A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (103 page)

Neither France nor Germany integrated women into its armed forces, though the Germans were preparing to do so late in 1918. The British were pioneers, creating women’s branches of their army, navy, and air force in 1917. Female officers were called “administrators” rather than given military rank. Noncommissioned officers were “forewomen,” the privates “workers.” In what was a bold innovation by British standards, the army began to accept women from the working class. Traditionalists were shocked. A letter to an English newspaper complained of women “making themselves and, what is more important, the King’s uniform, ridiculous.”

The Americans followed Britain’s example and soon went further. As early as March 1917 the U.S. Navy was enlisting female clerks as “yeomanettes,” who were barred from sea duty but given formal naval rank. In the summer of 1918 the Marine Corps advertised for female volunteers, got two thousand responses just in New York City, and eventually accepted three hundred.

All this took place against a background of vast suffering for the women of Europe. In Germany alone more than a million and a half soldiers were dead by late 1918, and nearly a third of them had been married. Widows, many of them living in severe deprivation and struggling to support children, had become a significant element of every country’s population. Little better off were the families of prisoners of war. Hundreds of thousands of unmarried young women would never find husbands.

In western Europe the new roles assumed by women proved to be surprisingly short-lived. Women’s suffrage movements had been gaining strength up to 1914—had appeared to be on the verge of success in places—but the war brought them to an end. In January 1918 Britain granted the vote to women, but only to women who owned property. Later in the year, in an odd twist, it allowed women to hold elective office while continuing to deny them the vote. Women who had expected to be given the vote and other rights in return for their service and sacrifice learned that they were mistaken.

The changes wrought by the war proved to be most permanent in the most improbable places. In Turkey, before the war, women had been virtually excluded not only from employment but from education and even social life beyond the walls of their homes. The lynching of women deemed to be of bad moral character was accepted practice. The war turned Turkey’s women into office workers, organizers of charities, teachers, nurses, and even transporters of ammunition. The veil was abolished, and schools for girls appeared in surprising numbers. Things later reverted to the traditional pattern in rural areas, but in Constantinople the changes stuck.

Change was most dramatic in revolutionary Russia. Huge numbers of women had gone to work in war factories where conditions were even more abominable than in the west. This and the severe deprivations of the long conflict—never enough food or fuel, vast numbers of men killed—radicalized the women of Russia’s cities. They figured importantly in the uprisings that brought down the tsar. When the Bolsheviks took power late in 1917, equal pay and rights for women became the law of the land. The final irony is that civil rights in Russia soon became once again meaningless for women as well as for men.

Chapter 35

The Black Day of the German Army

“The scale and nature of operations required a ‘big business’ type of commander, a great constructing and organizing brain.”

—B
ASIL
H. L
IDDELL
H
ART

O
n a morning at the end of May, for the first time in more than three and a half years, German soldiers stood on the banks of the River Marne barely fifty miles from Paris. They were bone-weary and threadbare, and in days of moving south some had made themselves sick gorging on captured enemy stores. Still, the return to this place must have felt like triumph. Since the start of the Chemin des Dames offensive, they had rolled over or swept aside every enemy unit in their path. They had wrecked seven French and British divisions, taken fifty thousand prisoners, and advanced thirty miles. And the way ahead looked clear: the troops retreating before them were thin on the ground, almost without artillery, and unable to find a place to stop and turn and fight. The Germans must have felt that, if they found the strength, they could keeping on walking to the Eiffel Tower.

It is unlikely that many of them understood how empty their triumph was. Their advance was creating an enormous salient, the biggest yet, a kind of sack with a narrow mouth. They were inside the sack, and every step they took made it deeper or wider. But the mouth was not growing at all. It was in danger of becoming smaller. If it were closed altogether—if the French held on to Reims and retook Soissons—the German assault troops would be trapped.

The Allied side too (with the Americans in the fight, the term
Allies
becomes appropriate as a substitute for
Entente
) had little appreciation of how vulnerable the Germans were. They had taken Soissons, they appeared to be on the brink of taking Reims, they had advanced so far between the two cities that they were starting to cross the Marne, and they appeared to be unstoppable. The crisis bore all the earmarks of a disaster, and a contagion of panic set in. At the eastern end of the front, south of St. Mihiel, French General Castelnau began laying out a plan for a withdrawal to the west—for abandoning the fortresses that had long made his sector all but impregnable. To the north Haig’s staff was dusting off its plans for an evacuation back to England. Even the irrepressible Foch was infected. He suggested that Clemenceau prepare the government to leave Paris, whose citizens were fleeing by the hundreds of thousands, and talked of fighting all the way to the Pyrenees. Franchet d’Esperey, the “Desperate Frankie” of 1914 fame, ordered the French Fifth Army to give up Reims. Lloyd George, having returned to Versailles, yielded at last to Foch’s appeals for more troops from England. (They were desperately needed; Haig was disbanding 145 battalions to replenish those that remained.) Only Pétain, the supposedly overcautious pessimist, remained untroubled. He felt certain that the Germans had fatally overextended themselves and that their ruin was inevitable if the Allies just held on.

But then, just as everything seemed to be unraveling for the Allies, the situation began to turn around. Two of Pershing’s big divisions, ordered to converge where the Germans were crossing the Marne, linked up with French units and met the enemy at Château-Thierry. It was the Americans’ first major engagement, and it brought the German advance to a stop. The commander at Reims disobeyed Franchet d’Esperey, stayed in place, and stopped the Germans there as well. When the Germans pulled themselves together for another assault on Reims, they had to do so without storm troops or Bruchmüller’s artillery and failed miserably.

Ludendorff, thwarted again, turned to the next phase of his plan: the attack at the River Matz west of Soissons. The goal here—it had become an urgent need—was to broaden the mouth of the salient at its western end, pushing the Allies far enough back that they could no longer threaten the one rail line carrying German supplies and troops southward toward the Marne. The attack was to begin on June 9, with Hutier’s army taking the lead. Everything had to be done so hurriedly that secrecy was impossible. As the preparations proceeded, American Marines launched an attack at Belleau Wood to block one of the Germans’ approaches to Paris. They did so artlessly, advancing shoulder to shoulder in a way rarely seen since the slaughter of the British at the Somme in 1916, but their high morale and the sheer weight of their numbers kept them inching forward. It would take them almost three weeks and many casualties to secure the wood, but the process consumed German troops that Ludendorff could ill afford to lose.

Hutier’s preparations at the Matz were so rushed and unconcealed that the French began to suspect a German ruse designed to draw their attention away from some other, more secret operation elsewhere. German deserters even told the French the exact times when the bombardment and the infantry’s advance would come. Nevertheless, when the attack began—another Bruchmüller barrage, a forward rush by experienced troops who had been allowed to rest since Michael—it was a complete success, and for the least excusable of reasons. Once again the defenders were commanded by a Foch disciple who had scorned Pétain’s instructions and put his main force on or near the forward line, where the German artillery devoured it. Hutier’s troops advanced six miles that day, demolishing three French divisions and taking eight thousand prisoners.

But then on June 11, as if from out of nowhere, the French counterattacked west of Soissons. Their advance was directed by Charles Mangin, “the Butcher,” the almost maniacally aggressive French general who throughout the war had alternately been glorified for his ferocious offensives and censured, even removed from command, for carrying things too far. Thanks to Foch, he was back in command of a corps, and he was unquestionably the right man for the job at hand. This time it was the French who were concealed by fog. Rushing eastward, they caught Hutier’s troops on open ground without prepared defenses. The Germans were thrown back with such shocking force that Ludendorff immediately called off the Matz operation.

There followed a month of comparative quiet that the armies on both sides used to catch their breath and pull themselves together. Not only the Germans but now the French as well were preparing fresh attacks. Something new made its appearance on the Western Front during this period: the first cases of the Spanish influenza that would spread around the world and in eleven months kill more people than the war itself. All the armies were affected, but chronic malnutrition made the problem worse on the German side. Thousands of men all along the front became too sick for duty—as many as two thousand per German division. By the end one hundred and eighty-six thousand German soldiers would die of the disease along with four hundred thousand German civilians.

The quiet was interrupted on July 4 by the Battle of Hamel, one of the most remarkable (if largely forgotten, perhaps because comparatively bloodless) operations of the war. It took place near Amiens, its aim was to clear away the German threat to that city, and it was planned and executed by John Monash, who in April had been knighted by King George, promoted to lieutenant general, and made the first non-English commander of the BEF’s Australia–New Zealand Corps.

Monash himself was one of the war’s most fascinating figures and arguably the most effective commander on either side. Raised on the Australian outback by Jewish shopkeeper parents who had emigrated from Prussia (the Monasch family home—that was the original spelling of the name—had been not far from Ludendorff’s birthplace), he had risen from humble beginnings to take degrees in engineering, liberal arts, and law, to become an accomplished musician and linguist, and to found a consulting firm that directed the construction of bridges and railways all across Australia. Along with all these accomplishments, almost as a kind of avocation, Monash distinguished himself as a reserve officer in Australia’s tiny army, designed a breech-loading cannon, and became popular as a lecturer on tactics and military technology. He was given command of one of Australia’s first brigades at the start of the war and spent 1915 at Gallipoli, where his brigade went ashore with the first invasion and stayed until the end. He contributed significantly to Plumer’s success at Messines Ridge in 1917 and, as a major general, commanded a division at Third Ypres and Passchendaele.

Powerful people in Australia had tried to keep Monash out of the war, and powerful people in Europe later tried to obstruct his advancement. Eyebrows went up, in 1918, at the thought of giving a third star and command of two hundred thousand Anzac troops to a man who was not only an amateur soldier, not only a colonial, but a Jew whose parents had come from Germany. He survived only because every general who served with him became his admirer and defender, and because the king came to respect him.

It was at Hamel that Monash showed what he could do. He used his organizational genius and experience in the management of huge projects to integrate as never before all the terrible new machinery of war: machine guns, artillery, aircraft, and tanks. Executing Monash’s plan of attack, his troops needed only ninety-three minutes to reach all their objectives, capturing thousands of enemy soldiers and suffering only light casualties, making Amiens secure and opening a way for further Allied offensives. Their success explains why Captain Basil Liddell Hart, a veteran of the Great War who spent the rest of his life writing its history, said that Monash “had probably the greatest capacity for command in modern war among all who held command.” It was a kind of capacity, Liddell Hart continued, that abandoned the old-school dash and flair of the British and French professionals and “fulfilled the idea that gradually developed in the war—that the scale and nature of operations required a ‘big business’ type of commander, a great constructing and organizing brain.”