The Allied offensive on the Western Front, intended to relieve Russia’s military distress on the Eastern Front, began on 25 September 1915, two weeks after the end of the Zimmerwald Conference calling for an immediate end to the war. The needs of an ally in danger could not be ignored: the defeat of Russia would enable the Germans to transfer enormous forces from the east to fight against Britain and France.
The offensive was launched in two separate regions. The French attacked the German trench lines in Champagne, the British at Loos. These were the offensives agreed by the British and French leaders at the Calais and Chantilly Anglo-French conferences in July. In Champagne, the French made a two-mile dent in the German line along a fifteen-mile front and took 1,800 Germans prisoner. The capture of the German strongpoint of La Courtine was reported with particular enthusiasm in Paris, the depth and intricacy of its communication trenches and underground tunnels being remarkable.
Also in Champagne, awaiting the order to go forward, an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, the poet Alan Seeger, wrote home enthusiastically on September 25: ‘I expect to march right up the Aisne borne on an irresistible élan. It will be the greatest moment of my life.’ Another American volunteer, the nineteen-year-old Edmond Gěnet (a great-great-grandson of Citizen Gěnet who had been sent to America in 1792 by revolutionary France as its representative, and settled in New York State), also wrote home that day, telling his parents of the German prisoners-of-war he saw on his way to the front: ‘Some of them, mere boys of sixteen to twenty, were in a ghastly condition. Bleeding, clothing torn to shreds, wounded by ball, shell and bayonet, they were pitiable sights. I saw many who sobbed with their arms around a comrade’s neck.’ Nearer the front line Gěnet saw ‘one poor fellow who must have been totally blinded for he walked directly into the barbed wire and had a most trying and painful time to get out.’
Gěnet and five hundred of his fellow Legionnaires were in action on September 28 at the battle for the German strongpoint known as Navarin Farm, east of Reims, where more than three hundred were killed or wounded. Gěnet and Seeger survived. Among those killed was Henry Weston Farnsworth, a graduate of Harvard, class of 1912, who had gone straight from university to the First Balkan War as a newspaper correspondent, and who, when war broke out in Europe, hurried to be part of it. Joining the Foreign Legion, he revelled in its diverse characters, writing to his parents of ‘a Fijian student at Oxford, black as ink’, ‘a Dane, over six feet’, ‘another Dane, very small and young’, ‘a Swiss carpenter, born and bred in the Alps, who sings—when given half a litre of canteen wine—far better than most comic opera stars’ and ‘the brigadier Mussorgsky, cousin descendant of the composer’. Most of those killed that September 28 are forgotten. Farnsworth is remembered because the letters he wrote to his parents survive.84
Among the Legionnaires who were severely wounded at Navarin Farm was John Elkington, the British officer who had been court-martialled and dismissed from the British army for his ‘surrender document’ a year earlier. For his bravery in action the French army awarded him the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre. When his award became known in London, his British commission and rank were restored to him on the personal initiative of King George V.
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While the French were attacking in Champagne, the British attacked at Loos. The initial bombardment was along a six-and-a-half mile front. Using poison gas for the first time, the British released 150 tons of chlorine across No-Man’s Land, from 5,243 gas cylinders. As a direct result of the gas, six hundred German soldiers were killed. British troops advanced at one point more than 4,000 yards. One battalion was led in its assault by men dribbling a football across No-Man’s Land.
On the sector of the line held by the 15th (Scottish) Division, the British gas failed to blow forward into the German trenches. As the men hesitated to go forward through their own gas cloud, Piper Peter Laidlaw rallied the men of his battalion by striding up and down the British parapet playing ‘Scotland the Brave’ on his bagpipes, ignoring both the gas fumes surrounding him and the German machine-gun fire. He was wounded, but continued to play. The Scotsmen went forward, overrunning the first two lines of German trenches. Laidlaw was awarded the Victoria Cross.
Frank Cousins, one of the men of the Special Company who released the gas that day, wrote in his diary: ‘One poor lad fainted at the parapet and then went over. In came a lad with a pierced vein which we turnequed.85 He was still there at 2 o’clock. He too wanted to go over again. Then a fellow came in gassed. Then we got a man in who was shot thru’ the stomach and gradually bled to death. Then came a man with a smashed leg. We helped all these. One Black Watch officer came in with a shattered leg. We got him across our trench and his remark was typical: “What a damned mess there is in this trench!” We were busy in the trenches till 11.30. Then I went over the top and I worked between the two trenches making men comfortable and giving water.’
Another of those whose task was to release the gas was Donald Grantham, who found himself, like Cousins, attending to the injured. Garside, Harris and Aldridge were all members of a special Brigade, responsible for the gas cylinders and pipes. ‘Heard a man gassed,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and found Garside unconscious, brought him round and got him into a dugout nearby…. Then into fire trench where I found Harris dead with a bullet hole clean through his head. Helped drag him into a dugout. This was about nine and I did not get his blood washed off my hands for over ten hours. Did a few bandages and helped wounded down. Carried a man with wounded foot right out, then carried another part way. Helped others. Returned to our dugout then went and fetched Aldridge (badly gassed) from fire trench and carried him right out to the Dressing Station.’
The death toll at Loos exceeded in intensity that of any previous battle. On September 25 the ‘Roll of Honour’ notices in The Times filled four columns.86 The soldiers made great efforts to keep up their spirits. Harold Macmillan, a future British Prime Minister, moving up to the front line at Loos with his regiment on the following day, wrote to his mother: ‘A stream of motor-ambulances kept passing us, back from the firing line. Some of the wounded were very cheerful. One fellow I saw sitting up, nursing gleefully a German officer’s helmet. “They’re running” he shouted.’ For three hours Macmillan’s regiment waited, and sang ‘almost ceaselessly, “Rag-time”—and music hall ditties, sentimental love-songs—anything and everything. It was really rather wonderful.’
The next day, September 27, saw Macmillan’s regiment in action. His commanding officer was gassed, and both the second-in-command and the adjutant were killed. Macmillan himself was slightly wounded in the head, and shot through the right hand.87 He had been ‘more frightened than hurt’, he wrote to his mother from hospital, but it had been ‘rather awful—most of our officers are hit’. The words ‘rather awful’ masked a deep well of suffering.
Pushing through Loos to the Lens-La Bassée Road on the second day of the battle, British troops crossed the road at two points, opposite Hulluch, and opposite the Bois Hugo. Their numerical superiority was considerable, but several dozen German machine guns faced them in both places. ‘Ten columns of extended line could clearly be discerned,’ recorded the German regimental diary of the men defending Hulluch. Each advancing column was estimated at more than a thousand men, ‘offering such a target as had never been seen before, or thought possible. Never had the machine gunners such straightforward work to do nor done it so effectively. They traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks unceasingly.’
It was five months since Haig had told the British War Council: ‘The machine gun is a much over-rated weapon and two per battalion is more than sufficient.’ He was once again being proved terribly wrong. The German regimental account continued: ‘The men stood on the fire-steps, some even on the parapets, and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across open grass-land. As the entire field of fire was covered with the enemy’s infantry the effect was devastating and they could be seen falling literally in hundreds.’ Further south, as the British troops approached the Bois Hugo, a similar slaughter was taking place. Again the German regimental diary gave a stark picture, describing how ‘dense masses of the enemy, line after line, appeared over the ridge, some of the officers even mounted on horseback and advancing as if carrying out a field-day drill in peacetime. Our artillery and machine guns riddled their ranks as they came on. As they crossed the northern front of the Bois Hugo, the machine guns caught them in the flank and whole battalions were annihilated.’
Hundreds of men have left descriptions of the Battle of Loos, some in letters, some in recollections. Fourteen years later, Robert Graves, who was just twenty at the time of the battle, gave an account in his book Goodbye to All That of one episode, and of one officer’s story: ‘When his platoon had run about twenty yards he signalled them to lie down and open covering fire. The din was tremendous. He saw the platoon on the left flopping down too, so he whistled the advance again. Nobody seemed to hear. He jumped up from his shell-hole and waved and signalled “Forward.” Nobody stirred. He shouted: “You bloody cowards, are you leaving me to go alone?” His platoon-sergeant, groaning with a broken shoulder, gasped out: “Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they’re all f—g dead.” The Pope’s Nose machine gun traversing had caught them as they rose to the whistle.’88
So appalled were the Germans at the effect of their machine guns that they called the battle the ‘Field of Corpses of Loos’ (Der Leichenfeld von Loos). Near the Bois Hugo, when the fifth British attempt to push past the wood had failed, and when wounded men began to work their way back to the British lines, one German regimental diary commented: ‘No shot was fired at them from the German trenches for the rest of the day, so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy for the enemy after such a victory.’
After that fifth attempt to push past the Bois Hugo, the attack was called off. Among the officers reported ‘missing’ after he had been caught by German machine-gun fire and shellfire from the wood was Second Lieutenant John Kipling, the only son of Rudyard Kipling. Some years later Rudyard Kipling was told by a soldier who had witnessed the attack: ‘Jerry did himself well at Loos and on us innocents. We went into it, knowing no more than our own dead what was coming, and Jerry fair lifted us out of it with machine-guns. That was all there was to it that day.’ After the war, Rupert Grayson, who had been wounded in the hand by the same shell splinter that killed John Kipling, became almost a surrogate son for the writer, and a prolific writer himself. He died in April 1991, at the age of ninety-three.
John Kipling’s body was never found. The officer who went forward with him, 2nd Lieutenant Clifford, was also shot: either killed outright or fatally wounded. His body was found only later. Captain Cuthbert, who led the detachment, was also killed that day. His body was never found. Twenty-seven of those whom they led were also killed.89 Rudyard Kipling wrote of his son’s death, and the death of so many sons:
That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given…
To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes—to be cindered by fires—
To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
But who shall return us our children?
With an outpouring of anger, another of the young officers who fought at Loos, Roland Leighton, wrote to his fiancée, Vera Brittain: ‘Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of putrescence!’ Leighton went on to ask: ‘Who is there that has known and seen, who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?’
For the French, the Champagne offensive was declared to be a success, with Joffre announcing at its close that 25,000 German soldiers had been captured, as well as 150 heavy guns. For the British, Loos was a set-back that caused much heartsearching and distress. Of nearly 10,000 British soldiers who attacked at Loos, 385 officers and 7,861 men were killed or wounded. To General Haking, who on the afternoon of the second day asked the survivors ‘What went wrong?’, the official history recorded the men’s answer: ‘We did not know what it was like. We will do it all right next time.’ But moods were changing: in the House of Lords, a bastion of propriety and patriotism, the Battles of Neuve Chapelle and Loos were being described as ‘defeats’. On October 8, after a visit to Sir John French’s headquarters, Haig noted in his diary: ‘Some of the wounded had gone home and said that they had been given impossible tasks to accomplish and that they had not been fed.’
During and after the Battle of Loos, Captain W. Johnson, serving with a field ambulance, noticed a phenomenon that had not been widely seen on the battlefield since the retreat from Mons. Many of the younger members of Kitchener’s New Armies, the volunteers of eighteen and nineteen, were patients sent to him from the front line with what the official medical history of the war describes as ‘definite hysterical manifestations (mutism and tremors)’.
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On the Eastern Front, the eastward flight of refugees from the war zone continued to add to the chaos and hardship behind the lines. Reaching the station at Brest-Litovsk, on October 5, on her way back to Moscow, Florence Farmborough noted in her diary: ‘All was disorder and confusion. The town had been lately raided by a German Zeppelin and near the station two or three houses had been entirely destroyed, while, in the town itself, considerable havoc had been caused by incendiary bombs.’
On October 10 the German poet Rilke wrote in a private letter from Munich, ‘Can no one prevent it and stop it?’ But in a lodging house in neutral Switzerland the war offered a prospect of future triumph. ‘News from Russia testifies to the growing revolutionary mood’ was Lenin’s comment in a private letter, on the day of Rilke’s questioning.
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That September, an energetic naval officer, Commodore Roger Keyes, the Chief of the Naval Staff at the Dardanelles, submitted a new plan for forcing the Straits by ships alone. He was overruled by the admiral. Sixteen years later Churchill commented bitterly: ‘I marvelled much in those sad days at the standard of values and sense of proportion which prevailed among our politicians and naval and military authorities. The generals were so confident of breaking the line in France that they gathered masses of cavalry behind the assaulting troops to ride through the huge gaps they expected to open on the hostile front. To sacrifice a quarter of a million men in such an affair seemed to them the highest military wisdom. That was the orthodox doctrine of war; even if it did not succeed, no error or breach of the rules would have been committed. But to lose one hundredth part as many sailors and a dozen old ships, all of which were in any case to be put on the Mother Bank in a few months’ time, with the possibility of gaining an inestimable prize—there, was a risk before which the boldest uniformed greyhead stood appalled. The Admiralty and Generals had their way. The fleet continued idle at the Dardanelles. The armies shattered themselves against the German defence in France. The Bulgarians carried an army of 300,000 men to join our enemies; and Serbia as a factor in the war was obliterated.’
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In Mesopotamia, the British advance along the Tigris had continued, with an assault on Kut being launched on September 26, as the battles at Loos and in Champagne were at their height. Kut was taken, though not without some alarms when Indian troops seemed reluctant to storm the Turkish trench lines, and with hardships brought on by a thirst so intense that men were incapacitated. There was an additional cause for fear: on the first night of the battle, wounded men who could not be found in the intense blackness of the night were robbed by marauding Arabs, mutilated and murdered. Yet the aftermath of the capture of Kut seemed hopeful, the Turks still not seen as formidable enemy. Among the captured Turkish weapons was a Persian cannon from the time of Napoleon: it was dated 1802. The British had come 380 miles from the sea. The way seemed clear for a renewed advance in November, through Ctesiphon where the Turks were reported to be digging in, and on to Baghdad, only a further twenty-two miles away.
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Behind the lines in Europe, the punishment of those who helped the other side was continuous. In German-occupied Brussels, on the morning of October 12, following her Court Martial, the 49-year-old British nurse Edith Cavell was being led to her execution for having helped British and French prisoners-of-war, and Belgians who wanted to serve with the Allies, to escape to neutral Holland. At the execution posts a Belgian, Philippe Baucq, was being shot with her. She asked the guards for some large pins, which they gave her. She then pinned her long skirt tightly round her ankles, so that her dress would not flare up after she had been shot. She was struck by four bullets: one pierced her heart and killed her instantly.
During her trial, Edith Cavell had admitted the offences of which she had been charged. Protests by the American diplomats in Brussels, who were in charge of British interests, had no effect, despite Hugh Gibson’s appeal to the head of the German Political Department in Belgium, Baron von der Lancken, to telephone the Kaiser and seek his direct intervention. Once sentence had been passed, Lancken said, ‘even the Emperor himself could not intervene’. When this emphatic statement was published later in the war, the Kaiser was understood to have been greatly displeased.
On the night before her execution, Edith Cavell told the American Legation chaplain, the Reverend Horace Gahan: ‘They have all been very kind to me here. But this I would say, standing as I do in view of God and eternity: I realise that Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’ Despite this Christian sentiment, her execution led to an upsurge in anti-German feeling in Britain and the United States. This feeling was inflamed by the wide circulation of a false story that she had fainted on the way to the execution post, and had been shot while lying on the ground by the officer in charge of the firing squad. This imagined episode was depicted in the New York Tribune in a drawing of the prostrate and bleeding body of Edith Cavell, lying on her back, with a tall German officer, wearing a spiked helmet, standing over her and holding an enormous smoking revolver. The caption read ‘GOTT MIT UNS’, God is with us.
In Flanders, the Battle of Loos continued. Among those killed on October 13, in an attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt, was the twenty-year-old poet Charles Sorley, who had written shortly before his death:
Earth that blossomed and was glad
’Neath the cross that Christ had,
Shall rejoice and blossom too
When the bullet reaches you.
Wherefore, men marching
On the road to death, sing!
Pour gladness on earth’s head,
So be merry, so be dead.
On marching men, on
To the gates of death with song.
Sow your gladness for earth’s reaping,
So you may be glad through sleeping.
Strew your gladness on earth’s bed,
So be merry, so be dead.
Sorley’s body was never found. His name is carved in stone on the Loos Memorial to the Missing. A poem that was found in his kit after he was killed spoke of ‘millions of the mouthless dead’ and warned those who said that they would remember:
…scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
On the night Charles Sorley died at Loos, the Germans carried out their heaviest air raid of the war over Britain. Five Zeppelins took part, dropping 189 bombs on London and the Home Counties. Seventy-one civilians were killed.
On the front in Champagne, the French poet Auguste Compagnon was killed that month. On the Eastern Front, the painter Oskar Kokoschka was among the Austrian soldiers wounded in action and henceforth a civilian in all but name. ‘My wounds proved more decorative than lethal,’ the 29-year-old Second Lieutenant wrote to a friend. ‘A bullet in the head and a hole in the chest. My engagement is broken, my studio resolved, and a big silver medal in exchange. I am a pensioner!!!!!!’ His food parcel, made up as he had asked with the comforts he most wanted while campaigning, arrived after he had been wounded, and was returned to Vienna. He followed it shortly afterwards.
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Russia, Britain, France and Italy each suffered set-backs that autumn. On the Isonzo Front a cholera epidemic forced the Italian commanders to isolate whole units. Paratyphoid fever was also a hazard. Among those who were laid low by it was Private Benito Mussolini, the socialist editor who had welcomed Italy’s entry into the war, and whose son, born that autumn while his father was in the trenches, he named Vittorio Alessandro, in joint honour of the eventual victory and an English naval captain who had recently distinguished himself by his bravery. ‘Rain and lice, these are the two enemies of the Italian soldier,’ Mussolini wrote in his diary. ‘The cannon comes after.’ His own trenches were more than 6,000 feet above sea level, on Monte Nero. ‘We do not take fortresses by force,’ he noted, ‘we must take the mountains.’ But those mountains were defended by the Austrians with every defensive skill.
The lack of success of the Entente continued to be contrasted with the successes of the Central Powers. On October 5 a massive artillery bombardment, including 170 heavy guns and 420 heavy mortars, was the prelude to an Austro-German invasion of Serbia. At last, and despite the set-backs of the autumn of 1914, the murder of Franz Ferdinand was going to be avenged, and with a terrible vengeance. That same day, 13,000 French and British troops landed at Salonica, intent on hurrying northward to Serbia’s defence. Among the forces facing the Austrians and Germans as they crossed the Danube to attack Belgrade were four Anglo-French naval guns. But the Austro-German forces overwhelmed all opposition. The Serbs, weakened by a typhus epidemic, evacuated their capital on October 9. That same day the Austrians invaded Serbia’s ally and neighbour, Montenegro. Bulgaria, eager to annex the southern Serb region of Macedonia, attacked the Serbs two days later. The Central Powers had gained a new partner.
The Entente rushed to the defence of Serbia, as in 1941 Britain was to rush to the defence of Yugoslavia. On October 14, as the first French units reached the Greek-Serbian frontier, a further 18,000 French troops landed at Salonica. But it was the ordeal on the Western Front that continued to dominate French thought. On October 19, in Champagne, 815 French soldiers were killed, and more than 4,000 made seriously ill, when the Germans used a mixture of chlorine and phosgene in a gas attack along a ten-mile front.90 For the Italians, too, the Austro-German-Bulgarian advance into Serbia was completely overshadowed on October 18 by the opening of the third battle of the Isonzo. The numerically superior Italian forces, nineteen divisions as against eleven, 1,250 guns as against 604, failed to capture the two objectives, Mount Sabotino and Mount San Michele.
On October 21 the Bulgarians, who had set their sights on the annexation of Serbian Macedonia, entered the Macedonian city of Skopje. The first shots fired by the French on the Salonica Front were against Bulgarian troops, when they beat off a Bulgarian attack on Strumica railway station, twenty miles from the Bulgarian border. A new war zone had opened, the twelfth at that moment in the war.91 It was in a region with few roads, rough mountains, narrow defiles and rushing torrents. When French troops, continuing northward from Negotin, approached the river Vardar on their way to Veles, they headed for the road bridge marked on the map. When they reached it, they discovered it had been destroyed in the First Balkan War.
For one of the leading combatants, the Austrian General Conrad, the rapid success of this new attack on Serbia led to hopes that, once Serbia was defeated, it might somehow be possible to make peace with Russia, and end the war, while the existing structure of Europe was still intact. He put this to Franz Josef in a memorandum on October 22, but it was to be almost exactly three years before peace came, and with it the complete disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire. The imminence of victory was a time for boasting and advancing, not for reflection and compromise. At Potsdam, on October 22, at a meeting with the American Ambassador James W. Gerard, the Kaiser spoke angrily of United States financial help for Britain and France and protested that ‘a number of submarines’ built in America had been escorted to Britain by ships of the American navy. ‘America had better look out after this war,’ he warned the Ambassador. ‘I shall stand no nonsense from America after the war.’ He was careful, however, to distance himself from the sinking of the Lusitania, telling Gerard that he would ‘not have permitted’ the ship to be torpedoed if he had known about it, and that ‘no gentleman would kill so many women and children’.
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In the war zones, suffering and privation were everywhere evident. By October 24 the Bulgarians had driven a wedge between the Serb forces and the French who were trying to come to their aid. Three days later the German forces entered Knjazevac, taking 1,400 Serbian soldiers prisoner. As German, Austrian and Bulgarian forces were overrunning Serbia, two Entente war zones were becoming cursed by mud and rain. On the Gallipoli Peninsula, the troops who were huddled together in crowded, wet, constantly shelled trenches had no possibility of driving the Turks off the high ground. On the Isonzo and Dolomite Fronts, Italian forces still battling for the peaks were repeatedly driven off, or made the smallest gains for the heaviest of costs.
With the ending of the Third Battle of the Isonzo on November 4, more than 20,000 Italian soldiers had been killed and a further 60,000 wounded. In the Dolomites there had been a moment of Italian rejoicing on October 30 when a grandson of Garibaldi, General Peppino Garibaldi, captured the mountain village of Panettone. After capturing the 4,662-foot mountain pass of the Col di Lana on November 7, however, his forces were driven off two nights later.92
On the Western Front, in Champagne, German troops, many of whom had just been brought back from the Russian Front, drove the French from La Courtine, which had been captured with such plaudits a month earlier. They also drove the French out of a 900-yard section of their front-line trenches north of Massiges on November 4, killing most of their occupants and taking twenty-five prisoners. In a French counter-attack, however, mostly with grenades, the Germans were driven back.93
The fighting in Champagne was severe: in the region of La Courtine and Massiges, within a radius of only five miles, five villages were totally destroyed: Hurlus, Perthes-les-Hurlus, Le Mesnil-les-Hurlus, Tahure and Ripont. Ten miles to the west, beyond Navarin Farm, are two more ruined villages, Moronvilliers and Nauroy. On the modern Michelin maps these eighty-year-old relics of the devastation of the war zone are shown with the symbol ‘ruines’.
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The Entente was faring worst on the Eastern Front, where the whole of Russian Poland had fallen under German control. The number of Russian soldiers taken prisoner-of-war in the twelve months of conflict had reached 1,740,000. At Helsinki, Russian sailors on the battleship Gangut and the cruiser Rurik protested against the bad food and the severity of their officers. Fifty were arrested. The Russian Finance Minister, Peter Bark, hurried to France, travelling by sea from Archangel via Britain, to seek extended financial credits to shore up Russia’s warmaking abilities. A million pounds sterling had been borrowed in the second week of war. That sum had reached £50 million, with a further £100 million promised. Bark wanted even more, but President Poincaré was not helpful. ‘I could remind Mr Bark’, the protocol of their discussion read, ‘that neither the text nor the spirit of our alliance led us to foresee that Russia would ask us at some time to lend our credit.’ Bark produced his trump card: not gold reserves or the collateral of raw materials, but the threat that Russia would be unable to continue the war without French economic assistance. Poincaré gave way. The prospect of the German and Austrian armies being freed to move against the west was an overpowering argument. Russia remained at war, its indebtedness growing by the day.
With the new credits, Russia could import war materials on a larger scale, even from Japan, her enemy of a decade earlier. A mass of stores came in, through the Russian port of Archangel and then by railway over vast distances. Within a year Russia owed Britain £757 million and the United States £37 million. The British goods that reached Russia under this credit system included 27,000 machine guns, one million rifles, eight million grenades, 2,500 million bullets, 300 aeroplanes and 650 aeroplane engines. Among Russia’s needs was barbed wire. At the outbreak of war she possessed just over 13,000 tons in store. In the following year she manufactured a further 18,000 tons. But in that same year 69,000 tons had been purchased abroad and brought to Archangel. The problem, as with all war supplies reaching that remote northern port, was to get them to Petrograd and then on to the front. When Colonel Knox passed through Archangel that October he found ‘an enormous accumulation of stores at the port—copper, lead and aluminium, rubber and coal, and no less than 700 automobiles in wooden packing-cases. Much of this material was lying out in the open.’ Only 170 railway wagons were able to leave the port each day. A British firm was working to improve the railway line.
In an attempt to increase their ability to bring western war supplies to the front, the Russians were also trying to link the port of Murmansk with Petrograd. More than 30,000 Russian labourers were brought on six-month contracts to the cold, inhospitable region from provinces on the Volga, and 5,000 from Finland. But it was not enough, as hundreds and then thousands deserted, and almost none agreed to renew their contracts. Recourse was eventually had to German and Austrian prisoners-of-war, of whom 15,000 were brought to the railway, as were 10,000 Chinese labourers. The railway took a year and half to complete. Even then its carrying capacity developed only slowly.
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At Gallipoli the daily ravages of gales and illness had created havoc with the fighting abilities of the Allied forces. As many as three hundred men were being evacuated sick every day. Shortage of ammunition was limiting artillery fire to two rounds per gun per day. A new British commander, Sir Charles Monro, was sent out to retrieve the situation. Hardly had he arrived than he received, on October 28, a telegram from Kitchener with the bluntest of messages: ‘Please send me as soon as possible your report on the main issue at the Dardanelles, namely, leaving or staying.’ Monro immediately sought the opinion of each of his commanders, at Helles, Anzac and Suvla, about the possibility of a new offensive against the Turkish positions. They were unanimous: their men were capable of no more than twenty-four hours’ sustained battle.
On October 31, Monro replied to Kitchener’s telegram, recommending withdrawal. He was supported by General Byng, commanding at Suvla, who wrote: ‘I consider evacuation advisable.’ General Birdwood, the Anzac commander, disagreed, fearing that a withdrawal not only would be used by the Turks to claim a complete victory, but would have an adverse effect on Muslims everywhere, including in India. No decision was reached, and the troops remained on the peninsula.
At Salonica, British forces, some from Gallipoli, had landed to join the French effort on behalf of Serbia. Their progress was slow. ‘You’ll probably ask why we don’t get on,’ G.H. Gordon, a captain in the 10th Irish Division, wrote on November 1, ‘but there’s a very good reason, their strong position and our not enough men.’ The conditions at Salonica made him wish he was back in France. ‘All our moves here have been done in inky blackness and usually under rain and on very ill-defined tracks in the hills.’
On November 5, Bulgarian forces captured Nis, giving the Germans a direct rail link from Berlin to Constantinople, and ending the Serbian-controlled section of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway.94 The Serbian armies fought tenaciously, regaining villages and holding up the advancing armies, but being steadily driven back. For every fifty shells in Austria’s advancing artillery, the Serbs had only one with which to reply, and their gunners received a stream of orders not to waste them, and then only to use them in emergency.
Burning their last motorised vehicles and heavy guns, 200,000 Serbian soldiers and civilians retreated a hundred miles across the mountains to find sanctuary in Albania. But the three-week march over rough terrain exacted a terrifyingly heavy toll: the death of 20,000 Serbian civilian refugees. ‘People who shared in the retreat’, Miss Waring wrote in her wartime history of Serbia, ‘tell a confused story of cold, hunger, gorgeous scenery, Albanian ambushes, of paths covered with the carcasses of horses, of men dying at the wayside. We hear of the Ministers of Russia and Great Britain laying on straw next to the Serbian Foreign Minister, his wife and son, while in the next room lay the Italian and French Ministers, secretaries, consuls, dragomans, servants, pele-mele. We hear of the King, lying on a stretcher, drawn by four bullocks, sharing the difficulties of the road with the common soldier.’
The march across the mountains was a saga of distress, with hunger, privation and disease adding to the difficulties of the harsh terrain. Among those who had travelled from Britain to help the Serbs was Mabel Dearmer, a pioneer film-maker and successful novelist, playwright and illustrator. ‘What chance would Christ have today?’ she wrote in a public appeal, as the march continued. ‘Crucifixion would be a gentle death for such a lunatic.’ Shortly after sending her appeal, she died of enteric fever, while trying to help sick women and children.
As the marchers moved slowly westward, there was another grim hazard. Albania had declared itself for the Entente and offered help to the Serbs. But Albanian tribesmen who had suffered at Serb hands in 1912 and 1913 attacked the columns and killed hundreds of the marchers.
***
Although they were fleeing for their lives, the Serbs took with them into the mountains of Albania more than 24,000 Austrian prisoners-of-war. When the marchers reached the Albanian coast, these Austrians were interned in Italy and Sardinia. Many of them also died, of typhus and cholera. The Serb soldiers who reached the sea, more than 260,000, went mostly to the Greek island of Corfu, where they awaited in exile the day when they might liberate Serbia from the Austrian yoke. The evacuation had involved 1,159 escort voyages by forty-five Italian, twenty-five French and eleven British steamers. As well as the men, 10,000 horses were also taken away to safety. It was, writes one historian, the ‘largest sea evacuation in history until Dunkirk’.95
Sick and wounded Serb soldiers were sent to a quarantine camp on the small island of Vido, where so many hundreds died that it became known as the Island of Death. Of the 30,000 Serb boys who set off to cross the mountains, only half survived the march. Hundreds more were killed by Austrian air bombardment while waiting in the harbour of San Giovanni di Medua for ships to take them to Corfu. Once on Corfu, a hundred boys died each day for lack of food. The survivors of this terrible saga were sent for their safety, and their schooling, to England and France. Those children who were consumptive were sent to a sanatorium on Corsica. The war of embattled armies had also become a war of prisoners-of-war, of forced marches, of refugees, and of orphans.
Serbia’s two military allies, the French and the British, withdrew into Greece, while Bulgarian troops took up positions along the former Serb border. This war zone, like that on the Italian-Austrian Fronts, was one of mountain passes, rugged terrain, few roads, and steep gorges. For the Entente soldiers it was also very far from home. There was no way in which these small forces could intervene in the fate of occupied Serbia, where hundreds of Serbs were executed and others imprisoned for the slightest manifestation of nationalist sentiment. Yet south Slav nationalism, the hope of a larger south Slav kingdom, could not be crushed by Austrian persecution. In the words of the Serb poet Zmay Yovanovitch:
And what the power that drove thee on, and bore
Thee up, and lent thee wings? It was the hope
Within the brain. Without it there had been
No flight beyond the darkening clouds.
On November 7, off Sardinia, an Austrian submarine shelled and then torpedoed an Italian ocean liner, the Ancona, on its way to New York with many Italian immigrants on board: 208 passengers were killed, including twenty-five Americans. As with the previous German submarine sinkings, the American Government protested, found the Austrian reply unsatisfactory, but took the matter no further. On November 17 a British hospital ship, the Anglia, struck a German mine off Dover and sank: 139 among its crew and the wounded men on board were drowned.
***
On November 14 a new war zone was opened, one of the least remembered of the war. On that day, in the deserts of Italian Libya, which before 1912 had been part of the Ottoman Empire, the Senussi tribesman rose up in revolt against the Allies. Supported by the Turks, the Senussi opened fire at a British-Egyptian border post at Sollum. Two days later, three hundred tribesmen occupied the Zaura monastery at Sidi Barrani. British troops were sent into action, but the tribesmen, with the desert as their hiding place, continued to cause considerable aggravation.
Captain Jarvis, a British officer based in Egypt, who was an expert on desert warfare, later wrote: ‘In some respects this was the most successful strategical move made by our enemies of the whole war, for these odd thousand rather verminous Arabs tied up on the Western Frontier for over a year some 30,000 troops badly required elsewhere and caused us to expend on desert railways, desert cars, transport etc. sufficient to add 2d to the income tax for the lifetime of the present generation.’
Five days after the outbreak of the Senussi revolt in what had earlier been one extremity of the Turkish Empire, an act of heroism took place behind the Turkish lines in European Turkey when two British pilots, Richard Bell Davies, who in January had been injured in an attack on Zeebrugge, and G.F. Smylie, bombed a railway junction at Ferrijik on the Gulf of Enos. Smylie’s machine was hit by Turkish anti-aircraft fire: he made a forced landing, could not start up his plane, and disabled it. Davies, seeing this from the air, landed nearby, grabbed hold of Smylie as a group of Turkish soldiers approached, hauled him on board and flew off with him to safety. For this ‘feat of airmanship that can seldom have been equalled for skill and gallantry’ Davies was awarded the Victoria Cross.
***
Since May, in a minor Ministerial position, Churchill had continued to impress on his Cabinet colleagues the possibility of victory at Gallipoli, if the planning and execution of the land campaign was improved, and the naval attack re-activated. His advice had not been heeded. On November 4, General Monro, dispatched to the Salonica Front, was replaced at Gallipoli by General Birdwood, who wanted to try one more military assault on the Turkish positions. He was overruled by Kitchener, who made a surprise visit to the peninsula on November 11 and insisted that evacuation be carried out speedily. That day, the inner Cabinet was reduced to a five-man War Council, from which Churchill was excluded. He at once resigned from the Government and went to the Western Front, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, to become a battalion commander.
At Gallipoli, a thunderstorm on November 27, with hail and torrential rain, swept men and animals along the gullies and trenches. At least a hundred men were drowned. Among the British officers at Suvla during the blizzard was Captain C.R. Attlee, who described in his memoirs how the heavy rain ‘turned our trenches into moats’.96 There followed two days of ferocious blizzard with driving snow, when another hundred men froze to death or died of exposure. At Suvla alone 12,000 men were treated for exposure. For the Australians and Indians in particular, the sub-zero temperatures were a torment. The only welcome deaths were those of the millions of flies that had gorged themselves on the corpses: when the storm passed they had disappeared.
Evacuation had become inevitable: the only question was, when? But on December 2, having returned to London, Kitchener asked the commanders at Gallipoli whether a renewed attack might not be possible after all, if the four British divisions at Salonica were to be sent to Suvla Bay (from which some of them had earlier come). General Byng was sceptical, pointing out that the landing piers at Suvla were being repeatedly washed away by storms, that the rain had made such roads as there were almost impassable, and that there was not enough existing shelter from the storms for the troops already there. Once more, evacuation was back at the top of the agenda.
Not evacuation, but a renewed advance was the unchanging British plan of campaign in Mesopotamia. There, on November 21, General Townshend attacked the Turkish defences of Ctesiphon, as a prelude to what was intended to be a rapid march on Baghdad, a mere twenty-two miles away. But the earlier good fortune of Basra, Kurna, Amara and Kut was over. Of the 8,500 British and Indian troops who went into battle at Ctesiphon, more than half were killed or wounded. Despite almost twice that number of casualties, the Turkish defenders, far from panicking and fleeing as they had in earlier battles, not only stood their ground but counter-attacked. The British, four hundred miles from the sea, could expect no reinforcements of any sort; the Turks could and did call on the resources of Baghdad, only a few hours’ march away.
Having come so far, the British were forced to retreat. The humiliating journey back to Kut began on November 25. The survivors of the battle were exhausted and demoralised: the lack of facilities for the wounded made every mile of the retreat a torment. Shortly after the retreat began, a Turkish gun battery managed to immobilise the river flotilla, exposing those who were marching along the river bank to continual fear of attack. When the wounded continued by river south from Kut to Basra, Arab brigands, firing from both banks, killed many as they lay helpless in the ships taking them back.
At Kut, the defences were strengthened and preparations made to resist a Turkish attack. It was known that a senior German officer, Field Marshal von der Goltz, was on his way to take command, with 30,000 Turkish reinforcements. The British public, hitherto confident that the capture of Baghdad was imminent, suddenly faced the prospect of one of its armies being cut off and trapped, as Gordon had been at Khartoum three decades earlier. When the War Cabinet in London advised General Townshend to leave Kut and withdraw further down river, they received the reply that he was already besieged.
***
In the trenches on the Western Front, winter had brought wet and cold to plague the troops. The 36-year-old Raymond Asquith, the son of the British Prime Minister, and himself a Member of Parliament, wrote to a friend on November 19 of another ‘unpleasant feature’ of daily life in the trenches, ‘the vast number of rats which gnaw the dead bodies and then run on one’s face making obscene noises and gestures.’ The Prime Minister’s son added: ‘Lately a certain number of cats have taken to nesting in the corpses, but I think the rats will get them in the end; though like all wars it will doubtless be a war of attrition.’
***
In London, on November 27, pacifists from all over Britain gathered to establish a No-Conscription Fellowship, with the declared aim of refusing to do any form of military service. Many of them were Quakers. What united them, their President, Clifford Allen, declared, was ‘a belief in the sanctity of human life’. On December 4, Henry Ford despatched a ‘Peace Ship’, Oscar II, across the Atlantic with leading American women and journalists on board. Their instruction was: ‘Get the boys out of the trenches and back to their homes by Christmas.’
In Berlin that month, a prominent banker told the American Ambassador, James W. Gerard, that ‘the Germans were sick of the war; that the Krupp’s and other big industries were making great sums of money, and were prolonging the war by insisting upon the annexation of Belgium’. Prussian landowners were also in favour of continuing the war, the banker told the Ambassador, ‘because of the fact that they were getting four or five times the money for their products, while their work was being done by prisoners’.
The fate of the Armenians was the harshest of all outside the war zones. A 25-year-old Jewish girl, Sarah Aaronsohn, who had set out from Constantinople to her home in Palestine, travelled that December through the Taurus mountains to Aleppo. Her biographer has written: ‘She saw vultures hovering over children who had fallen dead by the roadside. She saw beings crawling along, maimed, starving and begging for bread. From time to time she passed soldiers driving before them with whips and rifle-butts whole families, men, women and children, shrieking, pleading, wailing. These were the Armenian people setting out for exile in the desert from which there was no return.’97
***
As the second winter of the war arrived, its impact was felt in all the war zones. But cold weather on the Eastern Front did not deter nine hundred Cossack troops from a three-day, 24-mile march, in fourteen degrees of frost, through the Pripet marshes to the headquarters of a German division. There, on November 28, they captured the eighty-strong Staff including the divisional general, who later shot himself. The front line in the east was stabilising. The Germans had driven as far east as Dvinsk and Vilna, the Austrians had regained Brody and Czernowitz. Russian Poland was entirely under German occupation. To feed the captive population, the Germans opened talks on December 2 with a United States diplomat, Dr Frank Kellogg.
***
At the Dardanelles, the new British admiral, Wester Wemyss, argued that a renewed naval attack, like that of March 18 by ships alone, would enable the Straits to be opened and kept open. In two telegrams to London he outlined his plan and expressed his confidence that it would succeed. His proposal for action was rejected. Instead, he was put in charge of all naval arrangements for the total evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The evacuation of the troops from Anzac and Suvla began on December 8. At Suvla, Captain Attlee was in command of a rearguard holding the perimeter around the evacuation beach. In twelve days 83,048 troops, 4,695 horses and mules, 1,718 vehicles and 186 heavy guns were taken off. The yearlong effort to reach Constantinople by sea and defeat Turkey by an overwhelming show of naval strength in the Sea of Marmara was over. All that remained was to evacuate the troops at Cape Helles.
The Turkish triumph of late 1915 was not confined to Gallipoli. In Mesopotamia, at one of the southern extremities of the Ottoman Empire, 25,000 British and Indian troops were besieged by 80,000 Turks in Kut. The siege began on December 5. The defenders held out for 147 days, waiting in vain for reinforcements to reach them from Basra. The relief force was itself under constant attack as it tried to reach Kut: in a battle at Sheikh Sa’ad more than 4,000 of the relieving force were killed or wounded. So bad were the medical arrangements that even eleven days after the battle a newly arrived Indian Field Ambulance unit found two hundred British and eight hundred Indian wounded still lying in the open, on muddy ground, without shelter, and with their first dressings still unchanged.
The set-back in Mesopotamia did not weaken the attraction to the British of a renewed effort to undermine the Central Powers, and make substantial territorial gains, by breaking the Ottoman Empire. Many national aspirations were at stake. As the Russian-born Jewish nationalist Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote, while the outcome of the war was still uncertain: ‘The only theatre where “decisive blows” can be imagined is Asiatic Turkey. On that theatre warfare seems to have kept its old character: smaller numbers of men and material, smaller losses as price of victory, and incomparably quicker territorial advance in the case of victory. This truth cannot be obscured by the two failures of Gallipoli and Kut: the causes of the melancholy results of the Dardanelles and Mesopotamian campaigns are sufficiently known, and these results do not prove anything except the danger of either negligent or half-hearted warfare.’
It was not until the very last phase of the war in Europe that Jabotinsky’s pointers to victory in Asia were to be followed, and proved true, opening up vast areas of the hitherto closed confines of the Ottoman Empire to partition and spheres of influence. Not only Jewish but also Arab aspirations had been stimulated by the prospect of an Allied victory on the Gallipoli Peninsula. On July 14, while the fighting there was still undecided, the Sherif of Mecca, Sherif Hussein, had written to the British authorities in Cairo to request British acknowledgement of ‘the independence of the Arab countries’. If this did not come within thirty days, he had warned, the Arabs ‘reserve to themselves complete freedom of action’: a scarcely veiled threat to throw their desert resources behind the Turks.
Sherif Hussein’s request had reached Cairo after the second Gallipoli landings. Even the hanging of eleven Arab leaders in Syria by the Turkish Governor, Jamal Pasha, on August 21, had not stimulated a more favourable British attitude to Arab aspirations, even though one of those hanged, Abd al-Karim al-Khalil, had hoped to organise an anti-Turkish revolt along the Eastern Mediterranean coast between Beirut and Sidon, which could well have cleared the way for an Allied landing there, cutting the Turkish lines of communication with Gaza, Sinai and the Suez Canal.
The immediate British response to Hussein’s search for independence was a cynical one. ‘I should personally recommend the insertion of a pious aspiration on the subject of the Sherif’s ideal of an Arab Union,’ the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, advised. ‘Something might be added to ensure his remaining definitely on our side until our success at the Dardanelles enables us to give more authoritative expression to our views.’
Before that hoped-for British success at Gallipoli, an Arab staff officer in the Ottoman army, Muhammad Sharif al-Faruqi, deserted from the Turkish forces at Gallipoli and crossed into the British lines. He was, he told those who questioned him, a descendant of the Prophet and wished to be taken to the Holy City of Mecca to see the Sherif Hussein. Taken by boat to Cairo, he was interrogated there on October 11 by Colonel Gilbert Clayton of the Arab Bureau, to whom he revealed that he was a member of a secret Young Arab Society opposed to Turkish rule. The society’s leaders, he said, in both Syria and Mesopotamia, wished to collaborate with the British in return for Arab independence.
According to al-Faruqi, both the Turks and the Germans were willing to grant the Arabs their territorial demands. This was not true, but Clayton and his colleagues in Cairo had no means of checking it. On the very day of al-Faruqi’s interrogation, Bulgaria mobilised against the Allies. The situation on the Gallipoli Peninsula was suddenly endangered by the prospect of Bulgarian troops joining the conflict. Al-Faruqi told Clayton that if an immediate British declaration was made supporting Arab independence, with specific territorial lines, the anti-Turk revolt would begin at once: in Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine. On the following day, October 12, Clayton telegraphed the Foreign Office in London advising acceptance of the terms implicit in Al-Faruqi’s report. To reject the offer, Clayton warned, would ‘throw the Young Arab Party definitely into the arms of the enemy.’ The Arab ‘machinery’ would at once be asserted against Allied interests throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Clayton’s reasoning was decisive: eleven days after he sent his telegram to London the British Government made the commitment to Arab independence that Sherif Hussein had earlier sought in vain. In a letter sent to the Sherif from Sir Henry McMahon, Britain agreed ‘to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories included in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca’. These included Mesopotamia and much of Syria. They excluded, at McMahon’s insistence, ‘portions of Syria lying west of the districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo’. Whether or not they excluded Palestine was to be a matter of subsequent dispute, since that was not mentioned in the exchange of letters. Six years later McMahon was to explain, in a letter to the Colonial Office: ‘It was as fully my intention to exclude Palestine as it was to exclude the more northern coastal tracts of Syria.’
The siege of Kut had begun on December 5. On December 7 the British Cabinet made its decision to evacuate Suvla and Anzac, but not, as yet, Cape Helles. A week later McMahon wrote again to Hussein to inform him that the latest Arab request, for neither Aleppo nor Beirut to be excluded from the area of future Arab independence, would have to be taken up with the French. As for the part the Arabs must play in the future, ‘it is most essential’, McMahon wrote, ‘that you spare no effort to attach all the Arab people to our united cause and urge them to afford no assistance to our enemies. It is on the success of these efforts, and on the more active measures which the Arabs may hereafter take in support of our cause, when the time for action comes, that the permanence and strength of our agreement must depend.’
The British had failed to secure victory either at Gallipoli or in Mesopotamia. These distant failures were to prove a strong deterrent to further distant campaigns, putting off the time when an Arab revolt against the Turks would become an integral part of Allied war strategy. The Arabs in 1916, like the Italians and Bulgarians in 1915, wanted to see some prospect of victory and territorial gain before committing themselves to battle. For the British, the frustrations of each of the set-backs of 1915 were considerable, with Gallipoli and Mesopotamia the most depressing. On December 20, Lloyd George expressed these feelings when he spoke in the House of Commons: ‘Too late in moving here, too late in arriving there. Too late in coming to this decision, too late in starting with enterprises, too late in preparing! In this war the footsteps of the Allied forces have been dogged by the mocking spectre of “too late”, and unless we quicken our movements damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much gallant blood has flowed.’
***
As 1915 came to an end, it was clear that the war that was to have ended by Christmas 1914 was certainly not going to be over by Christmas 1915. The British Government did not want it, however, to continue in the Balkans. On December 4, at a conference in Calais, the British, led by Asquith, insisted that the Allied forces at Salonica should withdraw. Now that Serbia was defeated they could serve no purpose there. The French bowed to this logic. But two days later, at a further inter-Allied conference, this time at Chantilly, the Russians, Italians and Serbs prevailed upon the French to agree to keep the Salonica Front open. In support of this view, the Tsar himself sent Asquith a telegram regretting the Calais decision. Less than a week after Calais, Kitchener and Grey returned to France, and agreed that the Salonica Front should remain in place, Kitchener reporting back to his colleagues that ‘good feeling had been restored’.
Plans were also laid at Chantilly for an Allied victory on the Western Front in 1916, when Joffre obtained British agreement for a joint and simultaneous Anglo-French offensive in the summer of 1916. It would take place both north and south of the river Somme, on a forty-mile front. What Joffre described as the ‘brilliant tactical results’ of the Champagne and Artois offensives of 1915 would be repeated and surpassed. Germany, his experts reported, was running out of reserves. With Kitchener’s New Armies on the British front, with sufficient guns for an overwhelming preliminary bombardment and sufficient ammunition for a sustained advance, the Battle of the Somme would be decisive.
***
On December 19, Sir Douglas Haig took over from Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief of the British army in France. That same day, an ominous day for millions, he wrote scathingly in his diary of the fate of the telegram he had sent to the War Office at noon, asking who was to succeed him as commander of the First Army. ‘Up to 11 p.m. no reply reached me. Then Sir Wm Robertson arrived from England and telephoned from St Omer that the Prime Minister and Lord K had gone out of London for the weekend, and nothing could be settled until Monday! And this is war-time!’
That day, December 19, the Germans released phosgene gas, ten times more toxic than chlorine, against the British forces in the Ypres Salient. Their aim was to cause panic and a mass retreat. But the British troops, who had been surprised by the new weapon in April, were now well trained in gas drill and well equipped with gas helmets. A thousand soldiers were gassed, and 120 killed. The wind was a strong one that day, blowing the gas cloud southward across the British lines and far to the rear: because of a curve in the line, some of the gas was blown along the German trenches on the Wytschaete Ridge.
The hoped-for British panic did not take place, and the line held. In London, Vera Brittain received a pencilled note from her fiancé, Roland Leighton, on the Western Front: ‘Shall be home on leave from 24th Dec.—31st. Land Christmas Day. R’. She contemplated with excitement the possibility of getting married during that brief leave, even of having a baby, ‘Roland’s very own, something of himself to remember him by if he goes.’ Throughout Christmas Day she awaited him, then went to bed knowing that he would be with her on the following day. ‘The next morning I had just finished dressing, and was putting the final touches to the pastel-blue crepe-de-Chine blouse, when the expected message came to say that I was wanted on the telephone. Believing that I was at last to hear the voice for which I had waited for twenty-four hours, I dashed joyously into the corridor. But the message was not from Roland… it was not to say that he had arrived home that morning, but to tell me that he had died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station on December 23rd.’
Roland Leighton had not been killed in the thick of battle. Like so many of the war’s dead, his life was destroyed far from the violence of a massive onslaught or the onrush of armies. His platoon had taken over a section of the trenches where the front-line wire was badly in need of repair. He had gone to inspect the area where the wiring party would have to work. His way should have led through a communication trench, but it was flooded, so he had taken a concealed path through a gap in the hedge. The previous British occupants of that sector of the front had not passed on the message that the communication trench had been flooded for some time and that the Germans were accustomed to open fire now and again at the gap in the hedge with a machine gun. The moon was nearly full that night, and the German machine gun was a mere hundred yards from the hedge. As Leighton reached the gap, the Germans opened fire and he was hit in the stomach. Two men risked their lives to carry him back to the trench. The next day an operation could not save him. One machine-gun bullet had injured the base of his spine. That night, as his fiancée later wrote, ‘Uppingham’s record prize-winner, whose whole nature fitted him for the spectacular drama of a great battle, died forlornly in a hospital bed.’98
***
On the Western Front, the conditions of warfare at the end of 1915 were appalling, described immediately after the war by a former front-line correspondent, Phillip Gibbs, in his book Realities of War. ‘Our men were never dry,’ he wrote. ‘They were wet in their trenches and wet in their dug-outs. They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water, and they drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their “bully”, and endured it all with the philosophy of “grin and bear it!” and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places, between explosive curses.’ Hardly had the trenches been drained after one rain storm than another undid the work ‘and the parapets slid down, and water poured in; and spaces were opened for German gun-fire, and there was less head cover against shrapnel bullets which mixed with the rain drops and high explosives which smashed through the mud’.
During November the rain was so intense that many trenches were knee high, and even waist high in water. Gibbs recalled how, in one sector of the front, ‘reckless because of their discomfort, the Germans crawled upon their slimy parapets and sat on top to dry their legs, and shouted, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Our men did not shoot. They, too, sat on the parapets drying their legs, and grinning at the grey ants yonder until these incidents were reported back to GHQ—where good fires were burning under dry roofs—and stringent orders came against “fraternisation”. Every German who showed himself—owing to a parapet falling in—would be shot too. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other, as always, in this trench warfare, but the dignity of GHQ would not be outraged by the thought of such indecent spectacles as British and Germans refusing to kill each other on sight. Some of the men obeyed orders, and where a German sat up and said, “Don’t shoot!” plugged him through the head. Others were extremely short-sighted… Now and again Germans crawled over to our trenches and asked meekly to be taken prisoner.’
An episode took place that winter that was spoken of throughout the Western Front. Above a German parapet, Gibbs has narrated, ‘appeared a plank on which in big letters was scrawled these words: “The English are fools.” “Not such bloody fools as all that!” said a sergeant, and in a few minutes the plank was smashed to splinters by rifle-fire. Another plank appeared with the words: “The French are fools.” Loyalty to our Allies caused the destruction of that board. A third plank was put up. “We’re all fools. Let’s all go home.” That board was also shot to pieces, but the message caused some laughter, and men repeating it said, “There’s a deal of truth in those words. Why should this go on? What’s it all about? Let the old men who made this war come and fight it out among themselves at Hooge. The fighting men have no real quarrel with each other. We all want to go home, to our wives and our work.” But neither side was prepared to “go home” first. Each side was in a trap—a devil’s trap from which there was no escape.’
In his book, Gibbs described that ‘devil’s trap’ as follows: ‘Loyalty to their own side, discipline, with the death penalty behind it, spell words of old tradition, obedience to the laws of war, or to the caste which ruled them, all the moral and spiritual propaganda handed out by pastors, newspapers, generals, staff officers, old men at home, exalted women, female furies, a deep and simple love for England, and Germany, pride of manhood, fear of cowardice—a thousand complexities of thought and sentiment prevented men, on both sides, from breaking the net of fate in which they were entangled, and revolting against that mutual, unceasing massacre, by a rising from the trenches with a shout of, “We’re all fools!… Let’s all go home!”’
***
A particular source of agony that winter, adding to the torment of lice and rats, was ‘trench foot’. ‘Men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet,’ Gibbs wrote. ‘These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then go “dead” and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red hot pokers. When the “reliefs” went up scores of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or to be carried pick-a-back by their comrades. So I saw hundreds of them, and as the winter dragged on, thousands.’ Battalions lost more men from the fighting line from trench foot than from wounds. ‘Brigadiers and Divisional Generals were gloomy, and cursed the new affliction of their men. Some of them said it was due to damned carelessness, others were inclined to think it due to deliberate malingering at a time when there were many cases of self-inflicted wounds by men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out of the trenches. There was no look of malingering on the faces of those boys who were being carried pick-a-back to the ambulance trains at Rémy siding near Poperinghe with both feet crippled and tied up in bundles of cotton-wool. The pain was martyrizing like that of men tied to burning faggots for conscience’ sake. In one battalion of the 49th (West Riding) Division there were over 400 cases in that winter of 1915.’
A cure was eventually found: rubbing feet with oil two or three times a day. But while the malady lasted it wreaked havoc with the fighting strength of the battalions. Nevertheless, Gibbs wrote, ‘The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, resisted it, and would not be beaten by it.’
***
The Christmas Truce that had broken out so spontaneously on the Western Front in 1914 was not repeated in 1915. ‘Nothing of the kind is to be allowed on the Divisional front this year,’ one British Infantry Brigade was informed five days before the festive season was to begin. ‘The Artillery will maintain a slow gun fire on the enemy’s trenches commencing at dawn, and every opportunity will as usual be taken to inflict casualties upon any of the enemy exposing themselves.’
These orders were, in the main, obeyed. The historian Lyn Macdonald has written of how ‘in the trenches close to Plugstreet Wood a tremendous voice entertained the trenches of both sides with a selection from La Traviata, stopping abruptly in mid-aria as if a door had been slammed shut’. Near Wulverghem the Germans set up a tree on the parapet of their front trench on Christmas Eve, ablaze with candles. ‘For a few moments the tiny pinpoints of flame flickered uncertainly in the dark until a British officer ordered rapid fire and the Tommies shot it down.’99
Christmas Day was no different. ‘We hailed the smiling morn with five rounds fired fast, and we kept up slow fire all day,’ Corporal D.A. Pankhurst of the Royal Artillery noted. ‘Those were our orders. Some batteries sent over as many as three hundred shells. It was a Christmas present to Fritz, they said. But I do believe myself that it was intended to discourage fraternising.’ The shelling and shooting continued that day. Second Lieutenant W. Cushing was a witness when a private was killed in his battalion, a shell fragment having severed his femoral artery. ‘Stretcher-bearers attempted to deal with this mortal wound by using a tourniquet,’ Cushing wrote, ‘but this caused the poor chap pain, and the MO told us on the field telephone to remove it and let him die in peace.’ The Medical Officer had apparently been ‘about to risk his own life by coming to us across the open—there were no communication trenches left—but the CO ordered him to stay where he was at battalion HQ. It was just as well. We couldn’t afford to lose a Medical Officer in a fruitless effort to save life. He couldn’t possibly have arrived in time.’
Thus died Private W.G. Wilkerson on Christmas Day. He was buried in New Irish Farm Cemetery at St Jan, near Ypres. As the precise location of his grave could not be found when the cemetery was put in order at the end of the war, he is commemorated on a special memorial headstone bearing the inscription ‘Known to be buried in this cemetery.’ Near him lie 4,500 other dead.100 On the Gallipoli Peninsula, where the men at Cape Helles were expecting to be evacuated within a few weeks, Christmas Day saw further deaths from Turkish shelling and sniper fire. Among those killed that day was the twenty-nine-year-old Arnold Thompson, a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who had graduated from New College, Oxford, eight months earlier.101
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On the Eastern Front, the Central Powers were confident of their power. In Galicia, a two-week Russian offensive that ended on December 27, although supported by a thousand guns, each with a thousand shells, failed to break the Austrian line: 6,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner. That day the British Cabinet decided to evacuate Cape Helles, ending any Entente presence on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
At the end of 1915 the Central Powers were in the ascendant. Serbia was entirely under Austrian and Bulgarian occupation. Russian Poland and Belgium were under German control. At sea, the sinking of Entente shipping had been continuous and destructive. The German plans for victory in 1916 included unlimited submarine warfare, and an attack on the French forces defending Verdun and its ring of forts. The aim of this attack was to wear down the French army by the attrition of numbers. General Falkenhayn looked to an attack on Verdun to create a ‘breaking point’ in French morale. ‘If we succeeded in opening the eyes of her people to the fact that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for,’ he wrote to the Kaiser on December 15, ‘that breaking point would be reached, and England’s best sword knocked out of her hand.’ If the French were determined to defend Verdun to the last, as Falkenhayn was convinced they would, then, he told the Kaiser, ‘the forces of France will bleed to death’ whether the Germans captured Verdun or not.
‘Never through the ages’, comments the historian Alistair Home, ‘had any great commander or strategist proposed to vanquish an enemy by gradually bleeding him to death. The macabreness, the unpleasantness of its very imagery could only have emerged from, and was symptomatic of, that Great War, where, in their callousness, leaders could regard human lives as mere corpuscles.’ In his history of Verdun, Home quotes two other comments with regard to the attitude of the commanders to the losses, that of Haig’s son, that the British Commander-in-Chief ‘felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations because these visits made him physically ill’, and that of Joffre who, after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier, said to his Staff: ‘I musn’t be shown any more such spectacles…. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.’102
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As he put forward his reasons for the Verdun offensive, General Falkenhayn was dismissive of Russia’s power to intervene to take the pressure off France, or to threaten Germany in the east. ‘Even if we cannot expect a revolution in the grand style,’ he told the Kaiser in his memorandum of December 15, ‘we are entitled to believe that Russia’s internal troubles will compel her to give in within a relatively short period.’ To weaken Russia internally, on December 26 the authorities in Berlin handed the Russian Jewish Bolshevik, Alexander Helphand, a million roubles to spread anti-war propaganda throughout Russia. The money was paid over after the German Ambassador to Denmark persuaded Berlin that Russia could only be detached from the Entente by revolution, and that the Bolsheviks had it in their power to undermine the authority of both the Tsar and the Russian generals.
The year 1915 ended as it had begun, with a disaster at sea. On December 30, in the North Sea, an accidental internal explosion blew up the British cruiser Natal, with 304 fatalities. That same day, in the eastern Mediterranean, a German submarine torpedoed without warning a Peninsular and Oriental steamship company liner, the Persia: 334 passengers were drowned, among them the United States Consul in Aden and one other American citizen. Three days after the sinking an American diplomat in Paris, John Coolidge, wrote scathingly in his diary: ‘An American consul on his way to his post at Aden was on board, so probably Mr Lansing will buy a new box of note-paper and set to work.’ He was right: America’s neutrality was still a fixed feature of the war scene. Robert Lansing, the Secretary of State, issued a formal protest, but no more.
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On December 29, in Paris, the French National Assembly passed a Law which gave the land on which the British war cemeteries were located on French soil as ‘the free gift of the French people for a perpetual resting place of those who are laid there’. The cemeteries are still there eighty years after the war began: more than 2,000 cemeteries, tended by nearly five hundred gardeners. Even as the war was being fought, the future of its most poignant monuments was being enshrined in Law.
After twelve months of fighting, the line of trenches along the Western Front had not been broken by either side. It was Germany that stood along the line as the conqueror and occupier of French and Belgian soil, far from her own borders. Several French villages in the fighting line had been destroyed so completely that they were never rebuilt: east of St Mihiel are two such villages, Regniéville and Remenauville, taken in April from the Germans. At their entrance today is the road sign: ‘Village détruit’. Yet the nature of confrontation was such that the British in the Ypres Salient were emphatic that they had secured a great victory by holding Ypres at all. The town itself, regularly shelled by the Germans, was a ruin, but that too could be shown to have its virtuous aspect.
‘Only the methodical and painstaking Boche could have reduced a town of such size to such a state,’ commented Ian Hay, himself a soldier and one of the most popular British writers on the war. ‘But—the main point to observe is this. We are inside, and the Boche is outside! Fenced by a mighty crescent of prosaic trenches, themselves manned by paladins of an almost incredible stolidity, Ypres still points her broken fingers to the sky—shattered, silent, but inviolate still; and all owing to the obstinacy of a dull and unready nation which merely keeps faith and stands by its friends.’
Hay told his readers that there was a further lesson to be learned: ‘Such an attitude of mind is incomprehensible to the Boche, and we are well content that it should be so.’ One could stand on ‘certain recently won eminences’, Wytschaete Ridge, Messines Ridge, Vimy Ridge and Monchy, and look back ‘not merely from these ridges, but from certain moral ridges—over the ground which has been successfully traversed, and you can marvel for the hundredth time, not that the thing was well or badly done, but that it was ever done at all.’ In contrast with a sense of moral superiority were the men awaking ‘grimy and shivering, to another day’s unpleasantness’. That ‘unpleasantness’, however, had hardly any place in Hay’s narrative. The dead in his account had ‘gone to the happy hunting-grounds’.
What was clear, as 1915 came to an end, was that a mood of greater resignation prevailed than six months earlier. ‘We no longer regard War with the least enthusiasm,’ Hay wrote. ‘We have seen It, face to face. Our sole purpose now is to screw our sturdy followers up to the requisite pitch of efficiency, and keep them remorselessly at that standard until the dawn of triumphant and abiding peace.’ An experienced writer could still deploy the words and concepts ‘efficiency’, ‘standard’ and ‘triumphant’. Equally experienced soldiers could use a different language, a different perspective. Returning to the Western Front from their Christmas leave, the soldiers at Victoria Station were heard to sing a new refrain:
I don’t want to die,
I want to go home.
I don’t want to go to the trenches no more,
Where the whizz-bangs and shells do whistle and roar.
I don’t want to go over the sea,
To where the alleyman will shoot at me,
I want to go home
I don’t want to die.