The First World War

by John Keegan

As a result, the “exchange ratio” of casualties, as it would now be termed, at Neuve-Chapelle, was eventually almost equal: 11,652 British killed, wounded, missing and prisoners to about 8,600 German.

The reasons, in retrospect, are easy to identify. At the outset, the advantage lay with the attackers, as long as they could preserve a measure of secrecy, a diminishing possibility as the war prolonged and defenders learnt how greatly survival depended upon surveillance and alertness. Almost as soon as the attackers entered the enemy’s positions, however, the advantage tended to move towards the defenders, who knew the ground, which the attackers did not, had prepared fall-back positions, and were retreating towards their own artillery along, if lucky, intact telephone lines. The attackers found themselves in exactly the opposite situation, moving into unknown and confusing surroundings, and away from their supporting artillery the further they advanced, thus progressively losing contact with it as telephone lines were broken or left behind. Then,

when the defenders counter-attacked, the advantage reversed. The attackers had familiarised themselves with the ground taken, organised its defences, to their advantage but the enemy’s confusion, and re-established telephonic communication with their artillery. In this seesaw, functional and structural weaknesses disfavoured first one side, then the other, to the eventual frustration of all effort to break through to open country or break back to the original line of defence.

The First, which had secured the “Salient” at the end of 1914, had petered out in confused and ineffective fighting, largely conducted by the French, in December. By the beginning of April, however, Falkenhayn had decided, in order partly to disguise the transfer of troops to the Eastern Front for the forthcoming offensive at Gorlice-Tarnow, partly to experiment with the new gas weapon, to renew pressure on the Ypres salient.

Gas had been used by the Germans already, on the Eastern Front, at Bolimov, on 3 January, when gas-filled shells had been fired into the Russian positions on the River Rawka west of Warsaw. The chemical agent, known to the Germans as T-Stoff (xylyl bromide), was lachrymatory (tear-producing), not lethal. It appears to have troubled the Russians not at all; prevailing temperatures were so low that the chemical froze instead of vaporising.28 By April, however, the Germans had a killing agent available in quantity, in the form of chlorine.

By 22 April, 6,000 cylinders, containing 160 tons of gas, had been emplaced opposite Langemarck, north of Ypres, where the trenches were held by the French 87th Territorial and 45th Divisions,

The afternoon of 22 April was sunny, with a light east-west breeze. At five o’clock a greyish-green cloud began to drift across from the German towards the French trenches, following a heavy bombardment, and soon thousands of Zouaves and Algerian Riflemen were streaming to the rear, clutching their throats, coughing, stumbling and turning blue in the face.

The Germans attacked the Canadians with gas again on 24 April, but the effect was less than on the first day and more reinforcements were

at hand. Efforts at counter-attack were made both by the French and British. On 1 May there was another gas attack in the jumble of broken ground known to the British as Hill 60, the Dump and the Caterpillar, south of Ypres, where a railway line runs through the spoil heaps of the cutting near Zillibeke.

Gas in a variety of forms, the more deadly asphyxiant phosgene, and the blistering “mustard,” would continue in use throughout the war,

Its intrinsic limitations as a weapon, dependent as it was on wind direction, and the rapid development of effective respirators, ensured, however, that it would never prove decisive, as it might have done if large reserves had been at hand to exploit the initial surprise achieved by the Germans in the Second Battle of Ypres.

The Allies had no technological surprise with which to inaugurate either of their offensives on the Western Front in 1915, and both failed, with heavy loss of life, for little or no gain of ground. In May, the French and British attacked in Artois, against the high ground from which the Germans dominated their positions, t...

The French, spearheaded by Pétain’s XXXIII Corps, gained the summit of Vimy Ridge, to look down into the Douai plain through which the crucial rail tracks in enemy hands ran, only to be decisively counter-attacked by reserves reaching the summit before their own, positioned six miles in the rear, could join them.

Their number had been increased on the French side by reorganisation, which had produced another twelve (numbered 120–132), on the British by further transfers of Territorial divisions to France, and the first appearance there in number of the “New Army” or “Kitchener” divisions of wartime volunteers.

The British now held

most of the line from Ypres to the Somme, leaving a short length near Vimy from which the French Tenth Army would attack as soon as preparations for Joffre’s plan were completed.

The British government, in which the Conservatives had joined the Liberals to form a coalition ministry on 26 May, recognised that the autumn offensive was a test of confidence and withdrew its opposition.

Both allies were learning that a large-scale attack against trenches could not be launched extempore; roads had to be built, stores dumped, battery positions dug. The date of the opening of what would be called the Second Battle of

Champagne was postponed from the end of August to 8 September, then, because Pétain demanded time for a lengthy bombardment, until 25 September.

The Germans profited from the delay, and the undisguisable signs of impending attack, to strengthen the portions of their line against which they detected the offensive was preparing. Falkenhayn’s instructions of January had laid down that a second position was to be constructed behind the first, with concrete machine-gun posts in between. Despite the enormous labour ...

Worse still for the attacker, German defensive doctrine required that the second position be constructed on the reverse slope of any height occupied—and the Germans, by careful choice during the retreat of 1914, occupied the high ground—so that it was protected from the Allied artillery fire designed to destroy it. The role of the German artillery was, by contrast, not to bombard trenches but to attack the enemy infantrymen as they assembled

and then to lay a barrage in no man’s land once they moved forward; those who penetrated that barrier of fire were to be left to the machine gunners who, experience was showing, could stop an attack at ranges as close as 200 yards or less.33

In both sectors the offensives were preceded by a discharge of chlorine gas. At Loos, the gas hung about in no man’s land or even drifted back into the British trenches, hindering rather than helping the advance. In any case the six British divisions engaged—

were quickly stopped by machine guns; when two reserve divisions,

were started forward in support, it was from a position so far to the rear that they did not reach the original British front line until dark.

They stood up, some even on the parapet of the trench, and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across the open grassland. The machine gunners had opened fire at 1,500 yards’ range.

The enemy could be seen falling literally in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption” until they reached the unbroken wire of the Germans’ second position: “Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle the survivors turned and began to retire.”

A German victory Loos was; though the British persisted with attacks for another three weeks, they gained nothing but a narrow salient two miles deep, in which 16,000 British soldiers had lost their lives and nearly 25,000 had been wounded.

initiation to combat for the soldiers of the New Armies,

Yet Loos, in strategic terms, was pointless and so, too, were the efforts of Pétain’s Second Army and de Langle’s Fourth in the offensive in Champagne that opened the same day. There twenty divisions attacked side by side on a front of twenty miles, supported by a thousand heavy guns and behind a gas cloud similar to that launched at Loos.

the attempts on the Champagne heights nowhere gained more than two miles of ground. The Germans’ second line was not penetrated and, when the fighting ended on 31 October, their positions remained intact, though 143,567 French soldiers had become casualties.36

The Germans had shown that they had learnt much about the methods of defending an entrenched front, the Allies that they had learnt nothing about means of breaking through.

CRUISER WAR

WAR AT SEA

Italy,

Russia,

There had not been a comparable expansion of the fighting force. Because of the small size of the national demographic base, relative to Germany’s, and high proportion of men conscripted and held in the reserve in peacetime, over 80 per cent of those of military age, France lacked the capacity to expand its field army to the extent possible in Germany or Russia, where the pre-war military intake was less than half the age group.

twenty-five new infantry divisions were formed between February 1915 and the spring of 1916. The French army of 1916 was stronger than that of 1914 by more than 25 per cent.

Kitchener was able eventually to form six “New” or “Kitchener” Armies, each five divisions strong, to join the army’s eleven regular divisions and the twenty-eight infantry divisions of the part-time, voluntary Territorial Force. By the spring of 1916, Britain had seventy divisions under arms, a tenfold expansion since peace, and of those twenty-four were New Army divisions on or waiting to go to the Western Front.

He already had “the vital point” in mind, the fortress of Verdun in a loop of the Meuse, isolated during the operations of 1914, exposed to attack from three sides, badly provided with communications to the French rear area but lying only twelve miles from a major railhead in German hands.

Opposite his and its neighbouring positions, Falkenhayn had assembled, during January and February 1916, a reinforcement to Fifth Army, the German Crown Prince’s, of ten divisions, including six regular, supported by an enormous concentration of artillery. Among the 542 heavy guns were thirteen of the 420mm and seventeen of the 305mm howitzers that had devastated the Belgian forts eighteen months earlier, and to supply them and the field and medium artillery a stock of two and a half million shells had been accumulated.

The whole of the French defensive zone on a front of eight miles—one German division and

150 guns to ea...

growing intelligence of an impending German attack gradually brought the defenders to a better state of readiness, insufficient, nevertheless, without substantial reinforcements of guns and men, to guarantee successful resistance. On 19 February the rains stopped, next day a warm sun dried the ground, and early in the morning of 21 February the bombardment opened.

Had it fallen the results might have been beneficial to the French conduct of the war, for it was indeed a death trap, while the broken and wooded terrain to its rear was perfectly defensible at a cost in life much lower than the French were to suffer in and around the sacrificial city in the months to come.

Pétain at once identified two essentials for the defence: to co-ordinate the artillery, of which he took personal control, and to open a line of supply. Henceforth it would be the Germans on whom fell a constant deluge of shells as they clung to the front line or made their way forward to battle through the narrow valleys beyond the Meuse. Behind Verdun, the single road that led to Bar-le-Duc fifty miles away was designated a supply route for trucks alone; 3,500 were assembled to bring forward the 2,000 tons of stores the garrison

needed daily, the troops being ordered to march up and down the roadside fields. Any truck that broke down was pushed off the road, lest it interrupt the day-and-night flow of traffic. A whole division of Territorials was employed in road repairs and France was scoured for additional transport. Eventually 12,000 trucks would be used on what became known as the Voie sacrée.

Already on 27 February, the Germans recorded “no success anywhere.”

The Germans sought to overcome the resistance of the French infantry by pushing their artillery ever closer to the front, through saturated ground that demanded ever larger teams of horses to move a single gun. An immediate result was appalling casualties among the gun-teams—7,000 horses are said to have been killed in one day—yet, despite the growing weight of bombardment, the French line would not shift. By 27 February, the Germans had advanced four miles and

were within four miles of the city but no increase in offensive effort could push their front forward.