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I V Rites of War 0 Weissdorn mit den roten Beern, R I C H A R D D E H M E L "Der Frontsoldat,"
Christmas I 914 . . . But many there stood still To face the stark; blank sky beyond the
ridge, W I L F R E D O W E N "Spring Offensive" Often
during the scientific,
chemical "cubist" warfare, J A C Q U E S -E M I L E B L A N C H E .. 0 hawthorn with your berry red, What will spring bring instead? B A T T L
E B A L L E
T The artillery barrage is deafening. When the air is still, the din
can be heard faintly in London and Paris. Sometimes the pounding lasts for
days. In June 1916 at the Somme it continues for
seven days and nights. Field artillery, medium
artillery, and heavy howitzers. The fifteen-inch-caliber gun of the British
can fire a shell of fourteen hundred pounds. "Big Bertha" of the
Germans, with a caliber of seventeen inches, can project a missile weighing
over a ton. At Verdun in 1916 the Germans bring in several of those
twenty-ton monsters. Each is moved into position by nine tractors; a crane is required to 139 insert the shell. The impact of this shell annihilates buildings; it shatters windows in a two-mile radius. In August 1914 these huge machines of war had demolished the purportedly impregnable forts of Liege. As the Krupp guns "walked" their shells toward the final target, Belgian defenders inside the forts went mad. For concentrated attack there is usually one field gun for every ten
yards under fire, and one heavy-- six-inch caliber and
up-- for every twenty yards. When the huge shells burst, they ravage
the earth with their violence, hurling trees, rock, mud, torsos, and other
debris hundreds of feet into the air. Craters the size of swimming pools remain.
When a lull comes, and the rains return, men bathe in these cavernous holes.
The small and medium shells, which make up most of the barrage, are less
sensational in their effect. But to the soldier they too can mean
annihilation without trace. "A signaller had
just stepped out," wrote a medical officer of the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers,
"when a shell burst on him, leaving not a vestige that could be seen
anywhere near." The same officer described another image of shellfire: Two men
suddenly rose into the air vertically, fifteen feet perhaps, amid a spout of
soil 150 yards ahead. They rose and fell with the easy, graceful poise of
acrobats. A rifle, revolving slowly, rose high above them before, still revolving, it fell.1 Defenders huddle either in "funk holes" burrowed out of the
forward side of the trench, or in dugouts, often fifteen to twenty feet
underground, perhaps five paces square and about six feet high. The heavier
shells not only demolish trenches; they can bring the wooden support
beams, corrugated iron,
and wire netting of the dugouts rumbling down and at the very
least rearrange the earth above so as to obstruct exits. Acetylene lights and
candles flicker. Larger concussions extinguish them altogether. A respite,
will it come? Yes. Finally. But then the muted voice, of a sentry, who has
survived in a forward sap, is heard to shout "Gas!" There is a wild
scramble to find masks, to rug and pull to get them on; and the ordeal mounts
as gas fumes begin slowly to mix with darkness and smoke. At last there is
stillness, apart from muffled breathing, some rasping, coughing, and traces of weeping. Will the cycle begin again? Is the attack on its way? Have the
sentries survived? Are the periscopes manned? For when the attack comes,
there will be a "race for the parapet," up the dugout steps, 140 should that still be possible, into the trenches, if they are still
there, to fix bayonets, to assemble machine guns, to locate grenades, and if
time permits, to man mortars, flame throwers, and other sundry weapons of
this war of "troglodytes." 2
One must reach the parapet before the enemy arrives! On the other side of no man's land men wait. Faces assembled at scaling ladders are drawn and ashen. The tot of navy rum or Schnaps or pinard, which has been distributed a few minutes earlier, can dull the senses but not reverse the flow of blood. Equipment has been checked. Picks and shovels, bags for sand, Verey lights, wire. A load of over sixty pounds rests on each man's back. Along with personal kit there is a water bottle, rations, a gas mask, field dressings, mess tins, ammunition. Some men carry hand grenades and trench mortar bombs. "Carrying your house on your back is no joke," wrote Peter McGregor, a choirmaster from Edinburgh.' Officers travel more lightly, the British with swagger sticks to indicate commands, for a voice is unlikely to be heard above the tumult, with a pistol in lieu of a rifle, and without most of the other more cumbersome gear. Conversation at this point is almost insignificant. A few men chatter nervously. Some exchange final wishes. Some whisper prayers. Watches of platoon leaders are now synchronized. Zero. A shrill whistle. The wave of a cap. Men clamber up ladders.
Many are clumsy-- because of the load, from fear, or by nature.
Over the top! Physical nakedness is the first sensation. The body is now
exposed, tense, expectant, awaiting direct violence upon it. Even if one is
to follow the "creeping barrage"-- the practice by 1917-- of one's own
artillery toward the enemy trenches, that first moment of exposure reduces
him to innocence. "A man who stepped out of the trenches at that moment
and lived through has never in all the ensuing years faced such a
climax," wrote a survivor.4 Then the advance. Slow and faltering, because of the load, because of
the terrain, and because of the tactics of the attack. The Germans and French
are more innovative, often rushing forward in groups. The British are more
systematic. A man every two or three yards, platoons
abreast, a second wave twenty yards back. Heads are bowed, by the weight of
the pack and by the instinctual effort to shrink the target presented to the
enemy. 141 The cratered honeycomb of no man's land quickly breaks down any planned order. Men slip and fall. The line becomes straggly. Some get up and continue. Others cannot. In the mud of Passchendaele in 1917 some men drown in the huge, sewer-like craters filled with slime that comes of rain, earth, and decomposition. Some now begin to hear the bullets. Some note the stench, an overpowering odor, emanating from corpses the barrage has churned up. Some are hit. The race for the parapet has been lost. The field is now being swept by machine guns, pocketed by mortar fire, and scoured by rifle bullets. More men fall. Some cry out. Most are silent. The wounded rarely feel pain initially. Officers try to keep the line together. But these men in the limbo of no man's land, these "wanderers between two worlds," need little encouragement, for isolation in this situation means fear. Only in the group is there any emotional safety, any comfort. Indeed, the attackers are inclined to bunch, to herd together for mutual protection. Has the artillery managed to cut the wire, as promised? Rarely, with any kind of consistency. Breathless, on the brink of exhaustion, men look for gaps in the wire. The disappointment is overwhelming. The gaps are few, if any. The enemy fire has become withering. Only a handful of men reach the wire. They pitch their grenades. They fire their rifles. A few get through to the enemy trench, but bayonet combat is uncommon. Most of the officers leading the attack have been hit. Communication has ceased. The second wave experiences the same fate as the first. The third wave then decides that the attack has failed. Another whistle, this time a faltering one, signals retreat. Survivors stumble back. Some are disoriented and head in a lateral direction. Wounded men crawl. Some huddle in shell holes. The enemy artillery opens up, wreaking havoc on the retreat, but at least this time there is no counterattack. A remnant of the attacking unit returns. The wounded in no man's land are left to their fate until nightfall.
Then an attempt will be made to bring them in. They try to stifle their
rising agony. Moans bring down a torrent of bullets. And at last a tortured
stillness falls on the battlefield. 142 T H E M E S The illusion of the knockout blow continued to dominate strategic thinking throughout 1915, particularly in Britain and France, despite shortages of munitions and of adequately trained troops. British and French attacks in Artois, Picardy, and Champagne, German attacks in Flanders, and even the British vision of a breakthrough against the Turks in the Dardanelles, were all based on the dream of the "gap," the sudden parting of the enemy front, as if it were the Red Sea confronted by the faith of Moses, and the subsequent charge to victory. Only the abysmal Allied failures of Second Ypres, Gallipoli, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Arras, and Loos forced a reconsideration of
the approach, but even then it was not so much active as reactive thinking
that gradually changed the view of the military planners. It was the German
attack on Verdun, in February 1916, with an intensity and firepower
unprecedented in warfare that definitively changed attitudes. The year 1916
saw the advent and acceptance by both sides of a new war, the intentional war
of attrition, which would swallow up millions of men, not under the pretext
that quick victory was in the offing provided one could dear a major hurdle
but because the decision had been made that only by wearing down the enemy
could one win this war. Everywhere industry was mobilized, the work force
reorganized, food rationing applied or planned, taxation readjusted. The war,
in short, became an all-consuming enterprise. It became "total."
Charles Sorley termed attrition "that last
resort of paralyzed strategy." 1 Behind Falkenhayn's decision to concentrate
German offensive power on Verdun lay a number of motives and considerations.
He was always a "westerner" in that he believed that the decisive
battle in the war would take place in the west. While he agreed to place more
effort on the Eastern Front in 1915 in the attempt to defeat Russia, by
December of that year he had concluded that, contrary to expectations, Russia
would not be broken quickly. By contrast, France was on the edge of collapse,
and she might use the salient around Verdun, which constituted an advanced
French position in relation to the rest of the Western Front, as a point from
which to launch a last desperate offensive. That danger had to be
forestalled. Moreover, a strong German attack would wear down the French
completely and would also force the British to counterattack to the north.
This would cause Britain to sustain enormous casualties and push her, too,
toward exhaustion. 143 At Verdun General Falkenhayn assembled, along with his troops, 1220 pieces of artillery for an assault on a front of roughly eight miles. He estimated that for every two lives his armies lost, the French would lose five. That was the essence of attrition. Somehow, however, the French managed to survive the opening barrage and the initial attacks, and the battle then settled down to an atrocious mutual punishment. By November the French were to lose half a million men in this salient. Under such pressure they had to ask the British to take up the slack. The British response was to mount the great offensive on the Somme in July 1916, in which 60,000 men were lost on the very first day and another half million by November. Despite these Allied losses, Falkenhayn's mathematics had failed him. In the two battles of Verdun and the Somme the Germans lost about 800,000 men, slightly less than the French and the British. Ypres and the surrounding salient in Flanders continued to be pounded during 1916 and then fought over tenaciously again in 1917, at Passchendaele or Third Ypres, and so one can add Ypres to Verdun and the Somme to produce a trinity of horror. General Falkenhayn called this Stellungskrieg, position warfare. "The first principle of position warfare," he wrote, "must be to yield not one foot of ground; and if it be lost to retake it immediately by counterattack, even to the use of the last man."' Both sides adopted the same rules. "Whole regiments gambled away eternity for ten yards of wasteland"-- that was the judgment of Ivan Goll. For Ernst Junger, after the Somme the war and life in general had changed complexion: Here
chivalry disappeared for always. Like all noble and personal feelings it had
to give way to the new tempo of battle and to the rule of the machine. Here
the new Europe revealed itself for the first time in combat.4 For over two years the belligerents on the Western Front hammered at
each other in battles, if that old word is appropriate for this new warfare,
that cost millions of men their lives but moved the front line at most a mile
or so in either direction. If the war in the west can be divided into four
periods-- the opening battles of movement, the consolidation of 1915, the war
of attrition of 1916-1917, and the denouement of 1918 with its renewed
movement-- then the situation of 1916-1917 constitutes the longest and most
consistent period. 144 The battles of Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres embody the logic, the meaning, the essence of the Great War. Two of every three French poilus were funneled through Verdun in 1916; most British soldiers saw action at the Somme or Ypres or both; and most German units were in Flanders or at Verdun at some point. These also constituted the crucial battle areas of the war. And the standard imagery that we have of the Great War-- the deafening, enervating artillery barrages, the attacks in which long lines of men moved forward as if in slow motion over a moonscape of craters and mud, only to confront machine guns, uncut barbed wire, and grenades-- comes from these battles rather than those of the first or last year of the war. This middle part of the war reversed all traditional notions of warfare. Defense was turned into offense, a process that Joffre, unaware of the implications of his own idea, had earlier called a "victorious resistance.'" The gulf between technology and strategy meant that the attacker, regardless of numbers, was far more vulnerable than the defender, notwithstanding the effect on nerves of preparatory barrages. Despite the dramatic effects of heavy artillery at Liege, Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele, rarely was there sufficient firepower to destroy the enemy lines. As a result, defenders almost invariably won the "race for the parapet."' This meant that the attacker faced a far greater risk of defeat than the defender. The attacks of 1914 and 1915 decimated all the armies, and at the end of 1915 the stalemate was complete. In 1916 while the Germans and French were battering each other at Verdun, the attacking British lost at the Somme. In 1917 the French lost on the Chemin des Dames, to the point where their armies mutinied. The British lost at Passchendaele. In 1918 the Germans defeated themselves in their final desperate attempt to break through. Exhaustion, in the wake of that attack, led to their final retreat. The victimized crowd of attackers in no man's land-- a scene dramatically
opposed to the hearty revelries between the lines at Christmas l9I4-- has
become one of the supreme images of the war. Attackers moved forward usually
without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows, with the mechanical
efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass. "We were very
surprised to see them walking," wrote a German machine gunner of his
experience of a British attack at the Somme. 145 “The
officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a
walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They
went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them.7” A Frenchman described the effects of his machine gunners more laconically: "The Germans fell like cardboard soldiers." Herbert Read recalled seeing German soldiers falling like shooting-gallery targets. Here the hero became the victim and the victim the hero. The attacker became the representative of a world, the nineteenth-century world, which was demolished by this war. If the attacker was the representative of a world in its death
throes, the defender, either the dogged, frightened defender or the
resilient, cocky repeller, became the symbol of a
new world dawning. Since full-scale attacks were the exception rather than
the rule, most of trench life consisted of a form of defense, of a constant
and wearisome struggle to defend "existence," to survive the
conditions that were primordial at best. Words like poilu or Frontschwein, the hairy one and
the front pig, referring to the dirty, mud-caked, bearded French soldier and
his German counterpart, became terms of affection in their respective
countries by 1916, not the terms of abuse they might have been in an earlier
age of colorful and heroic military engagements. In this existence the
assault on the senses was total. "Our master is our daily misery;"
wrote a Frenchman. 10 The whole landscape of the Western Front became surrealistic before
the term surrealism was invented by the soldier-poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in
his program notes for the Diaghilev production of Parade in 1917, on which Stravinsky, Satie, Picasso, and Cocteau
collaborated. A panorama of devastation confronted the soldiers in the major
battle zones. Trees had been reduced to charred stumps; charred stumps were in turn
erected-- as observation posts-- to look like despoiled trees. Mud was ubiquitous. "Sunset and
sunrise are blasphemous," wrote Paul Nash, who served in the
Ypres salient, was invalided home, and then returned to Flanders as a war
artist: . . . only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds . . . is fit atmosphere
in such a land. The ran drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly
yellow, the shell-holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks
are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the
shells never cease . . . they plunge into the grave which is this land . . .
It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.11 146 A French aviator, looking down on the Verdun landscape after a rainfall, was reminded of "the humid skin of a monstrous toad." 12 The most inarticulate diaries of common front soldiers who experienced Verdun or the Somme or Ypres manage to transmit at least a sense of the physical misery of this warfare. A tour of trench duty consisted normally of three or four days and nights in the front line, followed by the same length of time in support trenches, followed in turn by a similar period in reserve. Only in reserve was it possible, as Herbert Read put it, "to be civilized-- to wash and change and write letters." 13 Otherwise each man was a savage. Before the mutinies of 1917, the French command was frequently lax about the proper organization of leaves and rest periods. A tour could last for over a month, and sometimes even for more than two months. Dirt and filth were, of course, constant companions in the trenches. The enveloping dirt was so depressing that men in midwinter sometimes braved the cold and took baths in shell holes. These were often full because of the persistent rain. "A life so frightfully bestial . . . Even pigs are better off!" Such was the comment of Louis Mairet. Soldiers debated about whether the mud of Ypres or the Somme was worse. Of Ypres in 1917 one Englishman wrote: It was not war. It was more like a mud lark if it had not been for
the machine guns and shelling. One dragged about everywhere. The tenacious
mud pulled one's puttees down and would have pulled boors and socks and legs
off if they had not been properly fixed. 15 On taking over a flooded trench a Frenchman quipped, "It'll be
all right so long as the U-boats don't torpedo us." "Never was there a climate
as this of Flanders," wrote J. W.
Harvey in a letter, and I hope my objurgation
against this rain, rain, rain, will not be deleted as censorable matter! I
suppose the continual firing may be in part to blame; yet I feel I shall look
with far greater clemency in future upon our own proverbial English weather in
comparing it with this. 17 147 Such comparisons were inevitable. "I always thought France was the land of sunshine," remarked Peter McGregor with genuine innocence in June 1916, "but it has been very cold and showery." Four days later the news to his wife, Jen, was "It rains here like a blooming tap." 18 Edward Thomas even wrote a poem on the subject, "Rain": "Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain." The rain had dissolved all love, all meaning . . . except the
love of death, If love it be for
what is perfect and Cannot, the
tempest tells me, disappoint. 19 Soaked through and freezing, Ernst Junger decided that "no artillery fire could break man's resistance so thoroughly as wet and cold." 20 No amount of clothing-- wool socks, vests, jerkins-- or even added newspapers, wrapped around various parts of the body, helped. Winter nights seemed impossibly long, and dawn was the coldest moment of the day. "We don't think of death," wrote a Frenchman in the winter of early 1915. "But it's the cold, the terrible cold! It seems to me at the moment that my blood is full of blocks of ice. Oh, I wish they'd attack, because that would warm us up a little." 21 In the next winter, in Artois, coffee and even wine froze in November. "Weather for polar bears," Marc Boasson commented in a letter. "Before you can have a drink, you have to chip away the ice. The meat is frozen solid, the potatoes are bonded by ice, and even the hand grenades are welded together in their cases." 22 In the severe winter of 1916-1917 hot tea froze within minutes, and bread, bully beef, and sausage turned to chunks of ice. In a poem titled "Exposure," Wilfred Owen evoked shriveled hands, puckered foreheads, and eyes of ice.23 In such conditions food could not be enjoyed, and the strain of
battle reduced appetites further. The irregular hours for meals, the
unreliability of supply lines, the lack of vegetables, the sameness of the
meat diet-- all this destroyed any possibility of pleasure. When Siegfried
Sassoon returned to the Somme from home leave in the spring of 1916, he
brought with him a smoked salmon to share with his men, but as he stumbled
and splashed up a communication trench known as Canterbury Avenue he
reflected that "smoked salmon wasn't much of an antidote for people who
had been putting up with all that shell-fire." 24 148 The weather, then, had a great deal to do with a soldier's spirits. A sudden lifting of cloud and the appearance of sun could raise morale. "Splendid weather," exulted Charles Delvert in the midst of the Verdun battle in March 1916. "This life has its charm. It's like camping out. You wander through the trenches; the air is fresh, the sun brilliant. Gay little clouds flit across the blue sky." But such weather was very much the exception in the war, and such a lyrical outburst was also very much the exception in Charles Delvert's diary. The trenches were infested with vermin. Flies, mites, nits, fleas, mosquitoes, and beetles were bothersome, but lice and rats were the major irritants. Lice laid their eggs in the seams of garments and multiplied at a terrifying rate. The louse was so fertile, said the poilu, that one born in the morning was a grandmother by evening. The battle against them was unwinnable. Soldiers tried to crush them with their thumb nails, burn them with candle flames, drive them out with powders and pomades sent from home, but to little avail. “The only way is to heave a few Rum Jars at them," quipped one Tommy." The biggest of them were given names: Kaiser, Kronpinz, Hindenburg. Only field laundry service and hot baths had any effect, and then just briefly. Roger Campana found these pests more ferocious than the vampires of the Congo or Polynesia . . . If Mr. Magpie had had a chance to get to know them, he would have cited them as an example for all Frenchmen." Campana's only consolation was the rumor that the lice in German trenches were bigger! Rats the size of cats were reported in the trenches, although they existed in even larger numbers around rest quarters. They were attracted by food left lying about and by decomposing corpses. They chewed up haversacks and gnawed through ration bags. In his section of the line, Roland Mountfort wrote to-his mother, the rats' greatest feat was to kill and devour five kittens nearly three weeks old that the trench cat was rearing in one of the dugouts. I don't know why they haven't done it before unless they were waiting in order to get a better meal.21 The battle against the rats was as serious at times as that against
the human enemy. To Percy Jones the rats became an obsession. "I am . .
. addicted to rat-hunting," he admitted in his diary. He went after them
every night with pick-handles and spades. 149 We sometimes
go a bit too far. For instance the night before last four of us were in full
cry after a rat between our front line trenches and chased him right up to
the second line where a sentry nearly shot us, imagining us to be Germans! Jones's obsession followed him to test billets a fortnight later. Near the canal in Ypres he participated in a veritable massacre: We had a
great battle last night and killed nearly a hundred, excluding many that must
have been stoned while swimming. The raft party ran out of ammunition and had
to come ashore for more bricks.2 The only effective instrument against rats and other pests was gas. A gas attack would clear the trenches of vermin for a time. It was at night that much of the work in the trenches was done. The normal bourgeois approach to time and to the clock was reversed. As darkness fell, armies of troglodytes emerged from their holes, like the very vermin they despised, and scurried about their tasks: wiring parties went out into no man's land; trench fortifications were repaired and extended as the Western Front became a vast, intricate anthill; vicious little raids, comparable to mosquito bites on the body of the collective enemy, were carried out. And even if one had no specific task to fulfill, sleep was impossible. Delver! described a night in the trenches in January 1916: Lights out.
Now the rats and the lice are the masters of the house. You can hear the rats
nibbling, running, jumping, rushing from plank to plank, emitting their little
squeals behind the dugout’s corrugated metal. It's a noisy swarming activity
that just won't stop. At any moment I expect one to land on my nose. And then
it's the lice and fleas that begin to devour me. Absolutely impossible to get
any shut eye. Toward midnight I begin to doze off. A terrible racket makes
me jump. Artillery fire, the crackling of rifle and machine-gun fire. The Boches must be attacking Mont Toiu
again. The caravan seems to quiet down about 1:30. At 2:15 it starts up
again, this time with a frightful violence. Everything shakes. Our artillery
thunders away without pause. At 3:00 the cannon shots become more
spread out and slowly things
quiet down. I doze off so as to get up at six. The rats and the lice get up
too: waking to life is also waking to misery.30 150 After a couple of days and nights of this relentless bombardment of the senses, men easily became disoriented, sluggish, even apathetic. "I felt I would barter my soul for a few hours of uninterrupted slumber," noted one.31 "What kills is the absence of sleep," wrote Delvert.32 When relief finally came, the battalion moved off to test quarters. Wilfred Owen: Bent double,
like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
And towards our
distant rest began to trudge. The odor of decomposition-- masked only by the almost equally intolerable reek of chloride of lime-- and clouds of flies attracted by the carrion were other inescapable curses. Limbs and torsos were churned up again and again by the shelling. Working parties digging or repairing trenches repeatedly uncovered corpses in all stages of decay and mutilation. Most of the time they simply shoveled them out of the way. Fragments of bodies did find their way, however, into sandbags. If those burst, they could divulge their contents in a manner so horrific that black humor became the only defense against hysteria. In the Ypres salient at one point men being relieved all filed past an arm protruding from the side of the trench and shook hands with it. "Tata, Jack." Those effecting the relief did the same on arrival-- " 'ello, Jack." An artillery gunner captain, F. H. T. Tatham, described to his mother another situation so grotesque that it was almost humorous: There has always been a horrid smell at our 0.P.-- in the trenches, which creosote has failed to remove. J found today that it is decomposed remains in a sandbag against which we leaned to use the periscope. I believe the unfortunate corpse may have been there six months-- the rats don't usuaJly leave them alone, so it was probably a dirty German. Having disturbed it, it stinks more than ever-- full of maggots. The offending sandbag has been drowned in creosote and thrown far away-- but they evidently couldn't get what was left of Fritz into one sandbag, and I fear to eradicate the evil would mean a fall in the parapet, so am in rather a dilemma. 35 The Australian J. A. Raws sent home an
equally "rum" tale. At work with a digging party at Pozieres at the end of July 1916, he was 151 subjected to, as he put it, "a tornado of bursting shells." He was buried twice. The second time, after struggling free, he saw a body, half buried, nearby. Thinking it a comrade who had just suffered the same fate as himself, he stumbled over to help the man out. He tugged and lifted. Suddenly, blood spouted all over Raws, and the head came off in his hands. "The horror was indescribable," he wrote. His brother had been killed three days earlier, and Raws himself would be killed on his next tour. A Frenchman at Verdun noted: "We all had on us the stench of dead bodies. The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank, everything we touched had a rotten smell." Mutilation was a daily spectacle in some sectors. At Fresnoy on the Somme a house with German soldiers
quartered in it received a direct hit. Ernst Junger
ran to help. We grabbed the limbs sticking out of the rubble and pulled the
corpses out. One was missing its head, and the neck sat on the torso like a
large bloody fungus. On another shattered bones protruded from the stump on
an arm, and the uniform was sodden with blood from a huge chest wound. On a
third the innards flowed forth from a body that had been slit open. As we
were pulling this one out, a splintered board that had stuck in the terrible
wound gave resistance, making gruesome sounds. On another occasion Junger was witness to a
machine gun duel. Suddenly our
master marksman collapsed, shot through the head. Although his brains
were running down his face to his
chin, he was still fully conscious as we carried him to an adjoining tunnel.18 After his dugout had been hit by a shell, Roger Campana
took a photograph of a comrade's body in order to prove to a friend what a
near miss he had lived through. The body was "laid open from the shoulders
to the haunches like
a quartered carcass in a butcher's window."" Delvert
recorded with greater precision" the dearth of a colleague: The death of
Jagoud was atrocious. He was on the first steps of
the dugout when a shell (probably an Austrian 130) burst. His face was
burned; one splinter entered his skull behind the ear; another
slit open his stomach,
broke his spine, and in the
bloody mess one saw his spinal
cord gliding about. His right leg was completely crushed above the knee. The
most hideous part of it all was that he continued to live for four or five
minutes.40 152 The Verdun of Cesar Melera included this scene and observation: Horses and mules buried. A fetid mud sometimes reaches your ankle,
disgorging an awful smell and a heavy opaque air. He who has not seen the
wounded emitting their death rattle on the field of battle, without cares,
drinking their urine to appease their thirst . . . has seen nothing of
war."'41 Men were threatened not solely by enemy fire but by their own artillery, too, when it fired short. General Percin estimated that seventy-five thousand French troops were killed or wounded by their own artillery." Jean Giraudoux noted ironically to Paul Morand, "I belong to the French regiment that has killed the most English." 43 Short shelling was caused by poor communication, human error, damp ammunition, or wind conditions, and invariably created bad blood between troops in the front lines and staff officers and the artillery regiments. Its incidence appears to have increased in general proportion to the increase in shelling as the war progressed." The front, in short, was, in Siegfried Sassoon's words, "rotten with dead." A month before his own death Louis Mairet reflected on the subject: Death! that word which booms
like the echo of sea caverns, striking and re-striking in dark and unseen
depths. Between this war and the last, we did not die: we ended. Neatly, in
the shelter of a room, in the warmth of a bed. Now we die. It is the wet
death, the muddy death, death dripping with blood, death by drowning, death
by sucking under, death in the slaughterhouse. The bodies lie frozen in the
earth which gradually sucks them in. The luckiest depart, wrapped in canvas
from a tent, to sleep in the nearest cemetery."'42 Can one exaggerate the horrors of trench life? Many have supposedly
done so and been reprimanded by others for producing in their accounts
nothing other than "mud and blood" sensationalism. Some veterans of
the Great War never experienced an attack; some never even saw the enemy,
despite lengthy front-line duty; a few survived the whole war without more
than a few scratches. Some parts of the front were indeed very quiet. Some
men never lost their sense of romance and adventure. Some 153 never lost their sense of humor. Thus, to concentrate
on the horror of Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres, say the critics, is to distort
the reality of the war. Even in these sectors, which were not, they claim,
the norm, massive artillery bombardments and attacks were rare. Most of the
time men were occupied by the humdrum problems of trench existence and essentially by boredom. Part of the problem in this debate is a matter of definition and
semantics. What sort of experience does one classify under "horror"
and what constitutes "boredom"?
Cannot one man's horror be an other man's
boredom, and vice versa? If one insists that horror is the sensation aroused
solely by the unexpected contradiction of values and conditions that bestow meaning
on life, and that in turn boredom is the inevitable upshot of routine, even
of routine slaughter, then the question can never be resolved, because no
sense of horror, even one caused by this war, can remain constant. After
several weeks of front line experience there was little that could shock.
Men became immunized, rather rapidly, to the brutality and obscenity. They
had to if they were to survive. As Fritz Kreisler, violinist and Austrian
infantryman, put it: A certain fierceness arises in you, an absolute
indifference to anything the world holds except your duty of fighting. You
are eating a crust of bread, and a man is shot dead in the trench next to
you. You look calmly at him for a moment, and then go on eating your bread.
Why not? There is nothing to be done. In the end you talk of your own death
with as little excitement as you would of a luncheon engage ment.47 And John W. Harvey, a Quaker from Leeds who was with the Friends'
Ambulance Unit, wrote from Ypres, "I am having a wearying time amid
sights that would be too full of horrors and pity to bear but for human
nature's capacity to get hardened by familiarity to anything." 48 Hence, even horror can turn to routine and bring on ennui-- the sense
that one has seen it all before and that existence no longer holds any
surprises. "There is nothing left in your mind…” continued Kreisler,
"but the fact that hordes of men to whom you belong are fighting against
other hordes, and your side must win.” 49 154 Even when things seemed quiet, the casualties continued to accumulate--
from sniper activity, from random artillery fire designed to keep the enemy
on edge, and from accidents. It was this attrition, precisely when nothing of
any consequence seemed to be happening, that horrified some soldiers the
most. Death seemed totally without purpose. In the war diaries of army units
there is often a terrible irony lodged in the terse one-line reports for the
day's activity: "All quiet. Three casualties." As the anguished
American ambassador put it in a letter from London, "When there's
'nothing to report' from France, that means the
regular 5,000 casualties that happen every day."50 The dichotomy set up in the "horror versus boredom" debate is a false one. What is crucial is the broader significance of the 1916- 1917 phase of the war, its relationship to previous forms of warfare, to expectations and values; and here it is hard to deny that the "front" experience of 1916-1917 was indeed a "frontier" experience, an experience of something that was, in its implications, completely new. Of course soldiers continued to classify sensations according to previously existing categories - this was an instinctive reaction -but the actual experience as a whole was crucial, and that, in its broader context, was novel. With time the former categories and the accepted relationship of the
war to previous history wore thin and collapsed. The rate of this
deterioration varied among the belligerents and among people, depending on
the resilience and resonance of existing values, but everywhere, even if only
in the post-war period, in the cauldron where purpose, memory, and outcome
brewed together, the validity of former categories disintegrated. T R A N S V A L U A T I O N The Germans had been, even before the war, the most readily inclined
of the leading nations to question the norms and values of nineteenth century
liberal bourgeois society, to elevate the moment beyond the grasp of the law,
and to look to the dynamics of immediate experience, as opposed to those of
tradition and history, for inspiration. In the war they concentrated from the
start on the idea of "victory," on a Dionysian vitalism,
which meant that the moment of conquest would proffer, of and by itself, an
exciting range of opportunities, primarily spiritual and life-enhancing and
only secondarily territorial and material. Territorial war aims, to which so
much of the literature 155 on the German war effort has been devoted,
were never more than hazy expressions of ebullience or hysteria born of war
weariness. The war-aim issue was never anything more than a political device
that reflected the fortunes of the front. The front dictated war aims, not
the other way around. That it was the Germans who were the first to begin to reverse the rules of warfare by recognizing the importance of defense and then by implementing officially the idea of attrition-- exhausting the enemy through self-sacrifice instead of "defeating" him by dashing enterprise-- was no accident. Germany had been the country most willing to question western social, cultural, and political norms before the war, most willing to promote the breakdown of old certainties and the advent of new possibilities. As a corollary, the Germans were less reluctant to stretch the rules of warfare. They were less reticent to break with international conventions associated by them with a rule of law imposed by Anglo-French hegemony and regarded by them as prejudicial to German interests. The idea of attrition was in the short term the upshot of a particular military situation, a response to the unexpected stalemate that resulted from the failure of the Schlieffen plan in 1914 and then continued through the next year. But it was also an indication of the willingness of the German military and the civilian leadership to translate the emotional involvement of the nation, so evident in the early days of the war, into military strategy. The army, which in the Prussian tradition had been regarded as "the school of the nation," was to become that for all Germans. "Total war" was the means by which this could be achieved. Now the soldier and civilian would no longer be distinguishable. A war of attrition would involve the commitment of the entire nation. Such an idea did not spring up overnight. Many of the activities of
the prewar Pan-German movement, of the Navy League, the colonial societies
and other radical nationalist organizations, were prompted by the aim of
revitalizing German society through military principles and virtues. And
interestingly, much of this popular form of militarism stemmed from
non-Junker elements, from new social types in the military, men like
Ludendorff and Bauer, and from white-collar elements-- the so-called new
middle class-- in the nationalist leagues. Total war was an ideal not of the
aristocratic Junkers-- of the Schlieffens and the Moltkes-- but of the new Germany. 156 Erich Ludendorff, commoner, son of a businessman, careerist, man of action rather than reflection, was a supreme symbol of this new Germany. He, like the modern impulse he represented, came from the periphery-- from his place of birth in a one-story house in the midst of an orchard in Krusczewnia in the eastern Prussian province of Posen. By July 1917 Ludendorff held more power than anyone else in Germany. To Ludendorff and to the new Germany, all political questions, all economic questions, all cultural questions, were in the end military questions. Now, attrition was to be merely an offshoot of such thinking. It could not have grown had there not been a consistent buildup toward "totality." This called for the breakdown of the distinction between soldiers and civilians and the rejection of accepted morality in warfare. The treatment of civilians in Belgium by the occupying German forces and the reliance on new methods of warfare-- especially the use of gas and inventions such as flame throwers, and the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare-- were the most important steps, until attrition, in the advent of total war. How the changing social and physical landscape of Europe would affect
future war was an issue that had concerned statesmen and politicians and
legal experts across the continent in the decades before 19 14. Would one be
able to distinguish readily between soldiers and civilians? At the beginning
of the nineteenth century the Spanish response to the Napoleonic invasion,
the resort to guerrilla warfare, had pointed to future problems. Then the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870-1871 revealed dramatically that Napoleon's experience in Spain
sixty years earlier was but a mild taste of what was in store if war
enveloped Europe's most populated areas. Between the battle of Sedan in September
1870 and the armistice in the spring of 1871, all the problems surrounding
the relationship between civilians and soldiers in war came to the surface.
The Germans bombarded Strasbourg, Peronne,
Soissons, firing into civilian neighborhoods, arguing all the time, however,
that civilians and military were assisting each other and that therefore
little distinction could be made between the two. Terror was also applied in
occupied areas: civilian houses were burned, hostages shot, and fines levied. 157 Between 1871 and 1914 international legal discussions concentrated on
defining the duties and rights of military invaders on the one hand and
civilian defenders on the other. In these exchanges the Germans generally insisted on the right to requisition and to demand
docility from a population under occupation. They were not alone in this, but
they were virtually alone in positing an extreme version of the argument-- the
idea of Kriegsverrat.
According to this view, the disruption of the war effort by civilians in
occupied territory is as treasonous as disruption by one's own nationals. 1 The German occupation of Belgium was consistent with this position, and while as a whole certainly not as monstrous as Allied propaganda made it out to be, the occupation policy was nevertheless draconic. If babies were not systematically snatched from mothers' arms and smashed against brick walls, if nuns were not deliberately sought out for sodomy, rape, and slaughter, if old people were not made to crawl on all fours before being riddled with bullets, considerable numbers of hostages were shot, including women and children and octogenarians. Louvain was razed, together with its library, founded in 1426, with its 280,000 volumes and its priceless collection of incunabula and medieval manuscripts. Schrecklichkeit, or frightfulness, was pronounced official policy in the occupied areas, initially in Belgium and then in France and Russia. The term furor teutonicus was used by Germans with pride. The treatment of civilians became incontrovertible evidence to the
Entente powers of German inhumanity; "poor little Belgium" and
"crucified Belgium" were the principal rallying cries in the
mobilization of British pro-war sentiment. The fate of Louvain and its
library was regarded as a symbol of German barbarism, of a Teutonic hostility
to history and
to western civilization as a
whole, to its artifacts, its
accomplishments, and its values. To the library at Louvain were soon added
the cathedral at Rheims, bombed first on September 20-- "the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man," asserted Henry James-- the Cloth Hall at Ypres, and eventually the
cathedral at Albert. The Germans claimed that the towers of these structures
were being used for observation and optical telegraphy and that they had no
option but to bomb them, regardless of the adverse publicity the action would
create. Soon, however, they undermined their own reasoning by attacking civilians
and historical monuments far beyond immediate battle perimeters. On October
II two Taubes reached Paris and dropped twenty-two
bombs, killing three and wounding nineteen citizens. Notre Dame 158 Cathedral was also scratched. This was looked upon by the Entente powers as an undeniable and unacceptable broadening of the forms of warfare. Then in December 1914 the war was taken to the civilians of England when the northern English port of Hartlepool and the seaside resorts of Scarborough and Whitby were shelled from the sea. In 1915 Zeppelin raids on London and Paris began, and by early 1916 these raids were being undertaken as far north as Lancashire. The young, talented, and already greatly respected historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote in the early months of the war that what the foreigner calls brutality in German behavior, the German himself must call simply honesty. After all, if the cathedral at Rheims was being used by French observers, it had to be bombed. It was as simple as that. For the French and the British to call the German a barbarian in these circumstances was pure hypocrisy. Meinecke was relatively moderate. Another German historian expressed similar ideas in shriller tones: Better that a thousand church towers fall than that one German soldier should fall as a result of these towers. Let's not have any whining from humanists and aesthetes among ourselves. We have to assert ourselves. Those are such simple truths that it becomes tedious to have to repeat them to people who don't wish to hear.4 Rather than such unequivocal assertions about the pre-eminence of life force over history, one might have expected from Meinecke and his confreres, given their professions, a greater respect for the dependence of the individual and the nation on their historical context. Yet the emphasis in their comments is on the Dionysian act of self-assertion. In the course of the war, thirty-five of forty-three holders of chairs of history in German universities were to aver that Germany had become involved in the war only because she had been attacked. A frequently observed alternative to the denial of history was denial
that acts of destruction had occurred. In October 1914 a manifesto appeared,
addressed to "the world of culture" and signed by ninety-three
German intellectuals. Among the signatories were such luminaries as the
theologian Adolf von Harnack, the writer Hermann Sudermann, the composer Engelbert
Humperdinck, the scientist Wilhelm Rontgen, and the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann. "It is not true," they
insisted, "that we have criminally violated the neutrality of Belgium .
. . It is not true that our troops have acted brutally in 159 Louvain.” Wish, fantasy, and illusion increasingly would become dictators over reality as the war-- and as the century-- advanced. In this process Germany led the way. Men should “open their hearts to humanity only as long as it cannot hurt them," said Ernst Junger. Such egoism and lust for sensation played a role, Junger was prepared to admit, in the advent of the war. An interest
in the gruesome was of course part of the complex of desires that dragged us
so irresistibly into the war. A period of law and order as long as the one
our generation had behind it brought a real craving for the extraordinary.1 Were the French and British justified in becoming so agitated about
German methods of warfare? After all, the British themselves had denounced-- as
the Germans were now doing to the Belgians-- the "unsporting"
tactics of the Boers when the latter resorted to hit-and run raids and
civilian resistance in the South African war at the turn of the century, and
the British military had felt forced to set up detention centers in which
women and children, as well as men, were incarcerated in harsh conditions.
Wits who charged Britain with hypocritical behavior savored the saying
"Britain rules the waves and therefore Britain waives the rules."
Moreover, there is evidence that French soldiers committed
"atrocities" in occupied territory early in the war, and as a
result one can rightly wonder how the French would have behaved had the war
been fought largely on German soil. A few days after mobilization, Louis Pergaud, a teacher and a former pacifist, wrote, "It
is necessary and it is urgent that we eradicate to the last stone and to the
last individual this race of vipers that is the Prussian race."' Nonetheless, the evidence as it stands shows overwhelmingly that the
Germans denied international standards most systematically-- in part out of a
sense of necessity, viewing these standards as injurious to their immediate
welfare, but also in large part because they, the Germans, were simply less
disposed to abide by rules they considered alien and historic and hence not
applicable either to themselves or to the colossal significance of the moment.
The Germans were to berate themselves after the war by claiming that their
propaganda effort had been far inferior to that of the Allies, but the truth
of the matter was that the Allies did have more substance behind their claims
against the Germans than the Germans had against their enemies. The Germans’
appeal to "honesty," "openness," and
"truthfulness" had a romantic and idealistic ring; it was an appeal
to internal, private virtues. The Allies' appeal was a social, ethical, and
historical one; it was to external, public values. 160 Henri Bergson accused the Germans in December 1914 of having made their barbarism "scientific," 10 and Henry James referred in January 1915 to the "baseness of demonism" that lay behind the destruction of Ypres, but the first systematic use of asphyxiating gas on the Western Front by the Germans, on April 22, 1915, at Langemarck near Ypres, against French and Canadian troops, removed any doubts in the Allied populations about the satanic nature of the German threat and about German "guilt." That event in the spring of 1915 was the most spectacular act in what Pierre Miquel has called "the terrorist war." 12 The Hague Declaration of 1899 and the Hague Convention of 1907 had forbidden the
use of "poison or poisonous weapons" in warfare. Although the
French and British were buying liquid chlorine as early as September 1914,
and though the French in particular had been working on gas munitions for
some time prior to April 1915, the fact remains that the Germans were the
first to use gas extensively and methodically. The chemist Fritz Haber, later
a Nobel laureate for his pre-war work on ammonia synthesis, had had the idea
in the autumn of 1914 that the use of chlorine would allow the Germans to
regain the initiative in the war and, despite munition
and manpower shortages, bring it to a victorious end. The Germans'
allegations that the Allies were using poison gas in their shells, as opposed
to relatively harmless and nontoxic irritants that both Germans and French
had already used-- these allegations they could not document; and their claim
that the Hague agreements did not extend to the diffusion of cloud gas, only
to use of projectiles emitting gas, was mere obfuscation. Some commentators at the time and some historians subsequently have
argued that an unwarranted to-do has been made about the use of gas. Gas,
they argue, was actually more humane than shelling, because it resulted in
fewer casualties, even after killer gas was introduced. 13 Such an argument is specious. Gas was certainly
not used because it was more humane but because it compounded the horrors to
which the front soldier was subjected. It was not used instead of artillery;
it was used in addition to artillery. As a British artillery man himself put
it in May 1915, after the Germans had taken Hill 60, a strategic point near
Ypres, with the help of gas: 161 If we are
not going to meet disaster at every turn we must use something of the sort
ourselves. These humanitarians claim that it is more merciful to asphyxiate a
man than to blow him up with high explosive shell. That is their pleasant way
of trying to
appear before the world at large. In
reality-- having turned on the gas they bayonet everyone who has been too
overcome by the fumes to move and then ram their high explosives onto the
wretched crowd of people who remain struggling for breath. Words fail to
describe one's feelings about the whole thing. 14 Soldiers, even seasoned veterans, on all sides never got used to the
idea of gas. Indeed, some of the Germans directly involved in the development
of poison gas considered it an "unchivalrous"
and "repugnant" weapon. 15 Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the Sixth Army, tried to
prevent its use, claiming that the enemy would respond in like manner, but he
was overruled. Ironically, it was his Sixth Army that was to be the object of
the first major British gas attack, at Loos in September 1915. Even though it
quickly became a standard part of the arsenal on both sides and deadlier forms were introduced
as the war
progressed, soldiers continued
to associate gas with improper methods of fighting. "I shall
never forget the sights I saw by Ypres after the first gas attacks,"
asserted Lieurenant Colonel G. W. G. Hughes of the
medical corps. Men lying
all along the side of the road between Poperinghe
and Ypres, exhausted, gasping, frothing yellow mucus from their mouths, their
faces blue and distressed. It was dreadful, and so little could be done for
them. I have seen no description in any book or paper that exaggerated or
even approached in realization of the horror, the awfulness of these gassed
cases. One came away from seeing or treating them longing to be able to go
straight away at the Germans and to throttle them, to pay them out in some
sort of way for their devilish ness. Better for a sudden death than chis
awful agony. 16 Victims of gas, once seen, tortured the mind far more, it seems, than soldiers mutilated by shells: In all my
dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges a t
me, guttering, choking, drowning. 17 162 Soldiers were of course intensely superstitious, and British troops came to feel that using gas would bring bad luck. The home front in Britain and France thought the Germans had put themselves beyond the pale by resorting to gas. Domestic opinion was outraged, and when the Daily Mail asked the women of Britain to make a million small cotton-wool pad respirators, according to specifications set out in the paper, for the emergency of late April, the army was inundated with donations. Several thousands of these were immediately sent to France and issued to the troops as a stop-gap measure. The technology of gas warfare developed quickly: from chlorine to phosgene and mustard gases. Mustard was the most deadly, and once again it was the Germans who introduced it. Respirators became accordingly more sophisticated, with face covers made of rubberized fabric and eyepieces of non-splintering glass. The men hated the masks. Breathing was difficult at best, and vision and mobility were restricted. Surrounded by masked men during a phosgene attack at Verdun, Pierre
de Mazenod was reminded of a "carnival of
death." 19 For many, gas took the
war into the realm of the unreal, the make-believe. When men donned their
masks they lost all sign of humanity, and with their long snouts, large glass
eyes, and slow movements, they became figures of fantasy, closer in their
angular features to the creations of Picasso and Braque than to soldiers of
tradition. Dorgeles called the gas mask "this
pig snout which represented the war's true face." 20 British comment on the German gas attacks
included the following: With use by the Germans of poison gas the war took a more bitter turn
and horror followed horror until the soldier of civilization had to rise to a
height of courage putting altogether in the shade that of the Knights of old,
who went out to fight loathly dragons which breathed fire and mephitic
vapours. In this mortal struggle with a race of scientific orang-outangs, it requires a shutting of the eyes to externals
and a looking inward to see the nimbus shining from the brow of the soldier .
. . But how more splendid than that of any be-plumed, caparisoned soldier of
old, is his courage as he rides, or squats in mud or dust, swathed in his
chemical bandages so that all human likeness is lost, awaiting not only shot
and shell and steel, but flammenwefer, asphyxiating gas, lachrymatory gas, stink
gas, and other instruments of German warfare!2
1 163 It is not surprising that when the "Anti-Gas Establishment"
of the Royal Engineers got together for a reunion ten years after the war,
one of the sketches in a comedy program made reference to the Russian ballet.
Both gas and the Russian dancers were regarded as the height of
"newness," as expressions of a sense of the modern that far
exceeded what was considered acceptable by most of society. Lieutenant
Colonel Henry S. Raper, CBE, FRS, Cavalier Crown of
Italy, was presented on the anniversary program in the following way: Raperski Presents his famous Russian Ballet,
"Dialysis." Argument: The scene is laid in a woodland glade in
which the three beautiful sisters, Chlorine, Bromine and Iodine, are
discovered wandering. Sodium, a notorious bad character, approaches and
beguiles them by presenting each with an electron for their rings. Too late
they discover what has happened and they are about to crystallize out in
despair, when they are precipitated by Argenrum and
thus saved from their awful doom. The last scene depicts Sodium, who has now
become an Ion, in Brownian motion. 22 Given the outcry in Britain when gas was first used, it is interesting to look at the introductory paragraphs of the Holland report on chemical warfare published in 1919. The report begins: That gas is
a legitimate weapon in war the Committee have no shadow of doubt and that it
will be used in the future they consider may be taken as a foregone
conclusion, for history shows that in no case has a weapon which has proved
successful in War ever been abandoned by Nations fighting for existence. 23 Twenty years later, at the outbreak of the next war, everyone in Britain would receive a gas mask. The "cubist war" had spread to the entire nation. The flame thrower was another weapon the Germans introduced first; it
was a part of their arsenal from late 1914. The Allies said that it
contravened the Hague agreements, which forbade the use of "arms,
projectiles and materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering" and
insisted, moreover, that "belligerents have not an unlimited right as to
the choice of means of injuring an enemy." The flame thrower consisted
of a cylinder of oil and a steel tube from which the oil was projected at
high pressure. Here was a weapon that, like gas, was not terribly effective
in the long term-- it was most 164 useful for incinerating the inhabitants of pillboxes or dugouts-- but that instilled appalling fear in its potential victims. For Mairet the Flammenwerfer was the supreme "symbol of this merciless war, a glowing vision of this century of madness." The French and the British did not relish using the flame thrower to the same degree as the Germans: they felt that if there was any resistance from the trenches being attacked, then the man carrying the flame thrower was likely to be hit, would become a human torch, and would represent more of a danger than a help to his own troops. If there was little resistance to an attack, then the flame thrower was hardly necessary. The French did retain the lance-flammes for mopping-up operations after a first assault wave had succeeded. Among other innovations of trench warfare that the Germans were the first to apply methodically were trench mortars and sniping. Minnenwerfer, or Minnies, as they were called by the British with ironic affection, appeared as early as September 1914 on the Chemin des Dames and elsewhere. The French hated them, calling them "coal scuttles" or "stovepipes." Snipers, too, with their telescopic sights, were loathed-- sometimes even those on one's own side-- as unsporting types. The British and the French were much slower in introducing new ideas
of warfare-- trench mortars, gas, or tanks. From the start there was a
reluctance to accept the reality of trench warfare: "I don't know what's
to be done," said Kitchener; "this isn't war." 25 Trench warfare of
course was blamed on the Germans; they were the first to resort to this
"unmanly" form of fighting. General Cherfils
accused the Boche of behaving like a "cowering mole," refusing an honest and virile fight a la loyale." But beyond denunciations of the Germans, little inspired and innovative thinking appeared. After the Somme battle had dragged on for three months without any sign of breakthrough, General Robertson could still describe tanks as "a somewhat desperate innovation.'' 27 Tanks were about the only Allied invention of significance in the war
of the trenches. Yet their premature use, in insufficient numbers, on
September 15, 1916, on the Somme, wasted the important weapon of surprise.
Surprise was regarded by the Victorian world as somehow unethical. Surprise
belonged to the immoral world of the gambler and flaneur. Success had to be the
upshot of hard work and effort, not chance and surprise. And so the tank was
not to be conceived of as a secret weapon but 165 rather as an offspring of British determination and commitment. As far as Haig was concerned, the tank was always to remain subordinate to infantry assault. In the end men, not machines, would win this war-- men "playing the game." If tanks were accepted reluctantly as a necessary part of the game by
the Allies, the German use of submarines to attack all shipping within a
designated zone was regarded by the French and British from the start as
another manifestation of German barbarism. The Germans had always attached more
importance to the symbolism of their war fleet than to its practical use. In
October 1912 Bethmann Hollweg,
for instance, told Lord Granvillle, a senior
officer in the British embassy in Berlin, that Germany required her fleet
"not merely for the purpose of defending her commerce, but for the
general purpose of her greatness." When the war broke out, British naval
superiority was evident from the start, and by the end of 1914 Britain had
firm control over home waters and had applied an effective blockade against
German shipping in the North Sea and English Channel; in addition, she had
done considerable damage to the German battle fleet on the seas. The kaiser
was reluctant to risk the rest of his prize fleet, to have his symbols
shattered, so with the exception of some hit-and-run raids on the east coast
of England and the battle of Jutland in 1916, the German fleet remained in
harbor behind its minefields. Deprived of the use of this status symbol, the
German naval authorities shifted the emphasis to a newer weapon of naval
warfare, one that was more "modern" in its effect, involving
secrecy, surprise, and sudden destruction, the submarine. In their emphasis
on submarines the Germans once again changed traditional patterns of strategic
thinking. The naval fleet should have been backed by the submarines, but the
reverse occurred: the submarine became the principal German weapon in the sea
war, and the surface navy was relegated to a position of support. On land the
Germans resorted to an underground war; on the high seas their approach was
the same. In February 1915 they announced the establishment of a "war
zone" around Great Britain in which all shipping, merchant or otherwise,
would be attacked without regard for the safety of crews and passengers.
Again the Germans argued that the British had led the way in the breakdown of
law on the seas and that they were simply responding to the British blockade
of their country. Britain had refused 166 to ratify the Declaration of London of l909, which attempted to establish a code of law for naval warfare, and she continued to interpret contentious questions about, for example, the nature of contraband to her own advantage; hence, so the argument went, Germany had no alternative but to adopt countermeasures, brutal though these might appear. In this case there certainly was some merit to the argument. Yet it is the nature of the German response that is of interest here. By resorting to unrestricted submarine warfare, and again refusing to make distinctions between soldiers and civilians, neutrals and belligerents, the Germans took the war, with much greater drama and elan than did the British with the blockade, into the realm of total war. Schrecklichkeit was applied on the seas. In March 1915 the passenger ship Falaba was hit by a torpedo that was fired while lifeboats were being launched. Over a hundred lives were lost. On May 7 the British liner Lusitania was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland, with a loss of 1198 lives, including 120 Americans, out of over 2000 passengers and crew. In a display of xenophobic fervor a medal was struck in Germany to commemorate this "victory" on the seas. Coming as it did within a few days of the first use of gas, the sinking of the Lusitania brought down the wrath of the neutral world on Germany. Josiah Royce, a professor at Harvard, had up until that point refrained from mentioning the war in his classes. But when he learned of the fate of the Lusitania, he could no longer restrain himself. "I should be a poor professor of philosophy, and in particular of moral philosophy, if I left my class in the least doubt as to how to view such things," and he went on to refer to "these newest expressions of the infamies of Prussian warfare" and "this new experiment upon human nature." Royce's reaction was representative of the American response. In the Entente countries the sinking of the Lusitania was followed by moral indignation and a flood to the colors. William Gregson, a twenty-five-year-old teacher at Arnold House, a grammar school in Blackpool, whose diary hitherto had contained more entries about school life and football than about the war, was clearly influenced by the event. On Sunday, May 9, he wrote in his diary, "Lusitania's loss still hangs like a cloud over us and brings forth more than usually fiery sermon from Rigby at Matins." Within a fortnight Gregson had decided to join up. 167 The Germans continued their tactics through the summer, attacking
unsuccessfully a large Cunard liner on July 9 and then sinking the White Star
liner Arabic on August 19. It was
dear that opinion against them was mounting and that submarine warfare was
not having the desired economic effect on Britain, and in September 1915 the
attacks were called off. However, as Falkenhayn developed his view of Stelkungskrieg - set forth most completely by him in a memorandum of December 1915-- he included, in his wider version of the nature of the new war, the energetic pursuit of unrestricted submarine warfare. Both were essential ingredients of total war. Falkenhayn was to be unsuccessful in convincing the civilian authorities and the kaiser on the subject of the U-boat war through 1916. But the realization, after the battle of Jutland, that Germany had little chance of toppling British naval supremacy and the similar lack of progress in the land war in 1916 finally convinced the kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg that a new campaign of submarine warfare was the only possible way to achieve victory. Despite the likelihood that such a campaign would result in American entry into the war, the Germans believed they could bring Britain to her knees before American power could be felt in Europe. If tonnage sunk is the criterion of success, this time the campaign in its early stages held definite promise, at least until the end of the summer of 1917, when the British introduced an effective convoy system. The worst repercussion for the Germans was, however, the entry of the United States into the war in April. The submarine war was to be continued to the end, but by July 1918 the turning point had come, because by then the British were producing more tonnage of new shipping every month than the Germans were sinking. In the air, as we have noted, the Germans also took the initiative in
expanding the boundaries of combat. Thus, at every level, in the war on land,
at sea, and in the sky, it was the Germans who usually tried the most novel
methods first. It was they who most blatantly stretched international
standards of behavior and morality. In all these areas and aspects of
warfare, the year 1916 assumed great importance. Many of the new ideas were
first tried out in 1915-- gas, submarine warfare-- so that year becomes in
retrospect a transitional year; but 1916 saw the advent and acceptance of the
new war in its most spectacular dimensions. Many were aware that momentous
changes were afoot. Georges Blachon published two
articles in early 1916 in the Revue des
deux mondes entitled "La Guerre nouvelle" and
"La Guerre qui se transforme sous nos yeux." ("The New
War" and "The War That Is Changing Before Our Eyes.") 168 In methods, tactics, and instruments of war, Germany took the
initiative in 1914. The war was to bring a revolution in the European spirit
and, as a corollary, in the European state structure. Germany was the
revolutionary power of Europe. Located in the center of the continent, she
set out to become the leader of Europe, the heart of Europe, as she put it.
Germany not only represented the idea of revolution in this war; she backed the
forces of revolution everywhere, whatever their ultimate goals. She helped
Roger Casement and the Irish nationalists in their struggle against Britain,
and she shipped Lenin back to Russia from Switzerland to foment revolution in
Petrograd. What was important above all for Germans was the overthrow of the
old structures. That was the whole point of the war. Once that had been
achieved, the revolutionary dynamic would proceed to erect new structures
valid for the new situation. 169 |