change in personalities. Asquith was replaced as prime minister by Lloyd George in early December 1916, and at the month’s end Joffre was succeeded by General Robert Nivelle, who had masterminded French recovery of Fort Douaumont at the close of the Verdun fighting.
These two changes were to have a significant impact on the British armies in France. It was already clear that Haig and Lloyd George did not get on. Haig had already told his wife that ‘I have no great opinion of L. G. as a man or a leader,’ and Lloyd George later declared that Haig was ‘brilliant – to the top of his army boots’. John Charteris recognised that the two were fundamentally incompatible.
D. H. dislikes him. They have nothing in common. D. H. always refuses to be drawn into any side-issues in conversation, apart from his own work. Lloyd George seemed to think this meant distrust of him. It is not so much distrust of him personally as of politicians as a class.74
Haig seemed to get on better with General Nivelle, initially reporting that he seemed ‘straightforward and soldierly’. But his plan for 1917 worried Haig. He proposed to strike a mighty blow on the Chemin des Dames, and to gain the troops required for it he requested that the British should extend their front southwards, from the Somme to the Oise. They were also to launch subsidiary attacks to pin down the Germans and prevent them from concentrating to meet Nivelle.
Haig questioned this strategy. He was in favour of attacking a German army palpably weakened by the Somme, but had long believed that Flanders, where a short advance could bring the German railhead of Roulers within his grasp, offered better prospects than attacks further south. Moreover, he had been warned by Robertson that the government was gravely concerned by the damage being done by German submarines based at Ostend and Zeebrugge on the Flanders coast, and in April 1917 Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the First Sea Lord, told an American colleague that ‘it is impossible for us to go on with the war if [merchant shipping] losses like this continue’.75 On 6 January 1917 Haig announced that he could not assist Nivelle unless some sort of provision was made for clearing the Flanders coast. He was spectacularly overruled. In late February Lloyd George met Nivelle at an Allied conference at Calais, and agreed to place Haig under his command for the duration of the offensive. Haig wrote to the king, offering to resign, but the monarch’s private secretary replied:
I am to say from His Majesty that you are not to worry; you may be certain that he will do his utmost to protect your interests; and he begs you to work on the most amicable and open terms with General Nivelle, and he feels all will come right.76
As the Allies discussed their strategy, the Germans acted. Successes in the East, and growing war-weariness in Russia, enabled them to shift troops westward, a process which accelerated as the year wore on. And they prepared to fall back from the great apex of the Western Front salient onto a carefully-prepared position known as the Hindenburg line, a shorter length of front which would free some twenty divisions. In the process they devastated the area between the old front line and the new one, in an operation named Alberich, after the spiteful dwarf in the Nibelungen saga. The influential war correspondent Philip Gibbs thought it a telling comment on German national character that destruction like this could be carried out by men who had lived for the past two years with the population they now dispossessed.
‘They were kind to the children … but they burnt our houses.’ – ‘Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away … But he helped smash up the neighbours’ furniture with an axe.’ – ‘The lieutenant was a good fellow … but he carried out his orders of destruction’ …
Gibbs concluded that ‘on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and all that was in them’.77 John Masefield, not easily persuaded by anti-German propaganda, was shocked by what he saw:
He has systematically destroyed what he could not carry away … Bureaus, mirrors, tables, sofas, have been smashed with axes, fruit trees have been cut, looped or ringed. Beds have been used as latrines, so have baths & basins … Houses, churches, cottages, farms, barns & calvaries have been burnt, blown up, pulled down or gutted … They are the acts of men. They are the acts of beasts.78
One German left a sign in English reading ‘Don’t be angry: Only wonder’ in the wreckage of a town: it can be seen in the Historiale de la Grande Guerre in Péronne. Captain Rudolf Binding, a German staff officer, admitted that: ‘The expulsion of the inhabitants from their little towns and villages was a heart-rending business, more ghastly than murder,’ though he added that it was ‘to the eternal shame of the English’ that they did not inflict losses following up the Germans.79
Such destruction horrified men inured to war. One soldier agreed that, though they might have left the Germans a desert to live in, the British would not have systematically destroyed the orchards, and an officer distinguished between damage done by ‘honest shells’ and arsonists. ‘The ruin was everywhere complete,’ wrote Edward Spears, a liaison officer with French troops who went forward into the liberated area.
Although there were touches which showed that more time had been available at some places than at others; the will was nowhere lacking, but the vandals had been hurried in some villages, that was all. It was as if Satan had poured desolation out of a gigantic watering-can, carelessly spraying some parts of the land more than others … Everywhere in these ruined villages women’s clothing lay about, underwear so arranged as to convey an indecent suggestion, or fouled in the most revolting way.80
Spears’s French driver, distressed almost beyond speech, kept muttering: ‘The swine, the bloody swine.’ Spears saw French soldiers bruised not simply by the physical destruction but also by the inevitable consequence of a long, and not always brutal, occupation. Some men, away from home since August 1914, found anguished wives nursing a new baby or a flaxen-haired toddler. ‘Can you love me still, who have loved you always?’ they begged. ‘No physical suffering I saw or heard of during the war equalled or even approached that raw agony,’ wrote Spears.81 There is more to the Western Front than ground lost and gained and the evolution of tactics. Just as men changed the front, so it changed them, and both the German gas attack of April 1915 and the destruction levied during the retreat to the Hindenburg line helped set iron into the soul.
The German withdrawal left Nivelle wrong-footed, for part of his offensive, now as passionately oversold to politicians as it was to soldiers, had been aimed at some areas that had been evacuated. On 4 April the Germans captured a copy of the attack plan, and thoughtfully distributed details to their waiting batteries. When French infantry attacked on 16 April, into icy rain which turned to sleet, they were cut to ribbons. Spears saw wounded coming back in despair. ‘It’s all over,’ they told him. ‘We can’t do it. We shall never ever do it. C’est impossible.’82 When Nivelle called off the offensive on 9 May he had lost some 100,000 men. He did not simply lose the confidence of his government, which replaced him with the big, wintry-faced Philippe Pétain, who had held Verdun in the dark days of early 1916. He did something far worse: he had pushed his men beyond endurance. The army which had endured Verdun had been a matchless amalgam of
steel-skulled Bretons, calm and obstinate men from the Auvergne, clear-eyed men from the Vosges, Gascons talking like d’Artagnan, idle men from Provence who put their back into it at the right moment, wolf-hunting men from the Isère, cynical and dandified Parisians, people from the plain or the mountain,
