False dawn
Lieutenant-Colonel John Fuller, now in his late thirties and the chief-of-staff of the Tank Corps, owned one of the brightest minds in Haig’s army. Fuller early in 1917 had begun to envision a form of breakthrough involving masses of tanks with strong air and artillery support and infantry brought forward in motor lorries, an idea that one day would be embraced by the Germans (who didn’t have any tanks in 1917) and called blitzkrieg.
Fuller didn’t think much of Haig. Forty years after the war Fuller, by then well known as an author of incisive books on military tactics, wrote that Haig was ‘stubborn and intolerant, in speech inarticulate, in argument dumb’. But Fuller said that Haig, unlike most cavalrymen, had studied war and ‘this was to be his undoing, because he was so unimaginative that he could not see that the tactics of the past were as dead as mutton … Thus, in spite of fire, wire and mire, cavalry figured in all his battles, and to the detriment of the other arms, because they and their enormous forage trains blocked communications.’
Fuller in June, 1917, sent a paper to Haig’s headquarters saying that the country in front of the old textile town of Cambrai was ideal for an attack by tanks. The ground was not badly cratered and rolled about gently. Fuller thought tanks had been misused on the Somme and at Bullecourt, where they had been doled out to infantry formations in ‘penny packets’. He thought they should be used en masse : hundreds of tanks on a front of four or five miles, a weapon of surprise and terror. Fuller didn’t see Cambrai as a major offensive so much as a raid, big and brief, that would panic the Germans.
Brigadier-General Hugh Elles, the commander of the Tank Corps, liked the idea. Kiggell, Haig’s chief-of-staff, didn’t, and it was put aside. Fuller put up the scheme again in August, by which time tanks had been proved of little value in the bogs of Ypres. Now the scheme had another supporter, General Sir Julian Byng, whose 3rd Army occupied the front facing the Hindenburg Line at Cambrai. But Byng had enlarged the scheme. He was thinking of breakthrough and of cavalry galloping through the gap opened by the tanks. Haig was now interested, even though he was in the middle stages of Third Ypres. Breakthrough and cavalry always made his heart leap. Byng was told in mid-October to start planning the attack for November 20.
This was an astonishing decision. Haig had lost the equivalent of ten to twelve divisions at Third Ypres. The two armies he had used there were worn out and couldn’t be used elsewhere. Third Ypres had failed in the terms under which Haig had sold it to Lloyd George. Haig knew that Lloyd George saw Third Ypres as butchery and waste and was more disenchanted with him than he had ever been. Haig didn’t tell Lloyd George he was planning a new offensive at Cambrai. He didn’t tell Robertson until October 20 and Robertson, staunch as ever, didn’t tell the frocks. Worst of all Haig didn’t think about reserves for Cambrai. He had a manpower crisis, as it was called, because of his losses at Third Ypres. So even if Byng initially succeeded at Cambrai, Haig could send him no troops to widen and exploit the breach.
Byng had 474 tanks, the new Mark IVs with improved armour plating, seven infantry divisions for the initial attack and others in reserve and five divisions of cavalry. The tanks would break through the Hindenburg Line, supported by infantry, and take the high ground in front of Cambrai, which lay seven miles behind the German frontline. Then the cavalry would gallop through and surround Cambrai before pushing on north and east. Elles, Fuller and the other tank men had thought carefully about what they were going to do. They came up with the first sophisticated plan for ironclads. Most of them were designated fighting tanks, but around fifty would act as supply vehicles dragging sleds, thirty-odd would carry chains and hooks for tearing out the German wire and several were equipped with wireless so that they could pass messages to the rear and to aircraft. The leading tanks would carry rolls of timber. These would be dropped into the German front trenches, which were ten-feet wide, to make bridges over which the tanks could cross.
The tank men were different. General Elles announced on the eve of the battle that he would personally lead the attack in a tank called Hilda. It would carry the brown, red and green flag of the Tank Corps.
There was to be no preliminary bombardment, which would have told the Germans an attack was coming. The British artillery opened up only ten minutes before the tanks began to roll. Cambrai was going to be that rare thing: a surprise.
And it was. The Hindenburg Line was captured in the first ninety minutes. The tanks tore up the wire so that the cavalry might push through. Hundreds of Germans trudged into captivity. Prince Rupprecht, in charge of this section of the front as well as Flanders, asked Ludendorff for reinforcements. The British pushed on. By 11.30 am, five hours after zero, they had taken much of the second line on a six-mile front. The bag of prisoners now ran to thousands. Hilda eventually broke down in the German wire. Elles was undismayed. He had already proved what tanks could do and how they should be used. He began the walk back to his headquarters. He expected to see cavalry trotting up at any moment.
The commander of the cavalry corps, a more cautious spirit than Elles, had set up his headquarters six miles behind the front and wasn’t sure what was happening there. Two of his divisions were even further back. By mid-afternoon the tanks and infantry were five miles in on a six-mile front but the cavalry was slow in coming up, and then had to return because there was no water for the horses. It has been claimed this was something close to a tragedy. It probably wasn’t: horses are fine targets for machine guns. The tragedy was that Byng didn’t have enough infantry to exploit the early gains.
The British press hailed Cambrai as a great victory. The Bishop of London ordered that the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral be rung. Soon bells were ringing across the British Isles, as though the war-winning blow had been struck. It was the first time bells had been rung for a victory.
The attack began to stall on the second day. Many tanks had been hit or had broken down. Rain came. Byng’s troops were held at several places, notably at Bourlon Ridge, which overlooked the British position. The Germans were bringing up fresh divisions. It was a familiar tale from the Great War: success followed by a loss of momentum. Haig could have called off the battle at this point. He decided to go on. Cambrai became another slogging match, with this difference: the Germans had reserves and Haig didn’t. After a week Haig wanted to call the battle off. The Germans didn’t. They counter-attacked on November 30 with fresh divisions. The British now had only sixty-three tanks to support the infantry. When Cambrai ended in snow and rain on December 7 the British still held part of the Hindenburg Line but had lost part of their own frontline to the south. Cambrai was another stalemate. British casualties had been only 4000 on that brilliantly successful first day. Now they were 45,000; the German figure was about the same.
Haig’s biographer, John Terraine, wrote that Cambrai was the low point of Haig’s career. ‘It weakened his prestige and position at a time when he needed every support he could get.’ In another familiar tale from the Great War the public’s hopes had been raised then lowered. It might have been better if those bells had not been rung. Cambrai had never been winnable because Haig never had the means to win it.
LLOYD GEORGE WAS vexed anew, for three obvious reasons. He had been given no advance notice of the battle; this was Haig at his most clumsy and high-handed, contemptuous not only of the Prime Minister but of the ways of democracy. Second, the attack had failed after the British people had been given false hope. And, third, Haig had presented the country with another long casualty list. But there was something else, something more subtle, that made Lloyd George even angrier.
Haig and Charteris had said all through the long days of Third Ypres that the German army was about to collapse. Yet the Germans were able to summon up a dozen divisions to deal with a crisis at Cambrai. And they could do this while also sending troops to Italy and to Riga on the eastern front. How could they do this if their army had been broken in spirit in Flanders?
Robertson conceded in a private letter to Plumer just after Cambrai ended that ‘the diminution of German morale has been greatly overdone at general Headquarters’. Northcliffe, the press baron who owned The Times and the Daily Mail, had long been Haig’s booster. Now, after Cambrai, he turned against him.
The political aftermath of Cambrai came close to farce. Robertson wrote to Haig, telling him Lloyd George was ‘well on the warpath … His great argument is that you have for long said that the Germans are well on the downgrade in morale and numbers and that you advised attacking them though some 30 Divisions should come from Russia; and yet only a few Divisions have come, and you are hard put to hold your own!’ The Prime Minister, Robertson said, believed Charteris had made mistakes about German numbers and morale.
Haig wrote back to say he understood Robertson had been having a ‘terrible time’ at Cabinet meetings. ‘I gather that the PM is dissatisfied. If that means that I have lost his confidence, then in the interests of the cause let him replace me at once. But if he still wishes me to remain, then all carping criticism should cease, and I should be both supported and trusted.’
Haig appeased the politicians. He replaced ‘Poor Charteris’ as chief of intelligence, while denying that his work had been faulty and expressed surprise when Kiggell told him Charteris was much disliked among the armies and corps. Haig pretended to face up to the problem of Gough. He transferred Neill Malcolm, Gough’s overweening chief-of-staff, to command of a division. He told Gough, for the first time, that it was common for divisional commanders to hope that they would not be sent to Gough’s army. Gough feigned surprise at this news. Haig wrote in his diary that he hadn’t told Gough this before because it might have affected his self-confidence.
Kiggell, Haig’s chief-of-staff, was thought to be ill; he was certainly tired. Fuller described him as tall, gloomy and erudite. ‘He was essentially a cloistered soldier; he never went near a battle, and – if correctly reported – only once visited a battlefield, and then long after the battle had been fought.’ Major-General Herbert Lawrence, a tense-looking divisional commander, replaced Kiggell. Kiggell’s deputy also went, as did the Quartermaster-General, the Engineer-in-Chief and the Director-General of Medical Services. This is sometimes referred to as a purge. It wasn’t: Haig and the army commanders stayed. John Grigg, Lloyd George’s biographer, wrote: ‘Though [Haig] often insisted that he was responsible for his subordinates … he did not ultimately act on the principle. They went; he stayed. However much he may have believed in them, he believed in himself more.’
The politicians could play at farce too. Early in 1918 Lloyd George sent Smuts, the South African general who was in the War Cabinet, and Maurice Hankey, secretary to the War Cabinet, to France. They were to talk to lots of generals. Lloyd George apparently explained that he did not know many of the generals. The secret brief given to Smuts and Hankey was to find a replacement for Haig. They couldn’t find a candidate. Here was Lloyd George leading a country in a long and terrible war that touched every aspect of life and had brought sadness across the land – and he didn’t know enough about his own commanders to alight on a replacement for Haig.
WHILE THE FROCKS and the generals were teasing and appeasing, each side not quite bold enough to tell the other what it truly thought, Vladimir Lenin was playing rougher politics in Petrograd. Kerensky still headed the provisional government but his authority was shrinking. Lenin had established himself as leader of the Bolsheviks. He was ready to launch the ‘real’ revolution. The first was merely about getting rid of the Tsar. The second was about a Marxist state and world revolution.
On November 7 (October 25 on the old Russian calendar, hence the ‘October Revolution’) the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, taking over railway stations, bridges, post offices and telephone exchanges, and the world changed forever. Lenin announced a three-month armistice with Germany.
Lenin eventually sent a delegation, headed by Leon Trotsky, to negotiate a peace settlement with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, the Polish fortress town. Talks began on November 22, two days after Cambrai opened. Lenin deliberately prolonged the negotiations. He needed to buy as much time as he could. He hoped German troops might join in his world revolution. He also knew that he had to take Russia out of the war. There was more to this than ideology: he suspected he would have to fight a civil war at home. But the Germans tired of his delaying tactics. In February, 1918, fifty German divisions went back to invading Russia, which was now even easier than before. Lenin and Trotsky suddenly wanted to negotiate again.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff were now running foreign policy as well as the war. They dictated the terms of the treaty and these were cruel. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were making a gigantic land grab. Russia lost Finland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland Courland and Livonia, about one-third of her people, much of her best farmland and most of her coal and iron mines. Russia also had to pay reparations.
Russia’s collapse had fearful implications for her former allies. Germany would be able to transfer dozens of divisions to France and Belgium. And indeed this eventually happened, but Germany could move only part of her army in the east. The new empire of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, much bigger than Germany itself, had to be garrisoned. Fifty divisions, some one million troops, had to stay behind to protect the spoils of war. Had Germany been less greedy in the east, she might have been able to send twenty-five divisions to the west at a time when the French army was still recovering from its mutinies and the British army was short of men after the carnage of Passchendaele and Cambrai.
Germany was as artless as ever at Brest-Litovsk, all Prussian thumbs and arrogance. In the words of one historian, the Brest-Litovsk treaty ‘flashed the brutality of German greed to the world. This was to be the fate of Belgium, France, Britain and Italy should Germany win the war.’
A WEEK AFTER Lenin, a cold man, came to power in Petrograd, Georges Clemenceau, a man of fiery passions and a radical of a different stripe, became Premier of France. Like Lenin, he came to the post by default: Painlevé had resigned after being defeated in the Chamber. Clemenceau was seventy-six and still bursting with the fire and patriotism that during his noisy career in journalism had earned him the sobriquet ‘Le Tigre’. (Clemenceau wrote the famous headline J’Accuse for Emile Zola’s open letter on the Dreyfus case.)
Lloyd George had first met Clemenceau nine years earlier. He remembered ‘a short, broad-shouldered and full-chested man, with an aggressive and rather truculent countenance, illuminated by a pair of brilliant and fierce eyes set deeply under overhanging eyebrows. The size and hardness of the head struck me …’ Clemenceau and Lloyd George had argued on this occasion. Years later Lloyd George discovered Clemenceau’s ‘real fascination: his wit, his playfulness, the hypnotic interest of his arresting and compelling personality’.
Clemenceau was two people: the amiable companion who loved literature and the simplicities of rustic life, and a hard man with a dictatorial streak. Churchill witnessed Clemenceau’s first speech to the Chamber as Premier in 1917. Clemenceau spoke without notes and in short sentences. ‘He looked like a wild animal pacing to and fro behind bars, growling and glaring … France had resolved to unbar the cage and let her tiger loose upon all foes … With snarls and growls, the ferocious, aged, dauntless beast of prey went into action.’
Clemenceau reduced his platform to three words. ‘Home policy? I wage war! Foreign policy? I wage war!’ He was the man for his times, as Churchill would be twenty-three years later.