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

⁶⁸ Even so, it is hard to estimate German casualties at very much lower than 600,000, and Captain von Hertig declared that: ‘The Somme was the muddy grave of the German field army and of the faith in the infallibility of the German leadership …’.⁶⁹ Charles Carrington, who saw the battle’s rough edge as an infantry platoon commander, was sure that:

      The Somme raised the morale of the British Army. Although we did not win a decisive victory, there was what matters most, a definite and growing sense of superiority over the enemy, man for man … We were quite sure we had got the Germans beat: next spring we would deliver the knock-out blow.⁷⁰

      Paddy Griffith is right to maintain that the Somme ‘taught the BEF many lessons and transformed it from a largely inexperienced mass army into a largely experienced one’.⁷¹ A mass of official tactical pamphlets appeared in its wake, providing army schools in France and Britain with the basis for their teaching and supplying individual officers and NCOs with more reliable material for private study than some earlier privately-produced material. New weapons and equipment arrived and were mastered. David Jones, in his wonderful prose-poem In Parenthesis, declared:

      The period of the individual rifle-man, of the old sweat of the Boer campaign, the ‘Bairnsfather’ war, seemed to terminate with the Somme battle. There were, of course, glimpses of it long after – all through in fact – but it never seemed quite the same.⁷²

      The Somme is a watershed in the history of the British army in the war. It was a strategic necessity, fought to meet a coalition requirement, and was an Allied victory on points. Some veterans never found its price worth paying. R. H. Tawney, a future professor of economic history serving, entirely characteristically, as a sergeant in a New Army battalion of the Manchester Regiment, wrote, while recovering from his wounds in England:

      You speak lightly, you assume that we shall speak lightly, of things, emotions, states of mind, human relationships and affairs, which are to us solemn or terrible. You seem ashamed, as if they were a kind of weakness, of the ideas which have sent us to France, and for which thousands of sons and lovers have died. You calculate the profit to be derived from ‘War after the War’, as though the unspeakable agonies of the Somme were an item in a commercial proposition.⁷³

      It confronts the historian with an unavoidable clash between head and heart: the only honest conclusion is to acknowledge the validity of both these irreconcilable imperatives.

      The Allied plan for 1917 was sketched out at another conference at Chantilly on 15 November 1916. It was resolved that Germany still remained the main enemy. When Romania, badly misjudging the equipoise of fortune, joined the Allies that summer she had been roundly defeated by a German army commanded by none other than Falkenhayn, dismissed as chief of the general staff in the wake of failure at Verdun. He had been replaced by the old but wily Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, closely assisted by Lieutenant General Erich von Ludendorff. The Allies proposed to maintain ‘general offensive action’ in 1917, and to elaborate detailed schemes later. By the time these plans were produced, however, there had been a far-reaching change in personalities. Asquith was replaced as prime minister by Lloyd George in early December 1916, and at the month’s end Joffre was succeeded by General Robert Nivelle, who had masterminded French recovery of Fort Douaumont at the close of the Verdun fighting.

      These two changes were to have a significant impact on the British armies in France. It was already clear that Haig and Lloyd George did not get on. Haig had already told his wife that ‘I have no great opinion of L. G. as a man or a leader,’ and Lloyd George later declared that Haig was ‘brilliant – to the top of his army boots’. John Charteris recognised that the two were fundamentally incompatible.

      D. H. dislikes him. They have nothing in common. D. H. always refuses to be drawn into any side-issues in conversation, apart from his own work. Lloyd George seemed to think this meant distrust of him. It is not so much distrust of him personally as of politicians as a class.⁷⁴

      Haig seemed to get on better with General Nivelle, initially reporting that he seemed ‘straightforward and soldierly’. But his plan for 1917 worried Haig. He proposed to strike a mighty blow on the Chemin des Dames, and to gain the troops required for it he requested that the British should extend their front southwards, from the Somme to the Oise. They were also to launch subsidiary attacks to pin down the Germans and prevent them from concentrating to meet Nivelle.

      Haig questioned this strategy. He was in favour of attacking a German army palpably weakened by the Somme, but had long believed that Flanders, where a short advance could bring the German railhead of Roulers within his grasp, offered better prospects than attacks further south. Moreover, he had been warned by Robertson that the government was gravely concerned by the damage being done by German submarines based at Ostend and Zeebrugge on the Flanders coast, and in April 1917 Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the First Sea Lord, told an American colleague that ‘it is impossible for us to go on with the war if [merchant shipping] losses like this continue’.⁷⁵ On 6 January 1917 Haig announced that he could not assist Nivelle unless some sort of provision was made for clearing the Flanders coast. He was spectacularly overruled. In late February Lloyd George met Nivelle at an Allied conference at Calais, and agreed to place Haig under his command for the duration of the offensive. Haig wrote to the king, offering to resign, but the monarch’s private secretary replied:

      I am to say from His Majesty that you are not to worry; you may be certain that he will do his utmost to protect your interests; and he begs you to work on the most amicable and open terms with General Nivelle, and he feels all will come right.⁷⁶

      As the Allies discussed their strategy, the Germans acted. Successes in the East, and growing war-weariness in Russia, enabled them to shift troops westward, a process which accelerated as the year wore on. And they prepared to fall back from the great apex of the Western Front salient onto a carefully-prepared position known as the Hindenburg line, a shorter length of front which would free some twenty divisions. In the process they devastated the area between the old front line and the new one, in an operation named Alberich, after the spiteful dwarf in the Nibelungen saga. The influential war correspondent Philip Gibbs thought it a telling comment on German national character that destruction like this could be carried out by men who had lived for the past two years with the population they now dispossessed.

      ‘They were kind to the children … but they burnt our houses.’ – ‘Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away … But he helped smash up the neighbours’ furniture with an axe.’ – ‘The lieutenant was a good fellow … but he carried out his orders of destruction’ …

      Gibbs concluded that ‘on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and all that was in them’.⁷⁷ John Masefield, not easily persuaded by anti-German propaganda, was shocked by what he saw:

      He has systematically destroyed what he could not carry away … Bureaus, mirrors, tables, sofas, have been smashed with axes, fruit trees have been cut, looped or ringed. Beds have been used as latrines, so have baths & basins … Houses, churches, cottages, farms, barns & calvaries have been burnt, blown up, pulled down or gutted … They are the acts of men. They are the acts of beasts.⁷⁸

      One German left a sign in English reading ‘Don’t be angry: Only wonder’ in the wreckage of a town: it can be seen in the Historiale de la Grande Guerre in Péronne. Captain Rudolf Binding, a German staff officer, admitted that: ‘The expulsion of the inhabitants from their little towns and villages was a heart-rending business, more ghastly than murder,’ though he added that it