a German occupation? No. If they deserted, their womenfolk told them to go back. The army came back to order, but its generals had learned. Peátain appreciated that he must stick to small, competently organized
operations, and these were indeed well staged. For instance the ‘Laffaux salient’, part of the Chemin des Dames, was taken back in August. For France, it would be
jusqu’au bout
, and an old radical nationalist, Clemenceau, took office.

But in that same Nivelle spring, there began another mutiny, this time on an enormous scale: the Russian army was breaking up. The German calculation of 1914, that Russia could be defeated then, but not in a few years, was, in its own terms, perfectly accurate. By 1916 her output of war goods was at least adequate. What was not adequate was the organization that more advanced countries could show as regards transport, rationing, finance, national unity. The great cities filled up with refugees, and peasants crowded the trains as they migrated to find work; at the same time, the army’s demands on transport were such that trains were fewer, and the capital got only fifty grain wagons a day of the ninety it had had before the war. Privation, universally shared, might be tolerable. But some had fuel and food, and others did not; there was suspicion that Germans were everywhere in the woodwork, including the Tsar’s glowering spouse; and the ‘capitalists’ who coined it in from war work in Petrograd – as the capital had been, anti-Germanly, re-named – generally had foreign names. How do such situations turn fatal? Again, the inevitable accident. 8 March (23 February by the then Russian, religious, calendar) was International Women’s Day, and the working-class wives of the capital staged a demonstration against the rising price of bread. They were having to get up early, in freezing cold, and wait around, only to discover often enough that the bakery did not have fuel for the flour, or that the flour was being held back by ‘speculators’ in expectation of a price rise. In the first week of March the weather, which had been very cold, suddenly improved, which allowed demonstrations to go ahead.

Again true to form for the Russia of that era, the Tsarist
machinery for repression was altogether inadequate: not even glue for posters proclaiming martial law. As George Orwell remarked of eighteenth-century England, there was nothing between putting up your shutters and calling out the army. Briefly, the police attempted to control things, and a few martyrs resulted. Then the army was called out. But it now consisted of unwilling conscripts, living in giant barracks in the middle of the government quarter, and they were disaffected, smuggling in drink, getting close to the working-class women. In a more advanced country, such soldiers would have been housed on some Salisbury Plain, but old Russia could not have afforded the infrastructure. The troops, invited to fire at the crowds, struck on 27 February (12 March). Authority now collapsed. The streets were full of soldiers, charging around in lorries, waving red flags.

Next day, the uniquely Russian feature of the revolution appeared: a
soviet
, the Russian word for ‘council’. On 28 February, the factories and the soldiers elected representatives for a sort of glorified strike committee, soon dominated by socialist intellectuals, with an addiction to the sound of their own voices. There were also politicians in the Russian parliament, the Duma, who thought that they must take charge, and by now many of the generals were on their side. One thing was essential: to get rid of Tsar Nicholas II, whom everyone, including the Imperial Yacht Club on one of the grandest streets of Petrograd,
Morskaya
, regarded as a liability. The generals told him to go, which he did on 2 (15) March, and the Duma politicians set up a ‘provisional government’, eventually proclaiming Russia a democratic republic, though they shrank from a proper election. The Soviet was the representative body, and had the key, but did not know what to do with it: 3,000 people, crowding into the Tauride Palace, two thirds of them soldiers. An executive committee was set up, composed of socialist intellectuals, incapable of organizing. It was, again, a feature of Russia’s
peculiar state of development, at the time, that the stiffening which other, later, popular revolutions immediately acquired – from the trade unions – was mainly absent. Trade unions might have their quarrels with the bosses, but did not want order to break down, and had the muscle to exert themselves, even in conditions nearing anarchy. Outside printers and railwaymen, there were no Russian trade unions. Meanwhile the socialist intelligentsia made sure that ‘reaction’ would be made harmless: they arranged for an end to saluting, to the military death penalty, and decreed that anyone and everyone in the army should form committees to elect officers and supervise their doings.

But the causes of the revolution did not go away – on the contrary, matters worsened. One of the great engines present in any real revolution (there have been some surreal ones) was inflation. Russian public finance now collapsed. In 1914 a very strict policy had been followed, and even the Tsar licked his own stamps, to save money. But the war became extraordinarily expensive, and the government was at a loss. It damaged its own cause early on, decreeing that spirits would not be drunk: one third of its revenue had come from the vodka monopoly. There was not the machinery for an income tax, nor was there a large middle class from which to take War Loan, as elsewhere. The government therefore issued paper money at a greater and greater rate – so great, in the end, that the printing presses broke down and, when clients came to banks to cash cheques, they were handed bundles of large notes with instructions to ink in the numbers themselves. The zeros on the notes went up, and so did the zeros on the price-tags. Food stocks became unpredictable: they might be held back at every stage in the chain, from peasant producers getting useless paper to banks which hoarded sugar in their vaults because at least it was a store of value. In turn, this problem affected transport, as railway wagons went to parts of the
country that traditionally supplied grain and returned half-empty, while in other parts of the country food rotted for want of transport. In the summer of 1917, there was a spiralling down of problems that meshed in an indissoluble web. Nothing worked. Government and Soviet struck attitudes, talked. Into this situation, on 9 (22) April, stepped Lenin, the most extreme figure in Russian affairs. He and his followers – called ‘Bolsheviks’ because, years before, in order to take over the Social Democrat newspaper in exile, he had underhandedly created a majority at the meeting in question, the Russian word for ‘majority’ being
bolshinstvo
– could see a simple solution, where other men saw none at all. Lenin said: bread for the people, land to the peasant, peace to all peoples. If the Russians started the process by getting out of this war, then others would follow – especially the Germans, among whom Lenin had lived for many a year. Then everything else could be sorted out. This suited the German government, and it let him travel from Switzerland to Russia by train.
²

Lenin had an extraordinarily powerful character. His charisma does not show up in his writings, which are unreadable, and, even granted the difference in rhetoric between one civilization and another, it is difficult to see how Russians could be held captive by his oratory. But they seem to have been, and, certainly, in a small group, Lenin prevailed against considerable initial hostility: in April 1917, even Bolsheviks returning from prison camps were in favour of carrying on with the war. Lenin spoke, and events went his way. The old order, as he said, would make mistakes, and indeed it did – its finances a mess, the food queues out of control, the generals feeling hopelessly inferior to the Germans, the troops sitting doing nothing but drink evil stuff on empty stomachs, the bankers and the diplomats in thrall to Anglo-French imperialists. The Russian Revolution was a huge mutiny, and though the army did stay at the front, in the summer of 1917 it was
quite incapable of offensive action and only barely capable of defensive. Briefly, in August, the Provisional Government tried to put down the Bolsheviks, but even then there was muddle. Lenin sat it out in Finland, in thin disguise. When a ‘state conference’ was held in the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow, to discuss Russia’s future, even the buffets were on strike. As the autumn went ahead, the only organized body left was the Soviet, by now Bolshevik-dominated, and on 7 November its troops put an end to the Government. More people died in the crush of the tenth-anniversary film than in the actual ‘seizure of power’.

How were the Allies to react to the mounting trouble in Russia? The Americans were far from ready, and the French were licking their wounds. The Italians, in August, launched the eleventh battle of the Isonzo, advanced five miles over the Bainsizza plateau north of Trieste, suffered twice as many casualties as the Austrians, and stopped. Only the British had the strength for a great effort, and in the summer, in Flanders, they went ahead. It was partly to do with Russia, and also partly to do with the Americans, in that the general aim was to win the war and impose a British peace before President Wilson could muddy the waters. Lloyd George subsequently distanced himself from the venture, but in fact allowed it to happen. It has entered history as ‘Passchendaele’, the name of a small village on a ridge that had some local tactical significance. After three months, and 400,000 casualties, the British took it. It was arguably the lowest point of British strategy.

Haig had always really wanted to advance in Flanders, and this in itself made sense. The Ypres salient was not easily defensible, and there were 7,000 casualties each week because of ‘normal wastage’ – the Germans occupied a height, the Messines ridge, and could fire at Ypres from the side. But from Ypres to the Dutch border – capture, in other words, of the
Belgian coast – was not far, and the submarine base at Zeebrugge could be dealt with. The plan itself was not senseless, and the British by now had considerable experience with the kind of bombardment that might loosen the defence. They also had the strength – millions of shells. But the whole area was known as the Low Countries for a very good reason: it had been rescued from the sea, the water-table was close to the surface, and if it were churned up by shell, there would be mud. If there were rain, it would be a morass.