Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (9 page)

Those who survived Gallipoli and were unlucky enough still to be fit for war were then sent to the Western Front, where the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was virtually wiped out at the battles of Beaumont Hamel and Gueudecourt in 1916. But Morris survived: aware that public opinion was turning against the war and that he had no chance of winning the 1917 election, he postponed the election on the grounds that he would be absent attending the Imperial War Cabinet in London. But his real reason for being in England was rather different. Sir Basil Davidson had written a letter for him.

Morris was already in London by September of 1917. On Christmas Eve he finally wrote to two of his former colleagues to announce his resignation as prime minister of Newfoundland. A few days later he received his peerage, and a grateful imperial government arranged for him to be appointed to the boards of a British insurance company and an aircraft-building firm. His heir still sits in the House of Lords today.

T
HESE PREDICTIONS ABOUT THE NEXT WAR BETWEEN THE GREAT
powers were first published in Russian by Jan Bloch, a Polish financier who had never been a soldier. But he got it all right: the trenches, the unprecedented scale of the slaughter, the enormous industrial resources that would be mobilized for the struggle—even the detail that most of the countries fighting the war would ultimately face revolution at home. He got only one thing wrong: he thought that so horrifying a prospect would deter the great powers from embarking on such a war.

Bloch was born in the part of Poland that then belonged to the Russian empire. He studied at the University of Berlin and returned home to pursue a financial career in a Warsaw bank, but he found time to conduct a fourteen-year study of modern warfare in his spare time. He published his conclusions in a six-volume, 3,084-page work in Russian in 1897, but it became famous across Europe only with the publication of the one-volume English translation,
Is War Now Impossible?
, in the following year.

By the time of Bloch’s study, all the countries of mainland Europe (but not the British) had created mass armies: their young men were conscripted into the army for two or three years in order to train them for war, and then they were sent home—but they remained in the reserve for another fifteen or twenty years, with an obligation to train annually and rejoin the army full-time if there was a war. Bloch’s analysis, based on an examination of modern military technologies (such as smokeless gunpowder, rapid-firing rifles, Maxim machine guns and long-range artillery), showed that these mass armies would not be able to wage battles in the old, decisive way because the sheer amount of firepower would force men to go to ground. An entrenched man would then, on average, be able to stop four men advancing against him across open ground, so the armies would have to stop moving, and the rest of the war would be conducted along an enormous battlefront like a siege operation on a continental scale. Armies of millions of men would inhabit these trenches year in, year out, and immense industrial resources would be consumed in attempts to break the resulting stalemate. The struggle might eventually be decided by attrition, if one side ran out of men and industrial resources before the other, but a likelier outcome was that the economic and social strains would be so great that they would lead to the “break-up of the whole social organization” and revolutions from below.

The book caused a sensation, and was partly responsible for the convening of the world’s first peace conference at The Hague in 1899.
However, the people who should have taken most interest in it, the professional military officers who served the various great powers, dismissed it out of hand as the ravings of an amateur. Why, if Bloch were right, the cavalry would even have to give up their horses! Reflecting on this obstinate ignorance shortly before his death in 1901, Bloch wrote: “The steadfastness with which the military caste clings to the memory of a state of things which has already died is pathetic and honourable. Unfortunately it is also costly and dangerous.” Dangerous because if the armies refused to recognize that that was the future of war, then war was indeed still possible. Thirteen years later, it duly came.

The general staffs of all the European armies had prepared elaborate plans for the first moves in the war and not much for later phases because they thought that there wouldn’t be any later phases. They assumed that the war would be like those of the mid-19th century, which in most cases were settled swiftly after a few decisive battles. The French and the Russians planned headlong attacks on Germany from the west and the east, while Britain, although a member of the Entente, had not formally committed itself to sending troops to the continent at all. The Germans, outnumbered by at least two-to-one and facing attacks on two fronts, adopted a gambler’s strategy: the Schlieffen Plan.

Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the Imperial German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, reckoned that Germany would have six weeks to knock France out of the war before the Russian army was fully mobilized and ready to attack, but that it was unlikely to succeed in doing that by a frontal attack against the French army along the Franco-German border. The German army might push the French a long way back, but France would still be in the war, and most of Germany’s troops would still be tied up in the west when the massive Russian army finally moved into Germany from the east. So the German plan was to surprise the French by marching west into Belgium before swinging round and advancing south past Paris, and finally swinging back east to envelop the French army and force France to seek peace.
The whole operation, Schlieffen reckoned, would take precisely forty-two days, and then the German troops would be transferred east to stop the “Russian Steamroller.”

There were only two problems with the Schlieffen Plan. One was that Belgium’s neutrality was guaranteed by Britain, and attacking it was likely to result in a British army being sent to France to fight the Germans (although the Germans went on hoping that it wouldn’t until the last minute). The other was that the German army just couldn’t march fast enough to get all the way around to the rear of the French army—for it had a long way to go—before the French and the British moved enough troops into northern France and western Belgium to stop them.

At first, the mobilization of the new mass armies went exactly according to plan: the German army, for example, grew sixfold in size in the first two weeks of August 1914 as all the reservists joined their regiments, and the trains then delivered them swiftly and efficiently to the various fronts. By the middle of the month there were 1,485,000 German soldiers on the borders with France and Belgium, ready to march and fight as soon as they got off the trains. The French, the Russians and lesser players like the Austrians performed similar miracles of organization—but then everything went wrong.

The French attacked straight across the frontier into Germany in massive force in accordance with Plan XVII. Their doctrine was
offensive
à
outrance
: by sheer élan the French infantry would charge through machine-gun fire and shrapnel, and sweep the German defenders aside. Indeed, the French soldiers were still wearing blue coats and red trousers in August 1914, despite the fact that this made them highly visible to the German machine-gunners. The offensives all failed amid great carnage, and by the end of August the French were on the defensive everywhere.

But the Schlieffen Plan failed too. When the French and the small British Expeditionary Force went over to the defensive in late August they were able to stop the German attack well short of Paris—and then something happened that took the soldiers completely by surprise
(although Bloch had predicted it fifteen years before). As soon as the exhausted armies stopped moving, they began entrenching to protect themselves from the lethal firepower of the enemy soldiers facing them, and those trenches quickly became a “front line” that made any further movement or manoeuvre virtually impossible. General Foch, later commander of the whole French army, was one of the first to notice what was happening. Sent to the western end of the front line after the armies had fought each other to a standstill north and east of Paris, he complained: “They have sent me here to manoeuvre, but things are not going very brightly. This eternal stretching out in a line is getting on my nerves.”

As the Allies and the Germans repeatedly tried to get around the remaining open end of this peculiar new obstacle, the armies would collide, halt and end up digging new stretches of trench, and within a few more weeks the front line reached the sea near Nieuwpoort in Belgium. Suddenly there were no more enemy flanks that you could hope to get around, just an endless front line. It was theoretically possible to walk 750 kilometres from the English Channel to the border of neutral Switzerland along either of two parallel lines of trench, sometimes as close as ten or twenty metres apart but more usually several hundred, without ever setting foot on the surface. The “Western Front” (from the German
Westfront
) was born.

The same thing happened in the east. The Russians mobilized far faster in 1914 than the German General Staff expected, and invaded eastern Germany in four weeks, not six, while the bulk of the German army was still committed to battle in France. So the Schlieffen Plan would have been a failure strategically even if it had gone exactly according to plan: in theory, the Russian army could have been nearing Berlin by the time the German army was enveloping Paris. But in practice it didn’t much matter, because the much smaller German army defending in the east was nevertheless able to stop the Russian offensive cold. By winter another “front line” of trenches had come into existence in Eastern Europe, this one 1,600 kilometres long, and the war of rapid
movement and decisive victories that the generals had foreseen was over. Everywhere, it had just become much easier to defend than to attack.

The reason for burrowing down into the trenches was obvious: industrial weapons—quick-firing artillery and machine guns that spewed out six hundred bullets a minute—filled the air with a lethal steel sleet, and anybody trying to move above ground was almost certain to be hit. In the first month of the war France lost 75,000 men killed and another 175,000 wounded. Had the French army continued to fight that kind of war, it would have run out of men entirely in about one year. The act of killing had been mechanized, and the trenches, however dreadful, were the only way to keep losses down to a (barely) tolerable level. Men became the prisoners of machines, trapped below ground level—except, of course, when they were ordered to attack, and had to stand up into the machine-gun fire.

The essence of the general’s art had always been to manoeuvre his forces, but now no movement at all was possible until he had broken through the trench line facing him—and the continuous front meant that
every
attack had to be a frontal attack. Since infantrymen could not hope to survive the hail of fire that would greet them if they tried to advance unaided—that was why they had dug the trenches in the first place—the only way to break through was to eliminate the sources of that fire by shelling the enemy’s barbed wire, trenches and gun positions into ruin before the attack. At least that was the theory.

So the trench war became a war of artillery, and over half the casualties were now caused by shellfire. The greatest problem of 1915 for every country was not at the front but at home, where shell production could not keep up with demand. Even in Britain, the world’s most industrialized country, there was a critical shell shortage in 1915, and the demands went on mounting: at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, the nineteen-day British bombardment used 4.3 million shells, weighing 107,000 tons. Battles had become an industrial operation in reverse, in which the rate of destruction at the front matched the rate of production at home.