At the end of the battles of Verdun and the Somme, the armies on the Western Front took stock, braced themselves for another winter in the freezing mud of the trenches, and laid their plans for spring 1917. The first of these emerged at a conference in Calais on 26–27 February in which the new British prime minister, David Lloyd George, enthusiastically endorsed the heady optimism of his newfound friend Nivelle, in an attempt to bypass the British generals and reduce their political power. This initiative immediately created bad feeling between himself and his army that would persist throughout the remainder of the war, and indeed beyond. Still more seriously, news arrived that the Tsar had been forced to abdicate on 15 March. At first this did not appear to affect the Russians' war effort, since General Brusilov mounted his second major offensive on 1 July, but after that failed it soon became clear that desertion and mutiny were taking over the Russian armies. However, the USA entered the war against Germany on 6 April, following Ludendorff's declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. This promised to give a great boost to the allies in France in 1918, although logistics experts were painfully aware of just how long it would take the Americans to mobilize their full fighting strength. It would be more realistic to expect them to exert decisive leverage only in 1919, rather than 1918.
On the Western Front itself the first major event was a carefully organized German retreat to ‘shorten their line’ and to occupy previously prepared positions behind the Noyon salient. These new fortifications were known as ‘the Hindenburg Line’, and they were formidable, incorporating all the lessons that the Germans had learned from their sacrificial defensive battles in the previous autumn. Ever greater depth between trench lines was a central feature of the system, together with numerous small strongpoints ahead of them, between them and behind them. The plan was no longer to beat the enemy off from a fragile front line, but rather to suck him into the middle of an interlocking ‘web’ of defences. Ideally these would be sited on reverse slopes, where the attackers' artillery observers could no longer follow the course of the battle, but where the overwatching defender's artillery could make free play. Then, once the attack had become confused and fragmented, there would be counter-attacks at every level, designed to retake all the lost ground and send the attackers back to their start line with heavy loss. Two other important features of the new system were exceptionally thick belts of barbed wire, perhaps thirty feet deep, and a widespread programme of pouring reinforced concrete. The Germans began to build shell- proof shelters and machine gun nests at or close below ground level, to complement their existing deep bunkers. It would be a whole year before the allies began to copy this technique on any large scale.
The advantage of the Germans' big step back in February and March 1917 was partly that they could economize on manpower by shortening their line, but also that they were winning leisure to build their new fortifications properly and deliberately some way behind the front. The retreat was designed to cover the completion of the defensive work, so that it did not have to be improvised under enemy fire. The labourers could enjoy the luxury of working in daylight and free from interference. So effective were all these ‘custom-built’ fortifications that they would not be broken until late September 1918, apart from a brief escapade at Cambrai from 20 to 30 November 1917. Even in sectors where the Germans did not step back, for example around Ypres, the very concept of their ‘depth defence’ still meant that they could construct many of their pillboxes and bunkers on reverse slopes some way behind the front, and thus still relatively well protected from enemy interference during the building phase. The main designer of these fortifications was General Friedrich Sixt von Arnim, who had studied defensive warfare at close hand on the Somme in 1916 and who then took command of the Fourth Army around Ypres in 1917. It would not be too much to suggest that he, more than any other individual apart perhaps from Lloyd George in 1918, placed the most obstacles in the path of Haig's success in command of the BEF on the Western Front.
The German concept of ‘defence in depth’. The outpost zone is designed to absorb the enemy's main artillery bombardment and to confuse his attacking infantry. The main battle zone will thus be preserved in a good state to defend itself against any new enemy impetus, but even if some parts of it are captured, counter-attacks at every level (shown here by arrows) will be launched immediately to recapture lost ground.
The great step back to the Hindenburg Line was nevertheless still a retreat rather than a step forward. The Germans who were ordered to abandon all the trenches they had painfully built and defended during the last days of the Somme battle were not persuaded that this was a sign of impending victory. They did their best to draw satisfaction from the operation by leaving booby traps and insulting graffiti behind them as they left, for the allies who followed them up to discover, but they could not help reflecting that the retreat began only three months after the Somme had finished. This powerfully suggested that the Somme had really been a defeat, and the Germans had hung around the battlefield for a while merely to satisfy their honour, in rather the same way that General Robert E Lee had kept his army on the field of Gettysburg for a day after that battle ended. By contrast, the allies who followed up the German retreat in spring 1917 did not experience any sense of victory after such a gruelling and bloody engagement, and were further shocked to encounter the novel ‘frightfulness’ of booby traps used on an unprecedented scale. In most British accounts these weapons are seen as just one more murderous type of attrition, and no connection is made with the idea that the BEF might have won on the Somme. But then again, neither had the Army of the Potomac at first realized that it had won at Gettysburg in 1863.
Meanwhile the allies had planned a big new co-ordinated offensive for spring 1917, which had to be delayed because of the German retreat. Eventually it started with a British diversionary push at Arras and Vimy Ridge on 9 April. Then on 16 April the French were to make a devastating attack (which would become known as the ‘Nivelle Offensive’) on the Chemin des Dames – the long ridge running just north of the river Aisne that the Germans had turned into a fortress immediately after their retreat from the Marne in 1914.
At Arras the ‘first day’ of the attack went off far more successfully than the ‘first day of the Somme’ on 1 July 1916. Despite the loss of air superiority, it was informed by nine months of intense combat experience, such as had not at first been available to the British on the Somme. Therefore the new artillery preparation was much more carefully orchestrated, with much more HE and even smoke shells in some of the creeping barrages. The preliminary bombardment with almost 3,000 guns lasted three weeks, and one observer called it ‘the greatest barrage ever seen’. Also the infantry spearheads were much better trained to take advantage of it, and in several places they were able to march forward some 6,000 yards without suffering heavy casualties. When they first heard of this unprecedented advance, the German high command was rocked to the core.
The capture of Vimy Ridge by the Canadian corps, commanded by General Julian Byng, was a meticulously prepared feat of arms that has been particularly celebrated by the Canadian government. The battlefield park that has been created there is always worth a visit nowadays. The original craters from mines and shells have not been ploughed over, as they have been on most of the other battlefields, so the tourist can gain a vivid impression of just how deep they are and how they must have looked before the vegetation grew back. More to the point is their sheer numbers packed into a relatively small area, often with two or more craters overlapping each other. This contrasts with the Newfoundland battlefield park on the Somme battlefield, where the shell holes are noticeably smaller and much further apart – although of course the shrapnel that was so widely used there did not leave craters. At Vimy there is no avoiding the physical evidence that a much heavier weight of HE shell was fired, and in fact during the first week of the Arras battle as a whole the British fired a total of slightly more than two million shells.
This awesome firepower helped forward more than just the Canadians, since the ‘home-grown’ British divisions on their right flank also did very well. In particular the 9th Scottish Division's capture of Le Point du Jour (north of Athies) was a remarkable achievement, combining careful planning and deception with numbing firepower on the day. This allowed the infantry to walk over the enemy's defences with slight loss, at least until the dread moment arrived when the attackers had outrun the reach of their guns and had come up against the enemy's second line. South of that there was a similar story, assisted by the medieval tunnels under the city of Arras, which had been improved to give shelter and concealment to the assault troops as they moved forward almost to the front line. They were also helped by the fact that the Germans, smarting from the devastating defeat of so many of their counter-attacks on the Somme, had left their counter-attack forces at Arras too far to the rear to be able to intervene. Thus the British were able to make dramatic advances before they encountered serious resistance. Nevertheless, in every case the Germans consolidated along their second line, and the fighting degenerated into the familiar see-saw with escalating casualties on both sides.
After the ‘first day’ at Arras there would be no more dramatic advances. The cavalry failed to break through at Monchy le Preux, and the infantry spearheads bogged down, waiting for their essential artillery support to catch up. It also soon became clear that in this ‘Bloody April’ the balance of power in the air was starting to swing back to the Germans, as their aircraft took a technological lead, most notably with their Albatross series of multi-role combat planes. This trend would grow through the summer as new specialized types were deployed such as the Halberstadt fighter bomber for ground attack, and of course the famous Fokker DR1 triplane air superiority fighter, which would be immortalized by the ‘Red Baron’ Manfred von Richthofen.
If the allies were perfecting their art of attack on the ground, they had not yet won the wider technological war. When we look to the south of the city of Arras in April 1917, for example, we do not find a favourable situation for the British. In this area the northernmost sector of the Hindenburg Line had been built and occupied earlier in the year, which made for more formidable German defences than at Vimy Ridge and Le Point du Jour. The British experienced a further difficulty because this was also the site of the boundary between General Edmund Allenby's Third Army, responsible for the bulk of the battle, and Gough's Fifth Army on the right flank. Gough would attack later than Allenby, mainly around Bullecourt on 9–11 April, where he had some innovative ideas about tactics. In a concept somewhat similar to Sir John French's trust in gas at Loos in 1915, he wanted to base a major part of his plan upon an all but untried new technology – in this case the tank. Unfortunately, however, his intended surprise required the Australian assault infantry to lie out in no man's land overnight, so that they would be present and ready to accompany the tanks when they crushed the enemy defences at dawn. These arrangements might have worked well if only there had not been freezing snow on the ground, and if only the tanks – which had been briefed and ordered forward very late in the day, and in a blizzard – had managed to arrive on time. Neither of these conditions was met, so that very soon after dawn a very cold and disaffected group of Australians expressed their contempt for all tanks in general, and for incompetent Pommy staffwork in particular. Their reward was to be told that they would have to go through the whole exercise all over again on the second night, which stoked them up from ‘furious’ to ‘incandescent’. Then, when the attack finally did go in, it enjoyed only very limited success and suffered heavy casualties, which only confirmed the ANZACs in their forcibly expressed opinions.
All the fighting at Vimy, Arras and Bullecourt had, of course, been designed as merely a diversion and an overture to help the great French ‘Nivelle Offensive’ on the Chemin des Dames, and it is true that it did indeed shock the enemy commanders by its initial depth of penetration. What it could not and did not do, however, was to fool them about Nivelle's intention to make a massive attack on the Aisne. He was assembling no fewer than 50 divisions and 5,000 guns on that sector, which were totally impossible to conceal. There was no possibility of surprise, any more than there had been in most of the previous battles in this war. It would be only at Cambrai on 20 November 1917 that the techniques of ‘predicted artillery fire’ would allow an attack to be mounted without a long preliminary period of shelling in the days before the infantry actually went over the top. Such prolonged bombardments (one week on the Somme, three weeks at Arras, two weeks at Third Ypres) represented unmissable clues to the enemy that something big was afoot. He would thus be able to amass his reserves in good time, and adjust his plans accordingly.
The French plans for their assault were further compromised when the Germans captured a copy of them on 5 April, at a time when all of Nivelle's immediate military subordinates, as well as his political superiors, were in any case experiencing grave doubts about the whole project. Even he himself momentarily offered to resign. Vital low-level details in planning the attack were being sacrificed in the interests of its vastly excessive scale and optimism. Yet as far as the soldiers at lower levels were concerned, all they got was repeated reassurance from Nivelle himself that this ‘one last push’ would finish the war completely, and all within the space of a few days. They accepted this official rationale with both relief and hope, and indeed who can possibly blame them?
The trouble was that the Germans had prepared their Chemin des Dames battlefield in much better depth than they had managed to do at Vimy Ridge and Arras. Nor did it help that the weather was freezing and many of the combats were fought in driving sleet. The attacking French troops were sucked into a morass of defensive strongpoints in which they lost the support of their own artillery at the same time as they came under fire from all directions, and were finally counter-attacked with devastating effect. They did gain large tracts of ground, although it was mostly ground that the enemy was happy to sacrifice, but the French also suffered very heavy losses indeed. By this point in the war they had suffered a grand total of well over three million casualties, and were morally as well as physically exhausted. Nivelle was replaced as commander-in-chief by Petain on 15 May, with General Ferdinand Foch as his Chief of Staff. More to the point, however, was the widespread shock of realization that Nivelle's confident promises of a rapid decision had never been more than hot air and wind. Disillusionment and a sense of betrayal suddenly spread throughout the French army, and widespread mutinies were not slow to follow.
The amazing thing about the French mutinies and combat refusals was that they were successfully hidden from the Germans, and secrecy was maintained. This was partly because many of the protesting troops agreed to hold the line defensively, but refused to make any attack. Therefore from the Germans' point of view the French lines remained fully garrisoned. In any case they had to worry about the next Russian offensive, as well as a major British push that was developing in the Ypres sector. It was also of crucial importance that Petain understood the soul of the French soldier, and knew how to act quickly to stop the rot. By making a few stern examples of the most intransigent mutineers he was merely following conventional military culture, but in other areas he was imaginative, innovative and humane. He improved the provision of food (and wine, or pinard); he increased home leave and arranged a regular rotation of rests out of the line; and he did what he could to increase the soldiers' battered self-esteem. Above all, he banned sacrificial attacks in which lives would be wantonly thrown away to no obvious purpose. The French army would revert largely to the defensive for the next twelve months, although it continued to practise limited and carefully prepared ‘bite and hold’ operations in circumstances where it was confident the casualties would be light. One such attack was the final recapture of the ‘Le Mort Homme’ feature and other advanced positions at Verdun on 20 August; another was a very tightly controlled and successful operation at Malmaison on 23–26 October. However, the French would venture forth to make larger attacks only in 1918, and only when they enjoyed clear tactical advantages. They had already lost many more men than either the British or the Germans in the West, and they quite reasonably believed it was high time for others to take up the lethal burden.
One source of reinforcements was ‘la force noire’, that is, the troops raised in the French colonies in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and sometimes even further afield. Alas, by mid-1917 most of the best of these had already been consumed in the flames of combat, with widely varying degrees of tactical success. They had nevertheless left an indelible mark upon the character of the French army as a whole, not least through the personalities of some of their leading commanders who rose to high office in the Great War. Joffre himself was the outstanding example, but the doyen of colonial officers was Joseph Galliéni, who played a key role defending Paris in 1914. Charles ‘Butcher’ Mangin grew into one of the most effective fighting generals at Verdun and then in 1918, although he was a spiritual ally of Nivelle, as perhaps his nickname might suggest. Less successful was the legendary Hubert Lyautey, the French equivalent to Kitchener, who was brought in from his private fiefdom in Morocco in late 1916 to become Minister of War, only to be instrumental in bringing down the whole government in March 1917. This did not prevent his promotion to Marshal in 1921 and his eventual elevation to the highest honour any French, or indeed Corsican, officer can legally claim – namely a prestigious tomb in Les Invalides in Paris.
Other reinforcements came from some unexpected sources. A brigade of Russians fought in the Champagne, east of Reims, where their chapel may still be visited. Portugal entered the fighting on 9 March 1916, but she could deploy only two divisions, or approximately the same numbers as the Indian Army forces (the British equivalent to ‘la force noire’), who had fought well in 1914–15, but had then melted away. In the summer of 1917 the Americans were still far from arriving in significant strength. All this meant that there was really only one force that could take the pressure off the French in the moment of their post-Nivelle crisis, and that was the BEF of the British Empire.
By this time the BEF had entered its phase of maximum strength and was also, at long last, well on the way to perfecting its art of modern war. It had already demonstrated this on the ‘first day’ of Arras and was about to do so again, perhaps more effectively still, on 7 June: the ‘first day’ of Messines.
