The Yanks Are Coming! (5 page)

While the Austrians were struggling, the Germans had blown through Belgium and now appeared almost unstoppable: the French government felt compelled to evacuate Paris on 2 September. One very important Frenchman, however, retained his
savoir faire
. The French commander General Joseph Joffre—walrus-moustached, imposing, imperturbable—rallied his army for what became “the miracle of the Marne.” French troops, still in their prideful blue coats and pantaloons
rouge
, came ferried to the front in an armada of French taxis pressed
into emergency service. The French hit the exhausted German First and Second Armies, surrounding them on three sides and bringing them to a shuddering halt; Moltke had a nervous breakdown, fearing he had stumbled into a disaster (though the Germans were able to extricate themselves); and the Schlieffen Plan fell to pieces. Two million men fought at the First Battle of the Marne (5–12 September 1914), and the consequence of this epic battle was not just an Anglo-French parrying of the German slash and thrust, it was a stalemated war of trenches from which there appeared no escape.

STALEMATE

When Confederate veteran John Singleton Mosby was asked to comment on the trench warfare in Europe, he said that Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson would have found a way around. “As it is, the forces are just killing. The object of war is not to kill. It is to disable the military power.”
¹⁴
But with all due respect to Mosby, Jackson, and Lee, there was no easy way around.

If you followed the war through American newspapers, you were getting a quick refresher course in the geography of Europe and Asia as generals struggled to find a way to break the deadlock on the Western Front. In 1914, there was the “race to the sea,” with both sides attempting to outflank each other in northwestern France and southwestern Belgium. When the belligerents' confronting trenches stretched from the English Channel to Switzerland, there were attempts to turn more distant strategic flanks, as in the Gallipoli Campaign against the Turks in 1915. Of massive battles there was no shortage, but by sticking pins in a map you could see that huge expenditures of men often moved the armies hardly at all, or moved them in ways that seemed marginal to any ultimate victory.

Some fifteen thousand Americans did not content themselves with reading about the war. They volunteered to serve as ambulance drivers (Walt Disney was one; Ernest Hemingway was another) or in the French, British, or Canadian armed forces. Among those serving in the ranks was Alan Seeger, a Harvard-educated poet who found his famous rendezvous with death as a member of the French Foreign Legion on 4 July 1916. He charged across more than two hundred yards of open ground against German machine guns at the village of Belloy-en-Santerre in the Battle of the Somme. Though he did not make it, the legionnaires secured a position in the village and held it for two days, taking 30 percent casualties, until they were relieved.

Seeger had alternated between moods of exaltation (“Every minute here is worth weeks of ordinary experience”) to trench depression (“living in holes in the ground and only showing our heads outside to fight and to feed”)
¹⁵
to admiration for the enemy, saying the Germans were “marvelous”
¹⁶
at trench warfare, to blunt realism (“And our rôle, that of troops in reserve, was to live passive in an open field under a shell fire that every hour became more terrific, while aeroplanes and captive balloons, to which we were entirely exposed, regulated the fire”).
¹⁷
By all accounts he was a brave man, and he was an inspiration for the memorial in Paris dedicated to the American volunteers.

Another American who joined the French Foreign Legion was Kiffin Rockwell, who enlisted with his brother Paul, served with Seeger, and after being seriously wounded hung up his infantryman's rifle and transferred to the French air force. His squadron, later known as the Lafayette Escadrille, was one of two units (the other was the Lafayette Flying Corps) set aside by the French for American pilots. In May 1916, only four weeks into the life of the escadrille,
Rockwell became the first American to shoot down a German plane. His technique in dogfights was to zoom within feet of the enemy before unleashing the lead from his machine guns. In September 1916, he made a diving attack and crashed, threaded with enemy bullets.
¹⁸

Even if one contented oneself with newspaper reports—rather than joining the French Foreign Legion—certain names and battles would have become familiar. There was, for instance, the confusingly named Sir John French who was actually an excessively sociable
¹⁹
if hot-tempered Anglo-Irish field marshal who had started life as a midshipman.
²⁰
A veteran of campaigns in the Sudan (1884–1885) and South Africa (1899–1902), he was commander of the British Expeditionary Force (from August 1914 through December 1915) and was neither very fluent in French nor overly keen on cooperating with them. French was a hard charger who thought that if properly supplied with artillery shells and men, he could somehow, somewhere break through on the Western Front.
²¹
Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war, doubted such a breakout was possible; and even Kitchener, who expected terrible costs, was appalled at the massive casualty lists from attempted breakouts—these battles seemed more like industrialized murder than war.
²²

French fought the First Battle of Ypres
²³
(19 October to 22 November 1914), where each side tried to gain the offensive in southwestern Belgium. The resulting combined casualties were nearly three hundred thousand men. While the Entente Powers blocked German attempts to renew the rightward thrust of the Schlieffen Plan, the battle also marked the end of the British regulars, the “Old Contemptibles.” They had fought brilliantly throughout, starting at the Battle of Mons, but were worn to the quick by casualties.

French's last battle with the BEF was the Battle of Loos (25 September to 14 October 1915) in northwestern France. Outnumbering the Germans in front of him, he thought he could blast his way through. The result was fifty thousand British casualties (including Rudyard Kipling's son, John, missing, presumed dead) and half that many German. The British tried using chlorine gas, already employed by the Germans, to overcome the stasis of the trenches.
²⁴
Instead, it blew back over the British, who had to charge through their own poison mist. Lack of artillery support and replacements for exhausted infantry units meant that while the British captured Loos, they could go no farther and were forced to withdraw.

To the relief of the American newspaper reader, French's replacement was the much less confusingly named Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Haig had the additional advantage of confirming American stereotypes that British commanding officers were all bluff, well-turned-out, well-mannered, white-moustached British aristocrats (as indeed many of them were). Haig held command of the British forces through the end of the war, so it was he who would eventually greet General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, in late July 1917, about a month after Pershing arrived in France.

On the French side, American newspaper readers would have been familiar with General Joffre—who actually came to America in April 1917 on a goodwill mission after Congress's declaration of war—because Americans still remembered him as the hero who had saved France at the Battle of the Marne. Joffre, like Sir John French, had believed the Germans could be defeated on the Western Front if the Western Allies applied sufficient artillery and men at the crucial point. Finding that crucial point, however, was proving immensely costly; it was not easily discovered.

Another familiar French general was Joffre's fellow hero of the Marne, Ferdinand Foch. A renowned writer and lecturer on military strategy and allegedly the finest military mind of his generation, he was sixty-two years old in August 1914, and up to that point he had never seen combat.
²⁵
Nor had he served abroad, in the training ground of France's empire. But those disadvantages paled to insignificance compared with his detailed understanding of the German army, which he had always regarded as the main enemy.
²⁶
The key problem for Foch was how to overcome German military superiority in numbers, equipment, and training. He found part of the answer in a patriotic assertion of the French spirit. Foch's own spirit was one of the legends of the Battle of the Marne. Commanding the Ninth Army, his headquarters exposed to the enemy, he famously proclaimed, “My center is giving way, my right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I attack.”
²⁷

Foch and Haig were commanders at the Battle of the Somme, which lasted from July through November 1916. To the newspaper reader, it was doubtless an awful and awe-inspiring event, with more than a million combined casualties between the Germans and the Western Allies. To the soldiers in the trenches, it was a test of fire and endurance that most of them met with incredible but matter-of-fact fortitude, even with “Death grinning at you from all around and hellish 5.9 inch shells shrieking through the air and shrapnel dealing death all round,” as one Australian captain wrote to his parents. “I don't know how long I stood it without breaking.” He was “very thankful to get my wound as it got me out of the firing line for a rest.”
²⁸
Rest, aside from the permanent kind, was hard to come by.

The Battle of the Somme was an Anglo-French offensive to break the German line in northwestern France through a mighty assault; the hope was to force a gap that would allow cavalry (and tanks,
which made their first appearance here) to plunge through, starting a war of movement that would end the deadlock of the trenches. The British lost nearly sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme trying to make this happen, with an opening artillery barrage so earth-shattering it was heard across the English Channel.
²⁹
But in four and a half months of battle, there never was a major gap to exploit. The Somme was primarily a British battle, and Haig kept thinking that a tenaciously pursued offensive must eventually “overthrow” the enemy. His resolute confidence was not matched by his political minders in London, who wondered how such losses could be justified, even as part of a war of attrition, for such minimal territorial gains. German lines had been pushed back six or seven miles at most.

The Battle of the Somme was preceded and outlasted by another battle equally enormous in cost, the Battle of Verdun, fought between the Germans and the French from February to December 1916. Erich von Falkenhayn, Helmuth von Moltke's successor as chief of the German general staff (since November 1914), recognized that attacks against fortified lines were generally futile, but nevertheless concluded that a decisive blow could be made against Verdun, a heavily fortified French city of the northeast, which projected into a pocket of the German front line. The French, out of pride and because it guarded a path to Paris, could not abandon it, and for that reason Falkenhayn believed he could turn Verdun, ringed on three sides by the Germans, into a killing ground for the French army, a massive battle of attrition fought by artillery. The Germans opened with a barrage that lasted nine hours.

General Philippe Pétain was given command of the citadel of Verdun. He would not relinquish it. Pétain, who believed in superior firepower as the way to win battles, worked hard to keep Verdun
well supplied, tried to match German artillery shells with his own, and rotated his men to lessen the nerve-shattering effects of perpetual bombardment. The Germans, commanded in the field by Crown Prince Wilhelm, inflicted enormous numbers of casualties, but ended the battle suffering almost as badly as the French;
³⁰
and because Verdun was held, it was the French who claimed the victory. Frenchmen, and Americans who read about the battle, would remember the order given in June 1916 by Pétain's subordinate, General Robert Nivelle, commanding the French Second Army at Verdun: “They shall not pass”
³¹
—and the Germans, by battle's end, had not. By the time the Americans arrived in France, Pétain was commander in chief of the French army, and Hindenburg had replaced Falkenhayn as chief of the German general staff.

A WAR ACROSS THE WHOLE WORLD

While the Western Front gained the most American attention—and was the front on which the American Expeditionary Force would later fight—this truly was a world war, having started in the Balkans and spread throughout Eastern and Central Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, colonial Africa, and elsewhere (including the islands of the Pacific, where Japan picked off such former German colonies as the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands).

There was, for instance, the Italian front. The Italians were officially part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria, but diplomatic details allowed Italy to claim neutrality, a relief to Italian generals who feared their own armies were too feeble to fight. In 1915, however, Italy flipped from being a passive member of the Triple Alliance to an active member of the Triple Entente, wooed by British, French, and Russian promises of postwar spoils. Italy
declared war on Austria in May 1915, but prudently avoided declaring war on Germany until August 1916.

The realist-pessimist Austrians and Germans were prepared for this, knowing Italians well enough not to trust them; and in the resulting combat between Austrian and Italian forces, it was the Italians who got the worst of it in combat in the frozen Alps. By 1917, the Italians had gained very little territory, and what they had gained would soon be lost in an Austrian counteroffensive. For that, Italy had sacrificed hundreds of thousands of casualties in a front that became as static as the one in the West.