A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (45 page)

Sir John French, to complicate things further, continued to complain that a commitment of troops anywhere except on the Western Front would be a monumental mistake. “To attack Turkey,” he said, “would be to play the German game, and to bring about the end which Germany had in mind when she induced Turkey to join the war—namely, to draw off troops from the decisive spot, which is Germany herself.”

Churchill, seeing no need for troops and therefore not in conflict with French, impressed upon Carden that a successful assault would justify even serious costs. “The unavoidable losses must be accepted,” he declared by telegram. “The enemy is harassed and anxious now. The time is precious.” Kitchener was firmly with Churchill, saying that Britain “having entered on the project of forcing the straits, there can be no idea of abandoning the scheme.” (Lloyd George, though without military experience, observed that continuing an offensive that has already proved unsuccessful has rarely in history turned out to be a good idea.)

Again Kitchener released the Twenty-ninth Division for service in the Aegean. This time, however, it was to be used—if needed—not at Salonika but at the Dardanelles. It was to become part of a new expeditionary force along with the Australian and New Zealand troops being transferred from Egypt. This force was put under the command of a longtime friend and protégé of Kitchener’s, General Sir Ian Hamilton, a lanky sixty-two-year-old veteran who had served with distinction in India and the Boer War, had been a British observer in the Russo-Japanese War, and had a reputation for fearlessness under fire. Hamilton left England immediately, without specific orders and without a staff appropriate to his new responsibilities. He was to be rushed to the Mediterranean by train, put aboard a fast ship, and delivered to the Aegean in a matter of a few days. Once there, he was to take stock of the situation and decide what should be done. The French, meanwhile, had assembled a new infantry division for service in the Dardanelles and, in spite of Joffre’s reluctance, started it for the Aegean. What was still supposed to be a naval operation, therefore, had by now come to involve almost eighty thousand troops. Russia too, Sazonov’s concerns having been put to rest by Grey’s grandiose offer of Constantinople, was promising a corps. It would go into action as soon as—no small condition—the British and French broke through to the Sea of Marmara.

Carden and De Robeck continued their preparations. Progress was being made in clearing the mines beyond the mouth of the strait. Weather permitting, the attack was only days away. Carden, however, was finding it impossible to eat or sleep. On March 13 he suddenly declared that he was unable to continue and would have to resign. De Robeck attempted to dissuade him—surrender of the Dardanelles command would mean the end of Carden’s career—but was unsuccessful. A doctor examined Carden, declared him to be on the verge of nervous collapse, and advised him to start for home without delay. De Robeck took command.

Neither De Robeck nor anyone in his fleet knew of something that had happened on the night of March 8 inside the strait in waters that the British had earlier cleared of mines. The
Nousret,
a little steamer that the Turks had converted into a minelayer, had slipped past the destroyers guarding the cleared sector. There, parallel to the shore, it had silently deposited a line of twenty mines. It had then made its escape undetected. The mines hung motionless just beneath the surface of the water.

On March 10, the same day that Kitchener released the Twenty-ninth Division for the Dardanelles, Sir John French began at the Belgian village of Neuve Chapelle his first offensive since the onset of stalemate on the Western Front. It is perhaps no coincidence that the two things happened simultaneously. French was motivated, in part at least, by a determination to demonstrate that Britain’s available troops would be better used on the Western Front than in some distant corner of the Mediterranean. It would not be strange if Kitchener had decided to get the Twenty-ninth away from Europe before the pressure to send it to Flanders became irresistible.

Vice Admiral Sackville Carden
Said a British and French naval force could reach Constantinople in thirty days.

Just as French had been angling to have the Twenty-ninth added to the BEF, Joffre had been angling to get the British to take over the portions of the front that his troops were manning north of Ypres. What he wanted was reasonable: the patchwork character of the front, French then British then French again, created endless logistical problems. Joffre also wanted to free his troops for fresh offensives he was planning in Artois and Champagne. In mid-February, when Kitchener made the first of his decisions to send off the Twenty-ninth and French retaliated by announcing that this would leave him without the resources to do as Joffre wished—extend his line or support Joffre’s latest offensive with an attack of his own—Joffre had called off the part of his plans that was to have been conducted in coordination with the British. He had begun complaining both to London and to his own government in Paris.

French and Douglas Haig feared that if Joffre got his way, the BEF would be consigned permanently to a supportive role. They wanted a different kind of role—they wanted
British
victories, and with them a full share of the glory. As it happened, Haig had a plan for producing victory: an artillery barrage of unprecedented ferocity to be followed by an infantry advance onto the ground cleared by the guns. He chose Neuve Chapelle because the Germans, who were thinning out their defenses in order to send troops to the more turbulent east, were known to have made especially severe cuts there. His objectives were to capture the Aubers Ridge, a long stretch of high ground a mile east of Neuve Chapelle, threaten Lille, and cut the rail line on which the Germans were shuttling troops and guns between Antwerp and Alsace-Lorraine.

French assented to Haig’s plan. He wanted the attack to happen as soon as possible, before the politicians decided to give the BEF piecemeal to Joffre and independent action became impossible. March 10 became the chosen date despite the fact that the ground at Neuve Chapelle was always waterlogged in springtime and would not be suitable for infantry operations until April at the earliest. Joffre, asked to mount a supporting attack at Arras on the same date, waited until March 7 to take his revenge by replying that the British failure to take over his line near the coast had left him without enough manpower to help. The British decided to proceed anyway.

Weather aside, Haig had chosen his battleground well. The sector that he had targeted was a bulge in the German line, a salient exposed to fire from three directions. It was defended by only fourteen hundred Germans equipped with only a dozen machine guns, with few reserves nearby. The wetness of the ground made entrenchment impossible, so that the Germans were up on the surface, behind sandbag barriers that provided scant protection against artillery. Haig had forty thousand men, many of them Indian colonials, to throw into the attack. Their way would be cleared by fire from a concentration of artillery that would not be equaled until 1917: one field gun for every five yards of front, one heavier piece for every nineteen.

All these weapons opened fire at seven-thirty
A.M.,
and for thirty-five minutes they turned the German line and the areas immediately behind it into an inferno where almost nothing could survive. Then they stopped, and the infantry, bayonets fixed, began their advance. Taught by experience to expect the worst, the troops at the center of the British line instead found almost no resistance. The defenders, everywhere except on the outer edges of the barrage, had been virtually annihilated. What was supposed to be the second line of defense was unoccupied and, when the British reached it, gave no evidence of having been occupied in months. When the Tommies moved through wrecked and abandoned Neuve Chapelle to yet another German line, it too proved to be empty. Only an hour and a half after setting out, they had reached their objective for the day. Ahead was empty territory, open and undefended. Haig had broken completely through—the first of only three times in the entire war that the German line would be torn open in this way. And only about a thousand German reserves were near enough to join the survivors within the next twelve hours. The gate to a tremendous victory stood wide open.

The story of how this triumphant beginning came to nothing is a chronology of mistakes, confusion, and leadership so deficient that it explains why Max Hoffmann, when Ludendorff later in the war exclaimed that British soldiers fought like lions, replied that fortunately for Germany they were “led by donkeys.” Haig had limited his attack to a front only two thousand yards wide. This was not only unnecessary in light of the thinness of the German defenses—which the British were aware of—but too narrow an opening for such a large force to pass through efficiently. But when questions had been raised by Edmund Allenby, a cavalry commander who later would win fame in the Arabian Desert, Haig swept them aside with the observation that Allenby knew nothing about handling such large numbers of troops. Another difficulty was that a four-hundred-yard-wide sector at the northern end of the German line had not been shelled according to plan and was still intact when the advance came. Although the guns responsible for bombarding the sector in question had not arrived until the night of March 9 and therefore could not be ready for action the next morning (platforms had to be built, telephone lines installed), nothing was done to assign the sector to other batteries. The result was a pocket of German defenders who, untouched by the bombardment, were able to bring machine-gun fire to bear on the attackers both directly ahead of them and to their south. This fire need not have been enough to stop the main offensive, but it and a similar problem at the other end of the attack zone caused the officers on the scene to order a halt until the machine guns could be dealt with.

There followed a series of almost inexplicable delays, most painfully at the center, the point of breakthrough, where the colonel in charge requested permission to continue his advance but received no answer. Behind him tens of thousands of troops and support units found themselves jammed together at the too-narrow hole in the line, barely able to move and not knowing what they were expected to do. Meanwhile small German units began to arrive from all directions, and though they were pitifully few they brought machine guns and light artillery with them and quickly threw together new defenses. When the attack finally resumed at the end of the afternoon, the opportunity was gone.

Haig tried again the next day and yet again on March 12, but the Germans were growing stronger by the hour and soon were counterattacking. When Haig finally gave up, his gains included little beyond the ghost town of Neuve Chapelle. He had lost 11,600 men, the Germans 8,600—the numbers being mere abstractions that, as always, veil thousands of stories of lives lost and wrecked. The recollections of one British veteran of Neuve Chapelle provides a peek behind the veil. “I was wounded in the battle and taken to a casualty clearing station,” said Cavalryman Walter Becklade. “I was beside a fellow who had got his arms bandaged up—I’d simply got my right arm bandaged. He was trying to light his pipe but couldn’t get on very well so I offered to fill and light it for him. But when I’d lit it I suddenly realized he had nowhere to put it, as he’d had his lower jaw blown away. So I smoked the pipe and he smelt the tobacco, that was all the poor chap could have.”

Lessons had been learned on both sides. The Germans acquired new confidence in their ability to hold off attacks even when outnumbered, and Falkenhayn became less reluctant to spare troops for the east. The British, on the other hand, learned a tragically false lesson. French and Haig concluded that Neuve Chapelle had failed because the opening artillery barrage had been too short. Henceforth they would insist on whole days of bombardment at the start of any offensive.

On March 13, the day after Haig ended his attacks, General Sir Ian Hamilton left London to take command of the not-yet-existent Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (which Kitchener had been calling the Constantinople Expeditionary Force until Hamilton suggested such a name might tempt the fates). He arrived in the northern Aegean just hours before the start of Admiral De Robeck’s March 18 attempt to force the Dardanelles and was able to witness its climax.

The fleet that De Robeck took into the strait that morning was awesome: sixteen battleships—four French and the rest British—most of them old but every one of them enormous, heavily armored, massively armed. At the head of the formation, steaming abreast, were De Robeck’s flagship
Queen Elizabeth
(which carried a dozen guns that fired shells fifteen inches in diameter) and three British battleships. About a mile astern of this vanguard, also abreast, were the four French vessels, commanded by a French admiral eager for combat and cheerful about following the orders of the British. Four other battleships guarded the flanks of these two groups while the others waited outside the mouth of the strait.