A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (105 page)

This campaign left the armies of Austria-Hungary incapable of maintaining a credible defense. On July 25 Conrad was relieved of command and elevated from baron to count, presumably for some reason other than his contributions to the destruction of the Hapsburg empire. Desertions were accelerating, the armies melting with the Alpine snows. Soon Vienna was informing Berlin that it could not continue. If Germany would not join it in seeking peace, Austria would do so alone. When it attempted to approach the Allies, however, it was rebuffed. It had acted too late to save itself.

Farther to the east, the folly that had been Brest-Litovsk was continuing to draw German troops into a military, political, and economic quagmire. They had to occupy the city of Kharkov deep inside Ukraine to maintain some vestige of control and any hope of extracting grain from that distant and unmanageable corner of their new eastern domains. They had to move into the Donets Basin, which since the start of the war had been Petrograd’s primary source of coal, in search of fuel for the decrepit railways taken from the Russians. They had to stretch their lines of communication into the Crimea to discourage an Allied advance from the Middle East. The Turks, meanwhile, had overextended themselves in the Caucasus by advancing in the aftermath of Russia’s collapse, and elsewhere they were entering a state of disintegration almost as advanced as that which had overcome the Austrians. They were being outmaneuvered and outfought by British and Arab forces in the crumbling southern reaches of their dying empire.

All was not hope and glory on the Allied side, either. The end of the German threat to Paris had ended also any possibility that the Clemenceau government would fall, a development that might have brought to power a government willing to negotiate with the Germans. But Britain and France alike were staggering under the weight of 1918’s cascade of casualties; the British were drafting fifty-year-old men, while the French were organizing combat units made up almost entirely of men over forty. Economic dislocations also were taking a toll. Workers at ammunition factories in Birmingham and Coventry went out on strike, returning only when Lloyd George threatened to draft them into the army. In August Britain’s police declared a one-day strike in protest of inflation’s ruinous impact on their wages. This was followed by a railway strike in several regions. Strikes were even more widespread in France, and the strikers were often at least as intent on pressuring the government to make peace as on winning financial concessions.

Such unrest reflected the fact that, to the uninformed eye, 1918 could still have the appearance of a year of German gains. The map continued to show Germany in possession both of eastern Europe and of more of France and Flanders than it had held at the beginning of March. The breakdown of the German army was not readily apparent behind the front lines as its remnants continued to put up a stubborn defense, hold the Allied advance to a glacial pace, and kill British, French, and Americans.

The German forces too were paying heavily, of course, and the relentlessness of the Allied attacks gave them no chance to rest, reorganize, or throw together adequate defenses. Their casualties in August alone totaled two hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Of this total, a hundred and ten thousand men were listed as missing, a gentle way of saying that many had deserted. German soldiers were celebrating when they managed to surrender without being killed. When newly captured troops arrived at the holding pens created by the Allies for their growing hordes of prisoners, those already inside welcomed them with cheers. By September the number of German divisions on the Western Front would be down to 125, and only forty-seven of those were considered capable of combat. The Allies by then were up to more than two hundred divisions, increasing numbers of them fresh and double-sized American units.

The impossibility of a German victory had become clear to all the senior commanders on the Allied side and to most of their German counterparts. Germany’s only hope, if any hope remained, was to take action on the diplomatic front before it, like Austria-Hungary, had nothing left to offer.

Background

THE GARDENERS OF SALONIKA

THERE IS A NICE SYMMETRY TO THE FACT THAT, AS AUGUST
1918 arrived and the war became four years old, a huge multinational army lay bottled up in the Greek port city of Salonika under the command of French General Louis-Félix-Marie-François Franchet d’Esperey.

The idea of establishing an Entente base in Salonika had originated with Franchet d’Esperey as early as October 1914, when he was commanding the French Fifth Army on the Western Front and had already been nicknamed “Desperate Frankie” by his British allies. He suggested it to President Poincaré, who was interested enough to ask him to draw up a detailed proposal. Franchet d’Esperey did so, explaining that by opening a front in the southern Balkans, France could protect Serbia and drain off German and Austrian troops from other places. But by the time the proposal was ready for consideration, the attention of the French and British was focused on the Dardanelles.

The possibility remained dormant for almost a year. Then, with the Gallipoli campaign in ruins and the Russians driven out of Galicia by the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, Erich von Falkenhayn decided that the time had come to take possession of Serbia and secure an overland route to Constantinople. In October 1915, facing an invasion, the Serbs appealed for help. Paris was eager to respond. It wanted not only to keep Serbia intact but to win over Greece and Romania through a show of force. It also saw an opportunity to give France a strong presence in the Balkans—one that could be valuable after the war. Britain’s leaders, with the exception of David Lloyd George, were skeptical. But they agreed to send one battered division from Gallipoli as junior partner to a much larger French contingent.

The expedition was put under the command not of Franchet d’Esperey, who by then commanded an army group in the west, but of Maurice Sarrail, an able but notoriously political officer who had recently been relieved by Joffre after a German offensive in the Ardennes caught his Third Army off guard. Uniquely among senior French generals, Sarrail was closely affiliated with the socialists in the National Assembly. He had become popular with critics of Joffre’s management of the war. His dismissal created an outcry, the leftists accusing Joffre of trying to eliminate a potential successor. The Salonika assignment was a convenient way of restoring him to command while getting him as far away from Paris as possible.

The first troops arrived at Salonika on October 5, and in short order Sarrail had them on the march toward Belgrade. They had only one single-track railroad to make use of, and the troops had to advance over some of the roughest, most barren hill country in Europe. They were met by Bulgarian troops who had recently been drawn into the war by German promises of rich territorial concessions—everything Bulgaria had lost in the Second Balkan War and more. They were still a hundred miles from Serbia when word arrived that the Serbs had been defeated and were fleeing for the coast through Albania. Sarrail could do nothing to help them. By late November he was pulling his troops back to their starting point.

He began building defenses that turned Salonika into a minature Western Front, practically impregnable. The British wanted out. Even Lloyd George had changed his mind, and Prime Minister Asquith was describing Salonika as “dangerous and likely to lead to a great disaster.” But France, Russia, and Italy all demanded that they not only remain but send more divisions. London complied for the sake of harmony.

Sarrail’s Army of the Orient grew rapidly. It included one hundred and sixty thousand men by January 1916, three hundred thousand by May. French, British, Italian, and Russian troops were gradually absorbed into it, along with Serbs who had been refitted on the island of Corfu. Sarrail involved himself so deeply in Greek politics (which were indescribably confused, with King Constantine leaning toward his brother-in-law the kaiser while leading politicians favored the Entente) that Britain and Russia became suspicious of French ambitions in the Balkans. Rumors circulated to the effect that Sarrail wanted to establish a kind of crusader kingdom in the region with himself as potentate.

The next complication was Romania, which both sides had been courting since the start of the war. When the Romanians agreed to join the Entente on condition that Sarrail attack the Bulgarians, the French government ordered him to proceed. It wanted to expand its reach in the Balkans and to draw German troops away from Verdun. Sarrail was preparing his offensive when the Bulgarians, as part of their role in Germany’s campaign against Romania, seized the initiative and attacked him first. Sarrail counterattacked in September (allowing the Serbs to take the lead and sacrifice a fifth of their army in the process) and took the Serbian city of Monastir before being stopped. Stalemate was restored, and civil war broke out in Greece. Sarrail was actively supporting the king’s political rivals.

The deadlock continued through 1917. The Entente had more than half a million men in Salonika by early that year, and in Europe the enterprise came to be regarded as a bad joke. German generals called Salonika their largest internment camp. Clemenceau, in his newspaper, called Sarrail’s troops “the gardeners of Salonika,” a waste of manpower needed on the Western Front. The place was far from a rural idyll, however. It was humid, swampy, and filled with pestilence. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were stricken with a virulent strain of malaria. The city of Salonika, which had belonged to the Ottoman Empire until four years earlier, was a hellhole. Refugees from the Balkan wars were crowded together in makeshift slums, and unsavory entrepreneurs grew rich by providing amusement for restless Entente troops. Venereal disease was epidemic, and a French division that had not had leave in more than a year briefly mutinied.

Sarrail tried an offensive in the spring of 1917, but it quickly failed. The Serbian army became embroiled in rumors of a plot to replace Serbia’s king with a military dictatorship. Colonel Dragutin Dmitrijevic, the same “Apis” whose Black Hand had plotted the assassination of Franz Ferdinand three years earlier, was arrested, convicted of conspiracy, and executed on June 26. That same day King Constantine of Greece was forced to abdicate and move to Switzerland. A provisional government that Sarrail had been fostering in exile took power in Athens, and Greece declared war on the Central Powers. Everything was in confusion, and Sarrail was widely despised.

When Clemenceau became premier, he sent Sarrail into retirement. The new commander was General Adolphe Marie Guillaumat, a veteran of France’s colonial wars and a Western Front army commander who offered the advantage of being determinedly apolitical. Guillaumat began making preparations for a 1918 attack on the Bulgarians; it was to be a limited operation with modest objectives. The Germans, meanwhile, were pulling their troops out of the Balkans for use in Ludendorff’s coming offensive in the west. Even the British generals in Salonika grew optimistic. The Bulgarians, left on their own, seemed unlikely to stand their ground if seriously threatened.

In June 1918, with the Western Front in crisis, Guillaumat was called home to become military governor of Paris. (There was more to this appointment than met the eye. Clemenceau and Foch, their minds made up to sack Pétain if conditions in France continued to deteriorate, had selected Guillaumat as his replacement.) It happened that Franchet d’Esperey was out of work at the time. In May, after the German break-through at the Chemin des Dames, Clemenceau had half-apologetically offered him up as a scapegoat to politicians demanding change. (“I bear you no ill-will,” he had told the general in dismissing him.) Franchet d’Esperey had been offered the Salonika command late in 1917, before Guillaumat. He had turned it down out of fear that, because he was known to be one of the army’s Catholic, even quasi-royalist conservatives, his appointment would outrage the leftists. Invited to succeed Guillaumat rather than Sarrail, however, he felt free to accept.

Almost as soon as he arrived in Greece, he began expanding Guillaumat’s plans. “I expect from you savage vigor,” he told the generals who greeted him when he landed. Two hundred and fifty thousand Greek troops had become available as a supplement to his army, and soon he was cabling Paris, demanding permission for a major campaign. Clemenceau was in favor. With the Germans on the defensive in Belgium and France and masses of Americans in action, there was no longer a need for more troops in the west, and with Austria nearly defenseless southeastern Europe seemed to offer rich opportunities. He got London and Rome to agree.

In September the Army of the Orient began moving north. This was its last chance to show that the whole thing had not been a tragic waste.

Chapter 36

The Sign of the Defeated

“No no no!…You do not finish a war like this!…
It is a fatal error, and France will pay for it!”