John Terraine - The Western Front 1914-1918

THE WESTERN FRONT
19141918

By the same author

MONS

DOUGLAS HAIG:
The Educated Soldier

JOHN TERRAINE

THE WESTERN FRONT
19141918

First published in 1964 by Hutchinson & Co Ltd
Published in 2003, in this format, by
P E N & S W O R D M I L I T A R Y C L A S S I C S
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Limited
47 Church Street
Barnsley
S. Yorkshire
S70 2AS

John Terraine, 1964, 2003

ISBN 0 85052 920 4

A CIP record for this book is
available from the British Library

Printed in England by
CPI UK

To those who were less fortunate than myself;
who were born in time to serve on the Western Front.

Acknowledgements are due to the Editors of History Today for permission to reprint Armistice 1918 (November 1958), The Genesis of the Western Front (July 1960), Lloyd Georges Dilemma (May 1961), Lloyd Georges Expedients (April and May 1963), The Battle of Guise (February 1960) and Big Battalions: The Napoleonic Legacy (June 1962); to the Editor of the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution for permission to reprint Passchendaele and Amiens (May and August 1959) and Haig: 18611928 (November 1961); and to the Editor of The Spectator for permission to reprint A Soldiers Soldier (June 1957).

My thanks are due to authors and publishers who have given permission for quotations from the following books: A Subalterns War by Charles Edmonds, published by Peter Davies Ltd.; Haldane: An Autobiography, published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.; The World Crisis by Winston S. Churchill, published by Odhams Books Ltd.; Soldiers and Statesmen 1914 1918 by Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, published by Cassell & Co. Ltd.; and Men and Power by Lord Beaverbrook, published by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.

PLATES

MAPS

THE WESTERN FRONT, 19141918, was a unique phenomenon. It was also, for the nations whose armies were devoured by it, a shocking phenomenon. This shock was produced by the great losses which the armies sustained, both cumulatively and incident by incident, apparently for little purpose. A great sense of waste was thus engendered, and this was almost wholly due to the exceptional quality of the Western Front itself: its grotesquely static nature.

The losses themselves were not exceptional. They were probably exceeded, even at the time, by those on the less publicized Eastern Front, where Russia alone is said to have lost two million men in 1915, and a million more in 1916, and where the Habsburg Empire met its doom. During the Second World War the Eastern Front witnessed even more dreadful scenes and greater bloodbaths; the Soviet Union revealed, in its post-war census returns, a loss of twenty million people between 1941 and 1945, 10 per cent of her total population. These considerations, of course, were beyond the knowledge of the 19141918 generation; laymen and politicians understandably quailed at what seemed to be an unexampled evil. The scale of events was, indeed, unexampled; their character was not. Those who had studied military history (an unfashionable pursuit) could point to many occasions when a similar balance of force had produced similar dire results. They could add that the growing human and material resources of modern states had already visibly multiplied the cost of war, and might be expected to go on doing so.

It was, above all, the entry of the masses into war that produced the most fearsome slaughters; this was a process which began in Europe with the French Revolution. During the Napoleonic period, all the important European nations except England became familiar with the sanguinary and destructive tendency of the new warfare. One of the essays in this book will point out the folly of supposing that Napoleon possessed some answer to this problem; on the contrary, he was one of its principal originators. His last battle, Waterloo, illustrates the case: according to the latest researches, the cost of Waterloo was 10,813 dead and 36,195 wounded, a total of just under 47,000 out of some 150,000 engaged. This is roughly the same proportion of 30 per cent of the overall British losses on that fatal and notorious day, July ist, 1916, of the First Battle of the Somme, when the British Army lost 57,000 men.

Overall percentages, of course, conceal terrible individual statistics: on the Somme, on July 1st, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment lost 710 officers and men, and was literally annihilated; in the same division, the 2nd Royal Fusiliers had 561 casualties, the 16th Middlesex 549, the 1st K.O.S.B. 552, the 1st Inniskilling Fusiliers 568, and the 1st Border Regiment 575, all these constituting percentages of well over 60. The 16th Royal Scots (34th Division) had the melancholy distinction of 333 dead out of 466 who fella most unusual and dreadful proportion.

Waterloo tells a similar tale. There, it was the defeated French who contributed most to the carnage; but there were grim losses among some of the British regiments. The 1st Dragoon Guards lost 246 out of 571; the 6th Dragoons, 217 out of 445; the 3rd Battalion 1st Foot Guards, 342 out of 860; the 30th Foot, 228 out of 635; the 73 rd Foot, 280 out of 498; the 1st Battalion 95th Rifles, 156 out of 418, and the 2nd Battalion of that regiment, 246 out of 655. The British total of 7,000 out of 24,000 engaged once again approaches closely the 30 per cent which seems to be the minimum that evenly balanced modern battle exacts.

If, after Waterloo, there was time for the Western European nations to forget this lesson it was duly repeated in the Crimea. But the most salutary warning came from America, where an industrial society, making full use of the most up-to-date power-sourcesteamrevealed what follows the mobilization of nations so equipped. The American Civil War (18611865) ended with a million dead; within that figure were contained battles of extraordinary bloodiness: 115 regiments63 Union and 52 Confederatesustained losses of more than 50 per cent in a single engagement. At Antietam 82.3 per cent of the officers and men of the First Texas Regiment were killed or wounded. At Gettysburg the First Minnesota Regiment lost 82 per cent.

Yet, alarming though these figures were, they did not express the full danger that lay ahead. That was revealed in a time comparison; for at Waterloo, nine hours contained the whole butchery, and three days fighting sufficed to overthrow Napoleon; the North took four years to defeat the outwardly much weaker and less industrialized South. Evidently, a balance of force had somehow been struck, and the effect of such a balance was to be seen in the grim casualty lists of the war. In 1914 a similar balance was arrived at, and the results were the same; only now it was not one nation divided against itself that fought, but the whole concourse of civilized powers.

Casualtieseven very great casualtiescan be made bearable if they are accompanied by striking achievements, best of all if they lead to swift and decisive results. On the Western Front, between 1914 and 1918, nothing of that kind seemed to be happening. Instead, at a human cost which mounted steadily as the armies grew to their unprecedented hugeness, only the most seemingly insignificant gains of ground were made, and decisive results constantly failed to reward even the most ferocious struggles.

The Second Battle of Champagne, the culminating offensive by which the French hoped to expel the Germans from their soil in 1915, produced 145,000 French casualtiesand a gain that was nowhere deeper than 3,000 yards. The Battle of Verdun swayed to and fro for nearly ten months of 1916, costing the French and Germans between them about three-quarters of a million casualties, and at the end of it the front was almost exactly where it had been when the whole thing started. The Battle of the Somme, in the same year, cost the British Army 415,000 casualties in four and a half months, and when it closed under the onset of a pitiless winter ground objectives laid down for the first day were still unattained. In 1917 the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) cost the British about a quarter of a million men in three and a half months, and their furthest advance was some seven miles. Not until 1918 was any appreciable movement felt on the Western Front.