Simon HEFFER
Of the 764,000 British soldiers who died in the Great War, 85 per cent fell on the Western Front, the line of trenches that ran from the North Sea coast of Belgium to the Swiss border. In this authoritative and fast-paced book, Nick Lloyd, whose 2017
Passchendaele established him at the forefront of the younger generation of military historians, deals with the 51 months during which the Germans fought the Allied powers there, in a predominantly flat land that is recalled as a sea of mud but is now peppered with the white stones and crosses that are the many Allied war cemeteries, as well as the granite ones of our defeated enemy.
There have been plenty of books on the Great War, and plenty, specifically, on the battle in the West, but Lloyd’s exhaustive research puts this book a cut above most. The reader is taken into the counsels of the British, French and German high commands, and experiences the victories, defeats and horrors of fighting in the words of soldiers on all sides. By the end of the book, one has a panoramic view of this crucial theatre of war.
Yet no book has yet been written, and probably no book ever will be, that can make the 21st-century reader comprehend the medieval carnage that took place over those four years, and why none of the combatants cracked before the Germans did in the autumn of 1918. Lloyd refers to the political difficulties in Britain after the Somme, and of the fall of Asquith and his replacement; he notes the mutinous behaviour of the French army in the winter of 1917, after the horror of Verdun; but it is not until the Germans have come to within reach of Paris in the summer of 1918, after their massive Spring Offensive, that the Germans finally throw in the towel. Even their immense effort of that spring could not get them to their goal; their supply lines could not keep up; morale collapsed; they surrendered in droves; and word came from home that parts of Germany were on the verge of a revolution as the promised victory started to appear impossible, and the lessons of the previous year’s uprisings in Russia began to be appreciated around Europe.
It is the insights into what, for the British reader, will be less familiar – the minds of the French and the Germans – that give this book its value. Lloyd writes of Pétain, in 1916, watching from his office window in his headquarters in the hôtel de ville in Souilly as French soldiers, in their new horizon-bleu uniforms, marched up to the trenches in front of Verdun; and how he witnessed “the discouragement with which they returned! – either singly, maimed or wounded, or in the ranks of their companies thinned by their losses. Their eyes stared into space as if transfixed by a vision of terror”. Lloyd reminds us that the Germans, too, endured heavy casualties on the Somme and at Passchendaele; the first day of the Somme was the worst in the history of the British Army, with more than 19,000 dead, and the suffering of the enemy, though not nearly so bad, remained appalling.
The main players in the drama – Foch, French, Joffre, Haig, Pétain, Hindenburg and Kitchener – are all portrayed in three dimensions: Kitchener’s aloofness, Foch’s terseness, French’s touchiness, but above all Haig’s apparent existence in a parallel universe. Those who have been waiting for a book on the Great War that exonerates Haig will have to wait a little longer; and Lloyd, if anything, goes lightly on him in the matter of how he landed the job as commander-in-chief, going behind French’s back and bad-mouthing him to everyone he could in politics and beyond – including the King – in the interests of supplanting him. However, Lloyd does not spare us the evidence of the disregard Haig had for the scale of the losses his tactics incurred on the Somme and at the Third Battle of Ypres. He compares him unfavourably with generals such as Plumer, who went to enormous lengths not to have their men sucked into carnage.
Lloyd paints a convincing picture of how, on the German side, the conduct of the war slipped out of the control of the ‘Supreme Warlord’, the Kaiser. Although Lloyd George in England and, later, Clemenceau in France, were virtual dictators when it came to the prosecution of total war, politicians in Germany were bypassed not by the head of government, nor even the head of state, but by the army itself. Hindenburg, Ludendorff and others in the high command drove the Imperial war machine almost literally into the ground. Although Hindenburg became a hero in post-war Germany, it was not least his attitude to the conduct of the war that forced the Kaiser’s abdication and brought Germany to the brink of revolution. As one of the Kaiser’s advisers told him in November 1918, his tattered soldiers would march back to the fatherland in orderly fashion after their defeat, but under his generals, not under him.
Lloyd sets out clearly the phases of the war in the West: the brief mobile war that lasted for only the first few weeks, after which both sides dug themselves in; then almost four years of trench warfare, with vast numbers on both sides insanely running into wave after wave of machinegun fire; and then the last phase, starting with the Spring Offensive, where the war became mobile again, and the Allies were on the verge of getting into Germany itself when the Germans sued for peace. He is right to emphasise the importance of the vast numbers of Americans who arrived at the Front in the summer of 1918, better able to batter the exhausted
German army. In the end, though, it was the Royal Navy’s blockade that drove Germany to sue for peace: the people at home could not bear another ‘turnip winter’ of revolting ersatz food and drink. They got one anyway, but the slaughter was stopped, for the moment at least.
This is the first of three volumes which, when completed, will comprise a magisterial account of the warfare between 1914 and 1918. The second will deal with the Eastern Front, a subject still relatively little known to British readers – which is unfortunate, since the drafting in to the West of dozens of German divisions from that front after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the war there was instrumental, paradoxically, to Germany’s defeat; for once their great advance petered out, there was no hope of repeating it and carrying on. Lloyd’s third volume will be about the other theatres of war, such as the Middle East. On the evidence of this book, the next two will be keenly awaited.
It is the insights into the minds of the German generals that give this book its value