The plague bacillus
Haig must have assumed that military strategy would be raised at some point during the Calais conference that was supposed to be about railways. Nivelle was about to begin an offensive that, he claimed, would win the war. Someone would surely want to say something about it. What Haig didn’t foresee was an ambush.
Thirteen days before the Calais conference Lloyd George interrupted a conversation between Maurice Hankey, the secretary to the War Cabinet, and the French liaison officer at the War Office. It turned out more than an interruption. The Prime Minister loitered with intent for two hours. He had a point to make. And he wanted that point relayed to Paris. Lloyd George told the Frenchman that the War Cabinet had ‘complete confidence’ in Nivelle. He was ‘the only man who is capable of bringing the operations to a successful conclusion this year’. The Prime Minister said he was trying to bring his colleagues around to this view, but did not count on doing so – unless Nivelle and the French Government took a strong line on the subject. Lloyd George was prepared to subordinate Haig to Nivelle and he wanted the liaison officer to pass on the news to Paris, which he of course did.
The War Cabinet met ten days later. Robertson usually attended such meetings. Hankey telephoned him to say there was no need to attend this one. Robertson didn’t go. The meeting gave Lloyd George authority at Calais to seek ‘such measures as might appear best calculated … to ensure unity of command’. It is not clear whether all members of the War Cabinet took this to mean that Haig would be subordinated to Nivelle. The King was not told of the ambush that awaited Haig. Nor were the dominions, even though Lloyd George’s scheme meant that Nivelle would have control of Australian, Canadian and New Zealand troops.
The conference that wasn’t really about railways opened at the Hotel of the Gare Maritime after lunch on February 26 and after Lloyd George and Briand had met privately for half-an-hour. The initial discussion was about railways, but it lasted only about an hour. Then Lloyd George broke in and suggested that the railway specialists withdraw elsewhere so that the more important question of military plans could be settled at once.
Lloyd George asked Nivelle to explain his plan again, which was strange because everyone knew the details. Nivelle finished and Lloyd George appeared to become impatient. He turned to Briand and, according to Haig, said: ‘Tell him to keep nothing back … as to his disagreements with Marshal Haig.’ There had been no differences of significance. Nivelle, as one historian pointed out, had failed to take his cue. Lloyd George now suggested that the French draw up their proposals for a system of command before dinner so that he, Robertson and Haig could discuss it after dinner. Lloyd George didn’t appear at dinner; he said he was ill. Haig dined with Nivelle and said he had ‘quite a cheery talk’ with him.
Robertson read the French proposals in his room. They had obviously been drafted several days before. Haig’s army, some sixty-odd British and dominion divisions, would be put under Nivelle’s command. Haig would be responsible for administrative matters, and not much more. An observer said Robertson’s face turned to mahogany and his eyes became perfectly round. His eyebrows slanted outwards ‘like a forest of bayonets held at the charge’. He looked as though he was about to have a fit. ‘Get ’Aig,’ he shouted.
Haig arrived. He was appalled, but there was a serenity about him, as though he was above such grubbiness. Robertson dealt with the frocks in London: he would have to sort this out. Hankey, as secretary to the War Cabinet, must have had a rough idea of what was going to unfold, but he too was said to be surprised when he saw the precise wording of the French proposals. Later in the night, he upset Robertson and Haig further by telling them that the Prime Minister did not have full authority from the War Cabinet for what he was doing.
Before that, Robertson and Haig had gone to Lloyd George’s room. The way Haig tells it, there was a discussion. The way Hankey tells it, there was a row, and one is inclined to believe him. Hankey said Lloyd George was ‘extremely brutal’ to Haig. Haig said his troops would not serve under a Frenchman. The Prime Minister replied that he knew the British private soldier and there were people he criticised much more than Nivelle.
Robertson and Haig left and talked some more. According to Haig’s diary, they decided they must resign rather than agree to the scheme. ‘And so we went to bed, thoroughly disgusted with our Government and the Politicians.’
Only Haig slept the sleep of the good. Robertson didn’t sleep at all. Lloyd George slept poorly. Hankey sat up and worked on a compromise. He was fortyish and wore a languid air, a soldier with a keen and subtle mind that he was careful not to flaunt. The scheme he devised became the basis for a new proposal the next day. The subordination of the British army would last only for the duration of the Nivelle offensive. Haig would have a right of appeal to his own government if he thought Nivelle’s orders put his troops at unnecessary risk. And Haig would retain control of operations in his own sector. Robertson and Haig agreed to the scheme, although, if anything, their contempt for the politicians had been heightened by the compromise. Hankey and Robertson had saved Haig, who didn’t seem as grateful as he might have been. The coup de théâtre scripted by Lloyd George and Briand had failed, mostly because of their clumsiness.
There was a case for a unified command on the western front and the highest position obviously had to go to a Frenchman. France was where the war was; she had 112 divisions in the field, compared with Britain’s sixty-two. John Grigg, Lloyd George’s biographer, points out that the scheme Lloyd George took to Calais was twice flawed. An allied supremo couldn’t be responsible to one of the national governments, as Nivelle was. He had to be an allied officer responsible to an allied war council. And, second, Nivelle was the wrong man. Political difficulties had already started to overwhelm him.
And now they worsened. In mid-March the Briand Government fell. Alexandre Ribot became Premier and Paul Painlevé, a brilliant mathematician, took over as War Minister. Painlevé didn’t like Nivelle’s sums. He wanted to remove him and cancel his offensive but couldn’t find a way. Nivelle’s only champion now was far away in London. Lloyd George had to believe in Nivelle. He had gambled on him in London and doubled his bets at Calais.
Nivelle had another problem that he refused to see. The German withdrawal on the Somme and elsewhere to a new defensive position – the Hindenburg Line, as the allies called it – had changed the battlefield. And now too there were doubts about the eastern ally. A revolution had begun in Russia. The Tsar had abdicated. The allies had not seen the Hindenburg Line being thrown up amid the mists and snows of winter. Neither side had foreseen the Russian Revolution.
IMMEDIATELY THE CALAIS conference ended Haig wrote to his King, who also happened to be Tsar Nicholas II’s cousin. The letter was not only improper but also rather clever. Haig said, in effect, that he had been ambushed at Calais. ‘I think, as the actual document stands, no great difficulty should occur in carrying on just as I have been doing, provided there is not something behind it. It is for this reason I have written so fully, in order that Your Majesty may be watchful, and prevent any steps being taken which will result in our Army being broken up and incorporated in French Corps.’ Haig said that throughout his dealings he had never offered to resign, but it was possible that the War Cabinet might want to replace him with someone more in their confidence. If this was so, the change should be made quickly. ‘At this great crisis in our History, my sole object is to serve my King and Country … I leave myself to Your Majesty’s hands to decide what is best for me to do at this juncture.’
If Haig was trying to alarm the King, he succeeded. The King’s private secretary wrote to thank him for his ‘secret letter’. He must not think of resignation. That would be disastrous for His Majesty’s army. ‘Such a step would never have His Majesty’s consent, nor does he believe that it is one entertained for a moment by his Government … I am to say from His Majesty you are not to worry: you may be certain that he will do his utmost to protect your interests, and he begs you to continue to work on the most amicable and open terms with General Nivelle, and he feels all will come right.’
Constitutional monarchy takes many forms.
LATE IN OCTOBER, 1916, British airmen had noticed fresh earth thrown up around the villages of Quéant and Bullecourt. The Germans looked to be digging a trench and this was strange. The villages were about fourteen miles behind the front in Arras. Next month a Russian prisoner who had escaped to the French lines said that 2000 of his countrymen were being forced to build concrete dugouts, protected by wire, near St Quentin, thirty miles south of Bullecourt and behind the Somme front. Here were the first clues that the Hindenburg Line was being built, but allied intelligence officers did not connect the two events. There is no reason why they should have.
Only on February 25, 1917, the day after Australian troops had discovered the Germans had deserted their trenches, were the British able to plot the course of the new German defences. But they could only do so for their own sector. The French, to the south, didn’t know where the Hindenburg Line ended.
In fact it ran for seventy miles to the Chemin des Dames ridge, where Nivelle intended to conduct his war-winning offensive in April. The Germans were to pull back fifteen to twenty-five miles along the length of it. The withdrawal was codenamed ‘Alberich’, after the cruel dwarf of German mythology, and his spirit dominated the orders. More than 100,000 French civilians were sent to Germany and Belgium as the Germans turned the country between the old frontline and the new into a wasteland. They wrecked houses, smashed crockery and seared upholstered chairs with hot irons. They fouled wells with horse manure and cut down fruit trees. These orders so offended Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the commander on the Hindenburg Line front, that he considered resigning. He also thought the vandalism would give the Germans a bad name. Throughout the war the Germans had handed propaganda weapons, loaded and cocked, to the allies: the murder of Belgian civilians in 1914, the sinking of the Lusitania, the execution of Edith Cavell – now this.
The orders came from Ludendorff. He deplored the destruction, he said, ‘but it could not be helped’. In ordering the withdrawal he was saying Germany could fight only on the defensive on the western front during 1917. He was outnumbered there by about 190 divisions to 154. He was hoping that German sailors could win the war with submarines, and do so before the United States was drawn in. He had not thought about a revolution in Russia. Such talk had been around for decades.
The Hindenburg Line was about economy: it eliminated two big salients bulging into the allied line, shortened the front by twenty-five miles and thus freed up thirteen to fourteen divisions. The new line was stronger than the old one. The Germans had turned the techniques of mass production to trench-building. The woodwork was of the same design throughout. So were the concrete dugouts beneath the parapet. The barbed wire hung from corkscrew pickets in three belts and shone new and blue in the sun. The line was 8000-yards deep in places.
Now it was ready. Ludendorff knew the allies would attack after the thaw. But where? Then Germans came upon an order, carried by a French prisoner, concerning a great French attack to be carried out on the River Aisne. Nivelle had already given up surprise.
BRITISH TROOPS WALKED into the villages of Miraumont and Pys on February 24. A few miles away the three Australian divisions left at the front (the 4th Division had been pulled out) were at once ordered out into the fog to occupy the ground the Germans had left. This meant advances of 1200 yards, maybe more if no Germans were found. Queenslanders, apprehensive about what they might find, leapt into a German trench near the Maze – and put up a black cat that bounded away at the sight of them. Not a single German. Australian lighthorsemen trotted up to the front. They and their shaggy mounts were going to do what cavalry used to do: ride out as a screen for the advancing infantry.
The Australian infantrymen were like convicts emerging from a prison hulk. The routines of confinement were no more: it was exhilarating and baffling. Somewhere up ahead there would be green fields and trees and birds and some day soon the sun would shine. Lieutenant Cyril Lawrence wrote that the horses went ‘mad with delight’ when they reached open country. ‘After all those months of standing knee and more than often belly deep in half-frozen slush, they were crazy and tore round everywhere over the little hills and valleys just like lambs at play.’
Captain Ellis, the historian of the 5th Division, said that the end of trench warfare produced a ‘spiritual thrill’. Ellis said the men had ‘grown insensibly’ into the habits of stalemate. Individual enterprise had fallen away. The infantry had grown used to fixed trench positions, the artillery to fixed battery positions. A colonel in the 1st Division found one of his Lewis-gun posts allowing retreating Germans to walk about with impunity 600 yards away. The men thought they were ‘too far away’ to fire at.
The generals didn’t share the elation of their men. They saw the cleverness of Ludendorff’s move. They knew it could undermine the logic of Haig’s coming offensive in Arras, which, in turn, was to be the prelude to Nivelle’s offensive on the Aisne.
The Germans were retiring in stages, holding up the allies here and there with bursts of machine-gun fire, then scurrying off. They had a timetable but the allies didn’t yet know what it was. Where were the Germans going to stop? At the Hindenburg Line itself, or at some spot short of it? The orders to the Australians were to advance cautiously and not to get too far ahead of their artillery.
By late February the Australians had passed Le Barque, the village where Hitler had been stationed the previous year. Now they were in green country in front of Bapaume, the market town with ramparts and moat. They came on booby traps in the empty trenches but most of them were obvious: objects that might be picked up wired to a hidden grenade, loose floorboards hooked up to a mine. March 11 produced the first glorious spring day. The men’s spirits rose.
Six days later, on St Patrick’s Day, they were in Bapaume. The Germans had fought like fanatics for holes in the ground at Mouquet Farm and dozens of other killing grounds on the Somme. Now they had abandoned a big town without a fight, leaving just a few skirmishers behind. Plumes of white and grey smoke rose from burning houses. Men of the 5th Division simply walked into the town.
Private Eric West, a student at Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia before the war, was repairing the road outside Bapaume with rubble taken from the ruined villages to the west. Earlier he had walked through those villages. He came to country strewn with dead, he wrote to his father. ‘In places they lie around in dozens. No doubt most are months old. The cold frosty weather preserves them pretty well. It is very interesting but very pathetic and gruesome. Here is a testament near a dead man. I open it and see on the first page: “To dear Jack, from Mable.” Here is another man, a prayer book is beside him; I look for the man’s name in it, but the first page is torn out. Evidently it has been used for identification purposes.’
West walked into Bapaume. ‘It had been knocked about far worse than Albert. I don’t believe there is one house intact … After the Germans had retired, three snipers were left here … They sniped a number of men before they were caught. I think they wanted to surrender at the end but were not allowed.’
Private David Whinfield dozed most of his first day near Bapaume. The next day, the 18th, he moved off with full pack as part of Pompey Elliott’s force to pursue the Germans. He walked through the village of Bancourt, just east of Bapaume. ‘No building is a quarter sound,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Explosives have been used. It was not spoiled by shellfire. Trees have been cut down, fruit trees too and just let lay there. Vandalism. A road crossing nearby had a mine exploded in it. The hole was twenty feet across.’ But Whinfield was happy. It was a nice spring day and he had heard a lark singing.
THE FIRST RUSSIAN revolution didn’t happen because a firebrand climbed on to a platform and spoke words that exploded in people’s minds. That would come later. The first revolution grew out of the combination of a shortage of bread in Petrograd, the capital, and a burst of winter sunshine. The shortage of bread in early March was just one symptom of how the war was hurting Russia; prices had increased fourfold since the war began and misery was everywhere. Then, around March 8 (February 23 on the Julian calendar that the Russians were using then), a weak winter sun glinted on the snow. The kinder weather allowed open-air demonstrations. These led to strikes and the burning of the law courts and police stations. In short there was civil unrest – no more. Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) was home to a large garrison of soldiers. They were expected to reassert the Tsar’s authority. Instead most of them joined in the demonstrations. And, at this point, a protest became a revolution, almost by accident, and with an element missing. The people wanted to get rid of the Tsar but there was no consensus on who or what should replace him. The British ambassador’s daughter overheard a conversation between two soldiers.
‘What we want is a republic,’ said one.
‘Yes,’ said the other. ‘A republic, but we must have a good Tsar at the head of it!’
Russia had suffered fearfully from the war. By now there were more than five million dead and wounded. But there was another figure that better explained the low morale of the army. Around two million Russians had become prisoners of war. The mass surrenders had nothing to do with the bravery or otherwise of the soldiers. They had everything to do with bad leadership and the fact that the average Russian soldier was poorly equipped and clothed, tired, cold, hungry and inured to failure. He also knew that his family was suffering back home, from soaring prices and black marketeering, shortages of food and fuel and the heartlessness of the tsarist system.
Nicholas was a dull and simple man who believed that God had appointed him and there was nothing more to say. The Enlightenment, French republicanism, constitutional monarchy, American democracy: these were for other men and other places. Nicholas was distant from his people and distrustful of intellectuals on the grounds that they might be smarter than him, which they invariably were. He resisted all attempts at liberal reform. In his heart and his head he was a medievalist, yet he lacked the willpower, the sureness, to be the man he wanted to be. Alexandra, his German-born wife and mother of their five children, had the mental toughness he lacked. She is credited with turning him against his military commander, Grand Duke Nicholas, whom he dismissed in 1915. The Tsar himself now became the commander-in-chief and moved to general headquarters at Moghilev, behind the Polish front, where he presided over a succession of defeats and became more isolated from the mood of the capital. The contempt for him went beyond the new proletariat to much of educated society, as well as conservatives and traditionalists. Most of the generals believed he should go.
He was at Moghilev when the riots broke out in Petrograd and tried to return, but his train was stopped about 100 miles south of the capital. There, on March 15, he abdicated in favour of his son, a twelve-year-old haemophiliac, who, ever so fleetingly, became Tsar Alexis II. That night, having been told that his son’s condition was incurable, Nicholas changed his mind. He would abdicate in favour of his brother Mikhail. Mikhail became Tsar for about as long as young Alexis before deciding that he too wanted to abdicate. The 300-year-old rule of the Romanovs was over.
It had all happened too abruptly. Nicholas had been succeeded not by a man or an idea but by a vacuum. There was no suggestion, however, that Russia would pull out of the war. The President of the Duma, Russia’s pathetic attempt at a parliament, told the British military attaché: ‘My dear Knox, you must be easy … Russia is a big country, and we can wage war and manage a revolution at the same time.’
The competitors for power were the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet, the committees of factory workers, soldiers and middle-class intellectuals. Among the political groups the Petrograd Soviet claimed to represent were the Bolsheviks. They alone wanted to pull out of the war, but they were a minority and two of their most prominent leaders, Lenin and Leon Trotsky, were in exile. The Duma set up a provisional government and pledged to keep Russia in the war. The Soviet passed its famous Order No. 1, telling the military to obey only the orders of the Soviet. The army was broken in spirit before the revolution; now it was being torn apart.
This was not obvious in the west, which had been taken by surprise. Lloyd George welcomed the revolution publicly – the Tsar’s medieval ways had long embarrassed his British and French allies – but privately feared that Russia was not ready for its lurch towards republicanism. Ludendorff saw an opportunity. What he had to do was to find a way to take Russia out of the war. Then he could transfer whole armies to the western front and go on the offensive. A brother-exile burst into Lenin’s study in Zurich to tell him of the revolution. Lenin denounced the provisional government’s decision to stay in the war and coined the slogan: ‘All power to the Soviets.’
Alexander Helphand (real name Israel Parvus), a revolutionary from Odessa now living in Germany, was a conspirator of genius and a man of lurid contradictions. He managed to combine Bolshevism with war profiteering. He was a friend of Lenin and trusted by prominent Germans. Helphand was fiftyish, fat, balding and persuasive. In mid-March he came to Ludendorff with a scheme that would change the world.
Russia could be taken out of the war, he explained, not with howitzers but by shipping a single man there to do what came naturally to him. With Lenin in Petrograd, Helphand argued, the Bolsheviks would unseat the provisional government and take Russia out of the war. Ludendorff arranged for a sealed train to take Lenin and other exiled revolutionaries from Switzerland across Germany and on, finally, to Finland Station in Petrograd. Churchill wrote in one of his memorable passages: ‘The German leaders turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They tranported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.’
Unlike Tsar Nicholas, Lenin was the true autocrat, sure of himself, cold and ruthless, a logician of revolution who was never going to worry about the means if the right end was in sight. The liberals and ditherers in the provisional government didn’t stand much of a chance against such a force. So here he was, on April 16, at Finland Station with his vaulting forehead and withering glare. The revolution had its firebrand.
WALTER ADCOCK OF the 2nd Australian Division was resting in the village of Favreuil, near Bapaume. He and others were sheltering in a house that still had beds, mirrors, tables and chairs. It was ‘cosy looking’ and brought on nostalgia. ‘It is a long, long time since I have heard the voice of a child, and it seems ever so long since I have heard the voice of a woman. Men, men, men, from daylight to sunset …’ That night Adcock drew a picture of soldiers at rest. Two were shelling boiled eggs. One was daydreaming. One man was cleaning out an old sandbag so that he could use it to carry rations. Another was enjoying a dixie-lid of rice he had scrounged. Several men were playing poker on the floor by the light of a half-inch of candle. Two idiots – ‘we have quite a lot in the army’ – were wrestling and swearing in another corner. Another soldier was catching insects – the men called them ‘chats’ – that had burrowed into his shirt. Next to him a young man was reading the Bible. Another was scraping mud from his boots with a bayonet.
These homely scenes were about to end. Private Adcock’s brigade, the 6th, commanded by Gellibrand, would be one of two columns sent out to pursue the Germans to the Hindenburg Line, six to eight miles away. Pompey Elliott would command the other column. Elliott was excited: this was like the military history he had read as a young man.
HAIG WANTED THESE two columns, and those from the British divisions, to push forward cautiously. His main concern was his Arras offensive, due to open in a fortnight as the overture to Nivelle’s offensive. Haig didn’t want distractions and he didn’t want to lose men he might need in Arras. Gough, who again had the Australians as part of his 5th Army, decided to chase the Germans with small columns that would be combinations of infantry, cavalry and field artillery. The main body would not be following. This pleased Elliott and Gellibrand, both unconventional soldiers who ached to be free of staff officers bearing sheaves of paper. General White, the staff officer’s staff officer, tried to limit their independence by imposing daily limits on their advances. Both brigadiers, he thought, ‘required holding’.
The interlude of open warfare began on the night of March 17. Elliott headed east along the line of the Roman road that ran on from Bapaume to Cambrai; Gellibrand, on his left, pushed northeast. The country fell in gentle valleys towards the Hindenburg Line. There were a dozen villages and hamlets ahead but hardly a fence or a farmhouse. Bright green grass peeped through the last straggles of winter snow. The allied cavalry and infantry actually manoeuvred. This hadn’t happened since 1914.
But, as George Wieck, Elliott’s brigade-major, noted, the mindset of the trenches lingered. The men were nervous about moving in the open – ‘even one distant rifle shot would send a whole platoon to ground.’ It was all so different. On its first day out Elliott’s column advanced some four miles, took a village and a fortified farmhouse, and incurred casualties of eight. At Fromelles the same brigade had run up close to 1700 casualties in a night trying to advance 400 yards. Elliott was affronted by what the Germans had done. He told his sister-in-law: ‘They’ve even bashed the poor kiddies’ toys to pieces and burned them and chopped down all the fruit trees and put poison or nightsoil into the water.’
Elliott took three more villages but was worried by flanking fire from Bertincourt on his right, which was outside his zone of command. Next day he took that village anyway, and two more. Birdwood was angry that Elliott had ventured into British territory to take Bertincourt. White told Elliott he would have to curb his ‘Napoleonic ideas’. White later said Elliott had cut an ‘amusing figure’ during the advance: he thought he was J.E.B. Stuart (the fabled cavalryman from the American Civil War), and that ‘the whole German army was retiring before him’. Elliott was told to halt his advance.
Then the Germans counter-attacked one of the villages that Elliott had taken. Now Elliott was angry. ‘Counter-attack me, would they?’ he shouted. ‘I’ll teach them.’ He paced and swore. ‘I’ll teach the bastards to attack me.’ He decided to assault the next two villages on his list. George Wieck reminded him that he had been told not to attack any more villages. ‘I don’t care if I hang for it,’ Elliott said. Wieck felt that Hobbs, the new divisional commander, at least had to be told that his orders were being ignored. He drafted a message for divisional headquarters and took it to Elliott. Elliott read it, thought about it for a moment, then said: ‘Send it.’ Hobbs refused to countenance the attacks.
A few days later Elliott wrote to his wife: ‘The old Bosche cannot fight very well in the open, and my boys have found it out and are eager for the job … It is just the fun of the world.’
The ‘old Bosches’ were in truth fighting a delaying action, holding up the advance here and there, fighting briefly then running. The old war, they knew, would be resumed at the Hindenburg Line.
GELLIBRAND’S COLUMN, TO the north of Elliott, swept through the villages just as quickly. The Germans seemed to be falling back on Lagnicourt, about a mile-and-a-half in front of the Hindenburg Line. Gellibrand made a lunge towards Noreuil, probably the most important village after Lagnicourt, and was repulsed with more than 300 casualties. Like Elliott, Gellibrand wanted to chase the Germans hard. Like Elliott, Gellibrand now came to be seen as a hothead by Birdwood.
Gellibrand’s brigade was withdrawn, to be replaced by the 7th, also from the 2nd Division. The new brigade was to go for Lagnicourt. On the day the brigade took over the men were enthralled by a dogfight between nine aircraft. The planes were only a few hundred feet up and, as one Australian put it, it was like watching magpies fighting. One of the German planes crash-landed. The pilot began to run down the valley and the Australians shot him. As he lay wounded, he told them he was Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia. Lighthorsemen galloped up. They and the infantrymen took the prince’s gloves, cap and goggles as souvenirs. A major arrived and the prince asked him to ensure that ‘these Australians’ did not maltreat him. From his hospital bed a few days later the prince thanked the Australians for their kindness and ‘good sportsmanship’. He too was ‘a sport’, he said. Then he died.
The 7th Brigade took Lagnicourt at a cost of 377 casualties. Captain Percy Cherry, a young Tasmanian orchardist, captured a fortified farm on the edge of the village, then slogged up the muddy main street where he was fired upon from stables. He rushed the stable yard and the Germans surrendered. He moved on and found the main resistance was coming from a big crater spotted with white chalk. He and his men overwhelmed the Germans there, then pushed on to the far side of the village. Cherry already held the Military Cross. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for Lagnicourt but would never know of it. A shell-burst killed him after the village was won.
The 4th Division now came in to replace the 2nd. Glasgow’s 13th Brigade took Noreuil with 600 casualties. Among the dead was Lieutenant William Hoggarth, a civil engineer from Adelaide, who had been the first Australian to break into Mouquet Farm. As he fell mortally wounded he shouted to those who tried to help him: ‘Go on! Go on!’ The villages were falling but the cost was rising.
Doignies and Louverval were the two villages Elliott had wanted to take as reprisals for the insult the Germans had offered him. Another brigade from the 5th Division now took them. Another 484 Australian casualties. At Louverval the Australians cut off twenty Germans who waved a white cloth in surrender. All but two were shot.
It was now April 3. There were just three more villages left between the Australians and the Hindenburg Line, which could be glimpsed up ahead, great heaps of chalk-shot spoil and barbed wire that shone blue-grey in the sun.
THE DAY AFTER the Australians threw the Germans out of Doignies and Louverval, senators in the United States prepared to vote on whether their country should go to war with Germany. It almost seemed as if the Germans wanted to drag President Woodrow Wilson into the conflict. Wilson had never wanted to be part of it. He was above such vulgarities. The war-makers were the kings and intriguers of Old Europe; he was the voice of the New World, the face of perhaps the truest democracy the world had known, a land of European immigrants, a good many of whom came from Germany. Wilson was prissy and proper. He had none of the warmth of Lloyd George or the wit of Billy Hughes. He seemed to care about humanity, but in the abstract. He believed in the nobility of ideas, that nations could organise themselves to avoid war.
The Germans had contrived to make Wilson’s neutrality untenable. First, there had been the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. The United States was not at war with the Kaiser – yet the Germans were sinking American ships on sight. The second event that brought America into the war was a cable sent by Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Minister. He proposed to Mexico that, should America be drawn into the war by the submarine campaign, Mexico should declare war on the United States. Zimmermann dangled the prospect of Mexico recovering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. This was absurd as an idea; it became a disaster when the cable was intercepted and published in the United States. Isolationists became interventionists overnight. Two days later the United States declared war on Germany.
Within a month there had been two tremendous changes in the war, but neither was quite what it seemed. The allies assumed that, despite the revolution, Russia would stay in the fight. And, at least on the battlefield, the American declaration didn’t mean much for 1917. It was certainly no reason for the allies to alter their plans. The United States hadn’t prepared for war. Its army numbered little more than 100,000. It had few modern weapons, such as howitzers, tanks, mortars, rifle grenades or aircraft. It would send a division and two brigades of marines to France almost immediately, but this was a gesture. The true significance of America’s entry was the number of troops it could supply in 1918 and beyond. Wilson had introduced selective conscription. From its population of 100 million the United States could supply at least two million conscripts by 1918.
Here was the real change in the war, a matter of future arithmetic. The Germans now had to win, or negotiate a peace, before mid-1918. After that they would be outnumbered on the western front and starving at home.
ON THE DAY that the United States declared war Hooky Walker’s 1st Division returned to the line to take the three villages that stood between the Australians and the Hindenburg Line. The villages fell, one by one and over several days, but at a cost of 649 Australian casualties. Three 1st Division men – Captain James Newland, Sergeant John Whittle and Private Thomas Kenny – won the Victoria Cross here.
The Australians were now within a mile of the Hindenburg Line. The war of movement, all three weeks of it, was over. Now it was back to one side grinding against the other from fixed trench lines. On their way from Bapaume to this spot the Australians had seen signs pointing to a little village on the other side of the Hindenburg Line. It’s name – Bullecourt – meant nothing.