Free World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone Page A

with the Germans, unless, in effect, he had no choice.
    Therefore, German attacks in the east. Falkenhayn, like Churchill, knew that the west offered only stalemate, and he was quite right. He tried one final attack in the west, again at Ypres in April 1915, and it was, like unrestricted U-Boat warfare, another exercise in Prussian crassness. A new weapon had come to hand – poison gas, banned by The Hague conventions, but justified for the weaseling reason that French rifle-bullets also released a gas on impact. It was indeed a horrible weapon, coming to blind or wreck the lungs of its victims. It was first tried out on the Russian front, in January, but the extreme cold reduced its effectiveness. In April, gas was released from cylinders, and it did cause immediate panic among the British and Canadians. But then the Germans themselves had to advance into it, and makeshift answers were found – cotton wool soaked in urine held off the effects for half an hour, and,later, there were proper gas masks. In any case, although the Ypres salient became even more uncomfortable for the British, there was no breakthrough, and Falkenhayn would not have known what to do with one. His main aim was at Russia.
    Here, Falkenhayn had some good fortune, because the western Powers dispersed their effort between Gallipoli and the front in France. The latter caused fixation. On the map, the German line looked very vulnerable, because it bellied out in an extended salient, with Noyon, fifty miles from Paris, at the apex, and the French newspapers led every day with that news. Generals looking for favourable publicity were duly mesmerized: some new attack would bring about liberation of the national territory. British volunteers, in millions, had abandoned the boredom of life in industrial towns for the supposed glamour of a soldier’s existence and were ready and willing to go. Salients were vulnerable to attacks from the sides, Artois on the northern edge, where the British Expeditionary Force was building up its strength, and Champagne, north-east of Paris, on the southern edge. If the British and French could break through in either area, then they could ‘pour’ cavalry through the gap, and perhaps surround the Germans in the central part of this salient. Here was the stuff of fantasy, and elderly generals, their experiences formed from cavalry charges in the South African veldt or the sand-table campaigns of Morocco, dreamt of glory. How this appeared on the ground has been described in one of the classic memoirs of the war, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That . Graves was a public schoolboy, infused with the romantic patriotism of the time, and volunteered as he left Charterhouse. His regiment’s regular officers believed in rituals. Officers dressed in baggy shorts, as if they were in India; colonels made it their business to make life humiliating for ‘warts’ – subalterns – even if, in civilian life, these had been prosperous and successful men. Not many of the commanders were at all bright, and some were downright dim.
    The first attempt of the British Expeditionary Force had been at a village called Neuve Chapelle on 10 April. In this early stage of the war, trench lines were still fairly undeveloped, and the British had massed guns in adequate numbers for the enemy trench to be overcome and then occupied. However, what then? German reserves arrived by train to another line, and British reserves came up on foot, each carrying sixty pounds of equipment – the equivalent of a heavy suitcase. The cavalry moved forward in expectation, and clogged the roads. But the guns had not registered the new German line, and the infantry were tired. Subsequent attacks therefore failed. These episodes were repeated in May, without the initial success. However, volunteers for the army were now arriving in droves, and in September, in concert with the French, a new and much more sizeable attack was planned. At Loos, a mining town, the