Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes

described the Ancre running down the western edge of the battlefield, ‘beneath great spurs of chalk, as the Thames runs at Goring and Pangbourne’.³⁰

      Most combatants wondered if the blighted landscape could ever be restored. ‘We used to say that it would never be reclaimed,’ wrote Henry Williamson,

      that in fifty years it would still be the same dreadful morass … It was said that this land … would not be cleared up for 100 years. But after the armistice Russian labourers came over in thousands, also Italians. I saw them digging with long-handled shovels, first collecting great dumps of wire and yellow unexploded shells. Rifles stood on thinning bayonets in places all over the battlefield in 1924, marking where wounded men had fallen. Dugouts were beginning to cave in.³¹

      In some places, like the zones rouges at Verdun, the land was simply cloaked in pine trees after the war and left to the patient hand of nature. Some villages were so comprehensively destroyed that they were no longer worth rebuilding in a post-war France whose manpower losses had reduced pressure on the land.

      When President Poincaré gave Verdun its Cross of the Légion d’Honneur he prophesied that ‘this ravaged countryside will recover the laughing face that it wore in happy times’, but the years have proved him wrong.³² The villages of Douaumont, Fleury, Vaux, Bezonvaux, Louvemont, Ornes, Haumont, Beaumont and Cumèries were never rebuilt. Small wonder that the female figure in Rodin’s bronze La Défense, sited symbolically outside Verdun’s Porte St-Paul, is ‘screaming in grief and anger at the sky’.³³ But elsewhere his optimism has been justified, as John Masefield prophesied while the war was still in progress.

      When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and then these places … will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps … In a few years time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench, Munster Alley and these other paths to glory will be deep under the corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.³⁴

      Major General Sir Ernest Swinton thought that Masefield was right. In Twenty Years After he wrote that:

      Time has worked its changes. The battle-fields today are green and gold again. Young trees are everywhere and the desolate waste of shell-hole and mud has given way to pasture-land and waving corn. Proudly on the heights stand the memorials to the fallen, and in the valleys and on hillside peacefully lie the silent cities where they rest.³⁵

THE EBB AND FLOW OF BATTLE

      The Western Front was created by the war’s opening campaign. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had been a humiliating defeat for the French, and at its end France’s two easternmost provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, were ceded to Germany. The burst of French patriotic revival which followed the defeat died away in the 1890s, its demise marked by the Dreyfus affair and the increasing use of troops against striking workers. But the French army had been modernised, with the 75-mm quick-firing field gun, the justly celebrated soixante-quinze, as its most visible symbol. Serious-minded officers studied march-tables at the new staff college, railway engineers threw a network of track across the countryside to make mobilisation and concentration easier, and military engineers scrawled their own geometry on the bare slopes of western Lorraine, glaring out to the new border.

      But despite a properly thought-through system of conscription which filled new barracks with fresh-faced youths, France was destined to remain weaker than Germany: neither her demography nor her industry could keep pace. Part of the solution was to offset French weakness with foreign strength. In 1892 she concluded a military accord with the Russians, and the conditions of French loans to help Russian industry placed particular emphasis on the construction of railways which would help the Russian army, huge but still only part-reformed, move westwards more quickly. In 1901 the Russians agreed to launch their first attack on Germany eighteen days after the declaration of war, and to follow it with up to 800,000 men by the twenty-eighth day.

      Colonial rivalry made an agreement with Britain more difficult. However, in January 1906 Colonel Victor Huguet, the French military attaché in London, called on the chief of the general staff to ask what Britain’s attitude would be if the Morocco crisis, then fizzing away briskly, led to war between France and Germany. ‘Semi-official’ discussions between the respective staffs were authorised shortly afterwards, on the understanding that their conclusions were not binding. French overtures came at a time when the British armed services were in the process of implementing reforms following the Boer War of 1899–1902, which had gone on far longer than expected and revealed some serious flaws in the military establishment. We shall see the results of some of these reforms in the next chapter, but the essential point in 1905–6 was that the newly created general staff (soon to be imperial general staff) was testing its weight in the almost equally new Committee of Imperial Defence, which had broader responsibility for national defence.

      The Royal Navy had previously enjoyed pride of place in defence planning, just as its warship-building programme gave it a stranglehold on the defence budget. But in 1906 a mixture of reticence and poor preparation lost it a succession of arguments in the Committee of Imperial Defence, and the general staff’s plan for sending around 100,000 men to France in the event of war with Germany was approved. It was not to be automatic, and would still require political approval: but it formed the basis for British military planning and a series of staff talks with the French. Another war crisis in 1911 saw Major General Henry Wilson lay the army’s war plan before the Committee of Imperial Defence with what Captain Maurice Hankey, its secretary, called ‘remarkable brilliancy’. Nothing had been neglected. The Francophile Wilson had even included ‘dix minutes pour une tasse de café’ as the troops moved up through Amiens station. The navy’s opposing plan was hopeless.³⁶

      The improvement of their army and the construction of foreign alliances encouraged the French to forsake the defensive plans which had followed the years immediately after the Franco-Prussian War in favour of offensive schemes. The one to be implemented in 1914, ‘Plan 17’, called for an all-out attack into the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. It embodied some characteristics which were distinctively French: ‘The French Army,’ declared the 1913 regulations, ‘returning to its traditions, henceforth knows no law but the offensive.’ The popular philosopher Henri Bergson lectured at the Sorbonne on l’élan vital, and Ernest Psichari wrote of ‘a proud and violent army’.³⁷

      But it also represented a tendency which was by now marked in the tactical doctrine of European armies in general. The fighting in South Africa and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 (the latter well attended by foreign observers) had not simply reminded men that fire killed. It had warned them of the danger that fire would paralyse movement, and that war would become costly and purposeless. Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff from 1891 to 1906, feared that:

      All along the line the corps will try, as in siege warfare, to come to grips with the enemy from position to position, day and night, advancing, digging in, advancing again, digging in again, etc, using every means of modern science to dislodge the enemy behind his cover.³⁸

      Armies believed that they had to shrug off what a French colonel termed ‘abnormal dread of losses on the battlefield’. All were to enter the war convinced that the tactical offensive was the best way to avert strategic stalemate.

      While the French