The Price of Glory Read online

  Each battle had failed largely due to the lack of heavy guns and ammunition of all sizes. At Arras, Pétain had been limited to 400 shells on a twelve-mile front, and, to make things worse, over a period of six months hastily manufactured shells burst 600 guns, killing many of their crews. The 75s barely scraped the surface of the German dug-outs, so that time and again the attacking French were mown down as they left the trenches by a solitary untouched machine gun. An officer who later fought at Verdun described one such typical occurrence in the autumn Artois offensive:

  Three hundred men of our regiment lay there in sublime order. At the first whistling of bullets, the officers had cried ‘Line up!’ and all went to their death as in a parade.

  Still in the de Grandmaison spirit, officers declined to make themselves inconspicuous by carrying a rifle; instead they led the way brandishing their canes and were picked off by the hundred. The attacks assumed a drearily stereotyped pattern. First came the preliminary bombardment and the agonising wait in the front-lines; then the attack, with perhaps a fortunate few, generally very few, reaching the first German trenches to bayonet the survivors there; a brief pause, then the enemy’s deadly barrage on their own captured positions, followed by the inevitable counter-attack; finally, the attackers, too few to hold their ground, driven back to their own trenches, decimated relics of the original force; the remaining three-quarters to nine-tenths, dead, or dying with their bowels hooked on the wire of No-Man’s-Land, knowing that unlike Gravelotte in 1870 there would be no truce to collect the wounded, and hoping only to attract the merciful attention of an enemy machine-gunner. Thus ended 1915, in a complete and bloody stalemate. France had by now lost fifty per cent of her regular officers, killed or disabled, and her dead already approached the total Britain was to lose in the whole of the war. And the only thing it had proved was that this was no way to win a war.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FALKENHAYN

  The World bloodily-minded,

  The Church dead or polluted,

  The blind leading the blinded,

  And the deaf dragging the muted.

  ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1916

  … the celebrated tale of the man who gave the powder to the bear. He mixed the powder with the greatest care, making sure that not only the ingredients but the proportions were absolutely correct. He rolled it up in a large paper spill, and was about to blow it down the bear’s throat. But the bear blew first.— WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, The Second World War.

  1915 was the least successful year of the whole War for Allied arms; never again would the prospects seem so bright for the Central Powers as at its close. The costly failures in the West had been matched by worse disasters in the East. Realising that there was no danger of a breakthrough in France, the Germans had been able to concentrate on pushing the pathetically ill-equipped Russians back across Poland, inflicting losses that would have sealed the fate of most European powers. By September Hindenburg and Ludendorff had captured 750,000 prisoners and come close to enveloping the main Russian army. Gallipoli, so brilliantly daring in conception, where, like many another undertaking of the First War, success seemed at times balanced on a razor’s edge, had passed into the hands of receivers. Courageous Serbia, the nation over which the war had ostensibly begun, had finally been submerged; her gallant old king forced to flee over the Albanian mountains in a bullock cart. Nervously sheltering behind the anti-submarine nets, Jellicoe’s formidable array of Dreadnoughts had won none of the sparkling naval victories that the British public and her Allies had expected. Instead, Scarborough and Hartlepool had been bombarded with impunity by Tirpitz’s battle-cruisers, and there appeared to be no solution to the mounting submarine menace. The sinking in May of the Lusitania had stirred America, but had not persuaded her to join hands with the Allies. Even in East Africa, the elusive von Lettow-Vorbeck and his handful of Askaris continued to pin down ten times as many Empire troops. Nowhere could the Allies find consolation.

  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 Mérite1 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 shatt
ered that she can never revive in anything like her old strength.