A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (38 page)

Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their operations chief, Max Hoffmann, decided that they could satisfy both imperatives simultaneously by taking a newly formed Ninth Army south by rail to the vicinity of Warsaw, a key base of operations for the Russians. There they could link up with the Austrian left and join it in a move against the four armies that the commander in chief of the Russian forces, the tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Romanov, was sending toward Silesia. The Eighth Army would remain behind to guard East Prussia. Ludendorff, bold as usual, wanted to take part of it south too, but Falkenhayn rejected this proposal as too risky.

These movements set the stage for the First Battle of Warsaw, in which eighteen German and Austrian divisions found themselves in the path of sixty Russian divisions advancing on a 250-mile front. Conrad’s assignment was to break the Russian line in the south by moving forward across the River San in Galicia, but his attempts to do so failed. Farther north, the German right and center made swift progress at first but then were slowed by days of torrential rain. “From Czestochowa we advanced in forced marches,” an officer in charge of munitions transport wrote. “During the first two days roads were passable, but after that they became terrible, as it rained every day. In some places there were no roads left, nothing but mud and swamps. Once it took us a full hour to move one wagon, loaded with munitions and drawn by fifteen horses, a distance of only fifteen yards…Horses sank into the mud up to their bodies and wagons up to their axles…One night we reached a spot which was absolutely impassable. The only way to get around it was through a dense forest, but before we could get through there it was necessary to cut an opening through the trees. For the next few hours we felled trees for a distance of over five hundred yards…For the past eight days we have been on the go almost every night, and once I stayed in my saddle for thirty consecutive hours. During all that time we had no real rest. Either we did not reach our quarters until early in the morning or late at night. We consider ourselves lucky if we have one room and straw on the floor for the seven of us. For ten days I have not been out of my clothes. And when we do get a little sleep it is almost invariably necessary to start off again at once…Long ago we saw the last of butter, sausages, or similar delicacies. We are glad if we have bread and some lard.”

As the Germans struggled forward, the Russians had time to assemble a mass of forces and counterattack. The German left was gradually bent back under the weight of repeated assaults until it faced northward instead of eastward and appeared to be on the verge of disintegrating.

By October 17 the Germans saw that they had to withdraw or be destroyed. The Ninth Army retreated sixty miles in six days, and by the time it was free of the Russians, it had lost forty thousand men. Overall the campaign had cost Germany a hundred thousand casualties, including thirty-six thousand men killed, the Austrians between forty and fifty thousand. The Russians pulled their guns out of the slime, and Grand Duke Nicholas began reassembling his sodden forces for a resumption of their advance.

By the start of the German retreat from Warsaw, Sir John French was beginning to move some of his forces eastward in Flanders. Falkenhayn, at almost exactly the same time, was setting in motion a westward offensive over adjacent ground. Until hours before their armies crashed into each other, neither was expecting to encounter an enemy in force. Both commanders were after territory: French’s goal was Brussels by way of Ghent, while Falkenhayn wanted the area directly west of Belgium and the port towns that would come with it. Each was eagerly aware that, if he could advance far enough, he might then be in position to turn away from the sea and encircle his enemy. Glory seemed just over the horizon.

Almost immediately, both sides encountered immovable resistance. A joint French-British thrust toward Ghent ran into Falkenhayn’s main force and was thrown back. The Germans tried to tear through the Belgian line at the Yser, but they too were stopped. Thus was set in motion the month of carnage called the First Battle of Ypres.

The nightmare was nowhere more hellish than where the Germans met the remains of the Belgian army. The suffering was magnified for the Belgians by the impossibility of digging in the waterlogged ground of the Flemish lowlands; for the Germans by the terrors of trying to cross a river under infantry fire while British navy shells screamed down on them from the nearby Channel; for both sides by the approach of winter and the new experience of being not only wet but half-frozen day after day and night after night.

King Albert rallied the Belgian troops. He was a competent soldier and a young man of considerable courage. He was also motivated: Foch had sternly warned him that if he failed to hold this last sliver of Belgium, he could not expect to retain his throne after the war. His Majesty positioned noncommissioned officers behind his line with orders to shoot any man who tried to retreat.

After days of murderous German shellfire that killed or wounded more than a third of the Belgians and effectively ended their ability to stand their ground, Albert played his last trump card. He ordered the opening (in some places the process required dynamite) of sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea. The Germans, who were getting more and more men across the Yser and sensed that victory was near, could not understand what was happening. In the morning the ground was covered with ankle-deep water. Assuming that this was the result of the continuing rains, the Germans slogged on. By midnight, the water was knee-deep and still rising. The Germans not only had to give up any hope of continuing their offensive but spent a difficult night getting their troops back to dry land. Soon they were separated from the Belgians by a five-mile-wide, shoulder-deep lake, and that part of the fight was at an end. The German troops who had been attacking across the Yser were sent south to join in the fight around Ypres. They found themselves in a terrible struggle, often hand to hand, for the villages atop the low ridge that circled around Ypres to the north, east, and south. The German objective was to break through the Entente line on that ridge and close in on Ypres itself.

At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman’s men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing—the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his first intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler’s exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.

The Germans found progress against the British and French as hard as it had been against the Belgians. But when the BEF and Foch launched their own attacks, they too were quickly thwarted. Along this part of the line, however, there were no dikes to be opened, so that the opposing forces could be separated and their misery brought to an end. The fighting continued day and night, the two sides taking turns on the offensive, and as the casualties mounted companies were reduced to the size of platoons and the tattered remnants of units were mixed together helter-skelter. Officers were all but annihilated, so that young lieutenants found themselves in command of what remained of battalions and regiments.

The rain continued, the nights grew colder, men lay on the surface of the earth because any holes they dug immediately filled with water, and still somehow the fighting went on. The landscape, though almost uniformly flat, was broken by villages and patches of woodland and by rivers and canals and hedgerows and fences extending in every direction. This was far better for defense than offense, and practically impossible for cavalry (which in any case was proving to be helpless against machine guns). The British were often outnumbered, sometimes by margins that seemed impossible, but time after time they held off attacks or came back to recapture lost ground. One thing that saved them was the skill of their cavalry, acquired in the guerrilla fighting of the Boer War, in dismounting and fighting as infantry. What ultimately saved them, at Ypres as earlier at Mons and Le Cateau, was the accuracy and speed (and of course the courage) of the ordinary British rifleman. Here again the fire laid down by the Tommies was often intense enough to convince the Germans that they were advancing not against rifles but against machine guns.

The devastating effectiveness of the British fire, coupled with the inexperience of some of the German reserves thrown into the Ypres meat-grinder, led to perhaps the most poignant of the many butcheries of late 1914. Thousands of schoolboy recruits, many of them as young as sixteen, followed almost equally inexperienced reserve sergeants and officers in heavily massed formations directly at the waiting BEF. They formed a wall of flesh—British soldiers recalled them advancing arm in arm, singing as they came, wearing their fraternity caps and carrying flowers—that blind men could hardly have missed. They were mowed down in rows. Where they somehow succeeded in driving back their enemies, they often didn’t know what to do next and so milled around aimlessly until hit with a counterattack. Many thousands of these youngsters lie in a single mass grave a short distance north of Ypres. At the site is a sculpture, the figures of a pair of parents kneeling in grief, created after the war by the mother of one of them.

Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides, and horror after horror. One evening, at the end of a day of murderous infantry gunfights under constant artillery fire, one of the German reserve units managed at tremendous cost to drive the British out of the village of Bixshoote. Later they received word that they were to be relieved overnight. In their lack of experience they assembled and marched away before their relief arrived. Observing this, the British moved in and again took possession. In the following two weeks the Germans would try again and again to retake what they had given away, failing repeatedly and always with even more casualties than before.

Losses were no less shocking on the other side. When Scotland’s Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was taken out of action, only about thirty men remained of the thousand-plus who had come to France at the start of the war. The BEF was moving toward annihilation. In some places along the line the British were stretched so thin that the Germans, observing, outsmarted themselves. They decided not to attack at those points, thinking that such a tempting target must be a decoy behind which lay masses of British or French reserves. There were no such reserves.

Somehow, the Germans and British again launched simultaneous attacks on October 30, and again they ran head-on into each other and grappled in a struggle in which the losses were almost insupportable on both sides. The next day the Germans alone were still attacking, and this time, at the village of Gheluvelt, another of their green reserve units broke through the defensive ring. Nothing lay between them and Ypres, but this sudden success after so much failure apparently was more than they could believe. While they waited for instructions, a British brigadier general found the only troops in the vicinity, the seven officers and 357 enlisted men who remained of the Second Worcester Regiment, and ordered them to retake Gheluvelt. To get to the village, these men had to cross a thousand yards of open ground, and during the crossing a hundred of them were cut down. The survivors, when they reached the edge of the village, darted into a grove of trees, fixed their bayonets, and attacked. Twelve hundred confused and frightened German soldiers, thinking that this ragged little gang must be the advance of some powerful force, ran for their lives. The Worcesters, with nothing between them and Ypres but open country, had sealed the hole.

That night Falkenhayn called a halt. He had no idea that the BEF was at the point of breakdown—out of reserves, nearly out of ammunition, at the limits of endurance. He still thought that a breakthrough was possible, but he wanted to assemble more trained and experienced troops before trying again.

Things became briefly quiet both in Flanders and in Poland in the early days of November, but almost daily the war continued to grow in size and change in shape. The first Canadian troops were in England now, being readied to cross the Channel and link up with the British. An entire corps of Indian troops, tough Gurkha units among them, was with the BEF in Flanders, and black troops from France’s African colonies were arriving at the front as well. In the east, Hindenburg was named commander in chief of all German forces on the Russian front. Ludendorff continued as his chief of staff, and Hoffmann stayed with him as well. When word came from Istanbul that the Ottoman Empire was entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, in Berlin and Vienna it must have sounded like a gift from heaven.

Before November was a week old, the Eastern and Western Fronts were heating up again. Grand Duke Nicholas put two armies on the march through Poland toward Silesia, and other Russian armies were moving southwestward to the Carpathians. And Falkenhayn was almost ready to try again to take Ypres. The kaiser was still at Supreme Headquarters, and his presence was as big a headache for Falkenhayn as it had been for Moltke. Wilhelm was constantly demanding a victory, a reason to don one of his most gorgeous uniforms and be paraded in triumph through some conquered city. In his protracted disappointment he was like a petulant adolescent, and no more useful.

During the lull in the Flanders struggle, Falkenhayn received a hurried visit from Ludendorff. As usual, and with Hoffmann’s help as always, Ludendorff had an ambitious plan ready for execution. Also as usual, his plan was aimed not just at stopping the Russian armies advancing into Poland but at destroying them. He proposed to do this by allowing the Russians to advance beyond the railheads that were their source of support until they ran out of momentum. Then the Germans would descend on them from the north, taking them in the flank and rear, cutting them off from Warsaw and safety. But more troops were needed. This was what Ludendorff had come for: reinforcements. Falkenhayn refused; he had been assembling all the divisions he could find for the new attack in Flanders, and the kaiser was hounding him. Ludendorff departed in a fury. Another war, this one within the German general staff, began at about this time. It was between Falkenhayn and the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team, and it was over the question of whether the Germans’ best hope of victory lay in the west or the east.