The great French ‘Nivelle offensive’ fails dismally, and with it the British, though the Canadians show their mettle
‘Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre,’ wrote Churchill. ‘The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.’
After the Somme, the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, came to the same conclusion. His commander-in-chief on the Western Front, Sir Douglas Haig, offered only a repeat of the costly frontal attacks of 1916. Lloyd George thought him ‘brilliant – to the top of his boots’.
But who might replace him?
In October 1914, as both sides dug in and stalemate developed, Lloyd George, then chancellor of the exchequer, called on General Noël Castelnau, commander of the French 2nd Army. How many troops did he have? asked the future prime minister. Nine army corps, was the answer. That was more than Napoleon had ever commanded in a single battle, replied ‘LG’.
‘Ah, Napoleon, Napoleon,’ said Castelnau, with a sigh; ‘if he were here now, he’d have thought of the “something else”.’
In January 1917 the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, having finally managed to sideline the long-serving commander-in-chief Joseph Joffre, began singing the praises of a new Napoleon – Robert Nivelle. Like Napoleon, Nivelle was an artilleryman, and he appeared to have mastered the potential of the ‘creeping barrage’, which at last promised to allow the infantry to break through the German defences. At the inter-allied conference in Rome that month Briand told Lloyd George and Paolo Boselli, the Italian prime minister, that during the counter-offensive at Verdun in December, Nivelle had sent telegrams from various places during the advance demonstrating that his objectives were being achieved exactly according to his plan. Briand was sure that the grand offensive his new C-in-C was planning would be decisive. When the Italian C-in-C, Luigi Cadorna, suggested instead a combined offensive against the Austrians on the Italian front, ‘LG’, wary of promised breakthroughs in France, was at once enthusiastic. However, the chief of the imperial general staff, the gruff ranker General Sir William Robertson, argued that the priority must remain the Western Front. Unfortunately, Cadorna backed down, apparently impressed by Anglo-French military solidarity.
Lloyd George met Nivelle in Paris on his way back to England and, reassured by his confidence, invited him to London. Later that month Nivelle addressed the war cabinet in perfect English (his mother was British) and made a strong impression. When he left, Colonel Maurice Hankey, the cabinet secretary, wrote in his diary: ‘Lloyd George would like to get rid of Haig, but cannot find an excuse.’
Instead, he proposed subordinating the BEF to the French high command for the coming offensive. Haig – since 1 January, by the express wish of the King, Field Marshal Haig – refused, arguing that Nivelle could rely on his best support but could not order him precisely how and when to give it. Lloyd George backed down, with some face-saving formula for all parties, but the episode left a bitter taste in Haig’s mouth and did nothing to improve the prime minister’s view of his new field marshal.
In March Nivelle began issuing peremptory instructions nevertheless, to which Haig objected both as a matter of military principle and because he did not ‘believe our troops would fight under French leadership’. Resignations threatened, Haig writing in his diary that he ‘would rather be tried by court martial’, and although things quietened down, the row led to Briand’s resignation.
It was while all this was going on that the Germans had decided to fall back to the Siegfriedstellung or ‘Hindenburg Line’. As information about the move came through, many of Nivelle’s own subordinates began urging him to abandon his plans. General Joseph Micheler, commanding the army group formed to exploit the anticipated victory, argued that the Germans were now in too strong a position. They had many more troops and artillery available for counter-attack, including those now being transferred from the Eastern Front after the Tsar’s abdication and the near-collapse of the Russian army. He begged Nivelle to stand on the defensive instead and send troops to Italy to gain a victory there before the Germans did.
Nivelle was not deterred, however: ‘Laon in twenty-four hours and then the pursuit. You won’t find any Germans in front of you.’
Indeed, the more his generals voiced their concerns, the more vaunting became his predictions. They would break through ‘with insignificant loss’ and in three days at most would be in open country on their way to the Rhine: ‘Nous les verrons Verdunés,’ he claimed: ‘We shall see them “Verdunned”.’
On 24 March, Paul Painlevé, France’s new war minister and a future prime minister, visited Haig and ‘questioned [him] closely about Nivelle’. Haig was guardedly supportive, writing in his diary that ‘I was careful to say that he struck me as a capable general, and that I was, of course, prepared to co-operate with whoever was chosen by the French government to be their C-in-C … my relations with Nivelle are and always have been excellent.’
Haig’s sense of soldierly solidarity when faced with a politician (especially ‘an extreme socialist’, as he described Painlevé) prevented his speaking his mind. Perhaps with the offensive only a fortnight away he believed the die was cast, and any doubts expressed only likely to do harm. It was a catastrophic mistake.
Still Painlevé was not convinced. Having heard the discordant voices (traditionally shriller in the French army than in the British), he tried to persuade Nivelle to heed his generals. This was an impossible proposition, and nonsensical too, for either a C-in-C was to be trusted to come to the best military judgement or he was not, in which case dismissal was the only option.
Nivelle threatened to resign. Painlevé, though a brilliant mathematician, could not find the formula or the confidence to – in effect – dismiss ‘the victor of Verdun’, and backed down. He would count it as the costliest mistake of his long political career.
At first things seemed to go well for the Nivelle offensive. The BEF, in its supporting role, was to make a preliminary attack along a 15-mile front at Arras and at Vimy Ridge to draw German reserves away from the coming French assault on the ridge of the Chemin des Dames above the River Aisne. This it began on 9 April, Easter Monday, in a snowstorm, spearheaded by 3rd Army under Sir Edmund Allenby. An early casualty was the poet and most lyrical of writers on the English countryside Edward Thomas, thirty-nine years old, not long commissioned and only recently arrived in France, who was killed in a forward observation post, spotting for the guns of his heavy battery.
Progress was encouraging nonetheless. The 9th Scottish Division advanced 4 miles, and the Canadian Corps under the British Lieutenant-General Julian Byng took Vimy Ridge, the dominating heights above the Artois plain, in one of the finest feats of arms in the entire war. This success did not come cheap, however. In the three days’ fighting it took to consolidate their gain, some 10,500 Canadians – or ‘Byng Boys’ as they were soon known – were wounded, and 3,600 killed (the Germans, defending fiercely, suffered 20,000 casualties). What had given the assaulting infantry their chance was an unprecedentedly accurate three-week bombardment, during which many of them were able to shelter from the counter-fire unobserved in tunnels hewn in the chalk of Arras. Isaac Rosenberg, one of the few acknowledged greats of the war poets not to have been commissioned, was serving with the 11th Battalion, The King’s Own, a ‘Bantam battalion’ (consisting of men under the 1914 minimum height of 5 feet 3 inches). In a letter home he wrote: ‘We’ve been in no danger – that is, from shell-fire – for a good long while, though so very close to most terrible fighting. But as far as houses or sign of ordinary human living is concerned, we might as well be in the Sahara Desert.’
Once the attack began, a very precise creeping barrage screened the infantry’s advance. It was devised and coordinated in large part by Major Alan Brooke – who in the Second World War would rise to become Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Churchill’s ‘master of strategy’. British artillery techniques had by this stage become quite sophisticated, including gas shells that neutralized much of the German artillery. On the other hand, the few tanks available were dogged by mechanical failure.
Exploiting success was another matter, however, not least because of the congestion behind the British front, caused in part by the very troops who were to have been the instrument of exploitation – the mass of cavalry, which instead became a target for the enemy’s guns. Fighting then descended to what it had been on the Somme – a slogging match, with mounting casualties on both sides (the Australians suffering particularly badly at Bullecourt due to the inveterate self-assurance of the 5th Army commander, Sir Hubert Gough). When the battle ended on 15 May, losses in the BEF had risen to 150,000. Indeed, the daily casualty rate was the BEF’s heaviest of the entire war. The following month, Haig sacked Allenby. ‘The Bull’, as he was known, not entirely affectionately, had fallen foul of those both above and below him. His subordinate commanders felt he had pushed them too hard, while Haig blamed him for failing to break through. It would prove to be one of the most felicitous of Haig’s decisions, however. Reassigned to command in Palestine, by Christmas Allenby would take Jerusalem from the Turks.
The French attack, when it came on 16 April – delayed several days by bad weather – faltered almost at once. The German defences were largely on the reverse slope of the Chemin des Dames and therefore hidden from observation, except by air, and although the French had mustered 1,000 aircraft, superior German fighter tactics and bad weather had negated the advantage (the BEF itself lost seventy-five aircraft in the five days preceding its attack). Nivelle’s artillery bombardment, by an unprecedented number of batteries, was much less successful than he had predicted, leaving the German machine-gunners to dominate the crest. The French infantry failed to keep up with the creeping – in fact, more a ‘running’ – barrage, which advanced too quickly at 100 yards a minute, and the attack could get no further than the top of the ridge. By nightfall the infantry had advanced just 600 yards instead of the 6 miles promised in Nivelle’s schedule. Of the 132 French tanks massed for the attack (mainly Schneiders), in action for the first time, 57 had been destroyed and 64 had become irretrievably bogged down in the mud.
As Micheler had warned, the Germans had been able to increase the number of divisions on the Aisne substantially – indeed, by a factor of four, so that the French were barely at parity, let alone with the usual superiority of three to one reckoned necessary in the attack. Operational security had also been poor, with divisional orders in some cases being copied down as far as battalion level, so that as soon as the Germans began taking prisoners they were able to piece together Nivelle’s intentions. There were even suggestions that Nivelle’s critics had leaked the plans – a suggestion that would have been unbelievably far-fetched but for the fevered state of the post-Verdun French army, which within a month would see widespread mutinies.
By 26 April, over 95,000 French wounded had passed through the casualty clearing stations. When the offensive was abandoned a fortnight later, the total number of casualties, dead and wounded, had risen to 187,000. Nivelle’s days were numbered.
But who was to succeed him? Paris was badly shaken, and the right answer – the infantryman Philippe Pétain – seemed unthinkable, for he had long been the outsider, refusing to subscribe to the orthodoxy of offensive à outrance (‘offensive to the utmost’) and insisting on the power of the defensive. But some, at least, could see his qualities. At the end of April, the Times war correspondent, Charles à Court Repington, wrote anxiously to Lloyd George from Paris:
I hear that influence is being brought to bear on your side of the water to oppose the appointment of Pétain to the chief command on the ground that he holds certain views which, in fact, he does not hold … [I] ask you not to credit the silly chatter which attributes to him a want of go and resolution.
He sees the situation clearly … He will not promise the moon as others have done. In this last French offensive our friends have lost 120,000 men, equal to two thirds of the French class of a year, and are much depressed. Pétain foretold the failure to the War Council … He sees that we are practically on an equality with the enemy, and must wait until you in England, and the Americans, provide the superiority of force necessary for victory … He is against trying to do much with little, and prefers to do little with much … He will most certainly support Haig in every way, for the arrest of this mad Rheims offensive [Nivelle’s] does not at all imply quietism and want of activity … Believe me that he is the best general in France.
Repington, dubbed by his detractors ‘the Playboy of the Western Front’, was wrong about many things during the course of the war, but not this. Although Pétain, who replaced Nivelle on 15 May, would not be able to contribute much in manoeuvre, he had the sense and courage to stop demanding slaughter.
Unfortunately, as the baton now passed to the British on the Western Front, Haig would not see things the same way.