Tommy (5 page)

Men easily found familiar comparisons. The old hospital in Corbie was ‘something on the lines of St Cross in Winchester', the stream running through Lumbres would make ‘an ideal trout stream, if only it was properly cared for'. Scottish infantry sitting about their billets in St-Omer made it seem like a Lanarkshire town, and Aubers Ridge looked just like the Hog's Back between Guildford and Farnham.
²⁸
The villages on the Somme were ‘each … as big as Cholsey, reckoning from the church to half way to the asylum'. Second Lieutenant H. M. Stanford, Royal Field Artillery, told his parents that the Flanders countryside ‘is very flat and full of dykes and canals but one can see fairly high hills out to the E. and N.E., otherwise it might be part of the marshes at home for the most part'. In the trenches, however, ‘the mud becomes worse than the Aldeburgh River, and that's saying a great deal'.
²⁹
John Masefield, on the Somme as a correspondent in 1916, described the Ancre running down the western edge of the battlefield, ‘beneath great spurs of chalk, as the Thames runs at Goring and Pangbourne'.
³⁰

Most combatants wondered if the blighted landscape could ever be restored. ‘We used to say that it would never be reclaimed,' wrote Henry Williamson,

In some places, like the
zones rouges
at Verdun, the land was simply cloaked in pine trees after the war and left to the patient hand of nature. Some villages were so comprehensively destroyed that they were no longer worth rebuilding in a post-war France whose manpower losses had reduced pressure on the land.

When President Poincaré gave Verdun its Cross of the
Légion d'Honneur
he prophesied that ‘this ravaged countryside will recover the laughing face that it wore in happy times', but the years have proved him wrong.
³²
The villages of Douaumont, Fleury, Vaux, Bezonvaux, Louvemont, Ornes, Haumont, Beaumont and Cumèries were never rebuilt. Small wonder that the female figure in Rodin's bronze
La Défense,
sited symbolically outside Verdun's Porte St-Paul, is ‘screaming in grief and anger at the sky'.
³³
But elsewhere his optimism has been justified, as John Masefield prophesied while the war was still in progress.

Major General Sir Ernest Swinton thought that Masefield was right. In
Twenty Years After
he wrote that:

T
he Western Front was created by the war's opening campaign. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had been a humiliating defeat for the French, and at its end France's two easternmost provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, were ceded to Germany. The burst of French patriotic revival which followed the defeat died away in the 1890s, its demise marked by the Dreyfus affair and the increasing use of troops against striking workers. But the French army had been modernised, with the 75-mm quick-firing field gun, the justly celebrated
soixante-quinze,
as its most visible symbol. Serious-minded officers studied march-tables at the new staff college, railway engineers threw a network of track across the countryside to make mobilisation and concentration easier, and military engineers scrawled their own geometry on the bare slopes of western Lorraine, glaring out to the new border.

But despite a properly thought-through system of conscription which filled new barracks with fresh-faced youths, France was destined to remain weaker than Germany: neither her demography nor her industry could keep pace. Part of the solution was to offset French weakness with foreign strength. In 1892 she concluded a military accord with the Russians, and the conditions of French loans to help Russian industry placed particular emphasis on the construction of railways which would help the Russian army, huge but still only part-reformed, move westwards more quickly. In 1901 the Russians agreed to launch their first attack on Germany eighteen days after the declaration of war, and to follow it with up to 800,000 men by the twenty-eighth day.

Colonial rivalry made an agreement with Britain more difficult. However, in January 1906 Colonel Victor Huguet, the French military attaché in London, called on the chief of the general staff to ask what Britain's attitude would be if the Morocco crisis, then fizzing away briskly, led to war between France and Germany. ‘Semi-official' discussions between the respective staffs were authorised shortly afterwards, on the understanding that their conclusions were not binding. French overtures came at a time when the British armed services were in the process of implementing reforms following the Boer War of 1899–1902, which had gone on far longer than expected and revealed some serious flaws in the military establishment. We shall see the results of some of these reforms in the
next chapter
, but the essential point in 1905–6 was that the newly created general staff (soon to be imperial general staff) was testing its weight in the almost equally new Committee of Imperial Defence, which had broader responsibility for national defence.

The Royal Navy had previously enjoyed pride of place in defence planning, just as its warship-building programme gave it a stranglehold on the defence budget. But in 1906 a mixture of reticence and poor preparation lost it a succession of arguments in the Committee of Imperial Defence, and the general staff's plan for sending around 100,000 men to France in the event of war with Germany was approved. It was not to be automatic, and would still require political approval: but it formed the basis for British military planning and a series of staff talks with the French. Another war crisis in 1911 saw Major General Henry Wilson lay the army's war plan before the Committee of Imperial Defence with what Captain Maurice Hankey, its secretary, called ‘remarkable brilliancy'. Nothing had been neglected. The Francophile Wilson had even included
‘dix minutes pour une tasse de café'
as the troops moved up through Amiens station. The navy's opposing plan was hopeless.
³⁶

The improvement of their army and the construction of foreign alliances encouraged the French to forsake the defensive plans which had followed the years immediately after the Franco-Prussian War in favour of offensive schemes. The one to be implemented in 1914, ‘Plan 17', called for an all-out attack into the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. It embodied some characteristics which were distinctively French: ‘The French Army,' declared the 1913 regulations, ‘returning to its traditions, henceforth knows no law but the offensive.' The popular philosopher Henri Bergson lectured at the Sorbonne on
l'élan vital,
and Ernest Psichari wrote of ‘a proud and violent army'.
³⁷

But it also represented a tendency which was by now marked in the tactical doctrine of European armies in general. The fighting in South Africa and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 (the latter well attended by foreign observers) had not simply reminded men that fire killed. It had warned them of the danger that fire would paralyse movement, and that war would become costly and purposeless. Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff from 1891 to 1906, feared that:

Armies believed that they had to shrug off what a French colonel termed ‘abnormal dread of losses on the battlefield'. All were to enter the war convinced that the tactical offensive was the best way to avert strategic stalemate.

While the French planned a direct assault, the Germans were more subtle. Their situation was complicated by the Franco-Russian alliance, which meant that they faced the prospect of war on two fronts. Schlieffen eventually concluded that he could win only ‘ordinary victories' over the Russians, who would simply withdraw into the fastnesses of their vast empire. Instead, he proposed to leave only a blocking force in the east and to throw the bulk of his armies against France. A direct assault across the heavily-fortified Franco-German border offered poor prospects, so he would instead send the majority of his striking force through Belgium, whence it would wheel down into France, its right wing passing west of Paris, to catch the French in a battle of encirclement somewhere in Champagne. The term ‘Schlieffen Plan' is historical shorthand for a series of drafts revised by Schlieffen and his successor, Helmuth Johannes Ludwig von Moltke, chief of the general staff when the war broke out, and there has been a recent suggestion that it was a
post-facto
invention to account for German failure in 1914. But its essential elements were clear enough. The battle's western flank, where the German 1st, 2nd and 3rd Armies were to march through Belgium, was to be the decisive one, and it was the area of the Franco-Belgian border that would be denuded of troops by French emphasis on Plan 17. But because the Anglo-French staff talks were not binding, the arrival of a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) could not be taken for granted, and so it was precisely to this flank that the BEF would be sent.

The course of the swiftly-burning powder train that blew the old world apart in the summer of 1914 is too well documented to need description here. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in the Bosnian town of Sarajevo on 28 June, encouraged the Austrians to put pressure on the Serbs, who they regarded as responsible for the outrage. The Serbs appealed to their Slav brothers in Russia, and although the Russians hoped to avoid large-scale war, their supposedly deterrent mobilisation on 30 July was followed by a German mobilisation on 1 August and an immediate French response. Early on the morning of 4 August the leading troopers of General von der Marwitz's cavalry corps, spearheading the German attack, clattered across the border into Belgium.

The British Cabinet held its first Council of War on the afternoon of Wednesday 5 August, and on the following afternoon it authorised the dispatch of four infantry divisions and a cavalry division to France: more troops would follow once it was clear that home defence, the function of the untried Territorial Force, was assured. It is clear that, whatever propaganda was milked from German violation of Belgian neutrality, British intervention was motivated by clear
raison d'état.
Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary in H. H. Asquith's Liberal government, recognised that German victory would result in its dominance in Europe, a circumstance ‘wholly inimical to British interests'.

The commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal Sir John French, was given formal instructions by Lord Kitchener, the newly-appointed Secretary of State for War. ‘The special motive of the force under your control,' wrote Kitchener,

When French was replaced by Sir Douglas Haig in December 1915 these instructions were replaced by a more forceful insistence that: ‘The defeat of the enemy by the combined Allied Armies must always be regarded as the primary object for which British troops were sent to France, and to achieve that end, the closest co-operation of French and British as a united army must be the governing policy …'.
⁴⁰
Both sets of instructions were statements of Cabinet policy, underlining the government's commitment to coalition strategy.

It is worth quoting these instructions at length because they make a crucial point about the Western Front. Start to finish, it would be the major theatre in a coalition war. Its importance was given unique weight by the fact that, from after the autumn of 1914, the Germans were in occupation of a wide swathe of French territory, which included not simply the great city of Lille, but the surrounding area of mining belt along the Franco-Belgian border. It was the land of
les galibots,
lads who went down the mine at the ages of eleven or twelve, dreadful mining accidents (1,101 miners were killed at Sallaumines in March 1906), and an area which rivalled the ‘red belt' round Paris as the heartland of French socialism. Until German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line in early 1917, the angle where the front turned to run eastwards was near the little town of Noyon, which is as close to Paris as Canterbury is to London. It is easy for British or American readers to forget this now, though it was impossible for soldiers then to be unaware of the shocking damage that the war was inflicting on France or the front's proximity to the French capital.