Laffin On the Western Front

Soldier's Stories from France and Flanders
1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9525-5
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

A serious attempt to illustrate the humanity of the soldier on the Western Front, this title reflects World War I as they saw it: from first shot to last. These tales, told to fellow men in the trenches, behind the lines, at base hospitals and at the estaminets and billets during rest periods, have been recorded here.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Laffin, John

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

Creating the Western Front

The Western Front is probably the bestknown battle line in history, but the events which led to its creation need explanation and clarification. Without this help what are people of the late twentieth century to make of this extraordinary area and the astonishing events that took place there? In simple terms, the Western Front was a relatively narrow battlefield 460 miles in length and up to 20 miles in breadth on which, during a period of 50 months, more than 6 million soldiers were killed and another 14 million wounded.

To expand the description a little, vast armies confronted one another across belts of barbed wire many miles deep. The wire defended line after line of trenches that collectively ran for thousands of miles across a morass of mud, and in places hills and mountains. The hostility between the Allies and the Central Powers was intense and their soldiers fought ferociously, but for most of the time with little military result.

A mixture of political and military madness brought the Western Front into being and maintained the incredible violence, which made it so infamous. The nature of the war, the prodigious effort, limitless courage and sacrifice – on both sides – and the intensity of the fighting has intrigued those generations that followed the ‘lost generation’. There is a curious fascination with the Western Front and all that it entails – the memorials and monuments, the mine craters and trenches, the famous woods and rivers, the thousands of war cemeteries, the villages and towns with names that would excite not a moment’s attention had they not been the scene of some costly battle. Like the battlefields of Waterloo and Gallipoli and those of the English Civil War and the American Civil War, the killing fields of the Western Front have an apparently inextinguishable mystique.

The Western Front differs from the others in that fighting raged across it almost incessantly for the duration of the war. The death of 20,000 men in one day of battle was not cataclysmic enough to bring the madness to an end. Neither side could break through the other’s lines, no matter the force, the money and the lives expended.

The trigger for what came to be called ‘The Great War’ was a singular act of madness. It was the assassination, on 28 June 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of his wife. The murders took place in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo and the killer was a young student nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. The organization to which Princip belonged, Mlada Bosnia (Young Bosnia), considered his act ‘tyrannicide for the common good’.

Franz Ferdinand was undoubtedly a tyrant, as well as being a brutal, boastful and bloody-minded man. As a pitiless hunter he shot tens of thousands of birds and animals and fired his guns and rifles so frequently that he permanently injured his shoulder and impaired his hearing.

As a prince Franz Ferdinand was also a field marshal and he had gone to Bosnia and its sister province Hercegovina, which the Habsburgs had annexed in 1908, to inspect the Austrian Army. The populace of the province, a mixture of Slavs, Serbs and Croats, had always wanted to join Serbia, their national state, and they regarded the Austrians as a hostile occupying power. In killing the Habsburg royal couple Gavrilo Princip imagined that he was striking a blow for freedom.

Austria-Hungary saw the assassination as a challenge to its status as a Great Power, especially as its rulers had already had other trouble with Serbia. The Habsburgs asked their German allies to back them in a show of force and the German Emperor Wilhelm II and his chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, not only promised support but said that if Russia intervened to aid Serbia Germany would oppose Russia.

Uncertain about how to proceed, the government in Vienna took until 23 July to frame a formal note to be sent to Serbia. Its ‘Ten Points’ included cessation of all propaganda against Austria-Hungary, the arrest of certain people accused of complicity in the assassination, and the participation of Austrian representatives during the investigations in Serbia. The general intention was to humiliate Serbia.

However, the Serbians accepted the note, though they added qualifications to a few points in an attempt to salvage a little prestige. As a precaution, the armed forces were mobilized. On the whole, the Serbian official reply, handed to the Austrian minister in Belgrade, was such a cleverly drawn document that Vienna did not know how to react. It solved the problem, on 28 July, by declaring war on Serbia, though the Austro-Hungarian army was in no state to do any actual fighting.

Russia, as patron of the Slav states in the Balkans, felt itself threatened and began to mobilize its huge army of conscripts. Even now nothing more than grandiose bluffing was in progress, but German military might and pride became involved. General Schleiffen, chief of the German general staff from 1892 to 1906, had enunciated the dictum ‘Mobilization means war’, and although he was dead his slogan lived on.

The German general staff convinced themselves that a war was actually in progress and on this false premise argued that if they did not act now they would lose their great advantage of superior speed and sophisticated railway transport. Their paranoid fear was that Russia and France, as allies, would attack them on two fronts, – an alarming prospect. On 31 July Chancellor Bethmann Hollwegg asked his chief of the general staff, von Moltke, just one question: ‘Is the Fatherland in danger?’

‘Yes,’ said Moltke, a response that led directly to war. Even so, some statesmen were still trying to mediate in an effort to prevent war. In the early hours of 1 August, King George V appealed directly to Tsar Nicholas of Russia to refrain from hostilities. But the momentum towards war was now unstoppable and on that same evening Russia and Germany were at war. On 3 August Germany declared war against France.

On 2 August the Germans had demanded that Belgium give the German armies open thoroughfare across the little lowland country in order to attack France. The German general staff wanted to implement the Schleiffen Plan, or the Cannae Plan as Schleiffen himself called it. It was an imaginative and ambitious strategy to encircle the French armies in the event of another war. Though he was now dead, Schleiffen’s plan was still attractive to his successors.

When King Albert of Belgium refused to comply with the Germans’ wishes the British government was drawn into the conflict because of a treaty, dating back to 1839, which committed Britain to go to Belgium’s defence should it be attacked. On 4 August Britain became the only power to declare war on Germany, rather than the other way round.

The chain of reactions was moving so quickly that nobody could stop one declaration linking with another and suddenly the world was at war. Both sides were convinced that their cause was right and that God marched with them; German soldiers’ belt buckles carried the words Got mit uns (God with us).

Immense armies were soon on the march to the eastern and western fronts – that is, the German eastern and western fronts. In the east the more professional and better-armed Germans decisively defeated the Russian armies at Tannenberg at the end of August. Vast German and French armies could move rapidly towards the Western Front because of the efficient railway systems but once they were delivered to the railheads the troops’ movement was slow, since no army had any mechanical transport. The initial thrust provided military momentum for only a month, after which the armies moved no faster than in Napoleon’s time, a century earlier.

Defence was largely mechanized, because of the railways, but attack was not. Horses pulled the guns and the transport while forage for the horses occupied more space than ammunition or food.

On 14 August the French launched a great offensive at Lorraine and suffered casualties so heavy that they were not exceeded in any later campaign, including that of Verdun. The Germans swept through Belgium, with the soldiers sometimes covering 30 miles a day on foot. Each time the French generals ordered a major attack against the invaders they lost still more men.

The British, meanwhile, were deciding how best to help Belgium, and at a Council of War on 5 August several ideas were presented. After long discussion, much of it pointless, Sir Henry Wilson of the War Office pointed out that the British Expeditionary Force, although it was a small one of about 100,000, must move to a timetable drawn up in 1911 and the only one in existence. It placed the BEF on the French left. This couldn’t possibly help Belgium, the reason for Britain going to war, but the Council of War agreed to use the old plan, the cabinet concurred and the BEF was sent to the Western Front. We can only speculate on what might have been achieved had the BEF been kept as an independent force and used more intelligently.

A French drawing of August 1914 showing the French Army going to the rescue of the damsel Alsace. The German claim to sovereignty over Alsace is swept aside as the French troops arrive.

By 22 August advance divisions of the BEF had reached the town of Mons, where the following day they were attacked by two German army corps, vastly superior in numbers. The BEF held firm but as the French troops on the right fell back the British commander, General Sir John French, had no option but to retreat. At Le Cateau on 26 August the BEF stood and fought again and withdrew once more.

In fact, both sides were moving away from each other, but...