First-hand German accounts of the fighting on the Western Front in the First World War are dramatically (an adverb of particular force in this context) different from those written by British participants. Very often conveyed in the historic present tense, their sentences are short and direct, devoid of the convoluted and passive constructions so beloved of more academic German prose of the same vintage. Using pathos, they cast the dead as heroes, putting direct speech into their mouths and not infrequently closing their observations with an exclamation mark for added and rhetorical effect.
For British readers these German accounts can seem ‘over the top’: rarely have they been taken seriously by those few Anglophone historians anxious to explore the ‘other side of the hill’. They have been given equally short shrift by their German counterparts. The products of the 1920s and ‘30s, they are seen as tainted by fascism and encrusted with the ‘stab in the back legend’ so fervently promoted by German militarists. But the consequence of such superciliousness has been to rob us of an enormously rich and extensive primary source. The German army produced a vast body of regimental histories after the First World War, the best of them incorporating first-hand accounts and most of them written by participants in the actions they described. True, some of them took their tone from the more hyperbolic volumes of the series, Schlachten des Weltkrieges, or ‘battles of the world war’, of which Ypern 1914, written by Werner Beumelberg, is – as Jack Sheldon points out in this book – one of the more egregious examples. Sponsored by the Reichsarchiv, the body responsible for the German official history, Schlachten des Weltkrieges was designed to appeal to a more popular market, but some of the series undoubtedly rose above the expectations of the genre – just as did some of the regimental histories.
These points matter because in 1945 the Royal Air Force destroyed the bulk of the Prussian military archives, leaving subsequent historians much more reliant on the published materials of the inter-war period than would otherwise have been the case. To dismiss the accounts so wonderfully exploited (and fluently translated) by Jack Sheldon in The German Army at Ypres 1914 is wilfully to deepen our ignorance and lack of understanding of an institution central to modern military history. Moreover, the German Sixth Army – one of two Bavarian armies mobilised in 1914 – took a major part in the fighting at Ypres. Unlike those of Prussia, the Bavarian archives were not destroyed in the Second World War, and so Jack Sheldon has been able to work in some unpublished material of particular force: look at the revealing memorandum printed in chapter 6 and issued on 30 October 1914 by Krafft von Dellmensingen, the Sixth Army’s chief of staff and himself no mean historian of the war.
The German Army at Ypres 1914 is a tactical narrative of German operations at the regimental and battalion level. That was the significance of 1st Ypres: it was the moment when the generals of 1914 confronted the end of manoeuvre, when corps-level movements and aspirations to higher strategic control were confounded by the tactical constraints of positional warfare. Flanders had long been one of the richest areas of Europe – agriculturally, commercially and (increasingly) industrially. It had enabled the armies of the French revolution to march on their stomachs, and the Germans followed Napoleonic precepts in the autumn of 1914. They scratched Belgium’s fertile soil for winter root crops, turnips, beet and mangel wurzels, in order to compensate for the collapse of supply. The German cavalry played an effective part in the opening stages of the battle (contrary to the reputation accorded them in British accounts) but found their movements hampered by hedged and fenced fields, by railway lines and urbanisation. Such a landscape was particularly well adapted for defence, and all the allied armies – Belgian, French and British – proved themselves in their exploitation of the opportunities it presented. But the consequences were horrific: it can be argued that proportionately the casualty levels at 1st Ypres outstripped those of the Somme and Passchendaele, and with them the ‘old’ armies of 1914 ceased to exist.
Many of the accounts used by Jack Sheldon refer to the effectiveness of sniper fire: German soldiers removed the tell-tale spikes from their Pickelhaube helmets, and officers put their swords to one side and picked up rifles to make themselves less conspicuous. But the big killer was field artillery, particularly the French 75 mm gun firing shrapnel over open sights at ranges of less than 1,000 yards. German reserve artillery could not compete: deficient in training, it too often fired short and it was under-equipped. According to Jack Sheldon, one officer, lacking telephone line to speak to his guns let alone to other formations, had to use a whistle to give fire control orders, and another had to collocate his guns with the infantry so that he could communicate.
The first battle of Ypres became the stuff of legend in post-war Germany. The fighting at Langemark, characterised as a Kindermord, a slaughter of the innocents, was portrayed as a heroic and self-sacrificial action by German student volunteers, advancing into battle with patriotic songs on their lips. Plenty of the accounts cited by Jack Sheldon testify to the role of music in sustaining German morale, and General Berthold von Deimling announced that musicians who played during attacks would be awarded the Iron Cross. But the armies of 1914 were old not just because they were the last representatives of a disappearing order but also because they used reservists to bring their units up to strength – not so much adolescents fresh from school as middle-aged fathers whose military service lay several years in the past but who were now recalled to the colours.
The legends grew from rumour, fed even at relatively high levels of command. One corps headquarters reported that the Germans had taken Calais. Many accounts testify to the fixed belief that Belgian franc tireurs were actively engaged in the fighting, although recent scholarship has debunked this myth as robustly as it has that of the Kindermord at Langemark. From the British perspective the German version of the battle in turn punctures some standard wisdom. It testifies to the effectiveness of the navy’s ship-to-shore gunnery in the battle on the Yser canal; it praises the martial qualities of the Indians, so often portrayed as failing to cope with the rigours of a northern European winter; and it pays tribute to the value of the British army’s colonial experience. German reservists were more complimentary about the British infantry than were many of their more senior officers, seeing them as long service soldiers, hardened by fighting in South Africa and on the north-west frontier of India, and forgetting that many of them were also ‘old’, ex-regulars to be sure but also reservists.
Historians concerned to engage with issues of morale in the armies of the First World War have tended to gallop forward to 1917, to the mutinies and the revolutions which then preoccupied all those in command. However, it was in the second half of 1914 that armies really confronted the ‘shock of battle’ for the first time, and they all reeled under the blow. They had no precedent for what they encountered, no compass to guide them. Some struggled to hold on to religious faith, to faith in the nation and to love of family. But others sought ways out of the battle, from desertion to self-mutilation. Jack Sheldon’s references to the loss of junior leaders to ‘grip’ units and to give them direction makes it even more surprising that the German army endured through the winter – and was to do so for four more years.
Hew Strachan
Chichele Professor of the History of War,
All Souls College, University of Oxford.