The Illusion of Victory (33 page)

In New York, an anxious Flora wrote:“Quentin I am so worried about you. I am sure you are not a bit well and I wish—oh so much—you could get away somewhere . . . in the south of France. . . . I hardly dare say this but . . . I think with your bad back you ought not even to be in aviation. . . . At the bottom of your heart don’t you think there is a good deal of sense in that?”
¹⁷

The boom of 6,000 artillery pieces drowned out Flora’s loving voice. On March 21, 1918, Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff launched Germany’s massive attempt to win victory on the Western Front. The
Kaiserschlacht
(kaiser battle) began at dawn with a stupendous bombardment on the thirty-four divisions of the British Third and Fifth Armies along a forty-three-mile front south of Arras. The Fifth Army was guarding the “hinge” between the British and French fronts, always an inviting target. An officer called the rain of shells “more like a convulsion of nature than the work of man. The noise was so immense, it was impossible to hear an order beyond a few yards, even when shouted through a megaphone.”
¹⁸

Unlike previous bombardments on the Western Front, the German artillery was on target from the first round. Thanks to ingenious artillerymen and painstaking mapmakers, the Germans had figured out how to fire the big guns accurately without the messy business of “registration,” which had previously consumed days and eliminated all surprise from French and British attacks. The man in charge of the rain of destruction was Colonel Georg Bruchmuller, whom black humorists on the general staff called
Durchbruchmuller
(Breakthrough Muller). After almost four years of study, he had composed a deadly symphony, called a fire waltz, that combined precise combinations of poison gas and high explosives, carefully orchestrated to wreak specific havoc on different sections of the battlefield.
¹⁹

Mustard-gas shells were aimed at the flanks of the enemy defenses, because mustard dispersed slowly and could hinder attackers as well as defenders. Odorless phosgene gas was for the forward trenches, the immediate target of the attack. Huge quantities were also fired into the enemy rear to immobilize their artillery. These shells were mixed with shells containing diphenyl chloramine, which fouled gas masks and forced men to breathe the deadly phosgene.

Undetected by Allied spies, patrols or aircraft, Ludendorff had managed to concentrate sixty-seven divisions on the forty-three-mile front, giving him a 2-to-1 manpower advantage. For a final touch, the German high command unveiled a new set of tactics. Certain units had been designated
Angriffdivisionen
(attack divisions); they had been trained as
Sturmtruppen
(storm troopers) with a radically different approach to the battlefield.

Instead of trying to seize specific objectives, storm troopers were given what are now called mission-oriented orders. They were equipped with light machine guns and mortars and told to break through the weakened British defenses in squads and companies, leaving to the rest of the army the job of mopping up holdouts in the forward battle line. Previously, storm troopers had been elite units, trained to bring off trench raids. The Germans were betting they could imbue whole divisions with their reckless ardor. Experiments on the Eastern Front had convinced Quartermaster General Ludendorff this could be done.
²⁰

At 9:30 A.M., after five hours of merciless pounding by Bruchmuller’s guns, the storm troopers emerged from the ground fog. Their rifles remained strapped to their backs; their favorite weapon was the hand grenade. Lieutenant Ernst Junger, who commanded a company, urged his men forward with wild emotion, convinced they were about to win the war.“They . . . had gone over the edge of the world into superhuman perspectives,” he later wrote.
²¹

He and other companies rolled up trench after trench of British officers and men dazed and panicked by the bombardment. Thousands of other Tommies fled. Others were stunned to discover Germans attacking their strong points from the rear.“I thought we had stopped them,” recalled one machine gunner, “when I felt a bump in my back.” The bump was a revolver in the hand of a German officer.“Come along, Tommy, you’ve done enough,” he said.
²²

So swiftly did the storm troopers advance, they were soon in rear areas where bacon sizzled on the stoves of abandoned mess halls. They paused to eat, stuffed their haversacks and kept going. By nightfall, they had burst through the center of the Fifth Army into open country.

In 1916, on the Somme, Field Marshal Haig had lost 500,000 men fighting across these same woods and fields, to gain a grand total of 98 square miles in six blood-soaked months. On March 21, 1918, the Germans gained 140 square miles in twenty-four hours, at a cost of 39,329 casualties. While John J. Pershing talked about it, Ludendorff and his fellow generals had invented a type of open warfare that worked.
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Bluff Irish-born General Hubert Gough realized his Fifth Army was in imminent danger of a rout. He pleaded for reinforcements, but Field Marshal Haig, jittery about the rest of his battle line, sent him only a single division. (Haig, out of touch as usual, thought the Fifth and Third Armies were holding their own and sent them warm congratulations.) Gough turned to the French, who were supposed to rush men across the hinge if the British got in trouble (and vice versa). The French sent only a handful of riflemen. The day before the attack, the Germans had leaked disinformation that convinced General Pétain that an assault on Rheims was imminent.

On the third day of the battle, the British Third Army also began to crumble. Their commander had crammed most of his men in forward trenches. They put up a strong defense at first, but when the storm troopers finally broke through, there were no reserves to stop them. An appalled Haig realized there was no alternative but to retreat south of the Somme River.
²⁴

It was a devastating humiliation for the British army. Having paid a half million men to win this part of France, they presumed they would stay. Huge fuel and ammunition dumps had to be destroyed, entire hospitals and airfields evacuated. Soon Gough’s fear of a rout became reality. As thousands of beaten Tommies, many of them wounded, trudged south in a disorganized mob without officers, a cry went up: “German cavalry!” In seconds the panicky infantrymen stampeded down the road, flinging wounded men into ditches, throwing away packs, rifles, gas masks.
²⁵

Ironically, this headlong retreat was probably the best tactic the harried British could have devised. It kept at least part of the disintegrating Fifth Army and the crumbling Third Army out of the grasp of the oncoming Germans. By this time, some 90,000 British soldiers had surrendered and were on their way to prisoner-of-war camps. Ludendorff ordered one of his armies to seize Amiens, a vital rail center. Another army was told to keep smashing its way down the hinge, to separate the French and British. The Germans encountered some French troops, finally sent by the cautious Pétain, but they were too few and too late.

Inexplicably, the German drive began to run out of steam. Lieutenant Rudolf Binding, a division staff officer, saw one reason on March 28.“Today the advance of our infantry suddenly stopped near Albert,” he wrote in his diary.“I began to see curious sights . . .men driving cows before them . . . others who carried a hen under one arm and a box of notepaper under the other. Men carrying a bottle of wine under their arm and another one open in their hand . . . Men staggering. Men who could hardly walk.”
²⁶

Binding described the British back areas as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” along with seeking food, not to mention wine, that was better than they saw in their own army’s blockade-shriveled rations, the storm troopers also stopped to equip themselves with warm English boots, jackets and raincoats. They fed their half-starved artillery horses on “masses of oats and gorgeous foodcake.” an unanticipated problem was getting their artillery across the devastated battlefield to keep up with the advance, which neared 40 miles by the end of March. The sheer distance, and the added burden of the loot the infantrymen were carrying, were the main reasons why, on April 4, the first phase of the
Kaiserschlacht
came to a halt, with Amiens uncaptured. Still the Germans had acquired another 1,200 square miles of France, inflicted 164,000 casualties on the British and 70,000 on the French—and thrown panic into the ranks of both the French and British armies.
²⁷

Only two companies of American engineers, who happened to be working temporarily with the Fifth Army, participated in this great battle. They suffered seventy-eight casualties. The rest of the AEF was still earnestly training for open warfare in Lorraine. Their brief tours in quiet sectors of the front lines had no impact whatsoever on the war. The stunning success of the
Kaiserschlacht
made many people wonder if John J. Pershing’s refusal to amalgamate his army with the French and British was a ruinous mistake.
²⁸

One American woman volunteer saw this cataclysm from a uniquely terrible viewpoint. Shirley Millard was a New Yorker whose heart “thumped admiringly to the tune of Over There.” Her parents kept telling her she was much too young to go to war, and she did not have an iota of training to drive an ambulance or nurse wounded men. But she had two valuable assets, “a fair knowledge of French and the determination that goes with red hair.” when she heard the French were recruiting Americans to serve in their depleted nursing corps, she volunteered. On March 16, 1918, her awed fiancé, about to begin training as a lieutenant at New York’s Camp Upton, saw her off with kisses and presents, urging her “not to win the war” before he got there.

Millard enjoyed every minute of her eight-day voyage across the Atlantic, in spite of the ubiquitous submarines. She read a handbook on nursing in secret, still pleased that she had managed (so she thought) to bluff the French recruiters into taking her. She assumed she would be given some sort of training when she arrived in France. She had no idea that France had been chronically short of nurses since the war began. Nursing was not an accepted profession for Frenchwomen. It had been left to nuns—and in France’s ongoing war between the secular left and the religious right, many religious nursing orders had been driven out of the country.

On March 24, 1918, Millard and the nine other members of her unit landed in Bordeaux. They were instantly ordered aboard a train to Paris, where they were told they were needed at an emergency hospital near the front. Soon they were in an odoriferous, covered
camion
(truck) that had just carried a load of mules to the front. They shrugged into their uniforms as the camion roared through the night at headlong speed. They told each other how lucky they were to get to the front without boring delays.

As darkness fell, they reached their hospital, a big, rambling old château near Soissons. Around it on the lawns loomed numerous barracks for wounded enlisted men. Wounded officers were treated in the château. In the distance, the newcomers could hear the boom of artillery. Heavy fighting was obviously in progress. On the grounds between the château and the barracks were hundreds of men, who they assumed were sleeping.

A French doctor looked them over and beckoned them to follow him. Often they had to step over the men on the ground as they hurried toward the barracks. Their ears picked up pathetic cries for water, food, a priest. They realized the prone soldiers were all wounded, lying there waiting for treatment. Moments later, an airplane exploded and burned in the black sky above them. By that time, Shirley Millard was at the door of Barracks Forty-Two. The doctor opened the door only wide enough to shove her inside. She would soon learn that lights drew German bombers.

She found herself in a long, low room, with cots so jammed together it was hard to walk between them. Light came from flickering candles. Nurses, doctors, orderlies rushed up and down the center aisle. Someone shoved a huge hypodermic needle into her hand and told her every man who came in must have a tetanus shot. Then she was to get them ready for the operating table. Millard stared at the hypodermic. She had no idea how to use it. “I’d never even
had
one [an injection],” she thought.“And what did ‘get them ready’ mean?”

She watched another nurse snap on the glass tube containing the antitoxin, fill the syringe and give a man his injection. She followed the same procedure, but when she tried to plunge the needle into her man’s arm, it bent. A passing orderly told her the man was an Arab, with skin as tough as leather. She found another needle and tried again. It worked! Ditto the second, third and fourth times.“Soon I am going like lightning.”

Then she found out what getting them ready meant. She watched a French nurse as she undressed several wounded men,“removing all their clothing, boots leggings, belts, gas-masks.” then she washed their wounds and wrapped them in a clean sheet to prepare them for surgery. Taking a deep breath, Millard went to work. Most of the men were caked with mud from head to foot; they screamed and cursed her as she struggled to undress them without causing more pain.

Beneath one set of blood-and mud-soaked bandages, she found an arm hanging by a tendon.
Roses Are Blooming in Picardy.
The plaintive British war song started wailing in her head as she went on to the next man. She bathed a “great hip cavity” where a leg once was. Next was a man with no eyes. She could see into the back of his head.

She stared at a chest ripped open by a shell as the exposed lungs slowly shuddered to a stop. Next came a burly Breton, who reminded her of the porter in the hotel in Dinard where she had stayed with her parents years before.“I slit him open!” he babbled.“Open I tell you! Goddamn his soul!”