A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (102 page)

The line along the Chemin des Dames was commanded by General Denis Duchesne, a former chief of staff to Foch and one of the new generalissimo’s most ardent disciples. His force, though mainly French, included three British divisions that after being severely mauled in the Michael fighting had been sent to this long-quiet area to recover. Contemptuous of Pétain and his directive, encouraged in his insubordination by Foch’s example, Duchesne crowded his troops into poorly prepared entrenchments up on the front line. His entire array of defensive positions, artillery included, was five miles deep at most. And all of it was north of the River Aisne, so that the defenders would have to fight with water at their backs. The whole arrangement was magnificently bold and ripe for disaster.

General Hamilton Gordon, commander of Duchesne’s British corps, questioned the French general about his arrangements.
“J’ai dit,”
Duchesne haughtily replied.
I have spoken.
The troops were to stay where they were. If attacked, they were to yield nothing.

Corporal Hitler, seated at left: Winner of two Iron Crosses

As before Michael, and despite the fact that their preparations filled four weeks with the movement of men and guns, the Germans were almost miraculously successful in maintaining secrecy. More than twenty divisions were assembled opposite Duchesne, and more than three hundred thousand shells were stockpiled for each corps of two or three divisions. And yet as late as May 26, when the British reported signs of imminent trouble, Duchesne was unconcerned. “There is no indication,” he said, “that the enemy has made preparations which would enable him to attack the Chemin des Dames tomorrow.” He then departed for Paris and an assignation with his mistress.

Hours later, at one
A.M.
on May 27, four thousand German guns and four thousand mortars began their work of devastation. The barrage fell mainly on the unfortunate British, whose worst fears suddenly became real. At four
A.M.
fourteen divisions of storm troops with seven more in close support attacked behind a wall-solid creeping barrage. They found the defenders either dead or in shocked disarray. Discovering a gap between the French and the British, they pushed through. By midday they had advanced five miles and (the British and French having failed to destroy the bridges) were across the Aisne. Corporal Adolf Hitler, armed only with a pistol and operating alone, captured twelve French soldiers during the advance. For this action he was given an Iron Cross First Class, complementing the Iron Cross Second Class he had received almost four years earlier.

By nightfall the Germans were across a second river, the Vesle, and still moving. Once again, however, their lack of cavalry or armored motor vehicles deprived them of the means to overtake the fleeing French and British. In an effort to compensate, the commander of the German Seventh Army ordered that the advance continue all night—a thing that proved to be physically impossible. By the time exhaustion made a halt imperative, the lead German units had moved forward twelve miles across twenty-five miles of front. It was a spectacular achievement, comparable to what Hutier had done at the start of Michael.

All was not well, though. On the German left, near the city of Reims where the French defenses were stronger and had been more intelligently arranged, the offensive had failed. This compromised all the gains at the center and on the right, leaving the advancing units with an exposed flank. To support his offensive as it moved south, Ludendorff needed the rail centers of Soissons and Reims, the former at the western end of the entry to the new salient, the latter to the east. German troops would enter Soissons on the second day of the battle but, bizarrely, be ordered out again, apparently because their looting went out of control and their commander feared a collapse of discipline. Ludendorff, upon learning of this, would order them to go back in and stay. Soissons was not enough, however. Until Reims fell, the Germans would be advancing into a kind of sack that, while growing bigger at the bottom, had a dangerously narrow mouth and only one vulnerable lifeline.

Pétain and Foch were surprised that Ludendorff had attacked in such force at the Chemin des Dames. As the attack resumed on May 28 and continued to progress, they puzzled over how he was sustaining his momentum, not knowing how many troops he had taken from the north. For once they were in agreement: Reims must be held, along with a wooded plateau just beyond Soissons. This would keep the mouth of the new salient from opening wider. Neither general thought Paris was in danger. To threaten the capital, the Germans would have to shift their attack toward the west. If they did so, the French Tenth Army that was part of Foch’s reserve was in position to fall on their flank. Pétain ordered one of the armies north of the Oise to come south. He also asked Foch to send reserves but was refused. Clemenceau, never one to leave military operations in the hands of the generals, traveled to Foch’s headquarters and was surprised to learn of this refusal. When Foch explained that he believed the new offensive to be intended not to capture Paris but to drain the Flanders reserve, Clemenceau declined to interfere.

By the end of the second day, the Germans were in possession of high, easily defended ground south of the Vesle. They had reached nearly all the objectives that Ludendorff had set for their offensive, and in doing so they had captured huge quantities of desperately needed supplies. The familiar pattern was once again emerging. At one end of their line, around Soissons, the Germans had succeeded more easily and completely than they had expected. But at the other end, in the attempt to take Reims, they had failed. As before, the question was what to do next—whether to push on where the troops had been so successful, or try again where they had failed, or simply call the whole thing off. German intelligence was watching keenly for evidence that Entente reserves were moving out of Flanders. Thanks to Foch, no such evidence existed: the reserves were staying put. The entire effort had to be judged a failure. At an evening meeting at Crown Prince Wilhelm’s headquarters, all the generals in attendance, Ludendorff among them, agreed that the offensive had to continue. Once again losing sight of what he had originally intended, Ludendorff ordered seven of the divisions being saved for Flanders to be brought south to join in the attack. He was like a roulette player trying to recoup his losses by putting chips on more and more numbers.

Background

THE WOMEN

ONE OF THE STAPLES OF GREAT WAR PROPAGANDA WAS
the poster showing a nurse (always beautiful and composed, always immaculate) bending over a handsome young soldier (calm and alert, seriously but not mortally wounded, never injured in ways unpleasant to the eye) who gazes up at her in gratitude and admiration.

Such art had always been a fantasy, and by the war’s climax it was an affront to truth. Many thousands of female nurses were doing heroic service near the front lines in the summer and autumn of 1918, but there was nothing romantic about their experience. The avalanche of casualties on both sides had turned field hospitals into places of horror.

“Hundreds upon hundreds of wounded poured in like a rushing torrent,” an American nurse remembered. “The crowded, twisted bodies, the screams and groans, made one think of Dante’s Inferno.” Men came in with parts of their faces missing, with their sexual organs gone, with limbs reduced to dripping shreds.

Things were even more terrible on the other side. “We are supposed to care for up to three hundred wounded here, but there are absolutely no supplies!” a German nurse recorded in her diary. “In the morning helpful soldiers found us some mattress ticking. We began by tearing it up for bandages, since there was no material for dressings. Later we took down the curtains and made bandages of them. Our charges are starving, and all we can give them is dry army bread.”

There was the stink of gangrene, and the pathetic shell-shock cases. Dying boys cried out for their mothers, and, in the second half of 1918, more and more fevered men were dying of influenza.

More than fifteen thousand women were with the American Expeditionary Force and auxiliary organizations such as the Red Cross by that time. (Ten thousand American nurses had volunteered to serve with the Entente forces before the end of 1914.) The BEF had twenty-three thousand nurses and fifteen thousand nurses’ aides, the armies of France sixty-three thousand, the Germans ninety-one thousand. They performed magnificently—a hundred and twenty American nurses died in Europe, and two hundred were decorated for bravery under fire—but they were only a tiny percentage of the women whose lives were affected by four years of war.

The start of the conflict, and the outburst of patriotism to which it gave rise, had brought out masses of women volunteers in all the belligerent nations. At first their governments scarcely knew what to do with them. Women had few rights in those days. (New Zealand had granted them the vote in 1893, but two decades later it remained almost alone.) Women of “good” family had little access to careers and almost none to the world of public affairs. Nurses were obviously essential and quickly put to work, but in other respects things continued—for a time—in the old familiar ways. The volunteer associations of women that sprang into existence in Britain, France, and Germany were not only dominated but monopolized by the upper and middle classes. If working-class women had been accepted, many would not have been able to afford the required uniforms.

But soon, with so many millions of men at the front, women were needed badly. The volunteers were put to work as clerks, cooks, drivers, canteen workers, telephone operators—in nearly any job, as time passed, where they could free a man for combat. The British would ultimately have a hundred thousand women in service in this way—all carefully screened to ensure that they came from the right kind of background. For young women who had expected the future to be limited to marriage and child-bearing, it all could be wonderfully thrilling. “For the first time I was going to be someone,” said a French girl. “I would count in the world.”

Russia’s Tsarina Alexandra, seated at right, in a hospital far from the front

Members of Britain’s Auxiliary Ambulance Corps making a morning milk delivery

For the women of the lower classes, millions of whom were employed before the war began, more than adventure was involved. The pay of common soldiers was minuscule, allowances for dependents not sufficient to sustain life. (The allowance for a wife was one and a quarter francs per day in France, nothing for a dependent mother or sister.) And ironically, the war destroyed many women’s jobs. In France 85 percent of women in industry when the war began were employed in textile manufacturing. As many of the factories were shut down, 60 percent of those women were thrown out of work. Sixty-seven percent of garment industry jobs disappeared. In France and elsewhere many of the women who went into the munitions factories were no doubt motivated by patriotism. But for many it was also a matter of survival.

The resulting changes were dramatic. In Germany more than five million women entered the labor force, rising from 35 to 55 percent of the total employed. In Britain the comparable total was more than one and a half million, with seven hundred and fifty thousand women taking jobs previously held by men, three hundred and fifty thousand moving into new war-related positions, and almost a quarter of a million becoming agricultural laborers. In France, whose population was more heavily rural than Britain’s or Germany’s, food production became increasingly the work of women. Female employment in French munitions factories rose from fifteen thousand early in 1915 to six hundred and eighty-four thousand in 1917. The French railways, which had employed six thousand women before the war, had fifty-seven thousand on their payrolls by the end. Female employment in the Paris subways rose from 124 to more than three thousand.