A Passchendaele Portrait:
The Stupid War 1914-1918 Daniel M. Dobkin
There's not much point in trying to describe the smell of a rat dead two or three dayswhile eating onion soup: you'll ruin your appetite and confuse your terms. So let's set the scene and then discuss its significance.
The ground is, first and foremost, muddy; the sky, above all, gray. The shallow shellholes are distributed between the scraps of tangled barbed wire hanging off the broken wooden posts. There aren't many whole examples of anything, but there are pieces of things we don't normally like to think of in pieces, as well as those that come that way: guns, helmets, hands, heads, boots, even an occasional body that is merely perforated. The few soldiers making their slow way upon the slippery wooden planks that pass for a boardwalk have long ago accepted and rendered mute the exhaust of the ubiquitous rotting carrion that soldiers become here, even as exposure has dulled any humane objection to their fate.
Our olfactory protection is more efficiently provided by our distance of six thousand miles and nearly a century than by any biological adaptation. The dead men are only words on a page, or perhaps old photographs on our television screens. Still, we will attempt to surmount these barriers and confront this scene as closely as we may; it is the proper beginning of understanding, for nowhere as in the mud of Passchendaele do we find so aptly symbolized the futility of the Stupid War.
For two hundred million years the African and Eurasian plates have ground against one another like great gnashing teeth, raising the Alps and lesser broken lands of central and southern Europe. In consequence, the armies of men have been frequently deflected towards the flat plains of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands: slightly elevated slabs of the ancient continental shield pivoting the opening of the north Atlantic, exposed as dry land for our human moment by the vagaries of sea level and the work of generations of inhabitants. It is thus that the Schlieffen plan had conceived of a huge right wing of German attack across Belgium into France, realized in the cataclysm of August 1914, and so three years later that we find the British and German armies locked in combat on these same flat plains. The region around Ypres had been reclaimed from marshiand by centuries of labor, and farmers of the region were under penalty to keep their dikes clear. Recent child of the sea, the soil was a thin powder over a hundred meters of impermeable clay. Much land was utilized only for pasture, as it was too wet for cultivation. The destruction of the intricate drainage system by indiscriminate shelling would lead to an impassable graveyard for British troops just as inevitably as the relentless deforestation of Bangladesh oppresses its inhabitants with flooding in our own time.
The campaign had been in the mind of the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir Douglas Haig, since at least the previous year, but crystallized as an effort to draw German reserves towards the Belgian area of the front, so as to prevent them from overwhelming the French army. Futile and profligate offensives in the spring of 1917 had finally inspired the (by now citizen) army of France to revolt: they had grown tired of being mown down in lines by German machine guns. But by the time Haig was ready to launch his saving offensive in July of 1917, the French army had recovered its discipline under the less reckless leadership of General Petain, though it never recovered any enthusiasm for attack. The German army facing the British in Belgium, holding the high ground and warned by the long preparation, had implemented an advanced defensive scheme of interconnected fortified "pillboxes" whose concrete protected their occupants from shrapnel and whose machine guns, supporting each other, dominated the field of any possible attack. The submarine bases on the coast of Belgium which had seemed to threaten Britain with starvation (though in fact the naval campaign was mostly waged from German territory) were apparently enervated by the success of the new convoy system. Yet the campaign went on, reflecting an adherence to plan in the face of adverse circumstance already familiar in the annals of this War.
The British preceded their attack with a lengthy artillery bombardment: 2300 guns firing continuously from July 22 to July 31. Owing to the ingenious arrangements of their opponents and the natural barriers of mist few defenders were killed (though many were no doubt deprived of sleep and even sanity by the ceaseless shelling), but the bombardment almost as if by intent prepared the ground ideally for the summer rains that came, in early August as in every year, hours after the British troops left their trenches. By August 2 the British and French forces had sustained 35,000 casualties. "...wounded men failing ... into the shell holes were in danger of drowning. Mules slipped from the tracks and were often drowned in the giant shell holes... Guns sank until they became useless; rifles caked and would not fire..."
Drainage ditches ruined, the rain collected on the clay, swelling tiny creeks into stagnant bogs, as the futile campaign progressed into the winter months. Trenches could not be dug to deeper than two or three feet; for most soldiers the only protection was a shallow shell hole. The deepest ones, covered by a canvas awning, housed company commands. When the rain grow persistent occupants of the holes were often faced with the dubious choice of drowning in them or being shot as they tried to find other cover. Sidewalks of "duckboard', planks laid out onto the mud from hole to hole, formed the only possible means for the movement of men, horses, and supplies.
Attacks were monstrous, massive things. Late on the night of a scheduled attack, the infantry would start forward towards their "jumping off" positions. If they were lucky, they would reach the forward areas, lines of attack marked off by white tapes, by midnight or so, leaving five or six hours for precious sleep. More often, men and animals would struggle over duckboard and mud, sinking and sliding, making one mile in an hour, arriving at the front just in time to continue slogging as the bombardment began.
For the success of each attack was wrapped around artillery bombardments. The only way for an army to advance into open country without being mowed down by a hail of bullets was to keep the enemy from shooting. For this purpose, masses of artillery would mount a "curtain barrage": a precisely calibrated wall of explosive carnage, advancing (if everything went well) at just the rate of a walking infantryman. The attackers sought to "stick their noses into the barrage", walking immediately behind and in synchrony with it -- for any delay would allow the defenders to climb out of the dugouts in which they sheltered from the big guns and deal death once again.
Sometimes things went well; but more frequently they did not. The front-line artillery, horse drawn across the impossible mud, often failed to arrive; or when fired sank irretrievably into the muck, becoming impossible to aim. The back-line artillery, without accurate communication with the soldiers, advanced at a measured pace which too often bore no relationship to the actual position or rate of advance of the infantry. Only the most precise planning and exacting execution could lead to an advance; and even the most successful attack could only advance as far and as fast as the massive, ponderous artillery which made it possible.
The mud is still wet, the bodies still stinking, the sky is still gray with promise of more intolerable rain. It is daybreak, October 14th. Even the lackadaisical and incompetent General Gough had known how difficult the attack ordered for the 12th was to be, but Staff had not permitted him to delay. The rain had begun almost precisely at the opening of the attack: the artillery had been desultory, the attackers bogged, the gain of territory tiny, the casualties horrendous.Back in London the newspapers are busy declaring another success. Here on the battlefield, an informal truce has been declared to clear out some of the wounded. We can imagine that, like the soldiers, we took shelter for the evening in a captured pillbox: "twenty-four wounded men inside, two dead Germans on the floor, six dead Germans outside, in various stages of decomposition. The stench was dreadful." With the daybreak, we poke outside of the pillbox. Forty dead men lie within twenty yards of us, and the whole valley is full of their companions. Nowhere has the attack gone much farther than one of General Haig's well-struck golf balls.
Back in the intoxicating warmth of May, Haig had promised the Government a brief and decisive strike: the Channel ports (40 kilometers distant) taken in two weeks, or the attempt terminated. Yet in the event the butchery continues, and will until the 4th of November, culminating in the capture of the shelled-out hulk that had been the village of Passchendaele. Three hundred thousand British and Imperial troops and two hundred thousand defenders will fall battling over a wet and stinking sausage of land 3 to 4 miles wide and 16 miles long: that is, one dead or wounded man for every sixty-foot square of muck. The ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge, unthreatened, will remain in German hands until the final withdrawal next year.
The soldiers shiver in the flooded shelf holes. Their ambition is to obtain a hot bath, dry socks, clean underwear. General Haig wishes to be mentioned in the histories with Wellington and Nelson. The Kaiser wants to have two good arms, and escape the dead hand of his uncle Edward (VIl, late king of England). The British government wants to preserve the position of influence which its textiles, coal, and trade have built it, though it is not quite sure whether this is to protect the privileges of the rich or improve the lot of the poor. The French Army wishes to reconquer Alsace and Lorraine, to erase the scars of its defeat in 1870, and if possible regain preeminence over a civilian government it does not like and does not trust. Lenin wants to be left alone to (as he thinks) remake society; Stalin wants to be tall, with big hands. No one wants to bury hundreds of thousands of human corpses in the muck, together with the wealth of nations distilled into the cases of artillery shells. What, then, has led them to do exactly that?
In order to understand the path to the quagmire of Passchendaele, we must go beyond pompous denigration of the participants and understand why real people making decisions for the reasons real people make them could so thoroughly misjudge the consequences of their actions. War is not a monolithic institution. The role of war in society changes each time new weapons, tactics, and organization are employed in it; sometimes, the changes are so vast as to constitute a revolution. The European Civil War of 1914-1918 was almost wholly evil, for its huge costs in lives and resources far exceeded any possible gain for the participants in general or any nation in particular. Yet its most immediate predecessors on the European scene, Bismarck's wars of the 1860's, had been on the whole a successful employment of limited war in policy: the actual battles were merely a framework around which diplomacy resolveddisputes at a relatively modest cost in lives.
We have been taught that the role of armed conflict changed suddenly and without precedent in the desert of New Mexico on the stormy morning of July 16, 1945, but this is not correct. Oppenheimer's Destroyer of Worlds was merely one in a chain of innovations which have repeatedly transformed the reality of war. The killing fields of the Stupid (often misnamed Great) War were the result of a misunderstanding of the consequences of such technological change on the battlefield by the commanders of the armies, and in consequence by the national leaders they advised. The nature of these changes are the subject of the remainder of our discourse.
The fires of the Napoleonic Wars (1796 to 1815) had forged the military doctrines and dogmas of Europe in the 19th century. In these times the primary armament of the individual foot soldier was the smooth-bore musket; that of the cavalryman, the saber. The muskets fired a round lead ball and were loaded from the muzzle. The loading process involved many steps in order to properly compact the gunpowder and seat the ball so as to contain the gases of combustion long enough to allow a complete explosion; a skilled musketeer could be expected to get off perhaps two shots per minute. (The Prussians, the very best, achieved four.) The ball thus flung had very high air resistance and short range, and no spin for stability in flight (and thus accuracy). The net result was that these weapons had an effective range of 100 meters or so.
Infantry tactics of the time, which initially sound absurd to the modern ear, make sense once the consequences of this type of weaponry are considered. Infantrymen in attack would march in columns and upon closing with the enemy reform into ranked lines, shoulder to shoulder. They would advance at a walking pace, keeping formation, firing by turns. The accuracy of their muskets was so poor that no attempt to aim was made; instead the lines merely tried to maximize the density of their fire, in order to overpower the enemy's fire. If possible, the attackers would close with the defenders, at which point the bayonet became the weapon of choice. The effective range of the enemy weapons, 100 meters, would take about 1 minute for the attacking group to cross; in this time, each defender might fire 2 to 3 times, and might succeed in wounding or killing perhaps one attacker. Thus if the attackers, through good fortune or the cleverness of their leaders, had a significant advantage in numbers, they would be able to come to grips with their opponents. Once this final stage of close-quarters battle was reached, the determination and mercilessness of the individual soldiers became of utmost importance; this explains the critical role given to the "offensive spirit" in the minds of commanders and strategists.
Similarly, the role of cavalry attack was obvious and sensible in this environment. Horses, being much faster than men, could cross the effective range of the enemy weapons quite possibly before a shot could be fired. A well-timed cavalry charge could be used to distract and "turn the flank" of an opponent by forcing this close-quarters battle at the will of the attacking force. Only a well-trained "square" of men, coordinating the tasks of reloading and firing in any direction, could protect themselves against mounted attack.
Because the soldiers did not fire very many rounds of ammunition, the logistical requirements of the army were modest; the whole army could move about at the rate of a walking man while maintaining coherence of organization and supply. A soldier might carry his day's requirements in ammunition; a horse might draw in a wagon the needs of a field artillery piece. Attacks could be mounted with minimal preparation, facilitating tactical surprise. During an attack an army might be permitted (and expected) to continue at walking pace to pursue a fleeing enemy or exploit a "breakthrough" (a penetration into the soft underbelly of the opponent) for a day or two at normal efficiency, while waiting for supply services to catch up.
This, then, is the image of battle that was in the minds of the commanders of the great Continental (and smaller British) armies of the early 20th century. Battles were viewed as dynamic things, where small local advantages in manpower could be easily exploited to create great victories. Clever planning by the staff commands would create these small advantages; the virtues required from the individual soldier were obedience to orders and an aggressive spirit, rather than great tactical subtlety. This view of armies and soldiers could and did become the unspoken basis of strategy without the need to invoke conspiracy, ambition, intent to deceive, or simple evil on the part of its adherents. The evil results occurred because this beautiful, relatively simple, internally consistent image was, by 1914, seriously and tragically out of step with the reality of the battlefield.
Indeed, between the fall of Napoleon and the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by (one must suspect) members of his own security police, the technology of weaponry had come a long way. The individual soldier now carried a rifle, firing streamlined bullets encased in cartridges containing their own primer and powder. During the century the art of cutting slots in the barrel of a gun in order to impart spin to the projectile ("rifling") had improved considerably; together with the innovations in manufacturing that enabled the mass production of precision barrels and cartridges, these improvements had created weapons that could easily fire 20 or 30 bullets in a minute, with an effective range of 300 to 400 meters. The addition of smokeless powder (nitrocellulose) towards the end of the century enabled this increasingly deadly rifleman to conceal himself effectively as well. Primitive, dangerous muzzle-loading cannon had become breech-loading artillery, capable of firing (in the case of the French 75 mm cannon) nearly as fast as a rifle. 'Heavy' artillery (exploited initially only by the Germans) could fire huge shells full of thousands of projectiles, guaranteeing the death of any exposed person in the region of impact. Most significant of all was the perfected machine gun, patented by the American Hiram Maxim in 1885. Unlike earlier, hand-cranked multiple fire weapons, this gun employed the force of the explosion to load the next shot and set the firing pin. Employing a water-cooled barrel and belted cartridges, this gun could fire 400 rounds per minute for extended periods, enabling a pair of soldiers, under certain conditions, to decimate a regiment of opponents.
It is easy to see how the picture has changed. Let us again join a brave company of soldiers attacking shoulder to shoulder to the sound of fife and drum. They now come under fire not for 100 but for 300 or 400 meters --that is, three or four minutes at a walk. During this time their opponents, who have taken cover in trenches and are nearly invulnerable except to artillery, fire 90 or 100 times per man (or several hundred times for those armed with machine guns). If the numbers are roughly equal to start with, it is obvious that all the attackers will be killed or wounded and the defenders barely scratched. Bayonets are mere dead weight. The cavalry is even worse off: the faster pace of horses fails to make up for the huge target a horse and rider present to a rifleman. All the cavalry are dead long before they can close to saber range. The critical factor here is exposure: if I can see you, I can kill you.
The result of all these changes was not just a perturbation but a revolution in the reality of battle. Small numerical differences could be totally overwhelmed by positional advantages, because of the huge deadliness of the weaponry. An army attacking over an open field would be mowed down by an opponent under cover. Only artillery could threaten the defenders -- but as soon as the artillery stopped to let the attacking troops through, the defenders could crawl out of their holes and once again deal roughly with the invader. The loss of a few of their number to the artillery attack simply didn't matter as long as the advantage of position was maintained. Finally, either attack or defense (but especially attack) required huge quantities of ammunition and thus sophisticated logistical support, difficult to provide in an essentially horse-drawn world. Laborious preparations inevitably warned the enemy of an approaching attack. Combined with the ease of reestablishing an effective defense after a retreat, these new realities made the classical idea of 'breakthrough" (the attacker penetrating into the underbelly of the opponent and preventing retreat or regrouping) an illusion, a will of the wisp always sought and never found on the Western Front through four long years of battle.
Naturally all the statements I have just made are gross oversimplifications. Successful attacks could be and were carried out many times during the conflict of 1914 to 1918. The vital point to realize -- the vital point which all the commands save the German staff failed to grasp, and they only vaguely, until millions of men lay dead -- was that success now turned critically on attention to details of terrain and tactics, instead of depending primarily on numbers and spirit; and that advance could only proceed at the rate allowed by the voracious logistic appetites of the armies. This meant that winning--or losing--a battle, even a major one, would not determine the outcome of a war, because the conditions for success were so hard to create and so easy to disrupt.
Humans often act against their real interests, but almost always in favor of their perceived advantage, a habit so enchantingly if irrelevantly enshrined as "the pursuit of happiness" by our Declaration of Independence. Europe (in which for these purposes we include Britain) in the early 20th century was filled with terrorism, poverty, corruption, anarchism, labor unrest: all the unresolved contradictions of an agrarian culture in transition to an industrial society, unrelieved by the political flexibility characteristic of the United States. The people of France, Germany, Austria, and even peaceful Belgium (after it was attacked) greeted the call to arms in 1914 with a euphoric surge of nationalism shared by virtually all classes of society. It is tempting to make the (unprovable) assertion that a war between the European Powers was inevitable under such conditions; but the War That Happened, the Stupid War, the Human Mincing Machine, need not have been. It surely would not have happened had the peoples of these nations clearly envisioned the war they were to fight; they expected sacrifice and difficulty but not wholesale decimation.
A sensible, defense-oriented strategy for the French army, consistent with the realities of battle of the time, had been advanced by General Michel, then head of the French General Staff, in 1911. Implementation of such a plan might very well have resulted in a politically neutral stalemate at the French border within a month of the outbreak of war, allowing the combatants to back out of the conflict with a chastened idea of the value of war in politics. Instead, Michel, a man of perception but not resolution, was removed and replaced by Joffre, whose opposite temperament nearly destroyed his country when the test came. What was the origin of this essential error in judgment on the part of the military and government of France, and of similar misjudgments by the other Great Powers of the time?
The explanation is simple, and may be applied to all the classes of society: they were lied to by the military about both the costs and benefits of war, in the sense that what the Joffres, the von Moltkes, and later the Nivelles and the Haigs, told the leaders and the people was not true. The military commands, and thus the civilian leaders, were infatuated with windows of opportunity, strategic breakthroughs, bandwagoning -- the seductive levers by which their guns and discipline might be converted into political and economic advantage. The reality of the machine-gun-swept, defense-dominated battlefield was left undiscussed. The lies were believed until it was too late by those who heard them because the lies were believed by those who told them.
Five centuries had passed since the flower of French chivalry had fallen at Agincourt in 1415, pursuing glory before victory, enshrining courage over tactical acumen. Decades of battle with England, punctuated by infamous defeats at Crecy and Poitiers, as well as ignominious failures against Islamic forces at Mahdia and Nicopolis, had not displaced the armored knights of France from their place in the van of the attack, heedless of danger and also of order, unity of command, and the power of the English longbow or indeed any missile weapon. Yet in a fundamental sense the great victories of the English had had equally little effect on their fortunes. Their weapons and resources were not equal to the task of conquering a fortified city, leaving the English armies incapable of achieving a conclusive resolution of the war. No means existed whereby the killing of French soldiers could be converted by the English kings into the desired result: political and economic control of northwestern France. The continuing battles and associated brigandage merely inflicted more misery upon the increasingly hostile peoples of both nations. The military power available to the rulers of this time was well-fitted to the vicious suppression of their own unruly people, but quite inadequate to achieve domination of foreign lands.
In contrast, the colonial expansion of European culture into the Americas, Africa, and much of Asia during the 15th through the 19th centuries (the 'Vasco de Gama" era) had been, from a chauvinistically European point of view, a great success. From the wars with the various native inhabitants of the Americas to Kitchener's recovery from the disaster of Khartoum, the basis of European dominance had seemed to lie in military superiority over non-European rivals. Furthermore, the origins of European wealth seemed to lie in the titular possession of foreign lands. The whole colonial era appeared to demonstrate how victory in battle directly translated into political dominance and widespread prosperity for the victor. One of Britain's observers of the conflict between Russia and Japan, General Sir Ian Hamilton (who later commanded the failed assault at Gallipoli), wrote in 1905 "... that there are millions outside the charmed circle of Western civilization who are ready to pluck the sceptre from nerveless hands as soon as the old spirit is allowed to degenerate... Providentially, Japan is our ally... England has time, therefore ... time to implant and cherish the military ideal in the hearts of her children; time to prepare for a disturbed and an anxious twenthieth century."
Disturbed and anxious it has surely been, yet the twentieth century has brought power beyond that "charmed circle" despite, not as a consequence of, military action. Was there ever truth to this association? The perspective of a century leads us to see a connection far more tenuous and uncertain between European arms and colonial power. Battlefield victories there were, but the age of European domination, like that of the Empire of Rome, was probably based on economic power rather than military prowess. It is quite likely that possession of (as distinct from trade with) lands outside Europe represented a net economic loss to the colonizing nations during the 19th century. Nevertheless, the mythology of the age of colonization had helped place a veil of respectability over the institution of land warfare. The butchery of the American Civil War 1860-1864, the British humiliation at the hands of the Boers in 1899, the complex and difficult Russo-Japanese war of 1905: clear illustrations of the problems of offensive war as an instrument of policy in the age of the repeating rifle, these conflicts were studied in great detail by the technical staffs of the great European armies and studiously ignored by the strategists whose preconceptions they violated.
Knowledge of the world is collected piece by tiny piece; the conversion of this unwieldy compendium of facts into precepts simple enough for our minds to comprehend proceeds by suppression of distinctions without consequence, while preserving in grand generalization those that are essential. We may now trace the curious path which brought the men of Britain to die in the mud below the low hills of Messines. The last steps are easy and obvious: from the debarkation ports, over the wartime railroads to the little junction at Ypres, and down the Menin road in wagons or trucks or on sore feet, slipping on the scraps of duckboard to rest (all too often the last rest) in a shellhole in the slime. Yet the critical jumping-off points for this attack lay in the failure of the collective mind of Europe: it had applied a brush too broad, a sieve too coarse, a simplification of the world which brutal reality would not bear. The generals in their staff cars to whom Belgium in the dust of May looked the same as in the mud of October; the strategists who watched the flags on the maps and saw only the cavalry charges of their youth; the leaders who read 1914 on their desk calendars and weren't sure if it was really 1870 or indeed 1815; the collective peoples to whom war was either a stirring patriotic exercise or an evil so absolute as to be unworthy of contemplation: each had held and failed to exercise its veto, allowing the gallant and the merely resigned to oppose shrapnel and flying lead with tired human flesh.
Through the strange levers of opinion polls and advertisement, the people of most of the great nations of the world now set military policy in a fundamental sense. Mindless pacifism is hardly sufficient guidance for our course: following Robert Heinlein, we refer the holders of the position that war never solves anything to the city fathers of Carthage for enlightenment. Equally mindless faith in militarism without examination of means and consequences is the path to Passchendaele. Two thousand four hundred years ago, Sun Tzu wrote "War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied." The British soldiers who died in their sheltholes were sent by a citizenry which had failed to make the distinction between muskets and machine guns. A more refined discrimination is necessary if we are to navigate the perilous century before us and realize the promise messily postponed by the guns of August of 1914.
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Bibliography:
The indispensable starting point of any investigation of this sad and remarkable conflict is Barbara Tuchman's classic The Guns of August. Ms. Tuchman's enthralling narrative of the opening scenes of the War that Didn't End Wars will leave the novice fascinated but with many more questions than answers (at least, so it did for me). A concise portrait of the whole war is laid out in much drier prose in B. H. Liddell Hart's The Real War 1914-1918; the Belgian campaign described in this essay is detailed in Leon Wolff's In Flanders Fields.
For those interested in the broader questions of war and weaponry, a fascinating reflection may be found in Vic Hurley's Arrows Against Steel: The History of the Bow. Nominally a discussion of the role of archery in warfare, this book is in fact a review of important infantry and cavalry tactics over 3000 years of recorded history. Technology in War by Kenneth Macksey gives a more complete idea of some of the changes which took place in the armaments of Europe during the 19th century. The misunderstandings of those changes, which led to the War, are detailed in Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, edited by Steven Miller. Last but by no means least is perhaps the most important book every written on the subject of land warfare, Sun Tzu's The Art of War. This tome, penned (well, actually brushed) about four hundred years before Christ, remains a vital source on many aspects of the employment of armies and their relation to government.
In the realm of the truly obscure, my limited knowledge of the tectonic history of Europe was borrowed from the excellent (but now rather dated) history of the development of plate tectonics, Continents in Motion by Walter Sullivan.
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Paul Brunemeier, Christopher Olson, and Margaret McComb were kind enough to review various incarnations of this manuscript.