World War I, 1914-18
2.2. From Movement to Attrition
monstrous, yet compared with the 9 million men that Germany and France had under arms at this point it carried little weight. As Churchill was to write to his wife not long thereafter, entire
“avalanches of men”6 were preparing to take the place of the dead and the wounded.
Thereafter, almost without pause, the rst battle of the Aisne, the battle of the Yser, and the rst battle of Ypres came and went. So heavy were German losses at Ypres that the battle acquired the nickname Kin-dermord, the massacre of the innocent. Yet, in all the slaughter, a decision did not result. Having reached the channel at Ostend on October 15, the Germans kept almost the whole of Belgium except for a small corner in the southwest where the Belgian army, having broken out of Antwerp, succeeded in maintaining a toehold. The French in their turn retained control over their channel ports, without which continued British participation in the war would have had to be routed through Brittany and the Gulf of Biscay and made considerably more di cult than it was. More important from our point of view, the stalemate led to the opening of trench warfare.
supervising the works, and allocating so and so many yards of front to corps, divisions, and regiments. Back home, training soon came to include using the spade as well as the ri e. Within months, on both sides, vast networks of zigzagging trenches appeared, until it became theoretically possible for a soldier to walk from the channel coast all the way to the Swiss border without once having to show his head above ground.
Most trenches were up to ten feet wide and about eight feet deep.
This enabled people to walk upright in them, but required steps so that they could re and often ladders so they could sortie and attack. Almost from the beginning, they ran in zigzags, the idea being to provide better cover from shell re and ensure that resistance could continue in case part of the system was invaded by enemy troops. Most trenches were open to the sky, but here and there parts of them were covered both against the weather and to provide shelter against weapons such as trench mortars and hand grenades. Some trenches had boardwalks for keeping out the mud, but the majority did not. Access was provided by communications trenches that, becoming shallower as they ran to the rear, zigzagged across the terrain in a similar way.
The rst systems were simple and consisted only of a single line.
As early as 1915, however, both sides began experimenting with forti ed belts consisting of layers of parallel trenches. First came the forward line, shallow, thinly held, and serving mainly for observation. Next came the main ghting line, located, if possible, on the reverse slope of a ridge—in Flanders, anything more than a couple of yards high constituted a ridge—so as to be out of the enemy’s sight and harder to target. Partly because they took better care of their men, partly because they spent most of the war on the defensive, the Germans invested more in their trenches than did the British and the French. Much of the credit on the German side was due to expert miners who directed the construction of deep dugouts (Stollen). Most Stollen housed a platoon or so, providing them with very good protection against anything but a direct hit by a heavy shell. All that was left above ground was a small number of
lookouts. As soon as the barrage lifted, they would alert their comrades, who would seize their weapons and race outside as fast as they could.
Some systems also included a third defensive line, located out of range of all but the biggest guns and intended mainly to serve as shelter for troops as they assembled in preparation for the counterattack. By the middle of the war, most systems probably varied between four and six miles in depth. Also at this time, most systems were more or less continuous as far as the topography allowed. In 1917–18, however, the Germans started experimenting with individual strongholds. Each stronghold might be manned by a force of company strength. Each was independent of the rest, and each one was so designed as to be capable of defending itself not just to the front but in all directions, the rear included. The idea was that they should act as breakwaters, continuing to resist even after they had been surrounded or bypassed, causing the attack to disperse and peter out.
Whatever their precise form, all trench systems were completed by the laying of millions upon millions of mines—suitable for protecting a pre-selected battle eld—as well as miles upon miles of barbed wire to entangle attackers and expose them to defensive re.
At places, the wire could be dozens of yards thick. In others, it was left deliberately thin so as to entice attackers into killing grounds;
the more numerous the directions from which the defenders could bring re to bear, the greater the slaughter they could commit.
Between major o enses, when the times were quiet, life in the trenches was uncomfortable and dangerous. Sniper re, sudden artillery bombardments, attacks from the air, one’s own raiding activities, and the raids launched by the enemy in response all resulted in a steady trickle of casualties. No major battle took place on the Western Front between December 1915 and June 1916, and yet six thousand British soldiers were killed. Between January and April 1916, during a period of relative calm, the Austrians lost
fteen thousand.7
According to a rule of the thumb used by the German army, at any given moment one out of twelve soldiers would be absent owing to sickness. Unhygienic conditions caused untreated wounds to fester and often caused intestinal problems. Cold and damp led to pulmonary diseases and trench foot. Conditions tended to be more tolerable in summer—but even then the trenches were hellish.
Fighting had always been the most stressful of all human activities by far, but hitherto combat had usually lasted hours or, at most, a few days. This was no longer true in 1914–18, when many battles, such as Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres, lasted for weeks, even months. Imagine a continuous concussion of exploding shells, the very air lled with screaming pieces of metal and noxious fumes from cordite or gas, the sound of screaming wounded, and the smell of dead comrades (a horrible mixture of rotting esh and excrement) left where they fell, perhaps weeks before.
The outcome was the appearance, apparently for the rst time in history, of masses of psychiatric casualties. In the German army alone, about one in twenty soldiers was a ected.8 These were men who, though their bodies appeared to be uninjured, displayed a variety of symptoms, from stammering to bed-wetting, trembling, and paralysis. Many of the symptoms resembled those that, before the war, had characterized females of the middle and upper classes (lower-class women were regarded as more or less immune).9 Accordingly, those su ering were classi ed as su ering from either neurasthenia—weakness of the nerves—or hysteria; the latter, despite the fact that they had no uteruses.
On pain of disintegration, armies could not a ord to treat their soldiers as leniently as hysterical women were. Some men, judged to be malingerers, were tried and punished. Most were summarily treated by being given a strong sedative that put them to sleep for a few days. After waking, they would be subjected to an additional few days of military-style exercises before being pronounced “cured”
and returned to their units. Those, however, were the fortunate ones. Patients who still showed symptoms were taken to rear-area
hospitals. There, hard-faced doctors subjected them to electrical shocks, some of which were so severe as to amount to real torture;
either they “recovered” or they did not. For example, in Britain after the war, sixty- ve thousand veterans drew pensions because psychological injuries made them un t for work, and of them nine thousand had to be hospitalized.
While the junior o cers, up to and including captains, lived and fought with their men under deplorable conditions, the same rarely applied to the remainder of the leadership. Senior commanders and their sta s usually took quarters in country houses situated up to thirty miles from the front. They lived in comfort, not seldom as their hosts’ table guests; the fact that they brought their own food with them usually secured them a warm welcome. Except for the occasional air attack, they were almost entirely out of harm’s way.
On the other hand, the most senior commanders virtually carried their countries’ weight on their shoulders, often for years on end. To avoid breaking under the strain, they were compelled to develop regular, punctilious habits that made them appear cold-blooded, aloof, and insensitive.10 Hindenburg slept soundly before the battle of Tannenberg, after the battle of Tan-nenberg, and, wags claimed, during the battle of Tannenberg. If the commander’s rst task is to keep up his subordinates’ con dence at all costs, then to that extent, even sleeping during a battle may have its uses.
Compared to the troops serving at the front, the situation of those positioned along the lines of communications was much more comfortable. Legally or otherwise, the rear-echelon troops had rst access to whatever the homeland could send its heroes, at the same time often enjoying the amenities of towns and villages. Among them were bathhouses, movie houses, co eehouses, and women who, especially in occupied territory, often sold themselves cheap.
For every professional prostitute, there was the amateur in search of a little food, warmth, and, perhaps, human kindness as well; such encounters have been described in the memoirs of Ludwig Renn and Carl Zuckmayer, among others.11 These marked di erences in living-conditions, not surprisingly, tended to cause tensions between
front and rear. For example, German troops spoke bitterly of Frontschweine (front-line swine) as opposed to Etappenhengste (rear- echelon studs).
At the time the war broke out, two-thirds of the ground forces consisted of infantrymen, and of those the overwhelming majority carried bolt-action, magazine-loading ri es. Four years later, the percentage of infantrymen had declined to slightly under half, and many of them no longer carried ri es but rather were assigned to machine-gun crews. These fearsome weapons, each of which developed repower equivalent to that of a platoon and a half, were e cient defensive weapons but did have an o ensive component. In attacks, they provided cover for advancing infantrymen by forcing the other side to keep their heads down, a tactic used by a young German company commander and future eld marshal, Erwin Rommel, in his famous 1917 attack on the Italian Front. On defense, when red from pre-prepared, carefully sited, and if possible en lading positions, the results of their use could be horri c. When French troops were mown down in Lorraine early in the war, the Germans themselves were appalled by the results.
These early machine guns tended to be clumsy and on the heavy side, which was one reason why most armies, instead of distributing them among the infantry, had originally considered them artillery weapons. Most models were water-cooled and required crews of two or three men to carry the weapon, cooling equipment, and ammunition, as well as to aim, re, and feed the ammunition belts.
And even if they could be carried forward on the assault, these qualities made machine guns unsuitable for the next phase of an assault, the ghting in the trench. Here even ri es, measuring a little over four feet even without bayonets, were not ideally suited for ghting in the restricted space trenches provided. As a result, 1915–16 saw limited use of the rst experimental submachine guns in the form of the German Bergman and the French Chauchat.
Another weapon that made its appearance in these years was the mortar. Also sometimes known as Coehorns, after their inventor, mortars had a long history dating back to the seventeenth century
when they were used against besieged cities; now that all warfare had turned into a gigantic siege, they again came into their own.
Mortars di ered from ordinary artillery in that the trajectories on which they red their bombs were much steeper than those permitted even by howitzers. Accordingly, they did not need a complicated recoil mechanism but were supported by a detachable base plate lying at on the ground. The smallest models could be disassembled and carried by two or three men; others were put on wheels so that they could be pulled or pushed. Under the conditions of trench warfare, mortars gave the infantry just what it needed most: the ability to lob explosives from above. Their principal disadvantage was relative inaccuracy, but even that could be overcome by a well-practiced crew.
The greatest killer of the time was, of course, artillery. In the years before 1914, preparing to ght one another in the open, armies had acquired large numbers of eld artillery pieces, the most famous of which was the French seventy- ve-millimeter gun.
Thanks to its recoil mechanism, which made it unnecessary to reaim after each round, the “75” and its counterparts in other armies could re almost as fast as a ri e could. Thus, in 1870–71, over a period of ve months each German gun had only red two hundred rounds on the average; but now there were periods when more than that number was red on a single day. So enamored of “madame soixante-quinze” were the French that they regarded it as a solution to almost any problem. They used it to equip some of their early tanks. They red it over open sights so as to serve as an anti-tank weapon, and they even provided it with curious contraptions so as to make it point skyward and use it to shoot at aircraft. All this was well and good as long as operations proceeded in the open eld.
However, the 75 and its equivalents quickly turned out not to have the power for dealing with trenches, raising the cry for much heavier guns.
In 1914, having planned on breaking through heavily forti ed perimeters, the side best provided with such guns was the Germans;
they alone possessed easy-to-transport, quick- ring 105-, 150-, and
210-millimeter howitzers. Later, the others caught on. Concentrated in the hands of divisions, corps, and, in the case of some superheavy models, armies, the guns were normally positioned a mile and a half to two miles behind the front. Artillery used defensively would shoot up enemies as they tried to cross no-man’s-land. O ensively, it was used to demolish the enemy trenches and then change to a creeping barrage behind which the infantry could shelter and advance; indeed, the longer the war, the more true it became, as the saying went, that “Artillery conquers, infantry occupies.” The list of standard missions was completed by providing harassing re, intended to make life on the other side more di cult, and counterbattery re, employing any range advantage to take out the other side’s guns.
Operating the guns required brains and brawn, with highly intelligent and mathematically knowledgeable o cers directing parties of sweating, grunting, often half-naked men to haul the ammunition and swab the barrels. Yet survival rates among gunners were higher than among the infantry, with the result that many a junior artilleryman of the First World War made it to a high command position by World War II. Among them, to list but three examples, was the British chief of the imperial general sta , Field Marshal Alan Brooke; and, on the other side, the chief of the Wehrmacht high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Another was the chief of the army general sta , General Franz Halder, who, as a result of his specialty, was taunted by his Fuehrer for knowing nothing of front-line service.12
To augment the e ect of artillery, beginning in the spring of 1915, both sides began experimenting with poison gas, though the Germans were the rst to actually use it. At rst gas was released from cylinders laboriously brought to the trenches, put into position, and opened when the wind was favorable, that is, blowing toward the enemy, a chancy operation even under the best of conditions. A better solution was to put the gas in heavy artillery shells capable of delivering it where commanders wanted it, at the time they wanted it, for the purpose they wanted it.13
The rst gas attacks caused much excited denunciation in the press of the receiving side (who happened to be the British)14 as well as a short-lived panic among the troops subjected to the attacks. Later, though neither side exactly liked the idea, both increasingly came to regard gas as a normal weapon of war. They prepared their troops accordingly, providing them with masks and lters, and set up decontamination facilities. All of this proved to be fairly e ective. Considering the evil reputation gas later acquired, it is an interesting fact that, even after the more e ective mustard gas and phosgene replaced hydrochloride, only 3 percent of all fatalities were caused by gas; yet the number of shells that were lled with it rose from just 1 percent in 1916 to as high as 30 percent in 1918.15 This might explain why, in 1935, at least one participant in the Geneva Disarmament Conference (who had been gassed himself) considered gas a rather humanitarian weapon.’6 Thus the real logic behind the use of gas was that, being heavier than air, it would settle onto the lowest points on the battle eld, forcing the men on the receiving end to leave their trenches. Once they had done that, hitting them with conventional artillery became all the easier.
Apart perhaps from the early phases of major o ensives, when the battle eld would be lled with line after line of men attempting to run forward, stumbling, falling down, seeking shelter, and rising again (if they had not been killed or incapacitated), it was curiously empty. Yet less than half a century had passed since, on elds such as Chancel-lorsville and Gravelotte, vast formations of colorfully dressed troops had gathered as if on parade. Whether these men were on foot or on horseback, whether they had advanced, retreated, wheeled, or maneuvered, weapons were displayed in full view, discharging white clouds of smoke and revealing positions as they did so.
As always, the key to everything was intelligence and in every army, the intelligence o cer was among the most important of all.
Both sides relied on prewar estimates and material, which they received by way of neutral countries, to answer basic questions