The western front, p.27
The Western Front, page 27
In Fourth Army’s sector, the chief obstacles to an advance lay in the twin positions of Longueval and Delville Wood, and the imposing rise of High Wood. After the dawn assault on 14 July, Rawlinson’s operations had broken down, with German reinforcements pouring in to prevent further exploitation. Delville Wood was now just a tangle of upturned earth and shattered tree stumps. The South African Brigade took it on 15 July, only to find itself surrounded on three sides and subjected to repeated counter-attacks. The earth, thick with roots, was difficult to dig into and gain the kind of shelter that would have protected men from the heavy shelling. The fighting reached a terrible climax on the afternoon of 18 July, when a major counter-attack was delivered by elements of two German divisions, led by specially trained assault troops, pushing forward into the wood, supported by flamethrower teams. ‘Grenades flew incessantly over the assault positions’, observed one witness. ‘Violent roars accompanied the explosions, with lumps of stone, beams, trees, branches whirling through the air, which was soon filled with a dense cloud of dust and smoke.’10
The result was a costly stalemate. German units entered the wood and came under heavy sniper and machine-gun fire, and the attack melted away in a series of confusing skirmishes, brutal bayonet fighting and counter-charges. ‘None of the officers, as far as there were any, knew their people, and very few people knew their commanders’, remembered one German survivor. ‘All order was lost on the chaotic battlefield, especially in the dense, battle-scarred forests.’11 When the South Africans were finally relieved on 20 July, just 780 men answered the roll call – out of a total strength of 121 officers and 3,032 other ranks.12 This was what the Somme had become, in all its blood-soaked fury. Attack and counter-attack under an iron rain, fought in ever more desperate circumstances and amid a landscape that no longer resembled the pleasant farmland of northern France, just a pale, broken wasteland littered with the dead.
Rawlinson may have been a more conscientious commander than Gough, but he still struggled to coordinate his forces effectively; caught between the desire for decisive operations and the requirement to secure suitable jumping-off positions for future attacks. British units would move up to the front, make small-scale attacks and often meet with failure, and the following day more battalions would try again. Rawlinson authorized six separate attacks on the Longueval sector between 15 and 22 July, while at the same time failing to coordinate any meaningful activity with the French, leaving Foch growing increasingly frustrated. The Somme had never been his choice of battlefield and the halting inconsistency that characterized British operations in July 1916 so exasperated him that he sent a note to Haig on 19 July stating that ‘an overall attack’ (what he called ‘l’attaque d’ensemble ’) was the ‘best way to obtain wide and lasting results, avoid losses and conserve the results gained by making it impossible for the enemy to concentrate his artillery fire’.13
Still the British attacked. To the northwest of Longueval stood the brooding darkness of High Wood, situated on one of the highest points of the battlefield. There the same horrific story seemed to play out time and again. It was first reached on 14 July by a collection of Indian cavalry squadrons, which galloped up through the cornfields, pennants streaming, only for a swift counter-attack to send them reeling back to the British lines. Over the next two months attack after attack, battalion after battalion, went up the sloping fields towards the wood, managing to secure a tenuous grip on its southeastern edge, before being counter-attacked or bombarded in turn. A renewed attack was launched on the morning of 23 July, but ran into fierce resistance amid the tangle of splintered trees, now honeycombed with trenches. One defender recalled how ‘wave after wave’ of British soldiers came on ‘against our shot-up trenches. Then red flares soared into the sky, and all at once the curtain of a deadly barrage descended in front of our entire position, cutting down the enemy by whole ranks . . . But the British are persistent!’14 Afterwards Lieutenant-General Henry Horne, commander of XV Corps, which was tasked with taking the wood, was almost ready to admit defeat. ‘We have got a portion of High Wood but not all of it,’ he reported, ‘and as things are now it is very difficult to get on any further. I puzzle my brains how to do it.’15
‘The scales of fate have long wavered. Now that is over. One of the scales keeps on going up, the other going steadily down, laden with a weight which nothing can henceforth lighten.’ The words of Monsieur Poincaré, President of France, were part of a series of stirring proclamations published in the Allied press on 1 August 1916 – the second anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Joffre, Haig and Lloyd George all added their thoughts as the war entered its third year and the populations of Europe began to face the daunting prospect of another winter with no sign of peace. Yet Poincaré believed that there was hope; the Allies were now, he wrote, ‘beginning to gather the fruits of [their] perseverance’. ‘The Russian Army is pursuing the routed Austrians. The Germans, attacked on the Eastern and Western fronts, are throwing in their reserves. British, Russian, and French battalions are cooperating for the liberation of our territory. The sky is clearing, the sun is rising.’16
Despite growing disillusionment with his leadership, Joseph Joffre carried on, his bulky frame haunting the corridors of the Grand Condé as he strained every muscle to keep the Allies united, their forces concentrated. In a report he had written on 20 August for his senior commanders, he expressed his belief that the pressure they had placed upon the German Army was beginning to tell. ‘Whatever the extent of our success on the Western Front, the Anglo-French offensives, by the mere fact of their power and duration, will have a decisive influence on the end of the war. They retain and absorb the largest and best part of the German forces and, thus limiting the aid that Germany can give to her faltering ally, they are, with the victorious resistance of Verdun, the inevitable condition of the successful development of the manoeuvre of the Russian and Italian armies . . .’ It was, therefore, not unreasonable to think that ‘the campaign of 1917 will mark the final decay of the enemy powers if the Entente members remain faithful to unified effort, which is one of the essential elements of their strength and the most valuable pledge of their victory.’17
Joffre continued to worry about what the British were doing. Vallières kept him up to date with British progress, and he occasionally went to see Haig, but it proved difficult to coordinate the actions of their forces as closely as he would have liked. He had been unhappy at Haig’s decision to concentrate his attacks on his right flank (where Rawlinson had made the most gains) and would have preferred the British to continue pushing along a wide front, only for Haig to refuse and tell him that he was ‘solely responsible to the British Government for the action of the British Army ’.18 Joffre tried, again and again, to get Haig to conform to French plans – preferably a broad advance to the east (rather than the northward push that Haig was now attempting) – but with little success. Poor weather, inexperience, differing priorities and logistical problems all condemned the two allies to muddle along, advancing when they could, and only rarely doing so in a concerted fashion. The British attack was now ‘dying away in secondary and local actions’, he complained, ‘which are costly and slow and do no more than give an illusion of activity’. Instead, Joffre (like Foch) wanted to organize an ‘action d’ensemble ’ – a big attack like 1 July that would concentrate their forces and restart the offensive – hopefully to take place at the beginning of September to coincide with Romania’s entry into the war.19
Despite Haig’s oft-professed wish to cooperate closely with the French, it did not prove possible to attack on Joffre’s preferred date, and a series of postponements eventually spoilt any prospect of a joint attack. Haig was determined to fight only when he was ready and, with the prospect of using a new weapon in the forthcoming attack, he would not be rushed. He had first heard about the development of armoured vehicles, or ‘caterpillars’ – what would become known as the ‘tank’ – in December 1915 and had been kept informed of their progress throughout the year. The first six machines left England on 15 August and Haig was able to inform Rawlinson the following day that he was to begin planning for a grand offensive in which tanks would be used to ‘secure the enemy’s last line of prepared defences between Morval and Le Sars with a view to opening the way for cavalry’ – an attack projected for some time in mid-September.20
Sir Douglas Haig – ‘lithe, active and firmly knit, always immaculately dressed in khaki service kit, with field boots shining like a mirror’ – remained bullishly confident of victory as the Somme offensive continued into August. His attempt to break the line and push his army through the deep belt of German defences may have failed in July, but he never wavered from his belief that, sooner or later, the enemy would crack. He was buoyed by intelligence reports of the ‘great confusion’ that German units had encountered upon arriving on the battlefield and was confident that many battalions had been reduced to fewer than 100 men, with some regiments able to muster only about a third of their full strength.21 Yet the cost of the offensive had been heavier than anyone had anticipated, and as early as 29 July Robertson had warned Haig that ‘the Powers that be ’ were ‘beginning to get a little uneasy in regard to the situation’. He was concerned that casualties were rising and the chief object of the offensive – ‘relief of pressure on Verdun’ – had largely been achieved. Therefore, he wanted Haig to consider ‘Whether a loss of say 300,000 men will lead to really great results, because if not, we ought to be content with something less than what we are now doing.’22
Robertson was always keen to support Haig, even if the note revealed a niggling concern about the progress of the battle. The CIGS saw his primary role at the War Office as keeping Britain’s War Cabinet on the straight and narrow strategic path that had been laid out in the winter of 1915–16 – the main focus being on the Western Front – and avoiding (or minimizing) any risky adventures that resulted in British strength being dissipated. He also knew that any criticism of Haig and his performance might imperil Britain’s concentration in France. Yet he recoiled from the over-sanguine acceptance of the offensive that Haig epitomized and on 5 July, just days after the great breakthrough attempt had failed so disastrously, he had written to Sir Launcelot Kiggell, Haig’s Chief of Staff, that ‘the road to success lies in deliberation’. While Haig always veered towards the breakthrough, Robertson – like Rawlinson, Foch and others – advocated cautious, siege-like advances that would rely on artillery to batter down the defences without risking mass infantry assaults. ‘The thing is to advance along a wide front step by step to very limited and moderate objectives, and to forbid going beyond those objectives until all have been reached by the troops engaged.’23
What Robertson hoped to achieve by writing such a letter is unclear. He specifically requested that Kiggell not show this ‘to anyone ’, but he may have been hoping that it trickled through to the Commander-in-Chief and caused him to modify his ambitions. His note on 29 July about casualties was probably written with a similar idea in mind; that by delicately offering advice couched in such a way as not to offend Haig’s amour propre, he could help Haig avoid some of the fallout from promising too much without delivering. But Haig was thick-skinned, brushing off Robertson’s warnings with a blunt restatement of the rationale behind the offensive. Verdun had been relieved. Moreover, it was unlikely that Brusilov would have had so much success had there not been such heavy fighting on the Western Front. Regarding the Somme, Haig was sure that he had ‘inflicted very heavy losses on the Enemy’ and it was his intention to carry on. He would ‘maintain a steady pressure’ and ‘push my attack strongly whenever and wherever the state of my preparations and the general situation make success sufficiently probable’.24
Haig did, however, recognize that perhaps now was not the right moment for a decisive attack. In an appreciation of the situation written on 2 August, he sketched out what he called the ‘general principles’ on which operations were now to be conducted. ‘The present situation is that the enemy has brought up considerable reinforcements of men and guns, and can continue for some time still to replace tired troops.’ With German forces having recovered from the inevitable disorganization that followed the opening of the offensive, Haig admitted that they were ‘still too formidable to be rushed without careful and methodical preparation’. Therefore, it was necessary to prepare fresh assaults while also strengthening defensive positions to guard against enemy counter-attacks. To bring this phase (what he dubbed a ‘wearing out battle’) to a ‘successful termination’, it was necessary to ‘practise such economy of men and material as will ensure our having the “last reserves” at our disposal when the crisis of the fight is reached’, which he believed would be some time in the second half of September.25
With the climax of the battle not expected for several weeks, a succession of royalty and senior politicians made their way to France, drawn to the titanic struggle taking place on the Somme. After being shown the enormous preparations behind the lines, the long rows of guns, their muzzles pointing skywards, alongside small mountains of spent shell cases, the visitors would inevitably stop by Haig and his staff. GHQ was now based at Montreuil-sur-Mer, a pleasant walled town a short drive from Le Touquet on the coast. On 12 August, His Majesty King George V came to lunch, posing for photographs outside Haig’s chateau with Poincaré, Joffre and Foch, before heading inside to pore over a large map of the front. A waiting journalist confirmed that the meal ‘was of the most friendly and intimate character’.26 Another notable visitor was the Prime Minister, Asquith, who was escorted to the outskirts of Fricourt – one of the fortified villages that had resisted repeated attacks on 1 July – where he was met by his son, Raymond, an officer with the Grenadier Guards. They walked up a short rise, only for a German ‘whizz-bang’ to explode nearby, showering them in dirt. They hurried into a nearby dugout and there, under the flickering electric lamps, waited for the shelling to pass. Asquith dined with Haig that evening and, over a bottle of his finest brandy, expressed complete confidence in the offensive and offered to help in any way he could. ‘Haig is I think doing very well’, he wrote to a friend; ‘sticking to his original plan and not allowing himself to be hustled’.27
David Lloyd George was of a different opinion. The new Secretary of War (who had been appointed after the death of Lord Kitchener) had long doubted the wisdom of attacking on the Western Front, and the heavy losses and inevitable obfuscation from Robertson did little to change his mind. When he received word of Romania’s declaration of war upon the Central Powers, he dashed off an urgent note to Sir Frederick Maurice, Director of Military Operations, on the supreme importance of doing everything they could. ‘We cannot afford another Serbian tragedy’, he wrote – recalling the events of the previous year when the Allied landings at Salonika had been too slow to prevent Serbia from being overrun. ‘I therefore once more urge that the General Staff should consider what action we could in conjunction with France and Italy take immediately to relieve the pressure on Roumania if a formidable attack developed against her.’ But Lloyd George’s entreaties went nowhere. At a meeting of the War Committee on 12 September, it was agreed to maintain the offensive on the Somme for the foreseeable future, with the CIGS arguing that the best method of aiding Romania was to stay the course in the west.28
Lloyd George could have interrogated Robertson’s position at the War Committee had he not been in France, where he was touring Verdun and meeting with a host of senior French officials, including Foch. Lloyd George was keen to quiz Foch on the performance of the expeditionary force, particularly ‘why the British who had gained no more ground than the French[,] if as much, had suffered such heavy casualties’. Foch was noncommittal and talked about how the French infantry had ‘learnt their lesson in 1914’, only for Lloyd George to press him again on the ability of British commanders. Once more Foch did not take the bait, replying ‘that he had no means of forming an opinion’. Lloyd George went away unsatisfied, but within days word reached Haig of what had transpired, leaving him seething with anger and disbelief. ‘Unless I had been told of this conversation personally by Gen. Foch, I would not have believed that a British minister could have been so ungentlemanly as to go to a foreigner and put such questions regarding his own subordinates.’29
The spiralling costs of both Verdun and the Somme finally began to have their effect on the German High Command. Offensive activity at Verdun was formally curtailed on 12 July, and although fighting on the Meuse continued throughout the late summer and autumn, the Crown Prince’s forces would increasingly find themselves on the defensive as a series of powerful French counter-thrusts took place. Fleury and Thiaumont were recaptured on 3 August and a week later Falkenhayn addressed his senior commanders on future strategy. It was of ‘great importance’, he wrote, to convince ‘both the enemy and our own troops that the offensive on the Meuse has not entirely come to an end . . . Moreover, the present position of our first lines on the right bank of the Meuse is such as to necessitate that all means should be employed to improve it before the coming of the autumn rains. On the other hand, the present military situation, strained as it is, compels us to economize men and munitions wherever possible.’30
