Even the dangers posed to the Allies by Russia’s withdrawal from the war did not alter the cautious policy of the United States. On the first day of 1918, General Pershing successfully opposed an urgent request from Lloyd George that America send over as many surplus troops as possible, and incorporate them immediately on their arrival into British and French units.
Lloyd George argued that the Germans were planning ‘a knock-out blow to the Allies’ before a fully trained American army was ready to take its place in the line that summer. Pershing disagreed. ‘Do not think emergency now exists that would warrant our putting companies or battalions into British or French divisions,’ he telegraphed to the Secretary for War in Washington, ‘and would not do so except in grave crisis.’ Pershing did accept a request from Pétain, however, that four black regiments that were already in France should serve as integral parts of French divisions. They did so for the rest of the war.
As 1918 opened, the Western, Italian, Salonica and Turkish Fronts were each the scene not of any large-scale offensive, but of spasmodic fighting characterised by repeated raids and counter-raids. On the former Eastern Front, negotiations for a Russo-German peace treaty paused for a twelve-day break over the New Year. Behind every front line, political movements were stirring with a new enthusiasm, looking to negotiation, war-weariness and the unexpected evolution of events to satisfy their ambitious plans for statehood. The main precondition, however, for many of these hopes was the disintegration of Austria-Hungary, which could not be taken for granted.
On January 5, in an address to the British Trade Unions, Lloyd George stated that the dissolution of Austria-Hungary was not an Allied war aim. Though he could not say so, he still hoped to detach the Hapsburgs from Germany. Within the Hapsburg borders national aspirations were growing. On January 6, in Prague, a specially summoned convention, meeting in the immediate pre-war Municipal House, whose architects had sought to epitomise Czech national aspirations, called for the independence of the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia. Two weeks later the German-speaking peoples living in the Sudetenland region of Bohemia called for a province of their own.
The omens for national self-determination, if not for independence, appeared favourable to those who sought an Allied victory. On January 8 President Wilson, in an address to the United States Congress, set out a peace programme for Europe based upon fourteen separate points, essentially democratic and liberal in outlook. In future, diplomacy and treaty-making would always proceed ‘frankly and in the public view’. Freedom of navigation would be assured on the sea. Economic barriers would be removed and ‘an equality of trade conditions’ established among all nations. Naval armaments would be reduced. In questions of colonial sovereignty, ‘the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’. Germany must evacuate all Russian territory. Belgium must be ‘evacuated and restored’. All French territory must be freed and ‘the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871’ over Alsace-Lorraine be ‘righted’. The frontiers of Italy must be ‘along clearly recognisable lines of nationality’, thus giving Italy the Austrian province of South Tyrol. The peoples of Austria-Hungary should be given ‘the freest opportunity of autonomous development’. Roumania, Serbia and Montenegro should be restored, and Serbia given access to the sea. The Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire should be ‘assured a secure sovereignty’, but the other nationalities inside Turkey assured of their ‘autonomous development’. A Polish State should be erected, ‘united, independent, autonomous… with free unrestricted access to the sea’. Finally, a ‘general association’ of nations must be formed to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity ‘to great and small States alike’.
These Fourteen Points were intended as a counter to the growing appeal of Bolshevism among the soldiers of the Central Powers, and to be more attractive than a Bolshevik-inspired peace. They did not, however, satisfy to the full the hopes for statehood that had been aroused. The peoples of Austria-Hungary would be given not independence, but, in Wilson’s phrase, ‘the freest opportunity of autonomous development’. Many Czechs and Slovaks noted this with disappointment. Nor did Wilson give any recognition or encouragement to the aspirations of the South Slavs for a single State of their own. Austria would have to evacuate Serbia and Montenegro, but he made no mention of the other two South Slav nationalities, the Croats or Slovenes. Two days after Wilson issued his Fourteen Points, a delegation of Finns reached London, hoping to obtain British support for Finland’s independence. The earlier reliance upon German patronage was set aside.
The race for national patronage was affecting both sides, as the Allies and their adversaries looked for new recruits to the conflict, or sought to isolate old enemies. On the day of the arrival of the Finnish Mission in London, the Central Powers and the Bolsheviks both recognised the independence of the Ukraine. Latvia declared its independence from Russia on January 12. On the following day, in their revolutionary Decree No. 13, Lenin and Stalin announced their support for Armenian self-determination. At Brest-Litovsk, the peace negotiations had resumed after their New Year break. This time the Bolshevik delegation was led by Trotsky, who hoped, if only by threats of world revolution, to limit German and Austrian demands for substantial territorial gains at Russia’s expense. The Turks also sent a delegation to Brest-Litovsk, intent on recovering the lands in eastern Anatolia that had been lost to Russia in 1878.
***
The desire to continue the war, and the hope of ending it, were in conflict in every nation. But for the Allied powers, the moral imperative of victory was still being publicly asserted, and widely held. In a speech at Edinburgh on January 10, Balfour declared that the horrors of war were ‘nothing’ compared to a ‘German peace’. With almost two million men under arms, the British Government was making plans to bring in at least 420,000 more.
Three days after Balfour’s speech, the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell commented in a private letter: ‘The world is damnable. Lenin and Trotsky are the only bright spot.’ Russell’s pacifism had only a few echoes in Britain. On January 14, having been wounded on the Western Front and invalided home, a British infantry officer, Max Plowman, took the rare step of resigning his commission, writing to his regimental adjutant that his hatred of war ‘has gradually deepened into the fixed conviction that organised warfare of any kind is always organised murder’. Plowman added: ‘So wholly do I believe in the doctrine of Incarnation (that God indeed lives in every human body) that I believe that killing men is always killing God.’
Hunger and privation at home were as much an influence for war weariness as the killing. On January 22 a secret British report, based on a careful reading of British intercepted correspondence, revealed ‘a decided increase in letters for an immediate peace’. In Berlin, six days later, more than 400,000 workers went on strike, demanding peace. Within forty-eight hours these strikes had spread to six other cities. The German authorities reacted swiftly and firmly, declaring martial law in Berlin and Hamburg, and drafting many of the striking workers into the army. But the hunger that the British naval blockade had exacerbated could not be assuaged by martial law or compulsory service. Civilians were being forced to eat dogs and cats, the latter known as ‘roof rabbits’. Bread was made from a mixture of potato peelings and sawdust.
From Vienna came yet more tentative talk of a possible negotiated peace. ‘More foreign speeches reported today, moderate but very evasive,’ the pacifist Clifford Allen wrote in his diary on January 28 (he had been released from prison because of ill-health), and he commented: ‘Austria quite mild. Why can’t they all make speeches round peace table instead of from platforms thousands of miles apart and at intervals of weeks or months?’ The ‘foreign speeches’ were those of the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, and the new German Chancellor, Count Hertling, suggesting ‘an exchange of ideas’ through Washington (Czernin) and discussion on ‘a limitation of armaments (Hertling). Commented The Times: ‘Neither discloses the least readiness to meet any of the demands which the Allies with one accord declare to be indispensable.’
***
On January 28, at a military hospital at Wimereux, on the Channel coast, the Canadian medical officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, died. Nearly three years had passed since, in the Ypres Salient, he wrote the lines:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…
In a naval action off the Dardanelles, 127 British sailors had been killed on January 20 when their monitor, the Raglan, was sunk by a German warship. That same day, in the North Sea, two German destroyers were sunk by British mines, and a German submarine sank the armed British steamer Louvain, killing 224 of those on board. On January 26, three German submarines were sunk, two in the English Channel and one in the St George’s Channel. Five days later, in an accidental night collision in the North Sea, two British submarines hit each other and sank, with the loss of 103 submariners. On January 29, three German ‘Giant’ bombers flew over Britain on a raid that injured twenty civilians. The ‘Giants’ were followed the next night by thirty-one ‘Gothas’ flying over Paris, dropping 267 bombs and killing or injuring 259 Parisians.
Submarine and aerial warfare combined to create hostility even among those whose instincts were for some form of compromise peace. ‘Isn’t the German mentality a depressing thing,’ the former British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, who favoured offering Germany ‘economic equality’ after the war, wrote to a friend on January 27. ‘When one is not in office and out of London it is so uncomfortable to hate anybody and one longs more than ever for peace, but I do not see how there is to be peace with the people who still run Germany.’
***
In the east, Lenin’s forces had entered the Ukraine and declared the triumph of Bolshevism there. The Central Powers announced their support for an independent Ukraine. On January 28, Russian Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalists fought against each other at Lutsk, where three years earlier German and Russian forces had battled for supremacy. On January 29, Lenin’s troops entered both Kiev and Odessa. Two days later, with Ukraine falling rapidly under Bolshevik rule, Lenin established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, also known as the Soviet Union. This was followed within two weeks by the creation first of the Red Navy and then of the Red Army.
Discontent was growing in more and more armies and navies. On February 1, Greek troops in the town of Lamia, who were about to be sent to the Salonica Front, mutinied. Two of their leaders were executed. On the day of the Lamia mutiny, Austro-Hungarian sailors on board ship in the Gulf of Cattaro (Kotor) also mutinied. Led by two Czech socialists, the 6,000 sailors raised the red flag and announced their adherence to Bolshevism. But they played the ‘Marseillaise’, not the ‘Internationale’, and their demands were closer to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points than to Lenin’s decrees: national autonomy (as already being demanded by the Slav groups in the Vienna Parliament, not independence), immediate peace, no annexation of territory, demobilisation, and better living conditions. The mutineers appealed for support to the Austrian troops in the Cattaro garrison, and to the crews of German submarines alongside them in the bay, but this attempt to widen the mutiny was rebuffed. On learning of what had happened, the Austrian naval authorities despatched three battleships from the Istrian port of Pola: eight hundred of the mutineers were taken off their ships, forty were brought to trial, and four were executed.
In France, bread shortages led to a protest, on February 5, by 3,000 people in Roanne, on the Loire, followed by looting.
***
On January 18, a full American division, the 1st, entered the front line, in the Ansauville sector of the St Mihiel Salient. It had been sent there to gain experience of holding the line, and took no offensive action. As soon as the Germans discovered that Americans were opposite them, they tried to demoralise them, launching a raid on an American listening post, killing two soldiers, wounding two and capturing one. Then they ambushed an American patrol in No-Man’s Land, killing four, wounding two and capturing two. ‘This thing of letting the Boche do it all is getting on the nerves,’ one American officer noted in his diary on January 30.
American troops were arriving every week in France, where, under Pershing’s vigilant eye, considerable port and base facilities were being developed for them and their stores. The American contribution to the war, though not yet marked by the participation of armies, was becoming a frequent element in war reporting. On February 5, Lieutenant Thompson was the first American pilot serving with the United States Forces in France to defeat a German aeroplane in combat. That same day off the coast of Ireland, the first American troops were killed while on their way to Europe, when the British troopship Tuscania was sunk by a German submarine: 166 American servicemen and forty-four British crew members were drowned.
***
Vocal and visible anti-war feeling in Britain was still confined to a few thousand conscientious objectors. On February 6 there was outrage among them when a former shoemaker, Henry Firth, died at the work centre for conscientious objectors at Princetown on Dartmoor. Having been in prison for nine months, he had become so ill that he had accepted alternative service at the Princetown stone quarries on Dartmoor. Admitted to hospital after collapsing at work, his request for eggs was refused on the grounds that they were wanted for the soldiers in France. Eventually the authorities relented, and three fresh eggs were granted him: they arrived the day after his death. Three days after Firth’s death, Bertrand Russell was sentenced to six months in prison for advocating in public that the British Government accept a German offer to open peace negotiations.
‘War is a disciplinary action by God to educate mankind,’ the Kaiser told the citizens of Bad Homburg on February 10. Three days later he told a War Council convened at Homburg that there was a world-wide conspiracy against Germany, the participants in which included the Bolsheviks supported by President Wilson, ‘international Jewry’ and the Grand Orient Lodge of Freemasons. He made no mention of the fact that as many as 10,000 Jews, and many thousands of Freemasons, had already been killed fighting in the ranks of the German army. Nor did he seem to remember the details he had been given only two months earlier of German financial backing for the Bolsheviks, including a secret German subsidy for the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda.
A week after the Kaiser’s speech, on February 17, there was a dramatic development on the former Eastern Front, when the long-drawn-out peace negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Germans at Brest-Litovsk broke down. Germany’s terms were too hard for the Bolsheviks to accept. The Germans at once prepared to resume the war in the east. ‘Tomorrow we are going to start hostilities against the Bolsheviks,’ General Hoffmann wrote in his diary that night. ‘No other way out is possible, otherwise these brutes will wipe up the Ukrainians, the Finns, and the Baits, and then quickly get together a new revolutionary army and turn the whole of Europe into a pig-sty.’
The war resumed, with fifty-two German divisions crossing the November ceasefire line, occupying Dvinsk in the north and Lutsk in the south, and moving eastward along the Russian main-line railways. Lenin realised that the Bolsheviks must give in to whatever was asked of them. ‘It’s not a question of Dvinsk,’ he told Trotsky, ‘but of revolution. Delay is impossible. We must sign at once. This beast springs quickly.’ On January 19, Hoffmann received a telegram, signed by Lenin and Trotsky, accepting the conditions of peace that had been offered at Brest-Litovsk. But Hoffmann was in no hurry now to accept it. He was even vexed that the renewal of hostilities was to be cut short. He therefore replied that acceptance had to be confirmed in writing, and sent by a courier through the German lines. Meanwhile, the German advance continued. On February 20, German troops entered Minsk, taking more than 9,000 Russian soldiers prisoner. ‘The Russian army is more rotten than I had supposed,’ Hoffmann wrote in his diary that day. ‘There is no fight left in them. Yesterday one lieutenant with six men took six hundred Cossacks prisoner.’
The war continued for a whole week, the Germans using the Russian roads and railways as if they were on a civilian excursion: in 124 hours they advanced 150 miles. ‘It is the most comical war I have ever known,’ Hoffmann wrote in his diary on February 22. ‘We put a handful of infantrymen with machine guns and one gun on to a train and push them off to the next station; they take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops and go on. This proceeding has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.’
Lenin and Trotsky knew that peace had to be made on Germany’s terms. But their written request, which reached Berlin on February 21, was rejected by the Germans, who sent a note back, on February 23, demanding even harsher terms. The Germans knew that the territorial integrity of Russia was disintegrating even faster than could have been anticipated. In the Tsarist province of Finland, where Red and White Russian forces had been in conflict, the Finnish national leader General Mannerheim demanded the evacuation of all Russian troops from Finland without delay: Red and White alike. The Bolsheviks agreed to this on February 23. Then, on the following day, after a stormy session of Lenin’s ruling council, during which the revolution’s leader went so far as to threaten resignation, he obtained a 116 to 85 vote in favour of the new German terms. The vote in the Central Committee was even closer, seven in favour and six against. On the issue of accepting whatever Germany demanded, Lenin and Trotsky were joined by a new figure on the international scene, Joseph Stalin.
***
As Lenin and his colleagues prepared formally to leave the war, and to abandon vast areas of western and southern Russia, United States troops were in offensive action on the Western Front for the first time. On February 13, at the Butte de Mesnil in Champagne, American artillery batteries took part in a six-hour rolling barrage before a French attack that broke through the German lines and captured more than 150 German prisoners. Ten days later, at Chevregny, south of German-held Laon, two American officers and twenty-four of their men volunteered to take part with French troops in a raid on German trenches. The raid lasted half an hour, and twenty-five Germans were taken prisoner. The Times commented that although ‘the actual occasion was not of much importance—February 23 is one of the dates that will always be remembered in the history of the war’.
While the Americans were fighting at Chevregny, Churchill, as Minister of Munitions, was visiting the Ypres Salient, passing through the battlefields of 1915, 1916 and 1917. ‘Nearly 800,000 of our British race have shed their blood or lost their lives here during 3½ years of unceasing conflict,’ he wrote to his wife on February 23. ‘Many of our friends and my contemporaries all perished here. Death seems as commonplace and as little alarming as the undertaker. Quite a natural ordinary event, which may happen to anyone at any moment, as it happened to all these scores of thousands who lie together in this vast cemetery, ennobled and rendered forever glorious by their brave memory.’ Among Churchill’s friends who had fought in the Salient and had been killed, was an American volunteer, Henry Butters, who came from San Francisco. ‘I just lied to ’em and said I was British born,’ he had told Churchill, when asked about how an American citizen could be serving as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery.
American participation on the battlefield was now a fact, forty-two-and-a-half months after the war had begun. On February 26, three days after that first raid, the Chief of Staff of the American 42nd Division, the Rainbow Division, was observing a French raid on the German trenches near Réchicourt. Carried away with the enthusiasm of the moment, he joined in the raid, helped to capture several German soldiers, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre: the first such award to a member of the American Expeditionary Force. His name was Colonel Douglas MacArthur.192 A year earlier, when American troops were being recruited, there had been concern in political circles in Washington that individual American States might be aggrieved if other States were to be the source of particular divisional recruiting. It was then suggested to the Secretary for War, Newton Baker, that one complete division could be drawn from the surplus units of many different States, thus avoiding the danger of jealousies and friction. According to Baker’s recollection, ‘Major MacArthur, who was standing alongside, said, “Fine, that will stretch over the whole country like a rainbow.” The Division thus got its name.’
Much was expected of the American forces. The British, French and even American newspapers wrote enthusiastically of how America would soon darken the skies with its aircraft. This forced Pershing to protest to Washington at the exaggeration, pointing out that, after almost a year of war between America and Germany, there was not yet a single American-manufactured aeroplane in service on the Western Front.
***
In the East, German troops continued their rapid advance, occupying Borisov, Gomel and Zhitomir. Along the Baltic, their forces reached Dorpat on February 24, then moved swiftly towards Reval, where on the following day the Bolsheviks scuttled eleven submarines to avoid their capture by the Germans, who entered the Estonian port a few hours later.
The continuing German successes in the east led to a renewal of patriotic zeal inside Germany. To an academic correspondent who rebuked him for his dislike of the war, Einstein wrote on February 24: ‘Your ostentatious Teutonic muscle-flexing runs rather against my grain. I prefer to string along with my compatriot Jesus Christ, whose doctrines you and your kind consider to be obsolete. Suffering is indeed more acceptable to me than resort to violence.’193
On February 25 German troops reached the outskirts of Narva, on the Baltic. In doing so, they clashed briefly with a Bolshevik detachment of just over a thousand men. On February 26 the Finnish Battalion, which had fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front for a year and a half, arrived back in Finland, at the town of Vasa, pledged to uphold Finland’s independence (declared the previous December) and to drive the Bolsheviks from the rest of the country, including its capital, Helsinki. On the following day, German forces reached Mogilev, the former Tsarist military headquarters, and on that same day, February 27, a German aeroplane dropped its bombs on the Fontanka Embankment in Petrograd.
Lenin having agreed to resume peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the Soviet delegation returned there, reaching the town on February 28. The Germans refused, however, to agree that their arrival must lead to an immediate end to hostilities. The fighting would stop, Hoffmann insisted, only when the treaty was signed. The negotiations began again on March 1. There was nothing left for the Bolsheviks to do but to accept the terms offered them. These included a Turkish demand for the annexation of Ardahan and Kars, which Russia had annexed from Turkey in 1878. On March 2, as the delegates discussed the detailed terms of the peace treaty, the German army entered Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, which the Bolsheviks had taken only a month earlier. On the Baltic, German forces occupied Narva, the most easterly Estonian city, only eighty-five miles from Petrograd. Plans were made in the Russian capital to evacuate the Government to Moscow, and Lenin gave emergency orders ‘to intensify the preparations for blowing up of railways, bridges, and roads; to gather arms and arm detachments; to transport arms into the interior of the country’.
The Germans looked set to enter Petrograd. In their rapid and virtually unopposed advance since the Brest-Litovsk negotiations had first broken down, less than two weeks earlier, they had captured 63,000 Russian prisoners, 2,600 artillery pieces and 5,000 machine guns. The weapons would be of great value on the Western Front. Throughout March 2 the German forces continued their eastward advance. Lenin and Trotsky had no choice but to instruct their delegates to sign. The German High Command was relieved: it was eager to turn Germany’s military might against the Western Front.
***
At five in the afternoon of March 3, the Russo-German peace treaty was signed at Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks accepted the harsh reality of the battlefield, giving up all claims to the Baltic provinces, Poland, White Russia (later known as Byelorussia, now Belarus), Finland, Bessarabia, the Ukraine and the Caucasus. This constituted a third of her pre-war population, a third of her arable land, and nine-tenths of her coalfields: almost all the territory, in fact, that had been added to the Tsarist dominions since the reign of Peter the Great more than two hundred years earlier. Once more, as after the fall of Bucharest at the end of 1916, the Kaiser celebrated with champagne.
Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, all Russian naval bases in the Baltic except Kronstadt were taken away. The Russian Black Sea Fleet warships in Odessa and Nikolayev were to be disarmed and detained. The Bolsheviks also agreed to the immediate return of 630,000 Austrian prisoners-of-war. They permitted the Armenian areas conquered by Russia in 1916 to be transferred to Turkey.194 Armenian soldiers fought against this distant decision, but were quickly crushed by Turkish forces moving eastward. On February 24 the Armenians had already been driven out of Trebizond, on the Black Sea. On March 12 they were driven from the city of Erzerum, on the Anatolian plateau.
The Roumanians signed a treaty with the Central Powers, at Buftea, on March 5, ceding the southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria, but being offered a former Russian province, Bessarabia, if she could extract it from Bolshevik rule. A Bolshevik Congress, meeting in Petrograd on the following day, accepted the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and at the same time adopted the name Communist for their Party. Fearing the possibility of a renewed German threat along the Baltic, on March 12 they moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow.
***
Although the situation looked bleak for the Allies on the Western Front, two items of news, one from the Eastern Mediterranean and one from the war in the air, brought a boost to Allied morale. On February 21, Allenby’s forces drove the Turks from Jericho and reached the northern end of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth, 1,290 feet below sea level. On the Western Front, British bomber pilots made raids on four nights in February on German barracks and airfields, including a successful attack on a main aircraft hangar near Metz.
In Britain, Lloyd George and Churchill were looking ahead with new strategies to bring victory over Germany in 1919. On March 5, in the hope of being able to secure a victory over Germany a year hence, Churchill assured Lloyd George that he would produce 4,000 tanks by April 1919, a thirteen-month programme. Victory on the Western Front could only come, he told the Prime Minister, when Britain and France had ‘stronger and better armies’ than Germany. ‘That is the foundation on which everything rests, and there is no reason why we should not have it in 1919’.
By 1919 the American army would also be a decisive factor on the Western Front. Conscious of this, German propaganda tried repeatedly to undermine French confidence in the American soldiers and to cast doubt on the contribution they would make. On March 5 the German wireless news gave an account of the interrogation of some American troops who had recently been captured. ‘They are strong young fellows but do not seem to have much desire to fight. To them it is an enterprise undertaken by New York financiers. They hate but respect the English. With the French they are on good terms. They have not the slightest idea of military operations and seem stupid and fatalistic in comparison with the war-accustomed Frenchman. They were glad to escape further fighting.’ A further broadcast three weeks later stated that French officers ‘do not conceal their disillusionment’ over the value of the American troops, who were ‘entirely incapable of carrying out independent operations’.
***
In the first week of March 1918, the Central Powers took four bombing initiatives. On March 4, Austrian aircraft bombed Venice, Padua, Mestre and Treviso, but lost a third of the planes taking part. Three days later, three German Giant bombers attacked London, a single bomb killing twelve people in a residential building in Maida Vale and damaging four hundred houses. On March 8, Gotha bombers dropped more than ninety bombs on Paris. Without panic, but with much fear, 200,000 Parisians left the capital by rail for the countryside. On the following day a German airship dropped its bombs on the Italian naval base and steel plant at Naples. Three days later German forces occupied Odessa. For the first time in history, one power’s control of Europe stretched from the North Sea to the Black Sea, something even Napoleon had not achieved.
Within two weeks of occupying Odessa, German troops entered the Black Sea port of Nikolayev, seizing one Russian battleship, three cruisers, four destroyers and three submarines, as well as gaining control of the naval dockyard. The German triumph in the east was unprecedented, and complete. On March 8 the Kaiser refused the throne of the Duchy of Kurland, along the Baltic Sea: the region became, instead, a German protectorate. In the Middle Ages it had been the domain of the Teutonic Knights. Any criticism of German nationalism was not tolerated. There was indignation in Germany in mid-March, when a long memorandum written by the former German Ambassador to London, Prince Lichnowsky, justifying Britain’s pre-war diplomacy, and criticising Germany’s handling of the crisis, was published in the newspapers. Lichnowsky was asked to leave the diplomatic service.
The British continued to try to detach Austria-Hungary from Germany. On March 9, General Smuts returned to Switzerland with Lloyd George’s confidant Philip Kerr, to talk to an Austrian emissary, Count Alexander Skrynski.195 Despite the fact that Skrynski was a Pole, he rejected the conditions for peace that Smuts laid down, that ‘justice must be done to all peoples’ inside the Hapsburg dominions, by means of autonomy for the Poles, Czechs, Croats and other minorities. The talks continued for five days, but then the Austrians broke them off. Kerr’s view, as he explained to Rumbold, was that the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, ‘may have realised that once he had started negotiations public opinion would never allow him to draw back if the Entente terms were reasonable and that once he started negotiations it was rather the case of a separate peace or the break up of Austria-Hungary.’
Those Austrians interested in negotiating with the Allies had also to consider the possibility of a German victory on the battlefield, of which they would be the beneficiaries. Behind the lines, anti-war feeling and fears were spreading. On March 16, in Vienna, an Austrian police report told of ‘great and rather widespread resentment against Germany’ inside Austria itself. But on March 19 a former Austrian Foreign Minister, Baron Burian, wrote in his diary: ‘No one will now listen to the word “peace”. Everything is based on the forthcoming offensive, as if everyone were entrusting himself without a tremor to the decision of fate.’
***
On March 9, the Germans began, with a series of artillery bombardments, the preliminary phase of what was to be their largest, and most essential gamble of the war: a massive offensive against the British and French forces on the Western Front. Hitherto the main military initiatives on the Western Front had been taken by the Allied powers: on the Somme, at Ypres (Passchendaele) and at Cambrai. Each of these offensives had broken themselves against superior German fortifications and defence lines. Now it was the Germans who were going to try to break through the line of the trenches. They had one overriding concern, that their victory should be secured before the mass of American troops, unbattered by battle, reached the war zone.
In the preliminary feints, a series of bombardments throughout the Western Front, among the targets of the German artillery was an infantry post in the Parroy Forest. Hit on March 7, it happened to be held by men of the American 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division. Nineteen Americans were killed in the single dugout. At their funeral service a poem was read out, written by the poet Joyce Kilmer, then serving as a corporal in the Division:
…death came flying through the air
And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,
Touched his prey—
And left them there—
Clay to clay.
He hid their bodies stealthily
In the soil of the land they sought to free,
And fled away.
Between Ypres and St Quentin the German preliminary bombardment of March 9 started with a gas attack in which half a million mustard gas and phosgene shells were fired, a thousand tons of gas in all. That day, during a German gas attack in the Salient du Feys, Colonel Douglas MacArthur supervised the capture by a company of American troops of a German machine-gun strongpoint. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. On March 11, during a further German gas barrage, MacArthur was among those gassed. His injury was classified as ‘slight’ and he recovered within the week. For having been injured in battle he received the Purple Heart.
The use of gas on the battlefronts led to many individual cases of panic, fear, malingering and desertion. In the German army this led to the establishment of a rule, in operation throughout the German medical services from the end of 1917, that ‘alleged’ cases ‘of gas poisoning and malingerers who show no definite symptoms are retained for twenty-four hours to forty-eight hours for observation in medical inspection rooms of units… with a view to returning them to their units if possible’. They were not to be admitted to local field hospitals or gas clearing stations.
On March 19, in a pre-emptive strike near St Quentin, the British fired eighty-five tons of phosgene gas, killing 250 Germans. Then, on March 21, the Germans launched their great offensive. Were it to succeed, Germany could win the war in the west on the battlefield, as she had already won it in the east, at the conference table.