A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (73 page)

In the Caucasus Yudenich and Kemal, determined and able and well matched, struck at each other again and again, capturing towns and then having to give them up. In Greece Sarrail stopped his retreat with a counterattack against the Bulgarians and again began trying to push toward the north.

Three of the disasters of this period were particularly pointless. The Italians started the Seventh Battle of the Isonzo, which like its predecessors lasted only a few days, generated thousands of casualties, and accomplished nothing. On Brusilov’s front, Tsar Nicholas sent an elite army of Imperial Guard units that were nominally under his personal command (he didn’t go with them, however) to join in the advance on Kovel, now largely defended by Germans. The Guards, a hundred and thirty-four thousand of the best infantry and cavalry remaining to Russia, outnumbered the defenders and were better supplied with guns and shells. But their commander, a Romanov grand duke handpicked for the job by the tsar, ignored the lessons of the Brusilov offensive. Regarding flank attacks as unworthy of a force as superb as his, he sent the Guards in frontal assaults straight at the guns of the Germans. He sent them seventeen times—they found themselves trying to advance through waist-deep water while being strafed by aircraft—and every attempt ended in slaughter. Brusilov, who was not even consulted, could only read the reports and grieve. When the enterprise was called off at last, fifty-five thousand Guardsmen were casualties. As news of this disaster spread among the troops and into the civilian population, anger and resentment boiled to the surface. The heads of generals rolled, but the damage had been irretrievable.

At Verdun, which otherwise remained quiet by Verdun standards, the French on September 4 experienced a disaster that uncannily mirrored the earlier German explosion inside Fort Douaumont. In a fourteen-hundred-foot railroad tunnel that was being used by Nivelle’s troops as a barracks, communications channel, storage depot, medical treatment center, and refuge, a fire somehow broke out where rockets were being moved by mule. It spread to a chamber where grenades had been stockpiled, then to the fuel for the tunnel’s generators. It burned out of control for three days, trapping and killing more than five hundred men. The poilus too were finding reason to grumble.

September 25 brought another British thrust on the Somme. Again Haig used his tanks—only 30 percent got as far as no-man’s-land before breaking down—and as usual the Tommies paid a high price in lives for gains that included the village of Thiepval, which had been a prime objective back on July 1 and now fell at last after two days of hard fighting. Thereafter the weather failed, the onset of autumn rains making further movement impossible.

Falkenhayn, at the same time, was clearing Transylvania. Late in September he delivered a thrashing to a Romanian force at Hermannstadt. (As the name of this town indicates, Transylvania had a substantial German population, one eager to help Falkenhayn’s army with intelligence and in all other possible ways.) The Romanians fell back to the so-called Transylvanian Alps and prepared to make a stand in the passes. They were reinforced by two hundred thousand of their countrymen sent from the Danube. Their numbers, and the fact that they were on high ground protected on both sides by mountains, appeared to make them secure. Falkenhayn desperately needed to get past them and link up with Mackensen. His whole plan depended on that. But with winter approaching in the high country, time was running out. If this thrust were not to degenerate into another stalemate, he had to force the Romanians out of the passes before the snows came.

Early October brought a three-day Eighth Battle of the Isonzo, which cost many lives but otherwise had no results, and preparations for a new French attack at Verdun. On October 19, satisfied that this was not going to be another squandering of lives, Pétain allowed Nivelle to begin bombarding the Germans with six hundred and fifty pieces of artillery (among them new siege guns bigger than the German Big Berthas) and fifteen thousand tons of shells assembled for the purpose. It was February in reverse: for four days the French blasted away at demoralized German troops who, huddled under an intermittent freezing rain, saw their defenses blown apart around them. On October 22 Nivelle played a trick. Suddenly all his guns fell silent, after which, by pre-arrangement, the thousands of French troops positioned along the front line sent up a great cheer—always until now a sure sign of an attack. Thoroughly fooled, the Germans uncovered the artillery that they had kept concealed until now and opened fire, thereby disclosing their positions. This was what Nivelle had wanted. There followed not an infantry attack but another day and a half of French shelling, during which sixty-eight of the Germans’ 158 batteries were destroyed. Many of those that remained were so worn out by almost a year of heavy use as to be no longer accurate. The new French guns slowly began to break Fort Douaumont apart, setting its interior afire. The German garrison was pulled out, leaving the fort undefended.

The assault force was commanded by Mangin. When it attacked on the morning of October 24, its soldiers were concealed in mist, shielded by a creeping barrage, and thoroughly prepared. (At least partly to satisfy Pétain, a full-scale model of Douaumont had been constructed behind the French lines, and one French unit after another had captured it in mock assaults.) The attack was a total success. In one day the French retook positions on the east bank of the Meuse that the Germans had spent four and a half months and tens of thousands of men capturing. The retaking of Douaumont sparked national jubilation. When Fort Vaux fell nine days later (it too was abandoned by the Germans and captured almost without a fight), France was prepared to believe that at Verdun its army had won one of history’s great victories. Nivelle, almost overnight, became the nation’s new hero, the man who had “the formula” (so he himself declared) for turning the tide. Few wanted to notice that the Germans still held all their gains on the west bank, so that their artillery could block further advances on the other side of the river. Nor did it seem to matter that though the Germans were giving ground, they were doing so slowly and in good order. The hills retaken by the French were without strategic value, and nothing remotely like a breakthrough had been achieved. But Nivelle and Mangin were eager to strike again.

Nor was Haig quite finished (or the Italians, who on November 1 began a three-day Ninth Battle of the Isonzo that brought to almost one hundred and forty thousand the number of casualties suffered by both sides on that little front during 1916). On November 13 the British detonated a mine that their tunnelers had dug under a German redoubt on the blood-soaked ground of Beaumont-Hamel, and the subsequent attack by seven divisions captured both the redoubt and twelve hundred German soldiers. This fight went on for six days. Then on November 18 a blizzard brought it to an end. The Battle of the Somme was at an end as well. Absurdly, in their final forward plunge the British commanders had pushed their line downhill from a freshly captured ridge to the low ground beyond. The only result was that thousands of troops would, for no good reason, spend a miserable winter entrenched in cold, deep mud dominated by enemy guns.

Casualties on the Somme totaled half a million British and more than two hundred thousand French. Though the British and French originally estimated German casualties at above six hundred and fifty thousand and this number was long accepted by historians, it cannot be accurate. Official German sources place their Somme casualties at two hundred and thirty-seven thousand, a total that corresponds approximately to the calculations of Australia’s official historian. The extent to which the British and French exaggerated is clear in the various governments’ official (and credible) tabulations of total deaths on all sectors of the Western Front in all of 1916: one hundred and fifty thousand British, two hundred sixty-eight thousand French, and one hundred forty-three thousand German.

Whatever the numbers, many of Kitchener’s armies were now not only battle-seasoned but seriously reduced. German losses, though far from outlandish in comparison with those of their enemies, had been higher than necessary. The reason was that Fritz von Below, commander of the Second Army at the Somme, had threatened to court-martial any officer who allowed his men to withdraw and later launched hundreds of useless counterattacks. Ultimately Falkenhayn was responsible. “The first principle in position warfare,” he had decreed, “must be to yield not one foot of ground; and if it be lost to retake it by immediate counterattack, even to the use of the last man.” Ludendorff, upon making his first visit to Verdun, ordered an end to such practices and began the introduction of more flexible, less costly tactics.

Just ahead of heavy snows that might have kept them blocked all winter, Falkenhayn’s divisions now forced their way through four mountain passes. The Romanians, virtually out of ammunition, were unable to resist. Mackensen began moving toward Falkenhayn from Dobruja, which he had thoroughly subdued. The Romanian commander divided his force to strike simultaneously at Falkenhayn and Mackensen, trying to keep them apart. It was a bold move but completely beyond the capabilities of the army that attempted it. It might have had a chance of success with Russian support, and by now Alexeyev had relented. In response to the threat that Romania’s collapse was beginning to pose for Russia itself, he did what he had feared from the start that Romania’s entry into the war would force him to do. He told Brusilov to extend his line more than two hundred miles to the east and south. This ended the danger of a German move into Russia, but it so dispersed Brusilov’s troops as to render him incapable of continuing his offensive. Alexeyev was trying to send troops into Dobruja from the east, but he had acted too late in a theater that was without adequate railroads. Sarrail, meanwhile, was again trying to come to the rescue from the south. He raised hopes by capturing the city of Monastir in southern Serbia, but thereafter his advance stalled.

At the start of December Falkenhayn and Mackensen came together and finished the destruction of the Romanian army in the Battle of Arges. Since their government’s declaration of war, two hundred thousand Romanians had been killed or wounded (half the dead were victims of disease, actually) and one hundred and fifty thousand had been taken prisoner. Those able to flee went northward into Russia. The Germans, Bulgarians, and Austrians (plus some Arab units contributed by the Turks) had lost about sixty thousand men. On December 6 they crowned their victory by taking possession of the capital city of Bucharest. The forces that Alexeyev had been trying to send against them were able to do nothing more than block Mackensen from advancing northward out of Dobruja along the shore of the Black Sea.

The consequences of the Romanian campaign transcended the numbers of men lost and the propaganda benefits reaped by the victors. Over the next year and a half the Central Powers would remove from Romania more than two million tons of grain, one million tons of oil, two hundred thousand tons of timber, and three hundred thousand head of livestock. To a considerable extent, Romania fueled Germany’s ability to stay in the war.

All the battles were now over except the oldest, the one at Verdun. On December 13 the political ice under Joseph Joffre broke at last. Questions about his leadership, above all about his failure to prepare at Verdun, had finally generated more pressure than his defenders were able to withstand. The hero of the Marne, the revered savior of France, was moved into an empty position as adviser to the war cabinet. To satisfy his supporters, to keep them and Joffre himself from resisting or protesting, he was made a Marshal of France. His successor as commander in chief was not his able deputy Castelnau (too aristocratic and Catholic to be acceptable to the republicans who dominated the government), not the demonstrably effective Foch (also too Catholic—he was a member of a lay religious order, and one of his brothers was a Jesuit priest), and not the supremely competent and sensible Pétain (too chronically contemptuous of politicians and his fellow generals to be digestible by either the government or the army). The new chief was France’s new darling, Robert Nivelle, the self-styled genius credited with changing Verdun from a tragedy into a national triumph.

Two days after Nivelle’s promotion, his man Mangin attacked for the last time at Verdun. This was another success, at least from Mangin’s perspective. It resulted in the capture of eleven thousand Germans and 115 of their guns. But it lacked any real importance—by the third day the Germans were successfully counterattacking—and by the time it was brought to a halt the number of French casualties since the end of the German offensive had risen to forty-seven thousand.

Verdun was over at last. For months the battle had been little more than a struggle over a symbol. No one seemed capable of asking why the French were attacking or the Germans were bothering to defend. The crown prince, in his postwar memoir, offered the German rationale. To have walked away from ground over which so much blood had been spilled, he wrote, would have been politically impossible—would have caused explosions at home. The French in the end were fighting for nothing more substantial than glory—not France’s so much as Mangin’s glory.

Meaningless as it was, the last assault of 1916 brought an ominous if largely unnoticed foreshadowing of the year that lay ahead. As they moved forward to the trenches from which they would once again have to throw their flesh against machine guns, the French troops began to bleat like sheep. The sound echoed all around.
Baaaa, baaaa—
the one pathetic form of protest available to men condemned to die. More than the fighting, more than any piece of ground won or lost, this was the sign of what was coming next.