CHAPTER XVII.
THE GERMAN SPRING OF 1918.
Was G.H.Q. at fault?—Where we could best afford to lose ground—Refugees complicate the situation—Stark resolution of the French—All the Pas-de-Calais to be wrecked if necessary—How our railways broke down—Amiens does not fall.
To affirm that a great German attack was expected in the Spring of 1918, and that the site of the attack was not altogether unexpected, seems to imply a very serious criticism of G.H.Q. That being so, why did the Germans succeed in breaking through and winning such an extent of territory and coming within a narrow margin of gaining a decisive advantage?
The question is natural, especially as one soldier in high command has stated—or is reported to have stated—that he knew exactly the spot where the Germans were going to attack. Some day there will be an exhaustive inquiry into all the circumstances of the Spring of 1918. Probably as a result it will be found that no serious blame can be attached in any quarter, but that what happened was the result of a series of events which were mostly unavoidable.
For the first time Germany could concentrate her whole strength on this Front. Yet our strength was at the lowest point it had reached for many months and, since we had just taken over a new sector of the line, our defence was thinner on the average than it had ever been since 1915. Further, we were definitely short of some essential defence material. If we had strengthened the sector where the chief attack came we should have had to weaken another sector. Then the Germans would have attacked that sector. They chose, and chose naturally, the point where our line was thinnest. If it can be shown that the sector where our line was thinnest was the sector in which we could best afford to lose ground, it will have to be admitted that, in the main, G.H.Q. had made the best dispositions possible with the means at hand.
A glance at the map of France will show that pretty clearly. Put in a phrase, the German plan was to push the British Army into the sea. In the north our line was dangerously close to the sea. Our most northern port, Dunkirk, was actually under shell-fire and in consequence could be very little used. A very small gain of territory by the Germans in the north would have brought Calais and Boulogne under shell-fire. Then our existence as an Army north of the Somme would have become impossible. We could not have kept an adequate force there in supplies. In the north every yard of territory was of the greatest strategic value. As our line ran south the French coast bulged out. We had more room to manœuvre there; loss of ground was not so vital. If the Germans had won on the line Ypres-Armentières the same depth of territory that they won on the line Arras-Péronne, we should have had to evacuate all France north of the Somme.
In short we took the biggest risk of loss of ground where the loss was least dangerous to the vital plan of the campaign. In the light of the man-power available it was probably the best course that could have been pursued. We knew we had to lose ground, probably a good deal of ground, and decided to lose it where it mattered least. We had very good ideas as to where.
For proof of this look up the representations as to civilian evacuations which were made by G.H.Q. to the French authorities in February, 1918. Those representations, by the way, were not given any attention at all in some cases; at the best only perfunctory attention. The result was that when the German attack came, civilian refugees added to our difficulties and anxieties. If the prompt and complete evacuation of all civilian refugees from threatened areas and from areas close behind the front line, which were urgently needed for the accommodation of troops, could have been effected, the Army's tasks would have been much simplified. But that proved impracticable. Civilians were generally unwilling to abandon their homes voluntarily. The French authorities were reluctant to enforce evacuation. A civilian quitting his home voluntarily was responsible for his own keep. A civilian forced to quit became a charge on the French Civil Authorities. This naturally led to a wish that civilians as far as possible should be compelled to quit their homes by force of circumstances rather than by order of the authorities.
As far back as February, 1918, pressure was brought to bear on the French Authorities to agree to defined measures to meet the emergency of a withdrawal of part of our line, which was then foreseen as a probability. But it was not found possible to secure prompt assent to the steps which were necessary. There were all sorts of complications. For one thing it was feared that to set up the machinery of evacuation would spread dismay among the French civilians. Another obstacle was the financial one which I have already mentioned. Yet another was that created by the status of the miners in threatened areas. These were mobilised men under French Military Command; their wives and children were civilians. If their wives and children were evacuated the miners would not stay.
Later, arrangements were agreed to between the British Force and the French Authorities for the systematic evacuation, with their live stock and supplies, of civilians in threatened areas. But the early difficulties considerably hampered operations. I mention this not at all by way of a tilt against the French Authorities, whose reluctance to make provision for evacuations was natural enough, but to show that G.H.Q. was not "caught napping," and to illustrate also the difficulties which an Expeditionary Force operating in a friendly country has to meet.
There are, of course, many advantages springing from the fact that the country in which you are quartered is friendly. But I am not sure that the disadvantages are not almost as great. In an enemy country you know at any rate where you are; military safety, military convenience are the supreme law; and the civilian population have only to be considered to the degree that the laws of war and the dictates of humanity decide. In a friendly country, where the old civil government remains in operation, an Army is hampered at many points. There are various actions which military convenience prompts but which cannot be taken without the assent of the civilian authorities; and perhaps cannot be urged with the weight of the full facts on those civil authorities. This evacuation difficulty is an instance in point. If G.H.Q. had had its way the Germans would have won far less material in their advance; and perhaps their advance would have been stopped at an earlier stage if our operations had not been hampered to some extent by the crowding of the road with civilian refugees.
Still, on the big issues the French were splendid. What, for example, could have been more heroic than the decision they came to a little later: that, in case of the German advance continuing, the whole of the Pas de Calais province was to be destroyed, the harbours of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne wrecked, the dykes and locks destroyed so that the country would have been generally inundated?
To some degree defensive inundations were actually carried into effect, but with fresh water only. The responsibility in the main rested with the British Army which was holding the threatened territory. The only saving stipulation made by the French, who thus offered in the cause of the alliance to give up for half a century the use of one of their fairest provinces, was that before the sea was let in to devastate the land, Marshal Foch should give the word. It was on April 12th, 1918, that the Allied Commander-in-Chief gave orders for defensive inundations to stop the Germans from getting to the Dunkirk-Calais region; and on April 13th the Governor of Dunkirk began to put these into effect. There were two schemes of inundation, one for a modified flooding with fresh water of certain limited areas; the other for a general flooding, with sea-water as well as fresh water, of all low-lying areas around Calais and Dunkirk.
It is impossible to praise adequately the stark courage that agreed to this step. It was courage after the antique model, and it showed that France was willing to make any sacrifice rather than allow the wave of German barbarism to sweep over civilisation. The effect of letting the sea in on Pas de Calais and destroying the canal locks and the harbours would have been to make this great province a desert for two generations. The effect of allowing it to fall into German hands, with all its canal and harbour facilities, would have been to give new life to the submarine war, to make the bombardment and ultimately the invasion of the English coast possible.
At one time it seemed almost certain that an evacuation of at least part of Pas de Calais would have to be carried out; and arrangements were made in detail: that in any area which was evacuated, either deliberately or in consequence of direct enemy pressure, the most thorough destruction should be carried out to deny to the enemy any stores of material or facilities of transport. The method of every destruction and the unit responsible for it were arranged in advance.
The main lines of a policy of destruction were laid down in the event of:—
1. A withdrawal to the Calais—St. Omer defensive line;
2. A withdrawal to the line of the Somme;
3. An enemy advance along the line of the Somme, cutting off Flanders and Pas de Calais from the South.
Provision was made for the using up or removal of all possible stores; for the destruction of the remainder; for the destruction of all railroads, water-ways, signalling systems, factories, etc. Where British and French troops were operating together in a fighting zone, their respective responsibilities were delimited. Arrangements were also made, in case of withdrawal, to clear from certain water-ways all canal craft which might serve the enemy as bridge material over inundations.
Certainly it was not "gay," as the French say, this preparation for destroying the property of an Ally. But we took comfort from the fact that after all the position was better than in 1914. Then a German victory seemed possible. Now in 1918 the only question was what sacrifices we should yet have to make before achieving victory. In 1914, after 50 years of intensive preparation, the German had rushed upon an unsuspecting Europe. He neglected nothing in preparing for victory. He threw overboard every scruple in order to secure a rapid triumph, violating the neutrality of Belgium and Luxemburg merely because by so doing he gained a better field of deployment. His objective was Paris, and, according to authoritative accounts, his plan on reaching Paris was to divide it up into twelve quarters and burn down a quarter every day that the French Army delayed to surrender. The terms of surrender were to include the giving up of the French Fleet and the French ports for use in an invasion of England.
The danger at that time was very real. Germany was the only country adequately armed and organised. The British people had had to sacrifice in great measure the Regular Army to stay the first German onset. France was strained to a point which to any other country would have meant exhaustion. We could recall the preparations that had to be made to meet the imminent fear of an invasion of the British coast; the desperate shifts and expedients which had to be adopted in the first stages of the organisation of the New Armies; the peremptory demands for guns and shells when there were no factories to make either in anything like the quantity demanded. That was a time when it needed the highest of moral courage to remain calm and confident.
The Spring of 1918 is not a pleasant thing to think about; but it is hardly endurable, even now in safe retrospection, to think on the position of Great Britain at home or in the field from October, 1914, to September, 1915. It was that of an unsuspecting man before whose feet suddenly a pit of destruction opens. He falls scrambling, struggling down, and at last reaches a little ledge which gives a momentary safety. But it is still a desperate task merely to hang on. Far up, remote almost as a star, shines safety. Below are his friends of civilised Europe, all worse situated than himself, some at the point of complete destruction. From above a fierce storm of missiles rains on his head. From below come piteous appeals for help. To hold on to his little ledge, to help the friends below, to climb up and throttle the foe above—he has all these to do and little time to think before he acts. Hardly endurable, yet necessary to think over, so that the greatness of the danger into which the world was plunged by German militarism can be gauged.
In 1914 an occupation of the French Channel Ports with England almost entirely unarmed might have been a very serious thing. The serious view taken of it in Great Britain can be judged from the preparations which were made to devastate a great area in the South and East of England so as to give to the Germans only a desert as a foothold. In 1918 if the Germans had got Pas de Calais they would not have got any ports with it, and an invading force arriving in England would have met a force at least equal to it in equipment and war experience.
So we waited in some confidence for another Marne to follow another Mons, and smiled a little grimly at the change of tone in Germany. The Kaiser, cock-a-whoop again, was declaring now for a "strong German Peace." In one office, side by side with the "situation map" which showed from day to day the depth of the German advance, there were stuck up in derision extracts from the most vituperative of the German press. Here is one from the Deutsche Zeitung:
"Away with all petty whining over an agreement and reconciliation with the fetish of peace.... Away with the miserable whimpering of those people who even now would prevent the righteous German hatred of England and sound German vengeance. The cry of victory and retaliation rages throughout Germany with renewed passion."
This from Germania:
"There can be no lasting peace and no long period of quiet in the world until the presumptuous notion that the Anglo-Saxons are the chosen people is victorious or defeated. We are determined to force with the sword the peace which our adversaries did not see fit to confide to our honest word. We Germans are an incomparably strong nation."
These horrible threats remained on the notice-board until long after the tide of battle turned and the German was in full retreat back to his lair.
And we rather liked the story which the German press had to the effect that a deputation of German business men had put before Hindenburg in February the gloomy prospects of the country's food supplies, concluding: "In May, Germany will be almost without food." Hindenburg thereupon replied: "My reply is that I shall be in Paris on April 1st."
The date chosen seemed so appropriate!
Still, it would be foolish to say that we had no anxieties. Some of our stoutest fellows were up at "advanced G.H.Q.," a temporary H.Q. near Amiens, from which most of the really exciting work was done. At Montreuil we had not the exhilarating feeling of being within the sound of the guns, but had to face perhaps the hardest of the toil. It was rare for an officer in some branches to leave his room before midnight, and the usual hour for starting work was 8.30 a.m. Meals ceased for a time to be convivial affairs. One rushed to the table, ate, and rushed back to work.
The work was so overwhelming because of a combination of circumstances. The character of the War had changed from stationary to moving over almost all the British Front, calling for a return to the mobile system of supply and for new classes of material. British reinforcements were arriving from other Fronts, sometimes without their full supply train and without the full equipment for our Front, and not familiar with its system of working. There were large movements of French troops into British Areas, and in some cases these French troops relied upon British sources for some of their supplies and transport, and in all cases their line of supply had to be dove-tailed in with ours. American troops were moved into British Areas and relied upon British sources for many items of equipment, transport and supplies. British Administration was thus being called upon for supplies to British, French, American and Portuguese troops, at the same time as our lines of supply had to be re-organised and co-ordinated with the new French lines of supply. Further difficulties were created by the necessary frequent changes of railheads and the great movements on the roads of civilian refugees. Territory threatened by the enemy had to be evacuated as far as possible of civilians, and of civilian goods and stock likely to be of use to the enemy in case of capture.
The extent of this accumulated difficulty from a transport point of view can be gauged from the fact that a British Army needs on a day of intense fighting 1,934 tons of supplies of all kinds per mile of front.
The railways came as nearly as possible to a complete breakdown under the strain. After the first Battle of the Somme, our military railway system in France was thoroughly reorganised by civilian experts. It was a reorganisation which followed, I believe, the best models of the great railway companies of England, and it coped with the very heavy traffic during the period of fixed or Trench War quite well. Unfortunately it was not a system adapted for moving warfare.
A civilian railway expert would doubtless find many reasons for amused criticism in a military railway system in the running. It would appear to be rather haphazard, to be run a good deal on the principle of a train getting there if it could, and to be very faulty in the matter of time-tables and so on. Well, the German advance in its brutal practical way simply riddled with holes that admirable railway reorganisation which the civilian experts had conferred on the B.E.F., France.
Perhaps it was only to have been expected. Trench War in its railway requirements was deceptively like peace. You had your railway termini, and the requirements of a Division were fairly stable. You ran so many trains a day and, except for an occasional rush on some sector when fighting warmed up suddenly, there were no problems that differed greatly from those say of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.
In moving war it is different. Then a railway system must be elastic enough to stand such a series of shocks as would be conveyed to the L.B. and S.C. manager if at 9 p.m. he were told: "It is Bank Holiday to-morrow. Provide for carrying 100,000 extra passengers, about 10,000 horses and 4,000 carriages." Then at 10 p.m. he learned: "You can't shunt any trains at Lewes; and you can only run trains through with luck. It is under heavy shell-fire." Then every half-hour subsequently he got a new order, diverting traffic from one point to another, changing the destinations of his trains and so on.
The transport situation for the moment was saved by the Motor Transport. But the Commander-in-Chief had to act promptly and set up a "jury-mast" arrangement for railway control to tide over the crisis. In effect he took the supreme control of the railways out of the hands of the Transportation Directorate and put it under a "Board of Directors" meeting daily, at which the Q.M.G. presided. A later development made the Chief of General Staff Chairman of this Board. Then, when things settled down, the system that had been set up by the civilian experts was largely scrapped. Military Railways were again put under the control of the Quartermaster-General. The "stupid soldiery" did rather well with them, not only in the period of pause that came between the German advance and our great counter-attack, but in the gigantic task of following up our advance.
The task of pulling together the railways was not an easy one. The enemy advance had caused a direct loss of some light railway systems, and on the broad-gauge systems important engine depôts were lost, and our front lateral line was brought at several points under the fire of the enemy's artillery. Use of this front lateral line had thus become precarious. The results of this were felt in every part of the railway system. Good circulation is the essence of railway working; and a block at any point has an effect similar to that of an aneurism on a human artery. Because of the loss of engine depôts, and the hindrances to circulation on the front lateral line, the back lateral line along the coast became seriously congested. This congestion reduced the capacity of every engine by an average of 15 per cent.
Further, our rear lateral line had two particularly vulnerable points, one at Etaples, where it crossed the Canche, and the other at Abbéville, where it crossed the Somme. Upon these points enemy aircraft made frequent attacks, imposing delays, occasionally causing minor destruction, always adding to the effects of the existing congestion. An excellent piece of work reduced very considerably the effect of one successful enemy air-raid. Half an hour after midnight, one night in May, the Canche railway-bridge at Etaples was damaged. At once an avoiding line—constructed for such an emergency—was put into operation, and trains were running through at 2 a.m.
On one of the worst nights of the German advance, when we went up to the situation-map without any enthusiasm, half afraid of what we should see, young Captain Hannibal Napoleon deepened our gloom by declaring oracularly:
"If we hold on to Amiens we shall be all right. If Amiens falls to the Germans it is goodbye to Montreuil, and no more Paris leave for a few years."
Hannibal Napoleon (that, of course, was not his name) was very junior and very confident of his strategical genius. It was a favourite amusement to "pull his leg" and draw from him an "appreciation" of the situation, which he was always willing to give with the authority of a Commander-in-Chief.
This oracle was displeasing, because on the appearance of things that night we had not an earthly chance of holding Amiens. But the unexpected happened. Not very many hours afterwards the news came through that a successful stand was being made in front of Amiens; and young Hannibal Napoleon was able to crow like a Gallic cock over his profound strategical judgment.