Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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Such destruction horrified men inured to war. One soldier agreed that, though they might have left the Germans a desert to live in, the British would not have systematically destroyed the orchards, and an officer distinguished between damage done by ‘honest shells’ and arsonists. ‘The ruin was everywhere complete,’ wrote Edward Spears, a liaison officer with French troops who went forward into the liberated area.
Although there were touches which showed that more time had been available at some places than at others; the will was nowhere lacking, but the vandals had been hurried in some villages, that was all. It was as if Satan had poured desolation out of a gigantic watering-can, carelessly spraying some parts of the land more than others … Everywhere in these ruined villages women’s clothing lay about, underwear so arranged as to convey an indecent suggestion, or fouled in the most revolting way.80
Spears’s French driver, distressed almost beyond speech, kept muttering: ‘The swine, the bloody swine.’ Spears saw French soldiers bruised not simply by the physical destruction but also by the inevitable consequence of a long, and not always brutal, occupation. Some men, away from home since August 1914, found anguished wives nursing a new baby or a flaxen-haired toddler. ‘Can you love me still, who have loved you always?’ they begged. ‘No physical suffering I saw or heard of during the war equalled or even approached that raw agony,’ wrote Spears.81 There is more to the Western Front than ground lost and gained and the evolution of tactics. Just as men changed the front, so it changed them, and both the German gas attack of April 1915 and the destruction levied during the retreat to the Hindenburg line helped set iron into the soul.
The German withdrawal left Nivelle wrong-footed, for part of his offensive, now as passionately oversold to politicians as it was to soldiers, had been aimed at some areas that had been evacuated. On 4 April the Germans captured a copy of the attack plan, and thoughtfully distributed details to their waiting batteries. When French infantry attacked on 16 April, into icy rain which turned to sleet, they were cut to ribbons. Spears saw wounded coming back in despair. ‘It’s all over,’ they told him. ‘We can’t do it. We shall never ever do it. C’est impossible.’82 When Nivelle called off the offensive on 9 May he had lost some 100,000 men. He did not simply lose the confidence of his government, which replaced him with the big, wintry-faced Philippe Pétain, who had held Verdun in the dark days of early 1916. He did something far worse: he had pushed his men beyond endurance. The army which had endured Verdun had been a matchless amalgam of
steel-skulled Bretons, calm and obstinate men from the Auvergne, clear-eyed men from the Vosges, Gascons talking like d’Artagnan, idle men from Provence who put their back into it at the right moment, wolf-hunting men from the Isère, cynical and dandified Parisians, people from the plain or the mountain, from the city or the hamlet.83
The Nivelle offensive snapped its frayed tendons, and it began to mutiny.
The British contribution to the offensive was an attack at Arras intended to fix the Germans in Artois and prevent them from turning to face Nivelle. On 9 April the Canadians, four fine divisions fighting side by side for the first time, took Vimy Ridge in one of the war’s slickest set-piece attacks. Further south, the remainder of Allenby’s 3rd Army sallied out across the landscape around Monchy-le-Preux, described by James II so long before.
The battle started well, not least because of steadily-improving artillery techniques, and Ludendorff ruefully admitted that British gains were ‘a bad beginning for the decisive struggle of the year’. But as the attackers passed their first objectives, beyond pre-planned artillery fire, they found themselves, as had so often been the case in the past, taking on intact defences without adequate support. Lance Corporal H. Foakes, a medical attendant with 13/Royal Fusiliers, saw the consequences of advancing into observed artillery fire.
Over a wide belt the high explosive and heavy shrapnel came continuously and without ceasing. Amid a terrific din of roars and explosions the high explosives pitched in the ground with a shaking thud, to explode a fraction of a second later with a roar (which I always likened to the slamming of a giant door) throwing up a huge column of earth and stones and blowing men to pieces. Continually, too, came the high explosive shrapnel. A big shell, known to the troops as a ‘Woolly Bear’, bursting with a fierce whipping ‘crack’ about one hundred or two hundred feet from the ground, they rained down red hot shrapnel and portions of burst shell case.84
A battle which had started with great promise was soon stuck fast, but Haig was compelled to continue it to deflect German pressure from the French. It is not a battle that features prominently in British folk memory, but it should. Its average daily loss rate, between 9 April and 17 May, of just over 4,000 men, was higher than that of the Somme.
Haig knew that the French army was in ‘a very bad state of discipline’, and the gossipy Lord Esher drove up from Paris to GHQ and told John Charteris that ‘the morale of the whole nation has been badly affected by the failure of their attack’. But the French, understandably, kept quiet about the full extent of the mutinies, and Pétain – ‘they only call me in catastrophes’ – vigorously wielded stick and offered carrot to restore his army to reliability.
We cannot prove that Haig embarked upon his forthcoming campaign in Flanders simply because the French had mutinied, tempting though it would be to believe it. It is, however, clear that that he had long been committed to attacking in Flanders when the opportunity offered. When the printed version of his dispatches omitted this firm declaration which had formed part of the original, he had it inserted as an addendum:
The project of an offensive operation in Flanders, to which I was informed His Majesty’s Government attached considerable importance, was one which I had held steadily in view since I had first been entrusted with the Chief Command of the British Armies in France, and even before that date.85
An Allied conference in May concluded that a major war-winning offensive would have to wait until the Americans, finally drawn into the war by Germany’s adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, were present in France in strength. There were many who presciently feared that the Germans, now increasingly able to concentrate on the Western Front, might win the war before this happened, and by remaining on the defensive the Allies would hand the initiative to the Germans.
Finally, as we have seen, Haig was under pressure to get German submarines off the Flanders coast. In May he showed Pétain a sketch-map which showed a phased advance from Ypres to Passchendaele, and then out to Roulers and Thorout. As the second phase of the land advance began, there would be an amphibious hook along the coast, with a landing near Ostend. ‘Success seems reasonably possible,’ he told the War Cabinet that month.
It will give valuable results on land and sea. If full measure of success is not gained, we shall be attacking the enemy on a front where he cannot refuse to fight, and our purpose of wearing him down will be given effect to. We shall be directly covering our own most important communications, and even a partial success will considerably improve our defensive positions in the Ypres salient.86
The third battle of Ypres was thus the child of mixed strategic parentage, as soldiers’ bitter descriptions of it so accurately recognised.
As a curtain-raiser to the main battle, entrusted to Sir Hubert Gough’s 5th Army, Sir Herbert Plumer’s 2nd Army was to take Messines Ridge, south of Ypres. Plumer was ‘Plum’ to his contemporaries, ‘Drip’, because of a long-term sinus problem, to irreverent subalterns, but ‘Daddy’ to his men. His hallmark was meticulous planning and careful briefing: it is no accident that the future Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was serving as a staff officer in one of his corps, saw the Plumer method first hand, and learnt much.
On 7 June