Beyond Flanders, Europe had changed dramatically during the 16 weeks of Third Ypres. When the first guns opened up on Pilckem Ridge, Russia’s armies were still in the field, fighting in Galicia and at Riga. On the day after Passchendaele fell, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, with Lenin calling on ‘all warring peoples’ to seek ‘a just and democratic peace’. From another ally good news had come as late as 18 August, the day the battle of Langemarck ended: General Cadorna reported his troops had pushed the Austrians back 5 miles in the eleventh battle of the Isonzo. But Lloyd George’s hopes for a breakthrough south of the Alps were soon to fade. On 24 October – as the Canadians completed preparations for Second Passchendaele – a predominantly German army attacked high in the mountains, in terrain where no commander had ever contemplated a major offensive. Before nightfall, the prettily scenic town of Caporetto was in German hands – and so, too, were 15,000 prisoners, a hundred guns and some 15 miles of the upper Isonzo valley.1
Within two days an Italian retreat became a rout. Cadorna urgently sought help. Foch at once ordered two divisions sent to Italy and set out for Cadorna’s headquarters in Treviso himself four days after the first Germans entered Caporetto. For three critical weeks the chief of the French general staff remained in Italy, strengthening the nation’s will to stay in the war. Lloyd George, too, responded to Cadorna’s plea: he insisted that the CIGS dispatch two more divisions to Italy and follow Foch to Treviso. Another three divisions would soon be on their way south. To Haig’s dismay on the day after the Canadians entered Passchendaele he was ordered to send Plumer, the soundest of his generals, to command the British troops south of the Alps. Plumer was away from Flanders for the next four months.
Lloyd George used the Italian crisis to secure greater inter-allied cohesion and a co-ordinated general strategy for the war as a whole. He backed French proposals for a Supreme War Council, breaking the news of his decision to a sceptical Haig in Paris on 4 November. Then accompanied by General Smuts, the South African soldier and statesman he co-opted to serve in the War Cabinet, Hankey and Sir Henry Wilson (who strongly supported the French proposal) Lloyd George travelled to Rapallo for a conference that kindled some fighting spirit in Italy’s political leaders and took practical steps to halt the retreat on the Piave river. It was at Rapallo, in the improbable setting of the New Casino Hotel, that a Supreme War Council came into being, though the council’s headquarters were the Trianon Palace in Versailles.2 The prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy served as council members, each appointing a military representative; Lloyd George chose General Wilson. Robertson remained hostile to the whole concept, not least because he saw in the military representative a likely and eager successor to his post as CIGS.
By 14 November, Lloyd George was back at Westminster. He found Londoners indignant at ‘inadequate’ defences that failed to prevent four successive nights of air raids, with incendiary bombs dropped on the capital, an alarming novelty. Yet, unexpectedly, ten days later church bells across England could ring out to celebrate a victory for the first time in the war. At Cambrai, on 20 November, 374 tanks led almost a quarter of a million British and Canadian troops to break through a 6-mile weakly held sector of the Hindenburg Line. As there was no artillery preparation, Byng’s Third Army took the Germans completely by surprise. The tanks penetrated wire entanglements of three defence lines and at some points penetrated as deeply as 4 miles. More ground was won in six hours than around Ypres in six months. George Samuel, a captain in the Royal Field Artillery, wrote to his wife that evening, ‘Since the 8th . . . I have . . . not had my boots off for several nights at a time. We have done all our marching by night and hidden ourselves by day . . . But it’s been worth it. The six hours pure joy we have had today have repaid every bit – and I am confident that we shall go further when we want to!’3
Alas! the prospect of decisive victory soon receded. Haig and Byng had not expected such dramatic success; no plans existed for exploiting what was intended as a raid in strength. Two cavalry divisions held in reserve were never ordered to advance, and by dusk on the first day 65 tanks were destroyed in action; 109 others had broken down. A week of hesitancy followed the triumphs of the opening day. The Germans brought up fresh infantry regiments and a mass of artillery for a counter-attack. By the end of the month all the land gained on 20–21 November had been lost, apart from two small villages. Another 45,000 names were added to the casualty lists. Confidence in Haig’s overall strategy fell to a low ebb, although much criticism at Westminster and in the newspapers centred on GHQ and the structure of command rather than on the C-in-C personally.
Lloyd George would have liked to replace both Haig and Robertson4 but both officers could still count on firm support from the Unionists and from the king. It was, however, agreed that GHQ needed a shake-up. To Haig’s regret, he lost both his chief-of-staff General Kiggell, and his chief intelligence officer, Brigadier-General Charteris, whom Lloyd George blamed for giving wrong estimates of the German numbers before Cambrai. Haig was pleased by an improvement in relations between GHQ and GQG, and he welcomed the resolute spirit that followed appointment of Georges Clemenceau as French prime minister in late November. But it was with great reluctance that he accepted a request from the Supreme War Council at Versailles to take over a further 28-mile sector of the Front from the French. Already a shortage of trained men had induced the War Office to change the composition of an army corps, cutting each of them from four battalions to three, but by early February the BEF was ready to assume responsibility for 123 miles of the line, from the Yser in the north down to the Oise. Inevitably the new sector, assigned to General Gough’s Fifth Army, was behind its neighbours in trench construction.
Haig told the War Cabinet early in January that the best way of frustrating German plans was to resume the offensive in Flanders; he still had faith in the value and importance of cavalry. Curzon, with recent experience in mind, icily observed that ‘the character of warfare in the ensuing months would present few opportunities for the use of cavalry’.5 With regret Haig concentrated on improving defences of the troops in the Salient and, with less urgency, across the old frontier and down to the Somme. Third Ypres had shown the value to the Germans of trench defence in depth. By mid-January when, at Lloyd George’s request, Smuts and Hankey crossed to France to inspect the defences, the British lines had gained a string of advanced outposts a mile ahead of the main network of trenches. The outposts were served by concealed ‘alleys’ that ran back in some places for two and a half miles. The visitors were impressed. The prime minister had also asked Smuts and Hankey to look for a younger commander who might fittingly replace Haig. They could find no suitable candidate: the C-in-C retained their confidence, but Hankey returned to London uneasy over morale. In a private note, he warned Lloyd George: ‘The army is tired of the war and there is a general feeling that peace is not very distant.’6
OHL’s plans for 1918 were already well advanced. As early as 11 November 1917, Ludendorff and Hindenburg summoned the generals in the West and their principal staff officers to a conference at Mons.7 Closure of the Eastern Front allowed a major change of policy in Flanders and France, Ludendorff told them: it was essential to abandon the defensive strategy of the past year and seek a swift and final victory before men and material from America bolstered ‘the Entente Powers’. Several options were considered, even a renewal of the Verdun offensive. Ludendorff’s chief of the operations department Lieutenant-Colonel Wetzell, presented a plan for a two-stage offensive, with a feint attack in the Verdun sector or between Arras and St Quentin masking the main assault, one that was designed to force the British to sue for peace by striking around Ypres. Wetzell proposed that the first objective should be, not Ypres itself, but the key railway junction of Hazebrouck, whose capture would isolate the troops in the Salient from the main allied army in France and enable the advance to continue and take Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne.
After the battle of Cambrai, however, Ludendorff rejected any plans for attacking at Verdun or in Flanders. His preference was an all-out offensive across the Somme in a bid for Paris. To him there were lessons in both recent battles. Cambrai had shown the value of tanks; bigger ‘land battleships’ must be speedily developed, with the technical knowledge acquired from captured British models. The victory at Caporetto confirmed the importance of secrecy and surprise: all forward movements in the coming offensive should therefore be made at night; by day, camouflage must conceal the massing of artillery from prying reconnaissance aircraft. The specialist storm-troopers, developed by Falkenhayn, were to train in collaboration with equally specialized artillery units and with ‘assault troops’. They should move forward quickly and carry on advancing rather than pause to consolidate initial gains. Behind the lines, there was intensive training and rehearsals throughout February – a month when with characteristic perversity the weather remained fine that winter.
Meanwhile, Germany’s enemies consumed much time in inter-allied conferences and, among the British, in civil–military political bickering. Lloyd George out-manoeuvred Robertson when he sought to preserve the independent authority of the CIGS, and Robertson resigned his post – making way, almost inevitably, for Sir Henry Wilson.8 Outwardly, Haig was quietly confident of defeating any Spring Offensive by Ludendorff. On 2 March he told his assembled senior generals that he was so impressed by all he had seen of their preparations that his only fear now was that Germany might hesitate to launch an offensive.9 If it came, he was convinced the blow would fall once again in Flanders, and he retained six divisions in reserve, to cover the Channel ports. Sir Herbert Gough, whose Fifth Army was thinly spread along the most southerly sector, argued that the enemy would make a strike for Amiens, seeking a breakthrough at the point where the Fifth Army’s new positions bordered the most northern French outposts. The Fifth Army comprised only 12 under-strength infantry divisions and three cavalry; they were expected to hold 42 miles of the Front. To placate Gough, Haig spared him two reserve divisions.
As late as Saturday, 16 March, the restructured intelligence at GHQ reported that no build-up ‘south of the Bapaume–Cambrai road’ could be detected.10 That night 47 German divisions were on the march southwards to join 28 divisions already at the Front. The movement continued through the hours of darkness on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, heavy fog enveloped the lines, muffling all sound through the small hours of Thursday, 21 March. Then, at 4.40 a.m., ‘Operation Michael’ began. Some 6,000 guns and 3,500 mortars bombarded 40 miles of Front between the River Scarpe, near Arras and St Quentin.
There had been no barrage like it in any previous offensive. High-velocity howitzers targeted railway stations and sidings at some points 25 miles away. In the front line, high-explosive, gas and shrapnel shells fell on the Fifth Army trenches. There was, too, an innovative Blue Cross shell, two-thirds explosive and one-third diphenylchloroarsine, an irritant gas that incapacitated a victim by constant sneezing. By 8.40 a.m. when the assault infantry went forward fog, smoke and gas had thrown a hideous blanket over a vast battlefield. The sun did not begin to break through until early afternoon. By then General von Hutier’s 18th German Army had taken all their prescribed objectives. By dusk Hutier’s forward troops were 5 miles into the defences. The British losses that day were appalling: more than 7,000 dead and 21,000 captured. Overnight a deeply perplexed General Gough ordered the Fifth Army to fall back beyond the Crozat canal. On Monday afternoon (25th March) the Third Army was ordered back to a line along the Ancre, close to the Somme battlefields: the BEF’s second great retreat of the war had begun. ‘During the whole of this dreadful march we were shelled, shelled, shelled,’ wrote D.J. Polley, a machine-gunner in the Royal Naval Division. ‘If there can be monotony in the expectation of death, then the very din of battle became monotonous.’11
The German troops were elated. Second Lieutenant Herbert Sulzbach, a gunner, wrote in his diary: ‘This day must be the greatest in the history of the world. The last night of the four years of static warfare passed . . . in the greatest possible excitement. The impossible thing has been achieved: the break-through has succeeded!’12 The first OHL war communiqué told the German people the battle ‘was under the personal leadership of His Majesty the Emperor’. This statement was almost as exaggerated as Sulzbach’s enthusiasm; the kaiser spent fully nine hours that day with the military paladins at their headquarters in Avesnes. The patriotic Kölnische Zeitung, dutifully following OHL’s lead, called the offensive ‘Die Kaiserschlacht’ (The Emperor’s Battle), and the name stuck. It was a burdensome honour to bear. The Napoleonic mantle condemned Wilhelm to success; failure would irreparably damage the prestige of the dynasty.13
Despite the euphoria, Ludendorff was far from content with the first day’s achievements. As reports reached him at Avesnes it became clear that casualties were high: over 10,000 dead and almost 29,000 wounded. Moreover in the north he had looked for encirclement of General Byng’s Third Army at Arras but the dry, chalky fields were spared the fog that arose from the marshes to the south. The RFC could not get airborne and direct the guns for a British counter-bombardment. In consequence, General von Below’s 17th Army made none of the progress shown by the 18th Army.
So it was to be for the next 16 days, with holding operations in the north while the 18th Army swept ahead, across the old Somme battlefield. One day Gutier’s troops advanced 10 miles and on the next, 12. In alarm the allied commanders, together with Clemenceau and President Poincaré, hurriedly conferred at Doullens on 26 March and agreed to entrust Foch with responsibility for coordinating the activities of all the allied armies on the Western Front. He was accepted as a Supreme Commander, a generalissimo in all but name, a status confirmed ten days later.14
Yet at first it seemed as if military co-ordination came too late. Morale in Paris had been badly shaken when two shells fell in the heart of the city on the first Saturday of the offensive. Three days after the Doullens conference a shell hit the church of St Gervais during Mass on Good Friday, killing 88 worshippers. It was difficult to convince Parisians that the enemy was not at the gates of the capital, but could fire from a hidden site 75 miles away. Another 300 shells fell on Paris over the next three months, a constant reminder of German strength and the power of Krupps artillery.15
All remained quiet within the Ypres Salient. To Haig’s satisfaction, Plumer had returned from Italy and resumed command of the Second Army; he was even prepared to spare troops to go south-wards, as reinforcements for threatened positions around Amiens. Although the BEF’s stubborn resistance blunted the penetrative power of Hutier’s troops, on 28 March they came within 10 miles of Amiens. A week later, in the same sector, the indomitable Australians launched a successful counter-attack. Ludendorff was a realist, at least over military affairs: on 5 April he recognized that his troops needed rest and reinforcement. Operation Michael came to an end; the allied dead and gravely wounded were as yet unknown, but some 70,000 French and British troops passed into prisoner-of-war camps and more than a thousand guns were captured. German losses too were heavy, perhaps as high as a quarter of a million men killed, gravely wounded or taken prisoner. By the end of the first week in April, some German divisions could muster no more than 2,000 men.16
Almost immediately, Ludendorff reverted to a variation on the plan Wetzell had advocated at the Mons conference. ‘Operation Georgette’ would be launched in Flanders, striking not in the first instance for Ypres but for the railway junction of Hazebrouck, 19 miles from the German front south of Armentières. As a second objective Crown Prince Rupprecht’s Army Group was to gain Mont Cassel, the highest point in the hills along the Franco-Flemish border.
This sector of the British line was weakly held. General Horne’s First Army was over-stretched: on average his divisions were each responsible for slightly more than five and a half miles of front. Among his forward troops were four brigades of the 2nd Portuguese Division, due to be relieved on 10 April. Although the British had anticipated an attack in Flanders in the year, the timing and the choice of battleground took them by surprise. On 8 April a German airman inadvertently revealed to his French captors that troops were massing in front of the Arras to Armentières sector, but the news cannot have reached British headquarters more than 12 hours before ‘Georgette’s’ guns opened up.
The countryside between the La Bassée canal and the River Lys was flat and marshy and, as on 21 March, the Germans were assisted by a clinging mist, in places as dense as fog. The full weight of a barrage from the German Sixth Army’s guns, firing gas and high-explosive shells, fell on the unfortunate Portuguese.17 At least one battalion did not wait to see the infantry emerging from the cloud. The ‘pork-and-beans’, as they were nicknamed by the Tommies, ran like frightened rabbits: ‘I don’t believe that some of them have stopped running yet,’ Lieutenant Arthur Preston White of the neighbouring 1st Northamptonshires wrote six weeks later in a letter from hospital.18 Other fugitives stole any bicycles they found and were seen pedalling desperately in the general direction of Le Havre. Most of the Portuguese brigades were simply overwhelmed by the onslaught: 6,000 men ended up in prisoner-of-war camps. There is no precise record of their losses, but one in seven of the Portuguese Expeditionary Force perished on the Western Front, and 9 April was their grimmest day of battle: the death toll that day must have been considerable. So intense was the fighting that the 7th Gordon Highlanders, seeking to plug the gap, lost some 700 officers and men killed, seriously wounded or taken prisoner.
Within three hours the Germans were through the thin British line. To the right, Territorials in the 55th West Lancashire Division held the village of Givenchy, already heavily fortified. They were still defying the enemy when relieved five days later. To the left of the gap the 2nd Worcesters checked the advance in the village of Neuve Eglise. But a new danger arose: on 10 April the German Fourth Army struck north of Armentières, drawing Plumer’s Second Army into the battle and bringing the fighting back once again to the Messines–Wytschaete ridge. And on this occasion Plumer had neither the manpower nor the guns to check the German thrust. For fear of encirclement Plumer felt forced to evacuate the ridges east of Ypres. In the course of 48 hours almost all the gains made in 1917 were lost, including Messines and even Passchendaele.19
Over the following days the Germans pushed forward up the Menin Road as far as Hellfire Corner, the crossroads only a mile east of the Menin Gate. Here they were checked by the original fall-back defences strengthened during Second Ypres and by continued resistance on Pilckem Ridge that threatened their left flank. The danger for the city was greater than in either October and November 1914 or in the following spring. Haig was extremely worried. He pressed the French to prepare plans for flooding the low-lying land between the Flanders heights and Dunkirk, but his immediate concern remained the shortage of well-trained troops. On the first day of ‘Georgette’ he saw Foch and sought French help. None was forthcoming: Foch needed every division he could find to protect Paris and meet the attack Pétain anticipated in Champagne. Late in the evening of 10 April, Foch and Weygand again met Haig, however, and agreed to press ahead with plans for an advance northwards from the Somme. This threat to Ludendorff’s communications would release British, Australian and Canadian troops and give Haig the reserve force he desperately sought.20
Next morning the C-in-C wrote out personally the famous Order of the Day, addressed to the First and Second Armies: ‘There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.’21 Haig did not mention the Order in his diary entry for 11 April, and there is no evidence that it stiffened the sinews of any of the weary troops to whom it was addressed, nor indeed that many of them knew of it until after the battle. Brigadier-General Freyberg VC, visiting the Hampshire Regiment near Bailleul an hour before dawn next day, ‘found the whole battalion asleep, lying in every kind of position’. Later Freyberg came across another ‘snoring company’. The men were extraordinarily resilient. ‘It is all fearfully thrilling and everyone is in the best spirits,’ Lieutenant-Colonel Murray of 15th Brigade Royal Horse Artillery assured his family: ‘It doesn’t matter losing ground if we make it as expensive as we have been doing.’22 Was Haig’s rallying call of 11 April intended as much to boost morale at home as to hearten the troops in the fields?
Yet, in what is generally called the Battle of the Lys, there were several instances of magnificent defiance. Most notable was the determination of the 4th Brigade of the 31st (Guards) Division to counter the German threat to Hazebrouck. In four hours of hand-to-hand fighting along almost a mile of the hurriedly constructed lines south of the town one company of 250 Grenadiers was completely destroyed, another was reduced to 20 men and a third to only six. But Hazebrouck, the hub of the strategic railway network, was never captured.
Ludendorff’s plans were again frustrated. He turned instead to the North, with the two armies once again engaged at Langemarck on 17 April. An attempt to force a way through the Belgian lines along the Yser was repelled that day in the fortified village of Kippe. Four Belgian infantry regiments fought throughout the day with courage and tenacity. They took 800 prisoners, a great fillip to Belgian trench morale.
Finally, Ludendorff looked again longingly towards the Channel ports and massed three and a half divisions to oust six newly arrived French regiments from Mount Kemmel, the 500-foot high vantage point commanding the route to Dunkirk. Hindenburg flattered the geographical contours of Flanders by assigning the task of conquering the mount to the Alpine Corps, veterans of attacks along the Serb-Greek frontier as well as in the Carpathians and northern Italy. Their assault on 25 April was preceded by an intense artillery bombardment with mustard gas and phosgene. The French troops found their respirators offered insufficient protection. They fled down the northern slopes of the mount ahead of the Alpine Corps, showing Portuguese alacrity. Some 800 French were taken prisoner at the crest of the mount and another 1600 in Kemmel village.23
It was, however, Georgette’s last fling. Ludendorff, like Falkenhayn in the same region during the autumn of 1914, was alarmed at the extended and exposed position of his troops, many of them the best-trained battalions still available to him. The Army Group commanders, especially Crown Prince Rupprecht, warned him of falling morale and battle weariness. His overall strategy of springing surprises by mounting concurrent attacks in isolated sectors was proving a drain on manpower and resources. OHL could no longer control more than one battle at a time. Ludendorff had to choose between making a final drive for Paris or pushing ahead for the Channel ports. At this moment he was unexpectedly confronted with a new problem. Already, on two occasions, OHL was alerted by reports of increased naval activity in the Channel. Were the British contemplating amphibious operations?
Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had succeeded Admiral Bacon in command of the Dover Patrol the previous December. Keyes was highly critical of the discarded plans for an amphibious landing. The Admiralty, however, was alarmed at the prospect of destroyers based on Zeebrugge and Ostend joining the smaller U-boats in breaking through the protective barrage and causing havoc among the cross-Channel transports that sustained the BEF. Keyes accordingly spent the first three months of the year perfecting plans to seal the two Belgian ports with block-ships. Twice in mid-April an armada of more than a hundred small vessels and the old cruiser HMS Vindictive set out from Dover, only to run into difficulties and return to port. On 22–23 April, Keyes tried again, flying his flag in the destroyer, HMS Warwick. Shortly after midnight, as his ships approached the Belgian coast, Keyes greeted the coming of St George’s Day with the signal ‘St George for England’. From the Vindictive came the response, ‘And may we give the dragon’s tail a damned good twist.’24
The raid did not achieve all Keyes had hoped. At Zeebrugge the block-ships trapped the destroyers but the smaller U-boats soon found a channel to avoid them. At Ostend two block-ships ran aground on a sandbank short of their objective: the Vindictive was herself used as a block-ship in a second raid there a fortnight later. During the raid on Zeebrugge, the Vindictive transported a large body of men, equipped with weapons tried and tested in the trenches – flame-throwers, mortars, machine-guns and even howitzers. The marines attacked the German garrison on the Mole with great courage: eight Victoria Crosses were won at Zeebrugge, two at Ostend. Casualties, however, were heavy: 200 dead and 400 wounded. In Britain the highly dramatic raids lifted morale at one of the low points of the war. They also had considerable influence on Ludendorff, particularly the equipment assigned to the marines. He now had to reckon with a possible landing behind his lines. Six days after the Zeebrugge Raid, Ludendorff ordered the Fourth and Sixth Armies to end their advance and consolidate. St George may not have knotted the dragon’s tail but Georgette caught a decisive blow from the swirl of the twist.
Over the next six months, the outcome of the war still seemed in the balance to the public at home. Good news came from outside Europe with successful offensives in Palestine, Mesopotamia and eventually in the Balkans, too.25 American troops had crossed to France at the end of June 1917 and in mid-January 1918 took over a sector of the Front on the Meuse. But it was not until the spring of 1918 that their commander, General Pershing, could begin building up a formidable US army in Europe. During the six weeks of Germany’s Michael and Georgette offensives 158,000 Americans landed at Brest; another 245,000 followed in May. Ludendorff had to act swiftly and decisively before the newcomers were ‘acclimatized’ and ready for action.
To the surprise of Foch, Pétain and Haig the Germans were able to launch their third major offensive in ten weeks on Monday, 27 May. Ludendorff amassed guns and storm-troopers along a 45-mile sector of the Chemin des Dames and, in the initial advance, broke easily through the French Sixth Army. By Tuesday night a salient 15 miles deep pointed directly towards Paris. Place-names last in the spotlight 45 months ago returned to the headlines. By Thursday the Germans were back on the River Marne, east of Chateau-Thierry, little more than 40 miles from the capital.26
If the ground were familiar, so too was Ludendorff’s strategy. He pushed forward too far too fast, and he had to halt in order for supplies to catch up. On this occasion roads, railways and troops passing through the towns were subject to bombing from the skies, both by the French and by the Royal Air Force (the RAF, created on 1 April by the amalgamation of the RFC and the RNAS to form a separate service, independent of both the War Office and the Admiralty). General Franchet d’Esperey, who had shown such verve in 1914, commanded Army Group North and, in consultation with Pétain, concentrated his troops east of the Marne between Chateau-Thierry and Rheims. For three weeks in June, Army Group North and the US 1st and 3rd Divisions held the Germans in check. Foch wished to launch an immediate counter-attack but was prepared to wait until Ludendorff exhausted his forces.
On 14–15 July a terrifying artillery duel was fought out west of Rheims as Ludendorff sought to envelop his enemies by striking south-westwards. Foch parried the subsequent attack, with support not only from the Americans but also from an Italian division. In three days the Germans lost 50,000 men, though allied casualties were also high, mainly from the initial bombardment. On 18 July, Foch at last struck, with General Mangin’s Tenth Army threatening the vital lateral supply route, the road from Soissons to Chateau-Thierry. After another three days of battle, the threat to Paris was finally removed. Ludendorff kept his operations staff at work on further projects, the most advanced being a renewed attack in Flanders, to cross the Yser and swing northwards, cutting off the Belgians and reaching the coast in the vicinity of La Panne. But all such plans were little more than war games. On 22 July, Hindenburg had to report to the All Highest War Lord that the Kaiser-schlacht was ending in total failure.
On 8 August – to become for Ludendorff ‘the Black Day of the German Army’ – Haig joined the offensive. Elaborate deception, including great activity by two Canadian battalions in the Flanders hills, convinced German observers that most Dominion troops were in the Mount Kemmel area. Bogus wireless messages, duly intercepted by the Germans, also suggested the imminence of an offensive in Flanders; even King Albert learnt of the bogus messages, and was puzzled and aggrieved that neither Foch nor Haig had consulted him. But all attention was focused once more on the Somme. Together with the Australians, the Canadian Corps formed the spearhead of an attack launched by Haig that day finally to clear the threat to Amiens and, if possible, force the Germans away from the Somme and back to the Hindenburg Line. The allied gains led to a series of conferences, in which Haig and the more cautious Pétain successfully curbed Foch’s propensity for frontal assaults. On 15 August, Foch (newly created a marshal of France) accepted a strategy of carefully timed thrusts up the line. ‘Tout le monde á la bataille’ (‘Everyone into battle’) was his rallying call, and tout le monde responded. By 30 August a confident headline in The Times could welcome ‘The Flowing Tide’ of victory. Among brigades and battalions back to lines left in April was the 15th Royal Horse Artillery. ‘It is curious to look back to those dark days in April when we were hanging on to Ypres by our eyelids,’ Colonel Murray wrote home on 1 September; ‘Who would have thought then that in four months we should be chasing him [Ludendorff] back thoroughly beaten?’27
In London the War Cabinet remained suspicious: optimistic predictions from the BEF commanders-in-chief had so often proved ill-founded; the Hindenburg Line had yet to be breached, and there was concern that bakingly hot weather in July and early August was giving way to thunderstorms, conjuring up visions of another ghastly assault through churned-up mud. As CIGS, Sir Henry Wilson gave Haig more loyal support than the C-in-C had expected, but he too warned him against massed frontal attacks. Haig was angered by such sustained criticism, not least because the war had at last become mobile and, as a cavalryman, his strategic instincts were sound – at times more far-sighted than those of Foch.28
Command of the northern sector of the Front, from the Ypres–Poperinghe Road to the coast was accorded to King Albert, with 11 Belgian divisions and six French. To his right, Plumer remained in command of the British Second Army, down to the south of Armentières. Fighting in Flanders flared up again at the end of August, as the Germans began to pull back from their own exposed salient around Kemmel. The British 38th Division regained Mount Kemmel on 31 August. A fortnight earlier, the US 27th and 30th Divisions took over a sector of the line at the foot of Kemmel. From 31 August to 4 September the Americans were engaged in heavy fighting, during which they advanced for more than a mile and captured the villages of Vierstraat and Voormezele, incurring more than 2,000 casualties. But the main American theatre of war lay far to the east on the Meuse south of Verdun, around St Miel, where the ‘doughboys’ gained their first victory in Europe.
In the Belgian trenches officers had for some time been concerned at what they regarded as subversive activities by the Flemish Front movement, pressing to secure full self-government for Flanders in post-war Belgium.29 In June the Front leaders called on Flamingant Dutch-speakers in the trenches to defend themselves against enemy attack but avoid being needlessly slaughtered – a curious distinction, seen by King Albert’s French-speaking staff officers as discouraging participation in any drive against the enemy. The Flemish Front leaders believed they could count on 50,000 ‘militant Flamingant soldiers’ but they misunderstood the mood of their compatriots. The men might resent Francophone supremacy, but they loathed German occupation of towns and villages even more intensely. When the opportunity to free the homeland from the invader arose, they stood at one behind their royal commander-in-chief. The Flemish Front leaders were arrested and imprisoned – a rash move, perhaps, for it made them martyrs for their cause.
Yet when the main offensive by King Albert’s Flanders Army Group began at dawn on 28 September there was no sign of treasonable disaffection. The Belgians were supported by French and British troops. Across crater-pocked ridges and the wasteland of old trenches the advancing troops met surprisingly little resistance as they took Poelcapelle, Gravenstafel and Passchendaele; by now the most reliable German regiments were holding the Hindenburg Line. It was there that on 29 September the 46th Division – mainly Shropshire lads, together with the Sherwood Foresters – broke into the German defences across the St Quentin canal, taking 2,400 prisoners and capturing 70 guns.30 In Flanders that day the Belgians found the German defences in the forest of Houthulst more formidable, and they suffered heavy losses. As so often in this sector, the weather intervened. By 2 October the attackers were again impeded by heavy mud. The old prize of Roulers still eluded them.
Meanwhile, Plumer’s troops had thrust forward up the Menin Road beyond Hooge, recovering land lost in April and the earlier battles. The greatest change of all, however, came on 3 October in Ypres itself. Not a shell struck the town or the ruined villages clustering around it on that Thursday. An eerie silence suffused the streets. After four years the town was beyond the reach of German guns and the noise of battle receded into a distant rumble. Within a fortnight, VADs, the women who had volunteered for front-line nursing with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, were tending the wounded in Ypres’s improvised hospitals.
Gradually the Germans pulled back across Belgium. As early as 3 October the navy ordered 31 serviceable destroyers, torpedo-boats and U-boats to leave Ostend, Zeebrugge and the Bruges canal for the safety of home ports. At last, on the morning of 17 October, a British aeroplane flying over Ostend reported that the Germans had pulled out of the town. That afternoon Sir Roger Keyes welcomed King Albert and Queen Elisabeth aboard the destroyer HMS Termagant at Dunkirk. With the black, red and gold standard of Belgium flying above the White Ensign the Termagant made a surprise entry into Ostend harbour, to the delight of the townsfolk. ‘A wonderful trip,’ King Albert wrote to Lord Curzon. ‘It was a great day for us to enter our first reconquered town after 4 years.’31
Two days later Belgian troops liberated Bruges and Zeebrugge and reached the Dutch frontier outside Sluis: the coast was cleared. The Flanders Army Group was poised to press forward on Ghent, Brussels, and Charleroi with Plumer’s Second Army between the rivers Lys and Scheldt, two French corps supporting the Belgian drive on Roulers and Courtrai, and the mass of the Belgian army to the north and east.
Europe’s future, however, was being shaped elsewhere, in a valley of pine and birch on the fringe of the Belgian Ardennes. OHL’s headquarters were in the Hotel Britannique at Spa. There the news reaching Hindenburg and Ludendorff was uniformly bad: the defences in the West were crumbling; the allied armies based on Salonika had forced Germany’s smallest ally, Bulgaria, to seek peace terms; the multinational Habsburg and Ottoman empires were close to disintegration, and ‘red cells’ of Bolshevik troublemakers were reportedly agitating in the fleet and the munition factories. The military paladins thought peace and constitutional reforms essential for Germany if the Reich was not to suffer the fate of Russia; Kaiser Wilhelm recognized the logic behind their arguments, though reluctantly and with reservations. In a letter to the Crown Council in Berlin, dated 4 October, Hindenburg pressed the need for the ‘immediate despatch’ of a peace offer: ‘Owing to the breakdown on the Macedonian Front . . . weakening our reserves in the West’ and ‘the impossibility of making good our very heavy losses in the battles of the last few days . . . it is imperative to stop fighting . . . in order to spare further useless sacrifices,’ he explained, ‘Every day lost costs thousands of brave soldiers’ lives.’32 Through Swiss mediation, contact was made with President Woodrow Wilson in Washington on 4 October.
Despite the urgency of Hindenburg’s plea, the conflict continued for five more weeks: the allied governments were divided over the terms to be offered to the enemy, with influential figures in France, Britain and America arguing for the war to be carried into Germany as an act of preventive retribution.33 At times the fighting reached an even greater intensity. Some German positions were fanatically defended by individual regiments or battalions – Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon – frustrated by the sudden transition from near victory to imminent defeat. Conversely, Herbert Sulzbach thought the French shelling a week before the Armistice was the heaviest of the war: ‘It isn’t a barrage any more, it isn’t even a hurricane of fire, it’s a typhoon of fire!’, he wrote in his diary on 4 November.34 During the last hundred days of the war in the West the British took 188,000 prisoners, the French 140,000, the Americans 44,000 and the Belgians 14,000.
After the liberation of Bruges, the pace of the left flank of the Flanders Army Group slackened, in part because of delicate political negotiations between emissaries from the capital and King Albert; the Belgians were still in the western outskirts of Ghent when the war ended. On the Scheldt the British Second Army reached Marlborough’s old battlefield of Oudenarde. Further south the reconstituted Fifth Army had crossed from Lille into the province of Hainaut at the end of October; attached to the Fifth were the Portuguese, with the same liaison officer, Captain Dartford, attached, as during the March débâcle; he noted that their reintegration was supervised by ‘a strong personality . . . Col. B. L. Montgomery’.35 By 10 November the Fifth Army was near Tournai. Slightly over half of Belgium was still under German occupation.
On Thursday, 7 November, there were rumours in London and Washington that an armistice had been signed. In reality, a German delegation was at last on its way to meet Marshal Foch in his headquarters Pullman train at Réthondes, in the forest of Compiègne; there would be no more negotiations but the delegates had to seek final authority to sign the proffered terms from Spa – and it was still possible that Germany would fight on. Expectancy in the trenches ran high over the weekend when, on Saturday evening, it was confirmed that Kaiser Wilhelm had abdicated and was said to be seeking sanctuary in Holland. Soon after five in the morning of Monday, 11 November, the Armistice was signed in Foch’s railway-saloon office. ‘Hostilities will cease at 11 A.M. today,’ Foch informed all commanders in the field at ten minutes to seven. Fittingly, on the previous afternoon, Canadians and British had entered Mons, where for the BEF it all began.