Under the impact of a series of small strokes, Hardie's brain was starting to go. He sent a note to Sylvia Pankhurst from his latest hydrotherapy spa, misspelling her name and saying that he was leaving shortly "with no more mind control than when I came." His family began to fear letting him go out for walks alone. But Sylvia's sister Christabel showed him no mercy. In a July 1915 issue of her WSPU newspaper, she printed a cartoon showing Kaiser Wilhelm II giving "Keir von Hardie" a bag of gold. Sylvia turned to her mother, begging her to stop such attacks. "He is dying," she wrote. Emmeline did not answer.
At sea, as on land, the proper war of the textbooks was nowhere to be found. The mighty guns of the behemoth dreadnoughts that Britain had invested so many billions in building, and their tens of thousands of sailors, were useless against the real naval threat from Germany, which turned out to be a weapon that neither side had previously paid much attention to, the submarine. (Various pre-1914 British admirals had grumbled that submarines were "un-English," or "the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface," or "an underhanded method of attack"; one had called for captured submarine crews to be hanged as pirates.) Germany's small but state-of-the-art fleet of U-boats sent 227 British merchant ships to the bottom of the ocean in 1915. The Royal Navy searched desperately for a counter-weapon.
More bad news also came from the Gallipoli Peninsula, where the Turks were not playing their expected role as Orientals who could be conquered with ease. They had German arms, good discipline, and fine generalship. Many of the Allied soldiers killed by Turkish machine guns never made it out of the small craft landing on Gallipoli's beaches; they were packed into the boats so tightly that they remained sitting up even after being shot dead. The troops who did manage to come ashore never managed to advance more than five miles in from the coast. All told, the Allies suffered well over 200,000 killed and wounded. Before the end of the year they decided to abandon the campaign.
Things were even worse in Russia. In May 1915, on the one section of the front where the Tsar's armies had won substantial territory, from the lackadaisical Austro-Hungarians, the Germans stiffened their ally with a strong infusion of troops and artillery and began methodically pushing the Russians far back into their homeland. Avoiding major attacks in the west, Germany poured all its offensive effort for the year into expanding eastward, and the Central Powers advanced steadily some 300 miles until cold weather and swampy ground finally halted them. The new front line left a wide swath of the Russian Empire—much of what today is Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania—in enemy hands. During the six months of the relentless offensive, the Russian army lost an estimated 1.4 million men, or more than 7,500 a day. By July, the general staff had alerted all commanders to watch for Bolshevik propaganda leaflets concealed in packages sent to the troops from home, and the army was hit by its first large wave of desertions. In August, capturing a besieged fortress, German troops took 90,000 Russian prisoners in a single day, including 30 generals.
As the Russian army slowly retreated on a front more than 600 miles long, its troops destroyed crops, houses, railways, entire cities, anything that might be of use to the enemy. In western Russia a zone of destruction gradually spread for hundreds of miles, where no food grew and few buildings stood. It was the Boer War's scorched-earth policy all over again, but on an immeasurably vaster scale. From this wasteland the retreating Russians also forcibly removed huge numbers of people. Targeted above all were non-Russian ethnic minorities, who the tsarist government feared would cooperate with the German occupiers. After bayoneting and hanging some people to start with, pillaging, whip-wielding Cossacks and other troops drove at least half a million Jews from their homes. Three-quarters of a million Poles were also forced to move east, and, in total, roughly the same number of Lithuanians, Latvians, and ethnic Germans. As these terrified refugees began their flight, they could often look back and see Russian soldiers setting fire to their homes or farms. A British military attaché with the Russian army passed a column of refugees 20 miles long. "Whole families with all their little worldly belongings piled on carts; two carts tied together and drawn by a single miserable horse; one family driving a cow; a poor old man and his wife each with a huge bundle of rubbish tied up in a sheet and slung on the back." By the end of 1915, Russia had well over three million homeless refugees—in caravans on the roads, packed into freight trains, or crowded into makeshift shelters in fields, forests, towns, and cities. A year later, there would be some six million. No one imagined that in a second global conflict less than three decades later the numbers would be so much higher, the expanse of blackened rubble so much wider.
The commander of the retreating Russian army, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, let it be known that after-dinner conversation at his headquarters should be on "diversionary themes not concerning the conduct of the war." In September he was gently eased into another job. The dreamy and indecisive Tsar Nicholas II himself took personal command of his armies. The Tsar, the British ambassador once observed, was "afflicted with the misfortune of being weak on every point except his own autocracy." He moved in at army headquarters in grand style, watched parades, toured the nearby countryside in his Rolls-Royce, played dominoes, read novels, and issued odd orders, at one point promoting all the officers who happened to attend a ceremonial dinner. "My brain is resting here ... no troublesome questions demanding thought," he wrote to his wife.
For the troops, however, rifles remained in short supply, and some infantry units moved up to the front carrying only axes. In December, part of Russia's 7th Army would march to their front-line positions without winter boots. Here and there, Russian soldiers began talking of mutiny, and, once the front line stabilized for winter, they started fraternizing with the Austro-Hungarians, visiting the enemy trenches, trading caps and helmets, and posing for photographs. In a desperate attempt to keep the troops disciplined, the Russian army's high command legalized flogging.
If Russia collapsed, it would mean that the full weight of German manpower and munitions would fall on Allied forces in the west. This only increased the pressure on Sir John French, who noticed grimly that VIP visitors like Prime Minister Asquith always made a point of visiting Haig's headquarters as well as his own when they came to France.
Meanwhile, plans were drawn up for the decisive battle, Sir John's final chance. Although the field marshal surely wished it could be otherwise, in the sector of the front where Britain and France had agreed the attack was to be launched, Haig was his subordinate commander. For his part, Haig assured everyone that this time they would reach the German rear areas and cut their lines of communication. He told a visiting French general that his men "were never in better heart and longing to have a fight." Among the units moved into advance positions was the Irish Guards battalion in which Lieutenant John Kipling eagerly awaited his first battle. Ominously, the attack was to take place near the northern French village of Loos, another coal-mining district where slag heaps offered protection to the German defenders and pithead elevator towers provided perfect observation posts.
In the preceding weeks, John's father had toured the Western Front, thanks to the War Office. Out of this came a bellicose series of newspaper articles, quickly turned into a book, France at War. Kipling termed the Germans "outside of all humanity," rejoicing when he saw a charred patch on the floor of a dressing station where a wounded German major had been burned alive when the building was set on fire by shelling. Noble France, he found, was without "human rubbish" like British pacifists. French soldiers and civilians he met echoed his righteous fury. "It is against wild beasts that we fight," said one Frenchwoman he quoted, or perhaps invented.
Although father and son were at one point within 20 miles of each other, the writer was sensitive enough to know that his son "wouldn't like to have me tracking him." John followed his father's movements through newspaper articles and the letters Rudyard wrote to him almost every day, which included bits of advice he picked up from Britis
h and French soldiers: put up wire netting to keep grenades out of your trenches; equip a man with a whistle to warn of falling mortar shells; when interrogating enemy prisoners, believe the private rather than the officer. Just as in the letters he had written John when he was a
child, Kipling sometimes made little drawings: a skirt worn by a music hall performer, a scene from a film, a diagram of how to put up that chicken wire. John replied with a story about a French farmer's pig that had got into his platoon's food supply and had to be chased away: "I don't think I have ever laughed so much in my life." In the midsummer heat, "my visage is the colour of a well smoked briar pipe," John reported. "We look like a Colonial regiment, we are so sun burnt.... I don't think I have ever felt so fit before."
As the battle at Loos approached, Sir John French, Haig recorded contemptuously in his diary, looked "older and fatter." This would be the biggest land offensive in British military history, and French knew his job was on the line. "Whatever may happen I shall have to bear the brunt of it," he wrote to his mistress Winifred Bennett on September 18, 1915, "and in cricket language they may 'Change the bowler."'
Writing home a few days later, John Kipling asked for "a really good pair of bedroom slippers (fluffy & warm with strong soles)." Then, after an 18-mile march through rain: "Just a hurried line as we start off tonight. The front-line trenches are nine miles off from here so it wont be a very long march. This is THE great effort to break through & end the war.... One will be in the thick of it tomorrow."
12. NOT THIS TIDE
MORE THAN ANY previous war, this one depended on huge quantities of industrial products and the raw materials needed to make them. The Germans soon coined a word for it, Materialschlact, the battle of materiel. Among the more important goods was precision optical equipment—aerial reconnaissance camera lenses, periscopes, rangefinders, telescopic sights for sniper rifles, and binoculars. All were essential, particularly the last: when the lives of his men on the battlefield could depend on locating an enemy sniper or machine-gunner, every officer or NCO needed a reliable pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. The British military, however, was running disastrously short of binoculars. An appeal to the public brought in some 2,000 pairs (including four each from the King and Queen), but not the tens of thousands needed. Manufacturing high-quality lenses requires special glass that is difficult to make: it must transmit light without flaws, dimming, or distortion, yet be strong enough not to crack or shatter when ground and polished. Optical factories in England were capable of increasing their output only slowly.
And so, in mid-1915, just as preparations were getting under way for the big attack at Loos, British authorities turned to the world's leading manufacturer of precision optics: Germany.
Before the war, German companies, like the famous firm of Carl Zeiss in Jena, had been major exporters of top-of-the-line optical goods. From London, an agent of the Ministry of Munitions was quietly dispatched to neutral Switzerland to propose a deal. The answer from Germany was prompt and positive, and the outlines of an agreement were sketched out. The German War Office would immediately supply 8,000 to 10,000 each of two types of binoculars, one for infantry officers and one for artillery officers. "For the future," reads the dry official record of the History of the Ministry of Munitions, "they were prepared to deliver, six weeks after the signing of the contract, 10,000 to 15,000 [of each type] and they were even prepared to demobilise special workmen from the Army to enable these orders to go through quickly." Of lower-grade binoculars for NCOs, Germany could supply 10,000 to 12,000 immediately and 5,000 a month thereafter. It would also be happy to supply 5,000 to 10,000 telescopic sights per month "and to provide as many rangefinders as the British Government required. In order to obtain samples of the instruments, it was suggested that the British Forces might inspect the equipment of captured German officers and artillery."
And what did Germany want in return for this astonishing bounty of tools that would better aim British rifles and howitzers at German troops? One treasured commodity, vital for everything from telephone wires to factory machinery to the tires and fan belts of motor vehicles, a commodity unavailable to Germany because of a tight blockade imposed by the Royal Navy, but abundant in the Allies' African and Asian colonies: rubber. Without rubber the Germans, among many other problems, faced the prospect of using steel tires on their army trucks, which rapidly chewed roads to bits. The rubber, it was agreed, would be delivered to Germany at the Swiss border.
During August 1915, the first month of this top-secret devil's bargain, the Germans delivered to the British even more than first agreed to: some 32,000 pairs of binoculars, 20,000 of them the higher-quality types for officers. Records that would show how long the trade continued, or how much rubber the Germans received in return, have disappeared. More frustrating, there seems to be no written trace of what was in the minds of the men who negotiated this extraordinary agreement. Did each side think it was getting the better deal? Were both British and German business executives so eager for profit that nothing else mattered? Or did the war have such all-encompassing momentum that, to better fight it, anything at all seemed justified, even trading with the enemy?
Looking through exactly these kinds of high-grade binoculars late on the morning of September 26, 1915, German officers at the front near Loos could not believe what they saw. On the second day of a major battle, roughly 10,000 British troops were walking toward them across more than half a mile of no man's land. This was not a case—as had happened before and would happen again—in which a preliminary bombardment had failed to destroy German machine-gun nests. Before this day's British attack, there had been no bombardment. The German machine guns were in protected bunkers, behind long, intact rolls of barbed wire, in belts sometimes up to 30 feet thick.
The British, according to a German account, moved forward in ten columns, "each about a thousand men, all advancing as if carrying out a parade-ground drill.... Never had machine guns had such straightforward work to do ... with barrels becoming hot ... they traversed to and fro along the enemy's ranks; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The result was devastating. The enemy could be seen falling literally in hundreds, but they continued to march." Some British officers were mounted on horseback, and so made even more conspicuous targets. German riflemen stood on the parapets of their trenches to fire at the fast-diminishing ranks that kept moving until they reached the first row of unbroken barbed wire. "Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle the survivors turned and began to retire."
These British troops, most of them volunteers who had joined the army after the war broke out, had arrived in France only weeks earlier. As the survivors retreated, the Germans, in a moment of mercy rare for either side, held their fire. "My machine gunners were so filled with pity, remorse and nausea," a German commander later said, "...that they refused to fire another shot."
The battle at Loos had begun the previous day, after Kitchener himself had reviewed the soldiers and congratulated them on the honor that had fallen to them. For Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the troops involved, it was a promising opportunity: if the attack succeeded, he would win great glory; if it failed, the person blamed would likely be the already precarious Sir John French. The two feuding generals did not even have a telephone line connecting their temporary command posts. Meanwhile, the Germans, knowing some sort of an attack was coming, had strengthened their defenses. In photographs from before the attack, the chalky soil around Loos gives the parapets of German trenches the ghostly look of long rows of snowdrifts stretching across the summer fields.
This was the first assault in which British troops used poison gas. For in scientific, industrialized warfare—as would be true four decades later with the atomic bomb—no nation would have a new weapon to itself for long. Haig ordered 5,000 six-foot-long cylinders of chlorine, weighing 150 pounds each, to be transported to the British front line by night, to maintain secrecy. For the last part of the way each of these had to
be carried through communication trenches slung from a pole resting on the shoulders of two men. More pairs of soldiers carried lengths of pipe, to be attached to each cylinder, in order to spray the gas over the parapet of the trench and into no man's land. One pipe carrier's memories are a reminder of how much of the war's torment lay in merely getting supplies to the front: "The communication trench is zig-zag from beginning to end. The result was that we had to carry the pipes right above our heads in order to get them along the trench, otherwise at every corner they would get stuck. The communication trench is 3½ miles long and the journey took us between 7 and 8 hours. Rain was falling during the whole of the journey. In many places the trench was over a foot deep in water."
When September 25, the day for the attack, dawned, Haig ordered the gas released. The wind, however, was very slight. In some places the gas made it to the German lines, where soldiers had already donned their masks. In others, it drifted into no man's land and stayed there—which meant that British troops had to attack through it as they tried to pierce what, in some places, were seven to ten rows of German barbed wire. In a few spots, the breeze blew the gas back into the British trenches. All told, the British suffered more casualties from their own gas than the Germans. The surprise gas release was supposed to substitute for a massive artillery bombardment, which would have signaled an attack was imminent, and in any case, shells were still in short supply. But neither Haig nor French seems to have given much thought to one crucial fact: gas does not cut barbed wire.