Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (97 page)

Some influential voices argued for abandoning the blockade, on the grounds that it was ineffectual as well as diplomatically damaging. Ministers were dismayed to discover that American consular officials in Europe were actively assisting the passage of freight to Germany in collusion with shippers, while neutral Italy was supplying the Central Powers with grain and rubber. Grey, whom the war had rendered profoundly melancholy and increasingly erratic, produced a bizarre personal suggestion: to allow luxury goods into Germany so that it wasted its foreign exchange on buying them. There were additional fears in Whitehall that a ruthless blockade would precipitate the collapse of the entire global financial system, with especially disastrous consequences for Britain. In consequence of all these arguments and doubts, in October the British almost abandoned their blockade. This was an extraordinary development, since before 1914 the Admiralty had expended much energy on planning economic warfare as Britain’s principal weapon against Germany. In December, British ships were discharging food at Rotterdam, of which a substantial proportion found its way into the stomachs of Britain’s enemies. Only in 1917, when the United States entered the war, did the allied blockade belatedly become a critical instrument in forcing Germany to its knees.

Meanwhile, in the British government’s debate about its strategy, John Horne and Alan Kramer have written that by 1916 ‘war as a military process threatened to dwarf the moral and political significance of its outbreak’. This was already true at Christmas 1914. Any romantic ideal professed by soldiers in August was dead, displaced by huge and bewildering new realities. A eulogy for the old way was pronounced by Winston Churchill, who wrote with characteristic wit and only mild self-parody: ‘It
is a shame that War should have flung aside [cavalry charges] in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine-guns … [Politicians] let war pass out of the hands of the experts and properly-trained persons who knew about it, and reduced it to a mere disgusting matter of Men, Money and Machinery.’ These last words reflected the sincere nostalgia of many senior soldiers, though their civilian compatriots might have riposted that the professionals’ conduct of operations in 1914 was scarcely an endorsement of their claims to ownership of the conflict.

The BEF now deployed 270,000 soldiers, organised as a cavalry corps under Allenby and two armies, one commanded by Haig, the other by Smith-Dorrien. Since August it had lost 16,200 officers and men killed, 47,707 wounded, 16,746 missing or taken prisoner. Forty-seven heirs to noble titles had perished, many of them among 150 dead Old Etonians, 15 per cent of the school’s final wartime loss. These casualty figures seemed terrible enough to the British people, but remained small by comparison with those of the other belligerents, reflecting the country’s relatively modest 1914 contribution to the war. Later, of course, everything changed: by the time of the armistice, and as a consequence of conscription, almost six million men – a quarter of Britain’s adult male population – had passed through the ranks of the army, and about one in eight had perished.

On 20 December Sir John French paid a brief visit to Walmer, on the Kent coast, to meet Asquith and Kitchener. The prime minister and his cabinet colleagues found it irksome to be obliged so largely to entrust the courses of the government and the fortunes of the nation to its generals, alien beings, but who else was there with any understanding of military affairs? Asquith was also increasingly exasperated by the public indiscretions of senior officers, optimists and doomsayers alike. He wrote: ‘The authorities should … clap a padlock on the tongues of all fighting men – whether Generals or Admirals.’

Kitchener was incorrigibly remote from his fellow men, and few found his company congenial: young Cyril Asquith contemplated the field-marshal’s ruddy, densely-veined features, and observed with disdain that ‘his cheeks resemble a map of the Polish railway system’. However, the victor of Omdurman, though a limited human being who had once proposed to dispatch the skull of the long-dead Dervish leader the Mahdi from Khartoum to London for public exhibition, was no fool – and a great
deal more sensible than the BEF’s commander-in-chief. Cyril Asquith’s sister Violet, who was also staying at Walmer, told her friend Rupert Brooke that Sir John French was ‘amazingly optimistic about things, much more so than either Father or K[itchener]. [The C-in-C] detected great signs of “strain” in the Germans – says he has taken practically nothing but professors prisoners for the last 3 weeks! … He thought it quite on the cards a sudden collapse might take place & the whole thing might be over in April or May without anyone getting anywhere sensational – like Berlin!’

Here was further evidence of French’s threadbare judgement, founded in a conviction that the spring offensives planned by the Western allies could yield a decisive outcome. It was astonishing that the BEF’s commander had not been sacked for his deplorable conduct since August, especially before and during the Marne battle. He wrote in November about France’s commanders in unpardonable terms for an allied C-in-C in the field: ‘
au fond
they are a low lot, and one always has to remember the class these French generals mostly come from’. But he kept his job because the government was confused about how to fight the war. Many of its members, including Churchill, still harboured delusions that Sir John was a competent commander, let down by pusillanimous allies. Even Kitchener had felt compelled to praise French to the House of Lords in September for displaying leadership, ‘calm courage’ and ‘consummate skill’, a travesty of the truth. Sir John’s egregious misconduct – for his tenure of command in 1914 amounted to nothing less – did not alter the course of history, because forces far larger than the BEF determined outcomes. But his continuance as C-in-C through 1915 was a misfortune for those whom he led. His successor Haig, unsympathetic human being though he appears to modern generations, and by no means one of history’s great commanders, was an abler manager of armies.

Asquith himself inclined towards optimism, inspired more by events on the Eastern than the Western Front. He confided to Venetia Stanley after the Walmer weekend: ‘There seems to be some solid reason for thinking that Austria wd. like to make peace on her own account.’ His mind sometimes wandered strangely. He told Stanley that one winter night he dreamed he had been supplanted at Downing Street by Herbert Samuel, about whom he quoted Prince Hal: ‘A Jew, an ’Ebrew Jew!’ Lacking energy and instincts for warmaking, Asquith nonetheless clung to office until December 1916. An apologist might best say that the French, Russian, German, Austrian and Italian governments displayed no greater wisdom than Britain’s Liberal administration during the first years of the conflict.

Elsewhere in the cabinet, Churchill displayed unflagging enthusiasm for the fray, but now feared a stalemate on the Western Front which would leave millions of fighting men ‘chewing barbed wire’. The prime minister wrote on 5 December: ‘[Winston’s] volatile mind is at present set on Turkey & Bulgaria, & he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: to wh[ich] I am altogether opposed.’ Churchill himself was increasingly bored and frustrated by his role at the Admiralty, and yearned for a military command. He argued after the war that it was a great mistake no Anglo-French strategy conference was held in the winter of 1914, and was probably right. Inter-allied cooperation was organised piecemeal, with initial emphasis more on how to fund the war than on how to fight it. Britain’s allies took the view that, since its manpower contribution was relatively small, it could at least pay a lion’s share of the bills – as indeed it did, especially through loans to France. Meanwhile, however, nothing was done to resolve the serious problems created by divided command in France. Only in the desperate circumstances of the March 1918 German offensive did the British do what they should have done forty-four months earlier, placing their armies under a French supreme commander, Foch.

Britain’s most brilliant orator and most popular Liberal politician shared Churchill’s belief that the Western Front was stalemated. Lloyd George already harboured a private scepticism about allied generalship which would mature into contempt, writing to Asquith: ‘I am uneasy about the prospects of the War unless the Government takes some decisive measures to grip the situation. I can see no signs anywhere that our military leaders and guides are considering any plans for extricating us from our present unsatisfactory position. Had I not been a witness of their deplorable lack of prevision I should not have thought it possible that men so responsibly placed could have so little forethought.’

The Chancellor favoured opening a Balkan front: contributing men and resources to support operations by the Serbs, Greeks and Romanians, and seeking to strike at the Turks through Syria. His view that a more imaginative military leadership could have found a way to avoid heavy casualties and achieve an early victory over the Central Powers was almost certainly mistaken, but he passionately adhered to it for the rest of his life. Churchill in lesser measure shared his opinion, writing after the war: ‘Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.’ He himself retained into the Second World War a delusion that if sufficiently
ingenious military means were employed, victory might be secured at modest cost. But in twentieth-century conflicts between powerful industrial states, he was wrong.

In
The General
, C.S. Forester’s brilliantly contemptuous 1936 portrait of a British wartime officer, the novelist likened the commanders of World War I to savages, striving to extract a screw from a piece of timber by main force, assisted by ever more fulcrums and levers. It was such a pity, wrote Forester, that they failed to grasp the fact that had they instead twisted the screw, it might have been withdrawn with a fraction of the effort. This view of wartime generalship, which was essentially also that of Churchill and Lloyd George, has commanded widespread favour ever since. But what if, as most scholars of the conflict today believe, it was impossible to ‘turn the screw’, to identify any credible means for breaking the stalemate?

The attempt to defeat Turkey through an assault on the Dardanelles was probably a chimera, with little prospect of achieving its objectives even had the Gallipoli campaign been better conducted. Britain certainly had to engage the Turks to protect its vital imperial interests, for instance on the Suez Canal, but it is very questionable that the 1915 allied operations could have contrived a Turkish surrender, even had they secured the gateway to the Black Sea. Russia would have benefited importantly from freedom to ship exports abroad, especially grain. But it remains implausible that the Tsarist regime could have been saved, the war won on the Eastern Front, by dispatching arms through the Straits. Russia’s institutional military incompetence represented a huge handicap. Moreover, in 1915–16 the Western allies were chronically short of munitions to supply their own armies, far less to re-equip Russia’s forces on a scale sufficient to alter history, though some powerful voices in London favoured allowing Russian soldiers to fight with British-made arms, as a cynical alternative to the enlargement of the British Army on the Western Front and consequent ‘butcher’s bill’. Anglo-French operations against Turkey, and the subsequent pillage of the defeated Ottoman Empire, exerted a profound influence on the destinies of the Middle East, but very little upon the outcome of the conflict.

The Western Front was the cockpit of the war, and in such clashes as those of 1914–18, it was almost inevitable that a vast amount of dying had to be done before a decisive outcome became attainable. The same was true in 1939–45: much-diminished Western allied losses reflected not better leadership than that of the earlier conflict, but the fact that the second time around, the Russians bore the overwhelming burden of
necessary sacrifice. On the only occasion that a large Anglo-American army went head to head with the Wehrmacht on a limited front, in Normandy in 1944, some infantry rates of loss were briefly comparable with those of 1916, until the German line was broken and Eisenhower’s armies could exploit their terrific mobile capability, such as did not exist in World War I.

Among the commanders of 1914, Joffre, especially, merits extreme censure for his Plan XVII assaults. But had France’s C-in-C lacked his elephantine stubbornness – or strength of purpose, if you will – the subsequent successful Marne counter-offensive would not have taken place. In the winter of 1914, following his supremely important triumph in the battle of wills with Moltke outside Paris, Joffre’s standing as director of France’s war effort was unchallenged. Ypres, in October, showed that Falkenhayn had no more successful formula than his allied counterparts for conducting attacks. Germany’s army was institutionally superior to those of its enemies, but none of the Kaiser’s generals displayed genius: even Ludendorff, a master tactician, proved a dismal strategist.

Allied commanders from September 1914 onwards laboured under the fundamental handicap that in order to regain occupied Belgium and eastern France they were obliged to attack, while the Germans could exercise at will their privilege of adopting the defensive, yielding ground when it seemed advantageous to do so. Winning Britain’s share of the war on the battlefield became in 1916–18 the responsibility of Sir Douglas Haig, who succeeded Sir John French as commander-in-chief. Haig’s thinking was powerfully influenced by his experience at Ypres in October 1914. Recalling how close the Germans had come to breaking through, he deduced that determination and persistence – superiority of will – could yield decisive results to an attacker who displayed such qualities. But at no time before 1918 does it today seem plausible that any of the rival successive offensives on the Western Front could have proved a war-winner. Only with the exhaustion of Germany, American entry into the war and a remarkable improvement in the operational methods of the British Army – for which Haig can claim significant credit – did victory become attainable.