If the supply of ammunition cannot be maintained on a considerably increased scale it follows that the offensive efforts of the army must be spasmodic and separated by a considerable interval of time. They cannot, therefore, lead to decisive results.47
The Germans responded to Neuve Chapelle by rejecting the prewar defensive doctrine of ‘one line, and that a strong one’, and by beginning the construction of a second defensive position, itself composed of several trenches, far enough behind the first to compel an attacker to mount a distinct assault on each. The British found the battle’s lessons less easy to discern. One critic recalled seeing follow-up waves ‘packed like salmon in the bridge-pool at Galway’ as they awaited the word to go forward, and the battle did highlight the serious problem, never fully solved during the war, of how to establish effective communications between attacking troops and their reserves. The high concentration of artillery was actually higher than that achieved at the beginning of the Somme offensive in the summer of 1916, and it was to transpire that what was eventually to become known as a lightning bombardment was actually more effective than a more methodical preparation.
The logic that encouraged the Allies to attack on the Western Front, to recover friendly territory, worked in reverse for the Germans, and persuaded them to remain on the defensive, holding gains which would prove useful bargaining counters if there was a compromise peace. They made only three major exceptions, in 1915, in 1916 at Verdun, and in the spring of 1918. The first was on 22 April 1915, when the Germans launched an attack north of Ypres, just west of the junction between British and French troops, behind a cloud of chlorine gas. Like the British at Neuve Chapelle they were unable to exploit the very serious damage done to the French defenders. The very gallant stand of 1st Canadian Division helped check the exploitation, and there followed a broken-backed battle as the British launched repeated, badly-coordinated counterattacks. This second battle of Ypres cost the Allies over 60,000 casualties, most of them British. It cost Smith-Dorrien his job, largely because of Sir John French’s long-standing prejudice. He was replaced by Sir Herbert Plumer, under whose direction the British held a much reduced salient east of Ypres.
The British attacked again that spring. On 9 May 1915 they assaulted Aubers Ridge, in a movement designed to support a French offensive further south, losing 11,500 men for no gain. This time Sir John French squarely blamed is failure on lack of shells: he had been ordered to send 22,000 to Gallipoli, and The Times correspondent, Charles Repington, a retired officer who was staying at French’s headquarters, supported his line, declaring on 19 May: ‘Need for Shells: British attacks checked: Limited supply the cause: A lesson from France.’ French also sent two of his staff to London to pass documents to David Lloyd George, a member of Asquith’s Cabinet, and to opposition leaders. The government might have survived the shell scandal had it been an isolated problem, but the resignation of Lord Fisher as First Sea Lord persuaded Asquith to form a coalition government. Lloyd George took up the newly-established portfolio of Minister of Munitions, but, although he made a point of appointing ‘men of push and go’ who could ‘create and hustle along a gigantic enterprise’, the first consignment of ammunition ordered by the new ministry did not arrive until October 1915: the heavily-criticised War Office had in fact succeeded in generating a nineteen-fold increase in ammunition supply in the first six months of the war.
On 16 May the next British offensive, at Festubert, just south of Aubers Ridge, fared little better, gaining 1,000 yards on a front of 2,000 for a cost of 16,500 men. Another attack, this time at Givenchy, went no better, and Lieutenant General Sir Henry Rawlinson, whose IV Corps had played the leading role in all these spring attacks, found himself passed over for command of the newly-formed 3rd Army, which went instead to General Sir Charles Monro, who extended the British line further south as far as Vimy Ridge.
French and Joffre met at Chantilly on 24 June and declared themselves committed to continuing offensives on the Western Front: without them the Germans could shift troops to another front for an attack of their own. Passive defence was, therefore, ‘bad strategy, unfair to Russia, Serbia and Italy and therefore wholly inadmissible’. An Anglo-French meeting at Calais on 6 July gained Kitchener’s somewhat grudging support for a large-scale offensive, and a full Allied conference at Chantilly the following day confirmed the principle of a co-ordinated Allied attack on all fronts. Joffre’s strategy for the Western Front had actually changed little. Previous British attacks had been designed to support French thrusts further south. And now he proposed that the BEF should attack at Loos, in the shadow of Vimy Ridge, with one French army attacking just to its south and the main French blow falling around Rheims in Champagne.
Sir John French was not happy. On 12 July he looked at the Loos sector, and thought that ‘the actual terrain of the attack is no doubt difficult, as it is covered with all the features of a closely inhabited flourishing mining district – factories – slag heaps – shafts – long rows of houses – etc, etc’.48 He proposed to fight chiefly with artillery, but Joffre demanded ‘a large and powerful attack … executed in the hope of success and carried through to the end’. Then Kitchener threw his weight into the balance: Sir John was ordered to help the French, ‘even though, by doing so, we suffered very heavy losses indeed’.49 Once he had received this unequivocal order French’s spirits lifted, and he hoped that gas, which would now be available to him in retaliation for German use of gas at second Ypres, would be ‘effective up to two miles, and it is practically certain that it will be quite effective in many places if not along the whole line attacked’.50
The battle of Loos was to be the biggest fought by the British army in its history thus far. First Army was to attack with the six divisions of I and IV Corps, with the newly-formed XI Corps, comprising the Guards Division and two inexperienced New Army divisions, in reserve to exploit success. Early on the morning of 26 September Haig gave the order to launch the gas from its cylinders, and the infantry went forward at 6.30. On the southern part of the front there was considerable success: Loos itself was taken, and the German first position overrun. However, it proved impossible to get the reserves up in time to exploit these gains. French, probably concerned that Haig might commit them prematurely, had unwisely retained control of them, and it was typical of his old-fashioned style of command that when he heard of the break-in he drove up to see the corps commander and give his orders in person. Precious time was wasted.
The two New Army divisions, moving up along busy roads with rain hammering down, were not in fact ready to go forward till mid-morning on the 26th. When they reached the intact German second opposition they were very roughly handled: the twelve attacking battalions, some 10,000 strong, lost 8,000 officers and men in under four hours. The history of the German 26th Infantry Regiment is deservedly much-quoted.
Never had machine guns had such straightforward work to do, nor done it so effectively; with barrels burning hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks unceasingly; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen literally falling in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption. The extended lines of men began to get confused by this terrific punishment, but they went doggedly on, some even reaching the wire entanglement in front of the reserve line, which their artillery had scarcely touched. Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle, the survivors turned and began to retire.51
A subsequent attack was described by Captain W. L. Weetman, one of the few surviving officers of 8/Sherwood Foresters, in a letter to his former commanding officer.
We got across the open to attack a well-known spot [the Hohenzollern Redoubt] which you probably know of, though I think I had better leave it nameless … Of course they heard us coming and we soon knew it.
Young Goze was the first down, a nasty one I’m afraid. Then Strachan disappeared along the trench and I fear was killed. Y
oung Hanford fell, I don’t know when but was killed at once and I saw his body later on after it was light … Becher was outside before the attack directing us with a flashlight and got a bullet in the thigh – explosive – and lay out for nearly 2 days. Before we had finished Ashwell and Vann got nasty ones through the shoulder, and that left only the CO and myself …
About half an hour before the relief was finished our dear Colonel was killed instantly by a sniper, whilst trying to locate Becher’s body, as we then thought he had been killed. It was the last straw and I took on the remnants to Rescue Trenches and then broke down. I thank God I was spared, but it is awful to think of all those brave fellows who have gone.52
Loos cost the British more than 43,000 men, including three major generals and the only son of the poet and writer Rudyard Kipling. It was the end for Sir John French. Haig ensured that the papers on his handling of the reserves were circulated in London, and French’s political support, waning since the spring, at last collapsed. He left France on 18 December, resentful and embittered, returning home to a peerage (he quipped bitterly that he might take his title from the town of St-Omer, which had housed his headquarters, and be Lord Sent Homer) and the post of commander in chief of home forces. Haig replaced him, and General Sir William Robertson, French’s chief of staff since early 1915, became chief of the imperial general staff in London, where he staunchly supported Haig’s insistency on the primacy of the Western Front. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, previously assistant to the CIGS, replaced him at Haig’s headquarters.
The failure of the September offensive did not deter Jofffe, and Haig inherited the requirement for another Allied offensive. This time it was to take a new form, elaborated at a meeting at Chantilly on 14 February 1916. Instead of the familiar two-pronged attack, with an Anglo-French jab in Artois in the north and a French thrust in Champagne in the south, the two armies were to attack side by side on the River Somme. The British took over the front from Arras to Maricourt, just north of the Somme, in early 1916, forming a 4th Army, commanded by the happy Rawlinson, in order to do so. Haig was especially anxious to relieve French troops because, on 21 February, the Germans had begun their attack on the French fortress of Verdun. Although it is impossible to be sure of the motivation of General Erich von Falkenhayn, who had taken over from the exhausted Moltke as chief of the general staff in the autumn of 1914, it is likely that the traditional view remains correct: he was attacking at Verdun not in the hope of making territorial gain, but with the deliberate intention of provoking an attritional battle which would ‘bleed the French army white’. Haig had never had any realistic alternative to the place of that summer’s Allied offensive: and now, with the attack on Verdun, he was to be constrained in time too.
In April general headquarters was moved south from St-Omer to Montreuil, better placed to watch over the extended British front, and on 26 May Haig entertained Joffre in his (remarkably modest) quarters in the nearby Château de Beaurepaire. All too well aware that many of his New Army troops, upon whom the battle would largely depend, were not yet fully trained, Haig suggested that he might not be able to attack till August. Joffre exploded that there would be no French army left by then. Haig soothed the old gentleman with some 1840 brandy, but it is clear that he fully understood the coalition dimension of the battle: on 10 June he told Kiggell that ‘the object of our attack is to relieve pressure on Verdun’.53
We have already seen how soldiers’ spirits lifted when they left Flanders for the wider horizons of the Somme, and Rawlinson’s reaction was no exception. ‘It is capital country in which to undertake an offensive when we get a sufficiency of artillery,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘for the observation is excellent and with plenty of guns and ammunition we ought to be able to avoid the heavy losses which the infantry have always suffered on previous occasions.’54 The same rolling landscape that so cheered men moving to the Somme provided the Germans with admirable ground for defence, and Rawlinson faced two well-prepared lines, with a third in the early stages of construction. The front line, with the Roman road from Albert to Bapaume slashing obliquely across it, incorporated fortified villages like Serre, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, and Fricourt, and the pattern of spurs and re-entrants provided admirable fields of fire.
The chalk enabled the Germans to construct deep dugouts, some more than 30 feet deep and effectively impervious to destruction by all but the heaviest guns. These were no surprise to the British, who had already captured one near Touvent Farm, in the north of the attack sector. Rawlinson and his chief of staff devised a plan of attack based on the methodical reduction of strongpoints by artillery and the step-by-step advance of infantry; but this ‘bite and hold’ project did not please Haig, who wanted something bolder, ‘with the chance of breaking the German line’. There is, though, evidence that Haig did not see a breakthrough as the battle’s most likely option. His head of intelligence, Brigadier General John Charteris, wrote in spring that: ‘DH looks on it as a “wearing-out” battle, with just the off-chance that it might wear the Germans right out. But this is impossible.’55
The eventual plan of attack was a compromise. It embodied a week’s bombardment which saw Rawlinson’s gunners firing a million and a half shells, the explosion of mines beneath selected points of the German line, and a massed assault by 4th Army’s infantry behind a creeping barrage. Two divisions of General Sir Edmund Allenby’s 3rd Army were to attack at Gommecourt, just beyond Rawlinson’s northern boundary, to distract German attention from the main effort. Finally, Lieutenant General Sir Hubert Gough’s Reserve Army (renamed 5th Army towards the battle’s end) was on hand to push through the gap. On 22 June, with his artillery bracing itself to unleash the heaviest bombardment thus far delivered by British gunners, Rawlinson warned his corps commanders: ‘I had better make it quite clear that it may not be possible to break the enemy’s line and push the cavalry through in the first rush.’56
Much of what went wrong on that bright, bloody morning of 1 July 1916, the British army’s most costly day, with 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them killed and 2,152 missing, was determined before the first shot was fired. Rawlinson’s initial deductions were correct, though even his ‘bite-and-hold’ scheme would have been costly. But a methodical bombardment which forfeited surprise and yet failed to deal adequately with the German front line, and scarcely at all with the second, out of range to Rawlinson’s field artillery in its initial gun-lines, meshed unhappily with Haig’s insistence on the need for rapid exploitation. Rawlinson’s artillery density, with one field gun to every 21 yards of trench and a heavy gun for every 57, was less than had been achieved at Neuve Chapelle. And although a recent historian has described subsequent criticism of the plan as ‘hindsight, untroubled by any understanding of the realities of the time’, it did not require lofty strategic vision to suspect that the artillery would not do all that was expected of it.57 Rifleman Percy Jones of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles (waiting to attack at Gommecourt with 56th London Division) wrote: ‘I do not see how the stiffest bombardment is going to kill them all. Nor do I see how the whole of the enemy’s artillery is going to be silenced.’58
The strategic imperative which had taken the British to the Somme ensured that there could be no let-up despite the heavy casualties and disappointing gains of the first day. Rawlinson bewilderingly decided to jettison the normal military principle of reinforcing success in favour of consolidating the ground he had gained in the south – where the whole of the German first position on Montauban Ridge had been taken – and renewing his attack on untaken objectives further north. Haig overruled him, placed Gough in command of the northern sector of the battle, and told Rawlinson to press matters south of the Albert-Bapaume road. It took 4th Army a fortnight to secure positions from which it could assault the German second line on the Longueval-Bazentin Ridge, and the gruelling process involved a bitter battle for Mametz Wood in which 39th (Welsh) Division would be badly mauled.
Rawlinson’s next ma
jor attack was delivered under cover of darkness early on 14 July 1916. Crucially, the artillery density was far higher than on the first day of the battle – ‘two-thirds of the number of guns … would have to demolish only one-eighteenth of the length of trench’.59 Darkness limited, though because of ‘fixed lines’ did not wholly negate, the effect of the defenders’ machine guns, and the final five minutes of intense bombardment added psychological dislocation to the considerable physical destruction achieved over the previous three days. The attackers secured the ridge, although, crucially, they failed to take High Wood and Delville Wood, both of which sat like sponges on the crest and would enable the Germans to seep troops forward over the weeks that followed. The plan for cavalry exploitation did not work, less because of the cavalry’s inherent limitations than the familiar problem of initiating exploitation as soon as an opportunity was identified.
Fourth Army spent the next two months on Longueval Ridge, fighting what Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson rightly call ‘The Forgotten Battles’, a series of local offensives in which Rawlinson never brought his full weight to bear. It does not require hindsight to recognise this. Company Quartermaster Sergeant Scott Macfie of the King’s Liverpool Regiment told his brother that:
The want of preparation, the vague orders, the ignorance of the objective & geography, the absurd haste, and in general the horrid bungling were scandalous. After two years of war it seems that our higher commanders are still without common sense. In any well regulated organisation a divisional commander would be shot for incompetence – here another regiment is ordered to attempt the same task in the same maddening way.60