We Are Betrayed, Sold, Lost The Great War

The Western Front, January 1917.

The hopes of men lay frozen in the grip of winter -

one of the coldest in living memory.

A British war correspondent wrote,

"The snow gave a beauty, even to no-man's land. Lying softly over the tumbled ground of mine fields.

"So that all the ugliness and destruction and death was hidden under this canopy.

"The snowflakes fluttered upon stark bodies there and shrouded them tenderly.

"It was as though all the doves of peace were flying down to fold

"their wings above the obscene things of war."

The cold imposed a defiant cheerfulness.

Keeping warm became a major preoccupation.

We slept in our clothes and our boots. We used to place our top boots under our bodies,

because they used to be stiff in the morning - one couldn't get them on.

The weather then was very, very bitter.

The ground was frozen hard. The hooves of a horse

or the tread of a man's boot would linger for a month.

And when we received our rations,

the bread had to be sawn through,

because you could see the ice in it.

The sinews of war were paralysed by the cold.

Boilers of railway engines froze solid, ships were trapped in ice,

vehicles slithered to a halt, aircraft were grounded.

The guns still fired, although accurate artillery observation was often impossible.

"There was," wrote an onlooker, "something suggestive of tragic drama in this silent countryside,

"where millions of men were waiting to kill each other."

At the beginning of 1917, some 1,300,000 French men had been killed or were dead of wounds,

or in prison, or missing.

A loss of nearly one life for every minute of the war.

The French army had forgotten how to smile.

An old soldier summed up the French state of mind.

"They had lost the habit of the sun.

"They even feared the moonlight.

"They had abandoned the red trousers and kepi of 1914

"along with their illusions, and had put on horizon blue.

"The blue of a horizon always dirty, dull, and without hope."

Now the French soldiers were being asked for yet one more effort.

They responded once again to a promise which brought fresh hope.

General Robert Nivelle assured his army...

"The rupture of the front is possible in 24 to 48 hours,

"on condition it is with a single stroke and by a sudden attack."

Nivelle was aiming at nothing less than an outright victory.

As an army commander at Verdun, his tactics had been brilliantly successful on a small scale.

But this attack involved a million men. It envisaged, in his words...

"The destruction of the principal mass of the enemy armies on the western theatre by a battle

"delivered with a considerable numerical superiority.

"Breaking through the enemy's front in such a way that the breakthrough can be immediately exploited."

The plan was to return to the French offensive doctrines of 1914.

It was a plan with the simplicity of genius...

or lunacy.

General Nivelle was cultivated, plausible, intensely ambitious.

He expressed himself ably.

But British military leaders, aware now of the hazards of the Western Front, were sceptical of his plan.

General Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, voiced their fears.

"To Haig and myself, the plan seemed to have many fallacies.

"A breach in the enemy defences on the scale contemplated couldn't be affected within 48 hours."

Major Speirs, a liaison officer who understood the French army, had other misgivings.

"The French army had suffered and fought too long. It was tired to death.

"The light that had guided them receded as they advanced down the long, hopeless road of the war."

Verdun, Champagne, Ypres, Artois, the Somme, the scarp -

they were all just synonymous for suffering and death.

Behind the lines too, the war had left deep scars.

The heart of France was beating slower now, from loss of blood.

From the agony of cumulative grief endured by so many parents,

so many wives, so many hundreds of thousands of orphans.

The assembling French army's new weapons and new tactics now offered new hope.

The men were exhorted...

"Keep moving - the infantry must be through the rear German positions seven hours after zero hour."

And Nivelle insisted that...

"The stamp of violence, of brutality and of rapidity, must characterise your offensive."

Gradually the familiar round of preparations gathered momentum.

As over a million men moved into the assembly areas,

the spark of the Mons was rekindled.

The Marseillaise was heard again on the march, as it had been in 1914.

MARSEILLAISE PLAYS

From French West Africa had come 35 battalions of Senegalese.

Men with fierce courage, but unused to the cold of a northern winter.

From the distant Urals and from Moscow had come two brigades of Russian troops.

They received an ecstatic welcome.

Now in France, in March 1917, they read in their newspapers of a revolution in Russia.

The Tsar had abdicated. There was talk of peace.

The Russian troops in France were a source of disaffection.

They were divided among themselves. When on leave in Paris, they saw Russian revolutionary propaganda.

They took a vote as to whether they should join in the offensive at all. They decided to fight.

It was not a good omen.

The Germans too had had a hard winter.

They occupied haphazard trench lines that they were cast in by the ebbing tide of the Somme battles.

Hindenburg told the German chancellor...

"The military position can scarcely be worse than it is."

Hindenburg's lieutenant, Ludendorff, predicted that if one of the allies did not collapse,

Germany's defeat was inevitable.

The probability of the allies breaking though in the west had worried Ludendorff since the Somme.

Through winter he had been building a strong system of fortifications,

running from Arras in the north to Soisson in the south.

The Hindenburg line overlapped the sector which Nivelle was proposing to attack.

It was not yet finished in February 1917, but under pressure from local British attacks in the north,

and with expectation of the French offensive, Ludendorff ordered a withdrawal to the new line.

In some places, 30 miles behind the original front.

"The decision to retreat was not reached without a painful struggle.

"It implied a confession of weakness that was bound to raise the morale of the enemy and lower our own."

One night we were not shelled, and we wondered what had happened.

Then we heard the old Hun, as we called him, was pulling out.

He'd gone.

And then we saw the cavalry come up.

The Bengal Lancers trotted past - a wonderful sight.

Rumours all around were, "Is he going? Is he packing up to go home?"

Bit by bit we followed, our patrols went out - they had good rear guard action that they'd laid in advance.

At last we got onto green fields, and roads that weren't shelled.

All was virgin country, and we could gallop on the downs,

we could see the hares and see the larks.

After the months and months of utter brownness and chaos and everything going back into ruin,

to see that open country again was marvellous.

The German withdrawal was accompanied by an orgy of calculated destruction.

Bridges were blown, roads mined, tracts of countryside flooded.

Fruit trees in full bloom senselessly felled,

wells poisoned, household objects booby-trapped.

"Whole villages had been torn down by hand, evidently at the cost of immense labour.

"It was as if the whole countryside had fallen into the hands of demons

"who had vented their lust for destruction on these dwellings.

"As the people grasped the fact that the Germans had really gone,

"they crowded round us, tears of joy and gratitude running down their cheeks.

"Many just wanted to touch us, to make sure that we were real.

"Hardest to bear were the inquiries - the piteous questions about relatives and friends.

"Their questions evoked unbearably the vision of wooden crosses.

"Hundreds of thousands of little wooden crosses scattered from Switzerland to the North Sea."

The Allied advance towards the Hindenburg line was painfully slow.

The weather was atrocious, and the troops, accustomed to static trench warfare, moved as one man put it...

"Like an army of moles suddenly ordered to disport themselves in the light of day."

In France, as indeed in Britain, the German retreat was hailed as a great victory,

and Nivelle claimed the laurels.

-"Had

-I

-been able to command the German armies,

"I couldn't have given them orders more favourable to my plan."

Haig, whose army was to attack at Arras in support of Nivelle's offensive, took a different view.

"The advisability of launching Nivelle's battle grows daily less.

"The enemy has organised the area in the rear of the threatened front to enable his troops to slip away.

"His object seems to be to disorganise our offensive by causing our attacks to be made in the air."

Nivelle himself obstinately refused to admit that the German withdrawal had altered anything.

"I don't fear numbers. The greater the numbers, the greater the victory."

"He was like a man under a spell," wrote a British liaison officer.

The German defences were wiped out in his imagination and he could see himself galloping in open country.

Grave doubts now beset Nivelle's own generals.

Petain, Franchet d'Esperey, Micheler - their misgivings were shared by the politicians.

Like Painleve, the new Minister of War, and Ribot, the Prime Minister.

But the politicians did not dare dismiss the commander in chief on the very eve of a great offensive.

Already the British bombardment at Arras had begun.

Among the men of Haig's armies, hopes ran high.

They had a premonition that this time all would go well.

On the eve of the attack, a trench raiding party was sent over

to discover how effective the bombardment had proved.

It reported that the first and second German lines were not recognisable as trenches.

German prisoners spoke of "a symphony of hell."

A symphony which had shattered every pain of glass in Douay - 15 miles behind their lines.

They knew the Canadians were about to try to retake Vimy Ridge.

"You Canadians may reach the top of it," said one prisoner,

"But you'll be taken back to Canada in a rowing boat."

On the dawn of Easter Monday, April 9th, the gunfire suddenly stopped.

-Then,

-"Fire!"

"The British guns broke out again,

"into such a fire as had yet been seen on no battlefield on Earth.

"It was the first hour of the Somme repeated but a hundred-fold worse.

"As our men went over the parapet the heaven above them was a canopy of shrieking steel."

As the barrage passed, the Germans on Vimy Ridge saw khaki figures in flat steel helmets

swarming in every direction.

These were the Canadians attacking one of the strongest positions on the Western Front.

We had to thread our way amongst the shell holes because the ridge itself had been so pounded.

The German trenches were almost obliterated. They were mere ditches.

We carried on there - the first objective was the German main line,

then we went on to the eastern crest of the ridge.

When we reached the top of the ridge a remarkable sight was unfolded.

We saw before our eyes

all the German occupied villages around Mons - the mining villages with the slag heaps and mine shafts.

And you could even see beyond Mons. They didn't seem to be affected at all. They still seemed intact.

This was the promised land and the Canadian soldiers were the first to see it since the days of 1915,

when the French had held part of the heights.

It was to remain a promised land.

For though the British advanced five miles in places on the first day, capturing 13,000 prisoners,

they hadn't the means or experience to follow up this feat of arms.

The British diversionary attack had fulfilled its purpose.

It had pinned down German reserves.

But the German positions facing the French on the hills of the Aisne were a great natural strength,

and were organised in depths to a distance of five miles.

And the Germans knew the date, even the hour, of the French attack.

GERMAN ACCENT: Minutes before the French attack, the German batteries opened up.

and the fire was so tremendous that hardly any French soldiers went over the top.

After a while, the Germans sent patrols

to find out what happened.

And there they found the French trenches deserted,

except for the wounded and the dead.

Full of dead.

To the assaulting French infantry, the attack was a nightmare.

FRENCH ACCENT: And we could see that everything in the German line was in order -

the machine guns, the men, and everything, and...

But even in some places the barbed wire was there in place.

Was hopeless.

The deeper they penetrated, the more the guns took toll of them.

The Senegalese, their faces grey with cold, were even unable to load their rifles.

Caught between German machine guns and their own artillery fire, they fled the field.

The Russian brigades also suffered cruelly.

French tanks in action for the first time, bogged down in the mud.

The French air force was grounded by the weather.

The wounded returned from the front, swamping medical services.

On these muddy heights under the drenching sleet and rain,

the French attacks faltered, stopped, and wearily faced the inevitable counterattack.

Losses mounted, hope faded.

"It's all up," they said. "We shall never do it."

At French army headquarters, as the reports came in,

an American man observed their effect on some French politicians.

"All day they were telephoning the government in Paris,

"that the army was being massacred and demanding they stop the attack."

It couldn't be stopped. The Germans counter-attacked immediately.

At the end of the first day's fighting, French casualties totalled 90,000 men.

At the end of a fortnight, 120,000.

At the end of three weeks, over 180,000.

The Germans lost 160,000 men,

of whom 40,000 were taken prisoner, and a few miles of ground.

But the real balance was not to be struck in gains and losses, but in hope unfulfilled.

In the bitter sense of betrayal felt by a million French soldiers.

"We've just taken part in one of the most glaring crimes of the war.

"We are betrayed, sold, lost.

"We've learnt nothing - it's a return to 1915.

"They give us citations and crosses, but we'd rather chuck them back at the high command.

"Let those war-to-the-end merchants come up here and see for themselves.

"Our commanders are incapable of leading us to victory.

"Peace ought to be made straight away."

They had had enough. The army of the Marne, of Champagne, Artois, Verdun, the Somme.

This army which had expended itself with valour for three years,

which had lost about one and a half million men - killed or prisoners - at last its proud spirit broke.

They had had enough.

Back in Paris, beneath the surface bustle of a great city, all was speculation and doubt.

But the hospital trains, steaming into the Gare du Nord, told their own truths.

Rumours fed by parliamentary deputies and fanned by defeatists,

spread their sly contagion through the summer days.

In every cafe, in every bistro, in every concierge's lodge, at every street corner,

the casualty figures were trebled, quadrupled.

Rumours and evasions, disillusion and defeatism,

everything that France stood for seemed to be threatened.

Soon after I visited Paris I observed for myself

that things weren't too well, even in the civilian population.

I saw, for instance...

a strike,

of the girls in the big milliner shops - the dressmakers.

They were called, rather pathetically I thought, "Les Petites Mains" - The Small Hands.

And what they were striking for was one sou an hour more -

a ha'penny.

I saw these girls processing down some of the main thoroughfares,

and a lot of men on leave joined them.

That showed there was something. There was unrest, disquiet.

Still more alarming stories now began to filter into Paris from the zone of the armies.

Anxious about all these rumours concerning mutinies,

I decided to go up and see for myself.

I arrived in part of the country near Soisson, which I know well,

and there I was met with the most amazing sight.

Regiment after regiment was in open mutiny.

By which I meant there were degrees of mutiny.

In many units,

the officers were confined to a section of the village -

had no authority at all -

and the men had established posts,

and I wasn't in the least molested.

I asked what was going on...

..got rather evasive answers, but in the main found that the line taken by the men was...

..that they were prepared to occupy the line, but they weren't prepared to fight.

The French army had endured too much for too long.

The agony of Verdun, lack of leave, miserable rest camps and canteens, harsh discipline, low pay,

and now the awful disillusionment of Nivelle's attack.

It was not that they had failed to win a victory, it was that the victory itself was not enough.

It had not produced the expected ending of the war.

The soldiers went on strike.

All through May and into June, the mutinies multiplied.

More and more regiments out of the line refused to obey orders,

refused to take part in attacks or even return to the front.

54 divisions were affected, yet there was little violence.

For the most part, men drifted away into the woods, tried to commandeer trains to Paris,

or just sat tight in their camps or billets,

until, weary of inaction, they gave themselves up to loyal troops.

Russian brigades set up councils and disarmed their officers.

They had to be shelled into submission by French artillery. But at the front, the line held firm.

The men's attitude was, "We'll never advance, but we won't let the Bosch advance either."

"No-one believed any longer in a decision by force of arms," wrote an officer at French GHQ.

"It is an army without faith."

A choice had now to be made between ruin and reason. Reason prevailed.

Nivelle was dismissed and France turned, as she had done in the worst days of Verdun, to Petain -

a man who understood men.

General Petain was put in charge of the French army,

and he re-established morale in a matter of months.

I saw him doing so, some of the time.

He visited, in a very short time, every division in the French army,

insisting that every single company should be represented by at least one trustworthy man.

He spoke to them ALL and they realised he felt for them,

appreciated what they'd endured,

and was determined that they shouldn't be submitted to such unnecessary suffering again.

Petain listened to the grievances of his troops and acted swiftly.

Every man who could be spared was pulled out of the line.

Decent rest camps were built with facilities for recreation.

A leave system was introduced which allowed men home every four months,

provided trains to get them there and even canteens for the journey.

The troops began to feel at last that somebody cared for them,

that they mattered as individuals.

But military discipline demanded harsher measures as well.

Petain reported to the Minister of War...

"It is necessary to make examples in every regiment that has mutinied."

Over 400 death sentences were imposed. Many were commuted,

but 55 ringleaders were taken out to face a firing squad.

55 executions...

Those were the official figures.

But it is likely that more were shot after summary courts martial.

How many will never be known.

The secret of the mutinies was kept with extraordinary success.

When I reported to the war office there were mutinies in the French army,

the Chief Imperial General Staff expressed the utmost astonishment at this...

..because he said he'd heard nothing of it.

It did seem astonishing that we had 60 highly qualified officers,

attached to the French headquarters,

and over a period of weeks,

the French had managed to conceal any trouble from them.

In a way, perhaps it was fortunate because the Germans hadn't heard either.

If the Germans had, the war would have been over.

When Major Speirs' report was received, he was ordered back to 10 Downing Street.

Lloyd George said to me,

"Is the French army going to get over this?"

And I said, "I believe it is.

"They've had a frightful time.

"But now Petain's in charge, and he's a wonderful leader and the men have got faith in him,

"I believe they will get over it."

France did get over it, but her convalescence was painful and slow.

In the meantime her armies were in no state to prosecute the war.

It was a time of crisis for the allies - the Russians were talking of signing a separate peace.

The Italians wanted reinforcements.

On the Western Front, the British Army was left to bear the burden.

In the words of Lloyd George, "It was the one allied army

"which could be relied upon for any enterprise, however hazardous and arduous it might be."

Yet one bright beacon illuminated these dark and desperate days.

On April 6th 1917, the United States of America had declared war on Germany.

Now despite all the disillusionment of two and a half years, there was hope again.