VICTORY was in the air breathed by the allies in the west. Not even the smell of decay, of high explosive, or the sickening sweetness of mustard gas could disguise it. The tasks ahead were certainly formidable. In addition to a series of prepared defences, the Germans would make good use of rivers and canals. For the first time since 1914, however, a general offensive, on a vast front, from the Meuse to the Channel, could be launched. Superiority of numbers had been attained, but it was not sensational. The chief factors making such an offensive possible were tanks and superiority in the air, in guns, mechanical and horse transport, food, and, last but not least, fighting spirit.
The German leaders were well aware of their deficiencies, particularly in spirit. Significantly, old Hindenburg, almost a cipher in days of victory, was coming to the front. Intrepidity is more useful than tactical skill in times as ugly as these, and Ludendorff’s nerves were breaking. Prince Rupprecht, a courageous man but not like Hindenburg an optimist by nature, wrote on 27 September that peace must be concluded in the winter, even though it should be on hard terms.1
The German defensive tactics were sound. The front was held in six zones: outpost zone, forward battle zone, main battle zone, greater battle zone, rearward position, and rearward battle zone. The first was what its name implies. Its function was to disorganize the attack. Even the forward battle zone was lightly held, by squads, machine-guns, and single field guns. Only in the greater battle zone was the front line the line of resistance. Yet these high-flown titles often meant little. When driven back to a strong prepared position like the Hindenburg Line the Germans obviously had to make it the main line of resistance and fight for it; in fact the campaign developed into retreats from one line to the next. In the intervals defence depended on large numbers of hidden machine guns. The result was that serious breaches in the German array were avoided but ground was steadily lost.
The opposing strengths by divisions were French 102, British 60, American 39, Belgian 12, Italian 2, Portuguese 2, a total of 217; German 193, Austrian 4, a total of 197.
On 3 September Foch had issued a directive which determined the future course of the campaign. The influence of Haig’s ideas is marked.
The British, supported by the French left, would attack in the direction of Cambrai and Saint-Quentin.
The French centre would drive the enemy beyond the Aisne; the Americans, after the Saint-Mihiel operation, and the French Fourth Army on their left would attack in the direction of Mézières.
Then, on 8 September, Foch visited the King of the Belgians and afterwards saw Haig and Plumer. As a result, an offensive in Flanders, directed on Ghent and Bruges, was added, for which the British Second Army and a French force were placed under the orders of King Albert, with the French General Degoutte as Chief of Staff. It was the official version of the catchword of Foch: ‘Tout le monde à la bataille!’
The American First and French Fourth Armies struck first, on 26 September. The Americans had, after completing their business at Saint-Mihiel, quickly extended their front to include most of the breadth of the Argonne forest. Pershing states that he was given a choice between this sector and Champagne, farther west, and chose this because he thought no troops but his possessed the morale or offensive spirit to tackle it.1 In his personal account he writes: ‘Most of the light and heavy guns . . . and supply trains . . . were provided by the French, some by the British . . . and practically none from home. We had 189 light tanks, all of French manufacture, 25 per cent of which were handled by French personnel.’2
The Germans were partially surprised, and in any case the system of defence in depth made it likely that the first day’s thrust with limited objectives would succeed. Neither Pershing—who was combining the functions of Commander-in-Chief and commander of the First American Army—nor Gouraud on his left met with serious resistance. The advance averaged nearly three miles.
Next day opposition stiffened, and the Americans were much delayed by the difficulty, of which they had small experience, of getting their guns across a shell-pocked No Man’s Land.1 Both armies, however, kept the advance going pretty steadily against tough and skilled resistance from the inner flanks of the Army Groups of Gallwitz and the German Crown Prince. The trouble was in the Argonne, where lack of artillery observation and barriers created by intermingled fallen trees and brushwood proved heavy handicaps. About 5 October a pause occurred, broken only by minor operations. By then the maximum advance of the Americans and French was over eight miles, but in the forest nowhere much beyond half the distance. Losses were heavy.
On 27 September, twenty-four hours after the opening of the Franco-American offensive, the British Third and First Armies launched an attack on a front of eighteen miles with the left flank on the Sensée Canal. It was to be a tremendous offensive, bigger even than the Meuse-Argonne. When the Fourth Army joined in on the 29th forty-one divisions (including two American) would be advancing against forty-one German divisions, whereas in the Meuse-Argonne it was thirty-seven American and French against: thirty-six German. Whereas the country was by nature the easier on the British front, indeed ideal, the obstacles were forbidding. They included the Canal du Nord and Canal de Saint-Quentin, and on the whole Fourth Army front the intact Hindenburg position, three powerful lines of defence. It had the biggest task, and was allotted ten of the fourteen tank battalions available. So the first two days were only the prologue. Yet the swift passage of the Canal du Nord and the six-mile advance which brought the inner flanks of Byng’s and Home’s armies virtually to the gates of Cambrai alarmed O.H.L. On the evening of the 28th Ludendorff told Hindenburg that a request for an armistice ought to be made.
The alarm was heightened by the success of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army. It crossed the Canal de Saint-Quentin—where this held water, the assault troops used collapsible boats, rafts, and three thousand lifebelts borrowed from Channel packets—and breached the first and second Hindenburg systems. Rawlinson, a very good tactician, noting the obstinacy with which the enemy was now disputing the progress of the Third and First Armies, was convinced that by extending the breach north-eastward he could clear their path. On 4 October he smashed a way through the third Hindenburg system. His expectations were fulfilled. The Germans drew back, not only on his front but on that of the Third, First, and even the Fifth Army in the now quiet country between Lens and Armentières.1 So three corps, one of which was American, cleared the front of three armies. The incident points to a flaw in Haig’s masterful handling of the offensive: he parcelled out divisions rather too evenly. This heavy punch on a narrow section of a long front was rarely to be repeated. We must recall, however, that Haig had allotted Rawlinson nearly all the British armour, without which the punch would have lacked its violence.
Haig was dissatisfied with the progress of Débeney, who embarrassed Rawlinson by hanging back on his right. He went so far as to appeal to Foch to urge him on, and the Generalissimo admonished Pétain, and even Débeney directly. The British command believed that Débeney, a first-class soldier, had in mind France’s frightful death-roll and waited for the toughest objectives to be breached first by the British. He was certainly slow, but it is only fair to add that his First Army was faced by a higher proportionate German strength than most others.
The Flanders offensive began on 28 September. The original forces allotted were ten British, twelve Belgian, and six French divisions. The Belgians had fought only one major battle since those of 1914. Since then a hundred and twenty thousand men, the majority refugees, had joined the Army, which was now a hundred and seventy thousand strong. Twenty-two thousand had entered national workshops set up by King Albert. He believed that, with few recruits left, the Army was capable of only one great operation. He had avoided taking part in the Flanders offensive of 1917, which he thought would waste away his forces without adequate return, but he had extended his front in order to make the campaign possible. The Belgians had been the first to stop a German offensive dead. The King was a cool, determined soldier and his army was in good form. He suspected that he had been given a French Chief of Staff in order to rob him of the leadership of his armed forces, of which he could not constitutionally divest himself, and on more than one occasion he asserted his position strongly.2
Despite heavy rain upon the Flanders clay, the first day was a great success. By evening most of the notorious Ypres ridge, wrung from the enemy in the prolonged and bloody struggle of 1917 and afterwards perforce yielded without a battle, was in the hands of the Allies. By the following evening that could be said for it all, and at the Anglo-Belgian junction due east of Ypres the progress exceeded nine miles. The defence of the German Fourth Army was a thing of patches, and the infantry was generally ready to flee or surrender. For a moment the vision of a swift advance providing a chance to roll up the German right hung before the vision of the Allies.
It was a mirage. Once again the Ypres plain lived up to its reputation. The conditions differed from those of 1917. The advance had stridden across the old battlefield into unspoiled country and reached firm ground. It was not now the troops who were bogged, but it came to the same thing, except that they were spared the miseries of a year ago. It was the transport that was caught by the rise of the water in the churned ground. The stoppage was most serious behind the Belgians, the largest contingent. On 2 October fifteen thousand rations for Belgian and French troops were dropped by the Belgian Air Force, with some aid from the R.A.F.1 This hold-up came when the Allies stood facing the German Flanders Position, had indeed pierced its foremost line, and when fresh German divisions had reached the scene. But for local actions, rarely successful, the offensive was hung up until 14 October, while the assailants turned their energies to toil on roads and railways. The convergent operations which Haig had suggested and Foch had decreed were showing no signs of turning the enemy’s flanks and meanwhile Haig’s armies of the left centre had burst into open country.
Thus the plan was not working perfectly. On the other hand, the Allies were clearly marching to victory. Now lift the curtain to survey the German Government, G.H.Q., and O.H.L. It is a scene of defeat.
On 29 September Ludendorff stated at a Council of War that an immediate armistice was necessary. The Foreign Minister, Admiral von Hintze, spoke to his brief by suggesting an appeal to President Wilson on the basis of his ‘Fourteen Points’.2 Hintze, primed here also, advised that the Emperor should initiate democratic government. This would associate the left wing with the defeat and perhaps shift the blame to it. That was only the first of successive efforts by ministers—who behaved from first to last in more dignified fashion than the Hindenburg-Ludendorff duumvirate—to take the responsibility of surrender from the shoulders of the Army. The duumvirs of course agreed. Chancellor Hertling now turned up and was shocked by the armistice proposal. He asked for permission to resign, which was granted. Prince Max of Baden, a Liberal, was offered the appointment, and, after a system of parliamentary government had been decreed, accepted. On 4 October German and Austrian Notes requesting an armistice were sent to the President. Ludendorff was naturally influenced by the collapse of Germany’s ally in Macedonia and the breach opened in the front of the Central Powers, but he made the most of it. Anything to slide the blame off his own shoulders! We must drop the curtain on him again for a moment.
On 12 October Pershing formed the Second Army under the command of Bullard on the more or less inactive front between the Moselle and the Meuse. He handed over the First Army to Liggett, who seems to have been a better tactician than his chief. Clemenceau the Tiger had been roaring about the check and talked of appealing to Wilson to remove Pershing, a proposal which Foch managed to blanket. The renewal of the offensive on 14 October brought but limited success and was extremely costly. The rawer among the American troops exposed themselves as recklessly as the new British divisions on the first day of the Somme. Liggett, who actually took over on the 16th, decided on further reorganization.
Meanwhile Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, covered on the right by Débeney and on the left by Byng, advanced to the new German front on the Selle, and Horne fought his way forward to the Sensée Canal. During the pause before the assault on this position the Germans withdrew to the Hunding-Brünnhilde fortifications, with the French Fifth and Tenth Armies on their heels. Rawlinson’s set attack on 17 October with only four British divisions and two American—the same two as before, one of them the 30th, which had so delighted Haig—broke a reorganized German defence on the Selle. Two days later the Third Army forced a passage of the river lower down, where it was a more formidable obstacle. By the 24th Boehn’s Army Group had taken a dreadful beating and left twenty thousand prisoners on the battlefield of the Selle. This great British victory immensely hastened the German slide to perdition. It could not go on much longer because the bottom was all but reached. Meanwhile the First Army reached the Scheldt Canal at Valenciennes and on the Fifth Army front the Germans fell back so fast to this obstacle that the British pursuit involved little fighting. The enemy was by now desperately short of reserves, ammunition, and horses.
In Flanders the British Second Army in King Albert’s Group forced a passage of the Lys against stiff opposition on 19 October and paved the way for a general allied offensive towards the Scheldt. The French had now formed an army, the Sixth, including two American divisions, in this group.
What of the French Armies between the Americans and the British? Gouraud’s Fourth Army on Pershing’s left played a full and vital part in the offensive, though so far the depth of its advance was less than that of the First American Army. Of the other three no comment more acute and reasonable has been written than the following: ‘With shrewd strategic sense the French in the centre appreciated that decisive results depended on the rapid penetration and closing of the pincers, and so did not unduly hasten the retreat of the Germans facing them. In their skilful advance they usually kept a step in rear of their allies on either flank. . . . If their commanders had been slow to learn how to economize life, they, and still more their men, had learnt it now. Perhaps a shade too well.’1
It may be added in qualification that French casualties in the offensive were very heavy and that from 18 July to the end their haul of prisoners amounted to 74 per cent of the British and three times the American. Their most enterprising army commander was Mangin, who won a fine victory astride the Serre on 18 October, but he did not remain to the end.2
The request for an armistice did not make a cessation of hostilities certain. In fact, Ludendorff, typically for a gambler, had changed his mind about this. The Allies could not afford to let up. In this phase Liggett’s and Gouraud’s armies had heavy fighting. The Americans first broke the German front to the northward, then, simultaneously with the advance in that direction, drove the enemy off the dominating Hauts de Meuse, east of the river. In one day, 1 November, the defence to northward was cracked. The rest was pursuit against rear guards, except for the clearance of the Hauts de Meuse, in which a French Corps under Liggett’s command took part. By 6 November the American left was looking down into Sedan,1 and Americans and French had closed on the Ardennes. This was the thrust that O.H.L. feared most acutely because it would hasten the growing paralysis of the railways.
The French Fifth and Third Armies made only a slight advance, but on 2 November, the progress of the British Third and First was good. On the 4th Rawlinson forced his way across the Sambre-Oise Canal and Débeney followed suit.
Then suddenly everyone was marching. Not very fast, because the German machine-gunners were still troublesome and, more important, the communications were feeling the strain. Railheads were far in rear because the Germans had effected demolitions all along the permanent way and dug in delayed-action mines under it. Road movement was checked because all bridges had been cut and it needed Herculean efforts to push bridging material forward through dense traffic. Food had to be provided for the inhabitants, especially as the Germans had generally taken the cattle and poultry with them. Still, contact was maintained. At certain points fighting was bitter. The American First Army was still hard at it in the early hours of 11 November and effected crossings of the upper Meuse on a wide front. Bullard’s Second Army, having attacked on the 9th, was still advancing slowly. A Canadian battalion cleared the last German machine-guns out of Mons just before first light. Foch was shifting strength eastward for an offensive in Lorraine under the orders of Castelnau, in which he hoped Pershing would allow six American divisions to take part under the orders of Bullard.
We return to the German scene. On 9 October President Wilson’s reply to the request for an armistice was received in Berlin. As preliminaries he demanded acceptance of his Fourteen Points and the evacuation of all occupied territory. After much wrangling these terms were accepted, on the 12th. Then on the 16th came a cold douche from the American President: the conditions of an armistice must be drawn up by the military advisers of the allied Governments. The debate grew hot, Ludendorff making a great show of resisting these conditions. Was it that he could safely do so without preventing an armistice? Prince Max accepted the conditions. On 27 October Ludendorff resigned to avoid formal dismissal. He was succeeded by Groener, who, however, did not return from Russia until the 30th.
The victorious Allies had meanwhile given their naval and military representatives the outline of the terms and Wilson’s suggestion that all details should be left to them had been accepted. Haig’s proposed terms were the mildest. Pétain’s line was more severe. Pershing’s was extremely so. Foch, the final arbiter, followed a middle course. Wilson’s reliance on a military solution had one curious effect. It set up a contrast between his Fourteen Points and the armistice terms, in that the former made no mention of occupation of German territory, whereas the latter provided for it. This gave the Germans an opportunity, eagerly seized, to pretend that they had been tricked. In fact, peace suggestions drawn up in general terms and armistice conditions for a period during which a state of hostilities is only suspended, not terminated, and for which strict and definite precautions are required, are very different matters. It must be added, however, that Foch was careful to provide for German military evacuation of the left bank of the Rhine and bridgeheads on the right, to be held by the victors. This had a political as well as a military object, the former being that if, as he hoped, France were to claim a frontier on the Rhine at the Peace Conference, prior occupation of the bridges was necessary. ‘Only the sacrifice of territory agreed to by the enemy at the time of signing the armistice will remain final.’
Spurred to haste by the Turkish armistice signed on 30 October, by the Austrian armistice signed on 3 November, and by the naval mutiny beginning on 29 October, the German Government nominated its delegates. At their head was the Roman Catholic leader, Matthias Erzberger. A representative of O.H.L. was appointed, but at the last moment withdrawn to bolster the fiction that the armistice had not been demanded by the Army.
In the early hours of 7 November Foch was informed by wireless of the names of the delegates. The German Government also stated that it would be happy if ‘in the interests of humanity’ their arrival were made a signal for a provisional suspension of arms. He disregarded this request, hardly meant to be taken seriously, and simply gave the place and time at which representatives should present themselves at the outposts. Then, accompanied by Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, head of a British naval delegation, he left by train for Rethondes in the Forest of Compiègne. The train was run on to a gun-spur.
Erzberger did some fencing, but obtained only slight technical concessions. It is now known that he was bidden to sign, whatever the terms, and that those offered appeared to him easier than any his highest hopes had envisaged. During the discussion Germany was proclaimed a Republic in Berlin on 9 November and Prince Max resigned, to be succeeded by Fritz Ebert, a Socialist. Early on the 10th the Emperor fled to Holland, followed by the Crown Prince. The Germans signed at 5 a.m. on 11 November. The essentials were:
Cessation of hostilities at 11 a.m. that day
Evacuation of invaded territory and of Alsace-Lorraine
Repatriation of citizens of Allied nations
Surrender of vast stocks of war material (including 5,000 guns and 25,000 machine guns)
Evacuation of the left bank of the Rhine and bridgeheads behind it, to be held by the Allies
Repatriation of Allied prisoners of war, without immediate reciprocity
Surrender of all submarines
Internment of surface vessels as designated by the Allies
From the Swiss frontier to the Moselle the front had not been affected by the great series of offensives. Thence the armistice line ran by Stenay, Sedan, Mézières, Maubeuge, Mons, and Ghent to the Dutch frontier.
That morning the scenes and sounds varied. Here and there a little combat took place even after 11 a.m., but over sections of the front only the occasional thumping of artillery or rattling of machine-guns was heard. Some batteries fired final salvoes just before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Then a strange silence fell. The victorious troops showed no immediate excitement. Doubtless many thought of lost kinsmen and friends, but the incredible fact that all was over left little room for other reflections. At night bonfires were lit here and there. Very lights and coloured rockets were shot into the sky already faintly illuminated by the sickle moon entering its first quarter.