A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (57 page)

“Coming back over the ground that had been captured that day,” one Tommy wrote, “the sight that met our eyes was quite unbelievable. If you can imagine a flock of sheep lying down sleeping in a field, the bodies were as thick as that. Some of them were still alive, and they were crying out, begging for water and plucking at our legs as we went by. One hefty chap grabbed me around both knees and held me. ‘Water, water,’ he cried. I was just going to take the cork out of my water-bottle—I had a little left—but I was immediately hustled on by the man behind me. ‘Get on, get on, we are going to get lost in no man’s land, come on.’ So it was a case where compassion had to give way to discipline and I had to break away.”

Joffre continued to batter away in Champagne into November, not giving up until Pétain began ignoring orders to continue. In the end the casualties of Second Champagne totaled a hundred and forty-three thousand for the French, eighty-five thousand (including twenty thousand men taken prisoner) for the Germans. The Loos and Third Artois offensives cost the British sixty-one thousand casualties (two generals and twenty-eight battalion commanders among them), the Germans fifty-six thousand, and the French forty-eight thousand. Again France was stunned. On the whole, however, Joffre was believed when he told the Paris newspapers that his losses had been dwarfed by the enemy’s and that the campaign had been a great success. The truth was that the Germans, though almost overwhelmingly outnumbered, had inflicted huge losses on the Entente armies while preventing them from accomplishing anything. In the process they had done more than Joffre or French to demonstrate that the Entente truly did have no troops to spare for Gallipoli or other distant theaters. Joffre’s credibility was freshly damaged, if only among those insiders who knew what was actually happening at the front, but Joffre himself survived.

Sir John French did not survive. Even as the Loos offensive was still in progress, Haig began to complain to his many well-placed friends that only French’s incompetence had prevented it from being a success. “If there had been even one division in reserve close up,” he later declared, “we could have walked right through.” Haig’s own position was far from unassailable—his failure to provide a reserve from his own forces was just one of his mistakes at Loos. But French, frightened and almost desperate to defend himself, made a fatal error. Foolishly, he falsified the official record of orders issued during the battle. When Haig learned of this, he made sure it was brought to the attention of King George, who intervened with the prime minister. When Asquith gave French the opportunity to resign, he yielded to what had become inevitable and agreed. Haig, to no one’s surprise, was appointed to the position for which he had been angling since before the start of the war. French returned to England and was made Viscount Ypres.

As the fighting wound down in the west and the exhausted armies of the east settled in for another winter, attention swung back to the Balkans and the Aegean, where intertwined events were once again unfolding rapidly. During the summer Bulgaria had become the centerpiece of an auction much like the one that had earlier brought Italy into the war. The Bulgarian government, like Italy’s, was motivated solely by considerations of which side could help it to grab the most territory from its neighbors, and early in September it opted to join the Central Powers. Even before the start of the fall campaign on the Western Front, it became clear that Germany and Bulgaria were preparing to invade Serbia. It was equally clear that, in the wake of the failures at Gallipoli, the fall of Serbia would endanger what little toehold the Entente still had in Europe’s southeastern corner. Sir Edward Grey had tried desperately to win the Bulgarians over, offering them many concessions. Because Serbia was Britain’s ally, however, Grey was unable to offer what Germany could: territory that Serbia had taken from Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War. Now Serbia had to be saved or Russia would be further demoralized and Greece and Romania might follow Bulgaria in joining the Central Powers. Saving Serbia meant getting Entente troops to Serbia. With the Russians gone from Galicia, there was only one possible way to accomplish that: through Salonika, the Greek port that early in the year had been an alternative to the Dardanelles as the focus of an Aegean offensive.

Before the end of September the French had several divisions, including one removed from Gallipoli, en route to Salonika. They were led by General Maurice Sarrail, who despite having been removed from command on the Western Front retained such potent political connections that the government had been obliged to find an assignment for him somewhere. Britain, unwilling to leave the Balkans to the French, ordered its Tenth Division from Suvla Bay to Salonika. For a time there were hopes of persuading the Russians to send troops as well, but on October 3 Foreign Minister Sazonov declared that this was impossible. His explanation was stark and indisputable: Russia was losing men at a rate of two hundred and thirty-five thousand a month. Its prewar professional armies had been essentially wiped out. Many of the armies that remained were wrecks.

Sarrail and the French and British divisions were ashore at Salonika on October 5. Two days later German and Austro-Hungarian troops under Mackensen entered Serbia from the north. After another two days two Bulgarian armies arrived from the east, one trying to push the Serbs toward Mackensen, the other cutting the rail lines connecting Salonika to Serbia. Sarrail, when he tried to advance, found himself blocked. The Serb army, trapped between overwhelming enemy forces approaching from two directions, decided to run for the sea. Masses of civilians fled with it; the entire nation seemed to be in flight. Exhausted, without food or other supplies, a mass of humanity tried to cross the snowbound mountains of Albania and was set upon by tribal enemies eager to settle old scores. “I remember things scattered all around,” a Serb officer named Milorad Markovic would recall. “Horses and men stumbling into the abyss; Albanian attacks; hosts of women and children. A doctor would not dress an officer’s wound; soldiers would not bother to pull out a wounded comrade or officer. Belongings abandoned; starvation; wading across rivers clutching onto horses’ tails; old men, women and children climbing up the rocks; dying people on the road; a smashed human skull by the road; a corpse all skin and bones, robbed, stripped naked, mangled; soldiers, police officers, civilians, women, captives. Vlasta’s cousin, naked under his overcoat with a collar and cuffs, shattered, gone mad. Soldiers like ghosts, skinny, pale, worn out, sunken eyes, their hair and beards long, their clothes in rags, almost naked, barefoot. Ghosts of people begging for bread, walking with sticks, their feet covered in wounds, staggering. Chaos; women in soldiers’ clothes; the desperate mothers of those who are too exhausted to go on.” Markovic would survive and become the father of a daughter named Mirjana. She would marry Slobodan Milosevíc, the Serbian strongman, who, nine decades later, was put on trial for war crimes after a later round of Balkan atrocities.

Serbia lost some two hundred thousand troops in this disaster. Of the hundred and fifty thousand who reached the Adriatic coast, only half were found to be fit for further service and transported on British ships to dismal camps on the island of Corfu.

Sarrail’s failure to prevent the conquest of Serbia, coming on the heels of so many other calamities, caused the French government to fall. Premier Viviani was succeeded by Aristide Briand. Minister of War Millerand was succeeded by—of all people—General Joseph Gallieni, Joffre’s unheralded partner in the saving of France a year before. Joffre found himself reporting to the man who had been responsible for his elevation to the commander in chief’s post years before, and whom he had tried so jealously to keep in the shadows before and after the Battle of the Marne. Joffre’s critics, increasingly numerous, hoped that Gallieni would dismiss him. Instead he once again defended and shielded him.

On October 11 Kitchener cabled Hamilton to ask his opinion of how many troops would be lost in a withdrawal from the Gallipoli beachheads. After replying that such a move would cost the British and French at least half the men they still had on the peninsula, Hamilton was relieved of command, his part in the war finished. Grey promised to give the island of Cyprus to Greece if it would join the Entente. The Greek government, intimidated by events at Gallipoli and in Serbia, declined.

In mid-November Kitchener traveled to Gallipoli, took a quick look, and said that the peninsula should be evacuated. When he returned to London, he discovered that Asquith had used his absence as an opportunity to further reduce his authority. The prime minister had reconstituted the committee responsible for war strategy, reducing it to five members with Kitchener, shockingly, no longer included. General Sir William Robertson, the onetime sergeant, was brought from France to become chief of the imperial general staff, the new War Committee’s chief adviser on military operations, and the channel through whom the government’s instructions were to be issued to the BEF. When Kitchener learned of this development, he went to Asquith and offered his resignation, which was refused. He still had much value as a figurehead, a symbol in the propaganda wars.

Also excluded from the new committee was Winston Churchill, who since losing his post as First Lord of the Admiralty had been left with no office except the essentially meaningless one of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (where his only duty was to appoint county magistrates). Angry and hurt, Churchill resigned from the government and entered the army as a major (he had hoped to become a brigadier general) on the Western Front. Far from an ordinary field-grade officer, he arrived in France with a servant, a black stallion with groom, mountains of luggage, and a bathtub equipped with its own boiler. He was met by a limousine and sped off to elegant accommodations at a château. By January, however, he would be serving on the front and proving to be a competent battalion commander.

One drama remained to be played out in the closing days of the year: getting the troops away from Gallipoli without incurring serious—and politically insupportable—casualties. On November 23 the War Committee approved a detailed withdrawal plan prepared by Hamilton’s successor. Over the next month, though an ignominious retreat, the escape from the peninsula proved to be the closest thing to a genuine military achievement by the Entente since the Marne. Working together night after night, the soldiers on the beaches and the Royal Navy steadily and stealthily got more and more men away under cover of darkness without letting the Turks and Germans know that anything of the kind was happening. The longer the evacuation continued, the more outnumbered the remaining men were—and the more vulnerable to being overrun and wiped out. The force at Cape Helles was down to nineteen thousand men when, on January 7, 1916, General Liman von Sanders launched an assault.

Here the entire Gallipoli fiasco came to the strangest possible end. Faced with British rifle and machine-gun fire, the Turkish troops for the first time since the start of the campaign simply and absolutely refused to attack. Even when threatened by their officers, even when shoved and slapped, they would not advance. Perhaps the problem was the absence of Mustafa Kemal; his health broken, he had been sent away in December. Perhaps the Turks had just had enough. “I’m twenty-one years old,” one of their lieutenants had written in November. “My hair and beard are already gray. My mustache is white. My face is wrinkled and my body is rotting. I can’t bear these hardships and privations any more.”

Thirty-six hours after this mutiny, the last Australian troops on Gallipoli were carried safely off to sea and it was all over. The campaign had taken the lives of at least eighty-seven thousand Turks. (That is the official number, but it is widely regarded as too low.) Forty-six thousand British, French, Australians, and New Zealanders had either been killed or died of wounds or disease. Total casualties on both sides were in the neighborhood of half a million.

Nineteen-fifteen was finished at last.

With hot food and room to move about, these British troops are clearly on a break from the trenches.