The Germans tear up the rule book at the Second Battle of Ypres
Before the Somme became a byword for insensate slaughter, and the defining image of the First World War, it was Ypres that was the British army’s centre of gravity on the Western Front.
Hard fighting there in October and November 1914 had cost the BEF some 58,000 casualties, most of them the irreplaceable regulars who could march all day, use cover artfully and fire fifteen aimed rounds a minute. By Christmas in many battalions there remained but a single officer and a few dozen soldiers who had heard the opening shots at Mons.
In the early months of 1915 the BEF had become a harlequin affair, reinforced by men of the Indian army, by territorials, by the few remaining regulars drawn from distant garrisons, and by Canadian regulars and militiamen, the first of the 600,000 of the Canadian Expeditionary Force who would serve on the Western Front. And aside from the futile blood-letting in March of the BEF’s first independent offensive, at Neuve Chapelle, they had been able to rest, reorganize and train, so that in mid-April they could begin relieving the French in the Ypres salient.
The timing was unfortunate, however. General Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the Grosser Generalstab – in effect, commander-in-chief – had authorized an attack on the Ypres salient as a strategic diversion from the German army’s main offensive on the Eastern Front. With a limited objective, however – to ‘pinch out’ the salient rather than capture the important road junction of Ypres itself – and not wanting to commit too many troops, Falkenhayn decided, in flagrant breach of the Hague Conventions of 1907, to use chlorine gas. This had been developed and advocated for use as a weapon by the German Franz Haber, who would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his work on synthesizing ammonia for use in fertilizers and explosives – an innovation that helped prolong the war.
Though intelligence sources had suggested that gas might be used, the warnings were unspecific and therefore not paid much heed by the French general staff. In consequence, the strange mist that drifted across no-man’s-land from the German line on the evening of 22 April towards the left (north-west) of the Ypres salient, where the trenches were still occupied by the French, took the defenders by surprise. Those who could, fled; those who could not, suffocated. Private Anthony Hossack of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, a territorial regiment, described the panic:
Over the fields streamed mobs of infantry, the dusky warriors of French Africa; away went their rifles, equipment, even their tunics, that they might run the faster. One man came stumbling through our lines. An officer of ours held him up with levelled revolver. ‘What’s the matter, you bloody lot of cowards?’ says he. The Zouave was frothing at the mouth, his eyes started from their sockets, and he fell writhing at the officer’s feet.
A gap 4 miles wide had opened in the allied line, into which the Germans advanced, but hesitantly, for their high command seemingly had as little confidence in the new weapon as the French had belief in its existence, and had not conjured enough reserves to exploit the success. Fortunately, too, the Canadian division, on the French right – their first time in action – held their positions just long enough for British and Indian reinforcements to be brought up to check the advance.
Nothing could be done for the gas casualties, however, though Private Bert Newman of the Royal Army Medical Corps recalled his sergeant-major’s desperate attempts to force Vaseline into the throats of men gasping for breath to ease the burning.
A German soldier who took part in the attack, Pioneer Willi Siebert, wrote:
What we saw was total death. Nothing was alive. All of the animals had come out of their holes to die. Dead rabbits, moles, and rats and mice were everywhere. The smell of the gas was still in the air. It hung on the few bushes which were left. When we got to the French lines the trenches were empty but in a half mile the bodies of French soldiers were everywhere. It was unbelievable. Then we saw there were some English. You could see where men had clawed at their faces, and throats, trying to get breath. Some had shot themselves. The horses, still in the stables, cows, chickens, everything, all were dead. Everything, even the insects were dead.
Two days later the Germans released more gas, which struck the Canadian 8th Brigade near St Julien. With only the most primitive of anti-gas masks – towelling or handkerchiefs soaked in urine – the Canadian division paid dearly in the heavy fighting, with some 1,700 dead, 2,000 wounded and almost as many taken prisoner. One of the first of the Canadians’ VCs was awarded posthumously to Company Sergeant-Major Frederick Hall of the Winnipeg Rifles, for repeatedly bringing in the wounded under fire. He and two other VC winners all came from homes on Pine Street in Winnipeg, subsequently renamed ‘Valour Road’.
The gas attacks shocked public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the authorities. Kitchener wrote to Sir John French:
The use of asphyxiating gases is, as you are aware, contrary to the rules and usages of war. Before, therefore, we fall to the level of the degraded Germans [in retaliating] I must submit the matter to the Government … These methods show to what depth of infamy our enemies will go in order to supplement their want of courage in facing our troops.
This sentiment did not, however, prevent the British from developing their own – and better – chemical weapons.
Meanwhile the BEF were also facing the conventional logic of defence: if ground is worth holding in the first place, it is worth counter-attacking to regain if lost. And the greatest apostle of offensive action, General Ferdinand Foch, commanding French troops in the north-west and therefore with moral authority over the BEF, now ordered just this.
The counter-attacks began in earnest on 26 April. That day the Lahore Division suffered 1,700 casualties – over 10 per cent – without even reaching the German front line. The story was much the same everywhere, and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commanding the BEF’s 1st Army, voiced his concern at the high cost of so little gain, suggesting instead that the line of defence be straightened and therefore shortened by withdrawing from the now even more constricted salient. Sir John French refused, though after another costly and futile attack by the Lahore Division, on 1 May, he authorized a limited withdrawal from its apex. Five days later, resenting this reversal, he took the opportunity to dismiss Smith-Dorrien and appoint in his place the less volcanic commander of V Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Plumer.
The German attacks had dampened neither French’s nor Joffre’s ardour for the long-intended allied offensive. The two commanders-in-chief would stick to the plans made months before to attack in Artois, south of Ypres, notwithstanding the manifest shortage of artillery shells. ‘Sir John, undeterred by the drain on his resources during his recent struggle,’ wrote Kitchener’s private secretary and biographer, ‘was determined to adhere, on its broad lines, to his main plan. “The ammunition will be all right,” he had told Kitchener on May 2; he knew his men to be in as high fettle as ever.’
Kitchener was far from convinced but gave the go-ahead nevertheless, largely at Joffre’s urging. Early on the morning of 9 May, therefore, the BEF attacked towards Aubers Ridge, while the French attacked towards Vimy Ridge – ground familiar from the Neuve Chapelle battle. Joffre said it was ‘the beginning of the end’; the war would be over in three weeks, because Foch was employing a new tactic of prolonged and heavy bombardment instead of surprise. Six days’ hard pounding by 1,250 guns along a 12-mile front held by four German divisions, and then eighteen French divisions would attack, with the BEF in support on the flank.
But the attack soon broke down, as all previous attacks had, except in the centre, where the corps commanded by General Philippe Pétain, later the hero of Verdun (and in the Second World War the ‘arch-collaborator’, president of Vichy France), broke through to a depth of 2 miles. However, the Germans managed to close the gap before reserves could be brought up to exploit the success, a pattern that would be repeated in every allied offensive for the next three years.
Progress in the British sector was just as disappointing. As Kitchener’s private secretary noted: ‘It was quickly and unhappily evident that Sir John [French] would be unable to make good the substantial support he had so manfully intended to lend. He could do little but to employ and destroy a considerable number of Germans, and capture – at sad cost to himself – some not very important trenches.’
Foch’s troops suffered 102,000 casualties, but the BEF’s were proportionately more: over 11,000 killed or wounded on 9 May alone, the great majority within yards of their own front-line trenches. Mile for mile, division for division, the Artois offensive saw some of the highest losses of the entire war.
But Sir John French knew where the blame lay – with the inadequate supply of shells, the result of the war council’s giving priority to the Dardanelles campaign. And when he returned to his headquarters on the first day of the battle, in despondent mood having watched the stalling of the attack from atop a church tower, what should he find but a telegram from Kitchener asking him to ‘hold in readiness for despatch to the Dardanelles via Marseilles by quickest route 20,000 rounds 18-pounder ammunition and 2,000 rounds 4.5-inch howitzer ammunition’.
In dismay he replied: ‘This morning I commenced an important attack, and the battle is likely to last several days. I am warding off a heavy attack East of Ypres at the same time. In these circumstances I cannot possibly accept the responsibility of reducing the stock of ammunition unless it be immediately replaced from home.’
Kitchener was adamant: ‘I will see that it is replaced [but] the state of affairs in the Dardanelles renders it absolutely essential that the ammunition which has been ordered should be sent off at once.’
The consignment was indeed replaced within twenty-four hours, but French was still dismayed, in part because he genuinely could not understand why industry could not supply more shells, or why the Dardanelles – a ‘sideshow’ – should have priority over his ‘decisive theatre’, but principally because he had a failed offensive to explain and consequently his neck to save. He therefore enlisted the support of the press, in the shape of Charles Repington, The Times’s influential military correspondent (dubbed ‘the Playboy of the Western Front’ because his promising career had been cut short a decade before as a result of a liaison with another officer’s wife).
On 14 May Repington wrote an excoriating piece on the shell shortage under the headline ‘Need for shells: British attacks checked: Limited supply the cause: A Lesson From France’, and for good measure French also sent two of his personal staff to London to brief politicians, including Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative opposition, in what Kitchener’s private secretary called ‘a minor coup d’état’.
Although it would redound to his discredit and, later, contribute to his dismissal, for the time being the ‘shell scandal’, on top of the Dardanelles setback, advanced French’s cause: on 25 May Asquith reluctantly formed a coalition government, with Lloyd George leading a newly created Ministry of Munitions and the Tory cabinet ministers increasingly arguing for priority to be accorded to the Western Front.
Meanwhile the wearying attacks and counter-attacks at Ypres continued, with the largest discharge of gas on 24 May preceding a huge German push across a front of 4½ miles. Plumer’s men, now with rudimentary but effective gas masks, were able to halt the enemy well short of the British line, and that evening Falkenhayn issued the order to cease all further attacks on the salient.
When Sir John French was relieved of command in December he would take the consolatory title ‘Earl of Ypres’; but there was to be a Third Battle of Ypres, even bloodier and more futile, in 1917, known thereafter as ‘Passchendaele’.
On 3 May 1915 Italy, having the previous August declared her neutrality on the grounds that the Triple Alliance was a defensive treaty and that Germany and Austria had waged offensive war, officially revoked the treaty. On 23 May she declared war on Austria-Hungary, though the declaration of war on Germany would not come until August 1916.
The acquisition of Italy as an ally, a considerable diplomatic coup, would add significantly to the Entente’s naval strength in the Mediterranean, act as a beacon (for a time at least) to the wavering Balkan states, and divert Austro-Hungarian troops from the Galician and Serbian fronts. The Austro-Italian border was 400 miles long, stretching from the Stelvio Pass to the Adriatic Sea. Italian forces outnumbered the Austrian, which had to remain on the defensive while Russia resisted strongly, but the difficult terrain was in the defender’s favour. The Italian commander-in-chief, Luigi Cadorna, a proponent of the frontal assault, planned to attack at once on the Isonzo river with the intention of sweeping across the Karst plateau into Slovenia, in turn threatening Vienna.
It was a grandiose concept, which, like similar plans hatched on the Western Front, took insufficient account of the defensive power of the machine gun and heavy artillery, and the variable quality of the available troops. The Alpini were tough mountain fighters, and the Bersaglieri, light infantry, experienced in recent wars against the Turks in Libya, but many of the conscripts from the south were ill-suited to the conditions.
Cadorna had some initial successes in his preliminary operations in late May and June, but as on the Western Front the fighting soon developed into trench warfare, though here the trenches had to be dug in Alpine rock and glaciers, and often at altitudes of 10,000 feet. It would become known as the ‘White War’. In the first six months of his campaign Cadorna would launch four separate offensives on the Isonzo, each without appreciable success and costing in all some 60,000 dead and more than 150,000 wounded, a quarter of his mobilized forces.