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At Berry-au-Bac and Juvincourt, tanks, used in numbers for the first time by the French, carried so much petrol that some caught fire, and the remainder outstripped the exhausted infantry meant to accompany them. By the end of the first day, of 132 tanks 57 had been destroyed and 64 had become bogged. None the less, the Nivelle offensive was not as big a disaster as its aftermath suggested. By 20 April, the French had advanced up to 7 km on the west of the front; they had taken 20,000 prisoners and only sixteen of the fifty-two German divisions available had not been through the battle.
On the rest of the front the gains were negligible, and within a week the hospitals, told to expect 10,000 wounded, were coping with 96,000. Across the army as a whole casualties by 10 May had reached 20 per cent, and in those units directly engaged they were at least double that: one Senegalese division, its soldiers already suffering from frostbite, lost 60 per cent of its strength.
Mutinies began in late April, grew in May, and peaked in June. In all, sixty-eight divisions were affected, and about 40,000 troops. Concentrated in the sector from Soissons to Reims, many of them involved units which refused to return to the line, having had too little opportunity to recover and rebuild.
Verdun had taken its toll. Desertion rates were already rising in the first three months of 1917. And the after-shocks continued into 1918. On the military side of the equation, therefore, the consequences of Nivelle’s offensive represented the culmination of a
process begun in 1914.
French civilian morale also drooped in the first half of 1917. Strikes in January and May 1917 spread from textile workers to munitions factories. For all Halévy’s concerns about the influence of the radical socialist, Alphonse Merrheim, most of the protests were reflections of the cost of living rather than of revolutionary sentiment. By January 1917 food prices in Paris had risen 40 per cent since July 1914, and by July 92 per cent: real wages had fallen 10 per cent.
Joseph Caillaux, prime minister in the 1911 Moroccan crisis, who had condemned the war in 1914 and was rumoured to have German contacts, was canvassed as a possible prime minister.
On 8 May Pétain was appointed to succeed Nivelle as commander-in-chief. He responded to the complaints about leave and rest. He handled the
mutinies with restraint: of 629 soldiers condemned to death between May and October 1917, only 43 were executed.29 But he also embarked on a programme of political education for the troops, emphasising the wider strategy of the war and the contribution to its purpose that the United States’s entry would make. His solutions, in other words, were both military and political. His closeness to Painlevé reunited the strategic outlooks of general headquarters and the government, and confirmed that France would adopt the defensive for the time being.
Lloyd George had wanted to lend artillery to the Italians so that they could take the initiative, but Cadorna feared that an offensive launched in isolation from efforts on other fronts would bring the German army as well as the Austro-Hungarian down on Italy.
Here an unlikely alliance had grown up between Robertson and Admiral Jellicoe, who had moved from the Grand Fleet to be First Sea Lord in December. Jellicoe was anxious to take out the German naval bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. His caution at sea had turned to pessimism in Whitehall. His worries were not simply focused on the threat of the U-boat; they also concerned torpedo boat activity in the Channel and even a cross-Channel attack. On 27 April he wrote a memorandum which was placed before the war cabinet: ‘We are carrying on this war ... as if we had the
absolute command of the sea. We have not... Disaster is certain to follow, and our present policy is heading straight for disaster.’
If the army could advance to Roulers, it would command the key German railway junction in the northern half of the western front. At that stage a daring amphibious operation would outflank the German positions from the sea and secure Ostend and Zeebrugge.
instead of aiming at breaking through the enemy’s front, aim at breaking down the enemy’s army, and that means inflicting heavier losses upon him than one suffers oneself.’
The rate at which the Germans were relieving divisions, when compared with 1916, led to the conclusion that the enemy had lost 350,000 men between 9 April and 27 May 1917, and that by 9 July the figure would have risen to over 450,000.32
Robertson, like Pétain, thought the war was not winnable in 1917. His intelligence picture, built up from a wider range of sources than that of Haig’s headquarters, offset any positives derived solely from the western front. Haig saw what was in front of him, and interpreted that in the best possible light: his devout Presbyterianism gave him an inner certainty which interpreted setbacks as challenges, a not undesirable quality in a commander.
On 7 June the British 2nd Army under Herbert Plumer, whose red face, rotund frame and white moustache were suggestive of David Low’s cartoon character Colonel Blimp, won a crushing victory at Messines. Like the attack at Vimy, it benefited from careful preparation, particularly by the artillery, which by dint of excellent intelligence was able to focus on counter-battery work.
The attack also succeeded because it was limited and staged. It gave the British a foothold on the end of the ridge that swept round to the east of Ypres, and it secured the right flank of the main thrust onto the Gheluvelt plateau, launched on 31 July.
The ideal of the staged, leap-frogging battle, set by the artillery timetable, had fallen foul of appalling weather. The rain in August was almost continuous. Mist prevented aerial reconnaissance. The drainage system of the flat, well-tilled land was broken up by shellfire, and the mud meant shell supply had to be performed by mules.
Every time a gun was fired, its trail sank into the soft ground, thus wrecking its bearing and elevation: rapid, predicted fire was impossible.
By the time the battle petered out in mid-November, the British had suffered 275,000 casualties, of whom 70,000 were dead.
In December instances of drunkenness, desertion and psychological disorders among British troops were reported to be on the increase. In fact, the number of shell-shock cases was smaller than on the Somme, a rate of 1 per cent, partly owing to different diagnostic procedures. Nor did the total number of courts martial rise exponentially, particularly when set against the increasing size of the army.
In 1917 5.5 million working days were lost in Britain, and as in France they peaked in May, with 200,000 workers out. Real wages were the prime complaint, but the possibility that the complaints might become politicised was reinforced in June, when the Independent Labour Party and the British Socialist Party met in Leeds and resolved to establish a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council.
Of all the three Entente powers in the west, Italy was the shakiest in its hold on liberalism. First, the extension of the franchise in 1912 was undermined by the fact that 38 per cent of the electorate was illiterate. Second, socialist extremism was stronger than moderate reformism, and the only counter seemed to be the card of nationalism. Third, although entry to the war divided the country rather than united it, parliament was not consulted.
Fourth, the economy was still predominantly rural, and it required the war to industrialise it. Moreover, with the war under way, Cadorna treated politicians with a contempt which blocked any alternatives to his own inept, if dogged, generalship. When in January 1916 Salandra suggested the formation of a council of war, combining the wisdom of generals and politicians, Cadorna declared that he was answerable only to the King. Criticised by the minister of war in the following month, he managed to force him to resign. He believed that the individualism of the Italians made them ‘morally
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Italian casualties in the eleventh battle of the Isonzo were 166,000, 25 per cent greater than those of Nivelle on the Aisne. In the month of the battle, August, 5,471 soldiers deserted, as opposed to 2,137 in April. The Ravenna Brigade had mutinied in March and the Catanzaro Brigade in July.38 Even Cadorna recognised that his army needed time to rest and recuperate.
On 24 October, after a short but intense bombardment which targeted the Italian batteries, the German and Austrian infantry achieved a complete breakthrough.
By mid-November the Germans and Austrians had driven the Italians back sixty miles to the River Piave. By following the valley floors, they had sustained the momentum of their advance until logistics and command confusion slowed it. Italian losses totalled almost 700,000, of whom only 40,000 were killed and wounded; 280,000 had been captured, many of them as intact units, and about 350,000 had deserted.
