A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (48 page)

On the other side, Conrad saw that his armies were on the verge of collapse and was begging the Germans for more help. Falkenhayn remained reluctant to comply, though increasingly he was of two minds on the question. His reluctance was fortified by the obvious intention of the French and British to continue their attacks on the Western Front, and by his belief that the war was going to have to be decided there. A complicating factor was the willingness of the Italian government, which until August 1914 had been joined to Germany and Austria-Hungary in what was called the Triple Alliance, to put itself on the auction block and see which side could offer the best terms.

Rome had been excluded from the July 1914 crisis by its putative but distrustful allies in Vienna and Berlin. This suited Italy’s astute foreign minister, Antonio di San Giuliano, who wanted nothing to do with any of it. He saw Austria’s behavior toward Serbia as aggressive and provocative, and he accused Germany and Austria of violating the terms of the alliance by failing to confer. Their actions, he said, relieved Italy of any obligation to go to war.

San Giuliano died in October, and Italy’s foreign affairs were taken over by the prime minister, Antonio Salandra, a future fascist who regarded his country’s neutrality not as a gift to be treasured but as a negotiable asset to be sold to the highest bidder. He put Italy up for sale, and because he claimed to have a ready army of almost a million men, the bidding was intense. The Entente and the Central Powers both thought it likely that the war would be decided by what Italy did. By spring, with the situation of the Entente so promising overall, it seemed almost impossible that the Central Powers would not collapse if a million fresh troops were thrown into the scales against them.

Antonio Salandra Prime Minister of Italy
Put his nation and its army on the auction block.

Britain made extravagant offers. It enjoyed the advantage of not having to promise anything that it, or France, possessed or wanted. Everything to be given to Italy (the port city of Trieste, lands from the crest of the Alps southward, islands in the Aegean, pieces of the Balkans and Asia Minor and Africa) could be extracted from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires at the end of the war. The Russians were less forthcoming. Confident at this point of defeating Austria, they wanted to promise nothing that might compromise their postwar dominance in the Balkans and points farther east. To win the acquiescence of the Russians, Sir Edward Grey promised them Constantinople and other parts of the Ottoman Empire—thus reversing what had long been an essential element of Britain’s Middle East policy.

The ability of the Central Powers to bargain was limited: much of what Italy wanted belonged to or was coveted by Vienna. The Germans, accordingly, hoped for nothing more than to keep Italy neutral, but they were willing to pay a high price to achieve this goal. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg went so far as to float the idea of giving part of Silesia to Austria-Hungary in compensation for its concessions to Italy. The proposal was shunned in Berlin; Silesia had been the single most highly prized conquest of Frederick the Great of Prussia.

The intrigues were endless. In Vienna the desperate Conrad and Berchtold came up with a scheme for getting Italy to mediate a general eastern settlement. Italy’s reward would be the South Tyrol, part of Austria-Hungary’s Alpine domain. Russia would be won over with offers of part of Galicia, Constantinople, and the whole chain of waterways from the Dardanelles to the Black Sea. That these plans would have been a flagrant betrayal of the Turks and likely would have been seen as a betrayal of the Germans as well appears to have been of no concern to either Conrad or Berchtold. Emperor Franz Joseph, when he learned of the idea, dismissed Berchtold. Thus the man most responsible for the war departed the stage before the conflict was a year old.

To Salandra, the bargaining appears to have been a game in which he had nothing to lose. It was obvious that he could do best by siding with the Entente. He merely went through the motions of bargaining with Germany to force the Entente partners to improve their offer. A decision could not be delayed indefinitely, however. If the Russians broke through the Carpathians, Italy’s market value would plummet.

Meanwhile the French general staff had turned its attention to the St. Mihiel salient, a forward bulge in the German line south of Verdun (which was itself a French salient extending like a spear point into German-held territory). The plan was typical: by breaking the line on both sides of St. Mihiel, the French could either cut the Germans off or force them to withdraw. In so doing they would straighten and shorten their line and reduce Verdun’s vulnerability. If fully successful, they would capture the railway lines extending westward from the German-held city of Metz and force an even more extensive withdrawal. These goals were, as always, deliciously attractive. The only question was, as always, their feasibility.

The offensive began on April 5. Fourteen French divisions supported by three hundred and sixty heavy guns—fully half of the total number of such guns possessed by the French army—attacked on a front almost fifty miles wide. The weather was terrible, the ground muddy, and visibility spoiled by fog, rain, and snow. French security was so lax, with French officers talking of what was coming in the cafés of Paris and towns nearer the front, that the Germans knew of the attack well before it began. Though most of the defenders were reservists, German combat engineers had been installing strong defenses since the capture of St. Mihiel in the fall, and the salient was rich in artillery. The fight quickly degenerated into prototypical Western Front warfare: bloody and sterile French assaults across the Woëvre plateau on the north side of the salient, withering fire from German machine guns and cannon. When Joffre finally allowed what came to be called the Battle of the Woëvre to gutter out, it had cost him sixty-two thousand men. But the relentless commander in chief, convinced yet again that he had come tantalizingly close to success, immediately set his staff to work on plans for another, bigger, two-pronged offensive north of St. Mihiel and in the Artois region to the west. All Europe settled down to a brief period of relative quiet. Even the Russians, their troops and supplies exhausted, had found it necessary to suspend—temporarily, they expected—their attacks in the Carpathians.

No one on the Entente side was comfortable with the lull. Joffre wanted another attack by the British, to keep the Germans occupied in Belgium. Sir John French, eager as ever to demonstrate that London should let him have more troops, was willing to cooperate. Falkenhayn meanwhile, unable to ignore a cacophony of warnings about danger in the east, continued to thin his lines in Belgium and France. He wanted, naturally, to keep these withdrawals secret from the French and British. To this end he was preparing a series of diversionary offensives. The first and most important would be at Ypres, where France too was preparing to take the initiative.

The Second Battle of Ypres, which introduced a horrifying new element into the history of warfare, had a suitably novel and horrendous prologue. For weeks British miners operating crude foot-powered devices called “clay-kickers” had been digging a tunnel from behind their lines into German territory. Their destination was Hill 60, the highest point on the Messines Ridge that overlooked much of the Ypres salient. The hill had been a key strongpoint and artillery observation post for the Germans since the autumn, when they first captured it. Once under Hill 60 (so named because it was sixty meters high, having been created years before with earth removed for construction of a railway), the tunnelers scooped out an underground chamber and packed it with explosives. When this cache was detonated at seven
P.M.
on April 17, it blew much of the hill hundreds of feet into the air, the German defenders and their weaponry and bunkers with it. The explosion was followed by an infantry attack that captured what remained of the hill at a cost of exactly seven casualties. An estimated one thousand Germans had died, with perhaps a hundred surviving. Hill 60 proved to be an uncomfortable prize, however, exposed as it was to German fire from three directions. Its possession was not enough to prevent the Germans from moving up an awesome array of their biggest siege mortars in preparation for Falkenhayn’s coming offensive and the experiment to be conducted in conjunction with it.

Second Ypres began late on the afternoon of April 22 after forty-eight hours of the kind of intense artillery bombardment that everyone now knew to be the preamble to an infantry attack. This time, however, when the guns fell silent, they were followed not by waves of charging riflemen but by the opening of six thousand metal cylinders containing 168 tons of chlorine, a lethal heavier-than-air gas that stayed close to the ground as it was carried on the evening breeze toward the French lines. Chlorine had been chosen because it was readily available—the German chemical industry produced 85 percent of the world’s supply—and because of its effects: it destroys the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen and causes its victims to drown, generally with excruciating slowness, in their own fluids. No one on the French side knew what the gas was. It first appeared in the distance as a white mist, turning yellow-green as it drew closer. Its effects were immediate and terrifying. Every man still capable of moving ran for his life. With astonishing speed a four-mile expanse of the French front line was totally cleared. Nothing stood between the Germans and the shattered ruins of the little city of Ypres, which they had spent so many lives trying to take in 1914. In minutes, and without losing a man, they had achieved a breakthrough even more complete than the one the British had won and squandered at Neuve Chapelle five weeks before.

The introduction of gas need not have come as such a surprise. A French divisional commander, a General Ferry, had learned of the German plans to use chlorine weeks before from a captured soldier. He had informed both the French high command and the British, suggesting that the canisters of which the prisoner had spoken should be located by aerial reconnaissance and destroyed with artillery. The only action taken in response to this warning was directed at Ferry himself. First he was reprimanded for communicating directly with the British rather than going through channels. After the battle, when the importance of Ferry’s warning was beyond question, he was sacked.

The success of the new weapon was as big a surprise to the Germans as the weapon itself was to the French. The only earlier use of gas, on the Eastern Front in the depths of winter, had been such a failure that the Russians hadn’t bothered to report it to their allies. Though this new attempt, unlike the first, involved a deadly chemical, the Germans regarded it as a mere experiment, a peripheral element in an operation intended only to persuade the French and British that the Germans remained strong in the west. Not enough reserves were on hand to push through and occupy Ypres, in part because so many troops had been sent to the east. And though protective breathing devices had been developed years before for industrial purposes, none had been provided to the attacking troops.

The advancing Germans were shocked by what they found: five thousand enemy soldiers on their backs, struggling for breath, suffocating in agony and terror. The Germans became so afraid of catching up with the gas as it rolled on before them that they advanced only two miles and stopped. By the time their commanders understood the scope of the opportunity that had been created, a congeries of British, French, and colonial troops had been sent forward into the gap and the opportunity was gone. From now on all the armies of the Great War would expect gas and be more or less prepared for it. And though both sides would use it extensively, never again would it disable enough men to decide the outcome of a battle. Even at Ypres the British and French needed only hours to understand what they were faced with and find ways to deal with it. First it was noticed that the brass buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms had turned green. Someone deduced from this phenomenon that the mysterious cloud must be chlorine and knew of a quick preventive: by breathing through a cloth on which they had urinated (a spare sock, for example), the troops could neutralize the poison before it reached their lungs. The first improvised gas masks thus emerged almost immediately after the first use of chlorine.

It was not necessary to be exposed to the gas or in direct contact with the enemy to experience the horror of Second Ypres. Canadian Sergeant S. V. Britten tasted his share when, just hours after the start of the attack, he and his unit were assigned to strengthen defensive positions not used since the fighting of late 1914. “Left at 6:30
P.M
. for reserve trenches and reached our reserve dugouts via St. Julien,” he recorded. “Just rat holes! One hell of accommodation! Got to the trenches as a fatigue party with stake & sandbags, and though they were reserve trenches, they were so rotten. No trenches at all in parts, just isolated mounds. Found German’s feet sticking up through the ground. The Gurkhas had actually used human bodies instead of sandbags. Right beside the stream where we were working were the bodies of two dead, since November last, one face downward in full marching order, with his kit on his back. He died game! Stench something awful and dead all round. Water rats had made a home of their decomposed bodies. Visited the barbed wire with Rae—ordinary wire strung across. Quit about 1
A.M
., came back to our dugouts and found them on fire. Had to march out to St. Julien, & put up in a roofless house—not a roof left on anything in the whole place. Found our sack of food had been stolen and we were famished. Certainly a most unlucky day, for I lost my cherished pipe. Bed at 4
A.M
.”