The Price of Glory (7 page)

As
‘L’ Année Stérile’
drew to a close, both sides began to shape their plans for 1916. On December 6th, Joffre held an historic conference of the Allied commanders at his HQ in Chantilly. It was the first attempt yet made by either side to co-ordinate war policy, and it was very much Joffre’s conference. Not until catastrophe brought in Foch in 1918 was there to be a supra-national commander like Eisenhower, but at the end of 1915 Joffre came closest to it. Of the men who had led Europe’s armies into the war, Moltke had been replaced by Falkenhayn after the Marne; Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich had been sacked and General Sir John French was about to be. Joffre alone remained, his dominion surer than ever; moreover, France was still bearing the greatest burden of the Allies. Under the influence of Joffre, the Allied representatives agreed that the only hope of a decisive rupture was for all-out offensives to be launched simultaneously in both East and West, accompanied by an Italian attack on the Austrians. With the perennial optimists of G.Q.G. at his elbow, Joffre spoke of the ‘brilliant tactical results’ of the Champagne and Artois offensives. Their failure was facilely explained away, while the G.Q.G. mathematicians declared that Germany was running out of reserves. For the Western end of the concerted offensives, it was agreed that 1915 should be repeated, but this time on a far bigger scale, with the British and French efforts linked, astride the River Somme. The plan was a simple and unimaginative one, which appealed to the mind of Haig, the new British commander. As the plan evolved in subsequent talks between Haig and Joffre, the French would attack with forty divisions on a twenty-five-mile front south of the Somme, the British with some twenty-five along the fifteen miles to the north. This time there was to be no question of the ‘Big Push’ going off at half-cock; they would wait until there was an abundance of heavy guns, and the ammunition for them, and until the new ‘Kitchener Army’ was quite ready. They would wait until the summer.
But the bear blew first….

* * *

At this juncture there enters one of the strangest figures of the whole war, whose intentions and personality still remain today obscured by an astonishing degree of mystery. Erich von Falkenhayn’s background was hardly unconventional, nor was his pre-war career particularly spectacular. In most ways he was typical of the Junker
caste. Contrary to the popular image abroad, the Junkers were not wealthy, feudal landowners on a vast scale; in fact, they were usually impoverished small-holders whose sole asset in common was an aristocratic lineage leading back into the Middle Ages. It was the hardship of scraping a living from the poor, sandy soil of eastern Germany, under its bleak climate, that traditionally orientated Junker sons towards the greater attraction of a military career, and that, at the same time, fostered the spartan habits so fundamental to the Prussian Army. The Falkenhayn family home was a modest farmhouse near Thorn, which, even before the westward march of Poland’s frontiers in 1945, lay deep in Polish territory. In Medieval days, Thorn had been the principal bastion of the Teutonic Knights, the Order that for centuries looked upon itself as the bulwark of Western civilisation against the Poles and other barbaric eastern tribes. The Falkenhayns proudly claimed descent from the Teutonic Knights, and could trace their origins back to the twelfth century. Among the many soldiers the family had produced, one had been a general under Frederick the Great and had won the
Pour le Mérite
¹
at the Battle of Liegnitz. Thus it was not unexpected that both Erich and his elder brother chose the army as a profession.

Falkenhayn was born in 1861, nearly a decade after Joffre. Twenty-five years later he married, and this is about all that is known of his private life. The following year he entered the War Academy. Both here and in his subsequent career his most sympathetic biographer finds no evidence of an intellect above the average; nor, indeed, any ‘lively urge’ to pursue the study of advanced military theory. It was a characteristic that Falkenhayn shared, evidently, with Haig and Joffre; and his career had one further resemblance to Haig’s in that both were average officers whose later rise to the summit was greatly facilitated by the patronage of their Sovereign. At the age of thirty-two, Falkenhayn became a captain on the General Staff, and three years later, in 1896, he was posted to the German Military Mission to China. Before it had started work, the Mission collapsed under protest from the Russians, who were alarmed at the possible consequences of any militarisation of the rickety Manchu regime. Falkenhayn, already in China, was given instead the post of chief instructor at Hankow Military School. After less than two years, however, he resigned — complaining that he had been able to achieve
little, because of the extreme age of his pupils. Meanwhile, the Boxer Rebellion had broken out, and Falkenhayn (now a Major) found himself appointed by von Waldersee, the commander of the International Relief Force, to the provisional government in Tientsin. Here he displayed considerable efficiency, and some ruthlessness, in restoring order to the chaotic situation; it was he who demolished part of the ancient, sacred city wall of Peking to improve communications.

It was about this period that Falkenhayn’s perceptive reports from China first caught the eye of the Kaiser. In 1902, he returned from the Far East to command — at the already advanced age of forty-one — a battalion of line infantry. In 1906 he was appointed Chief of Staff to the 16th Army Corps at Metz. General von Prittwitz, the Corps Commander, was an incompetent, panicky officer, whose command of the German forces in East Prussia in the first days of the war very nearly brought total disaster. Falkenhayn quickly saw his chance and allowed the work of the corps to centre more and more around his own person, cutting out his senior. Outsiders were left in no doubt as to von Prittwitz’s dependence on his Chief of Staff, and it was Falkenhayn’s mastery of the situation during summer manoeuvres that made its final, decisive mark on the Kaiser. From then on, Falkenhayn’s rise was meteoric. By 1911 he, a line officer, had achieved what was as improbable in the German as in the British army of that day; the command of a Guards regiment. The following year saw him promoted Major-General, again a Chief-of-Staff, and again at odds with his superior. In 1913 he was on the verge of applying for a transfer, when the news came that he had been put up another rank and appointed Minister of War. Nobody (with the possible exception of his brother officers) was more surprised than Falkenhayn. Finally, with the fall of Moltke in September 1914, the ultimate plum fell into Falkenhayn’s lap. He was then a mere fifty-three.

Even more astonishing than the way in which the new Chief of the General Staff had leap-frogged so many more senior generals was the fact that for several months he still retained his old post. By modern democratic standards this was as extraordinary as if Alan-brooke had combined the offices of CIGS and Minister of War, as well as most of the functions of Minister of Defence. In his dual capacity, Falkenhayn had far greater powers for the prosecution of the war than any Allied leader, and his planning could encompass a
wider arena than just the conduct of war by land. At the same time, he assumed this great responsibility with an experience of command and actual battle conditions even more remote than Joffre’s.

On first seeing a portrait of Falkenhayn, one’s immediate reaction is: ‘this is a typical Prussian general’. The hair is close-cropped, the nose well-bred, the features vigorous and stern. The eyes have that Prussian turn-down at the corners — a suggestion that in some far-off age there was an infusion of fierce blood from the Steppes into the Teuton stock. They flash with hard intelligence, and imply a capacity for ruthlessness and possibly cruelty. But when one comes to the mouth, partly concealed under the aggressive military moustache, the whole picture changes. It is not the mouth of a determined leader, a man of action, but that of an indecisive, introversive man of thought, and the sensitive, dimpled chin confirms the implications of weakness.

Here lies the vital key to Falkenhayn’s character. The ruthless streak was there all right; before the war in Parliament he had stood up strongly for duelling, as essential to the ‘honour of the army’; it was he who sanctioned the first use of gas at Ypres, advocated unrestricted submarine warfare and promiscuous bombing in reprisal for Allied air raids. He had a true Junker’s contempt for the Press and the ‘masses’, and was even less moved by casualty lists than either Haig or Joffre. He drove himself and his staff with similar ruthlessness, and his capacity for work seemed limitless; if anything, he erred by taking too much on his shoulders and trying to be in too many places at the same time. His strategic appreciations were often brilliant, and to Falkenhayn is due almost all the credit for bringing Germany out of the nadir of the disaster on the Marne to the high peak where her fortunes rested at the end of 1915.

Yet his ruthlessness lacked the tenacious purpose of a Ludendorff; too often indecision and excessive prudence turned his successes into only half-successes. When the surprise of the gas cloud at Ypres had torn a great hole in the British line, Falkenhayn was not prepared to risk a follow-up. When Ludendorff was on the verge of inflicting a greater defeat even than Tannenberg on the Russians, Falkenhayn thought the offensive too ambitious and nervously called it off. Temporary neutralisation was achieved, instead of annihilation. Caution and indecision dictated his refusal of an early Austrian design for a tank and of a Turkish offer to send some of their magnificent troops to the Western Front, where they might well
have provided the decisive reserves he lacked. He never took full advantage of Germany’s one great asset; the ability to switch troops rapidly from East to West, thereby gaining a temporary superiority. His principle was to be secure simultaneously at all points, and in this, as Liddell Hart has aptly remarked, ‘his actions and his mental attitude were those of a Commander striving to ward off impending defeat rather than one whose mighty army had only missed decisive victory by a hair’s breadth’. Even the disgraced Moltke had perceived the flaws in Falkenhayn’s character, writing to the Kaiser in January 1915 that his successor presented ‘a serious danger for the Fatherland… despite an apparently strong will… does not possess the inner forces of spirit and soul to draft and carry through operations of great scope….’ But by then the Kaiser was totally under the Falkenhayn spell, and all Moltke received for his trouble was the coldest of Imperial rebuffs. Finally, in the eyes of Colonel Bauer, one of his ablest staff officers (though, admittedly, a disciple of his rival, Ludendorff, and writing
ex post facto
), Falkenhayn was ‘all in all an unusual personality who would have made a brilliant statesman, diplomat, or parliamentarian, but least of all a general’.

Falkenhayn was what today would be known as a cold fish. Joffre may have been inarticulate, Haig too, and Pétain
repoussant
and imperious to his entourage, but we feel we know something about them as human beings. About Falkenhayn we know absolutely nothing. One of his biographers dubbed him ‘The Lonely General’, but his was a loneliness deliberately nurtured. He had no intimates, no confidantes, no coterie, and none of the popular appeal of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, so that when at last his potent influence over the Kaiser began to wane, he was finished. He guarded his thoughts like the Golden Fleece, repelling would-be Argonauts with a devastating, cold sarcasm. Supporting him in the rôle of Sleepless Dragon was the obstinate, slow-thinking Colonel Tappen, Head of Operations, whose biting tongue matched that of his superior, and of whom a colleague wrote ‘seldom was an officer so hated by his subordinates as he’. Even Falkenhayn’s war memoirs are written in a coldly impersonal third person, and from this aloof, almost inhuman reserve stemmed the mystery as to just what his intentions really were in attacking Verdun. One salient characteristic of Falkenhayn, indecisiveness, was to bring heart-breaking tragedy to both France and Germany at Verdun; the other, an almost pathological secretiveness that was a by-product of his withdrawn personality, would later
play a vital part in the final defeat of his hopes there and go far to losing the war for the Central Powers.

Early in December 1915, Falkenhayn sat down to compose a lengthy memorandum to his Kaiser. It began with an impressive appreciation of the state of the war:

France has been weakened almost to the limits of endurance.… The Russian armies have not been completely overthrown, but their offensive powers have been so shattered that she can never revive in anything like her old strength.

The reason the war continued at all, Falkenhayn deduced, was simply because of ‘the enormous hold which England still has on her allies’. And here he singled out the arch-enemy — Britain. ‘The history of the English wars against the Netherlands, Spain, France and Napoleon is being repeated. Germany can expect no mercy….’ Nor could she afford to maintain her defensive posture against Britain: