had yet been _built upon the western front. Further, the enemy
had withdrawn from a considerable part of the front which
Nivelle had intended to attack, and this made necessary a fur-
ther postponement of his battles, but he still adhered to the main
features of his plan. In the altered circumstances grave doubts
arose in the minds of some of the senior French generals as to the
feasibility of this plan, and when these came to the ears of the
French War Minister, M. Painleve, he assembled a Council of
War on April 6, on the very eve of the offensive, at which criti-
cs of the plan were presented by certain of the commanders
ho were to take a leading part in its execution. Nevertheless,
te French Government decided not to interfere with Gen.
ivelle. It is difficult to conceive of a more unfortunate prelude
a great battle. However, these doubts and hesitations of the
leaders were not known to the rank and file of the army or to the
French people; and when, on April o, the spring campaign began
by an attack by Allenby's III. Army on the enemy's lines E. of
Arras, and by the Canadian corps with one brigade of the 5th
Div. on the Vimy Ridge, and met with an immediate success,
hopes soared high. The French public was deeply impressed by
the rapid capture of the Vimy Ridge, which had for so long
resisted Foch's attacks, and great things were expected when the
French army advanced.
The second of Nivelle's blows was delivered by the group of
armies of the centre, now under Franchet d'Espercy, against the
German front in the neighbourhood of St. Quentin; but Franchet
d'Esperey was here in contact with a part of the main Hinden-
burg line, and he had neither the time nor the means to prepare
effectively for an attack upon their formidable defences. The
operations of the centre group of armies, which had been intended
to be an important part of Nivelle's programme, dwindled there-
fore into little more than a demonstration, which took place on
April 14 and had no material results. Nivelle's main battle,
which took place on the front between Reims and Anizy, began on
ril 16. It had been planned that the assaulting troops should
the first day of battle break through the first three German
ines. The attack was made by Mangin's VI. Army and Mazel's
V. Army, with Duchesne's X. Army and a mass of cavalry in
reserve ready to exploit their success. Antonine's IV. Army
struck in to the E. of Reims on the iyth. The left of Mazel's
attack failed almost entirely; and elsewhere, though the first
German line was captured, little progress was made beyond it.
The dream of a rapid rupture of the enemy's front had to be
abandoned, and a fresh plan of battle had to be formed.
One of the first results of the failure of Nivelle to realize his
hopes was that he had to request Haig to press his attacks to the
E. of Arras with all possible vigour, so as to keep the largest
possible number of Germans occupied in that quarter. This
entailed a prolongation of the battle of Arras into a period when
gains became small and were only purchased at great price.
None the less Haig decided that the situation made it neces-
sary to support the French with all his power, and he fought
on till May 17, by which time the British front was estab-
lished some 4 m. to the E. of Arras and in the plain to the E.
of the Vimy Ridge. While Haig was thus battling in the N.,
Nivelle on the Aisne front had brought his X. Army into his
front line, and by slow and bitter fighting had won his way up the
Chemin des Dames ridge, of which he captured the eastern portion.
Early in May it was quite evident that there was no prospect of
such a break-through as had been planned, and on the isth the
French Government replaced Nivelle by General Petain, while
General Foch, recalled from semi-retirement, became chief of the
staff in Paris. Petain's first task was to wind up the operations
on the Aisne front, and the battle ended definitely on May 20.
The spring campaign had proved a failure in comparison with
what might have been, and still more in comparison with what
Nivelle had promised, but its results were far from being insig-
nificant. The German retreat in March, which was a direct con-
sequence of the battle of the Somme, had at last brought about
the attainment of one of the objects for which Joffre had been
striving for so long. The Allies had now more elbow room on one
of the most vital parts of their front, that which covered directly
the roads to Amiens and Paris. Had the Germans in March igiB
started from the positions which they held in Feb. 1917, and
had their attacks progressed at the same rate, they would have
entered Amiens on the second day of the battle, which would
have ended with the German guns bombarding Abbeville and
communication between the French and British armies severed.
It is therefore not too much to say that the retreat which was
forced upon the Germans by the battle of the Somme saved the
Allies in the following year. But how much greater might the
results have been if the plan formed by Joffre and Haig in the
previous Nov. had been followed if the Germans had been
pressed on the Somme battlefield during the winter, and if they
had been attacked early in Feb. before their plans for retreat
had been completed. Despite all the difficulties with which the
successful conduct of that retreat by the Germans had con-
fronted them, the Allied armies had in the battles of April and
May captured 62,000 prisoners, 446 guns, and 1,000 machine-
guns, and had gained positions of the first importance; 57 divi-
sions had been compelled to fight upon the French front and 99
on the British front. Had Nivelle been content to follow Joffre's
example, and to prepare methodically for the exhaustion of the
German reserves without overtaxing the endurance of the sorely
tried French army before attempting to break through the ene-
my's lines, he might have claimed a conspicuous success for his
first campaign. But the hopes which he had roused had been
extravagant, and the dejection when they were not realized
was correspondingly great. The dejection was increased by the
news of the Russian revolution, and by exaggerated reports of
the losses in the Aisne battles; and it was hardly alleviated by
America's entry into the war, for it was well understood that
American troops could not be ready to take their places in the
firing line during 1917. The immediate consequence of this
dejection was the outbreak of a series of mutinies in the French
armies, which so affected the moral of the French troops that
Petain found it necessary to appeal to Haig to keep the enemy
engaged while he restored the confidence of his men.
If the attention of the Germans was to be occupied by the
British armies it was necessary that they should be forced to
fight. Upon any part of the British front S. of the point where it
bends S. from the Belgian frontier N.W. of Lille it was possible
for the Germans to repeat their manoeuvre of March and avoid
a battle by retiring into another system of defences, for in doing
this they would be merely abandoning a portion of French terri-
tory which was of no great value to them, while they might by
this method economize sufficient troops to enable them to fall
upon the French. On the Belgian front they could not fall back
without risking their hold upon the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge,
which were to them important bases for their submarine cam-
paign, and without endangering the security of the chief aero-
dromes from which their air attacks upon England were made.
For these reasons Haig decided to press the enemy with all his
available means upon the Belgian front, and on June 7 he began
this campaign with the battle of Messines. This battle was most
skilfully and thoroughly prepared by Sir Herbert Plumer, and
was fought and won by his II. Army. The battle began with the
explosion of a number of huge mines, the secret of which had
been preserved by constant and devoted watchfulness on the part
of the miners, who had tunnelled beneath the enemy's lines
many months previously and awaited patiently the opportunity
990
WESTERN FRONT CAMPAIGNS
for their use. The effect of these explosions, combined with a
very skilfully planned bombardment of massed guns of all
calibres, was such that, except in the right of the attack in the
neighbourhood of Messines, the infantry, for once, had little to
do. The whole of the Messines- Wytschaete ridge was captured
at comparatively very light cost, and the Ypres salient, a name
of ill omen for the British army since Oct. 1914, disappeared.
The strength of the British army in combatant troops was now
at its greatest. Haig had 64 divisions and 10 cavalry divisions
under his orders, and a mass of heavy artillery, tanks and aero-
planes. It was well that this was so, for the army was to be
called upon to endure greatly while Petain and his men got their
second wind. Nor was it only the situation on the western front
which called for resolute action, for the condition of the Russian
army was far more critical than that of the French army. Kor-
nilov had, on July i, begun an offensive, and if he was supported
and encouraged by success in the W. it was still possible that
the Russians might continue to be a powerful factor in the war.
With these heavy responsibilities on his shoulders,- Haig be-
gan on July 31 the second battle of Ypres, with a great attack by
the V. Army, which had been moved N. for the purpose. This
attack was combined with a subsidiary attack by the French
IV. Army under General Antoine on the British left. The object
was to gain possession of the Passchendaele ridge, so as to be
able to sweep with gun-fire the plains beyond it toward Zee-
brugge and Ostend. This achieved, a combined naval and
military attack, which had been secretly prepared in England,
was to be made on the Belgian coast, which it was hoped would
gain possession of the ports and so relieve the British Admiralty
of some of the many anxieties caused by the German " U "
boats. In preparation for the landing the British took over from
the French the lines on the Belgian coast near Nieuport and
moved other troops up to the coast behind these lines. The
position at Nieuport, which consisted of a narrow strip of ground,
with the Yser at its back, was not easy to hold against deter-
mined attacks, and before the British preparations for defence
were completed the Germans attacked and captured the lines
E. of the river. This was an inauspicious beginning, but worse
followed, for the weather broke immediately after the battle
began and then followed a rainfall unprecedented for August.
The plan of battle was to deliver a series of blows, each with
an objective limited by the support which the artillery could
give without changing position. It was believed that the expe-
rience of Messines and of Verdun had shown that this would
allow the infantry to reach their objective without heavy loss.
Ludendorff, however, met this method of attack by a new method
which he called the elastic system of defence. He made no
attempt to hold his front lines in strength, but withdrew the
bulk of his infantry from the zone which would be most heavily
bombarded and relied mainly upon machine-guns in concrete
" pill-boxes " to break up the British infantry attack, and upon
counter-attacks by the troops whom he had held back. But it
was less this method of defence than the mud of Flanders which
prevented British progress. The opening battle of July 31 gave
the British possession of the whole of the Pilken Ridge, of the
German first line of defence between Nordshoote and Klein
Zillebeke, a front of 10 m., and of most of the German second
line, but it was not until Sept. 20 that the enemy's third line
was penetrated, and not until Oct. 4 that the British were estab-
lished on the high ground between Broodseinde and Becelaere.
The difficulty of getting guns and ammunition forward through
the slough of mud prevented the delivery of a rapid succession of
blows, each with a limited objective, as had been planned, and
in the event a more terrible strain was imposed upon the British
troops than in any other battle of the war. As in the case of the
battle of the Somme, the first fruits of the third battle of Ypres
were reaped elsewhere than on the battle-front. The Germans,
forced to send more and more troops into the fiery furnace which
blazed in the Ypres ridges, were, compelled to leave the French
alone, and Petain had time to restore the confidence of his army.
Part of his method was the delivery of very carefully prepared
attacks on a comparatively small front, supported by a great
mass of artillery which should leave the infantry little more to
do than to occupy the ground won. The first of these attacks
was delivered by Guillaumat's II. Army on the Verdun front,
and was completely successful, ending with the French in pos-
session of all the ground which the Germans had won in 6 months
fighting in 1916. This was followed by a more important attack
delivered on Oct. 23 by Maitre's VI. Army, which gave the
French the whole of the Chemin des Dames ridge, and resulted
in the capture of 11,000 prisoners and 200 guns. Then and not
till then Petain expressed himself as satisfied that his immediate
purpose was achieved.
The British troops, struggling in the mud of Flanders, could
not be told the reasons which had called for a supreme effort from
them, and the terrible struggle through the mud, unrelieved by
any conspicuous success, was a heavy strain upon them. As
events turned out it would probably have been wiser to have
brought the third battle of Ypres to a close immediately after
the French had won the Chemin des Dames, but at that time
the British were within a short distance of the crest of
the Passchendaele ridge, while information received at G.H.Q.
showed that the strain upon the German army had been far
greater and that there had been a very appreciable lowering
of the moral of the German troops. Haig had yet another blow
in preparation. The continued bad weather and the slowness
of the progress had caused the abandonment of the project of
landing on the Belgian coast, and all hope of driving the Germans
from the Belgian ports had gone, but there still appeared to be
an opportunity of profiting from the exhaustion of the German
reserves before the winter gave them a period for recovery, as
it had after the battle of the Somme. A final reason for
continuing -the struggle was that on Oct. 24 an Austro-German
attack had been launched in Italy, and at Caporetto had broken
through the Italian lines. It was therefore of importance to
keep up the pressure upon the Germans on the western front.
So the third battle of Ypres was continued, until the ridge and
village of Passchendaele were captured on Nov. 3.
A fortnight later Byng's III. Army attacked the German front
opposite Cambrai. This battle opened a new era in trench war-
fare. One of the outstanding difficulties which the trench
barrier had created was that it had hitherto eliminated one of
the chief resources of generalship, surprise. The time and
labour required to prepare for a great bombardment, and the
accumulation of the huge stores of material of war on the selected
front of battle, made it impossible to conceal intentions from the
enemy. But at Cambrai these difficulties were overcome by
using a great number of tanks, brought up secretly to take the
place of the bombardment in breaking the enemy's defences.
The attack was made upon one of the strongest parts of the
Hindenburg system, but the tanks successfully broke through,
and the surprise was complete. At Messines the guns had left
nothing for the tanks to do, and in the third battle of Ypres
they had been defeated by the mud of Flanders, but at Cambrai
they came into their own. One thing alone was lacking as far
as their part in the battle went. The cooperation between the
tanks and the artillery in the later stages of the attack was not
complete, so that numbers of tanks fell easy victims to the
German guns, a lesson of which advantage was taken in 1018.
Of greater importance was the fact that 6 French and 5 British
divisions had been transferred to Italy to help the Italian army
to stem the disaster of Caporetto, so that Haig had not the
troops to complete and extend the first successes won at Cambrai.
It is a typical illustration of the advantage which their central
position conferred upon the Germans that several of the British
divisions which would have been invaluable at Cambrai had not
reached the Italian front at the time when the Austro-Germans
were checked on the Piave.and the battle of Caporetto came to
an end. So the German counter-attacks won back a good part
of the ground which Byng had gained in the first advance, and
the battle of Cambrai ended on Dec. 7 in one more disappoint-
ment for the Allies.
The campaign of 1917 on the western front had been fatally
hampered by the change of plan which had been made by
WESTERN FRONT CAMPAIGNS
991
Nivclle when he succeeded Joffre. That change had permitted
Ludendorff to prepare for and carry through the retreat into
the Hindenburg line, and had postponed the date of the Allied
offensive from Feb. i, the date fixed by Joffre, until April 9
a delay of nine precious weeks. As Joffre, had anticipated,
it had been necessary for the British army to bear the brunt of
the fighting, but it would have done so under very different
conditions if the Germans had been hustled back into the
Hindenburg line, as they were in Sept. 1918, and if Messines
had been fought at the beginning of April, and the third battle
of Ypres had begun on May 30 instead of July 31. The battle
of Cambrai might then have synchronized with the last offensive
of the Russian army, and the combined effect might well have
een such as to have saved that army from dissolution, for
dequate French and British reserves would have been available
France to support Byng's attack, and the war might have
tided victoriously in the autumn of 1917. As it was, the battles
1917 showed clearly that the solution of the problems of
ench warfare at which Haig and Joffre had arrived was correct.
It was first necessary to exhaust the German reserves and then
to strike a surprise blow or series of surprise blows. Cambrai had
shown how surprise might be achieved. But all this experience,
which had been purchased at great cost, had been acquired too
late to be put to profit in 1917, owing to the fatal delay in
opening the campaign of that year. The collapse of Russia was
definite and complete, and the Germans were transferring their
divisions from E. to W. as rapidly as their railways could carry
them. The French divisions had since the middle of the year
been gradually reduced in strength, as France had no longer the
men to replace the losses in the ranks, and now Petain found
himself compelled to cut down the number of his divisions. The
British army was not receiving from home the men to fill the
gaps caused by the bloody fighting of Passchendaele; and Haig,
early in 1918, was compelled to follow the example of the French
and reduce the strength of his divisions, while n British and
French divisions had been removed to Italy. True, American
troops had reached France, but it was improbable that they
would be able to take their place in the line of battle before the
middle of the summer. In April 1917 there were in France and
Belgium 64 British, 108 French and 6 Belgian divisions, or 178
in all, opposed to 128 German divisions. At the end of the year
there were 59 British, 98 French and 6 Belgian divisions, a total
of 163, opposed to 175 German divisions. Further, the British
and French divisions were considerably weaker at the end of the
year than they had been at the beginning, though this was
offset, to some extent, by a corresponding reduction in the size
of the German divisions. Most important of all, there were
still large German reinforcements, which might amount to as
many as 40 divisions, and did, in fact, amount to 32, ready to
come across from the Russian front. The Allies could only obtain
reinforcements in the shape of formed divisions by withdrawing
troops from Palestine and Salonika, and to this their statesmen
were opposed. So fate decreed that at the very time when the
Allies had at last found out how to breach the trench barrier, they
were thrown willy-nilly on the defensive, and had to prepare to
meet the greatest effort which Germany had yet made in the
west. (F. B. M.)
III. GERMAN OFFENSIVE, 1918
The military situation of the Central Powers at the end of
the year 1917 and the beginning of 1918 has been thus described
by Ludendorff in his Memories of the War:
" Throughout the latter half of 1917 I had strained every nerve to
bring about the results that had now been attained, sparing myset
no more than I spared others. The western front had held, the Ital-
ian army was defeated and the Austro-Hungarian armies m Italy
were inspired with new courage. The Macedonian front was holding
out. In the east the armistice negotiations were finished and the way
to peace lay open to the diplomatists. Negotiations at Brest
Litovsk were to begin about Christmas. There was a prospect ot
our winning the war. Only in Asia Minor had there been any hitch,
but the great events in Europe had pushed into the backgrot
Under the influence of this hopeful outlook the German
Supreme Command decided in favour of a decisive battle in the
western theatre of war in the spring of 1918. This decision was
justified in the first place by the collapse of Russia. Fortune had
favoured the Central Powers there, apart from their own military
successes. Yet these might be regarded by them as having made
good fortune deserved. The problem of a " war on many fronts "
had been clearly comprehended, and the principle of first com-
pleting the work that had to be done in the east had been con-
sistently maintained. But the fortunes of war are seldom all on
one side as Hindenburg and Ludendorff were to discover. The
peace negotiations in the spring of 1918 dragged on so long in
Trotsky's hands that not only did a new appeal to arms, though
a brief one, become necessary, but the final result was merely an
" armed peace." This involved keeping strong German forces
tied up in the east to secure the treaty and profit by it, and pre-
vented the best use being made of these forces in the decisive
battle of the war on French soil. But the fact remains that the
chief presupposition indeed, the indispensable one on which
the Supreme Command founded their project was the breaking
up of the enemy in the east. By the end of March 44 divisions
had gone to the west, followed in April and May by 15 other
divisions, among which were 3 of cavalry.
It was a question of considerable importance whether, and to
what extent, the participation of the Austro-Hungarian forces in
the coming decisive battle would be possible. The Italian army,
though not destroyed by the short autumn campaign of 1917,
had been so thoroughly beaten, and was so unstrung morally, that
it might reasonably be neglected as a military factor for the next
few months. The offensive there had also had the important
result of drawing off n French and English divisions from the
French theatre of war to Italy. The duration of Italy's collapse
was, of course, uncertain. It would presumably end automati-
cally when the Central Powers dropped their menacing attitude.
All the more was it important to maintain this. But it was not
considered necessary to keep German fighting forces in the
Italian theatre of war to this end. The moral of the Austro-
Hungarian army had risen so markedly since the success of the
last offensive that it seemed equal to carrying out this task
without German support. The 6 German divisions in Italy were
accordingly withdrawn during the winter, and were in the
French theatre of war by the end of March. The German
Supreme Command would have liked to use the Austro-Hungarian
army to still greater advantage in the general scheme by bringing
over a number of good fighting divisions and some heavy artillery
to take a direct part in the forthcoming battles in France. This
had been agreed upon in principle at a conference between
Ludendorff and General von Arz on Nov. 3. The matter was
further discussed in writing up to the beginning of Jan. 1918.
But in the meantime other influences were at work, opposing the
designs of the two Supreme Commands. According to Gen. von
Arz the Austrian Emperor and Empress were averse to sending