A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (94 page)

Freudians will argue that young Willy, in order to have a chance of establishing his own identity, was bound to rebel against his mother, against her anxieties and her frustrated efforts to mold him into a replica of her father. (She was always disappointed in his academic performance.) Be that as it may, rebel he did. As he approached manhood, he broke with his parents, moving in the one direction certain to appall them: toward his grandfather the emperor, toward Bismarck, toward the whole reactionary Junker ethos including what his grandmother in England called “that terrible Prussian pride and ambition.” As he took up a commission in one of the elite regiments, he said that he found there his first real home. He married a girl who could scarcely have been less like his mother—a dull, unquestioning German girl who in short order bestowed on him six sons in whom he took little interest and a daughter on whom he doted. His approving grandfather began to send him on diplomatic missions that should rightfully have been given to his father, humiliating poor Fritz and dividing the family into two openly warring camps.

All this history went into the making of the man who in 1888—the year his grandfather and his cancer-stricken father both died—became at twenty-seven the master and All-High Warlord of the most powerful nation on the European continent. Wilhelm II’s youthful impetuousness, compulsive self-aggrandizement, and painstakingly concealed insecurity so perfectly mirrored the nation he led that throughout the early years of his reign he and his brilliant uniforms and his theatrical displays of self met with public adulation. He was a precociously modern figure in his obsession with how he was covered in the press, an early and for a time successful practitioner of the dubious art of public relations. But it could not last. Wilhelm himself was psychologically too fragile to hold together the image, the facade, that he had worked long and hard to create. In his need to prove himself master of everything, he dismissed the mighty Bismarck two years after taking the throne. He intruded constantly into domestic and international affairs that he had neither the knowledge nor the skill to manage. “The emperor is like a balloon,” Bismarck had said. “If one did not hold him fast on a string, he would go no one knows whither.” With Bismarck no longer holding the string—Wilhelm could tolerate no underlings except those who made obsequious displays of submission—he soon went out of control. The last ten years of peace were punctuated with scandals and sometimes outlandish political and diplomatic blunders. He suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, the first of which, interestingly, occurred when his one close friend was revealed to be homosexual. He emerged from each setback and collapse more depressed than ever, more obviously a hollow man swollen with pretense, less able to function as a real—as opposed to a make-believe—ruler.

And through it all like a dark thread there ran his immensely complicated relationship with his mother’s homeland. He admired and even loved, craved the approval of but also envied and resented, the grandmother, uncle, and cousin who successively reigned in Britain. He built a fabulously expensive navy in the improbable hope that somehow this would cause Britain to want Germany’s friendship. “Nothing will change,” he said, “until we are so strong on the seas that we become valuable allies.” When the result was exactly the opposite of what he had hoped—when Britain felt so threatened that she was driven to friendship with Russia and even her ancient enemy France—Wilhelm reacted with angry, bitterly uncomprehending complaints of betrayal.

What he was, finally, was a weak and often foolish man who nevertheless managed to persuade much of the world that he was a monster and a danger. By 1914 he was only marginally capable of heading his government and even less prepared to direct Germany’s massive military machine. By 1918 he was little more than a figurehead in whom the real leaders of Germany had no confidence. By autumn his story would be very nearly finished.

Chapter 32

Entangling Misalliances

“I am sick of this d—d life.”

—G
ENERAL
S
IR
W
ILLIAM
R
OBERTSON

T
he British and the French, once they agreed that no large-scale offensives should be attempted in the new year, were left with much to guess at where German intentions were concerned. They had to try to figure out where (if anywhere) the Germans were likely to attack, and to settle on tactics and how to deploy their troops.

It was not easy to agree on any of these matters. The possibilities were too numerous for comfort. At the end of 1917 the Western Front still ran in the old zigs and zags from the Belgian coast down to Picardy in France, from there westward to Verdun, and then southward again to Switzerland. The eighteen miles nearest the English Channel were defended by thirteen Belgian divisions and, more decisively, by the broad shallow lakes created when the coastal dikes were opened in 1914. This flooding made the northern end of the front impregnable—essentially took it out of the war. Nearly as impregnable were the 150 miles at the southern end, where the steep pine forests of the Vosges Mountains, the heights looming over the River Meuse, and France’s mighty chain of fortresses formed a formidable wall.

That left hundreds of miles of potential battleground. German initiatives were feasible everywhere from the start of the British line at a Belgian stream called the Coverbeeck to south of Verdun. Flanders, Picardy, Champagne, the Argonne, the big German salient at St. Mihiel—all remained in play. The known fact that the Germans were now transferring large numbers of troops to the west made it probable not only that an attack was coming but that it would be on a bigger scale than what had been seen thus far.

Lloyd George’s miserliness with replacements notwithstanding, Douglas Haig had an immense army under his command. Fifty-seven British, Indian, Australia–New Zealand, and Canadian divisions, along with two unhappy Portuguese divisions that their government had tossed into the war as a gesture of friendship with England, held a hundred and twenty-five miles of front on a line running north-south from Flanders to the Somme. The BEF had held much of this ground exactly as long as the Germans opposite, but they had been far less conscientious about improving their defenses. Like his French allies, Haig had always been focused on the offensive, and so he had always regarded his position less as a fortress to be secured than as a series of launching points for attacks. He had encouraged his subordinates to think likewise, with the result that his front line was not what it could have been and his rear defenses were in many places rudimentary. These weaknesses could not be blamed on Lloyd George. While withholding infantry, the prime minister had dispatched more than a hundred thousand laborers to the continent. But as 1917 ended, only seventeen hundred of these men were at work on the British defenses. Even the following March, with Ludendorff’s blow known to be coming, only twenty-seven hundred would be so employed.

There was also a problem with how Haig’s forces were deployed. Passchendaele had been a drive out of the Ypres salient toward the north and west. The success of that drive, meager though it was, had drawn the British forward into a tight pocket between Ypres and the sea. Haig had kept his heaviest troop concentrations in and near this pocket, where there was little room for maneuver. He did so in part to protect the ports through which the BEF’s lifeline ran from England. His doing so was also a function of his belief, which revolted Lloyd George, that the ground taken at such cost at the end of 1917 could be an ideal starting point for a resumed offensive in the new year.

Another problem was the approach to defensive warfare taken by most of Haig’s army commanders. All but the savvy Plumer adhered to the old practice of packing large numbers of infantry into the line nearest to the Germans. They also left their second line within reach of enemy guns.

Lloyd George and the generals continued to be at loggerheads. At the turn of the year the prime minister forced Haig to replace his chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, and heads of intelligence, engineering, and medical services. Haig was not pleased. The new men were not drawn from the cavalry fraternity he favored, and having them imposed upon him was an embarrassment—the closest Lloyd George could come to replacing Haig himself. But they proved markedly more competent than their predecessors (Haig’s original chief of intelligence had been reviled and ridiculed for an optimism untroubled by facts), and so ultimately the changes would work to Haig’s advantage. As a further affront, Lloyd George appointed one of Haig’s rivals and critics, the venomously charming Henry Wilson, to be Britain’s military representative on the Supreme War Council.

Little more harmony was evident in the French camp, or in relations between the British and the French. Pétain, who commanded the army groups that would have to deal with any German attacks between Picardy and Verdun, was becoming an isolated figure. Only he among the French appeared to see the implications of what the Germans had achieved with their new assault tactics, and to understand that these innovations required a new kind of response. When on January 8 he promulgated his Directive No. 4, which offered such a response, his army commanders received it with indifference or poorly concealed scorn. Clemenceau, who understood what Pétain had achieved at Verdun and in dealing with the mutiny, saw also that the general no longer showed much confidence that the war could be won. This troubled him and contributed to his rejection of Pétain’s idea for a 1918 offensive in Alsace. Its purpose was to have been limited: a capture of coveted ground that would improve France’s bargaining position if peace talks began. That was not nearly enough for Clemenceau. For inspiration—for a professional’s assurances that victory could be achieved—the prime minister looked not to Pétain but to Foch. But instead of putting Foch in Pétain’s place, he held him in reserve. He was convinced that the Entente needed a supreme military commander. He was determined to put a French general in that post, and to see that Foch got the job.

And so Pétain remained the commander in chief, if not a greatly appreciated one. His Directive No. 4 offered badly needed changes. It drew on the lessons of the chess game that Plumer and the Germans had played in Flanders, and of the German counteroffensive at Cambrai, in calling for a thinly manned and flexible front line. This amounted to a revolution in French tactical thinking, an abandonment of the old idea, long since abandoned by the Germans, of holding every foot of ground at all costs. It was heresy to most of the army group, army, corps, and divisional commanders. Some of them protested. When Pétain did not withdraw his directive, they united in ignoring it. For support they had to look no farther than to Foch, who had never stopped worshiping at the altar of
offensive à l’outrance
and was known to have Clemenceau’s ear.

But it was Pétain who, with little support from above or below, had to get on with the job of preparing for a German offensive. He had ninety-nine divisions with which to do so, sixty of them spread along the front and the others in reserve. (There were also more than a hundred thousand American troops in France by this time—four oversize U.S. divisions—but Pershing did not regard them as ready to play an active role at the front. Nor was he willing to put them at the service of British or French commanders.)

They seemed immense, the forces at Pétain’s disposal, until one took into account the amount of territory they had to defend and the number of German divisions being brought from the east. He had only four divisions in reserve at the northern end of his line, not nearly enough for safety. In the hope of freeing more troops, late in 1917 he asked Haig to extend the British line fifty-five miles to the south, so that it would reach to and even beyond St. Quentin. Haig had no interest in doing anything of the kind.

Both Pétain’s request and the broader question of how to create an adequate reserve force in Picardy—precisely the place, as it happened, that Ludendorff chose for his attack—were still unresolved when, on January 24, the senior British, French, and American generals gathered at Compiègne. When the idea of creating a general reserve out of divisions contributed by Haig and Pétain was proposed, both men backed away from it with all possible haste. United only in their determination to continue operating independently of each other, they insisted that they had no troops to spare for such experiments. The conference ended without result.

Six days later the third meeting of the Supreme War Council brought the generals together with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. This meeting went on for four days and was contentious. Lloyd George made the last of his many efforts to shift the focus of the war away from the Western Front, trying to persuade the others to make Turkey the primary target in 1918. The idea was not without potential—the Turkish army was little better than a wreck, and taking it out of the war could have exposed Austria-Hungary’s eastern flank, and created tremendous problems for Germany in the Balkans and beyond. But the others were not interested. Clemenceau was absolutely opposed; nothing mattered to him so much as driving the Germans out of France. When Robertson supported Clemenceau instead of his own prime minister, his name went to the top of Lloyd George’s unwritten list of nuisances to be eliminated.