Tommy (6 page)

For most of the war the BEF was not under French command. Haig was temporarily so placed for the ill-starred Nivelle offensive of April 1917, and after the German offensive of March 1918 General Ferdinand Foch became Allied supreme commander, although his role was more one of effective co-ordination than tactical command. Yet both French and Haig knew that they had to fight a coalition war, difficult, frustrating and costly though it so often was. The timing and location of the British offensives at Loos in 1915 and the Somme in 1916 were the direct result of French pressure, and the state of the mutiny-struck French army in 1917 was an element in the decision-making process which led Haig to attack at Ypres that summer.

The bulk of the British Expeditionary Force disembarked at Le Havre and moved by train to its concentration area on the triangle Maubeuge-Hirson-Le Cateau. With its commander confident in the success of the French armies executing Plan 17 it set off northwards on 21 August, and the following night halted with its advance guard on the line of the Mons-Condé Canal, just across the Belgian border. By now Sir John French was beginning to hear that the French attack had met with bloody repulse, although he had no inkling that it was in fact to cost France almost a quarter of her mobilised strength and nearly half her regular officers. On 23 August 1914 the BEF fought its first battle on the canal just north of Mons.

Although Mons was a small battle by later standards, it had a resonance all its own as the Old Army of Catterick and Quetta did what it was paid to do. Corporal John Lucy of the Royal Irish Rifles was in a shallow trench under German shellfire when German infantry came forward.

But both the BEF's flanks were turned, and French was reluctantly persuaded that continuing an apparently successful defensive battle would be disastrous. So that night the BEF began a retreat which took it to Le Cateau on 26 August, scene of a much bigger battle than Mons, and then on to the River Marne. The retreat from Mons tried even the Old Army to the limit, as John Lucy remembered.

By 30 August, Sir John French, his mercurial personality influenced by the losses he had sustained, the apparent collapse of French plans, and Kitchener's warning about running risks, proposed to fall back on his lines of communication to regroup, and told General Joseph Joffre, the French commander in chief, that he would not be able to fight on the Marne. An alarmed Kitchener travelled to France to meet him in the British embassy in Paris on the afternoon of 1 September. The two men did not get on, and French was especially affronted by the fact that Kitchener arrived in field marshal's uniform – not surprisingly, for he wore it every day. Although accounts of the meeting vary, it ended with a note from Kitchener which emphasised that the BEF would ‘conform … to the movements of the French army …'.
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Although the BEF played an unimportant role in the battle of the Marne, the climactic struggle of the summer's campaign, it took part in the general advance which followed the Allied victory. ‘[It was] the happiest day of my life,' declared Jack Seely, Liberal politician turned cavalry colonel, ‘we marched towards the rising sun.'
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Despite optimistic chatter that the war would now follow the traditional pattern of advance, decisive battle, retreat and peace, it soon became clear that this was not to be the case. In mid-September the Germans dug in on the northern bank of the River Aisne and, although the BEF crossed the river, it made little impression on German defences. Sir John French, no military genius, but no fool either, quickly saw what had happened, and told King George V that:

In late September French formally asked Joffre for permission to disengage from the Aisne and to move onto the Allied left flank, which would make it easier for him to maintain communications with this home base and give his cavalry the opportunity of operating against the German right flank. What followed, known to historians as ‘The Race to the Sea', saw both sides shift troops northwards, feeling for an open flank. It established that, just as the southern end of the front already stretched to the Swiss border, the northern end of the front would reach the North Sea. In the process the movement northwards took the BEF to the little Belgian town of Ypres, first attacking on the axis of the Menin Road in the expectation that it was turning the German flank, and then desperately defending against strong thrusts aimed at the Channel ports.

The first battle of Ypres ended in mid-November 1914. By then the fluid pattern of the summer's fighting had set in earth, and the Western Front had taken up the line it was to retain, give or take local changes, until the Germans pulled back from the nose of the Noyon salient in early 1917. By the year's end the BEF had grown from around 100,000 men, organised in the four infantry divisions and one cavalry division that had gone to France in early August, to two armies and a cavalry corps, a total of more than 270,000 men, already more than half as many as had served in the Boer War during the whole of its duration. In the process it had lost 16,200 officers and men killed, 47,707 wounded and another 16,746 missing and taken prisoner. These dreadful figures were soon to be exceeded by more terrible casualty lists, but their impact on Britain's conduct of the war goes beyond sheer human suffering. For most of these casualties had been incurred by the regular army and, as we see later, the destruction of trained manpower in the early months of the war was to haunt the British army for the entire conflict.

Early in 1915 French initiated planning for an attack on the La Bassée–Aubers Ridge, on the southern end of the British sector. It was held by General Sir Douglas Haig's 1st Army, and he had altogether more confidence in Haig than in Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien of 2nd Army. In part this reflected the fact that Haig had served under him in the past, and the two apparently got on well: he would have been horrified to discover that Haig regarded him ‘as quite unfit for this great command at a time of crisis in our Nation's history'.
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French found Smith-Dorrien far less sympathetic, resented the fact that he had been sent out without consultation to replace the commander of II Corps when he died of a heart attack on his way to the concentration area the previous August, and likewise felt that his decision to fight at Le Cateau had been unwise. The attack was intended to be part of a wider Allied venture, but Sir John was unable to guarantee sufficient high-quality reinforcements to take over a section of the French front, upon which Joffre withdrew his support.

The British attacked anyhow, at Neuve Chapelle on 10 March. Their initial assault went well, largely because they had one gun for every 6 yards of front, and, because they were short of ammunition, they fired what they had in a rapid bombardment just before the attack. The Germans managed to prevent a breakthrough, though the British gained a maximum of 1,000 yards on a front of some 4,000. French hoped to repeat the process as soon as he could, but lacked sufficient artillery ammunition to do so. On the 18th he told Kitchener that:

The Germans responded to Neuve Chapelle by rejecting the prewar defensive doctrine of ‘one line, and that a strong one', and by beginning the construction of a second defensive position, itself composed of several trenches, far enough behind the first to compel an attacker to mount a distinct assault on each. The British found the battle's lessons less easy to discern. One critic recalled seeing follow-up waves ‘packed like salmon in the bridge-pool at Galway' as they awaited the word to go forward, and the battle did highlight the serious problem, never fully solved during the war, of how to establish effective communications between attacking troops and their reserves. The high concentration of artillery was actually higher than that achieved at the beginning of the Somme offensive in the summer of 1916, and it was to transpire that what was eventually to become known as a lightning bombardment was actually more effective than a more methodical preparation.

The logic that encouraged the Allies to attack on the Western Front, to recover friendly territory, worked in reverse for the Germans, and persuaded them to remain on the defensive, holding gains which would prove useful bargaining counters if there was a compromise peace. They made only three major exceptions, in 1915, in 1916 at Verdun, and in the spring of 1918. The first was on 22 April 1915, when the Germans launched an attack north of Ypres, just west of the junction between British and French troops, behind a cloud of chlorine gas. Like the British at Neuve Chapelle they were unable to exploit the very serious damage done to the French defenders. The very gallant stand of 1st Canadian Division helped check the exploitation, and there followed a broken-backed battle as the British launched repeated, badly-coordinated counterattacks. This second battle of Ypres cost the Allies over 60,000 casualties, most of them British. It cost Smith-Dorrien his job, largely because of Sir John French's long-standing prejudice. He was replaced by Sir Herbert Plumer, under whose direction the British held a much reduced salient east of Ypres.

The British attacked again that spring. On 9 May 1915 they assaulted Aubers Ridge, in a movement designed to support a French offensive further south, losing 11,500 men for no gain. This time Sir John French squarely blamed is failure on lack of shells: he had been ordered to send 22,000 to Gallipoli, and
The Times
correspondent, Charles Repington, a retired officer who was staying at French's headquarters, supported his line, declaring on 19 May: ‘Need for Shells: British attacks checked: Limited supply the cause: A lesson from France.' French also sent two of his staff to London to pass documents to David Lloyd George, a member of Asquith's Cabinet, and to opposition leaders. The government might have survived the shell scandal had it been an isolated problem, but the resignation of Lord Fisher as First Sea Lord persuaded Asquith to form a coalition government. Lloyd George took up the newly-established portfolio of Minister of Munitions, but, although he made a point of appointing ‘men of push and go' who could ‘create and hustle along a gigantic enterprise', the first consignment of ammunition ordered by the new ministry did not arrive until October 1915: the heavily-criticised War Office had in fact succeeded in generating a nineteen-fold increase in ammunition supply in the first six months of the war.

On 16 May the next British offensive, at Festubert, just south of Aubers Ridge, fared little better, gaining 1,000 yards on a front of 2,000 for a cost of 16,500 men. Another attack, this time at Givenchy, went no better, and Lieutenant General Sir Henry Rawlinson, whose IV Corps had played the leading role in all these spring attacks, found himself passed over for command of the newly-formed 3rd Army, which went instead to General Sir Charles Monro, who extended the British line further south as far as Vimy Ridge.

French and Joffre met at Chantilly on 24 June and declared themselves committed to continuing offensives on the Western Front: without them the Germans could shift troops to another front for an attack of their own. Passive defence was, therefore, ‘bad strategy, unfair to Russia, Serbia and Italy and therefore wholly inadmissible'. An Anglo-French meeting at Calais on 6 July gained Kitchener's somewhat grudging support for a large-scale offensive, and a full Allied conference at Chantilly the following day confirmed the principle of a co-ordinated Allied attack on all fronts. Joffre's strategy for the Western Front had actually changed little. Previous British attacks had been designed to support French thrusts further south. And now he proposed that the BEF should attack at Loos, in the shadow of Vimy Ridge, with one French army attacking just to its south and the main French blow falling around Rheims in Champagne.

Sir John French was not happy. On 12 July he looked at the Loos sector, and thought that ‘the actual terrain of the attack is no doubt difficult, as it is covered with all the features of a closely inhabited flourishing mining district – factories – slag heaps – shafts – long rows of houses – etc, etc'.
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He proposed to fight chiefly with artillery, but Joffre demanded ‘a large and powerful attack … executed in the hope of success and carried through to the end'. Then Kitchener threw his weight into the balance: Sir John was ordered to help the French,
‘even though, by doing so, we suffered very heavy losses indeed'
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Once he had received this unequivocal order French's spirits lifted, and he hoped that gas, which would now be available to him in retaliation for German use of gas at second Ypres, would be ‘effective up to two miles, and it is practically certain that it will be quite effective in many places if not along the whole line attacked'.
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