The First World War

by John Keegan

9 September was also a day of crisis. Kluck’s First Army was now fighting as an independent entity, separated from Bülow’s Second Army by a forty-mile

gap into which the BEF was pushing northward towards the Marne almost unopposed, but still formidably strong...

Then, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Quast received a telephone call from Kluck’s headquarters. The offensive was to be discontinued. An order for retreat had been received. The First Army was to retire northward towards the Marne and it appeared not the First Army only but the whole of the right wing. Local reality was dissolved in a larger reality.

He signalled Kluck and Hausen that “aviator reports four long columns marching towards the Marne” (the aviator was Lieutenant Berthold, the columns those of the BEF) and that consequently, “Second Army is beginning retreat.”

Once Second moved, First and Third were obliged to conform, as by the working of interlocking parts. Mechanistically, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth fell in with the retrogression. Along a front of nearly 250 miles, the German infantry faced about and began to retrace its steps

The positions to which he directed them were those on the river system next above the Marne, that of the Aisne and its tributaries. “The lines so reached,” he stipulated, “will be fortified and defended.”

For the “fortification and defence” of the Aisne, which the German First and Second Armies reached on 14 September, initiated trench warfare.

It was better provided with field engineer units than any army in Europe—thirty-six battalions, against twenty-six French—and better trained in rapid entrenchment.111 The entrenching tool had become, by 1914, part of the equipment of the infantryman in every army. However, while the British cavalry took pride in avoiding entrenchment exercises, and the French disregarded “the most demanding notions of cover,” the German soldier had been obliged to use the spade on manoeuvre since at least 1904.

German defensive positions frequently consisted of several successive trench lines linked by communication saps, often with barbed wire entanglements strung in front of them.”

The Aisne had now become the critical front and there, between 13 and 27 September, both sides mounted a succession of attacks, as troops became available, the Allies in the hope of pressing their pursuit further, the Germans with that of holding their line or even going over again to the offensive.

A British formation, the 11th Infantry Brigade, was the first to attempt an assault. It had found an unbroken bridge at Venizel and managed to establish itself on the crest on 12 September, after a thirty-mile approach march in pouring rain.115 Thereafter the difficulties increased. The French Sixth Army tried on 13 September to get round the flank of the Chemin des Dames ridge near Compiègne but met German resistance across its whole front. The BEF was also held up under the centre of the Chemin des Dames that day and the only success was achieved on the right where the French Fifth Army found the gap that still existed between von Kluck’s and von Bülow’s armies and reached Berry-au-Bac on the Aisne’s north bank.

Moreover, with the Germans digging furiously—the first load of “trench stores” to reach what was becoming the Western Front arrived from Germany on 14 September—the enemy line thickened almost by the hour.116 The French ability to find reserves was meanwhile hindered by their need to hold Rheims, recaptured on 12 September, but subjected to devastating bombardment in the days that followed;

On 17 September he instructed his armies to “keep the enemy under threat of attack and thus prevent him from disengaging and transferring portions of his forces from one point to another.”117 Three days earlier, Falkenhayn, the new German Chief of Staff, had likewise ordered counter-attacks along the whole front with a similar object. Both commanders had grasped that opportunity in the campaign in the west now lay north of the active battlefront, in the hundred-mile sweep of territory standing, denuded of troops, between the Aisne and the sea. Whoever could find an army to operate there, without weakening his grip on the entrenched zone, might still outflank the enemy and so triumph.

There was an army in the region. It was the Belgian, hanging grimly on to the “national redoubt” in the entrenched camp at Antwerp, to which it had retreated in the third week of August.

Thereafter the German besiegers of Antwerp, who had been reinforced, were able to begin a deliberate reduction of the fortress, while the campaign between the Aisne and the sea took on the character of a frenzied search for the “open flank” by the Allies and Germans in succession.

Both sides, with the line stabilising along its whole length, could economise force in the burgeoning entrenchments to send formations northward.

Even as it began to deploy, however, with the object of pushing south-eastward behind the German front, an equivalent German mass was marching forward to oppose

some of which had marched cross-country from the Aisne, other parts having been transferred by rail to Belgium first.

The outcome Falkenhayn intended was a new drive through northern France, leaving the Germans in possession of all the territory above the Somme and thus positioned to march down towards Paris from lines that outflanked the French entrenched zone between the Aisne and Switzerland.

At Antwerp, General von Beseler, an engineer by training, had by 27 September devised an effective scheme to crack the entrenched camp’s three lines of defences. The siege train of super-heavy guns that had reduced Liège and Namur having been transferred to his command, he began by bombarding the outermost and newest ring and then launched his infantry through the breach gained on 3 October.

The German artillery quickly began to break up their antiquated masonry, forcing the Royal Naval Division and what remained of the Belgian field army to evacuate towards the westernmost corner of Belgium on the River Yser.

Between 1 and 6 October the offensive of the new Sixth Army, whose mission was to “break down the weakening resistance of the enemy” between the Somme and Flanders, was checked and defeated by the French Tenth Army;

Finally, the great sweep of the eight German cavalry divisions, the largest body of horsemen ever to be collected in Western Europe before or since, was rapidly blunted by the appearance, west of Lille, of the French XXI Corps and its own supporting cavalry.

Thus, by the end of the second week of October, the gap in the Western Front through which a decisive thrust might be launched by one side or the other had been reduced to a narrow corridor in Belgian Flanders.

It was here, between 8 and 19 October, that the five corps now comprising the British Expeditionary Force arrived by train and road to sustain the Allied defence. To the BEF’s north the remnants of the Belgian army, which had managed to escape from Antwerp, had made their way along the coast to Nieuport, the town at the mouth of the Yser river that there flows into the sea; most of the marines and sailors of the Royal Naval Division had already got away to Ostend, where the British 7th Division, landed earlier, held a bridgehead until it joined the main body of the BEF near Ypres on 14 October.

Their six divisions had been reduced in strength to 60,000 men, but they succeeded in garrisoning ten miles of utterly flat and featureless terrain and in holding most of their positions until, after the loss of another 20,000 men, King Albert decided, on 27 October, to open the sluices at the mouth of the Yser and let in the sea and flood the area. The resulting inundation created an impassable zone ten miles long between Nieuport and Dixmude.

The length of their line was thirty-five miles, to hold which Sir John French had available six infantry divisions, with one in reserve, and three cavalry divisions, unsuitable as cavalry was, given its low scales of artillery and machine-gun equipment, for defensive operations.

another infantry division, the 8th, some additional regular cavalry and volunteer horsed yeomanry and, en route from India, the advance guard of four infantry and two cavalry divisions of the Indian Army. These, composed of British and Indian units in a ratio of one to three, though they included a high proportion of hardy Gurkhas, were scarcely suitable for warfare in a European winter climate against a German army.125 Weak in artillery and without experience of high-intensity operations, their arrival did not promise any enhancement of the BEF’s offensive capacity.

Falkenhayn, the new head of OHL, not only disposed of the relocated Sixth Army, with its eleven regular divisions, and of

Beseler’s III Reserve Corps, which had conquered Antwerp, but of an entirely new collection of war-raised formations, eight divisions strong.

raised from volunteers who had not previously undergone military training. Because Germany had needed to conscript only 50 per cent of the annual class of men of military age to fill the ranks of the peacetime army (France had conscripted 86 per cent), a pool of five million men aged from twenty to forty-five was available to Germany for war service.

The recruits received two months’ training, under sergeants who were mostly schoolmasters recalled to the colours, and then left for the front.

thirteen new divisions, two went to Russia, one to the front in Lorraine, ten to Flanders. It was those which, in the third week of October, would open the assault on the BEF between Langemarck and Ypres.

The battle that ensued raged almost continuously from early October, while the British and French were still attempting to push forward round the imagined German flank, until late November, when both sides accepted the onset of winter and their own exhaustion. Geographically it divided into four: a renewed offensive by Beseler’s corps against the Belgians on the coast, nullified by the inundations; an attempt by the French under Foch to drive north of Ypres towards Ghent, deep inside Belgium, an over-optimistic project checked by the Germans’ own offensive; the battle of Ypres itself, between the BEF and the German volunteers; and, to the south, a defensive battle conducted by the right wing of the BEF against the regular divisions of the German Sixth Army. Fighting on the three latter sectors merged effectively into one battle, so confuse...

Arriving in stages from the Aisne, II Corps on 10 October, III Corps ...

As the British arrived, so did fresh German corps to meet

The arrival of I Corps, commanded by General Douglas Haig, on 20 October secured Ypres itself, but that exhausted the army’s strength on hand; reinforcements from the empire, including the Indians, were all that were promised, and they were as yet only on their way. It was on 20 October that a general German offensive began against the whole front from La Bassée canal in the south to the estuary of the Yser in the north, twenty-four divisions against nineteen, though the latter total included the six terribly weakened Belgian. The real contest was between fourteen German infantry divisions against seven British, with three British cavalry divisions fighting

as infantry, and a collection of French sailors, Territorials and cavalry holding the river line between the British and the Belgians on the sea.

The line was held by the superiority of the British in rapid rifle fire. In artillery they were outgunned more than two to one, and in heavy artillery ten to one. In machine guns, two per battalion, they were equal with the enemy. In musketry, still quaintly so called in the BEF, they consistently prevailed. Trained to fire fifteen aimed rounds a minute, the British riflemen, of the infantry and cavalry alike, easily overcame the ...

24,000 British dead to 50,000 German—

The BEF’s trenches, at best hasty scratchings three feet deep, at worst field ditches, both frequently knee-deep in rain- or groundwater, were as yet unprotected by barbed wire. At the wettest places the defenders crouched behind sandbag mounds or brushwood barricades.

On 31 October Falkenhayn renewed the offensive on a narrower front, astride the road that leads from Menin, on the higher ground the Germans occupied, to Ypres.

mixture of regular and volunteer corps, six divisions in

The arrival of some French units, begged by French from Foch, thickened the defence, but the crucial sector was held by British rifle fire.

The Germans renewed their offensive on 11 November, by their calculation the twenty-second day of a battle “in which death had become a familiar comrade.”

Fighting around Ypres would flicker on until 22 November, the date chosen by the official historians to denote the First Battle’s termination. The British survivors, whose unwounded numbers were less than half of the 160,000 which the BEF had sent to France, were by then stolidly digging and embanking to solidify the line their desperate resistance over the preceding five weeks had established in the face of the enemy. The French, too, were digging in to secure the territory for which they had fought both north and south of the city. At best the line ran a little more than five miles to the eastward; elsewhere it stood much closer. Everywhere the Germans held the high ground, dominating the shallow crescent of trenches the British, who were to be its guardians for most of the coming war of attack and defence, would call “the Salient.”

French army, with a mobilised strength of two million, had suffered by far the worst. Its losses in September, killed, wounded, missing and prisoners, exceeded 200,000, in October 80,000 and in November 70,000; the August losses, never officially revealed, may have exceeded 160,000. Fatalities reached the extraordinary total of 306,000, representing a tenfold increase in normal mortality among those aged between twenty and thirty; 45,000 of those under twenty had died, 92,000 of those between twenty and twenty-four, 70,000 of those between twenty-five and twenty-nine.140 Among those in their thirties, the death toll exceeded 80,000. All deaths had fallen on a male population of twenty million and more particularly on the ten million of military age. Germany had lost 241,000, including 99,000 in the 20–24 age group, out of a male population of thirty-two million.141 Belgium, out of 1,800,000 men of military age, had suffered 30,000 dead, a figure that was to recur with gruesome consistency in each succeeding year of the war.142 The total was the same as that for British deaths,

with the difference that the British dead had almost all belonged to the regular army and its reserve of time-expired volunteer soldiers; those outside its ranks who had died, citizen soldiers of the few Territorial Force regiments, such as the London Scottish, which had reached Ypres before the end of the battle, and sepoys of the Lahore and Meerut Divisions, were few in number.143 Their casualties would soon rise grievously, for the Indians held long stretches of the line throughout the coming winter, suffering casualties of a hundred per cent in some battalions before the year of 1915 was out, while it was the arrival of the Territorial Force in strength in 1915 that alone allowed the British army to sustain its share of the war effort in France and to participate in the offensives mounted by Joffre in the Artois and Champagne sectors of the Western Front.144

A continuous line of trenches, 475 miles long, ran from the North Sea to the mountain frontier of neutral Switzerland.

offensives unsupported by preponderant artillery would not overcome and, for the meanwhile, the artillery of all armies was short of guns and almost wholly without ammunition; at the end of the First Battle of Ypres British batteries were limited to firing six rounds per gun per day, scarcely enough to disturb the parapets of trenches opposite and wholly inadequate to support infantry in an advance against machine guns.