A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (95 page)

Inevitably, the reserve issue came up again. Lloyd George, by prior arrangement with Clemenceau, nominated Foch to be chairman of an executive committee responsible for establishing a general reserve. For him it was another way of keeping Haig in shackles, for Clemenceau a first step toward giving Foch authority over Pétain and Haig. As before, these two generals wanted nothing to do with any such proposal. Though unable to block the creation of the new committee or Foch’s appointment as its head, they regarded the whole exercise as unnecessary and unimportant. They had already agreed that, if either was seriously threatened, the other would send as many as six divisions to the rescue. This agreement seemed sufficient to them.

Haig, abandoning his hopes for an offensive in Flanders, agreed to extend his right wing far enough to the south to take over twenty-five miles of French line. This was less than half of what Pétain had requested, but it would allow him to shift two corps, at least four and possibly six divisions, to his reserve. It did not, however, prevent Foch from requesting that Britain, France, and Italy between them contribute thirty divisions to the new general reserve, which otherwise would exist only on paper. Haig, who had been obliged to send five divisions to Italy in November and now had only eight in reserve, declared that he would resign rather than comply.

A dispute broke out within the British camp over the role of Henry Wilson and, by implication, of Robertson. Wilson, a French-speaking Francophile, had long been the French general staff’s favorite Englishman. (He was a passionate Ulsterman, actually, and would be assassinated in Ireland after the war.) As London’s principal agent in the secret prewar sessions that had first brought the staffs of the two armies together for joint planning, he had developed such an admiration for Foch that some who did not share his enthusiasm referred to him as Foch’s lapdog. He made little effort to conceal his disdain for Haig and Robertson, which won him favor in the eyes of Lloyd George. The new trouble erupted over the question of whether Wilson, in his new position as Britain’s military representative on the Supreme War Council, should report to Robertson as chief of the imperial general staff or to the government—to Lloyd George. Wilson wanted to report to the prime minister. Robertson’s position was that Wilson, being a general representing the army, must report to him directly and only through the chain of command to the government. Lloyd George, weary of Robertson’s insistence that the war had to be won on the Western Front and his unwavering support of Haig, no doubt saw in the situation an opportunity to rid himself of a problem. He therefore supported Wilson. Robertson, demonstrating that he was standing on principle rather than trying to aggrandize himself, offered to serve in either position, as chief of the imperial general staff or as council member, so long as the latter reported to the former. When Lloyd George refused, Robertson resigned.

“Wully” Robertson
Targeted by Lloyd George.

Lloyd George added insult to injury, and made the entire disagreement seem contrived from the start, by appointing Wilson to replace Robertson as chief of the imperial general staff. (The job was first offered to Herbert Plumer, whose refusal may have stemmed from indignation at how Robertson had been treated.) Wilson completed the farce by replacing himself on the council with a junior general whom he was easily able to control. Robertson was consigned to the British home forces. Thus was neutralized one of the most capable and respected generals to serve in the British army during the Great War. Robertson himself appeared to have few regrets. As he had written to Haig, “I am sick of this d—d life.”

Haig extended his line to the south in the simplest possible way: by ordering the commander of the army that formed his right wing, Hubert Gough, to spread out his troops to cover the additional twenty-five miles. The advantage of this approach was that it required no thinning of Haig’s left, where he continued to expect the enemy to attack. Such an expectation was not foolish. Haig knew at least as well as Ludendorff that the proximity of the sea put his left in an awkward position, and that the loss of the port towns of northeastern France would be a disaster from which recovery might not be possible. What he failed to anticipate was Ludendorff’s decision to strike elsewhere first because of the weather factor. The problem for Gough—one that he recognized and quickly reported—was that the thinning of his line made him alarmingly vulnerable. The front-line defenses that he had inherited from the French were in a poor state of preparedness, and in some places rear defenses barely existed.

Gough, whose Fifth Army was the smallest in the BEF, was being asked to cover forty-two miles of front with fourteen divisions. The two armies immediately to his north had sixteen divisions each and together had to defend only sixty-one miles. Gough complained, asking for more troops and for labor units with which to improve his position. He got no response. Haig believed, evidently, that in the unlikely event of an attack on his right, Gough would have ample room to pull back to the east and north while Pétain moved French troops from the south to fill any gaps. He is not known to have been aware that Pétain was under instructions, in case of an emergency, not to support the British but to fall back to a position from which he could protect Paris.

The Germans too remained tangled in disagreement and uncertainty. The preparations for the Michael offensive were moving forward efficiently enough—Ludendorff decided that the attack would begin on March 21, the earliest practicable date—but the generals and politicians were divided over how, and on what terms, to shut down the war in the east. This led to a breach between Ludendorff and certainly the cleverest, possibly the most brilliant general officer in the German army, the recently promoted Major General Max Hoffmann. On New Year’s Day, when Hoffmann returned from the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk for a meeting of the kaiser’s Crown Council, Foreign Minister Kühlmann invited him to lunch. Kaiser Wilhelm invited himself to join them. He asked Hoffmann for his views on what Germany should claim as the spoils due to it as the victor in the east. Hoffmann, mindful that Ludendorff had forbidden all officers to talk with the kaiser without first consulting him, tried to avoid answering. When Wilhelm insisted—he was, after all, the monarch to whom every German officer swore obedience—Hoffmann had little choice except to comply. He explained, knowing that everything he said was in direct opposition to Ludendorff’s thinking, that in his opinion it would make no sense to take permanent control of large expanses of territory in the east. Adjustments along the frontier with Poland could have military value, he said, but absorbing substantial non-German populations would bring only trouble.

General Max Hoffmann
Master tactitian of the Eastern Front.

After lunch Hoffmann attempted to telephone Ludendorff and explain what had happened. He was unable to reach him: Ludendorff was in transit, en route to the next day’s council session. When that meeting began, the kaiser launched into a lecture about the inadvisability of demanding too much from the Russians. Then, with the astounding lack of judgment of which he was capable, Wilhelm proudly declared that he was supported in this matter by a general of unquestioned ability: Max Hoffmann. Ludendorff was almost apoplectic. Soon he was demanding Hoffmann’s dismissal.

Ludendorff was blind where the settlement with Russia was concerned. He could see only that Russia was no longer capable of defending herself, and he took this as Germany’s opportunity to become master of everything east of Berlin. What he did not see, or more likely did not care about, was that stripping Russia bare would persuade the surviving members of the Entente that there was no possibility of negotiating an acceptable end to the war. It would convince them that Germany wanted nothing less than the destruction of her enemies and dominance of all Europe. Such worries had no meaning for Ludendorff. He
did
want the destruction of Germany’s enemies—the European ones, at any rate—and he intended to achieve exactly that. He was opposed not only by Hoffmann but by Kühlmann and Chancellor Hertling, both of whom urged restraint. Kühlmann in particular understood that if Ludendorff’s demands were satisfied, Germany and Russia could never be other than enemies. He wanted to lay the groundwork for postwar friendship—albeit with a Russia that had been seriously weakened. He hoped that at least a gesture in the direction of generosity would encourage Britain to enter into negotiations.

A week after the Crown Council meeting, Woodrow Wilson delivered an address to Congress in which he unveiled his famous Fourteen Points. These were a loftily idealistic expression of what America sought to achieve in the war: self-determination for all peoples, open covenants openly arrived at, and other fine notions that would prove to be entirely unachievable when put to the test. Characteristically, the president had not deigned to consult with his allies in preparing his speech. Though they were pleased with some of his words (a call for the restoration of Belgium, a suggestion that Alsace-Lorraine should be returned to France and that Austria-Hungary’s Italian possessions should be surrendered), they were surprised and confused by others and not much inclined to take them seriously. When news of the speech reached Berlin, it strengthened Ludendorff. Wilson the would-be peacemaker, by indicating that such fraught questions as Belgium and perhaps even Alsace-Lorraine might not even be open to discussion, had given Ludendorff new ammunition to use in insisting that the war had to be fought to a conclusion.

The mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm had altered his thinking on an eastern settlement by the time the Crown Council next met on February 13. Ludendorff was aggressive as always, urging not only that Estonia, Livonia, Finland, and Ukraine should be taken from Russia but that the German army should continue driving eastward until they had overthrown the Bolsheviks. The kaiser went even further. He proposed breaking what had been the Romanov empire into four separate entities: a truncated Russia proper, Ukraine, Siberia, and a Union of the South East. Such skeptics as Hoffmann, Kühlmann, and Hertling were not only powerless but by now essentially voiceless.

The Russians were shocked by what was demanded of them in the aftermath of this meeting. Trotsky threw up his hands, telling the Germans that he would never agree to what they wanted and urging Lenin to adopt a “no war, no peace” policy in which Russia would neither continue to fight nor agree to Germany’s terms. When the negotiations broke down completely, the Germans swiftly put fifty divisions back into motion along the Eastern Front. The Russians were so helpless that the Germans, though their best men and equipment were now in France, advanced a hundred and fifty miles in five days. The Turks, also unimpeded, advanced through the Caucasus to oil-rich Baku in Azerbaijan. The Ukrainian capital of Kiev fell to the Germans on March 1. Trotsky, furious, said that Russia should rejoin the Entente and resume the war. Lenin, fearing the capture of Petrograd and the destruction of his fledgling regime, moved his government to Moscow and said no.

On March 3 the Russian delegation, with Trotsky no longer participating, signed at Brest-Litovsk one of the most punitive peace treaties in history. Russia relinquished (not to Germany but to puppet regimes to be put in place by Germany) Courland, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Livonia, Poland, Ukraine, and White Russia (or Belarus). With these territories went something on the order of fifty million people, a third of the old empire’s population, and hundreds of thousands of square miles. Russia also lost a third of its rail system and agricultural land, more than half of its industry, three-fourths of its iron ore, and nine-tenths of its coal mines. The Russians agreed to demobilize what remained of their armies.

The Russian delegation treated the settlement as a bad joke. The delegation’s chief refused even to read the document that he signed, dismissing its contents as meaningless. There was no possibility that the Russian nation, regardless of who governed it, ever would accept such a settlement as anything other than an act of coercion without a trace of legitimacy. The settlement was precisely the opposite of what Bismarck had done after Prussia’s nineteenth-century victory over Austria-Hungary, taking no territory at all to avoid embittering a humiliated foe. Brest-Litovsk guaranteed that there could be no reconciliation—no true peace—between Russia and Germany.