John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Nivelle’s plan was to repeat the Verdun coup de main on an enormous scale against the German line along the Aisne. The British were to swing with their left at Arras and the French would follow with a right Sunday punch east of Soissons. In fortyeight hours the front would be breached. The first phase would be the pinching off of the Arras-Soissons salient. In four days the Huns would be rolled back on the Meuse. Invited to London, Nivelle described his plan to the British cabinet, then to “several persons of both sexes,” as the British Chief of Staff put it, at lunch. Lloyd George was so captivated he promised Nivelle to put Haig under his orders.

Both the British Chief of Staff and Sir Douglas Haig were pained by this news to the verge of resignation. They were cajoled into following Nivelle’s instructions for this one operation. In his diary Haig referred to one of Nivelle’s communications as the type of letter which no gentleman could have drafted. Sullenly but loyally the British command went along.

Nivelle’s plan had meanwhile become entangled in French party politics. It was discussed in the Chamber and in the newspapers. The German generals hardly needed to be further informed, when, on February 15, they captured a sergeant with a divisional order in his pocket which outlined a great part of it. On March 3 they captured Nivelle’s entire memorandum, which, to be sure there would be no misunderstanding, was being distributed widely among French commanders at the front.

Ten days after the capture of the French plans Ludendorff began an orderly and carefully planned retirement from the salient in question to a much shorter line which the Germans named for their mighty Hindenburg.

The code name of the movement was Alberich after the malicious dwarf in the Niebelungenlied. As the German troops retired they tore up the railroads, wrecked every house, poisoned every well, exploded mines at every crossroad. Fruit trees were cut down, cattle destroyed. Wherever a house was left standing it contained some kind of a booby trap.

So preoccupied were the British and French commanders with Nivelle’s plan that they allowed the German withdrawal to continue unhindered. The British engineer corps was kept busy reopening roads through the area of unexampled destruction the Germans left behind them.

In spite of cautious protests from British generals, in spite of Briand’s fall and the advent of the eightyyearold Ribot as head of the government in Paris, and in spite of the scepticism of Paul Painlevé, the new Minister of War, Nivelle managed to keep the politicians bemused. When it was pointed out that the German withdrawal had left no salient to pinch off, Nivelle shrugged and replied that the breakthrough would be that much easier.

It was a late spring. Cold rain alternated with sleet and snow. From day to day the offensive was postponed on account of bad weather, giving the Germans time to multiply the concrete pillboxes for Ludendorff’s newly conceived defense in depth. In the ravines of the limestone plateau north of the Aisne they dug tunnels or enlarged natural caves for gun emplacements. There was never an army better prepared to meet an offensive.

On April 6, the day the United States declared war, the Germans captured the detailed orders for Nivelle’s Fifth Army which was to lead off the attack. Preparations at French headquarters continued undisturbed. Nivelle was so hypnotized by the perfection of his plan he refused to change a single detail.

On April 9 the British began with their part of the show in front of Arras. After one of the greatest bombardments in history (eightyeight thousand tons of shells were thrown into the German positions) and a punishing gas attack, the British advanced with twelve divisions and sixty tanks. The Canadians captured Vimy Ridge, which had so long been fought for; but otherwise the British armies were stopped dead by the German pillboxes.

Haig, who had grudgingly allowed the tanks to see what they could do, brought up his beloved cavalry to exploit a breakthrough. Only a few squadrons saw combat. Haig’s attacks were continued, long after there were worthwhile gains to be made, as interference for Nivelle. The British lost eightyfour thousand men against a German loss of seventyfive thousand.

April 16, on a day of sleet and rainsqualls, Nivelle’s offensive took off. Continual delays had given the Germans time to bring in eighteen fresh divisions from the eastern front. The French air reconnaissance was poor. By some incredible miscalculation hundreds of Nivelle’s pilots were still at Le Bourget waiting to be issued new planes. French tanks floundered in the mud.

The attack was a disaster from the first. The Senegalese troops, of which much had been hoped, shivered and ran. The French divisions fought with their usual bravery. The first day they gained six hundred yards. Nivelle had predicted six miles. Instead of a breakthrough the operation settled down into a step by step slugging match. By the first of May the French after a loss of a hundred and eighteen thousand men had a foothold on the high ground of the Chemin des Dames.

By this time Painlevé had screwed up his courage to the point of demanding Nivelle’s resignation. Nivelle demurred. Old Ribot kept driving up and down behind the front in a tizzy, asking all the generals British and French what they thought of Pétain for a successor. At the French G.H.Q. at Beauvais such a yelling match took place between Nivelle and his subordinates, Gouraud and Micheler, all heroes of Verdun, that their recriminations were heard by the orderlies outside. It wasn’t till May 15 that Nivelle could be removed from his command.

Nivelle’s failure shattered the morale of the French armies. The Russian revolution was filling the newspapers with fine phrases about the rights of man. Socialists and syndicalists began to remember the old watchwords of the first of May, forgotten in the patriotic frenzy of the war’s beginning. All at once the French poilu had enough of letting himself be marched into German machinegun fire pour la patrie. Infantry regiments refused to attack. Red flags appeared. Military police ordered to suppress the mutinies were savagely slaughtered. In one camp behind the lines they hung gendarmes on the meathooks in the abattoir.

Companies deserted en masse. Even crack fighting units elected councils and drew up lists of demands. Woodrow Wilson’s call for a negotiated peace, echoed by the Petrograd Soviet and by socialists in neutral countries, was reiterated in the demands of the French troops. Besides that they begged for regular periods of leave, better living conditions and rational planning by the G.H.Q.

President Wilson dreamed of appealing to the people over the heads of their governments. The people had heard.

By the end of May fiftyfour divisions, something like threequarters of a million French soldiers, were involved in the mutinies. The censorship, which had not been able to keep secret the plans for Nivelle’s offensive, was successful in keeping knowledge of the mutinies from the Germans and from their Allies and from the French themselves. To those in the know the French Army seemed finished as a fighting force. With a heavy heart, Haig, who hadn’t any confidence in foreigners anyway, took upon his troops the punishing job of keeping the Germans busy for the rest of the summer.

Henri Pétain, who succeeded Nivelle, had also made his reputation at Verdun. He was known to have been opposed to the Aisne offensive from the first. A chilly aloof sort of man, an ardent Catholic, he belonged to the traditionalist antidemocratic sector of the officer corps, but he was enough of a soldier to understand the needs of the fighting man.

Some had to be shot, as Napoleon put it, pour encourager les autres , but courtsmartial were instructed to hear both sides of the story. While the courtsmartial were in progress two hundred and fifty of the mutineers considered most dangerous were sent to a quiet sector and annihilated by their own artillery. Units particularly noisy in singing the “Internationale” were placed in exposed posts where the German machineguns disposed of them. A hundred alleged ringleaders were banished to the colonies. Only twentythree mutineers were condemned to death, and led out publicly before firing squads, with the drumrolls and the panoply of military justice.