A Short History of the Great War

by A. F. Pollard

For a time he had the luck which lures the gambler on, and the scene of his second act was skilfully chosen. Before 21 March Haig had kept his line better manned north than south of Arras, and the reasons which made him anxious for the defence of his northern sector counselled Ludendorff to attack it when the defeat of the Fifth Army had compelled the British commander to divert ten divisions from the north and supply their place with the weary survivors of the battle of St. Quentin. He had little room to spare between his front and the sea, and a break-through, far less extensive than that which had been effected in March, would give the Germans the coast of the Straits of Dover, enable them to bombard the Kentish shore, hamper the port of London, and perhaps reach it with long-range guns like those with which they had occasionally bombarded Paris since 23 March. These annoyances would have been serious; but the British public paid itself a very bad compliment when it seemed to assume that the distant bombardment of London would have an effect upon the war disproportionate to that of Paris; and the notion that an impetus which carried the Germans to Calais would transport them across the Channel was merely another illustration of the comprehensive popular ignorance of the meaning of sea-power. Nieuport or Dunkirk might have taken the place of Bruges as a submarine base without greatly enhancing the success of that campaign; and Haig chose rightly when, having to weaken his northern front, he risked a sector north instead of south of La Basse and the Vimy Ridge. Defeat to the north of those points, even though it cost us the coast as far as Calais, would not entail retreat from the Artois hills between Arras and Gris Nez or threaten our liaison with the French which had been Ludendorff's first objective. The material comments on the value of his second thoughts were that the Germans might have had the Channel ports for the asking in 1914 but did not think them worth it, and that in April 1918 Ludendorff employed but nine divisions in his initial effort to break through. Probably his real ambition was merely to shorten his line and, in view of the possible resumption of his offensive in front of Amiens, to provide against a British counter-attack on the sensitive German position along the Belgian coast.

Anticipating some such attack, Haig had deemed it wise to relieve the two Portuguese divisions which held part of the front between the Lys and La Basse of their arduous responsibility; but he could only replace them by weary British divisions, and the change had only been half effected when, on 9 April, Ludendorff s attack began after the usual bombardment with gas and high-explosive on the 8th. The Portuguese broke fairly soon, the British flanks on either side were turned, and the whole centre had gone in a few hours. By night the Germans had captured Fleurbaix, Laventie, Neuve Chapelle, Richebourg, and Lacouture, and were on the Lys from Bac St. Maur almost as far as Lestrem. But the key-position at Givenchy was splendidly held by the 55th Division, which set a permanent limit to the German success and prevented it from obtaining anything like the dimensions of the March offensive. It continued, however, to develop on the north. On the 10th Bois Grenier fell, Armentires was evacuated, and the Germans poured across the Lys, taking Estaires, Steenwerck, and Ploegstreet and threatening the Messines ridge. That, too, followed on the 11th, while farther south the Germans secured Neuf Berquin and Lestrem. On the 12th they got into Merris and Merville and advanced to the La Basse canal, threatening to cross it and outflank Bthune on the north-west. Here, however, they were held up in front of Robecq, between the canal and the forest of Nieppe, and turned to exploit their advantage farther north. Their advance here was slower, but by the 16th they had mastered Wytschaete, Wulverghem, Neuve Eglise, Bailleul, and Meteren, and were facing the line of hills running from Mt. Kemmel to the Mt. des Cats.

British and French reinforcements were now arriving in considerable numbers, and Ludendorff would have been prudent to rest on his laurels. He had made a pronounced bulge in our line, had diverted forces from other sectors of the defence, and compelled us to evacuate our dearly-purchased gains of the Flanders campaign in the preceding autumn. On the other hand, he had lengthened instead of shortening his own line, he had achieved no strategical object, and his troops were left in a salient which invited attack. Unless he could win the heights from Mt. Kemmel to Mt. des Cats, which commanded the country to the coast, he would be in a worse situation for defence than he was before. He was thus driven to prolong the effort, pour fresh divisions into the battle, and convert a diversion into a major operation. Doubtless popular visions of the Channel ports and the bombardment of London reinforced the sounder military reasons for persistence. There were three obvious lines of attack--on the Belgian front north of Ypres, on the Kemmel range, now held partly by French troops, and on Bthune. The first was defeated on the 17th by a brilliant Belgian resistance, and the third was repulsed on the 18th before Hinges and at Givenchy; but the second was longer delayed and more stubbornly pushed.

The effort began with an intense bombardment on the 25th, and a few hours later the Germans had captured the village and hill of Kemmel; our forces were driven back to a line running in front of Dickebusch lake, La Clytte, the Scherpenberg, and Locre. Mt. Kemmel had been regarded as the key to the position, and it looked as though the range would fall. But Kemmel was an isolated height, and the Germans were beaten in the valleys which separated it from the Scherpenberg. Their attacks reached a climax on the 29th, and after some partial success were everywhere defeated. Local fighting continued spasmodically till late in May, but it was clear that Ludendorff's second offensive had come to an end like his first. Its extension had also ruined the chance of successfully resuming the attack in front of Amiens. On 23 April the Germans attacked just south of the Somme and captured Villers-Bretonneux, but it was promptly retaken on the following day; and in the struggle along that line in May we advanced as well as improved our position. The Germans had fought their last offensive against the British front and had failed; and when after a four weeks' pause they resumed their attacks, they were directed against the French.

During the interval the British public had time to reflect upon the disaster and its effects. They were brought home by a new military service Bill extending the liability to all men under fifty-one and bringing Ireland within its scope. Panic had as much to do with these proposals as forethought. The raising of the military age was calculated to weaken our industrial more than to strengthen our military power; and the extension to Ireland handed that country over to Sinn Fein and necessitated the diversion thither of large British forces, which might otherwise have been sent to the front, without producing a single Irish conscript. The proposal was, indeed, so foolish that its authors made no attempt to carry it out. Wiser was the speedy dispatch to France of 300,000 superfluous troops who had been kept in England by nothing better than an ignorant fear of invasion. But it was the amazing rapidity with which the United States responded to Mr. Lloyd George's anxious appeals that saved the Government from the effects of its own blunders and reduced its military service Act to a measure for the infliction of gratuitous hardship. In April nearly 120,000 American troops landed in Europe, over 220,000 in May, and 275,000 in June. On 2 July President Wilson announced that over a million had sailed; that number was doubled before the summer ended, and in July General Smuts was anticipating the possible presence in France of an American army as large as the British and French combined.

The need for so colossal a force did not arise, but in April the position of his Government as well as the military situation agitated the Prime Minister and gave wildness to his words as well as to his actions. Apart from the casualties, we had lost 1000 guns, 4000 machine guns, 200,000 rifles, 70,000 tons of ammunition, and 250 million rounds of small ammunition, and 200 tanks. Circumstances wore a different complexion from the roseate hues of the early months of 1917, and Mr. Lloyd George could not escape the kind of blame he had heaped upon his predecessors. He sought to evade it in his speech at the reassembling of Parliament on the 9th by shifting the responsibility for the disaster partly on to M. Clmenceau as the principal author of the unfortunate extension of the British line, and partly on to the commander of the Fifth Army. The latter at least could not reply, and the unfairness of the attack provoked much ill-feeling in the army and elsewhere; it found expression in a letter from Major-General Maurice, lately Director of Military Operations, which was published on 7 May and challenged the accuracy of ministerial statements. His charges were so serious that the Government at once proposed a judicial inquiry. Mr. Asquith committed the tactical error of moving instead for a parliamentary committee. The Government naturally treated his motion as a vote of censure, and escaped all investigation on the ostensible plea that it preferred a different method from that proposed by Mr. Asquith. The House of Commons by 293 to 106 votes expressed its apparent satisfaction with that "ex parte statement from the Prime Minister himself" which "The Times"--then his strongest supporter in the Press--had the day before said could not dispose of a charge which "unless and until it is impartially investigated and disproved, will profoundly shake the public confidence in every statement made from the Treasury Bench." It was not, however, with the honour of ministers that the House was mainly concerned. Members were in that mood, which occurs at times in every nation's history, in which questions of morals seem irrelevant or unimportant; and what they wanted was not the truth but a plausible excuse for shirking inquiry and refusing to add a political to the military crisis. Conscious of their own responsibility for the Government, they were impatient of any discussion which might reveal unpleasant facts to their constituents or military information to the enemy.

It is difficult also not to trace a political motive, if not in the attacks on Zeebrugge and Ostend, at least in the contrast between the enormous publicity they received and the silence which shrouded the more normal but not less important or heroic work of the British Navy. The plans, indeed, had been prepared and sanctioned by Jellicoe before he left office some months earlier; but many plans have long to wait the ministerial word, and the naval operations of 23 April were as timely for political as for military reasons. The military objective was to block the submarine and destroyer exits from Zeebrugge and Ostend, both of which were connected by canals with Bruges; and an operation of that kind against the elaborately fortified Belgian coast required favourable weather conditions as well as the highest courage. The plan at Ostend was simply to sink ships in the waterway; at Zeebrugge there were also to be diversions in the form of a landing on the protecting mole and the blowing up of the viaduct which connected it with the shore. Success was only possible if mist and smoke-clouds added to the concealment of night, and those conditions depended upon the wind. They seemed favourable on the night of 22-23 April, but a quarter of an hour before the Vindictive reached the mole, a south-west breeze dispersed the smoke-clouds and precipitated a torrent of shell-fire from the German batteries. In spite of it the landing party got on to the mole and systematically destroyed its works, while a submarine loaded with explosives was run under the viaduct and exploded. Meanwhile, the blocking ships were sunk at the mouth of the canal, and the survivors of their crews were picked up and got away in the Vindictive and her consorts. At Ostend the blocking ships had to sink outside the centre of the waterway; but the effort was repeated with better success by the Vindictive on the night of 9-10 May. Even Count Reventlow described these affairs as "damned plucky," but added that they were nothing more. The further attacks on the Belgian coast which were commonly expected did not come, and the operations had no appreciable effect upon the land campaign. But they hampered the German submarine campaign to some extent; and if they demonstrated once more that sea-power is limited to the sea, they also showed that on the sea German power had become a negligible quantity. That fact was, indeed, being proved in a more effective though less heroic fashion, by the safe transport of hundreds of thousands of American troops across the Atlantic; but possibly public opinion needed the more spectacular demonstration, and it certainly showed that the spirit of British seamen was unaffected by the tremors of politicians.

Politicians appeared, indeed, to be more nervous after the crisis had passed than they were before it arose, although their alarms did not greatly affect the incurable sang-froid of the British public; and the way in which the middle-aged shouldered the unnecessary burdens imposed upon them by the improvidence of their Government, was as exemplary as the eagerness with which youth had volunteered early in the war. Their acceptance of the new obligations had its value in stimulating America to dispatch her hundreds of thousands of troops more fit for active service; and few, if any, of the elderly English recruits saw any fighting. Ludendorff's plans had already gone astray when he failed in March and April to break the liaison between the French and British armies; and his subsequent operations were ineffective attempts to prepare the ground for a final offensive which he was never allowed to begin. It would have been doomed to miscarry in any case, for his preliminaries exhausted the forces intended for the final effort, and the battles in Flanders had enhanced the failure of his original design. He took four weeks to prepare for a second subsidiary operation, and hoped to achieve a better success against the French than he had against the British. He had the advantage of taking them unawares, and on the eve of his offensive a French journal proclaimed that it would be another blow at the British front because the Germans knew that the French line was impregnable. Popular opinion in France had attributed German success at St. Quentin and in Flanders to British incompetence or cowardice, and British troops had even been hissed in the streets of Paris. The attack on the Chemin des Dames was to modify this opinion, although some tactless Frenchmen announced that reserves sent up to the British sector, which alone stood its ground, were going "au secours des Anglais."

Ludendorff's object was to widen his front towards Paris, for the lure of the capital had already diverted him from his original plan of breaking the liaison between the French and British armies in front of Amiens. That Paris was his objective in May, and not the diversion of troops from the critical junction with a view to resuming that attack, seems clear from the fact that his next blow in June was struck between Montdidier and Noyon. The Chemin des Dames would have been impregnable if properly held, but Ludendorff s information was not at fault, and the possession of the interior lines gave him the same advantage as in March of striking either right against the British or left against the French. He struck early on 27 May and achieved the most rapid advance of the war on the Western front. The line from Soissons to Reims was held by only eight divisions, four French and four British--one of these in reserve--and in a few hours the French had lost all their gains since October 1914 and were back again behind the Aisne. The British divisions, although they had been sent there to recruit after their hard work in March and April, made a better fight, and maintained themselves in their second positions all the day. But the French retreat had uncovered the British left flank, and in the evening they had to withdraw to the Aisne. By that time the French were nearer the Vesle than the Aisne, and on the 28th they were driven well south of the latter river. On the 29th the Germans broadened their front by taking Soissons, and on the 30th the apex of the salient they had made had reached the Marne between Chteau-Thierry and Dormans. For three days they had advanced at the rate of ten miles a day, capturing some 40,000 prisoners and 400 guns. From that date the pace slackened. The Germans did not attempt to cross the Marne, but endeavoured to widen their salient by pushing east behind Reims and west across the Soissons-Chteau-Thierry road. They had little success in the former direction, but in the latter they gradually pressed back the French to an irregular line which ran from Fontenoy on the Aisne southwards along the Savires river across the Ourcq, and then turned eastwards down the Clignon and reached the Marne below Chteau-Thierry. American troops, who had on the 27th marked their advent into battle by capturing and holding Cantigny, a critical point on the Montdidier front, now took up an equally crucial position south-west of Chteau-Therry and drove the Germans back on 4-5 June, while on the 6th British troops recaptured Bligny south-west of Reims.

The French themselves defeated on the 5th a German attempt to cross the Oise at Lagache south of Noyon, which was intended to link up the German offensive on the Aisne with their next attack farther west. This was launched on the 9th between Montdidier and Noyon, and its purpose was to push southwards and envelop the French defences and forces in the forests of Compigne and Villers-Cotterets which had stopped the German westward advance on Paris between the Aisne and the Marne. It was a dangerous threat, but this time Foch was prepared. The attack was, indeed, a matter of common anticipation, and its adoption suggested that Ludendorff was getting to the end of his expedients. The Americans at Cantigny set a western, and the French success at Lagache an eastern limit to its front; and thus confined it advanced no more than six miles in four days. The French left stood firm and a brilliant counter-attack by Mangin on the German right flank between Rubescourt and St. Maur on the 11th determined its failure, although Foch was compelled to evacuate the salient which the German advance had created in the French line east of the Oise between Ribecourt and Mt. de Choisy. Hoping that this attack had diverted French forces from the defence of the forest of Villers-Cotterets, the Germans then renewed their push along the Aisne, but were promptly checked; and no better success attended their effort on the 18th to encircle Reims still farther east.