A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (77 page)

The withdrawal was code-named Alberich, after a maliciously tricky dwarf king in German (and Wagnerian) mythology. The new wall of defense that it created was named the Siegfried-Stellung Line by the Germans, but the Entente would call it the Hindenburg Line. The decision to construct it was among those taken by Ludendorff after he and Hindenburg replaced Falkenhayn as joint commanders in chief, and it showed once again Ludendorff’s ability to think and to act on a grand scale. It grew out of the conclusions he had drawn after an inspection of the Western Front in the aftermath of Verdun and the Somme: that his armies were no longer capable of taking the offensive, that too many of Germany’s diminishing manpower resources had been squandered, and that the defensive doctrine currently in use had to be scrapped.

“The decision to retreat was not reached without a painful struggle,” Ludendorff would write later. “It implied a confession of weakness bound to raise the morale of the enemy and lower our own. But as it was necessary for military reasons, we had no choice.” The decision was made possible by the enormous power that Hindenburg and Ludendorff together exercised in Berlin. They were the conquerors of the east, the people looked to them as saviors, and no one in the civil government, not even the kaiser, was prepared to stand against them. Again and again, in crisis after crisis, they almost always got their way—by threatening to resign if not by other means. Late in 1916, when Ludendorff demanded the mobilization of Germany’s entire civilian population for the war effort, he did not get everything he wanted, but he got a great deal. Sectors of German industry that had not already converted to the production of war matériel now did so. The army itself was restructured: Ludendorff created thirty-one new divisions in the fall of 1916 and thirteen more in January 1917, mainly by making each existing division smaller while giving it more machine guns and artillery. Boys born in 1899 were drafted ahead of schedule—though they proved, upon reporting for training, to be alarmingly malnourished.

The benefits of the withdrawal, if it could be pulled off, promised to be substantial. The front as it ran southward from Arras to Soissons and the area of the Chemin des Dames (“the Ladies’ Road,” so named because it had been a favorite bridle path of the daughters of King Louis XV) was a great ninety-mile bulge curving westward to include the city of Noyon, only a few days’ march from Paris. The Hindenburg Line would be twenty-five miles shorter, freeing thirteen divisions and fifty batteries of heavy artillery (roughly the equivalent of an entire army) for use elsewhere. This was a crucial consideration, because the German manpower situation had been difficult since mid-1916. At the start of 1917 the Germans had two and a half million men, 134 divisions, on the Western Front. Facing them were nearly four million Entente troops organized into 175 divisions (a total expected to rise substantially by year end as the BEF continued to expand). The danger that Germany would be numerically overwhelmed seemed to be increasing with every new month.

The creation of the new line would also enable Ludendorff to install, from scratch, the kind of physical infrastructure needed for a new kind of defense. Under his new approach, there was no longer to be a German front line in the traditional sense. The now-customary continuous line was replaced by small, mutually supportive steel-and-concrete camouflaged blockhouses laid out in a checkerboard pattern and manned by machine-gun crews. Wherever possible, these blockhouses were positioned on the forward slopes of hills, from which they would look down on attacking troops. They would be shielded by high rows of razor wire configured so as to channel attackers into narrow, lethal passages as had happened more or less inadvertently at the Somme. The men in the blockhouses, rather than standing their ground and fighting to the death, were to fall back when they had done what they reasonably could to slow the enemy’s advance. The old, brutal system, in which troops were packed together in the forward trenches in an effort to create an immovable mass and were expected to die at their posts, became obsolete. In its place was something intended to be significantly more flexible and much less costly in terms of lives.

The first true defensive line, in the new system, would be far to the rear—as much as a mile behind the blockhouses, beyond the reach of enemy mortars and light artillery. Another line would be another mile back, and the reserves would be positioned even farther in the rear than that, safe from most artillery but ready to counterattack as soon as an opportunity appeared. The result would be an elastic defensive network designed to draw the enemy into a miles-deep killing zone, one in which the reserves were no longer reserves at all in the traditional sense but a strike force poised to throw the enemy back at that point of maximum vulnerability where his initial thrust had exhausted its energy.

This was Ludendorff’s vision for the Western Front in 1917. It had everything to recommend it except for the short-term risk—the possibility that an Entente offensive (and one was sure to come before long, possibly early in the year) might catch the Germans midway through their withdrawal and between their old and new lines. This risk seemed so great that even Ludendorff hesitated—until fate intervened.

At the beginning of February the Germans intercepted and decoded a message sent from the Italian foreign office in Rome to Petrograd. It contained bad but not surprising news: the British and French were preparing an attack on the Western Front. It was to be yet another massive offensive, bigger even than the Somme, involving some one hundred divisions. But there was good news too, and it was very good indeed. The attack would not be coming until April—two months or more in the future. The Germans would have time enough to complete and man their new line. They would have time to school the troops in the execution of the new system. On February 4 Ludendorff ordered work to proceed, and it was fully under way five days later.

The Hindenburg Line, as it took shape, proved far too formidable for the humble term
trench warfare
to remain appropriate. It began with a trench, but one that was to remain unoccupied. This trench was almost ten feet deep and twelve feet across—a trap for tanks, and an equally forbidding obstacle for men advancing on foot. Behind it, one after another, were five or more rows of barbed and razor wire, each row twelve feet deep and twice a man’s height, each twenty yards distant from the next. Then came the blockhouses, with two machine guns in each. Beyond them—dangerously far beyond, for enemy infantry trying to advance under fire—lay the first true line, a largely underground beehive of chambers and passageways covered with up to eight yards of earth and impregnable to artillery and bombs. Farther back still, also down below the surface and positioned wherever possible on a reverse slope so as to be almost unreachable by artillery, were two lines of guns. This was defensive warfare raised to a new plane. It appeared to be invulnerable. It was the work of a commander of immense vision, energy, and ambition—a man prepared to bend the entire German Empire to his purposes.

And it was made possible by the fact that the British and French would not be attacking until April.

Entente planning for 1917 had begun in much the same way as the preparations for 1916: with a gathering of the high commanders at Joffre’s château in Chantilly, and with all the assembled generals eager to get back onto the offensive and finish off the Germans. This meeting took place on November 15, and the British, French, Italians, and Russians had no difficulty in agreeing once again that they would all attack simultaneously. They agreed also that they would wait until May, so that snow would not be a problem on the Eastern Front or for Italians pushing into the Alps. French General Robert Nivelle, now popular in Paris as the supposed hero of the final stages of the Battle of Verdun, presented a plan for a February attack on the Chemin des Dames, but it was set aside.

The assembled commanders even repeated themselves in failing once again to agree on where, exactly, the British should attack. As usual, Haig wanted to strike in Flanders, on the old Ypres battleground, with the old objective (dear to the Royal Navy, and of unquestionable strategic value) of capturing the Belgian ports. Once again Joffre wanted the British to be concentrated farther south, near if not actually on the old Somme line, and once again he was able to argue that his wishes should prevail because the French would be providing most of the troops. This point of disagreement was a mere detail, however. The generals more or less cheerfully left it to be decided later. Even Haig was optimistic. David Lloyd George, then still minister of war, arrived at Chantilly late in the discussions, after the decisions had been made. Though he had long since evolved into one of Britain’s most determined advocates of victory at whatever cost, he was also appalled by the Western Front’s casualties and not at all satisfied that they had been necessary or worthwhile. He was infuriated when he discovered that the military men had once again shown themselves to be incapable of coming up with anything better than a continuation of what was, in his view, their “legacy of inevitable disaster.” But there was nothing he could do—at the time.

During the six weeks remaining until the end of the year, the earth shifted under all their feet. Lloyd George became Prime Minister of England. Joffre fell from power and was replaced by Robert Nivelle. Suddenly the agreements reached at Chantilly mattered hardly at all.

The new year began with a January 5 conference of Entente leaders at Rome. Neither Haig nor Nivelle attended. They were separately engaged in developing their plans for the next offensive, the former still focusing his hopes on Flanders, the latter on a Chemin des Dames attack that would leave little room for action in Flanders. Lloyd George used the occasion to try to reduce the bloodletting on the Western Front. To the surprise and annoyance of General Robertson, who had accompanied him to Rome as chief of the imperial general staff, he proposed giving first priority in 1917 to a reinforced strike out of Italy aimed at destroying the remains of the Austro-Hungarian armies and taking Vienna out of the war. This idea had been conceived originally by Luigi Cadorna, the Italian commander in chief, and it had strategic merit. For Lloyd George it had the attraction of making another Somme or Ypres almost impossible in the near term. It would also take precedence over Nivelle’s Chemin des Dames campaign and a supporting British attack that Nivelle wanted at Arras. It would involve Italian infantry, mainly; the principal British and French contribution would be enormous quantities of artillery.

Cadorna, when he saw how hostile the British generals were to his idea, began to backpedal. The French premier, Aristide Briand, also was unethusiastic, perhaps because he knew that Nivelle would never agree. Having so recently participated in the displacement of Joffre, Briand would be in an awkward position if he disregarded the wishes of the man to whom he had entrusted the armies of France. Lloyd George, despite his recent elevation, had no leverage with which to impose his will on the others. He had become prime minister in spite of having few real friends in positions of power anywhere. Many members of his own Liberal Party resented him for having colluded in the fall of Asquith, the Conservatives had long and with good reason regarded him as a foe, and it was widely expected that his government could not last more than a few months. His hopes for an Italian offensive having died for want of support, he departed Rome a thwarted and disgruntled man.

Lloyd George stopped in Paris on his way home, and upon arrival he was met by Nivelle, who greeted him with a smart, flatteringly respectful salute. By all accounts Nivelle was a man of extraordinary charm. His ability to make political friends had contributed at least as much as his aggressiveness and dash to his startlingly rapid rise. He now worked his wiles on Lloyd George, who, accustomed to the disdain of his own country’s generals (Haig had called him a “cur,” though not to his face), must have been delighted. Nivelle brought unique advantages to his meeting with the Welsh Lloyd George. He was not only not Catholic but Protestant, and not only a Protestant but one who did not hesitate to display contempt for the faith of his Catholic countrymen. This had made him attractive to the French republicans, and now it made him attractive to the British. He spoke perfect English without an accent (his mother was English-born), which again made him exceptional among France’s senior commanders. And—no small matter, as it turned out—he had a pleasing skull. Lloyd George was a believer in phrenology, the then-popular pseudoscientific discipline based on the idea that character and destiny are revealed in the shape of one’s head. He considered the contours of Nivelle’s head and saw victory there.

David Lloyd George
Weary of the generals’
“legacy of inevitable disaster.”

Nivelle explained his plan for the Chemin des Dames. It would involve a multipronged attack on the German line west of Reims, and he proclaimed with invincible confidence that it would decide the war in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. It would be a French attack primarily (Lloyd George had to be pleased to hear that), supported by a complementary British offensive. It would use the same tactics that had produced such supposedly glorious results in the final weeks at Verdun. (Lloyd George was unaware that those results were achieved only after the Germans had given up on Verdun, and that the operation that produced them was on a comparatively tiny scale.) The death blow would be delivered by a strike force (Nivelle called it his Mass of Maneuver) made up of twenty-seven divisions of French infantry and cavalry. Best of all, Nivelle offered assurances that the offensive not only would not but
could
not turn into another Verdun or Somme. He promised that if somehow the impossible happened and it did not succeed within two days, he would bring it to a stop.