A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (49 page)

After the first day Second Ypres too turned into a standard Western Front slaughterhouse. The Germans, never having intended to capture anything, settled into defensive positions as usual while the French and British launched counterattacks that accomplished nothing.

On the evening of April 24 General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who had been one of the BEF’s senior commanders from the start of the war and had repeatedly demonstrated his steadiness and courage, visited French at his headquarters and asked him to cancel an attack planned for the following morning. French refused, the attack went ahead, and the result was as Smith-Dorrien had predicted: a loss of thousands more British, Canadian, and Indian troops, with a gain of no ground. A division of Indian troops freshly arrived in Europe was almost annihilated while crossing a mile of open ground; the few who reached the enemy line alive were promptly gassed. Nearby a regiment of Senegalese troops—Africans transported to Europe by their French colonial masters—panicked after being ordered to follow the Indians and encountering chlorine. They turned on their heels, shot the officers who ordered them to stop, and kept running until they reached a supply area in the rear, where they ran amok. A corps of British cavalry had to be dispatched to bring the rampage to an end. The next day Smith-Dorrien sent a message to BEF headquarters, asking Chief of Staff Robertson to explain to French the hopelessness of further attacks. He also suggested a withdrawal to a shorter, stronger line nearer the city of Ypres. Upon receiving a curt reply, he sent another message suggesting that, if his resignation was wanted, he was prepared to submit it. Smith-Dorrien soon found himself ordered home.

Lt. Gen. Horace Smith-Dorrien
Removed from command for trying to do the right thing.

Day after day, assured by Foch that Joffre would soon be sending reinforcements, French continued his offensive. The casualty lists grew longer. Not until May 1 did Foch confess that no French troops were coming—that exactly the opposite was happening; Joffre was removing troops from Ypres and sending them south for an entirely separate offensive. Finally French gave up. He ordered a pullback of three miles to precisely the position that Smith-Dorrien had been dismissed for suggesting.

The battle dragged on into late May, not ending until the Germans ran low on shells. They had taken forty thousand casualties, the British sixty thousand. “The profitless slaughter pit of Ypres,” as Churchill would call it, had injected two new elements into the war: mining and gas. By introducing the latter, the Germans further damaged themselves in the eyes of the world—in American eyes most importantly. Intellectually, it was perhaps not easy to draw a moral distinction between piercing men’s bodies with bullets and bayonets, blowing them apart with high explosives, and killing them with gas. On some deeper level, however, people sensed that warfare had been made monstrous in a new way, that another step had been taken toward barbarism. Not for the first time and not for the last, it was the Germans who looked most barbaric.

Background

TROGLODYTES

THERE IS NOTHING MORE BIZARRE ABOUT THE GREAT WAR
than the way in which, for four years, millions of citizens of Europe’s most advanced nations lived in holes in the ground. The Western Front was unlike anything the world had seen before or has seen since.

In trying to visualize the front, the easiest mistake is to imagine a pair of ditches running parallel from the North Sea to Switzerland. The whole setup was much more complicated than that. Each side had five thousand men per mile of front on average, and this manpower was used to construct elaborate defensive systems, usually miles deep, that were zigzagging mazes fortified in all the ways that the latest technology made possible.

Though the methods of the three armies differed in their details, the basics were similar everywhere. First came the true front line, a trench six or more feet deep and about that wide, generally heavily manned. A mile or so to the rear was a support trench with a second concentration of troops. Farther back still, beyond the range of all but the biggest enemy artillery, was a third line for the reserves. All but the lightest guns were behind this reserve line, unreachable except by the most successful offensives.

Even this description is too simple. Trenches were often impossible to dig in the waterlogged soil of Flanders, where walls of sandbags had to be erected instead, and maintaining a continuous line could be difficult in the rough hills north of Switzerland. The German front “line” often included three parallel trenches, the first for sentries, another for the main force, the third for backup troops. However many such rows there were in any particular place, they were connected by perpendicular communications trenches, shielded by fields of barbed wire as much as thirty feet deep, and, more and more as the war wore on, studded with machine-gun nests. The trenches were less often straight than broken by dogleg turns, so that any enemy troops who got into them would have a limited field of fire.

Life in this maze embodied a cliché about war: that it is tedium punctuated by eruptions of sheer terror. The food was loathsome: bread that was a week old by the time it reached the front, canned meat when meat was available, overcooked vegetables that invariably arrived cold. Alcohol was issued daily: wine for the French (half a liter at first, then a full liter), brandy for the Germans, and rum for the British first thing every morning. Latrines, six-foot-deep pits at the end of short side-trenches, were unspeakably foul, and the traffic made them a magnet for enemy artillery. With dysentery widespread, the men often preferred to use buckets, old food containers, or the nearest shell hole.

Discipline was harsh and not infrequently arbitrary. British officers made wide use of Field Punishment Number One. Men deemed guilty of minor infractions would be lashed to a post or spread-eagled on an upright wagon wheel two hours daily (one in the morning, another in the afternoon) for as long as three months, often within range of enemy guns. And the punishments inflicted by the environment were often even worse.

There was trench foot, a fungal infection caused by prolonged exposure to cold and wet. It could lead to gangrene, then to amputation. Twenty thousand British troops were afflicted with it in the first winter of the war. Until someone discovered that daily rubbings with whale oil were an effective preventive, men crawling to the rear were a common sight and were often accused of malingering.

And there was trench mouth, which diseased the gums and caused teeth to fall out.

And when the weather was warm, trench fever erupted, caused by the excretions of lice. It began with a tingling in the shins and led to something akin to a bad case of flu. It was rarely fatal but put thousands out of action.

Lice were universal, their bites leaving red marks on the skin of every soldier. The men spent hours searching out the lice in their clothing and killing them with their fingernails or a candle flame. It was hardly worth the effort; the eggs remained in the seams and would hatch in a few hours.

The rats were even worse. A single pair can produce more than eight hundred offspring in a year. The front, with its garbage and decaying human bodies, turned into rat heaven. Soldiers wrote home of rats everywhere, rats almost as big as cats, rats eating the eyes out of corpses. Rats would chew through a sleeping man’s clothes to get at the food in his pockets.

To all this was added a stench that rose to heaven, the impossibility when it rained of finding a place to lie down, and artillery fire that never quite stopped even when the front was supposedly quiet. Historians note that the armies of the Great War were made up largely of industrial and farm workers who were inured to hard labor, bad treatment, and minimal creature comforts. Even the generals most inclined to regard them as cannon fodder, however, understood that no one could endure much of this life.

And so the men were rotated. After no more than a week at the front, they would be pulled back to the support line, then to the reserve line, and finally to the rear. Even there, however, conditions were primitive. Shells still came roaring in, and exhausted, nerve-shattered troops would be drilled and harassed by officers eager to demonstrate their diligence.

The men were supposed to be given regular leave—a week every four months, in the case of the French—but often it didn’t happen. When it did, the congestion of the railways and the low priority given to soldiers traveling alone could make it impossible for them to get home. Men returned to duty with venereal disease, contracted by eighty of every thousand men in the BEF. (The German rate was worse, the French somewhat lower.)

A trench culture emerged, with its own hierarchy, language, and rituals. Stretcher-bearers, many of them conscientious objectors, were admired for the courage with which they went out to rescue the wounded. Runners (Adolf Hitler was one of them, and he ended the war with two Iron Crosses) were constantly exposed to fire as they delivered messages and scouted ahead when their units prepared to move.

The setting was ideal for snipers, who became a professional elite. Sniper schools were established. Their products worked in pairs, a rifleman and an observer, firing high-powered rifles equipped with telescopic sights through holes in sheets of steel. Antisniper snipers came next. They were not always welcomed by the other troops, however; when snipers’ positions became known, they drew enemy artillery fire.

Out beyond the lines lay no-man’s-land. (The term has been traced back to medieval England, where it applied to disputed ground between two jurisdictions.) Pocked with shell holes, littered with debris and dead bodies, no-man’s-land was sometimes half a mile or more in depth, sometimes only yards. Entering it meant death in the daytime, but at night it came to life. Raiding parties went out at sunset and returned at dawn, trying to see what enemy units were opposite, trying to capture prisoners to be questioned in the rear, sometimes just hoping for a few quick kills. For the most adventurous soldiers, this became a form of sport.

Wounds that allowed a man to go home without causing permanent damage were prized and envied. For the British these were “Blighty wounds”; for the Germans they were Heimatschüsse—“home shots.” Veterans developed respect, even something akin to affection, for the soldiers on the other side. The enemy was suffering in the same way, after all, and was doing so with courage. Temporary truces were arranged for the bringing in of dead and injured, and some sectors came to be dominated by a live-and-let-live attitude with no one trying to make things difficult. The Bavarians were known to be particularly good-natured. When they were about to be replaced at the front by Prussians, they would warn the men opposite to expect more difficult days.

The British troops were “Tommies” to the Germans. The British called the Germans “Fritz” at first, then “Jerry.” Names like “Hun” belonged to the patriots back home, from whom the men on the front felt increasingly alienated.

Officers could become objects of resentment. Even the most junior of them, often teenagers just out of the best schools, had personal servants. They lived in comparative comfort with better food and luxuries brought from home, and they never had to lift anything heavier than a swagger stick. Most despised of all were the staff officers, billeted in private homes far to the rear and rarely exposed to gunfire.

All this put officers in a different universe from the Tommies, the poilus, and the German Frontschwein. These common soldiers, whenever they moved, even when sent off on long marches or across no-man’s-land in daylight assaults, carried a ten-pound rifle, at least 150 rounds of ammunition, bottles of water, an overcoat, a blanket with ground cloth, a trenching tool, days of rations that were not to be opened without an officer’s permission, a “pocket primus” miniature stove with fuel, a mess kit with mug and cutlery, and whatever else they could manage, from socks and underwear to shaving gear, toothpaste, bandages, and books.

Chapter 16

Gallipoli