Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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to do it. I get annoyed, and moving close to him ask him what he would suppose I would be doing while he was loading up to shoot me. His comrade nudges him. He titters like a drunkard, wipes his mouth wearily with his sleeve, and says he is sorry. A bad business. Too much on the men when they begin to talk like that.42
By 30 August, Sir John French, his mercurial personality influenced by the losses he had sustained, the apparent collapse of French plans, and Kitchener’s warning about running risks, proposed to fall back on his lines of communication to regroup, and told General Joseph Joffre, the French commander in chief, that he would not be able to fight on the Marne. An alarmed Kitchener travelled to France to meet him in the British embassy in Paris on the afternoon of 1 September. The two men did not get on, and French was especially affronted by the fact that Kitchener arrived in field marshal’s uniform – not surprisingly, for he wore it every day. Although accounts of the meeting vary, it ended with a note from Kitchener which emphasised that the BEF would ‘conform … to the movements of the French army …’.43 Although the BEF played an unimportant role in the battle of the Marne, the climactic struggle of the summer’s campaign, it took part in the general advance which followed the Allied victory. ‘[It was] the happiest day of my life,’ declared Jack Seely, Liberal politician turned cavalry colonel, ‘we marched towards the rising sun.’44
Despite optimistic chatter that the war would now follow the traditional pattern of advance, decisive battle, retreat and peace, it soon became clear that this was not to be the case. In mid-September the Germans dug in on the northern bank of the River Aisne and, although the BEF crossed the river, it made little impression on German defences. Sir John French, no military genius, but no fool either, quickly saw what had happened, and told King George V that:
I think the battle of the Aisne is very typical of what battles in the future are most likely to resemble. Siege operations will enter largely into the tactical problems – the spade will be as great a necessity as the rifle, and the heaviest calibres and types of artillery will be brought up in support on either side.45
In late September French formally asked Joffre for permission to disengage from the Aisne and to move onto the Allied left flank, which would make it easier for him to maintain communications with this home base and give his cavalry the opportunity of operating against the German right flank. What followed, known to historians as ‘The Race to the Sea’, saw both sides shift troops northwards, feeling for an open flank. It established that, just as the southern end of the front already stretched to the Swiss border, the northern end of the front would reach the North Sea. In the process the movement northwards took the BEF to the little Belgian town of Ypres, first attacking on the axis of the Menin Road in the expectation that it was turning the German flank, and then desperately defending against strong thrusts aimed at the Channel ports.
The first battle of Ypres ended in mid-November 1914. By then the fluid pattern of the summer’s fighting had set in earth, and the Western Front had taken up the line it was to retain, give or take local changes, until the Germans pulled back from the nose of the Noyon salient in early 1917. By the year’s end the BEF had grown from around 100,000 men, organised in the four infantry divisions and one cavalry division that had gone to France in early August, to two armies and a cavalry corps, a total of more than 270,000 men, already more than half as many as had served in the Boer War during the whole of its duration. In the process it had lost 16,200 officers and men killed, 47,707 wounded and another 16,746 missing and taken prisoner. These dreadful figures were soon to be exceeded by more terrible casualty lists, but their impact on Britain’s conduct of the war goes beyond sheer human suffering. For most of these casualties had been incurred by the regular army and, as we see later, the destruction of trained manpower in the early months of the war was to haunt the British army for the entire conflict.
Early in 1915 French initiated planning for an attack on the La Bassée–Aubers Ridge, on the southern end of the British sector. It was held by General Sir Douglas Haig’s 1st Army, and he had altogether more confidence in Haig than in Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien of 2nd Army. In part this reflected the fact that Haig had served under him in the past, and the two apparently got on well: he would have been horrified to discover that Haig regarded him ‘as quite unfit for this great command at a time of crisis in our Nation’s history’.46 French found Smith-Dorrien far less sympathetic, resented the fact that he had been sent out without consultation to replace the commander of II Corps when he died of a heart attack on his way to the concentration area the previous August, and likewise felt that his decision to fight at Le Cateau had been unwise. The attack was intended to be part of a wider Allied venture, but Sir John was unable to guarantee sufficient high-quality reinforcements to take over a section of the French front, upon which Joffre withdrew his support.
The British attacked anyhow, at Neuve Chapelle on 10 March. Their initial assault went well, largely because they had one gun for every 6 yards of front, and, because they were short of ammunition, they fired what they had in a rapid bombardment just before the attack. The Germans managed to prevent a breakthrough, though the British gained a maximum of 1,000 yards on a front of some 4,000. French hoped to repeat the process as soon as he could, but lacked sufficient artillery ammunition to do so. On the 18th he told Kitchener that:
If the supply of ammunition cannot be maintained on a considerably increased scale it follows that the offensive efforts of the army must be spasmodic and separated by a considerable interval of time. They cannot, therefore, lead to decisive results.47
The Germans responded to Neuve Chapelle by rejecting the prewar defensive doctrine of ‘one line, and that a strong one’, and by beginning the construction of a second defensive position, itself composed of several trenches, far enough behind the first to compel an attacker to mount a distinct assault on each. The British found the battle’s lessons less easy to discern. One critic recalled seeing follow-up waves ‘packed like salmon in the bridge-pool at Galway’ as they awaited the word to go forward, and the battle did highlight the serious problem, never fully solved during the war, of how to establish effective communications between attacking troops and their reserves. The high concentration of artillery was actually higher than that achieved at the beginning of the Somme offensive in the summer of 1916, and it was to transpire that what was eventually to become known as a lightning bombardment was actually more effective than a more methodical preparation.
The logic that encouraged the Allies to attack on the Western Front, to recover friendly territory, worked in reverse for the Germans, and persuaded them to remain on the defensive, holding gains which would prove useful bargaining counters if there was a compromise peace. They made only three major exceptions, in 1915, in 1916 at Verdun, and in the spring of 1918. The first was on 22 April 1915, when the Germans launched an attack north of Ypres, just west of the junction between British and French troops, behind a cloud of chlorine gas. Like the British at Neuve Chapelle they were unable to exploit the very serious damage done to the French defenders. The very gallant stand of 1st Canadian Division helped check the exploitation, and there followed a broken-backed battle as the British launched repeated, badly-coordinated counterattacks. This second battle of Ypres cost the Allies over 60,000 casualties, most of them British. It cost Smith-Dorrien his job, largely because of Sir John French’s long-standing prejudice. He was replaced by Sir Herbert Plumer, under whose direction the British held a much reduced salient east of Ypres.
The British attacked again that spring. On 9 May 1915 they assaulted Aubers Ridge, in a movement designed to support a French offensive further south, losing 11,500 men for no gain. This time Sir John French squarely blamed is failure on lack of shells: he had been ordered to send 22,000 to Gallipoli, and The Times correspondent, Charles Repington, a retired officer who was staying at French’s headquarters, supported his line, declaring on 19 May: ‘Need for Shells: British attacks checked: Limited supply the cause: A lesson from France.’ French also sent two of his staff to London to pass documents to David Lloyd George, a member of Asquith’s Cabinet,