The Great War Explained

Dedication

When I go to Ypres, I visit Tyne Cot Cemetery at Passchendaele, the largest British military cemetery in the world. Two identical headstones stand side by side, each marking the grave of ‘A Second Lieutenant of The King’s Shropshire Light Infantry’. I was just such a one myself once, and I am proud to have worn the cap badge that they wore. This book is dedicated to them and to the many tens of thousands of soldiers who died in that war but who have no marked grave.

First published in Great Britain in 2012

By Pen and Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen and Sword Books Ltd

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Copyright © Philip Stevens, 2012

9781844685554

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Foreword

Timeline of the War

1 - Why Was There a War?

2 - 1914 – The War Begins

3 - 1915 – The Year of Trial

4 - 1916 – The End of the Beginning

5 - 1917 – The Year of Waiting

6 - 1918 – The End in Sight

APPENDIX I - The Cast

APPENDIX II - Composition of an Army

APPENDIX III - Other Arms

APPENDIX IV - Weapons

APPENDIX V - Hints for Visitors

APPENDIX VI - Visiting the Western Front

APPENDIX VII - Casualties

APPENDIX VIII - The War Poets

INDEX

Preface

I first met Philip Stevens in early May 2006 in that most English of locations, the boundary of the cricket pitch. He was watching his son play cricket (rather well) for Wellington College. He introduced himself and said he was one of a party of forty-five Wellington parents coming with me to the battlefields of the Somme and Flanders two weeks later, and would I like him to interject relevant information at different locations? I assured him that that would be delightful, making a mental note to myself as I rushed onto the next parental boundary deckchair that he was obviously a troublemaker and one to watch. By that stage I had taken forty-five parent or pupil trips to the battlefields from five different schools, and felt that I could walk from Verdun to Passchendaele with my eyes closed, knowing every inch of surviving trenches and the story behind each.

How, how wrong I was. Halfway through the first day of the trip, as I was breezily telling the assembled parents about the mysteries of Vimy Ridge, Philip started his machine gun patter of information. Never have I heard any guide speak with such authority, animation and enthusiasm. I was awed, as were all present.

Philip became a regular adjunct on my annual trips to the trenches, and he became simply stronger and stronger. Comparisons were made with David Rattray, the captivating oral historian of the Anglo-Zulu war murdered in January 2007, or indeed Richard Holmes, the brilliant military historian who died in April 2011 and who was such a good friend of Wellington College. Those who heard Philip begged for him to write a book about the war so a wider audience could benefit from his insights and brilliant mind.

Thus was this book born, nicely in time for the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war.

We have lacked a single volume history introducing the war in all its dimensions, written by someone who has served in the army, with a profound knowledge of the war, and with the gift of communicating this complex knowledge for the general reader.

It is twenty-five years since I myself first took parties to the First World War battlefields. I was stunned then, as are all first time visitors, by the galaxy of sights available for all to see. I counted myself lucky to have gone at that time, rather than some years later, when I imagined that interest would have faded as veterans died, and the Second World War loomed ever larger in popular consciousness. If anyone had told me that twenty-five years later, interest in the First World War would have doubled or trebled along with the numbers of visitors, I would have thought them quite mad. Yet, it is the case.

The First World War moves the young and not so young beyond their understandings. Truly, it is the most strange of all wars. This book will shape and inspire the fascination that all have in it. It is the essential starting point for all who want to make the pilgrimage to understanding the First World War. It will also be a humbling re-education to those who, like me, thought they knew it all.

Dr Anthony Seldon

Wellington College

July 2011

Foreword

This is not a learned history of the First World War; I started to write this book as a story, after guiding a battlefield tour when a question was asked – ‘Where can I find a beginner’s guide to why we are here and what we are seeing?’

The tutors in the Military History Department at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst taught me a love of their subject that has been a defining part of my whole adult life. In 2006 Dr Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, led the Trenches Trip for Wellington parents that made me think that I had something to write about. I thank him for writing the preface.

This is a story about people. This was a war of millions, during which generals accepted casualties in tens of thousands, often in a day or a morning, but each casualty was an individual. When I write about the mass of men I always think of individuals: Colonel Driant at Verdun, Private Parr at Mons, Noel Chavasse and the Liverpool Scottish, the small group of Devon men at Mametz.

Not all generals were incompetent buffoons, and just as I did, you should form your own opinions. As the greatest historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries still cannot agree about whether some of the most studied generals of all time were competent or fools, I think we need not wait upon their deliberations to make up our own minds.

Robert Burness and I enjoyed many visits to battlefields together. I am sorry that I cannot give him a copy of this book in memory of the many ‘Bottlefield Tours’, so named by his daughter Julia, that we enjoyed together.

In 2006 James Osborne and his family led me to study the 7th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment’s action at Aveluy Wood in 1918. James’s father won his medal there as one man’s personal contribution to winning the war; this book is a reminder that the history of the First World War is part of almost every family’s history as well.

Marney Brosnan produced maps for this book despite working amid the damage and loss caused by the Christchurch earthquakes. Roni Wilkinson found many pictures that are new to me and perhaps to you. I thank them both for their help.

Finally, I am grateful to many friends and members of my family. If you wondered why I am so dedicated to studying a war that happened a long time ago, I hope that when you have read this book you will say ‘I know now’.

Timeline of the War

The war ends legally, five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

The Western Front – the main arena of the war.

The Ypres Salient — a major battle took place here every year except 1916.

Verdun – a defining battle of French history and of The Great War.

Gallipoli — the forging of Australia and New Zealand.

The Somme — a by-word for the futility of war.

1

Why Was There a War?

After a fight in the playground, Teacher wants to know ‘Who Started It?’ After a fight on the scale of this war, the question takes some answering. However it can be argued that it all starts with one man.

Bismarck

Otto, Prince von Bismarck, the most obvious playground bully, had been dead for sixteen years before the war started. He became Chancellor of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1862 in dangerous times. The previous twenty years had been unsettled in Europe. In England the Corn Laws were increasingly seen as a food tax, a bar to foreign trade and a cause of price instability. Rising levels of national unrest forced final repeal in 1846. Eighteen forty-eight was ‘The Year of Revolutions’, with anti-monarchical uprisings and revolutions across Europe caused by a variety of economic and social grievances. France and England then fought Russia in the Crimea, with no real reason beyond suspicion of Russian ambitions in the Balkans. In Africa, India and beyond, the maritime powers continued to develop existing colonies and stake out new ones. In the 1860s America was to be busy with its own Civil War, where the Gatling gun introduced industrialised killing for the first time and the railway facilitated the first genuinely mobile war of citizen armies.

Bismarck strode into the European playground at an opportune moment. By character and ability he was the outstanding politician of the day, and his political philosophy appealed to the King of Prussia and his army. In simple terms Bismarck wanted a strong and united Germany, with Prussia as its main constituent state and himself as the dominant political personality. In the decade after becoming Chancellor, he fought Denmark for possession of territories, then Austria in 1866 to establish leadership of the Germanic nations. He rounded off the territorial expansion by humiliating France in the Franco-Prussian War, taking Alsace and Lorraine as the spoils of war. In 1871 he completed the programme with the creation of a united German federation, with the King of Prussia as Kaiser, and himself as Chancellor of the Empire.

From 1857 onwards the Prussian army was the iron tool wielded by Bismarck, The Iron Chancellor. After the unification of Germany, the Kaiser was Commander-in-Chief, but in reality General Count Helmuth von Moltke led the army. He was a profound thinker about military affairs in every aspect and created many modern concepts of military management, such as a general staff and staff training. He was also a considerable fighting general during Bismarck’s local wars of expansion.

The new Germany was a latecomer to the world of overseas territories and colonies. All the major powers had long-established empires. The King of Belgium was effectively the private owner of the Belgian Congo, and Disraeli had flattered Queen Victoria by arranging for her to be crowned Empress of India. In German thinking, the new and largest nation in Europe should also have colonies, and it was wrong that all the best places had already been taken. A restless desire to develop a proper empire, with colonies and possessions, became a fixed point in German political ambitions.

Kaiser William II was a particularly unfortunate successor to the throne created by Bismarck. William was the not-quite-absolute monarch of the largest nation in Europe, the nearly-absolute Commander-in-Chief of the largest, most professional army on the continent, and in both roles his powers outran his abilities. His grandfather, the first Kaiser, had been the nominally absolute monarch for seventeen years, but always under Bismarck’s tutelage. The old Kaiser William I died in 1888. His son Frederick was fifty-seven and Frederick’s only son William was less than thirty. Frederick the Third of Prussia, but the First of Germany, came to the throne a sick man and died of throat cancer in that same year.

The new Kaiser William II, still only aged twenty-nine when he came to the throne, was very aware of his standing as Queen Victoria’s oldest grandchild and pre-eminent monarch amongst her descendants. He considered that the Queen’s oldest son, his uncle Edward Prince of Wales, was an idle pleasure-seeker. It irritated him greatly that this elderly, fat roué was generally seen as the first gentleman and prince of Europe. By the time Queen Victoria died William had been Kaiser for twelve years, and although he had actually been the grandson holding her in his arms as she died he knew that King Edward VII would usurp his pretensions to primacy in the world of royal courts. Even the Kaiser of Germany could not hide the reality that the King-Emperor, the old Queen’s eldest son and his senior by eighteen years, was a person of greater significance than the Kaiser of the still-new German Empire that still lacked anything reasonably to be called imperial possessions.

Kaiser William III was impatient, jealous and extremely conscious of his status. His left arm was withered and all but useless, a humiliating handicap for the Kaiser of Prussia and all Germany. He overcompensated for this handicap in his militarism, constant need for ever more elaborate uniforms and decorations, and demand for physical excellence in those around his court.

Players, Alliances and Plans

Austria-Hungary was crumbling as an ageing empire, but as a client state of Germany was anxious to preserve Germanic leadership, not least in the troubled regions of Germany’s and her own homelands. Austria-Hungary’s Hapsburg Emperors would have difficulty containing developing independence movements in parts of their empire without Germany’s support, especially among the minority population linked by language, history and culture to a meddlesome Serbia next door.

Further towards Asia, the Ottoman Empire had lasted for 500 years of prosperity, but by the beginning of the twentieth century had been declining for over a hundred years, a crumbling and corrupt regime with little but force to hold it together and little enough force to ensure that aim. The empire supported the German and Austro-Hungarian axis, not least because these powers shared the same apprehensions about military and political threats from Russia.

Russia itself was another empire in decline, ill at ease with itself and its neighbours. War was an occasional hazard, especially with the Ottoman Empire, and for over fifty years Russia had been subject to attempted revolution at home. Concessions were given but led only to more demands. Church and State held an uneasy arbitrary grip on the mass of an agricultural peasant population, bound to the concept of Mother Russia and the Czar as Father of The People.

France, in particular, had defined her European ambitions. Above all other aims stood the national ambition to get back the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, taken by Germany as the spoils of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

Great Britain was the perpetual stumbling block in the way of any European nation with international ambition. Britain controlled the largest empire the world had ever known and had the military strength, mostly naval strength as befitted a maritime empire, to protect its possessions. British naval policy was simple: the British merchant marine represented 60 per cent of the global shipping fleet, and the British Empire about half of the civilised world. The Royal Navy should therefore be similarly dominant. As a rule of thumb, the tonnage of the Royal Navy should be twice that of the next largest navy. Germany set out to challenge this doctrine, driven by the Kaiser and his jealous guardianship of his own heritage. This dual policy committed Germany to land armies on the continental scale as well as naval forces on the global one.

Within the British Empire, the Dominions of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and at least part of South Africa would be counted into British plans.

In the Far East another empire was in the ascendant. Japan was emerging from medieval isolation, had beaten Russia decisively in the naval war of 1906. The defining battle was the naval Battle of Tsushima, in which Japan captured or destroyed thirty-four of Russia’s thirty-eight ships, killing or capturing over 10,000 Russian sailors for the loss of three small torpedo boats and 116 dead. Japan was an important customer of Tyneside ship-builders, especially for fighting ships, and this was thought to give a pro-British advantage to Japanese inclinations in the event of a European war. In the event, Japan would play little or no part in the war when it did come.

To the west the United States of America wanted to be left alone to heal the still-open wounds of the Civil War and continue the process of turning a group of states into a single nation, whilst developing an industrial base to compete with the world. There was little appetite for military power, beyond that needed to cope with a quarrelsome border relationship with Mexico.

Thus five Western empires, a number of European nations and the USA had more or less set out their positions for the war that many thought must come.

Formal alliances became the fashionable tools of international diplomacy. Germany and Austria-Hungary naturally allied themselves as the Central Powers; France and Russia allied themselves in a mutual defence pact to take effect in the event that the Central Powers might attack one or the other. Simultaneously, Russia appointed itself as the protector of the small Baltic Slavic states and declared its interest in their freedom from external pressure. The Ottoman Empire, in its death throes, dithered between the two main blocs, before eventually coming down on the side of the Central Powers. Italy was expected to join the German – Austrian alliance in the event of a European war. Belgium was neutral, her neutrality respected by all, and guaranteed by the Treaty of London of 1839. Most of the smaller countries around the edge of Europe were also neutral and of little significance in the political posturing of the Great Powers. Great Britain alone held herself aloof, pursuing the historic role of supporting the weak against the strong, preferring a balance of power rather than any single dominant power in Europe.

A remarkable diplomatic achievement served to increase German fears of encirclement by land and sea. The British and French governments had been moving closer together since the Crimean War of 1853-56, when they had fought on the same side against Russia in the fight for spoils and influence in areas where the Ottoman Empire was no longer able to maintain its imperial control. Since then, Britain and France had also fought side by side in the Second Opium War against China in 1856-60. A new treaty, The Entente Cordiale, was signed in 1904. It was not a military agreement and was little more than an expression of hope of friendship and cooperation. The public of both nations believed the Entente to be the work of the new king, Edward VII, whose gallant manners, roving eye and status as Queen Victoria’s son made him as popular in smart French society as they made him awe-inspiring in British. His ability to speak easily to all politicians probably did help bring the Entente into the world but he was by no means the only, nor the most significant, midwife at its birth.

The Entente certainly made no formal military commitment to France. However, senior British military figures agreed that the small British army was destined to fight alongside the French when the inevitable European war would occur. Military planning was effectively centred on the deployment and employment of a British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in the event that France would go to war with Germany. Naturally the officers responsible to the Imperial General Staff, the leadership of the army, for this planning were very conscious of the need for secrecy. Indeed they saw no need to tell their pacifically inclined Liberal political masters that they were undertaking no other preparation for a European war.

The new century unfolded: tensions arose within and across borders, and all countries were naturally writing war plans. Great Britain and France might have no sure idea about whether, how or where the BEF would be employed when they got to France, but Ferdinand Foch had no doubt about how the French Army would be employed. As pre-war Commandant of the École Supérieure de Guerre (ESG), the French Staff College for training future senior officers, he had exercised a very considerable influence over thinking in the higher reaches of the army. In the event of war, France would advance immediately and with unstoppable courage into the lost provinces and re-take them. La Revanche, Revenge, was the doctrine and L’Attaque á l’Outrance was the instrument, literally the extravagant application of force to achieve the objective. Foch’s disciple Colonel Grandmaison was chief instructor of G3, a special third year of study at ESG for a few selected high flyers marked out for accelerated promotion to the higher levels of command. He advocated the heroic concept, the courage of the French private soldier, the poilu, who would advance with panache, his courage defending his breast against the German machine gun. Yes, he really did write and speak like that, and in the years immediately before the war delivered a series of lectures with such oratorical brilliance that those who heard them accepted his doctrines with almost religious fervour. Grandmaison suffered for his own military beliefs by dying on the battlefield in 1915.

Meanwhile, over the years since 1911 the French planning staff had been led by the army Chief of Staff, Joseph Joffre, in constantly refining and elaborating on the execution of La Revanche. Each major refinement was written as a new model plan for the conduct of the inevitable war, and by 1914 the numbering system had taken the process to Plan XVII. For the benefit of anyone who doubted the new French philosophy of war, the opening sentence of Plan XVII made the position clear – ‘Whatever the circumstances, the Commander-in-Chief intends to advance, all forces united, to attack the German armies.’ By August 1914 Joffre was ready to put his theories, and Colonel Grandmaison’s interpretation of them, to the test. The French First and Second Armies would advance headlong into the occupied provinces in a series of actions that would later be known collectively as The Battles of The Frontiers.

Foch little knew that as a Corps Commander (1913), then Army Commander (August 1914) then Commander of the Northern Group of Armies (October 1914) he was to play a significant role in the unfolding of Plan XVII.

Germany knew that they could not win decisively a war fought simultaneously on two fronts, against Russia in the east and France in the west. From the mid-1890s onwards General Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German Great General Staff, directed his planning staff to solving this problem. As successor to Helmuth von Moltke he had at his disposal the largest, most professional army in Western Europe, and was confident in their ability to win a European war. In essence, he planned that a small force in the east would hold that frontier for a few weeks, against a slow and ponderous Russian mobilisation and advance, whilst an overwhelming force, gathered in Western Germany, would strike a blow to knock France out of the war in six weeks. The German attack would not go across the Franco-German border; the French Army would be there in strength, indeed it suited Schlieffen’s plan that the French would actually advance into the lost provinces and meet powerful German home defence at some distance from French supply lines. The German Army would march to the sound of a greater drum, to conquer countries not provinces.

So, the German Army planned that on the outbreak of war they would indeed advance not southward directly into France, but westward, into neighbouring neutral Belgium. The Belgians might grant free passage, but if they would not then the pitifully small Belgian forces would be swept aside. The great fortress cities like Liege would be by-passed and later captured, but speed of advance would be the key to success. After advancing westwards almost to the North Sea, the Germans would turn south, sweep down the gap between Paris and the sea, swing round south-eastwards below Paris and then turn north to take the French Army from behind. With her capital surrounded once again, as in 1870-71, and with her army crushed between the German home defences and the German Army behind, France would surrender within six weeks and free the German Army to transfer east in time to deal with Russia.

For fifteen years von Schlieffen and his successor, Helmuth von Moltke ‘The Younger’, nephew of the great architect of the Prussian army, refined the plan and prepared its implementation. The Schlieffen Plan, the Great Memorandum, as it was officially know, was never a completed work, always a work in progress. All major civil engineering projects were planned with a thought for their potential contribution to the greater work. As one example, railway building was considered as part of the plan to move an army west to fight France and then east to fight Russia. Four-track railways ran east to west across Germany, ending always just within the borders, at stations with sidings and platforms built to handle armies on the move. Military warehouses were built and filled with the necessary stores. The male population underwent national service, in a system that ensured that all men could serve usefully, in the front line, in reserve, as troops guarding communications or as home defence forces, until past their fortieth birthdays.