4

KNIGHTS AND PAWNS

And so we went to bed, thoroughly disgusted with our Government and the Politicians.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, 26 February 1917, at the Calais conference

At first, their relationship seemed workable. Haig spoke well of the prime minister, as a man he thought he could work with. Neither knew that their feelings would soon degenerate into a state of mutual contempt that would fester for the rest of their lives. This was not a passing power struggle between a political leader and his commander; this was viscerally personal, as one story reveals. After Haig gave an ill-advised interview to French journalists that came across as vainglorious in The Times’s English translation, infuriating Lloyd George, the prime minister tried to persuade Lord Northcliffe to turn his arsenal of ink on the popular commander. ‘[Lloyd George] made the proposition,’ the press baron recounted, ‘that I should attack [Haig] in my group of newspapers and so render him unpopular enough to be dealt with. “You kill him and I will bury him.” Those were his very words.’¹ (At the time, Lloyd George was the more likely target of Northcliffe’s press.)

At the heart of the dispute lay the question of how best to win the war: Lloyd George and Haig had very different ideas. The prime minister had no faith in Haig’s strategy of attrition, which he saw as pointless butchery. Lloyd George preferred to use the British Army in defence and on a third front in Italy, to limit losses. He later professed that he and the War Cabinet were not told of Haig’s Flanders Plan until June 1917, a month before the ground offensive began, implying that, had he known, he could have stopped it, and that he, at least, was not responsible. (This whitewash is one of several barefaced lies in Lloyd George’s otherwise riveting memoir.)

For one thing, Lloyd George had known of the Flanders Plan as early as 21 November 1916, when the War Committee fastened on ‘the very great desirability … of military action designed either to occupy Ostend or Zeebrugge, or at least render those ports useless as bases for destroyers and submarines,’ according to Asquith’s account. ‘There was no difference of opinion … that the submarine constitutes by far the most dangerous menace to the Allies at the present …’² On the 23rd, the Committee reinforced the point: the ‘expulsion of the enemy from the Belgian coast’ was of the highest importance.³ Lloyd George was not then prime minister, but it is inconceivable that a politician with his ego and hankering to be at the centre of events was unaware of the planning of the most important Allied offensive of 1917.

In January, General Sir William ‘Wully’ Robertson, the hot-headed, popular chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS), apprised Haig of the government’s support for an offensive in Flanders, and the ‘great importance’ it attached ‘to the capture of Ostend and Zeebrugge before next winter’. In whose name was he acting if not in the name of the government of the new prime minister?

Robertson’s letter, dated 1 January 1917, raised the question of whether General Nivelle’s plan for a new offensive in Champagne would prevent Haig ‘from undertaking the operations which you contemplate in Belgium’.⁴ The issue was extremely sensitive, because Haig’s hopes of attacking in Flanders hinged upon the support of his prime minister, which was never a given. Soon it would become clear that Lloyd George saw in Nivelle’s reckless plan for a lightning breakthrough a far more appealing alternative to Haig’s gradual attritional war.

On 5–7 January 1917, Lloyd George attended the Rome conference of Allied leaders and their military advisers to discuss the year’s war plans. True to his flamboyant form, the prime minister stole the show with an idea that tore up everything his advisers thought they had privately agreed before the meeting. Lloyd George had, in fact, been studying an alternative to Haig’s wearing-down war, which he had not discussed with anyone. Even members of his own Cabinet were in the dark, showing just how much the prime minister ran the war as he pleased.

Why not hurl the brunt of the Allied attack at Germany’s weakest point, on the Italian front, along the Isonzo River, Lloyd George asked the conference. ‘Would it not be possible,’ he said, ‘to make a great and sudden stroke against the enemy on the Isonzo front … to inflict a decisive defeat on him, and to press forward to Trieste and get astride the Istrian Peninsula?’⁵

‘No’, the delegates variously said or thought, ‘it would not’. The idea defied all conventional military sense. The British military advisers, led by Robertson, were ‘completely taken aback at finding their own Prime Minister putting forward a plan they had never heard of’.⁶ Robertson bit hard on his humiliation and calmly opposed the idea.

The French officials firmly rejected it. The British leader’s Italian ‘strategy’ was wrong-headed on several grounds, the commanders pointed out, not least because 130 of Germany’s 200 divisions, including the enemy’s best units, were then stationed along the Western Front – and any weakening of Allied pressure risked provoking an enemy offensive. The war would be won or lost in France and Belgium, the French and British delegations argued. To shift guns and men to Italy would denude the French and Belgian lines of defence and encourage the Germans to attack.

Even the callous and incompetent General Luigi Cadorna, the Italian commander-in-chief, who would fight a string of failed offensives on the Isonzo, was reluctant to agree to the reinforcement of the Italian front, despite his own government’s delight at the prospect.

Lloyd George refused to release his Italian bone: 20,000 railway wagons, he said, could safely transport the Anglo-French forces to Italy without fear of submarine attack, and Britain could spare much of its heavy artillery for a third front in Italy. Had the man lost his senses? Was Lloyd George seriously suggesting that they dismantle their vital defensive positions on the Western Front? And pack off the heavy guns in France and Flanders, then holding back the German steamroller, to Italy?

The delegates consigned the idea to a respectful oblivion, at least for now: the three governments’ military advisers agreed to examine the proposal and respond in good time.⁷ If they hoped the idea would sit and gather dust, they underestimated the British leader. He would never abandon his cherished Italian offensive (not even to appease Lord Northcliffe, who, on 2 January, had threatened to bring down the government if Lloyd George dared to move two divisions from the western theatre). It was a measure of Lloyd George’s extraordinary self-confidence – a union of wilful ignorance and sincere determination to spare Britain another Somme – that he reckoned he could turn the great ship of war to Italy.

For now, at least, the prime minister was obliged to stick with the Western Front, where his gaze settled on a fresh plan that owed nothing to Haig and promised fewer casualties: the lightning offensive envisaged by the dashing new French commander, General Robert Nivelle, the hero of Verdun. The Nivelle Offensive, when he heard of it, was music to Lloyd George’s ears. It aimed to break the German line on the Aisne River in a matter of days, heave the enemy out of France and end Haig’s war of attrition.

Robert Nivelle, 61, was a supremely self-confident artilleryman who had convinced himself, if not his fellow generals, that the artillery barrages with which he’d won the last battles of Verdun would work in the wider, better-defended theatre of the Aisne valley. Saturation shelling on an unprecedented scale followed by a concentrated, creeping barrage in advance of waves of shock troops would rupture the German lines and win the war. Best of all, in the politicians’ eyes, the Nivelle Offensive would be a short sharp blow with comparatively few casualties. All Nivelle needed was 48 hours, the Frenchman promised, and if the breakthrough took longer he promised he’d call the whole thing off.

Nivelle laid his plan before Haig on 20 December 1916. It aimed, Nivelle wrote, ‘to destroy the main body of the enemy’s armies on the Western Front’. The French forces, with British help, would ‘pin down as large a portion as possible of the hostile forces’ in the Somme and Arras–Bapaume sectors, while an ‘attaque brusquée’ would ‘break the enemy’s front in such a manner that the rupture can be immediately exploited’.⁸ If it failed, ‘it will still be possible’, Nivelle reassured Haig, ‘to carry out in fine weather (á la belle saison) the operations projected in Flanders’.⁹

At first, Haig gave his French counterpart the benefit of the doubt (he would later change his mind). The British commander agreed that ‘a decisive blow’ should be ‘struck by surprise’ now that ‘the Enemy’s morale is weakened’.¹⁰ Brigadier General John Charteris, Haig’s unreliable intelligence officer, spoke in awe of Nivelle’s self-confidence and how the Frenchman ‘sees big’.¹¹

Nivelle was strong on grand statements but short on detail. Who would lead the Anglo-French forces? Would there be a unity of command? At what point would the British and Dominion troops be released from the French offensive and entrained to Flanders? The transfer would involve a gigantic logistical operation, moving hundreds of thousands of men and huge amounts of ammunition and supplies. How would this be achieved?

With these questions high in mind, Haig told the French general (on 6 January 1917) that he would support the attack on the Aisne on the condition that it had a strict time limit: the decisive attack, Haig reminded Nivelle, would be of short duration (up to fourteen days in the opening bombardment phase, and 24–48 hours in the second phase). If Nivelle failed to get results in this time frame, Haig reserved the freedom to break off the offensive and move his troops to Flanders. ‘[T]he clearance of the Belgian coast,’ he wrote, ‘is of such importance to the British Government that it must be fully provided for before I can finally agree to your proposals.’¹² Haig henceforth planned two offensives in 1917: on the Vimy, Arras and Ancre sectors in France, in support of Nivelle’s left flank, scheduled for April; and in Flanders, on the Ypres Salient, scheduled to start in late July.

Haig proceeded on the assumption that his prime minister, whatever their personal differences, retained faith in his operational ability. For a commander of such experience, Haig could appear strangely guileless. He saw himself as a man of his word, an upholder of the Victorian values of honour and self-respect. He disdained the strange, slithering beast of the politician. Haig despised the political type, their venality, their molten nature, the ease with which they poured themselves into a new vessel and threw out the old. If you had told Haig then that Lloyd George was about to cast aside the strategic priority of the Belgian coast, he would have disbelieved you. If you had told Haig then that his prime minister was secretly working with the French to subordinate him to Nivelle, he would have thought you mad.

Lloyd George’s infatuation with Nivelle reached a high point on 15–16 January, when the Frenchman arrived at a conference in London to present his plan for victory. Nivelle was a great success. His dash and pluck charmed the ladies and enthralled the men. A smallish man, with a well-pruned moustache and an excellent command of English (the gift of his English mother), Nivelle deeply impressed Lloyd George, who, playing the amateur phrenologist, remarked that he liked the Frenchmen’s head. ‘He often judged men in this way,’ observed Brigadier General Edward Spears, the Anglo-French liaison officer. ‘[H]e either liked the shape of a man’s head or he did not’.¹³ Lloyd George also liked the way Nivelle spoke, and he quickly persuaded himself that the Frenchman’s plan was the right one.

In Nivelle, the prime minister espied a fellow man who got things done. Nivelle’s all-or-nothing gamble on the Aisne spoke to Lloyd George’s penchant for decisive, fleet-footed action over Haig’s long ‘bleeding’ war. What’s more, Nivelle was easier to comprehend, Lloyd George cruelly joked, than his famously inarticulate commander-in-chief. The Nivelle Offensive appealed to him for another reason: ever mindful of the rising body count, Lloyd George assumed that French troops would bear the brunt of the fighting – and the casualties.

Not everyone shared the prime minister’s faith in Nivelle. The Frenchman’s victory-clenching battle plan failed to persuade the experts in the War Office, who refused to believe that saturation bombing, however concentrated, could destroy nine to twelve lines of trenches set in a defensive system five to twelve miles deep. Nor were they convinced that the French guns could be moved up in time to support the advancing infantry, who, without artillery cover, would be cut to pieces. Yet the Nivelle Plan hinged on a breakthrough within 48 hours, a feat that neither side had accomplished in two years. The boffins in the War Office were ignored: Nivelle so impressed the British Cabinet that Lloyd George dismissed the criticisms as signs of weakness. He even ordered Robertson to send a special instruction to Haig to back Nivelle’s proposal ‘in the letter and in the spirit’ and on no account to keep the Frenchman waiting.

The Nivelle Plan gathered the support of powerful civilians. Soon, in Lloyd George’s mind, it had eclipsed the Flanders Plan. The U-boat menace on the Belgian coast, once thought so dangerous, receded as a priority. Nivelle himself dismissed the attack on the submarine bases as ‘an idée fixe’: a British obsession that would merely push the submarines eastward. The real war was in north-eastern France, he insisted. Only after the defeat of Germany on French soil, he granted, would the lesser glory of clearing Belgium fall to the British.

As the terrible day approached, Nivelle made ever more strident claims for his plan, propelled by the unwavering support of Colonel d’Alenson, his chef de cabinet, ‘a Napoleon without genius’ who was dying of phthisis and who burned for victory over Germany before he expired.¹⁴ Yet Nivelle’s nerves began to tell: he had never commanded an army on this scale; he received slender political support, in the form of Prime Minister Aristide Briand, himself in a fragile political state; and he enjoyed none of the affection the French people had bestowed on Joffre and Foch.

Nivelle overcompensated for his anxiety with a puffed up sense of his own importance, displaying a dangerous tendency to treat Haig as a subordinate (as field marshal, Haig easily outranked the French general). On 25 January, Nivelle wrote to his British counterpart in dictatorial tones, heavy with the presumption that the British and Dominion armies were a part of the French Army. This deeply rankled at Haig’s headquarters, where the issue of command had not yet been resolved.

As yet unknown to Haig, these were the opening salvoes of a ‘wearing-down war’ against the British commander, conducted behind the scenes by Lloyd George in concert with the French Government. The prime minister had privately decided to place Haig and his forces at the beck and call of Nivelle. If Lloyd George could not sack his commander-in-chief, under his pledge to the Conservatives, he could so humiliate him that Haig’s pride would do the rest and he would resign.

On the face of it, a more despicable act of sabotage of a commander-in-chief by his prime minister is difficult to imagine. For his part, Lloyd George had persuaded himself that his intentions justified this act of gross disloyalty: he wanted No More Sommes. That meant taking the reins of the British Army out of Haig’s blood-soaked hands and putting them in the Frenchman’s.

The prime minister delivered the body blow at the Calais conference on 26–27 February 1917, innocuously convened to resolve an Anglo-French dispute over railway lines in the British zone of operations. Well in advance, Lloyd George had made the true agenda of the meeting clear to the French Government but not to his own commanders: that was, to hand over command of the British forces in France to the French.

An unappealing feature of Lloyd George’s character was the puerile way in which he relished the coming destruction of his rivals, real or imagined. Buoyed by the blow he was about to inflict, he laughed and joked on the journey across the Channel. Yet the shooting down of Haig had an ingredient of calculated malice extreme even by Lloyd George’s methods.¹⁵

Haig and Robertson travelled to Calais suspecting nothing. Unusually, Robertson had not been invited to attend the War Cabinet two days earlier, because he would have opposed the scheme to dethrone Haig and blown the plot. Lloyd George merely suggested to the four-man meeting that agreements reached in London about the command structure would be formalised in Calais. Maurice Hankey, the formidable secretary of the War Cabinet, mildly minuted this as an endeavour to adopt ‘such measures as might appear best calculated … to ensure unity of command’.¹⁶ The Calais meeting would complete Haig’s deception in the most destructive way.¹⁷

The conference began at 3.30 pm in the Hotel of the Gare Maritime, a harbour-side haunt of illicit lovers, recently seasick passengers and anxious immigrants, flung up in the path of a restless, moaning wind. Lloyd George and Hankey represented the British Government; Prime Minister Aristide Briand and Minister for War General Hubert Lyautey, the French. Between them sat Haig and Nivelle, and fellow generals and staff members. The minds of the French and British commanders moved in different orbits. Haig and Robertson arrived expecting a robust discussion about logistics and railway timetables, involving Auckland Geddes, the director of recruiting at the War Office – though the presence of such powerful personages must have alerted them to the likelihood of a far more important agenda. Nivelle arrived expecting to hear the confirmation of his appointment as supreme commander of the French and British forces, which he presumed a fait accompli. (Nivelle would soon tearfully claim that he knew nothing of the plot to unseat Haig, and that it shocked him to find that he’d been used as the unwitting instrument of a politician’s dirty work. In fact, Nivelle had known the French were plotting to seize command of the British Army in late December 1916, though in fairness he may not have known the extent of Haig’s ignorance.)¹⁸

The mood rapidly deteriorated when the meeting reconvened at 5.30 pm, and Lloyd George raised the question of unity of command. ‘The enemy has but one army,’ he said. ‘The Entente Powers should secure for themselves the same advantage, especially in battle. If we do not do this we cannot hope for success.’¹⁹ He asked for complete frankness, and invited Nivelle to present his plan and to raise any differences of opinion he had with ‘Marshal Haig’. The prime minister urged Nivelle ‘to keep nothing back’.²⁰

After a little prefatory padding on the strengths of his relationship with Haig, the Frenchman rather hesitantly advanced the idea that unity of command was indispensable. Goaded by Lloyd George to force the point, Nivelle bluntly declared that France should have full command of the British forces.

Haig’s camp met this with astonished silence. Haig then opened his mouth, firmly declaring that he would decide ‘where and how I would dispose of my troops …’²¹ To relieve the tension, Nivelle was asked to put his terms in writing. The meeting adjourned.

The slow humiliation of Field Marshal Haig and his commanders resumed at 8 pm that night, when General Nivelle handed his written terms to Lloyd George, in the prime minister’s rooms. Haig and Robertson were not then present. These terms stated that the French commander-in-chief ‘will, as from March 1st, have command over the British forces operating on [the Western Front], in all matters affecting the conduct of operations’.²² The extraordinary document sought to give the French commander absolute power over planning, operations, munitions and supplies of the British Army, leaving Haig in command of discipline and arranging reinforcements – the powers, in effect, of little more than a provost marshal. A British ‘Quarter Master General’ would be installed at the French headquarters in Beauvais, through whom Haig would have to communicate to reach London.

Under this ‘unity of command’, the British Army, along with its Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African components, would henceforth cease to exist as a distinct entity and would become a mere appendage of the French, rather like the colonial forces of Morocco or Algeria. Lloyd George professed himself satisfied with the document, apparently unaware of the extent to which he would be handing over the camel of the British forces to France and leaving Haig barely holding its tail. The Dominions had had little say in the transaction that would bargain away the control of their soldiers. (Australia’s prime minister Billy Hughes had been unable to attend the Imperial War Cabinet meetings in early 1917, leaving him in a state of ‘complete ignorance’ of negotiations that would have a direct bearing on Australia’s army.)²³

Digesting the translation of Nivelle’s statement over dinner that night, Robertson turned a deep shade of red and showed ‘every sign of having a fit’.²⁴ ‘Get ’Aig!’ he yelled. On reading it, Haig was speechless with rage at the connivance of his prime minister with the French in his effective removal from command of the British Army. Spears would later compare this ‘monstrous farce’ to a Borgia family dinner at which the guests were pronounced poisoned upon the arrival of dessert.²⁵ ‘Seldom in history,’ his florid account continued, ‘can Englishmen have been asked to subscribe to such abject conditions. It seemed incredible that the greatest army we had ever sent abroad, now at the height of its power and absolutely confident of its superiority over the enemy, should be confronted with terms such as might be imposed on a vassal state.’²⁶

The execrable terms would be rejected, of course. The two commanders carried their rage – Haig’s silent and wounded, Robertson’s sulphuric – to the prime minister’s rooms at 10 pm that night. A violent row ensued. ‘[I]t would be madness to place the British under the French,’ Haig told the prime minister, adding that he ‘did not believe our troops would fight under French leadership’.²⁷ Lloyd George hit back with the insulting insinuation, ‘I know the British soldier very well. He speaks more freely to me and there are people he criticises a good deal more strongly than General Nivelle.’²⁸ Lloyd George concluded by shouting that Nivelle would command the British forces, and he showed his top soldiers the door.

They retreated to Robertson’s rooms for a post-mortem, joined by Lieutenant General Launcelot Kiggell, chief of the general staff of the British Armies in France. Aghast at their treatment, but braced by Hankey’s revelation that Lloyd George had not received ‘full authority’ to act from the War Cabinet, Robertson proposed the mass resignation of the top brass. He quickly thought the better of it. He was needed now, as never before, to defend the British Army. Instead, the commanders decided to disobey the plan, even though that meant disobeying their own government. They would ‘rather be tried by Court Martial than betray the Army’ by placing it under the French. ‘And so we went to bed,’ Haig brooded in his diary, ‘thoroughly disgusted with our Government and the Politicians.’²⁹

That night, Hankey prevailed upon Lloyd George to soften the arrangement, to preserve a semblance of cooperation. The prime minister reluctantly agreed, and Hankey and Major General Frederick Maurice found themselves deputed to stay up all night and hammer out a solution.

The next morning, in a meeting with Robertson (which Haig refused to attend), Lloyd George tabled a modified proposal: Nivelle would command the British Army only for the planning and duration of his offensive, after which Haig’s powers would be reinstated. Robertson rejected this, and fought tooth and nail for the army’s independence. Haig fired off a memo, warning that the proposal to subordinate the British forces to the French ‘must involve the disappearance of the British commander-in-chief and GHQ’: ‘So drastic a change in our system seems to me to be fraught with the gravest danger.’³⁰

Lloyd George thrashed about in a rage, and refused to compromise. After much coming and going between hotel rooms, a deal was reached: Nivelle would command the French and British forces on the Western Front for the duration of the offensive; Haig would have the right to challenge French orders if he believed they ‘would compromise the safety of his army’ and be free to choose the means of deploying his troops in the ‘zone of operations [the French] allotted him’.³¹ It was the best the British commanders could hope for, and they signed. From that moment, until the end of Nivelle’s campaign, the British Army would be a unit of the French.

Haig left Calais bridling with unconcealed disgust at the proceedings. He lunched at Boulogne, where he overheard a remark by General Joseph Micheler, commander of the French reserves, who happened to be sharing his doubts about the Nivelle Offensive: ‘it does not matter what the politicians decide’, Haig later quoted Micheler as saying, ‘the French soldier is not going to fight after the autumn!’³²

Haig and Robertson would never forgive Lloyd George for what they saw as an act of gross disloyalty. They were soldiers, above all; their loyalty to the army was indivisible. And so, on their return to London, Robertson at once informed the Army Council of what had happened, turning the ‘icy douche’ of responsibility on the government.³³ Ministers, he stressed, would now be held accountable for the safety of the troops and the consequences of a decision taken without his or Haig’s agreement. He made violently clear that his signature on the paper did not indicate concurrence.³⁴ His anger festering, Robertson later wrote to Haig, ‘I cannot believe that a man such as he can remain for long head of any Government. Surely some honesty and truth are required.’³⁵

Haig offered his resignation to the King, who rejected it. The old friends agreed that it was ‘a calamity for the country to have such a man at the head of affairs in this time of great crisis’.³⁶ Haig’s diary summed up the weight on his mind: ‘All would be so easy if I only had to deal with the Germans.’³⁷ ‘LG,’ he told his wife, is ‘looking about to find something else to increase his reputation as the “man of the hour” and the saviour of England. However I am doing my best and have a clear conscience. If they have someone else who can command this great Army better than I am doing, I shall be glad to hand over to him, and will be happy to come back to my darling wife and play golf and bring up the children.’³⁸

The War Cabinet regrouped on 28 February, and the prime minister made a half-hearted effort to patch things up. The Calais agreement, he back-pedalled, ‘merely’ sought to secure a ‘clearly defined unity of control’, and in no sense cast aspersions on Haig’s ability and qualifications, ‘in whom the War Cabinet continued to entertain full confidence’.³⁹ One can almost hear Wully Robertson’s heart thumping with Scottish rage at this twisted representation.

Unity of command should have devolved upon an overarching commander to whom Haig and Nivelle were equally answerable, under an Anglo-French war committee. Instead, the British commanders now faced the complete immersion of their beloved army into the French one. What neither man fully realised was that the subordination of Haig was the first blow in Lloyd George’s personal campaign against his ‘unsackable’ commander-in-chief. On either side, feelings were incandescent.

The war that had seemed like ‘noises off’ in this tawdry drama of power and control was allowed to resume. On 8 March, Haig was told that he ‘enjoyed the full confidence of the War Cabinet’; a week later, fresh words were inserted into the agreement, according to which ‘the British Army and the Commander-in-Chief will be regarded by General Nivelle as Allies and not subordinates, except during the particular operations … explained at the Calais Conference’.⁴⁰ Haig set aside his personal misgivings and resolved to enact the agreement to the letter.

Nivelle, however, nonplussed at not getting full control over the British, now revealed himself as the kind of man who sought power for its own sake. He continued to dispatch orders to Haig’s headquarters, eliciting the latter’s contempt for this ‘junior foreign commander’, a remark that did Haig no favours.⁴¹ The French general added to Haig’s woes by requesting that General Sir Henry Wilson, the bellicose Francophile schemer whom Haig deeply distrusted, be made head of the British Mission at Beauvais, through whom Haig would have to liaise.

Haig shot off a letter steaming with indignation at Nivelle’s ‘dictatorial language’ and bid to ‘grasp more power over our Armies’ than was agreed at Calais. He demanded that the British Government inform the French that their commanders had no authority to issue orders to British units other than through himself; and that Nivelle had no right to inspect British or Dominion units, ‘visit them’ or remove their troops from the line without his consent. He was even reduced to asking the Cabinet to dispatch an ‘expression of confidence in myself’ to the French authorities, painfully revealing just how little confidence Haig felt his government had in him.⁴²

Clearly, it was an unworkable arrangement, and the friction escalated. A ‘dangerous divergence of views’ now arose between Haig and Nivelle, the War Cabinet heard on 8 March. Haig had refused to cooperate, the French Government complained. Haig found it galling to be at the beck and call of a French officer of lower rank, in whose plans he had little faith; and with every slight, every humiliation, Haig’s contempt for Lloyd George deepened.

The next day, the British Government meekly complained to the French that Nivelle’s office had treated Haig as a subordinate (no surprise, surely, as that was exactly what the prime minister had reduced him to) and not an equal temporarily under Nivelle’s orders, itself a meaningless notion.⁴³ The fallout could imperil the Allied cause if the dysfunctional arrangement continued, so Lloyd George proposed another meeting to resolve the crisis.⁴⁴ This came to nothing; the French Government declined to attend.

On 14 March, the War Cabinet struck a conciliatory note. Haig (in one of his rare appearances) was asked whether he felt he had the ‘personal freedom of action’ necessary to deal with a surprise attack by the enemy on the Flanders front. He replied through gritted teeth that his freedom to act in Flanders would be assured so long as Nivelle didn’t take his troops ‘out of my hands at the critical moment’.⁴⁵

A few days later, Jellicoe, the first sea lord, posed a similar question: were British ground troops prepared for a possible enemy attack by sea, to the rear of Haig’s forces, at Nieuport? Jellicoe calculated that the Germans could land 20,000–30,000 troops using tugs and lighters assembled in the canals of Zeebrugge and Ostend.⁴⁶ A man less self-disciplined than Haig might have barked back that a disloyal prime minister had removed his power to act. Again, Haig kept his composure. No, he had not detected signs of enemy preparations for a seaborne invasion, he replied, warning however that ‘our coastal defences were not designed to deal with anything more than small raids’.⁴⁷

A month before the French offensive, Nivelle’s brittle confidence took a battering. In March, Briand lost power to his declared enemy Paul Painlevé, who became minister for war. A socialist intellectual, Painlevé thoroughly disliked Nivelle and thought his battle plan a recipe for ‘mass manslaughter’.⁴⁸ He threw his support behind Nivelle’s rival, General Philippe Pétain, the ‘Lion of Verdun’ and a national hero, who had consistently argued that the French infantry should dig in and wait until the Americans arrived. When Painlevé took office, on 19 March, however, Nivelle’s plans were too far advanced to halt. The new minister yielded to the momentum and hoped for the best.

Nivelle’s great moment approached. Heavy rains postponed zero hour well into April. The French train system groaned under the vast logistical exercise, and the target itself – the German forces stationed along the Aisne – seemed to be thinning out. The weary French Army began moving up, and the British diversionary battles, at Vimy Ridge and Arras, were set in motion.

Neither Nivelle nor Lloyd George, in their enthusiasm for the two-day miracle, had paused to consider the state of the French soldiers who were supposed to achieve it. Lloyd George’s readiness to accept huge French (and Italian) casualties ahead of British ones underscored the political over the humanitarian motive that prevailed. Yet any commander, or politician, with an ounce of compassion should have been able to see that the French troops were not up to the job. After their staggering losses at Verdun, these men were being ordered, again, to charge into the furnace.

That scarcely troubled Nivelle, who assumed the poilu would never tire of throwing his blue-uniformed body at German guns. Exhausted, badly fed and utterly demoralised, many had not had leave in months. Most had lost friends, brothers and sons at Verdun. Since 1914, between 2,560,000 and 3,285,000 French soldiers (depending on the source) had been killed or wounded, compared with 1,120,204 British and Dominion troops. The French people were numb with grief and the French Army close to collapse.⁴⁹

Meanwhile, on the other side of no-man’s-land, the Germans were fully aware of what the French were about to attempt. Nivelle had unwisely circulated his plan to the lower ranks. On 3 March, the Germans captured a French sergeant who happened to possess ‘a memorandum … of extraordinary value’, noted Crown Prince Rupprecht, commander of Army Group Rupprecht, ‘as to the particular nature of the surprise which the attacker has in view’.⁵⁰ On 6 April, a German raid captured the order of attack of France’s Fifth Army, laying out the Nivelle Plan in detail. The Germans immediately deployed 30 fresh divisions (about 400,000 men) to reinforce the vulnerable sector, and extended and fortified the wire and trench lines.

At this point, the Germans were able to draw on hundreds of thousands of fresh troops, thanks to mass conscription and the imminent arrival of reinforcements from the Eastern Front. The March Revolution had heralded the end of Russia’s participation in the war, and the redeployment west had begun. By April 1917, 151 German divisions (almost two million men) were entrenched on the Western Front, compared with 119 at the start of the Somme. The number of German rifles ‘opposing us’ was 100,000 greater than the total on the first day of the Somme, Robertson warned the War Cabinet on 10 April 1917.⁵¹ That said, the combined French and British forces exceeded four million, and they had many more guns than the Germans.

Bedevilling Nivelle’s hopes were reports of the curious absence of the German front line. The enemy seemed to be deserting his posts. The Australian forces first noticed it: a strange silence issuing from various points along the front. Patrols were sent to investigate, and, sure enough, the enemy were abandoning their posts. Word arrived of agricultural work ceasing, and plant and equipment being destroyed. The reports gradually formed a pattern, and the pattern conformed to an order. They had detected the early signs of a massive defensive withdrawal.

All along the entire front, the German forces were pulling back, under Operation Alberich, ordered by Ludendorff on 4 February. Between 9 February and 19 March, the German Army steadily withdrew to the heavily fortified ‘Siegfried Line’ (the Allies would soon call it the Hindenburg Line), a ribbon of steel that German engineers had been constructing for months. It comprised a system of wire, trenches and concrete pillboxes twenty to thirty miles deep and in places extending as far back as fifty miles. The withdrawal, timed to coincide with the resumption of the submarine war, was a shrewd defensive move designed to narrow the German front and ease the pressure on the army.

The scorched earth policy that preceded it brought the opprobrium of the world down on Berlin’s head. The French and British forces witnessed the wretched result, as they moved onto formerly German-occupied territory to get close enough to attack: terrified French villagers disgorged from the rubble of their homes. For two years, these French border towns had hosted the German forces; now the residents had become refugees in their own country. Many women bore the evidence of occupation, in the fair-haired babies of German fathers. ‘Can you love me still, who have loved you always?’ some would appeal to their French husbands on being reunited. ‘No physical suffering I saw or heard of during the war,’ wrote Spears, ‘equalled or even approached that raw agony.’⁵²

The British journalist Philip Gibbs witnessed the gutting of ‘the cottages of the peasants, and all their farms and all their orchards’ across the Somme valley. At Réthonvillers, one village of many, he saw ‘how each house was marked with a white cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ was used to mark the work of the Devil.’ Witnessing the women and children in the streets, and staring at him out of windows, ‘I was stuck with a chill of horror. The women’s faces were dead faces, sallow and mask-like, and branded with the memory of great agonies. The children were white and thin – so thin that their cheekbones protruded. Hunger and fear had been with them too long.’⁵³

The Germans left nothing edible or useable: the fields were devastated; livestock slaughtered; villages and towns depopulated and burned; the wells polluted. ‘Nearly every tree in the Aisne Department has been felled,’ reported one observer.⁵⁴ Booby traps primed to explode were attached to shovels, doors and displaced duckboards. Delayed-action bombs destroyed buildings, such as the town hall in Bapaume after the British occupied it. A recent environmental study of warfare described the German withdrawal as the ‘cold-blooded and systematic devastation of the countryside’.⁵⁵

Ludendorff would justify it as a painful strategic necessity – ‘we had no choice’ – admitting that it implied ‘a confession of weakness bound to raise the morale of the enemy’. He claimed his forces had not poisoned the wells, and had salvaged any valuable works of art.⁵⁶ His objectives were to narrow the front and ‘avoid battle’, salvage German guns and equipment, and destroy ‘highroads, villages, towns and wells’ to prevent the enemy ‘establishing himself in force … in front of our position’.⁵⁷ In pure strategic terms, the German pullback was a stroke of brilliance: the soldiers’ entrenchment along a slimmer, better-fortified front plugged the gaps in their line and transformed them into a far more dangerous defensive force.

Even as the German Army dematerialised, Nivelle insisted that his plan would triumph. He would outflank the Germans, if necessary, from the other side of the Hindenburg Line: ‘In this respect the German retirement may be entirely to our advantage.’⁵⁸ Nivelle reckoned on advancing twenty miles in three days. None of his senior commanders, not Pétain or Micheler or the howitzer-shaped General Franchet d’Espèrey, had any confidence in its success: the Nivelle Plan was unravelling before their eyes. On 6 April, beset by doubts, Nivelle presented French president Raymond Poincaré with an ultimatum: approve my plan or accept my resignation. Poincaré gave Nivelle the nod, and the French commander repaired at once to his new headquarters in a chateau near Chantilly, a former residence of Marie Antoinette, trailed by his wine cellar and chefs.

The British ‘diversion’ at Arras followed a week-long artillery barrage. At first light on 9 April, British and Dominion forces surged over the top, in a series of attacks aimed at diverting German reserves from the much bigger action soon to erupt in Champagne. It started well. The Canadian Corps stormed Vimy Ridge and captured it, at the cost of 10,500 casualties, in perhaps the greatest set-piece battle of the war. Further south, General Edmund Allenby’s Third Army advanced three-and-a-half miles in a day, the ‘greatest distance accomplished at a bound since the onset of trench warfare’,⁵⁹ and pierced the Hindenburg Line in several places. By 11 April, the British, Canadians and Anzacs had taken 11,000 prisoners – a record in so short a time. The War Cabinet were delighted; Haig should receive a telegram of congratulations, they decided.⁶⁰

Bad news soon arrived, and with it despair. In a pattern that would soon scar battle after battle, German counter-offensives reclaimed much of the lost ground, and dogged trench warfare resumed. While the Canadians held Vimy, the British were forced back and lost most of their gains at Arras. The casualties between 9 April and 16 May were 159,000, a daily average of 4076 killed, wounded and missing, which would prove to be the worst daily casualty rate of any major battle of the First World War.⁶¹ If Arras wore down the Germans, taught the British lessons on the ‘tactical learning curve’⁶² and amounted to ‘a victory of sorts’,⁶³ as some claim, it is hard to imagine what a real setback would look like.

At the same time came news of the Anzac disasters at Bullecourt. The unpopular British general Hubert Gough, who led the attacks, cursed his soldiers’ chances from the start. Exhausted after their long march to the front, the Australians and New Zealanders were sent straight into battle across open ground without artillery cover. To maximise the element of surprise, Gough ordered them to advance behind a dozen tanks, despite the fact they had no experience in tank tactics. The Anzac commander, Lieutenant General William Birdwood, expressed his gravest reservations; Gough overruled him. When only four tanks arrived in time, the attack was postponed and the forward troops streamed back from the jumping-off points, ‘disappointed, exasperated … like a crowd returning from a football match’.⁶⁴

Bullecourt resumed the next day: Gough made no allowance for the complete loss of surprise. At 3 am on 11 April, the Anzacs again moved into position behind the tanks, over a field drenched in German gas. The tanks advanced slowly, like lumbering tortoises, easy targets for shellfire and armour-piercing bullets. All were out of action by 7 am, and half the crews dead or wounded. Unprotected by tanks or guns, the Anzacs continued advancing. They were mown down. Those who reached the German lines, in scenes reminiscent of Loos, died on the wire. Some briefly penetrated the Hindenburg Line before the Württembergers, fighting ‘like demons’, reclaimed the lost ground.

Thus ended the First Battle of Bullecourt, another heroic failure: the Australian 4th Division lost 3000 officers and men. The Anzacs would never forgive Gough, whose ‘almost boyish eagerness to deliver a death blow’, wrote Charles Bean, ‘broke at every stage rules … recognised even by platoon commanders’.⁶⁵ Second Bullecourt would further poison relations between the Anzacs and their British commander (though, in fairness, the Anzac generals made their own errors in the second battle). The memory of the Somme and Bullecourt made up the minds of the Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians: they would never serve under Gough again, if they could help it.

Meanwhile, a tragedy of epic proportions was unfolding in Champagne. Here, the world was about to witness the spectacular folly of a man whose mind had lost touch with reality and whose obsession with his war-winning plan appeared to intensify with every premonition of its failure. A commander absorbed in his plans must at times take the enemy into consideration, Churchill had icily observed. Schlieffen, Joffre and Holtzendorff had been deaf to this advice. Now Nivelle would join their ranks – on a similarly devastating scale. Every word of dissent, Nivelle had rejected; every plea to reconsider – from Pétain, Painlevé and his own generals – he flung to the wind, wildly confident of his belief in Germany’s imminent defeat. ‘No consideration should intervene of a nature to weaken the élan of the attack,’ Nivelle told Micheler on 1 April. By then, Nivelle was beyond recall to a saner world.

His forces were immense. Nivelle drew on almost a million Frenchmen in the Aisne River valley, supported by 4800 guns and an estimated 1000 aircraft. The Germans on the opposing heights fielded 480,000 men, 2431 German guns and 640 German aircraft. At dawn on 16 April, the first waves of French troops advanced under sheets of sleet into a stretch of the most difficult terrain on the Western Front – steep gorges, swampy river valleys and sandy rock faces. Enemy machine guns commanded every ridge and spur. German intelligence had been precise: the French attacked exactly where and when expected. They were cut to pieces. The Senegalese colonials fled the field. Nivelle’s men gained 600 yards on the first day; he’d promised six miles.⁶⁶

As the news came in, Nivelle tried to soften expectations. His first reports were models of military obfuscation. Gradually the whole ghastly enterprise revealed itself to the French and British Governments: the much-touted breakthrough, the darling of Lloyd George, had failed according to all its benchmarks. During the first four days, almost 30,000 French troops had been killed, 100,000 wounded and 4000 captured, more than ten times Nivelle’s original casualty estimate for the first day.⁶⁷

The walking wounded fell back through a great pall of smoke and thunder, their faces disfigured with despair. ‘It’s all over,’ some variously told Spears. ‘We can’t do it. We shall never do it. C’est impossible.’ That day, Spears witnessed something he thought he’d never see in the French lines: ‘These men were broken in spirit as well as body.’⁶⁸ Nivelle had foolishly promised a breakthrough within 48 hours. His pride would not accept defeat, and he flogged the offensive for three more weeks, exterminating some of the finest units in the French republic. He called it off on 9 May, an absolute slaughter: 187,000 French men killed, wounded and missing, against 163,000 German losses. It was France’s worst casualty rate since November 1914, for a few miles of useless ground.⁶⁹

Nivelle was sacked and dispatched to North Africa. On 15 May, Marshal Philippe Pétain took command of the French forces, an army on its knees. Pétain moved quickly to salvage what was left of their self-esteem. He spoke personally to the men, anxious to rebuild some of their famous esprit de corps. Yet the French Army were finished as a fighting force, at least for the rest of the year. On 19 May, Pétain decided to postpone future offensives and rest his men in defensive positions until more tanks and the Americans arrived.⁷⁰

The French Army, Pétain realised, had further to fall. For almost three years, France had been devouring the best of her young men. She had thus far suffered the greatest loss of life in any battle in military history. Verdun had been monstrous, but Nivelle’s fiasco proved the last straw. The soldiers felt ill-used, hungry and furious at their conditions: French soldiers were paid a fraction of the daily rate of factory workers. From 3 May, the growl of mutiny spread through the ranks. Two regiments of a colonial division deserted, brandishing placards in their barracks: ‘Down with the War! Death to those who are Responsible!’⁷¹

The mutiny spread like a bushfire. Nivelle’s most damaged divisions led the insurrection. Soldiers singing ‘The Internationale’ threw down their weapons and ransacked their commanders’ headquarters. ‘Sympathy strikes’ erupted among workers in Paris, Soissons and Chalon. In time, 115 regiments from 45 divisions mutinied.⁷² A record 27,000 French soldiers would desert in 1917. By an astonishing piece of luck, or rare German incompetence, Berlin never discovered the extent of the mutiny, missing a perfect opportunity to attack Paris when just two reliable regiments were guarding the city’s gates.

At the time of Nivelle’s Waterloo, in London, the first sea lord held a finger to the wind. On 23 April, at the height of the U-boat war, Jellicoe presented a paper, ‘The Submarine Menace and the Food Supply’, to the War Cabinet. It warned of an extremely dire situation. An immediate investigation began into food stocks, likely future losses and minimum imports required to sustain the armed forces and the country.⁷³ The government, unaware that April would be the worst month for shipping losses, drew the worst conclusions. Haig’s Flanders Offensive refocused their minds, and a tic of humiliation alighted on Lloyd George’s brow.

Cometh the hour … Haig emerged from the smoke and failure of Champagne like a condemned man who had been granted a reprieve. His powers were now thoroughly restored. ‘Sir Douglas Haig has come out on top in this fight between the two Chiefs,’ noted Lloyd George’s private secretary, in her diary on 12 May. She feared that her boss would ‘have to be very careful in future as to his backings of the French against the English’.⁷⁴

A rare spectacle then ensued, of Lloyd George feeling obliged to appear humble, even contrite. Insofar as the prime minister was capable of humility, he conveyed less the fawning attentiveness of Uriah Heep than the importunate countenance of a Cheshire Cat. At the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris, 3–5 May, he presented himself as an innocent civilian ignorant of military matters, with ‘no pretensions to being a strategist’, despite his recent barnstorming interventions in strategy. He expressed his complete confidence in his military chiefs, and fully authorised Haig to attack when and where he thought best.

Back in command, Haig seized the reins of the Flanders Offensive with fresh gusto. On 7 May, he presented a new plan for Third Ypres at the army commanders’ conference at Doullens, north of Amiens. It divided the offensive into two stages. First, in early June 1917, he would attack Messines Ridge, the critical high ground to the south of Ypres that the Germans had more or less possessed since 1914. Next, at the end of July – a gap of seven weeks – he would launch the main offensive against the ridges radiating north and east of Ypres: Pilckem, Gheluvelt, Broodseinde and Passchendaele. Two simultaneous operations would assist the march on the coast: General Rawlinson’s forces at Nieuport would attack the Germans at Middelkerke, while an amphibious landing would strike behind the German lines, blocking their retreat. The combined British and Dominion forces would then destroy the U-boat bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge and drive the enemy out of Belgium.

Previously, these two stages – Messines and Passchendaele – had been part of a unified plan. Their separation in time would have immense repercussions, not least because the gap handed the enemy almost two months to prepare their defences for the Passchendaele onslaught.

Haig’s ideas met a mute, sullen response. Robertson thought them over-ambitious; Henry Wilson disapproved of anything Haig did or said. Only the Royal Navy welcomed the infantry’s help in defeating the U-boats. Yet nobody raised a hand against it – certainly not the contrite Lloyd George, who privately detested it and later claimed not to have head of it until June. He did ask the South African General Jan Smuts to review the plan, hoping for an answer that countermanded Haig. Instead, Smuts gave the ‘wrong’ answer: a defensive campaign would be disastrous. Smuts saw ‘more advantage in an offensive intended to recover the Belgian coast and deprive the enemy of their advanced submarine base’.⁷⁵

In the end, Haig’s was the only plan on the table. The British and Dominion commanders, facing Germany alone on the Western Front, believed they had no choice other than to attack and keep on attacking. As Lloyd George had told his French allies in Paris on 4 May, ‘We must go on hitting and hitting with all our strength until the Germans ended … by cracking.’¹ (With Nivelle’s failure, however, the prime minister now quietly revived his plan to ‘hit’ them in Italy.)

And so, in May–June 1917, as the mutinous French Army rested, the British and Dominion powers turned their eyes once more to the windswept plains of the Ypres Salient. Though Flanders had been a ‘dormant’ sector for the past two years, the Germans were well aware of Britain’s strategic interest in the Belgian coast, and were reinforcing their positions. On the Allied side, as we’ve seen, Haig had demanded half a million more men.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers now began to pour into this little patchwork of Flemish farmers’ fields, an area far smaller than the Somme and a fraction of the size of the great battlefields on the Russian front. That meant an unusual density of firepower, implying an exceedingly high force to space ratio – i.e. the number of shells fired per square yard – which, every commander knew, would churn up the battlefield and concentrate the casualties.