Europe is Mad

Despite the previous year's series of "disappointments punctuated by disasters" -- the rout of Serbia, Russia's loss of Poland and Galicia, the ghastly slaughter on the Western Front which had accomplished little -- the Entente Powers entered 1916 optimistic that the tide of the Great War could be turned in their favor. (Meyer, p. 363)

Italy, hoping to acquire territorial spoils in exchange for opening a new front, had been enticed to declare war on Austria on May 23, 1915. The battered Russians were restocking their ranks with fresh conscripts, and by spring would have two million men in the field, most of them adequately equipped thanks to a notable manufacturing expansion. The French had increased their output of shells, field guns, rifles, and explosives sixfold, and by skillful reorganization and deployment of soldiers from the rear had formed twenty-five new divisions. (Keegan, pp. 275-276) With nearly a million men on the continent -- a number that was growing at the rate of one hundred thousand a month -- "the little army with which Britain had begun the war" had metastasized beyond recognition. (Meyer, p. 364)

It was an inevitable statistical inferiority that guaranteed ultimate exhaustion and a death sentence should the German leadership continue to pursue a defensive strategy, no matter how effectively it was conducted

Concluding that Russia's "offensive powers" had been shattered and that she was on the verge of revolution and collapse, in a letter to Kaiser Wilhelm on Christmas Day 1915, Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn maintained that Great Britain -- the world's dominant industrial and maritime power, and now Germany's archenemy and principal threat -- must be persuaded by a demonstration of brute force that victory was beyond its grasp and that it should lay down its arms. (Meyer, pp. 366-367)

He proposed the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare to deprive Britain of vital foodstuffs and supplies and a concentrated operation designed to remove her "nearest and most important ally, France, from the war." (Meyer, p. 368) While he understood "that the fortified front could not be decisively penetrated," Falkenhayn argued "that France's will could be broken in one great battle of attrition . . . a battle so terrible in its dimensions, so shattering in its impact on both camps," that her people would be convinced that further resistance was futile. (Marshall, pp. 235-236)

Falkenhayn's plan was to lure the French into a German killing machine where they would "bleed to death" --  "to threaten some piece of ground they would do anything to hold," even in the face of overwhelming artillery. Such a "vital point" was the fortress of Verdun -- an isolated spear point jutting into the German line only twelve miles from rail supply. It had been a bone of contention between the two countries for many years, a cherished symbol of nationalism the French would fervently defend. It lay conveniently in the path of the German Fifth Army, which was commanded by Crown Prince Wilhelm, upon whom all accolades for victory would devolve. (Meyer, pp. 368-369)

The preliminary logistics were prodigious, and made even more remarkable in that they remained largely invisible to the French, which in part can be attributed to the hilly, wooded countryside and the cloudy winter weather of the region. Between late December and early February Falkenhayn amassed on the east bank of the Meuse River a hundred and fifty thousand men and over eight hundred guns, some capable of throwing one-ton projectiles. Five new railway lines were constructed across the Fifth Army's occupied zone to deliver weapons and ammunition. Thirteen hundred trains hauled in 2.5 million shells. (Meyer, pp. 372-373)

Falkenhayn's diabolical plan was not to capture Verdun but to bring the French within range of his artillery and then "bleed them white." His perverse logic was dismissive of the quick breakthrough that might compel them to retreat. Thus he would limit the first day's attack to a narrow front of only five to seven miles; he would wait until the end of the day to engage his infantry; and he would advance on the east bank of the Meuse only. He ignored his subordinates' contentions that the French were more vulnerable on the west bank and that his troops would be exposed to enemy artillery situated there. (Meyer, pp.373-374)

"Verdun was no longer an entrenched camp." (Marshall, p. 239) Having seen the speed with which the Germans had destroyed the fortresses at Liege and Namur, French commander Joffre had lost faith in such fortifications and had gradually stripped Verdun of guns and manpower. Only the warnings of aged General Herr, military governor of the region, and the meticulous preparations of Lieutenant Colonel Emile Driant, commander of two battalions in the hilly Bois de Caures, directly opposite the German lines -- both of whom had detected intensified enemy activity -- enabled the French to mount an effective resistance. Herr was able to muster thirty-five thousand men at the anticipated point of attack; Driant's thirteen hundred would bear the brunt of it. (Meyer, pp. 369-372)

Other than nationalistic sentimentality for this architectural landmark and historical anachronism, there was no reason to expend an army to defend Verdun. It had ceased to be "an indispensable anchor of the allied front . . . The north-facing forts would have been useless to the Germans. There were no great stores of materiel present to change hands." (Marshall, p. 242)

In fact, "historians have argued that the French would have wiser to abandon Verdun, fall back on the hill country to the southwest, and oblige the Germans to settle for a symbolic victory of minor strategic value." Meyer, pp. 380-381) Instead both were sucked into a maelstrom that in its length, cost, brutality, and sheer pointlessness became a microcosm of the war itself. (Meyer, p. 380)

Beginning early on the morning of February 21 and continuing into the next day, over a six-mile front, two million shells were thrown at the narrow triangle defined by Brabant, Ornes, and Verdun -- fired at the rate of 100,000 rounds per hour, mixing shrapnel, high explosives, and poison gas, obliterating the French forward trenches. (Marshall, p. 244)

"During the first day's bombardment an estimated eighty thousand shells fell on the Bois des Caures; on the second morning thousands more came screaming down." Finding his position nearly surrounded, Driant ordered a withdrawal, during which he was shot in the forehead. (Meyer, p. 381) Only seven wounded lieutenants and one hundred Chasseurs would survive his command. (Marshall, p. 244)

French deaths exceeded twenty-three thousand in the first five days compared to fewer than two thousand reported by the Germans. It was a rare instance of defenders suffering substantially heavier losses than their attackers. Falkenhayn's tactics seemed to be working. (Meyer, p. 383)

Displaying an astonishing willingness to die rather than surrender or retreat, the French held their ground for three days. Then, on February 24, the Germans stormed their secondary system of trenches, occupied the town of Samogneaux on the right bank of the Meuse, and advanced three-and-a-half miles, stopping only when the bastions of Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux blocked their way. The next day Douaumont fell to a lone German sergeant who took its fifty-six defenders by surprise and captured them. (Meyer, pp. 384-387)

French reinforcements continued to arrive, but were dispersed into the fray helter-skelter. "They were quickly shot up without accomplishing anything . . . The French were in such disarray, and so demoralized, that they would have been routed if hit with sufficient force." But Falkenhayn stubbornly refused to release his main reserves. An ammunition dump blew up, costing him four hundred and fifty thousand shells. Some of his giant howitzers fell silent under a barrage from French guns left intact on the west bank of the river. (Meyer, pp. 384, 386, 387)

The general whom Joffre sent to inspect the deteriorating situation, Noel-Edouard de Castelnau, was a firm adherent of the doctrine that national territory should never be relinquished. He ordered to Verdun "a man who, more than any other in the French Army, was capable of organizing an effective defense while at the same time protecting his troops from unnecessary destruction," Henri-Phillippe Petain. An infantryman who had made himself an expert in the science of artillery, he was a war leader unique in his willingness to share the dangers of combat and in his unwillingness to sacrifice lives needlessly. (Meyer, p. 388)

Immediately Petain began moving men and guns back into the strongholds Joffre had all but abandoned, positioning them and coordinating their fire to inflict maximum damage on the German assault troops. "He ordered an end to hopeless attacks on lost positions. He installed a 'line of panic' where the French could make a last stand should the Germans break through." (Meyer, p. 388)

"Petain saw that his main task was to establish adequate communications . . . Serving the decisive front were only one branch line and a narrow-guage railway -- this to supply one-half million troops and 150,000 draft animals. It couldn't be done. So Petain rebuilt the road from Bar-le-Duc, later called La Voie Sacree (the Sacred Way), and introduced into warfare the supplying of a fighting front via motor convoys manned and loaded to deliver like a moving belt." (Marshall, p. 247)

"At the peak of the conflict, trucks arrived in Verdun at the rate of one every fourteen seconds . . . at any given time as many as many as fifteen thousand men were at work keeping the roadbed in usable condition. Upon unloading, the trucks would be filled with men -- not with the wounded only, but with soldiers" being sent to the rear for rest and recuperation, part of Petain's plan to maintain a constant rotation of units into and out of the combat zone. "In time more than three-fourths of the entire French army -- 125 divisions -- would move through Verdun." (Meyer, pp. 390-391)

"The actions taken by Petain, coupled with the Germans' lack of reserves, changed the character of the fight. On February 27, barely forty-eight hours after standing on the brink of taking the city, the Germans for the first time captured no new ground." The next day melting ice and snow turned the frozen earth to mud and made the movement of guns and shells nearly impossible; soon forward units of German infantry found themselves under the same withering fire they had inflicted on the enemy only a week earlier. (Meyer, p. 390)

"The German Fifth army hit hard again on March 6. But the line of attack had changed." Since no success had been achieved on the narrow front on the east bank of the Meuse, Falkenhayn bowed to the entreaties of the Crown Prince and his Chief of Staff, Konstantin von Knobelsdorf; he agreed that the offensive must be broadened to the west bank, where, behind the heights of La Mort Homme (the Dead Man) and Cote 304, the French were hiding their lethal artillery. (Marshall, p. 247)

Petain was waiting for him, with sixty thousand fresh and well-provisioned troops. The Germans managed to take possession of a woodland called the Bois des Corbeaux and to overrun two lines of defense directly adjacent to the Meuse, but Le Mort Homme and the high points nearest it remained in French hands. (Meyer, pp. 399-400)

"On the ravaged ground of the east bank, after again throwing masses of infantry against reinforced French defenses and murderous artillery fire, the Germans found themselves reeling under the magnitude of their losses and unable to advance." (Meyer, p. 399) "The ruins of the village of Vaux changed hands thirteen times during the month of March, and yet the fort itself lay tantalisingly beyond German reach." (Keegan, p. 283)

In a struggle that had captured the imagination of the world, the two sides were bleeding each other white in futile efforts to take or defend a few square miles of ground that had no strategic import other than a colossal symbolism. (Meyer, p. 400) In his memoirs, Crown Prince Wilhelm would describe Verdun as "the mill on the Meuse that ground to powder the hearts as well as the bodies of our soldiers." (Meyer, p. 405) By the end of March the Germans had lost 81,000 men, the French 89,000.

Petain's valiant exploits made him a national hero but his defensive posture did not sit well with Joffre. In April he was replaced by Robert Nivelle, the dashing figure who had won fame in 1914 by repulsing a German attack at the gates of Paris. Nivelle and the general he brought with him, Robert Mangin -- labeled the "Butcher" by his own men for his indifference to casualties -- immediately earned Joffre's approbation by taking the offensive and by discontinuing Petain's system of rotating divisions through the front line. (Meyer, pp. 404-405)

In the far South Atlantic, the explorer Ernest Shackleton arrived at a whaling station on South Georgia Island, having miraculously survived a year and a half stranded on the fringes of the Antarctic continent. "When was the war over?" he asked the first man he encountered. "The was is not over," the man answered. "Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad." (Meyer, p. 406)

On April 9 the Germans launched an "enormous, convulsive" assault on both banks simultaneously. "Before sending their infantry into action, they fired off seven trainloads of artillery shells." They reached what they thought was the crest of La Mort Homme, only to discover that the real summit lay just beyond their reach. Twelve days of drenching rain saved the French from surrendering this critical position. By now their casualties had risen to one hundred thirty-three thousand, the Germans' to one hundred twenty thousand. (Meyer, pp. 405, 414)

On May 8 the Germans captured Cote 304 -- whose batteries protected La Mort Homme -- but only after thirty-six hours of bombardment by five hundred guns along a single mile of front and three terrible days of fighting at close quarters.

A vast ammunition detonation inside Fort Douaumont which killed six hundred fifty German soldiers led the French to believe it was in a weakened state. Beginning on May 17, Mangin's three hundred heavy guns fired a thousand tons of explosives onto a quarter of a square mile centered on the fort. The ensuing assault "broke into the fort's inner chambers. The Germans regrouped, however, and after days of hellish underground combat, drove the attackers out. The failure was so complete and the costs so high -- more than fifty-five hundred troops and 130 officers killed out of twelve thousand, another thousand taken prisoner -- that Mangin was relieved of command." (Meyer, p. 420)

The Germans finally took possession of Le Mort Homme at the end of May, and gathered themselves for the climactic east bank offensive that would carry them to Verdun. Fort Vaux fell on June 7 following six days of brutal combat and a defense so heroic that Crown Prince Wilhelm presented the captive French commander, Major Raynal, a sword to replace the one he had lost; Raynal had surrendered only because his men were literally dying of thirst. (Meyer, p. 427)

That left only one small barrier, Fort Souville, between the Germans and their long-sought objective. On June 22 they softened up the fort with a preliminary artillery barrage that was as savage as ever and ended with the release of a new weapon: phosgene gas, which killed every living thing, even insects and plants. "There are clouds of smoke, the air is unbreathable. There's death everywhere," wrote a French lieutenant. (Meyer, p. 428)

The next day Falkenhayn threw his last reserves into the attack: thirty thousand men on a front of just three miles against a stronghold that, if reduced, would leave them only two and a half miles from the central citadel. Indeed they broke through, only to come under murderous fire on both flanks while aircraft strafed them from above. "The forward edge of the advance got to within twelve hundred yards of the crest of the last ridge before Verdun, but that was as far as it could go. At the end of two days of horror for the men on both sides, the Germans had to give up." (Meyer, p. 429)

"Since February 21 about twenty million shells had been fired into the battle zone . . . Forests had been reduced to splinters, villages had disappeared . . . Over two hundred thousand men had been killed and wounded on each side . . . To both armies Verdun had become a place of terror and death that could not yield victory." A final effort by Germans on July 11 again reached Fort Souville but was again beaten back. (Keegan, p. 285)

After three more months of stalemate, on October 19 Nivelle unleashed a merciless five-day bombardment, having assembled six hundred pieces of artillery and fifteen thousand tons of shells for the operation. It was February in reverse, as the demoralized Germans, huddling under an intermittent freezing rain, watched their defenses blown apart around them. (Meyer, p. 465)

In the ensuing assault, led by Mangin, now back in favor, the French -- concealed in mist, shielded by creeping barrage -- retook in one day positions on the east bank of the Meuse that the Germans had spent four and a half months and expended thousands of lives to capture. "When Fort Vaux fell nine days later . . . France was prepared to believe that at Verdun its army had won one of history's great victories." But the hills regained were without strategic value, as was the seizure on December 18 of eleven thousand Germans and 115 guns -- the meaningless last gasp in this marathon of destruction. (Meyer, p. 465-466, 469)

"The fight for Verdun -- a prize that would have cost the French little if they had lost it and gained the Germans little if they had won it -- was finally at an end." (Meyer, p. 429)

On May 31, in the midst of this ongoing holocaust, near Jutland, a peninsula on the Danish coast, the British Grand Fleet and Germany's High Seas Fleet met in history's largest naval encounter -- until the advent of the next world war. "No sea had ever seen such a large concentration of ships or of ships so large, so fast, and so heavily armoured." (Keegan, p. 270)

Storming into the North Sea with an array of one hundred ships, German commander Richard Scheer's plan was to lure a contingent of British cruisers southward away from the protection of its dreadnoughts. Unbeknownst to him, British intelligence had decoded his radio messages, and his counterpart, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, was heading in his direction with one hundred and fifty ships and predominance in every category.

On encountering the weaker German battle cruisers, Vice-Admiral Sir John Beatty made a run to the south. Meeting the main enemy force, he turned back to the north, drawing the German dreadnoughts toward Jellicoe's Grand Fleet. Scheer, pounded by superior British fire, at first ordered a retreat, then reversed course to come to the assistance of a damaged cruiser. "Ten minutes of gunnery, in which the Germans endured twenty-seven hits by large-calibre shells, the British only two, convinced Scheer to turn away again to the darkening eastern horizon . . . Many ships remained to cover his flight, including his squadron of vulnerable pre-Dreadnoughts," and in a series of dusk and night cross-water actions both they and the British cruisers and destroyers engaged suffered severe damage. (Keegan, p. 272-273)

Both sides claimed victory. But the British -- while still in control of the North Sea -- had been outgunned and outmaneuvered, and had lost three more ships and thirty-five hundred more sailors than the Germans. (Meyer, p. 421)

"As a direct result of Verdun, the war in the east flared back into action." Honoring a commitment made to his allies at Chantilly in December 1915, on March 18 Tsar Nicholas ordered an attack at Lake Naroch near the Lithuanian capital of Vilna, where his one million men northern and central army groups outnumbered the enemy two to one. (Meyer, p. 400)

Offsetting their advantage, they were ill-trained and ill-equipped, poorly led by a pair of cautious, jealous, and incompetent commanders -- the two Alexei's, Evert and Kuropatkin -- and hampered by a snow cover that melted into a knee-deep slush and refroze. After overrunning the Germans' first two lines, they broke down in less than a week, eventually sacrificing one hundred thousand men, including twelve thousand who froze to death when the temperature plunged overnight. (Meyer, p. 402)

On April 28 the Germans counterattacked and regained in one day all the territory they had lost. Their astonishing success was due to a new battlefield technique devised by Georg Bruchmuller; days of heavy shelling were replaced with "a shorter, shockingly intense bombardment that, when the infantry advanced, moved ahead of it like a protective wall." Rejecting the conventional artillery tactics of the Western Front, the "creeping barrage" would prove to be one of the war's most important tactical innovations. (Meyer, p. 408)

Not surprisingly, Evert and Kuropatkin were  reluctant to resume the offensive; they were overruled by Chief of Staff Alexeyev and the recently-appointed commander of the southern front, General Alexei Brusilov. Heir to a military tradition and of noble descent, Brusilov's resume was nothing short of brilliant. At the start of the war he had driven the Austrians out of Galicia. In May 1915 he had directed a two-hundred-mile fighting retreat through the Carpathian Mountains and saved his army from encirclement. (Meyer, p. 407)

Brusilov seized his new opportunity with imagination and aggressiveness. He would attack along a two-hundred-and-fifty mile front to prevent the enemy from massing at critical points; he would neutralize their artillery and clear away barbed wire with a limited one-day bombardment; and he would advance his reserves to within seventy-five yards of contact so they could exploit openings as soon as they appeared. (Meyer, p. 423)

 "The result, on June 4, was a success of almost incredible magnitude. The Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army disintegrated when hit; more than half, seventy-one thousand men, were killed, wounded, or captured. The Seventh was wrecked even more, losing one hundred and thirty-three thousand men. It was the same almost everywhere; after three days Brusilov found himself in possession of three hundred thousand prisoners." (Meyer, p. 423)

"It was the greatest victory seen on any front since the trench lines had hardened on the Aisne two years before." (Keegan, p. 306) The complete destruction of the Austro-Hungarians was in Brusilov's grasp, yet it ultimately eluded him for lack of manpower. When his compatriot to the north, Evert, failed to send his inactive divisions southward in support or to engage the Germans opposite him in a timely manner, the latter were themselves free to move against Brusilov. (Meyer, p. 424) When Evert finally did attack on July 2, even a three-to-one numerical superiority could not prevent a disaster similar to the one at Lake Naroch; he lost eighty thousand men, five times as many as the defenders.

Brusilov resumed his offensive in August; he captured forty thousand prisoners and three hundred thirty guns in four days, and then turned northward to threaten the Austro-Hungarian fortress at Kovel. He had inflicted one million casualties, advanced his front thirty to sixty miles, destroyed half the Austrian army, obliged Falkenhayn to suspend operations at Verdun, and achieved worldwide notoriety, but, inevitably, gutted of supplies, his engine ran out of steam. (Stevenson, p. 136)

His triumph had cost him three hundred thousand men and consumed huge quantities of ammunition and supplies, which his war ministry could not replenish, and which, if it could, he had no means of transporting to the front. (Meyer, pp. 426-427)

Brusilov's success encouraged Romania to enter the war as an ally; unfortunately, he could do nothing to guarantee its security against a German intervention or a Bulgarian attack. Assailed on three sides, the Romanians were driven in full retreat to the remote eastern province of Moldavia, having squandered three hundred thousand men and abandoned half their country and millions of tons of valuable oil and grain to the Germans. Brusilov was compelled to extend his line two hundred miles to the east and south to prevent his ally's total collapse, a dispersion of troops that effectively ended his extraordinary campaign. (Meyer, p. 467)

"If it had been possible to win the war in the west by sheer force, by overpowering the enemy with manpower and firepower, the Battle of the Somme would have been synonymous with victory -- instead of debacle. The British and the French attacked a German army that they outnumbered by a wide margin. They had an equal advantage in artillery and total control of the air." (Meyer, p. 435)

But "the simple truth of 1914-1918 trench warfare was that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers." (Keegan, p. 293)

Thus, on the morning of July 1, 1916, when "the men of the British Fourth Army, the majority citizen volunteers going into action for the first time, rose from their trenches at zero hour and advanced in steady formation, they were almost everywhere checked by uncut barbed wire and shot down." Only five of seventeen divisions crossed the German line of defense; the rest came to grief in the purgatory of no man's land. (Keegan, p. 294)

It was not for lack of preparation. By the middle of June, the mastermind of the undertaking, General Sir Douglas Haig, had delivered to the site half a million men, three million shells, and fifteen hundred pieces of artillery -- one gun for every seventeen yards of the eighteen miles along which the attack would occur. Behind the Somme, stretching back twenty-five miles, he had fashioned an enormous military encampment. Seven thousand miles of telegraph wire and one hundred twenty of water pipe had been laid underground. Tunnels had been burrowed beneath the German entrenchments and packed with explosives. (Meyer, p. 436)

But the Germans had not been idle. Digging thirty feet into the dry, chalky soil, they had created an underground city, reinforced with concrete and steel, impervious to artillery fire, provisioned to withstand a siege, equipped with electric lighting, running water, and ventilation, and linked to the rear with telephone cable and communication passageways. (Meyer, p. 438)

The British plan for the initial assault was thirty-one pages long. Five days of bombardment (later reduced to three due to a rainstorm) would pour more than a million and a half shells on the German lines, after which, according to Fourth Army commander, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, "nothing could exist."

"British troops were to move forward across no man's land in successive waves . . . each wave would advance in a continuous line 100 yards in front of the next, at a steady pace of 100 yards a minute." (Hochschild, p. 196) "Every unit was told what points it would reach in the first hour and exactly where it would be at the end of the day." (Meyer, p. 438) Ahead of the leading wave, a "creeping barrage" of artillery fire would prevent any Germans still alive from emerging from their shelters to resist the oncoming hordes. (Keegan, p. 291)

So confident were Haig and his subordinates of the destruction their bombardment would wreak that they did not allow their inexperienced infantry to "fire and move," to lay down and cover with rifle volleys those ahead of them, for fear of slowing the advance; instead the recruits were instructed "to keep moving forward upright and in straight lines." (Keegan, pp. 290-291)

The shattering of Haig's and Rawlinson's expectations would be immediate and calamitous. The German position was far stronger than British intelligence had estimated -- indeed almost impregnable. At least twenty-five percent of the British shells failed to detonate. Two-thirds of those that did explode fired shrapnel, which was virtually useless against machine gun emplacements built of concrete, steel, and stone. Nor could shrapnel demolish barbed wire unless the shells burst at the right height above ground -- and the fuses designed to facilitate that proved to be unreliable. (Hoschschild, p. 204) Uncut wire in front of defended trenches was a prescription for massacre. (Keegan, p. 292)

The vaunted "creeping barrage" designed to intimidate enemy machine gunners was another disastrous failure. Firing by a timetable calculated according to the speed at which the infantry was expected to advance, the artillerymen, fearful of killing their own, tended to extend their barrage too quickly and too far ahead of their troops, who were pinned down under fire in tangles of barbed wire. (Keegan, p. 292)

The attack, when it came, at 7:30 in the morning, could hardly have been less of a surprise. Mustering infantry and cavalry were clearly visible through the open, rolling farmland. Ten minutes before zero hour, like a strident call to arms, an underground mine exploded behind the German lines. (Meyer, p. 441)

Those lying in wait were astonished at what they saw. "Instead of coming forward in a rush, instead of ducking and dodging and making use of whatever cover the terrain offered, the British were lined up shoulder to shoulder in plain view. Instead of running, they were walking almost slowly, as if to demonstrate their skill at close-order drill. Rifles and bayonets at the ready, they were like a vision out of the era of flintlock musketry." (Meyer, p. 445)

"Running in any case would have been nearly impossible. Every man in the first wave carried some seventy pounds of weaponry, ammunition, and gear" -- which were needed to sustain him once he reached the enemy dugouts. (Meyer, p. 446)

"The Germans simply pointed their machine guns at these knots of flesh and cut them down in swaths. 'We were surprised to see them walking,' said one. 'We had never seen that before . . . When we started to fire we just had to load and reload. They went down in hundreds. We didn't have to aim, we just fired into them.' " (Meyer, p. 446)

"Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over -- nearly two casualties for every yard of front. Nineteen thousand were killed, most of them within the first hour." German losses totaled 8,000. (Hochschild, p. 206) "It was the worst day in the history of British warfare . . . A generation later, at the Normandy invasion, the British and Americans together would fight twenty days before their dead, wounded, and missing reached twenty thousand." (Meyer, p. 447)

Further south, two French corps demonstrated what rational tactics could accomplish. Carrying only what they required for one day's combat, dispersing themselves rather than marching in formation, darting from one shell hole to another, encircling machine guns rather than hurling themselves into their frontal sights, they tore through the opposing defenses, captured several villages, and lost only two thousand men.

The British corps on their immediate left made equal progress, and was poised to plow ahead into open countryside, until foiled by Rawlinson's orders, which he refused to modify: "No serious advance is to be made until preparations have been completed for the next phase of the operations." For him, and Haig, that portended more of the same obtuseness. (Meyer, p. 448)

Rawlinson secured Haig's approval for another large-scale offensive on July 14 -- this time in the early predawn hours. Facing only four battalions, four British divisions quickly overran their first line and broke through the second. But by the time the British cavalry rode into position -- it took nine hours, so far in the rear had they been stationed -- the Germans had rushed forward enough reserves to block the hole, and were able to regain control of the field. (Meyer, p. 457)

This minor victory persuaded Haig that he was winning the manpower contest; he decided that the battle was worth continuing as one of attrition. "Fresh divisions were sent forward in monotonous succession -- forty-two by the Germans in July and August -- only to waste their energy in bloody struggles for tiny patches of ground . . . By July 31 the Germans on the Somme had lost 160,000, the British and the French over 200,000, yet the line had moved scarcely three miles in thirty days. North of the Ancre, or along the original front, it had scarcely moved at all." (Keegan, p. 297)

Trumpeting success in terms of the number of enemy killed and wounded led Haig to the harrowing rationalization that higher British casualties were mandated, even desirable. "After a September attack on Delville Wood by the 49th Division, he was upset enough to deplore, in his diary, that 'the total losses of this division are under a thousand!'" (Hochschild, p. 209)

A September 15 assault by eight British divisions featured the battlefield debut of the tank. (Meyer, p. 463) "Many minds contributed to the innovation but the main credit goes to Winston Churchill." While at the Admiralty he had made funds available for developing the land battleship that had been proposed as early as December 14 by a visionary young officer of the Royal Engineers, Colonel Ernest Swinton. (Marshall, p. 260)

Churchill lamented that the exciting new weapon was not stockpiled to at least brigade strength for the staging of a monster surprise. Instead the bull-headed Haig grabbed the first forty-two available and threw them into service at the first opportunity. (Marshall, p. 261)

Despite their limitations -- an average speed of only two miles per hour, a cramped crew compartment that could quickly heat up to a temperature of 125 degrees, no means of communication -- the initial appearance of these armoured beasts terrified the Germans and enabled the British to advance 3500 yards in short order. Ultimately, however, almost all of them broke down or stalled in deep shell craters. Of course, the French and Germans immediately instituted tank programs of their own. (Hochschild, p. 213)

His revolutionary technology nothing more than another setback, Haig reverted to painfully familiar tactics: massive artillery bombardments followed by infantry attacks. (Hochschild, p. 214) On November 13 the British detonated a mine under a German redoubt on the charred earth of Beaumont-Hamel, and subsequently captured the redoubt and twelve hundred soldiers. The next day, November 19, a blizzard ended the Battle of the Somme. (Meyer, p. 466)

To conquer seven miles of territory, the British had suffered almost five hundred thousand casualties -- including at least one hundred twenty-five thousand deaths -- and the French two hundred thousand. (Hochschild, p. 214) "Official German sources placed their Somme casualties at two hundred and thirty-seven thousand." (Meyer, p. 466)

Haig managed to survive his ill-fated war of attrition, but Falkenhayn did not. Insisting that "not one foot of ground should be lost at the Somme," he ordered three hundred counterattacks during the months-long battle. (Hochschild, p. 214) On August 29 he resigned his position as Chief of the German Army and was replaced by Field Marshal Hindenberg.

Similarly, on December 13, "the political ice cracked under French Marshal Joseph Joffre. Questions about his leadership, above all about his failure to anticipate Verdun, finally generated more pressure than his defenders could withstand." Appointed to succeed him was "the self-styled genius credited with changing Verdun from a tragedy to a national triumph," Robert Nivelle. (Meyer, pp. 468-469)

Like all who had postured before him, Nivelle believed he had a plan that would change the course of the war. But only the most sanguine observer held out any hope that it could stanch the horrific bloodshed.

REFERENCES

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Marshall, S. L. A. World War I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War. New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.

Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

I Order You to Die

As darkness descended on the last evening of a grisly 1914, it was evident that the grievous miscalculations of the Great Powers had ignited an unprecedented world cataclysm -- with no end in sight.

For one hundred fifty days huge armies had collided in protracted engagements on a titanic scale, transforming the European continent into a vast wasteland saturated with unimaginable yet predictable carnage. "In the last five months of 1914, more than 800,000 Germans had become casualties, and more than 100,000 of them were dead." (Meyer, p.241) French fatalities reached the extraordinary total of 305,000, with twice as many wounded or missing. (Keegan, p. 135) Russian casualties were an astounding 1.8 million, including 400,000 killed, and Austria-Hungary's over 1.25 million. (Stevenson, p. 76) More than half the British troops who had landed in August were dead or injured. (Meyer, p. 242)

On the Eastern Front, Grand Duke Nicholas's four Russian armies had reclaimed the offensive after the Tannenberg disaster and were massing toward Cracow, the gateway to oil-rich Silesia. To counter the threat, German commanders Hindenberg and Ludendorff directed the newly-formed Ninth Army under General August von Mackensen to move by rail to the vicinity of Warsaw and link up with Field Marshal Franz Conrad's battered Austrians.

On October 6, 1914, Mackensen's eighteen divisions found themselves in the path of sixty Russian divisions ensconced along a 250-mile front covering the Vistula River and anchored on the south by fortresses ringing the city of Warsaw. From the north the Germans made considerable progress until they were slowed by five days of torrential rain, giving the Russians time to regroup and organize a vicious counter-offensive which bent the German left flank at a severe right angle until it faced north instead of east. By October 17, Mackensen was on the verge of disintegration and had no choice but to save his army. In six days he retreated sixty miles, relinquishing all he had gained, with 40,000 fewer men. (Meyer, pp. 225-226)

Flushed with success the Russians rolled west across Poland, only to encounter blown bridges and rail lines and outrun their means of supply. Secretly uniting the Eighth and Ninth Armies, Hindenberg, now Commander-in-Chief in the east, attacked along a seventy-mile front and drove the Russians back to the great cotton-weaving and railway center at Lodz. Bolstered by reinforcements from the Western Front, the Germans used a series of frontal assaults to capture the city on December 6. They pursued the Russians thirty miles east, taking 136,000 prisoners. When the onset of winter brought all operations to an abrupt halt, both sides settled down to digging permanent trench lines in the frozen turf. (Meyer, pp. 234-235) The triumphant Hindenberg was made a field marshal.

"The Germans lost 100,000 men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting 530,000 casualties on their enemy. Their success, however, was of a discouragingly limited value." The Russians still had 120 divisions on the front while the Germans and Austrians could muster only sixty, and the Russian right flank still rested inside the East Prussian border. (Meyer, p. 235)

Further south Conrad's Austrians exploited a twenty-mile gap between the Russian Third and Eighth Armies, and in a four-day battle commencing December 3 gained forty miles. Their success thwarted the Russians' plans of crossing the Carpathian Mountains and advancing from Cracow toward Budapest and Berlin, but was spoiled by Conrad's third punitive invasion of Serbia. After capturing Belgrade on December 2, the Austrians, buffeted by a blizzard in their summer uniforms and weakened by four days without food, were routed by a Serb counterattack, losing over 200,000 men.

It was the end of creaking empire's fruitless attempts to subdue its tiny, unruly neighbor singlehandedly and of its viability as an independent fighting force. With the war scarcely begun, the Austro-Hungarians were spent, and would never again win a major victory they could call their own. (Meyer, p. 236)

Conrad's thirst for glory remained unquenched. He appealed to the Germans for assistance in conducting a winter campaign to recover Galicia and relieve the fortress of Przemysl. Hindenberg and Ludendorff agreed to send three divisions, securing authorization from the Kaiser himself when their superior, Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, balked.

The operation, which began January 23, 1915, quickly succumbed to the rugged terrain and and harsh winter conditions of the Carpathians. While Conrad enjoyed the comfort of his headquarters far from the action, his frigid, starving soldiers struggled to attack up ice-bound passes. "Soon it was the Russians who were advancing, managing for a while to push back the Austrians and Germans but at last being stopped by the same brutal conditions that had ruined Conrad." (Meyer, pp. 255-257) "By the beginning of April, the Russians dominated the Carpathian Front and . . . were again contemplating a breakthrough over the crests to the Hungarian plains," having inflicted 800,000 more casualties upon the exhausted Austrians since the beginning of the year. (Keegan, pp. 173-174)

Just as Conrad's advance was stalling, Ludendorff unleashed his own ambitious offensive, sending his Eighth Army, the heroes of Tannenberg, from the north and a new Tenth Army from the south into a grand encircling movement. In spite of a five-foot snowfall and forty-degree-below-zero temperatures, the Germans made good progress, taking the Russians by surprise and ousting them from their defenses. Slowed by a sudden thaw that turned ice to ice water and frozen earth to mud, the Germans still managed to surround and seal the Russian XX Corps in an enclave in the Augustow Forest. A valiant holding action by the trapped Russians enabled many of their comrades to escape and limited their casualties to 56,000. Hindinberg was again lauded for his exploits, although he admitted that, while the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes was a "tactical success," he "failed strategically" to eliminate the Russian Army. (Meyer, p. 258)

A minor footnote to the clash was a barrage of 18,000 artillery shells with which Ludendorff initiated an assault at Bolimov on January 31. The canisters contained xylyl bromide, a chemical that was supposed to incapacitate the Russians without killing them. (Meyer, p. 256) Although the first military deployment of poison gas in history was a failure -- no one had been informed that the agent was ineffectual in sub-zero temperatures -- another purveyor of death had been added to the combatants' arsenal. (Marshall, p. 161)

By the spring of 1915, thirteen hundred miles of fortifications stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains on the Eastern Front and from Belgium to the Swiss border in the West -- the length, depth, and elaboration of which had never before been approached in the annals of warfare. (Keegan, p. 173)

Between the two trench lines -- separated anywhere from fifty to one hundred yards -- lay a desolate, moon-cratered landscape, filled with "rusted tangles of barbed wire." As the weather warmed, the frozen earth would thaw into a muddy morass, causing soldiers' feet to swell, become numb, and burn from the dreaded "trench foot." (Hochschild, p. 135)

Every ten yards or so, trenches turned at right angles, zigzags which better contained artillery and mortar round blasts and prevented enemy raiding parties from seizing long sections with well-placed machine guns. Underground shelters or dugouts carved into the sides of the trenches and reinforced with planks and beams provided sleeping quarters, command posts, and emergency first aid centers. In wet or stony ground, trenches were shallow and protected by parapets of earth-filled sandbags -- which continuously oozed out in muddy rivulets or froze and burst. In low-lying areas, where puddles of water collected in the hollows, soldiers lived like swamp rats, covered in wet mud. (Hochschild, p. 136)

The British-French strategy in the spring of 1915 was to mount a joint offensive against the "northern shoulder" of  the German salient -- the Aubers and Vimy Ridges which guarded rail communications to the rear.

Partly because they lacked the manpower to strengthen portions of the front manned by the French and partly because they wished to restore the fighting reputation and assert the independence of their British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Commander John French and his Chief-of-Staff Douglas Haig devised a plan to attack at the ruined village of Neuve Chapelle, where the Germans were known to have thinned their defenses in order to send troops to the Eastern Front. In its unfolding the battle demonstrated the functional defects of trench warfare -- inadequacy of artillery support, rigidity of planning, mispositioning of reserves, and lack of delegation in command -- as well as the structural -- the "relative immobility and total vulnerability to fire of advancing infantry and the absence of means of speedy communication between front and rear, between infantry and artillery, and between neighboring units." (Keegan, p. 162)

At 7:00 AM on the morning of March 10, Haig opened fire with 500 guns, raining 200,000 shells on fifteen machine guns protecting the chosen sector. The bombardment took the Germans by complete surprise, annihilating all 1500 of them in thirty-five minutes, "an achievement rarely to be repeated. Even more of an achievement was Haig's success in having assembled the leading waves of an attack force of sixty thousand men within a hundred yards of the enemy in complete secrecy, a fact scarcely ever to occur again." (Keegan, p. 193) Ordered forward at 8:30, they met no resistance, and within twenty minutes breached the German line at a width of 1600 yards, the first of only three times in the entire war that this would happen. "Ahead was empty, undefended territory . . . an open gate to a tremendous victory." (Meyer, p. 276)

Then the functional and structural factors making for failure set in. The British plan stipulated that advancing infantry were to pause at breakthrough points to allow artillery to disable defenders ahead of them; when a battalion colonel requested permission to disobey his orders and continue forward, he received no answer. "Behind him tens of thousands of troops and support units found themselves jammed together at a too-narrow hole in the line, barely able to move and not knowing what they were expected to do." A four-hundred-yard-wide sector at the northern end of the German line had not been shelled, which left a pocket of defenders intact to impede the attack force with machine-gun fire. (Meyer, p. 277) Poor communications hampered efforts by battlefield units to obtain authorization to deviate from the the original plan and respond appropriately. By nightfall German reserves had filled the gap and brought their flanks forward to link up with the positions at the edges which had never been lost. (Keegan, p. 195)

"Next morning the British renewed the offensive, but thick mist prevented their artillery from locating targets," and they shortly desisted. The emboldened Germans counterattacked on the 12th, although a one-day postponement allowed the British "to consolidate their foothold, site twenty machine guns in commanding positions," and render the effort costly and ineffective. (Keegan, p. 195)

In the end, Haig had expended 11,600 casualties to occupy the ghost town of Neuve Chapelle, while the Germans had lost 8,600 -- an outcome and exchange ratio that would recur with numbing consistency throughout the war. Time and again, as they moved further from their artillery and communications, the aggressors lost the advantages of surprise and concentration, and became vulnerable to defenders firepower; as soon as the latter overextended their own lines, they became exposed to the defects that had undermined their opponents. (Keegan, pp. 195-196)

If Neuve Chapelle was the harbinger of an indelible pattern of lethal futility, so too was the Second Battle of Ypres, which followed a month later. Falkenhayn initiated it for a number of reasons: to divert attention from the transfer of troops to the East; to secure a more commanding position on the Channel coast; and to experiment with a deadly new weapon.

"A suitably novel and horrendous prologue" to the battle was the mining with secret explosives of Hill 60, the highest point on the Messines Ridge overlooking the Ypres salient; the detonation on April 17 killed one thousand Germans and enabled the British to capture the position at a cost of seven casualties. (Meyer, pp 295-296)

Five days later, following an intense forty-eight hour bombardment, opposite the village of Langemarck, two greenish-yellow clouds drifted across the front toward the French trenches and, heavier than air, settled among the unsuspecting Algerian and Zouave soldiers awaiting the enemy. This was not the tear-producing xylyl bromide of Bolimov, but chlorine, which causes excruciating death by overstimulation of fluid in the lungs, or drowning. The effect was immediate and terrifying; within the hour, the first line had been abandoned, a gap 8000 yards wide yawned invitingly, and nothing stood between the Germans and the shattered ruins of Ypres. (Meyer, p. 296)

Disaster was averted by the gallant stand of several reserve Canadian divisions rushed into action, by German fears of asphyxiation by their own hand, and by their failure to mass enough support to capitalize on the breakthrough. By the time the scope of the opportunity was apparent, congeries of British, French, and colonial troops had plugged the breach -- and a British Lieutenant Colonel, having deduced by the greening of his brass buttons that the toxin was soluble, demonstrated that cloths soaked in water (or urine) and tied around the mouth would serve as a prophylactic. (Meyer, p. 297)

"After the first day, Second Ypres turned into a standard Western Front charnel house. The Germans, never having intended to capture anything, settled into routine defensive positions while the French and British launched counterattacks that accomplished nothing." (Meyer, p. 298)

"The profitless slaughter pit of Ypres," as Churchill would call it, dragged on into late May, not ending until the Germans ran low on shells. They had taken forty thousand casualties, the British sixty thousand, while injecting two new elements into the war: mining and gas. (Meyer, p. 299)

Lacking any further technological surprises, on May 9 the British and French launched massive dual offensives which, pledged French commander Joffre, would "finish the war in three months." Two British formations were to storm the Aubers Ridge behind the enemy front line and, moving southeast, link up with the French, who by then would be on the march toward the town of Loos and the plain of Lens beyond that.

The British attack "came to grief quickly and dramatically," in this second battle of Artois. Forty minutes of preliminary but ineffective shrapnel bombardment failed to dent German dugouts reinforced with timbers and sandbags. Losses were 11,000 the first day -- followed by 17,000 more on May 16 and 18 with no ground gained -- "a disastrous fifteen hours of squandered heroism, unredeemed by the faintest glimmer of success," wrote historian Alan Clark. (Marshall, p. 207)

Initially, the French had more success against Vimy Ridge, in part because they waited a week while their 1200 guns poured 700,000 shells on the Bavarian Sixth Army. In three days they were able to penetrate the enemy front three miles -- their deepest thrust since the advent of position warfare -- until heavy rain "turned the ground into a gluey mud that further progress impossible." An impressive but temporary bending-back of the German line was ultimately stymied by last-ditch machine gun nests guarding their artillery. "As usual, the fight went on long after any chance of victory had evaporated . . . When it ended on June 18, the French had lost more than 100,000 men, the Germans just under 50,000." (Meyer, p. 323)

Ottoman Turkey was a slowly disintegrating empire held in the grip of a totally corrupt regime -- the thuggish remnant of the Young Turk revolutionaries who had deposed the sultan in 1908, namely Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha. Sedulously courted by Kaiser Wilhelm, they had finally opted to join the Central Powers when two German cruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau -- ostensibly purchased by Turkey but still under German command -- had eluded their British pursuers, steamed into the Black Sea accompanied by a Turkish flotilla, and on October 29, 1914, shelled three Russian cities. Three days later Russia declared war on Turkey, followed promptly by France and Britain.

The Turkish war effort -- which in time ran aground on three fronts: Egypt, Mesopotamia,and the Southern Caucasus -- cost it one-fourth of its population. "Of 4,000,000 adult males, about 1,600,000 were called to service. More than 1,000,000 families were left without breadwinners. A multitude of women, children, and old folk died of starvation and lack of medical care." (Marshall, p. 121)

Another lamentable outcome was the Ottoman government's undeclared campaign of genocide -- the first in a century of similar catastrophes -- against its Armenian subjects. Between June 1915 and late 1917 nearly 700,000 men, women, and children were force-marched into the desert to die of starvation and thirst -- an act of retaliation for a Russian victory which had enabled a division of Christian Armenians to establish a provincial government inside Russian-occupied Turkish territory and murder native Turks. (Keegan, p. 223)

Several factors directed British attention toward the Turkish Mediterranean front: the consolidation of the immovable trench line on the Western Front, which was causing tremendous loss of life; an appeal from Grand Duke Nicholas for a show of force in the theater; and battlefield evidence of Turkish ineptitude. A strike against the Dardanelles, the thirty mile passage separating the tiny European peninsula of Gallipoli from Asia -- where the Turks had shown no ability to resist an encroachment by a British ship in November 1914 -- was deemed the optimal strategy for crippling the Central Powers.

An admission from Admiral Sackville Carden, commander of the Mediterranean fleet, that, while it would be impossible to "rush the Dardanelles . . . they might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships," gave First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill the rationale to organize such a project. (Keegan, p. 237)

Assembling the most potent naval force ever seen in that part of the world -- sixteen battleships, twenty destroyers, an assortment of cruisers, and thirty-five fishing trawlers outfitted as minesweepers -- Carden promised to reach Constantinople in thirty days.

Beginning February 19 and continuing until March 16, his battleships pounded the forts guarding the strait's entrance into submission -- allowing marines and sailors to land and roam the nearby heights. It was deceptively encouraging progress.

Ten miles further north, at the Narrows, where the sea lane was only a mile wide, other well-protected guns remained menacingly intact. The civilian volunteers manning the improvised minesweepers refused to proceed under fire and had to be replaced by inexperienced sailors. On the night of March 8, a Turkish steamer slipped into the cleared sector and deposited twenty mines underwater. Carden suffered a nervous breakdown and was replaced by Vice-Admiral John de Robeck.

Concluding that "forcing the Narrows" would require the coordinated effort of all ships available, de Robeck ordered a grand advance on March 18. Between 11:30 AM and 2:00 PM all went well; the armada chugged a mile up the strait, overcoming each fixed and mobile battery as it moved forward, its firepower reaching the gun emplacements at the Narrows.

"Then, suddenly, the balance of the battle swung the other way." (Keegan, p. 239) The second French battleship in line, the Bouvet, blew up and sunk in two minutes, taking a crew of 600 with her. "The trawler-minesweepers came under heavy fire from the howitzers in the hills and soon turned and fled." (Meyer, p. 280) Two British battleships, the Irresistible and the Ocean, struck mines and sunk. "Both the Gaulois (French) and the Inflexible (French) were badly mauled, with hard damage to structure and some loss of crew." (Marshal, p. 154)

As darkness fell and shore targets were no longer distinguishable, de Robeck withdrew his fleet -- at first despondent, but later re-energized to return to the fray once he received word from Churchill that replacement ships were on the way.

Witnessing the engagement was General Ian Hamilton -- a veteran of the India and Boer Wars, an observer of the Russo-Japanese War, and a close friend of War Minister Kitchener; he had been rushed to the Mediterranean to take command of 70,000 gathering infantrymen. Eager to deploy his army, Hamilton wired Kitchener that strong landing parties were needed to support the resumption of naval activity -- drawing a conclusion probably best left to the Admiralty. Nevertheless, his certainty intimidated de Robeck into acquiescence and rendered Chuchill's protests to the contrary unavailing.

The Turks and Germans were astounded when de Robeck failed to return to the strait. Low in ammunition and mines with no means of resupply, demoralized to the point of readying an evacuation of Constantinople, they believed the British Navy was on the cusp of total victory.

"If only the English will leave us alone eight days!" exclaimed General Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission, whom Enver Pasha had placed at the head of his 84,000 Turkish Army. Finding his purported invaders logistically unprepared for anything as demanding as a landing on hostile shores, Hamilton procrastinated a month -- enough time for Sanders to populate the peninsula, improve its roads, and build fortifications above the beaches. (Marshall, p.176)

On April 25 the most powerful force ever to attempt an amphibious landing in the face of an armed enemy steamed over the horizon from the south and approached Gallipoli -- two hundred transports carrying 27,000 British soldiers of the 29th Division, 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops (Anzacs), and 16,000 Frenchmen, accompanied by de Robeck's bombardment fleet.

Hamilton had devised a scatter shot strategy. The Royal Naval Division was to make a feint toward Bulair at the narrow northern neck of the peninsula, "impossibly rough and heavily manned ground. The French, held in reserve were to make a diversionary landing of one regiment at Kum Kale, on the Asiatic shore." The 29th Division was to touch down on five small, unconnected beaches around Cape Helles, the toe of the peninsula. The Anzacs' destination was Gaba Tepe, a promising-looking spot ten miles up the coast which led to flat terrain. (Marshall, p. 177)

"The invasion should have been a success." At Cape Helles the British outnumbered the Turks six to one, and met heavy fire and barbed-wire resistance at only two attack points, V and W, where they suffered 2000 casualties at the hands of one hundred stubborn defenders. Nevertheless, the invaders took control of their designated areas, and hunkered down to await instructions that never came. (Meyer, pp. 309-310)

"With a terrible absurdity, the same thing happened at the three undefended beaches. The British could have moved inland effortlessly and taken the high ground that lay before them . . . But no one had told their commanders what to do after getting ashore." (Meyer, p. 310)

"At one of the undefended beaches (Y), after standing by idly all day, they spent a hard night fighting off an enemy force that had at last come forward to confront them. In the morning, thinking their position hopeless, they returned to their landing craft and were taken away -- at exactly the same time their Turkish adversaries, also having had enough, were themselves withdrawing." (Meyer, p. 310)

At Gaba Tepe, twelve thousand Australians and New Zealanders made their way ashore in twelve hours -- but a mile north of their target amidst steep rocky hills and ravines. As their advance units struggled to seize the heights of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair, they were met by the lead battalion of the Turkish 19th Regiment. Hurrying his men to the crests was the little-known lieutenant colonel, Mustafa Kemal, whose inspired leadership would become "the genesis of his greater fame as the father of a reformed Turkish Republic." (Marshall, p. 176)

"A day of desperate close-quarters fighting ensued . . . with both sides bringing forward more troops and launching one assault after another. Kemal, directing his men to make yet another charge in which no one seemed likely to survive, uttered the words that would forever form the core of his legend. 'I don't order you to attack,' he said. 'I order you to die.' " (Meyer, p. 311)

"Slowly, at terrible cost, the Turks forced the Anzacs back down the hill toward their landing place." When their commander sent Hamilton a message reporting failure and asking to have his men disembarked, he replied that they were to stay where they were and "dig, dig, dig." (Meyer, p. 312)

On the lower ground at Cape Helles, the British and French made two more attempts to extend their beach heads -- on April 28 and May 6 -- but both were repulsed with heavy losses, as the enemy had reinforced their positions.

Seventeen thousand Australians and New Zealanders remained crowded into, and unable to break out of, the wretched  2000-yard deep, one-mile-and-a-half-in-perimeter toehold they christened Anzac Cove. "Gallipoli turned into something almost worse than outright defeat: a stalemate as tightly locked as the one on the Western Front." (Meyer, p. 312)

Three months later the Allies made a third attempt to storm the peninsula. This time the centerpiece was an amphibious landing five miles north of Anzac Cove at Suvla Bay, where Turkish defenses were known to be weak.

By the morning of August 7, 25,000 soldiers had been delivered on shore with hardly any losses. Unfortunately, their commander, sixty-one-year-old Frederick Stopford, had never known combat. After moving two miles inland, his men inexplicably halted, moving back and forth in confusion, and failed to occupy the undefended heights of the Tekke Tepe, which had been the objective of the whole exercise. By the time one brigade managed to claw its way to the summit, Mustafa Kemal was there to meet it.

"The fight for Tekke Tepe Ridge followed two days of terrible combat at Anzac Cove . . . [during which] without sleep, able to stay on his feet only with the aid of stimulants administered by a doctor who followed him everywhere, Kemal was shot through the wrist while driving the Anzacs from the high point of Chunuk Bair." (Meyer, p. 342)

Although "the second invasion of Gallipoli was essentially finished . . . the hapless Stopford launched three additional attacks," the last on August 21, the largest engagement of the entire campaign. He "all but wrecked the 29th Division that had arrived . . . amid such high hopes in April. These anticlimactic offensives managed to connect Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove but not to capture any of the high ground on which the Turks were now positioned in strength." (Meyer, pp. 342-343)

At a cost of 40,000 casualties during the month, the Allies gained "five hundred acres of bad grazing ground" and a third shallow stakeout on the Gallipoli peninsula." (Marshall, p. 189)

They salvaged one minor victory from the extended debacle -- an evacuation conducted under cover of darkness between December 28, 1915, and January 8, 1916, which should be regarded as no less than miraculous, since each successive day left a dwindling number of troops exposed to annihilation should the Turks comprehend their vulnerability. The ill-conceived and poorly executed adventure cost each side 200,000 total casualties, including 46,000 Allied dead and 90,000 Turkish.

On the Eastern Front, the remainder of 1915 witnessed a series of unmitigated disasters which left the Russians on life support. In May, at Gorlice and Tarnow, their Third Army was overwhelmed by a one-two punch delivered by Mackensen's new Eleventh Army and Conrad's Austrians, who captured 150,000 prisoners and 200 guns. By mid-month Mackensen reached the San River; two weeks later he retook Przemysl, after a defensive stand ordered by Grand Duke Nicholas proved futile against German artillery. By the time the Germans were stalled by supply and transport problems and the Austrians by a counterattack, the Russian losses had soared to 400,000, and would have been greater had not some units barely evaded entrapment. (Meyer, pp. 328-329)

Over Falkenhayn's protests that not enough troops were available to achieve Ludendorff's objective of total victory, the Kaiser decided that the campaign should continue. By June 22, the Germans had occupied Lemberg and pushed the Russians back to the Bug River, completely out of Galicia, an astonishing relinquishment of all they had gained since the start of the war.

On July 1 the Kaiser rebuffed Falkenhayn's suggestion that negotiations be opened with the Russians, and gave his blessing for a renewed three-pronged offensive: one army group would drive southward to the east of Warsaw; another would attack from the west; and Mackensen would move north toward Lublin and Brest-Litovsk. (Meyer, p. 332)

Town after town succumbed to colossal artillery bombardments. On August 5 Warsaw was abandoned; it had been Russian-occupied for exactly one hundred years. (Meyer, p. 332) Scorching the earth as they  retreated, the Tsar's Cossacks and soldiers drove over a million of the region's inhabitants -- most of whom were Jews -- from their homes and destroyed stores of grain and other foodstuffs and four million head of cattle. (Meyer, p. 344)

"The scale of the war in the east was breathtaking." Within days the Germans seized the strongholds of Novo Georgievsk and Kovno and their 2000 guns. By now they had taken 700,000 prisoners, the Austrians an equal number. In desperation "Tsar Nicholas removed Grand Duke Nicholas as head of the Russian armies and, to the entirely appropriate horror of his ministers, appointed himself to the position." (Meyer, pp. 344-345)

On August 31 Conrad sent his tattered Austrians in a sweeping offensive aimed at encircling twenty-five enemy divisions south of the Pripet Marshes. Initial success gave way to disaster, when one army, after capturing the city of Lutsk, was outflanked by a Russian force that had concealed itself in the high grasses. In thirty days Conrad lost 300,000 men.

Two German pincer movements -- at Grodno and Vilna -- couldn't close in time to cut the railway lines running east and prevent the Russians from retiring in good order and establishing a new front. Having suffered 50,000 casualties in the effort, Ludendorff  "settled down to a busy winter of organizing and administering his substantial conquests." (Meyer, p. 347) The Russian army had been battered, but with shell output increasing and manpower reserves approaching twenty million, it remained a viable fighting force. (Keegan, p. 233)

Impressed by the Turks' valiant performance at Gallipoli and lured by the opportunity to regain territory it had lost to Serbia in the Second Balkan War, on September 6 Bulgaria yoked its fortunes to the Central Powers. It wasted no time, dispatching six divisions westward to act in concert with sixteen from Germany and Austria moving south in an effort to crush the remnant of the Serbian army.

In order to save Serbia and attract Greece as a partner, Britain and France embarked on an exercise as hopeless as Gallipoli. Although King Constantine of Greece -- intent on preserving his country's neutrality -- had dismissed his Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, an advocate of the Allies, he was obliged to allow the landing of a Franco-British expeditionary force at the port of Salonika. As a military base and fountainhead of an invasion, it was totally inadequate: only a single-track rail line ran north into Bulgaria; a few troops stationed on the surrounding heights could hold back legions; and the countryside was malaria-ridden and subject to heavy flooding in winter and intense heat in summer. (Marshall, p. 194)

By the time the rescuers were ashore on October 5, it was too late to help Serbia. Their commander, French General Maurice Surrail, found his route north blocked by the Bulgarian Sixth Army. "The Serbs, trapped between overwhelming forces approaching from two directions, decided to run for the sea. Masses of civilians fled with it . . . Exhausted, without food or other supplies, many were set upon by tribal enemies as they tried to cross the snowbound mountains of Albania." Of the 135,000 surviving Serbian soldiers, only half were fit enough to be transferred on British ships to the island of Corfu to await future service. (Meyer, pp. 354-355)

National pride, political pressure, and Russian pleas for a continued presence there compelled the British and French to linger in Salonika for the duration of the war. It became, in the words of German journalists, " 'the greatest internment camp in the world' . . . a great military hospital, where casualties sometimes exceeded one hundred per cent of the strength of arms on hand," (Keegan, pp. 255-256), a resoundingly pathetic verdict on this "most ponderous and illogical undertaking of World War I." (Marshall, p. 197)

Erupting on September 25, the final 1915 bloodstorm on the Western Front ravaged three distinct killing fields: Champagne, west of Verdun, where French divisions outnumbered German twenty-seven to seven; Artois, where the advantage was seventeen to two: and Loos, where six British divisions were opposed by only one German. "It was the spring offensive repeated on a larger scale." (Meyer, p. 348)

German positions were, however, close to impregnable, consisting of two lines, three miles apart, with concrete machine-gun posts in between, the second of which was constructed on the reverse slope of any height occupied, where it was amply protected from the artillery fire designed to destroy it. German tactics were not to bombard trenches but to barrage enemy infantrymen as they assembled and as they moved forward into no man's land; those who survived that gauntlet would be decimated by the machine gunners. (Keegan, p. 201)

In Champagne, four days and four nights of shelling wrecked the German first line; the French reached the second so quickly that they came under fire from their own artillery and had to pull back. By the time they regrouped and resumed the attack, the opportunity was lost; German reserves had regained the contested ground. Six more weeks of useless battering against an immovable object cost the French 145,000 casualties, almost twice the defenders'. (Meyer, pp. 350-352)

At Artois -- despite its grotesquely cut-up terrain, machine gun cupolas, deep dugouts, belts of wire, and elaborate trench systems (Marshal, p. 229) -- the French briefly claimed the crest of Vimy Ridge for a second time in 1915 before the impenetrable second German line drove them back. Concluding that further attempts were hopeless, French commander Joffre, for whom Artois had been only a secondary holding action, suspended operations -- but secretively, so as not to deter the British from pursuing their own offensive at Loos. (Meyer, p. 351)

Recovering from their own discharge of chlorine gas, which blew back in their faces, the British stormed both German lines, and achieved a stunning breakthrough into vacant countryside -- but too far, it turned out, as they had outdistanced their reserve divisions by ten miles. By the time those reached the front and resumed the advance across open grassland, "the Germans had filled the hole and were hammering away with their machine guns . . . The result was the most one-sided slaughter of the war: 7,861 troops and 385 officers were killed or wounded in a few hours, while German casualties totaled exactly zero." (Meyer, p. 351)

"Nauseated by the spectacle of the 'corpse field of Loos,' the Germans held their fire as the British turned in retreat, 'so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy after such a victory'. . . Though the British persisted with attacks for another three weeks, they gained nothing but a narrow salient two miles deep," at a sacrifice of 16,000 killed and 25,000 wounded. (Keegan, p. 202)

Although hardly without fault himself -- he had failed to provide a reserve from his own attack force -- Sir Douglas Haig was able to convince the King and War Cabinet that his superior, Sir John French, had erred grievously at Loos by holding his reserves too long and situating them too far in the rear. Sir John became the year's most notable casualty when he was dismissed as commander of the British Expeditionary Force and replaced by Haig.

Nineteen fifteen was mercifully at an end.

REFERENCES

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars; A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Marshall, S. L. A. World War I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War. New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.

Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 2004
























                                                                                                                                           

When the Lights Went Out

It was The Great War -- until a global clash of arms even more apocalyptic erupted a mere twenty years later and eclipsed the horror of 16,500,000 combat and civilian deaths by a factor of almost five. And yet despite the United States' more prominent role in the latter, borne on the broad shoulders of many of our own fathers -- aptly labeled "the greatest generation" -- I find the politics, military aspects, ramifications, and tragic folly of World War One much more fascinating.

It was, as depicted in Ken Follett's one-thousand-page melodramatic account of five families -- British, Welsh, Russian, German, and American -- swept into the maelstrom, nothing less than the Fall of Giants: the demise of the Prussian monarchy; the toppling of the Romanov dynasty; the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the collapse of Ottoman hegemony; and the unraveling of British imperialism. Were any of them ever haunted by the supreme irony of a world turned upside down or the baneful consequences of their ill-conceived motives? They went to war to preserve or augment their power and domain, and ended up punished, banished, or diminished, dragging the wasted lives of millions in their wake.

While World War One's death toll pales in comparison to its successor's, pure numbers can be deceptive. Eliminating civilian (a staggering 45 million in World War Two, 6 million in World War One) and Pacific theater (5.5 million in World War Two) deaths from the total reduces the disparity in European combat deaths to 20 million in World War Two compared to 10 million in World War One -- and most of that can be attributed to the 10 million men expended by the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler, over five times Russian losses in the earlier war. Conversely, four European countries -- the United Kingdom, France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy -- recorded higher combat deaths in the earlier war, and in the case of France and the United Kingdom by a count of 2.5 million to 600,000.

Of course, in 1940, Hitler's blitzkrieg overran France in a matter of months, while the German offensive in 1914 stalled at the gates of Paris; the Western front settled into a four-year stalemate during which each side sacrificed thousands in a series of attacks and counterattacks that yielded little territorial or strategic advantage. Nineteenth-century tactics stood helpless against twentieth-century weaponry.

"The magnitude of slaughter in the war's entire span was beyond anything in European experience: more than 35 per cent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out were killed in the next four and a half years . . . [and] one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 . . . Roughly 12 per cent of all British soldiers who took part in the war were killed." (Hochschild, p. xiv)

" 'The Great War lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,' wrote the historian Barbara Tuchman . . . Cities and towns in the armies' path were reduced to jagged rubble, forests and farms to charred ruins." (Hochschild, p. xiv)

"More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western front between 1914 and 1918, of which an estimated 15 per cent failed to explode." Every year roving French bomb-disposal specialists collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions. (Hochschild, p. xii)

George F. Kennan called World War One "the great seminal catastrophe -- the one out of which a century of catastrophes arose." A decimated and demoralized Russian populace shook off the bonds of its Tsarist oppressors, only to usher in, with German complicity, a Bolshevik dictatorship that would turn out to be more brutal, more murderous, and more ambitious than its predecessor. In seeking to humiliate their vanquished foes and extract exorbitant recompense for their expenditure of life and treasure, the victorious allies sowed the seeds that would germinate into Nazi revenge and aggrandizement. And in carving up the Ottoman carcass into arbitrary spheres of influence, they would impose a perpetual curse on a dysfunctional and volatile Middle East.

The sparks that ignited this conflagration were two lethal point-blank bullets fired by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, on the morning of June 28, 1914, as they were traveling in a motorcade through the center of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia. Princip and his five co-conspirators -- one of whom had earlier thrown a pocket bomb at the royal procession -- were members of Young Bosnia, a radical patriotic organization linked to and supported by the Black Hand, a secret nationalist group committed to unifying all Serbs by violence. (Meyer, p. 6)

The Black Hand had provided Princip and his circle with their bombs and revolvers, trained them, and helped smuggle them across the border from independent Serbia into Bosnia. The Austrians rightfully alleged that Serbian officials had blessed the plot, and seized upon the assassination as a pretext to subdue their unruly and hostile neighbor, which had been fomenting civil unrest for a decade. Before acting, however, they needed assurance that Germany was firmly in their corner, in the likely event that Russia -- which was emotionally, ethnically, and strategically invested in the security of Serbia -- would backstop its partner with its massive army.

Flamboyant, erratic, blustering, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, was inclined to belligerence; even moreso were the men around him. Bound to Austria-Hungary by a thirty-five-year-old military alliance, encircled by the tightening noose of the three powers knotted against them, fearful of losing the expensive naval and land arms race they had been contesting since the turn of the century, they were willing to risk a continental war at what they considered the opportune moment. Meeting with an Austrian emissary on July 5 just prior to departing on a Baltic cruise, Wilhelm was emphatic that Austria-Hungary must "march into Serbia" with German backing even if it meant war with Russia; the famous "blank check" was reaffirmed the next day in writing by German chancellor Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg. (Stevenson, p. 13)

On July 23, the emboldened Austrians presented an ultimatum to Serbia. Although at least half of its demands were reasonable, the most objectionable called for direct Austrian involvement in Serbia's investigation of the assassination and related internal affairs, the acceptance of which would compromise Serbia's sovereignty. Two days later, it was duly rejected, although in the most conciliatory language.

By now Tsar Nicholas II and his Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov were convinced that Austria-Hungary was acting not independently but as a tool of Germany, that Germany was on the brink of launching a preventive war, and that Russia could protect itself only by acting forcefully and quickly. (Meyer, p. 53) Taking a momentous -- and disastrous -- step, they promulgated a Period Preparatory to War, or pre-mobilization, which entailed canceling leave, clearing frontier railway lines, and mustering 1.1 million troops in the four districts closest to Austria-Hungary. (Meyer, p. 54)

As tension mounted, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey proposed a four-power conference of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to defuse the crisis; it fell on deaf ears as Germany and Austria were adamant that Serbia not escape its crimes unscathed.

On July 28, Kaiser Wilhelm returned from his cruise, read Serbia's gentle response to the ultimatum, trumpeted it as a "capitulation of the most humiliating kind," and urged his ally to moderate its intransigent attitude. But it was too late. Only hours later Austria-Hungary initiated partial mobilization in the Balkans, declared war on Serbia, and began shelling the capital, Belgrade, from Bosnia.

The next day the momentum toward war seemed to hang in suspended animation. The two cousins, the Kaiser and the Tsar, exchanged telegrams, each appealing to the other to restrain himself and his advisers. If Russia would refrain from full mobilization and Austria would confine its occupation to Belgrade, just across the border, perhaps the firestorm could be averted.

The warriors would not be denied. All through the 30th, at the behest of the Russian general staff, Foreign Minister Sazonov implored the Tsar to authorize full mobilization, asserting that the Germans were similarly arming themselves, a brazen falsehood. Conscious of the magnitude of his decision, the Tsar protested: "Think of the responsibility you are asking me to take. Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their death!" (Meyer, p. 76) But in the end he gave the fateful order -- even though, tragically, "in no real sense had the security of Russia, with the biggest army in the world, been threatened." (Meyer, p. 78)

Germany now dispatched its own ultimatums, giving Russia twelve hours "to suspend any war measures against Austria-Hungary and ourselves," and France eighteen to promise neutrality, demanding as hostages the great fortresses of Verdun and Toul, too high a price to be considered seriously.

In an eleventh-hour flurry of telegrams, Kaiser Wilhelm reiterated the terms of his ultimatum. The Tsar replied, "So long as the negotiations with Austria on Serbia's account are taking place, my troops shall not take any provocative action." He said that he understood Russian mobilization might require Germany to mobilize as well, but it need not mean war. He asked Wilhelm "for the same guarantee from you as I gave you . . . [and to] continue negotiating for the benefit of our countries and the universal peace dear to all our hearts." (Meyer, pp. 84-85)

But an open-ended postponement of hostilities would give Russia and France an advantage that would grow as time passed. Only Russia could prevent war, Wilhelm's generals insisted, and only by terminating mobilization.

At midday on Saturday, August 1, the deadline for the double ultimatum passed without an answer from either Russia or France. The Berlin government informed St. Petersburg that its continued mobilization constituted a state of war between the two countries.

In Paris, Marshall Joseph Joffre exhorted the French Cabinet: "Every delay of twenty-four hours in calling up reservists means . . . a retardation of the concentration forces, that is, the initial abandonment of ten to twelve miles of territory for every day of delay." When the German ambassador asked the French premier for a response to the ultimatum, he was simply told, "France will act in accordance with her interests." At 4:00 PM France announced mobilization of its armed forces, followed by Germany thirty minutes later. (Marshall, p. 43)

Britain's motives for entering the fray went deeper than its mutual defense covenant with France. It could not ignore Germany's impending violation of Belgian neutrality, which it had pledged to defend. "But more than national honor was at stake. British strategy could not tolerate [the threat] of a strident and overarmed Germany solidly positioned on the Channel coast and master of its greatest port, Antwerp, and its largest industrial complex." (Marshall, p. 50) When Germany failed to comply with Britain's ultimatum to respect Belgium's independence and integrity, it presented the Cabinet a righteous cause and a smoking gun.

Foreign Secretary Grey made one last futile try for peace. On August 1, he passed word to the Kaiser through his ambassador in London that "if Germany would hold off, he would promise to keep France neutral." Clutching hard at the straw, the Kaiser directed his Chief of Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, to "march the whole army east." (Marshall, p. 50) Not only was it too late; it was impossible, irrational, and irresponsible, Moltke calmly explained -- to stop the momentum of this enormous force, "to call off the great wheeling movement that was the whole and only point of German mobilization and almost certainly Germany's sole hope of victory . . . to turn its back on sixty-two French divisions ready for action and equipped with their own carefully developed plans." (Meyer, p. 97)

On Sunday, August 2, an advance contingent of German cavalry rode into Luxembourg to seize its network of railways. That evening Germany demanded unobstructed passage for its troops through Belgium. King Albert refused, harboring the vain hope that Germany would reconsider rather than risk international condemnation. When two days later the defiant Germans resumed their march, the British, in the words of Grey, could not "not stand by and witness the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history," and declared war. Later he added a mordant postscript: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." (Marshall, (pp. 52-53)

The Belgians made a valiant defense at Liege, holding off the marauders for ten days before they overwhelmed the twelve forts surrounding the city. The Germans crossed the Meuse River and swept west and south in a massive flanking wave spearheaded on the far right by Alexander von Kluck's First Army followed in line by Karl von Bulow's Second Army.

Marshall Joffre was certain the Germans were advancing with a relatively small army. "His intelligence bureau had estimated that they would begin the war with sixty-eight combat-ready divisions in the west -- not seventy-eight infantry divisions, ten cavalry divisions, and fourteen brigades of territorial militia, as was actually the case." And it had incorrectly assumed that no newly-mobilized reservists would be fed into combat. (Meyer, pp. 140-141) The result of Joffre's overconfidence -- a series of attacks by his five armies from Upper Alsace on his right through the Ardennes Plateau in his center to the town of Chaerleroi on his left -- was a multiple disaster known thereafter as the Battle of Frontiers.

"In grotesque encounters the French were everywhere beaten," their generals throwing their infantry against the Germans whatever the circumstances and no matter how grisly the outcome. 'They did not try to advance in short rushes or to wiggle forward or to make a stealthy use of the ground in their approaches . . . They charged straight in, expecting by audacity [and their unconquerable spirit] to stampede the enemy." (Marshall, p. 73) But as a young captain named Charles de Gaulle would later write, "In a moment it is clear that all the courage in the world cannot prevail against gunfire."

By the end of the month, the French had suffered 260,000 casualties, including 75,000 killed (27,000 of whom died on one day, August 22), compared to 18,000 German deaths, a disparity that can be explained by a difference in tactics. (Meyer, p. 142) The Germans would wait below ground or behind barriers, mow down their attackers with deadly machine-gun fire, punish them in retreat with artillery, and then emerge from their holes in vigorous pursuit. (Meyer, p. 162)

They were not, however, immune from blunders of their own.

Kluck, irascible, rough-hewn, aggressive, and relentless, wanted to circle his First Army far right around not only the French but also the forward elements of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's First Corps, taking both in the flank and possibly destroying them. But for coordination purposes he had been placed under the command of the more cautious and conventional Bulow, who favored a direct approach.

Consequently, on August 23, in the town of Mons, Kluck encountered British forces head-on, where they were strongest instead of weakest; his troops were repeatedly "shot to pieces in a field of fire so devastating that many of them thought they were facing an army of machine guns." Two days later Smith-Dorrien held his ground at Le Cateau, a bigger, bloodier fight than the one at Mons, with 55,000 British holding off 140,000 Germans and narrowly escaping envelopment. By this time Joffre had already reported to his war minister that his "cult of the offensive" had failed and that his armies were turning south to establish fortified defensive positions. (Meyer, pp. 161-163)

"When the Allies began their Great Retreat, the Germans appeared closer to victory than they would ever be again." But their advance was taking a heavy toll. Kluck's men were now beyond their frontier railheads and were marching twenty miles a day in the sweltering heat, burdened by 10-lb. rifles and 60 lbs. of gear. They could sustain themselves with forage but not their horses, exacerbating their supply problems. The lack of a telegraph system and a dearth of wireless sets impaired critical communications. Their ranks were depleted and could not be replenished, as soldiers dropped from exhaustion or were killed or wounded. (Stevenson, p. 45)

Then Chief of Staff Moltke made several fateful -- if not catastrophic -- decisions. Goaded by subordinates proclaiming the war in the west was virtually won, he sent two corps to Antwerp, one to the French stronghold at Mauberge, and two to East Prussia, a severe reduction of 275,000 men. Meanwhile, Joffre was doing the opposite -- using his interior rail lines to transfer troops from his right to his left, bolstering his newly-formed Sixth Army for the defense of Paris, and bringing the number of divisions facing the German right wing to forty-one, up from seventen.

The great German lightning strike force that had obsessed the general who had conceived it, Alfred von Schlieffen, now found itself not only bone tired, short of supplies, and increasingly without food but also outnumbered. (Meyer, p. 193)

Moltke now flinched, and proceeded to compound his errors. Having received sketchy reports of strong resistance by forces swarming near Paris, on August 27 he advised Bulow and Kluck "that it may be necessary to abandon the southwestern direction of the advance and wheel south." The next day Kluck was ordered to stay not in line with Bulow but slightly behind him -- an adjustment which would require him to suspend his progress for a day or more, or even turn around. Kluck decided that by shifting to the southeast, away from Paris, he could comply with his instructions yet continue to press forward.

"With Moltke's concurrence, the whole concept was changed, and the plan the Germans had followed since Liege fell by the wayside . . . Herewith was abandoned the main idea of crossing the Seine west of Paris and taking that city, the hub of all communications arteries, the citadel of French resistance. Instead, the now partly-fortified capital, and its garrison, would be left to threaten the flank of Bulow's armies." (Marshall, pp. 79-80)

Suddenly, a veil was lifted as French intelligence -- intercepted radio messages, papers found on a German officer, aircraft reconnaissance -- revealed the inexplicable opportunity at hand. "Kluck's army was 'in the air,' its communications exposed. The gap between it and Bulow's yawned wide; it would not stay open long." (Marshall, pp. 85-86)

It took the fiery colonial veteran, General Joseph Gallieni, who had been coaxed out of retirement to organize the defense of Paris, to convince Joffre it was time to act. On September 6, he ordered General Michel Maunoury to move his Sixth Army against Kluck's dangling left wing. But events had outrun him. Twenty-four hours earlier Kluck had sent General Wilhelm von Gronau's Fourth Reserve Corps west to the River Ourcq to protect his flank; surprised by the Sixth Army advancing eastward, he inflicted heavy damage before calling for help and retiring six miles.

Kluck now realized that he was facing a serious threat from the west; overnight he marched his entire army back across the Marne to the Ourcq, but left himself dangerously off balance, with his weak wing too far forward, when the Sixth Army renewed its attack. "For the next two days, the two beasts locked horns in a death struggle. Giving and taking great blows, the raw, unorganized French began to bend against Kluck's hardened veterans." When Maunoury tried to get around Kluck's right and was met head-on by two German corps, Gallieni commandeered 1200 Paris taxicabs and rushed reinforcements to the front. (Marshall, pp. 89-90)

"Men battled over worthless ground, ignoring great prizes close at hand. Artillery was fired, often wastefully, because shells were available though reliable target information was not. Generals advanced their troops who might better have spared them, fearing to miss their moment of glory." (Marshal, pp. 87-88)

As the madness rose to a climax, the outcome hung "on whether any of the German armies in the east could crack the French line or, alternatively, whether the German First Army or the French Sixth Army could destroy its opponents. The Battle of the Marne became a series of crises following one after another until finally something broke down." (Meyer, p. 207)

Kluck remained confident of victory. Having withstood all the French could throw at him, on the 8th, he ordered an encircling attack from the north led by an infantry corps under General Ferdinand von Quast. That night, however, the French secured an important bridgehead that ended all possibility of closing the gap between his army and Bulow's, completely demoralizing the latter.

Moltke, encamped a hundred and seventy miles to the north in Luxembourg, was getting almost no reports from Kluck or Bulow, and was in fact on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He sent his chief of intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, a man equally ridden by fear and doubt, to the front, empowering him "to issue such orders as were necessary" to save the German army. (Marshall, p. 92)

Arriving at First Army headquarters, Hentsch told Kluck's Chief of Staff that the BEF was now north of the Marne, that the gap between Kluck and Bulow had widened to thirty miles, that Bulow was planning to withdraw, and that Kluck had no alternative but to retire as well. When Kluck returned and learned of Hentsch's visit and Bulow's impending retreat, he reluctantly acquiesced. He had been monitoring the progress of Quast's corps, which had smashed through the disintegrating French defenses. Nothing lay between it and Paris but thirty miles of open ground -- which Quast was now ordered to turn his back on. It was the final melancholy chapter in the gruesome tragedy of how Moltke and the Germans had repeatedly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. (Meyer, p. 212)

While the tide ebbed and flowed along the Marne, one thousand miles to the east the Germans stumbled into "the most dramatic and complete victory achieved by either side in more than four years of bloody struggle." (Meyer, p. 177)

The German Eighth Army -- undermanned at 135,000 men and deficient in heavy artillery, medical service, and field telephones -- had already been badly mauled by Pavel Rennankampf's First Russian Army at Stalluponen on August 17 and at Gumbinnen on August 20 when Commander Max von Prittwitz learned that the Second Russian Army under Alexander Samsonov was entering East Prussia from the south, bringing the total forces arrayed against him to 650,000. Fearing envelopment, Prittwitz called Moltke and told him he was now compelled to abandon East Prussia and withdraw behind the north-south line of the Vistula River.

Prittwitz's Chief of Staff was Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann, one of the war's foremost tacticians. Using a map and compass, Hoffmann showed his superior that Samsonov's army was already closer to the Vistula River than the Germans and that a clear escape was not possible. Together the two conceived a plan to attack the divided Russian armies separately, although Prittwitz overruled Hoffman in identifying Samsonov to the south as the optimal first target.

Meanwhile Moltke -- whom Prittwitz had failed to inform of his new strategy -- was having second thoughts about vacating East Prussia without a fight; he decided that a change in command was required. The choice was inspired: Erich Ludendorff, the hero of Liege, whom he ordered to join the Eighth army as Chief of Staff. Too young, too junior, too much the commoner to be designated commander -- that position was accorded the sixty-seven-year-old Paul von Hindenberg, called out of retirement because of his reputation for steadiness and knowledge of the terrain. (Meyer, p. 168)

When Ludendorff proposed attacking the two Russian armies before they could unite, Moltke approved. It was Hoffmann's plan exactly, and it was already in motion by the time Ludendorff arrived on the scene.

The great battle turned on two minor incidents -- which solved the German dilemma of how to leave its northern flank undefended against Rennankampf's army. On the body of a Russian officer the Germans discovered intelligence indicating that Samsonov -- having detected a minor tactical adjustment by a German infantry corps, which he misinterpreted as a retreat -- was moving west and north, further away from Rennankampf. The Germans also intercepted a radio message disclosing "exactly what direction Samsonov intended to take and what timetable he intended to follow. It stated also, not surprisingly, that he wanted Rennankampf to come forward to join him." (Meyer, p.170)

Hoffmann was an expert on the Russian army and knew that Rennankampf and Samsonov belonged to rival factions, disliked each other intensely, and would do little to assist one another. Risking all, the Germans posted only a single division of cavalry opposite Rennankampf and moved the rest of the Eighth Army west and south. Nine divisions were maneuvered into a wide arc sixty miles across with the center left intentionally weak.

Samsonov marched straight for the vise. On August 26, a jittery Ludendorff ordered his normally aggressive First Corps commander, Herman von Francois to attack, but Francois protested that his artillery, his ammunition, and many of his men had not yet arrived on the battlefield. Oddly enough, his failure to strike lured Samsonov further into the trap.

Feeling pressure on his left flank, Samsonov sped a staff officer to his North-West Front commander, General Yakov Zhilinski, suggesting he should perhaps veer westward to confront this worrisome enemy force. "I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward," Zhilinski imperiously replied. "I insist that he continue the offensive." (Meyer, p. 174)

Zhilinski was fulfilling a promise he had made to the French two years earlier as chief of the Russian general staff; he had rushed his troops to the field in fifteen days -- without adequate food, weaponry, equipment, medical care, or communications. From his headquarters one-hundred-sixty miles to the rear, he thought he was masterminding a historic victory. (Meyer, p. 173)

On the 26th, two German corps with superior artillery collided with Samsonov's naked right flank and drove it back in confusion. The next morning Francois opened an artillery barrage that devastated Samsonov's left wing, and then sent his infantry forward into unexpectedly stiff resistance. Samsonov, incredibly, resumed the advance of his center, so aggressively, in fact, that Ludendorff was about to recall Francois's corps until Hindenburg calmly overruled him. (Meyer, p. 175)

At dawn on the 28th, Francois attacked again and discovered that the Russian left had evaporated; its troops had had enough and had fled en masse into the nearby woods. Francois swung around to the south and sealed off any hope for escape. "When a corps that had been stationed to the northeast in case Rennankampf showed up, reversed course, and marched toward Samsonov, the trap was complete." (Meyer, p. 175)

The net ensnared 90,000 Russian prisoners; another 150,000 were killed or wounded, compared to 37,000 German casualties. "Samsonov, saying he had failed the Tsar and could not go home, walked off alone into the woods and shot himself." (Meyer, p. 175)

Attempting to exploit his spectacular triumph, Ludendorff turned north to engage the malingering Rennankampf. In the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, fought September 5-13, Francois again penetrated the Russian left and worked way to the rear, but Rennankamp's center held, and he was able to retreat in good order. His pursuers encountered the usual problems of invading armies: exhaustion and outrunning their supplies. On September 25, the Russians counterattacked, ultimately driving the Germans back twenty-five miles to the Angerrap River, where they had commenced their campaign one month earlier.

On the same day that Samsonov's left collapsed, General Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf's Austro-Hungarian armies were suffering an even greater disaster -- on the killing fields of Galicia three hundred miles south. Even with an army of 500,000, the Austrians were outnumbered by their Russian opponents three to two. For two weeks they advanced in blazing heat across featureless plains with little effective cavalry reconnaissance on either side, blundering into superior Russian artillery in suicidal frontal attacks. When the bloodshed was over, they had lost 100,000 killed, 200,000 wounded, and 100,000 captured (compared to 250,000 Russian casualties), the cream of their competent junior military leaders, and two hundred miles of territory. (Stevenson, p.58)

Austria-Hungary would no longer be able to fight the Russians without German help.

On the Western Front, the year would culminate in a hellish nightmare that would haunt the landscape until the Armistice -- the month of slaughter known as the first Battle of Ypres. When the great armies converged on this quiet Belgian center of religion and cloth manufacturing, the Allies determined that it could not be defended from trenches. The higher ground to the east became the battlement, a pregnant bulge soon christened the Ypres salient. "Within this narrow compass through four years, more than one million human beings were to suffer death and wounds," at triple the rate of other sectors. (Marshall, p. 134)

Replacing the embattled Moltke, General Erich von Falkenhayn was determined to regain the offensive. He decided to extend the German front west along the Somme River all the way to the Atlantic, which would give him control of northern France and the key Channel ports of Calais and Boulogne; Ypres was the last obstacle in his path.

After ten days of round-the-clock shelling, Antwerp fell to the Germans on October 6, although 60,000 Belgian troops under Prince Albert managed to escape. They hurried west until they were almost in France and arranged themselves in a defensive line north of Ypres behind the barrier formed by the Yser River as it flows to the sea. There they awaited the arrival of the French Second Army -- now commanded by Ferdinand Foch -- racing to the sea from the south and Sir John French's British Expeditionary Force, whose goal, thrusting eastward, was Brussels.

Once again the Germans subjected the Belgians to murderous shellfire, killing or wounding over one-third of them. At Foch's suggestion, Albert ordered the sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea opened. A belt of water two miles wide and shoulder high flooded the Germans crossing the Yser and saved the Belgian army. (Marshall, p. 133)

"The next German drive opened October 20, raged ten days, and would not spend its fury until October 31, just as the British neared the breaking point." (Marshall, p. 135) "Along this part of the line there were no dikes to be opened, so that the opposing forces could be separated and their misery brought to an end. The fighting continued day and night, the two sides taking turns on the offensive, and as the casualties mounted companies were reduced to the size of platoons and the tattered remnants of units were mixed together helter-skelter." (Meyer, p. 228)

"Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides and horror after horror." The Germans persisted in attacking in mass, charging straight into bunched machine guns and volleying rifles. "Losses were no less shocking on the other side. When Scotland's Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was taken out of action, only about thirty men remained of the thousand-plus who had come to France at the start of the war." (Meyer, p. 229)

"Somehow, the Germans and British launched simultaneous attacks on October 30, and again they ran head-on into each other in a struggle in which the losses were almost unsupportable on both sides." Two hundred fifty men of the Second Worchester Regiment, with nothing between them and Ypres but open countryside, fixed bayonets and drove off twelve hundred confused German soldiers who thought they were the vanguard of a powerful force. (Meyer, p. 230)

"That night Falkenhayn called a halt. He had no idea that the BEF was on the brink of defeat -- out of reserves, nearly out of ammunition, at the limits of endurance. He still thought that a breakthrough was possible, but he wanted to gather more trained and experienced troops before trying again." (Meyer, p. 230)

"What he got was not victory but another series of inconclusive battles all along the ridges outside Ypres." The town of Lombartzyde changed hands seven times. As the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the salient, Foch repeatedly had to rebuff French and British generals who suggested that a retreat might be in order. (Meyer, pp. 232-233)

"All that saved the British hold on Ypres, beyond mortal valor, was the extraordinary defensive strength of the salient, a maze of wood plots, dikes, ditches, canals," houses, and walls, which could be stormed by the enemy only at a heavy cost. (Marshall, p. 137)

The German offensive crested on November 11. Their most elite regiment, the First Guards led by the Kaiser's son, uncovered a clear path to Ypres, but it too was spooked -- this time by a ragtag assortment of cooks, clerks, engineers, and staff officers. (Meyer, p. 233)

The fighting finally ended on November 22, when the incessant rain turned to snow, the mud froze, and the impossibility of achieving anything became too obvious to be ignored. The British had taken 58,000 casualties, the French 50,000, the Belgians 20,000, and the Germans 130,000. Even the old lion, British War Minister Lord Kitchener, was horrified. 'This isn't war," he said. (Marshall, p. 138)

By whatever name, the unprecedented carnage collaborated with the coming of winter to drive the contending forces to ground. Soon opposing trench systems, fitted with deep artillery-proof dugouts where soldiers existed like rodents, extended from the Alps to the North Sea. Intermittently, over the next four years, they would emerge from their warrens in supreme efforts to break the deadlock -- with little to show for thousands of lives sacrificed on the altars of national honor, stubborn generalship, and political self-righteousness.

REFERENCES

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Love and Rebellion 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Marshall, S. L. A. World War I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914 t0 1918. New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.

Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 2004.