Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (79 page)

Some of the shortcomings of newspapers were no fault of their own, but instead the consequence of governments’ refusal to provide facts or allow correspondents to visit the front. In Britain Col. Repington complained that censorship was being abused ‘as a cloak to cover all political, naval and military mistakes’. It was undoubtedly true that the system was exploited to sustain public morale much more than to conceal operational secrets from the enemy. In France, after the Marne the General Staff began to provide a thin dripfeed of information to the press, but the damage was already done: a credibility gap had opened which was never entirely closed. French journalists – and, before long, their readers – became chronically sceptical about all official pronouncements.

French soldiers in the field referred contemptuously to the ‘
bourrage de crâne
’, literally ‘skull-stuffing’, but properly ‘bullshit’, which made up the content of the newspapers that reached them. Maurice Barrès of
l’Echo de Paris
became notorious for his enthusiasm for the war, which prompted the impassioned pacifist Romain Rolland to dub him ‘the nightingale of carnage’.
Poilus
, rejecting the conventional press, turned instead to trench newspapers which soldiers wrote and copied for each other, or to Swiss titles when obtainable. Philosopher Alain Emile-Auguste Chartier, now a soldier, wrote on 25 November: ‘The
Journal de Genève
is eagerly seized upon here and officers make cuttings from it; the military reports are admirable and everyone agrees that our papers seem ridiculous by comparison.’

Soldier-historian Louis Debidour agreed: ‘All of us find intolerable the kind of literature produced by journalists about the trenches, the ingenuity of our men, the general air of enthusiasm, the forced gaiety displayed
by the troops, the picturesque layout of the trenches etc. All that is pure invention. The troops are no more than calm and collected; they are resigned to putting the best possible face on dreadful misery caused by the cold and the awful weather.’ German newspapers did the same. Frankfurt’s
Oder-Zeitung
included a feature entitled ‘Our Brandenburgers on the Aisne’. Its author, a war correspondent, applauded soldiers’ ability to establish cosiness – ‘
Gemütlichkeit
’ – in the trenches, and their capacity for seeing the funny side of things. Dugouts were described as ‘comfortably furnished’, while camps in the forward areas were said to resemble those on the old American frontier depicted in James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales
. The war was presented as a stimulating challenge for young men.

All the peoples of Europe showed themselves susceptible to the most implausible fantasies. On 29 September a writer named Arthur Machen penned a short story for the London
Evening News
in which he described how the men of the BEF at Mons had seen visions of St George at the head of Bowmen of old England, who delivered a shower of arrows which caused 10,000 Germans to fall dead without a mark on them. Though Machen’s piece was explicitly billed as fiction, huge numbers of people decided that it described a real happening. Meanwhile on the other side, Austrians warmed to the legend of a twelve-year-old child named Rosa Zenoch, who allegedly carried water to the wounded on the battlefield of Lemberg, at the cost of herself being maimed by shrapnel. The girl indeed lost a leg, and wound up in a Vienna hospital where Franz Joseph himself presented her with a locket and agreed to buy her a prosthetic limb. The story of ‘the little angel of Lemberg’ became a staple of Austrian children’s literature. Not to be outdone,
The Lady
recommended a new English book entitled
Belgian Playmates
by Nellie Pollock: ‘an extremely nice and timely little story for children, a tale of the present war, with the scene set partly in England and partly in Belgium’.

It is unsurprising that the soldiers of the rival armies felt a far stronger sense of community with each other than with their peoples at home, whom all the belligerent governments sought to quarantine from any real knowledge of what was being done in their name on the battlefield.

The Germans learned more about Britain’s war effort from social gossip transmitted through neutrals than they did from either allied newspapers or their own spies. Their first agent dispatched from Berlin was a reserve officer named Carl Lody, who made himself somewhat conspicuous by
speaking English with an American accent. He was arrested on 2 October following the interception of incriminating letters he had dispatched to neutral Stockholm. A public court-martial at Westminster Guildhall sentenced him to death, and Lody was duly shot in the moat of the Tower of London. ‘I suppose you will not shake hands with a spy?’ the condemned man said to the assistant provost-marshal. ‘No,’ responded that officer, ‘but I will shake hands with a brave man.’ Vernon Kell, director of MI5, respected Lody, and deplored the decision to shoot him. Other German agents were rounded up after a Belgian refugee in neutral Holland wrote to the War Office revealing the name – Frans Leibacher – and Rotterdam address to which they were addressing correspondence.

Fortunately for Berlin, however, other sources of information about British military activity were readily accessible. To the despair of commanders in the field, the ‘Upper Ten’ – the higher echelons of British society – were chronically indiscreet. The most sensitive operational intelligence was served at the tables of grand hostesses, from whence it often found its way into newspapers in neutral countries, and thus to the enemy. ‘To know anything one had to go out to lunch, and I am bound to say that at such houses as … Lady Paget’s and Mrs J.J. Astor’s the information was generally up to date and accurate,’ wrote the journalist Filson Young. ‘The well-fed oracle from the War Office, carefully waiting until the servants had left the room, with a peach and a glass of port before him and his “Well, I can soon tell the little
I
know,” remains a type of those days.’ Censorship or no censorship, British military security remained poor throughout the war, as did the quality of information provided to the public by their shackled press. It was a notable feature of the 1914–18 war that by its ending the credibility of governments had been grievously damaged by clumsy and indeed oppressive news-management policies. The deceits peddled to every belligerent society by its rulers contributed vastly to the disillusionment that followed.

14

Open Country, Open Sky

1 CHURCHILL’S ADVENTURE

On 2 September, between Switzerland and Verdun the rival belligerents confronted each other in almost continuous lines. A week later, the front had stabilised along a further sixty miles, between Verdun and Mailly. But there remained 170 miles of open country between the Aisne and the Channel, untraversed and unravaged by the warring armies. The French and British were struggling to find sufficient men to defend their positions. To the north and west, Falkenhayn saw opportunities to achieve before winter the envelopment which had eluded the Kaiser’s armies in August. He doubted that an absolute German victory was still attainable, but even if he failed to turn the allied flank, seizure of the Channel ports as far west as Calais would create an overwhelmingly powerful strategic position from which to negotiate a peace.

As the French and British armies redeployed to meet this threat – a remarkable feat of staffwork and logistics – their commanders enjoyed a similar surge of optimism. They supposed that a fast-moving campaign, unlike the profitless pounding on the Chemin des Dames, was still possible in northern France and the unoccupied region of Belgium. September and October witnessed the last awful convulsions of the 1914 campaign on the Western Front. In deteriorating autumn weather, the rival armies engaged in a struggle commonly described as ‘the Race to the Sea’, though both sides were less interested in the Channel coast than in seeking to get around behind each other. Sir John French elected to move the BEF to the allied left flank, partly to simplify his communications with England, but also under the delusion that his little army and its strong cavalry contingent might there exploit exhilarating possibilities. Instead, the British, French and Belgians found themselves locked first in a series of encounter battles, then in a headlong battering process that persisted through some
of the most terrible weeks of the war, as the allies clung precariously to their line in the face of massive German assaults.

On assuming command, Falkenhayn’s first move, against his own better judgement, was to allow Bülow’s army to make a further attempt to break through on the Soissons–Reims front. After that assault failed on 16 September, he threw everything into reinforcing his right wing. On the French side, and with the same hopes of getting around Kluck, Manoury advanced cautiously up the Oise, where on the 17th his troops clashed with the Germans, and were checked. Joffre began rushing men further north to form a new army commanded by Castelnau, the seventy-three-year-old stalwart who had shown himself ‘the rock’ on the Couronné de Nancy. But his men were reservists, neither energetic nor well-trained, and Falkenhayn was able to shift forces to meet them, forming his own new army led by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. The Germans’ problem was that the east–west railway systems of occupied Belgium, Luxembourg and occupied France were ill-adapted for moving large numbers of men northwards from the southern end of the front. The Belgian tracks had been heavily sabotaged by King Albert’s retreating countrymen, who also removed most rolling stock to France. In October the rail network was still operating imperfectly, even after the Germans had committed 26,000 labourers to clear blocked tunnels and repair broken track.

Between September and November, the Germans repeatedly pushed reinforcements towards the coast – but never quite sufficient or fast enough to achieve decisive results. The French used their trains better, and the difference proved critical. On the evening of 23 September, Rupprecht’s Sixth Army advanced up the Oise. Joffre at GQG was slow to grasp the significance of this movement, but Castelnau’s men were able to check it. French troops also stopped another thrust further south on the 26th, inflicting heavy losses. Here, yet again, Falkenhayn’s generals sent forward masses of men to suffer the same fate as had Joffre’s back in August, when it was their turn to attack. But the north was the real focus of attention: in the bosoms of many men of four nations, there still glowed competing hopes for a historic triumph. France’s roads were crowded with cavalry and vehicles moving up towards Amiens, Arras, Lens, Lille, while trains shuttled infantry formations to local detraining points.

In the German lines likewise, on 6 October gunner Herbert Sulzbach watched in awe as column after column of cavalry clattered past his battery on their way towards the front: ‘Dragoons from Darmstadt, mounted chasseurs from Trier, regiments from Metz, Karlsruhe, Bruchsal, Mulhouse
and Cassel: they look terrific with their lances, and you feel that something very big is going to happen … and you are suffused with hope and excitement. I saw quite a number of people I knew among the men moving past. How strange that people should meet on this gigantic front, pretty well on the field of battle.’ Sulzbach was almost equally excited to find his own chin starting to boast stubble, to hear himself swearing and grumbling like an old soldier: ‘it is something wonderful to be one of the millions who are able to join in the fighting’.

The Kaiser visited the front at Chauny, and sought to assuage scepticism among soldiers whom he met. ‘You’ll be home at Christmas,’ he said repeatedly. ‘I shall be letting you go home soon.’ There were matching hopes in Paris, where the euphoria of the Marne persisted. At the British embassy Sir Francis Bertie wrote on 1 October: ‘If Joffre be victorious and succeeds in obtaining Alsace-Lorraine for France, he may do anything he may please.’ Yet even before such civilian hopes were uttered, the French commander-in-chief had been obliged to abandon his ambitions of outflanking the Germans. Though he continued to rush formations forward, Joffre saw that these could do no more than hold a line, frustrate the enemy’s grand design. Prince Rupprecht’s men were advancing on Lille and threatening Arras, which by the evening of 4 October faced encirclement. In response to this threat, Joffre appointed Gen. Ferdinand Foch as his deputy, with responsibility for the entire northern area of operations. In this role, through the weeks that followed Foch’s contribution was to sustain an iron determination. He told his subordinates there could be no retreat: their men must die where they stood. Maud’huy, now commanding Tenth Army under Foch’s leadership, repulsed a major German push against Arras. By nightfall on 6 October, the line was stable. Falkenhayn shifted his attention.

The French were acutely aware that the fate of the north of their country and the rump of Belgium was not in their hands alone: British and Belgian troops would play critical roles. Since the last week of September, even as Prince Rupprecht’s army attacked the French east of Arras, his formations had also been sweeping across Belgium, where the local population and the Belgian army fell back in its path. From Ghent, the unhappy Madame Jeanne van Bleyenberghe wrote to a friend: ‘We heard the guns many times and you cannot imagine how dreadful it feels to hear the noise – to think that every time so many men are killed … You must have heard in your papers of the sufferings of our people, how old men, women and children were killed, whole villages and towns set on fire.’

On the 30th British volunteer nurse Gladys Winterbottom found herself skirting broken bodies as she drove into Waelham to pick up a casualty. ‘By the bridge was one of the nice little sentries – dead. We started to cross under terrific fire … but just then 12 terrified soldiers ran drunkenly across, clutching hold of the bridge railings to pull themselves along. Their commandant had been killed and they fled for their lives. We found no wounded, so I took all the 12 men up with me in the Fiat … The men were quite hysterical and almost embraced me in their relief. I was too racked to go under heavy fire again.’