Not For Turning
March 28th to April 3rd 1916
At Verdun and at St Eloi, neither France nor Britain was for turning.
On 28 March, the Germans attacked on the Haucourt-Malancourt front but were thrown back. Then they arrived in Malancourt village, more or less at the same moment as the French recovered their hold of the Avocourt redoubt. Over the next week, they clawed a way back to Vaux village, capturing part of the German salient. It was furious but not irrational: these were micro-moves to blow apart Falkenhayn’s grand strategy. Le Mort Homme and Hill 304 remained under continuous heavy bombardment and relentless infantry attacks.
The British line, meanwhile, advanced on St. Eloi, now the focus for the deployment of new drafts of tunnellers along the Ypres salient. The Germans had exploded mines under an area known as The Mound, just south-east of the village on 14 and 15 March, an action which had seen 500 British casualties. Now they hit back: on 27 March, six mines were detonated beneath German lines. British soldiers rose from their positions in the cold mud and attacked, quickly capturing three craters and the third German line.
The final outcome of the Verdun offensive remained unclear — but it was clear that the Germans had not made the rapid headway they had sought. The Kaiser demonstrated the uncertainty admitting privately ‘One must never utter it, nor shall I admit it to Falkenhayn, but this war will not end with a great victory’ while, on 1 April, publicly proclaiming that the end of the war, like that of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, would occur at Verdun.
By contrast, the emphasis of the Allied Conference in Paris, which ended on 28 March, was on solidarity — economic as well as military — and on its determination to see through the struggle until Germany and her allies were defeated. While its utterances were more coherent than those of the mercurial German supreme warlord, Germany’s defeat still seemed more like wishful thinking than grand strategy. Kitchener went straight from Paris to visit Haig, explaining his view that no further large effort was to be expected from the French Army.
Haig recorded in his diary:
They mean to economise men, consequently it is possible that the War will not end this year. Lord K. wished me for that reason to beware of the French, and to husband the strength of the British Army in France. I said I had never had any intention of attacking with all available troops except in an emergency to save the French from disaster, and Paris from capture. Meantime, I am strengthening the long line which I have taken over and training the troops.
Tellingly, from the perspective of later generations, he added: “I have not got an Army in France really, but a collection of divisions untrained for the Field. The actual fighting Army will be evolved from them.” This perspective would contribute to the ambivalent legacy left by Haig. At least he was assured that, if his preparations for a great attack later in the year were fulfilled, he would enjoy public support.
The Germans continued to champion styles of warfare, especially at sea, which fanned the flames of civilian hatred. On 30 March, the Portugal, a hospital ship near Rizeh on the Turkish coats of the Black Sea, was attacked by a U-boat. Passengers had seen the periscope but believed themselves to be safe since the ship’s Red Cross markings were clearly visible. They proved unduly sanguine. Although survivors claimed that the first torpedo had missed, U-33, under Konrad Gansser, had apparently returned to fire a second from a distance of thirty feet: it hit the engine room and the ship broke into two pieces. At the moment of the attack, the Portugal was lying stationary — it had stopped in order to repair one of the series of small boats it was towing, which were to be used to land the wounded.
The death toll was estimated between eighty and a hundred and included many nurses, including a Georgian princess, Aneta Andronnikova. No wounded were on board the ship at the time. To that extent, the tragedy might have been worse, but this was no consolation to the families of the 45 Red Cross doctors and nurses, and of the French and Russian crew members, who had perished. On 31 March, it was announced that 78,769 tons of Allied shipping had been lost the previous month — a total destined to rise much higher yet, and an eloquent reminder of the power of U-boats to respond pungently to Britain’s economic blockade of Germany.
Perhaps the more sensational challenge faced by Allies this week came at the hands of Zeppelins. On 31 March there was a raid on the east coast, which ended with one Zeppelin being destroyed — but 48 people had been killed and 64 injured. The following day the north-east coast took the hit, with 22 killed, 130 injured. The airship — L15 — was captured. On 2 April, Scotland was attacked for the first time when L14 travelled over Leith and Edinburgh. According to the Official History, eighteen high-explosive and six incendiary bombs were dropped. “Although many of these burst harmlessly, eleven people were killed and twenty-four injured; four houses, a spirit store, and three hotels were seriously damaged, and Princes Street Station and a large number of houses less seriously hit.”
Civilian morale in all areas appears to have been severely dented by these raids. The government milked their propaganda value, understandably, and new recruitment posters were issued designed to keep them in public consciousness (“It is Far Better to Face the Bullets than to be Killed at Home by a Bomb. Join the Army at Once & Help to Stop an Air Raid. God Save The King!” was a fairly typical product).
People needed cheering up. What a shame, we might now think, that the pragmatic Tommies and beleaguered civilians were not able to read the letters of the young Rudolf Hess, the future Deputy Fuhrer. At that time a young German officer recuperating in a field hospital after contracting an illness in his service in Artois, Hess regaled his mother with a conversation he had just had with a hospital orderly:
[He] says he can tell your character from the shape of your skull. After feeling my head he concluded the following: Good sense of colour … great love of nature in general … good at maths, technology, not so good at languages … Good humoured, gentle, great sympathy for animals. (true) I can get worked up about the smallest canary locked up in a cage … Very sharp and quick to grasp things (true). (Recently I was on a machine gun course, I understood everything long before the officers and sergeants. The artillery course was the same.) Suited to military life. Trustworthy. Good judgement. Good at comparing and evaluating things. (true) Religious but without adhering a particular creed of form of worship, like going to church. (true!) Everyone I have told about this is astonished.’
Hess was weird. He might have been a Victorian curate, whiling away unemployed hours in some remote living by dabbling in the dark arts of phrenology. Perhaps something has been lost in translation.
On 30 March, he wrote again:
‘Thank you for your dear words. It is really comforting to know that at least you have as much faith in these matters as we do out here. Back home people are complaining about days without meat. Here they only get meat every two weeks. They live off rice, potatoes and bits of salami. Grass cuttings are cooked as a vegetable. We could go without so much more before we have to live like this. And this is all nothing compared to what the soldiers are going through. Oh, they don’t know what a sin they are committing, these beer table gossipers and whingeing coffee-sippers! They should be silent. We have to keep fighting back home and in the field. The people here at the front are having a much worse time of it and they are not starving. Warm greetings to you, father and Gretel … Your son, Rudi.’
No doubt this was written when he was out of sorts. But his analysis has interest, especially in the light of his future career: it anticipates a version of history (defeat being solely a consequence of a collapse of morale at home) which assumed powerful traction.
The British could whinge too. But they tended to focus on the excessive zeal of the home front, rather than that they lived too well. If there are generalisations to be made, it might be said that they were bad at holding grudges and preferred wry disdain to bitter recrimination. The popularity of the cheerful and irreverent Bairnsfather cartoons, Fragments from France, testified to this. Over 200,000 copies had been published by the end of the month, with more editions ordered.
Bairnsfather, known as Bruce, had served with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment from the start of the war until invalided home after the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. He had been supplying cartoons to the Bystander weekly magazine with the first one published in September 1915. Gradually his characters, Bill, (so named in February 1916), with his walrus moustache and balaclava, Bert and Alf became world-famous.
The House of Commons, inclined to get pompous when it felt alarmed, initially protested at “these vulgar caricatures of our heroes”, but backtracked quickly once they saw how hugely popular “Bruce” was at home and in the trenches. Bairnsfather remained on the staff of the War Office Intelligence Department as an “Officer Cartoonist” and continued producing ‘Ole Bill cartoons.
There were moments when being wry or disdainful brought no relief. For the unhappy British and Indian soldiers still inside the besieged fortress at Kut-al-Amara, thoughts focused only on their struggle against disease, malnutrition and depression. Aerial attack from the Turks was now added to their list of woes. Colonel Maule wrote in his diary (in the form of a letter to his wife) on 28 March: “Many happy returns of the day. Next birthday I hope I shall be with you and not in this beastly country.”
Fellow officer Captain Lecky, in his diary, recorded the ongoing fatalities:
1 April — The men are dying off fast now from starvation, scurvy, pneumonia etc. The Tommies are sticking it better than the Indian troops who refuse to eat mule or horse.
2 April — Fox rejoined from hospital on 31 March, having recovered from his wound. Wood, after doing splendidly on Xmas Eve and recovering after having his arm blown off, has died of jaundice, poor chap.
Those in the fortress could often hear guns firing along the Tigris and knew that a British relief force was tantalisingly near- about seventeen miles away. Many clung to the hope of rescue. Another generalisation suggests itself: the British tended to have faith in their commanders.
Less so, the Russians. On paper they were doing rather well this week, with successes north of Bojan in Galicia against German troops and with their torpedo-boats sinking ten ships and destroying a munitions depot. On 30 March, the Germans were driven back over the River Oldenevitz. These moves were undertaken in an effort to take some of the heat off the French at Verdun but, for all their apparent success, it was costly. The area around Lake Naroch, 80 miles from Minsk in present day Belarus, was turned into a swamp by heavy rain and, by the end of the month, the Russian commander had halted the attack, after sustaining thousands of casualties for ten kilometres of ground — which the Germans would soon regain.
The suffering of Russian soldiers during these days were recorded in a later memoir by Alexei Noskov, a private soldier who would later become a Soviet General in the Soviet Army. He later claimed — not with much accuracy but with Bolshevik ardour:
The result of these operations was not decisive, and even mediocre in importance … Our losses were very high, numbering some two hundred and fifty thousand men. That was the amount of blood and suffering which the Russian people sacrificed to the common Allied victory. The sacrifices resulted from the personal intervention of Emperor Nicholas II.
As a feature of warfare in the east, conflicts of race and ethnicity complicated the national contests. In Petrograd, the British Chief of the Military Mission, Hanbury-Williams, recorded an interesting rumour in his diary for 29 March:
The Emperor told me of reports in to say that the Germans had put Russian Jews in charge of Russian prisoners of war, and that it has annoyed and irritated the latter, some of whom have escaped — an incident which will not lighten the anti-Jewish feeling in Russia.
There were crumbs of good news for the Armenians, reeling in the wake of genocide, when on 2 April Russian forces crossed the Upper Chorok, taking fortified mountain positions in the country. On 3 April, Greece refused permission to the Serbian army to use the overland route between Corfu and Salonika — a decision compatible with Greece’s frantic efforts to stay neutral, but also showcasing old Balkan enmities.
Talk of peace was, from every point of view, premature. Following the previous week’s visit by General Cadorna of Italy to Britain, it was decided that the Prime Minister should go to Italy after the Paris conference. He was accompanied by his PPS Maurice Bonham Carter, the Secretary of the War Council Maurice Hankey, and by the Foreign Office mandarin Hugh O’Beirne.
On 31 March, having first visited the battlefields of the Marne, the three men arrived in Rome, meeting the Queen of Italy. She was described by Hankey as “a handsome vigorous Montenegrin girl. She had been under fire at the front and had thoroughly enjoyed it, and did not appear in the least bit perturbed at the idea of an air raid on Rome. She said she would fetch out her rifle and take pot shots at them!”
The next few days were spent in meetings, including one with Pope Benedict XV on 1 April. According to Hankey:
The Prime Minister visited the Pope in the morning with O’Beirne, who is a Roman Catholic. O’Beirne tells me that the Pope made some suggestion of the desirability of an early peace, but the Prime Minister pursed up his mouth and said words to the effect that we should continue to the end.
The idea of his father in conclave with His Holiness amused Asquith’s son, Raymond, who wrote on 3 April:
‘I see that [Father] has been having a crack with the Pope. I hope he contrived to fight down his provincial prejudice against the Papacy and keep a civil tongue in his head.’
In fact, he had done well. Hankey, who could be fiercely critical of his political masters, had been impressed by Asquith’s “vast store of knowledge on all classical and historical matters. However can he remember it all amid his tremendous burden of State affairs? He is in tremendously good form, and thoroughly enjoying himself”. They left Rome on the evening of 2 April to visit the King of Italy who was at the front. According to Hankey “the visit has been a gigantic success”.
He had, however, considerable reservations about the resolve of their new ally:
I did not feel that the ministerial and upper circles whom we met had any real enthusiasm for the war; they are in it up to the neck and know they have to go through with it, but they have no great confidence in themselves and lean to an extraordinary extent upon us, and will continue to do so more and more. They have an unbounded belief in our strength and greatness (which is justified on the whole), but we shall continually have to support them more and more both in a material and moral sense.
Even as these words were written, Britain’s strength and greatness was being diabolically tested by a horrifying explosion at Uplees, near Faversham, in the worst munitions disaster in its history.
Two factories, the Cotton Powder Company and the Explosive Loading Company, taken over by the Admiralty in 1914, were working to full capacity to meet the demand for munitions. On 31 March, they had been inspected by Major Aston Cooper-Key who noted the Explosive Loading Company was in a ‘very congested state’ owing to the Ministry for Munitions having sent supplies ‘much in excess of the requirements of the works’.
Although he was concerned that when the magazines holding stocks of ammonium nitrate and TNT were full, they were simply covered with tarpaulin and left in the open, he expressed general satisfaction with what he had seen. At lunchtime on Sunday 2 April, a fire began which spread to the north wall of building No.833 filled with 150 tonnes of high explosive.
What followed was a predictable mixture of high drama and low farce: men risked their lives to try to remove as much of the explosive as they could from the building. When the fire engine arrived, it was discovered that the nearest hydrant was 700 yards away and, during the ensuing wait for an additional hose, a huge explosion ripped the building apart, causing a crater forty yards across and twenty feet deep. The tremor was heard as far away as Norwich and windows were shattered across the Thames estuary in Southend. Women did not work on Sundays so the casualties were men and boys of whom 115 were killed. From these small mercies alone might one draw comfort.
