A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (99 page)

Hutier moved forward nine miles on March 26, ten on the day following. The character of the campaign was becoming almost farcical, with the British retreating at an easy walk and Germans following at the same pace. When the British stopped to rest, the Germans would stop as well, keeping a safe distance. They had left behind most of their artillery and were short of almost everything. Their officers were unable to prevent them from looting whenever an opportunity arose. “Today the advance of our infantry stopped near Albert,” a German captain observed. “Nobody could understand why. Our airmen had reported no enemy between Albert and Amiens. The enemy’s guns were only firing now and again on the very edge of affairs. Our way seemed entirely clear. I jumped into a car with orders to find out what was causing the stoppage in front…As soon as I got near the town I began to see curious sights. Strange figures, who looked very little like soldiers, and certainly showed no signs of advancing, were making their way back…There were men driving cows before them on a line; others who carried a hen under one arm and a box of notepaper under the other. Men carrying a bottle of wine under their arm and another one open in their hand. Men who had torn a silk drawing-room curtain off its rod and were dragging it to the rear as a useful piece of loot. Men with writing paper and colored notebooks. Evidently they had found it desirable to sack a stationer’s shop. Men dressed up in comic disguise. Men with top hats on their heads. Men staggering. Men who could hardly walk…When I got into the town the streets were running with wine. Out of a cellar came a lieutenant of the Second Marine Division, helpless and in despair. I asked him, ‘What is going to happen?’ It was essential for them to get forward immediately. He replied, solemnly and emphatically, ‘I cannot get my men out of this cellar without bloodshed.’”

The retreat continued everywhere except at Amiens, where the British straggled onto the high ground east of the city and found themselves welcomed by French and British reserve divisions already in place there. They prepared to make a stand. The Germans stopped opposite them and waited for their guns to catch up.

Although the meaning of Michael had come down to the fate of Amiens, on March 28 Below’s army was launched on another attack on Arras. It lacked enough troops to do the job, there was no fog that morning, and because Byng had pulled back most of his troops, the opening bombardment fell on empty trenches. The result was a slaughter of the attackers and a decision by Ludendorff not to try again. No possibility remained except Amiens.

Recently so vulnerable, the city was now heavily defended and growing stronger by the day. Ludendorff sent nine of Below’s divisions to reinforce Marwitz’s army for an assault, but the shift came too late. The French Fifth Army, detached from Champagne by Pétain, arrived on the scene. This was the third army that Pétain had moved into the British sector, and it settled the issue. Soon, with the Germans no longer able to advance anywhere, both sides were digging in for a resumption of trench warfare. By April 5, sixteen days after it began, Michael was at an end. Gough, the scapegoat, was sent home and never granted the official review of his actions that he demanded. Haig would have been sacked as well, but Lloyd George remained unable to find a politically acceptable replacement.

The Germans had captured twelve hundred square miles, ninety thousand prisoners, more than a thousand guns, and mountains of supplies. They had inflicted more than one hundred and sixty thousand casualties on the British (the men taken prisoner included) and seventy thousand on the French. But one hundred sixty thousand of their own best troops had been killed or wounded as well, and seventy thousand had been taken prisoner. And all the ground they had won was worthless or less than worthless. It included not a single place of true strategic value. The German line had been lengthened by fifty miles at the same time that the number of troops available to defend that line had been significantly reduced. In moving forward into a huge and worthless new salient, the Germans had left behind the best defensive infrastructure on the Western Front. They had to start from scratch on ground where they had no finished defenses, no support system, no anything.

Ludendorff had driven his enemies to make changes that would have momentous consequences in the months ahead. Not only were the rudiments of a system of unified command now in Foch’s energetic hands, but the Americans were involved as never before. Until Michael, Pershing had been jealously husbanding his growing force, concentrating on getting it ready to make war in 1919. But Michael changed his thinking. “The Allies are very weak and we must come to their relief this year,” he told Washington in asking for an acceleration in the shipment of troops to France. “The year after may be too late. It is very doubtful if they can hold on until 1919 unless we give a lot of support this year.” On March 28, having no way of knowing that the emergency was coming under control, he had gone to see Foch and invited him to use the American troops in any way he wished. From that day the Americans were in the fight.

Background

LUDENDORFF

THINGS HAD NEVER GONE SO BADLY FOR ERICH LUDENDORFF,
or gone badly in so many ways over such a long period, as they did in 1918. As his problems mounted, he grew visibly fragile.

All his life he had displayed an insatiable appetite for work, but now his staff noticed him slipping away from headquarters without explanation. A member of the medical staff, writing of Ludendorff, would recall that at this juncture “there were reports of occasional crying episodes.”

Officers who served him became concerned for him personally and about his ability to function. Quietly, with considerable trepidation, they arranged for a psychiatrist who knew Ludendorff, a Dr. Hocheimer, to visit and see what might be done.

Everyone was on pins and needles the day Hocheimer arrived, wondering how he was going to approach Ludendorff and how the general was going to react. Ludendorff was a stiff, distant man with no visible sense of humor and firm control over all emotion except the rage that could break out in moments of intense stress. An ugly explosion was by no means out of the question. What happened was more unexpected than that. It revealed the depth of Ludendorff’s neediness.

He was predictably impatient at being interrupted but consented to see the doctor. “I talked earnestly, urgently and warmly, and said that I had noticed with great sadness that for years he had given no consideration to one matter—his own spirit,” Hocheimer recalled afterward. “Always only work, worry, straining his body and mind. No recreation, no joy, rushing his food, not breathing, not laughing, not seeing anything of nature and art, not hearing the rustle of the forest, nor the splashing of the brook.”

Ludendorff sat for a long time without answering. “You’re right in everything,” he said at last. “I’ve felt it for a long time. But what shall I do?”

Hocheimer urged a move from Ludendorff’s cramped quarters at Avesnes back to the more pleasant accommodations at Spa in Belgium. He recommended walks, breathing exercises, and a change in routine calculated to induce relaxation and the ability to sleep. Ludendorff followed these instructions conscientiously, even eagerly. As long as he continued to do so, his torments eased.

The High Command, posing for the camera
From left: Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Ludendorff.

He and Hocheimer continued to confer. The doctor’s ultimate diagnosis: “The man is utterly lonely.”

Utterly lonely: the theme of Ludendorff’s life. He had spent his first four and a half decades in a terrible solitude. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he had found an escape. And now the solitude was closing in on him again. That is almost certainly part of what he meant when, upon receiving heartbreaking news not long before Hocheimer’s visit, he said that “the war has spared me nothing.”

The third of six children in a respectable family of very limited means (his mother’s family was of aristocratic origin but impoverished), Ludendorff in childhood was notable for three things. He was so obsessed with cleanliness that he spurned games that might dirty his shoes. He was a diligent and talented student, especially in mathematics. And he had no capacity for making friends. He was drawn to a military career—his father had been a cavalry captain—and when he took the entrance examination for cadet school he did so well that he was not only admitted but advanced to a class of boys two years older than himself. His performance remained exceptional in everything except gymnastics—he was without physical grace, another thing that separated him from his classmates. The age dif ference and his extreme fastidiousness (he never showed the slightest interest in the adventures and misadventures to which schoolboys and junior officers are naturally drawn) kept him always on the outside. He was a drudge and a grind, if an able one.

After receiving his commission, he went through the usual rotation of assignments, distinguishing himself at every step. In his late twenties he was selected for study at the War Academy, an honor reserved for only the most promising young officers. The commandant there, observing his intelligence and performance, singled him out for the ultimate recognition: eventual assignment to general staff headquarters. By age forty he was in Berlin, a major working closely with the chief of the general staff, the fabled Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, whom he came to regard as “one of the greatest generals who ever lived.” After Schlieffen’s retirement, Ludendorff was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became a protégé of the new chief, Moltke the younger. He assisted Moltke in translating Schlieffen’s secret scheme for an overwhelming envelopment of the French army into settled German policy.

But he was still alone.

Then one evening when he was forty-four and apparently consigned to permanent bachelorhood, he noticed a woman stranded in the rain as he was walking home after one of his long days of work. He offered to share his umbrella, and the woman gratefully accepted. She was Margarethe Pernet, beautiful, lively, the mother of three young sons and a daughter, unhappily married. Somehow—it seems miraculous for a man as sealed up inside himself as Ludendorff—the two connected. They were married as soon as Margarethe could divorce her husband.

A new life, a new world, opened for Ludendorff. He delighted in his new family, and the children worshiped him. He remained addicted to a rigid routine, always departing for work no later than seven
A
.
M
. and expecting meals to be served not a minute early or a minute late. But now a new dimension was added, a connection, thanks to his ready-made family, to a wider and cheerier range of experience. All the evidence indicates that the marriage was genuinely intimate and happy, and Ludendorff’s career flourished. He became an influential member of Moltke’s planning staff, winning important admirers and powerful enemies as he pushed hard (much too hard, his enemies said) for an expansion of the army in anticipation of war. He was promoted to colonel in 1911, to command of a Düsseldorf regiment in 1913, and to one-star general in charge of a brigade less than a year after that. The outbreak of the war brought an immediate second star and assignment as chief of staff of the Second Army as it prepared to join the invasion of France. Before he could take up this new position, he was detached for temporary duty with the special force created to capture Liège; the plans for attacking the Belgian fortifications were largely his work. This led to his first taste of glory, to his receiving Germany’s highest military honor, and to his reassignment with Hindenburg to the East Prussian front.

His stepsons, all of whom emulated Ludendorff and had been preparing for military careers, went eagerly to war. The eldest, Franz, a promising youngster almost as gifted academically as his stepfather and far more popular with his peers, suffered such serious grenade wounds in 1914 that, after being awarded the Iron Cross, he was declared unfit for further duty. He began to apply for the Flying Corps and finally was accepted, possibly with Ludendorff’s help. His brothers followed his example, and soon all three were pilots flying combat missions on the Eastern Front. Franz suffered a concussion and broken hip in a crash landing, but as soon as he recovered he went back into action. In September 1917 he was shot down over the English Channel and killed. When Ludendorff learned of this, he hurried to Berlin to break the news to his wife. He was stricken, and perhaps guilty at having made the boy’s flying career possible. Margarethe was shattered.

Ludendorff was especially close to the youngest of his stepsons, who happened to share his first name. In March 1918 he received word that young Erich, still a teenager, had been shot down behind British lines, his fate uncertain. Not long afterward, with German troops advancing across France in the Michael offensive, Ludendorff was told of the discovery of a fresh grave. Its marker said, in English, “Here rest two German pilots.” He went to the grave and had the bodies dug up. One was Erich’s. It was temporarily reburied at Avesnes while arrangements were made for its transfer to Berlin.