World War One: A Short History (17 page)

The most vulnerable of Ludendorff’s great salients was that created in the Marne battle, and its edges were marked by Soissons to the north-west, and Rheims to the south-east. Here, on 15 July, the last German offensive occurred. The Kaiser himself appeared, and the affair was billed as an imperial battle, or even as
Friedenssturm
, ‘peace assault’. Fifty-two divisions were mustered, and the usual crushing artillery. However, the Allies now knew what to expect (and French intelligence worked very well, advertisements in the Luxemburg German-language press being used to convey messages detailing German railway movements). They also understood that the way to deal with Ludendorff’s methods was counter-battery fire – that is, to conceal gun positions, and then to open up on the enemy artillery in mid-bombardment, once its positions had been made clear. East of Rheims, defence in depth meant that the Germans were tired out before they reached the main French positions. Peátain used his reserves, and the Germans were halted on 17 July.

Now came the riposte – a counter-attack on the other side of the salient, from the forest of Villers-Cotterêts (the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas). The French had developed a light and fast-moving tank. Two generals, Debeney on the British right, and Mangin, to his right, began the tactics that were to become famous in 1940 as
Blitzkrieg
– tanks, fast-moving infantry, and aircraft flying low to to keep the German gunners’ heads down.
Three hundred tanks (Renault) and eighteen divisions, two of them American, struck in open cornfield, entirely by surprise, and went five miles forward. With the whole of the German force in the Marne salient threatened by a cut-off, Ludendorff pulled back from it, back to the Chemin des Dames. By 4 August the French had taken 30,000 prisoners and 600 guns. Foch then discovered how this war was to be won: he stopped. No more battering with light weapons against reserves. The answer was to suspend the attack where it had succeeded, and attack somewhere else, keeping the enemy reserves on the move. Move, they did: demoralizing slow journeys by train, halts, countermandings, continuations, and all of it in hot weather.

German reserves were now being badly disrupted – in fact a third of the entire German army was to spend the last three months of the war in or near slow-moving trains. Ludendorff had been setting everything up for a great Flanders attack. Now he had to put it off again and again. His defence expert, Lossberg, wished to withdraw, even to the Meuse and Antwerp, but Ludendorff overruled him. The French maintained some pressure in the Chemin des Dames, but the next main Allied action was British, at Amiens, on 8 August. Here was a limited scheme, simply to push the Germans back out of range of the station, and the French example of 18 July was properly studied. The generals – Rawlinson on the British side, Monash and Currie on the Australian and Canadian – were eminently practical men who were able to persuade Haig, when the time came, not to persist with the attack beyond a few days. Air control was established, and there was now a great profusion of weaponry of all types, particularly light Lewis guns that could be carried by fast-moving infantry. The noise of tanks coming into line was masked by aircraft flying low, back and forth. There was no preliminary bombardment at all, and morning mist concealed the initial attack. The new Mark V
and Whippet tanks were much faster and more reliable than earlier ones, and a special development was the laying down of a curtain of gas and high explosive in the German rear areas, to disrupt any counter-attack. The result, on 8 August, was a triumph, the Germans taken by surprise, in almost open-country positions that had not been thoroughly prepared; a brigade staff was captured at breakfast. On the first day, there were 12,000 prisoners and 400 guns were captured; almost 50,000 prisoners were taken by the end of the operation.

There is a mysterious process in the defeat of any army – the point at which the men give up hope. In the Russian case, the point was reached towards the end of the Brusilov offensive in September 1916, with the endless bloody failures of the Guard Army in the marshes before Kovel and Vladimir Volynsk. The German army’s morale began to break on 18 July, when the Villers-Cotterêts counter-attack was under way. The Kaiser, at the headquarters town of Spa, in Belgium, politely asked Ludendorff what had gone wrong, and Ludendorff said that the men were just not fighting any more – thousands were surrendering. A further sign was that men were reporting sick in greater and greater numbers. Curiously enough, if troops are well-led, they do not fall ill: before Trafalgar, in 1805, the French admiral had to leave 1,000 men behind in the West Indies, whereas the British admiral, Lord Nelson, lost no one in precisely the same area.
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Ludendorff even allowed himself a note of reproach towards the Kaiser. His own belief (like Cadorna’s) was that the political Left were being allowed to spread defeatism. But now, after Amiens, it was Ludendorff’s own nerves that began to crack. He began to hit the bottle and provoked quarrels with his subordinates – even with poor old Hindenburg, who had been doing no one any harm and looked the very part of fatherly commander-in-chief; he even wrote to his wife, before the offensive had started, to the effect that the general staff were very busy, that he would have time on his
hands, and could he be sent the various German classics to be re-read? Now, Ludendorff was saying that he could only manage a defensive action. Foch showed him to be accurate.

Foch kept up the pressure, arguing in a clever memorandum that the key was to stop after the initial successes. The British army took the lead in these – Arras on 17 August, Bapaume in the Somme country on the 21st, an outrunner of the great Siegfried line called the Drocourt-Quéant switch on the 26th, St Quentin on the 28th, Mount Kemmel on 4 September. Meanwhile, the French re-took the entire salient created by the German success of 27 May, and on 12 September came a major American effort, in which half a million troops with 1,500 aircraft and 270 light tanks cleared the St Mihiel salient to the south-east of Verdun (though the Germans managed to withdraw most of their men in time). Then came a brief hold-up at Ypres, and, towards the end of the month, the Americans showed that they did not have much to learn from the British when it came to making mistakes and persisting in them. In the Argonne country north of Verdun, much of it devastated and studded with rivers and ravines that made use of tanks impossible, fifteen (double-sized) American and twenty-two French divisions went into operation with an eight-to-one superiority. But there was a logistical breakdown, and American commanders persisted in neglecting the tactical lessons of 1917: they used old-fashioned methods, and wasted much of the training time on rifle fire, itself now becoming almost obsolete. Then they ran into a prepared position, the Kriemhild line, and stuck – the one real advantage being that German reserves (thirty-six divisions) had had to be concentrated there.

This enabled the British to stage what was to be almost a model battle and to crack the Siegfried line (referred to by the British as the ‘Hindenburg line’). On 27 September an enormous force assaulted nine miles of it, before Cambrai. The defences were three miles thick, and a special feature was that
they included the St Quentin canal, which had fifty feet of sloping banks down to its six-foot depth of muddy water. The only way across for tanks seemed to be a great tunnel, through which the canal passed, but it was thickly covered with wire, and the tanks were held up. However, there was a prodigious bombardment, with 126 shells from the field guns alone landing every minute on 500 yards of trench, over an eight-hour period, and the counter-battery fire by the heavy artillery had been very well prepared, silencing the German heavy artillery. The defenders were in effect stunned. An element of luck supervened, in that the British had captured outline maps of the defences, and there was further luck at the canal, with fog, which allowed a single division to cross, clamber up the opposite bank, and breach the Siegfried line on a three-mile front. This feat of arms enabled Australians and Canadians on either side to move forward, and by 5 October the British were into open country. Haig again proposed to stop, but the German retreat went on, leaving the front early in November just short of Brussels and Namur. In mid October the Americans at last broke through the Kriemhild line, and could threaten the great German railway base of Metz.

It was obvious enough that Germany would be defeated. She had lost over a million men between March and July, and a further three quarters of a million in the succeeding months, half of them made prisoner. There was also a crisis in the war economy, with plant wearing down, and the Social Democrat leader complained that working-class north and east Berlin lacked the 4,000 railway-wagons used for transportation of the vital potatoes. No doubt the country could have fought on, into 1919, as it did in 1945, but the end was in sight. On 28 September Ludendorff’s nerves cracked, and he raged against everyone, including in the end the Kaiser: the war would have to be stopped. ‘
No
confidence can be placed in the troops,’ he told his staff. Of course, the army could have made a stand on the
river Rhine, but everything was falling apart, and Germany’s allies now dropped out. They had all been following events in the west and, with the failure of Ludendorff’s great offensive, were looking to save what they could from the overall wreckage.

On 15 September the Allied force at Salonica, which had at last ceased to be what the Germans contemptuously called their greatest prisoner-of-war camp, moved forward, and the Bulgarians collapsed. They had not, anyway, been rewarded by the Germans as they had expected – no southern Balkan empire, as in days of (long-ago) yore. On the 28th they asked for an armistice. That cut the link to the Ottoman empire, but in any case the Young Turks were also angry at German interference in the Caucasus, and some were wondering whether they might not abandon the Germans and leave the Arabs to the British, while concentrating, with British support, on the Caucasus and its oil. Enver Pasha was thinking through the alternative to the Ottoman empire – a national Turkey which would take over Turkic Central Asia. The Young Turks left on a German submarine, to Odessa, and went their ways – Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Berlin, Moscow – to set this up. The Ottoman army withdrew from Syria, and an armistice was arranged on 30 October. Then the Austrians dropped out. Before then the Austro-Hungarian government had made noises about the acceptance of President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’, and the Emperor appointed as prime minister a professor, Lammasch, who even believed in them (he ended, in exile, as a professor at Berkeley). But it was the end of the Habsburg empire. Hungary declared independence; so did national councils representing the various other non-German peoples. The Germans of Austria, curiously enough, were first in the queue: they expected to join Germany. At that, there was even a brief German invasion of Austria. The Italians took advantage of the confusion to round up hundreds of thousands of unresisting soldiers
in the last days of October and called it the battle of Vittorio Veneto.

Germany still had some cards. True, the army was not what it had been, but elements of it were still formidable. She ran large parts of Russia and Turkey. Winter was coming up. The Rhine was an obstacle, and war-weariness was a considerable factor on the Allied side. So, too, was potential disagreement: would the British, with their empire, be happy with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which included provisions for the emancipation of colonies? After all, Brest-Litovsk had meant self-determination for the non-Russian peoples of the Tsarist empire, and there was the further possibility that an appeal could be made for Germany to be kept going as the leading anti-Communist state. Ludendorff now had a puppet foreign secretary, and, late in September, after the Bulgarian armistice, he cobbled together a plan, not revealed to the Chancellor. President Wilson could be appealed to, and that would mean formally making Germany more democratically run. The German Left might as well make itself useful as a stage-prop in this sense. Ludendorff, and many other nationalists, were already blaming it for the drop in morale, for the disorders of the economy and for the inflation caused by high wages. On 30 September a new chancellor was appointed, Prince Max of Baden, a liberal-minded south German, and his cabinet included representatives of the Centre and Left parties. Prince Max did understand that, if he asked for an armistice, it might just break the morale of the people irretrievably: they would realize that that was that, and there might be a sudden collapse, which would leave no room for negotiations. He was, as it happens, right. The Kaiser made his last calamitous contribution to German history when he sniffed that, ‘You have not been appointed to make difficulties for the High Command,’ and a public note was sent to the United States in the night of 4–5 October. Ludendorff was really saving his own reputation:
he would encourage others to make an end to the war, then turn round and say it had not been his fault.

At the end of the film
Oh! What a Lovely War
there is a scene of genius, as war graves, stretching all over the screen, have red tape slowly wound round them. This was what now happened. Officials and High Commands solemnly debated the ins and outs of the armistice for rather more than a month, and meanwhile the men went on fighting and dying, in tens of thousands. The German Note gave the Allies some trouble, because they were being forced to talk the language of democracy and self-determination whereas they were all resolved on vengeance and the creation of empires at the expense of the defeated. Even the Belgians thought that they should seize the Scheldt estuary from the Dutch. Getting a unified response, combining rapacity with sanctity, was difficult, though in the end British skills prevailed.

The Germans themselves were clumsy. The leaders of the Centre and Left – Matthias Erzberger and Philipp Scheidemann – sensibly wanted to adopt the Fourteen Points, but the generals only even looked at them on 5 October and the foreign office thought that they might be useful negotiation points and no more. The notes went back and forth – Wilson on the 8th, Berlin on the 12th, Wilson on the 14th, Berlin on the 20th, and then another exchange by the end of the month. Perhaps, if the Germans had been more realistic, something could have been saved. But they persisted with illusion, and on 12 October committed the blunder of sinking a British passenger liner,
Leinster
, drowning 450 people, including 135 women and children; in their retreat through Flanders, they were poisoning wells and ‘ringing’ fruit-trees. If Wilson began with hints of magnanimity, alarming his Allies, his demands now went up. Germany was to have proper democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and the submarines were to stop. Prince Max accepted. At this point, Ludendorff altogether reversed his original line,
and started manufacturing a very dangerous legend – that Germany had not really lost. He came to Berlin, without the Kaiser’s say-so, and said that Germany could fight on. On 2 6 October he denounced the terms being announced by his own nominees in the foreign office, and had a row with the Kaiser, whom he insulted; of Prince Max and his well-meaning left-wing associates he remarked, ‘these people can ingest the soup that they have brewed up for us.’ They did. The army leaders preserved their prestige intact. In due course, Ludendorff used his own to introduce Adolf Hitler into German politics,
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and, ten years later, in 1933, old Hindenburg, as president, appointed him chancellor.