The War to End All Wars: Chapters 6–8

Foot soldiers in the past had fought with single-shot rifles that could not fire very straight or very far and with crude short-range cannon.

British gunners perfected the “creeping barrage”—an advancing curtain of artillery fire that moved across the battlefield just ahead of the attacking infantry, providing cover as the assault came within yards of the enemy positions.

Batteries of machine guns firing point-blank at assaulting troops could turn an infantry attack into a mass suicide.

British officials put out the word that the huge, strangely shaped objects, kept under wraps beneath tarpaulins, were special water carriers—mobile tanks.

Tanks first went into action in France in 1916. Early models, made by both the British and the French, were so clumsy and mechanically defective that they often broke down on the battlefield, became mired in mud, fell into ditches, or were destroyed by enemy fire.

Germany failed to match the Allies in tank development, producing just one model, the cumbersome A7V, manned by a crew of twelve, which appeared too late in the war to have any real impact.

Several thousand others, unable to move, lay sprawled on the ground, gasping for breath.

Poison gas caused a lot of misery, but as a weapon it never proved decisive in any battle. Its effectiveness was limited by shifting wind directions, and by the rapid development of protective gas masks.

Following the war, most countries signed the Geneva Protocol, a treaty banning the use of poison gas and bacteriological (germ-spreading) weapons. Although such weapons were stockpiled by the major combatants during World War II, fear of retribution kept them from being used in any significant way.

Aviation was still a novelty when the war began. The Wright brothers had made their first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, less than eleven years earlier, and by 1914 airplanes were still simple and few.

At first, aircraft were used mainly to carry out reconnaissance flights, affording a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield and enemy positions.

Reconnaissance flights soon led to aerial combat. Pilots tried to knock each other out of the sky, maneuvering to gain command of the air over the battlefield.

These dogfights in the sky between daredevil pilots in open cockpits without seat belts, high above the mud of the trenches, were greatly admired. A pilot who shot down ten enemy planes qualified as an “ace” and was hailed as a national hero.

In 1915, Germany’s lighter-than-air dirigible balloons, called Zeppelins after their designer, Count Ferdinand Zeppelin, began nighttime bombing raids over southern England, causing widespread panic and killing or wounding several thousand people.

The Zeppelin crews simply dropped their bombs over the side of the passenger gondola by hand.

Since the days of Alexander the Great, mounted troops had proved decisive in offensive warfare and had served as an army’s eyes, ranging far afield on reconnaissance missions.

And the stalemate on the Western Front, with entrenched armies dug in and facing each other across no man’s land, made the cavalry almost useless.

The sweeping British victory at Megiddo (in present-day Israel) in September 1918, completing the British conquest of Turkish-occupied Palestine, was the last time in Western military history that mounted troops played a leading role.

The challenge facing the French and British armies, hunkered down in their own deep entrenchments, was to launch attacks across no man’s land—to break into and through the zigzagging mazes of enemy fortifications, which in places were miles deep.

And excavated deep beneath the surface, where the soil allowed, were shell-proof underground shelters, or dugouts in places thirty or more feet deep, approached down wooden staircases.

Trenches were constantly under repair. They were reinforced with sandbags, with sheets of corrugated iron, with wooden frames supporting the raised earthen parapets that protected the soldiers from enemy fire.

And many men also suffered from trench mouth, a severe bacterial infection of the gums, another hazard of life in the trenches, caused by poor diet, poor hygiene, and smoking. Added to these indignities was the awful stench that hung over the frontlines, a foul odor that instantly assaulted visitors.

This menacing wasteland was pitted with shell craters, scarred by the charred remains of dead trees, often littered with debris and dead bodies.

Soldiers manned forward listening posts, eavesdropping near enemy lines, trying to pick up vital intelligence.

There was always the chance that men moving through the darkness of no man’s land might be suddenly silhouetted by an enemy flare and targeted by machine guns.

Because no one could be expected to endure these perils for long, men were rotated on a regular schedule whenever possible.

A battalion would spend perhaps a week on the frontline and would then be pulled back for a stint at the support line, then moved to the reserve line, and finally shunted to the rear before returning to the front for another cycle.

You don’t look, you see; you don’t listen, you hear; your nose is filled with fumes and death and you taste the top of your mouth. You are one with your weapon, the veneer of civilization has dropped away and you see just a line of men and a blur of shells.

At the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915, “It was foggy and the attack was delayed two hours, which didn’t do our spirits much good,” British corporal Alan Bray recalled.

After three days and nights under fire at Neuve-Chapelle, British troops were so exhausted that they fell asleep. According to the official British history of the battle, they “could only be aroused by the use of force—a process made very lengthy by the fact that the battlefield was covered with British and German dead, who, in the dark, were indistinguishable from the sleepers.”

“I was wounded in the battle and taken to a casualty clearing station,” trooper Walter Becklade of the Fifth Cavalry Brigade recorded.

Even during lulls in the fighting, it was impossible to escape the sight and smell of death.

Now they were just shiny skeletons in their uniforms held together by the dry sinews, that wound round their bones.

In both sectors, the attacks were preceded by the discharge of chlorine gas—the first time poison gas had been used by the Allies.

Later at Loos, thousands of British troops advancing across an open field were slaughtered by German machine-gun fire. The Germans, appalled by the carnage, held their fire as the surviving British troops turned and retreated.

Italy, meanwhile, after renouncing its treaty agreements with the Central Powers, had entered the war on the side of the Allies.

But the Italian army proved woefully unprepared for war, launching repeated attacks against the Austrians, gaining no ground, suffering huge casualties, and becoming a liability rather than an asset to the Allies.

In October, a combined Austrian-German-Bulgarian invasion finally succeeded in crushing Serbia, occupying the kingdom and driving the defeated remnants of the Serbian army out completely.

The Turks unexpectedly put up a fierce resistance, and for months the Allies were unable to break away from their narrow beachhead positions while the death rate mounted as a result of fighting and rampant disease.

The Turks unexpectedly put up a fierce resistance, and for months the Allies were unable to break away from their narrow beachhead positions while the death rate mounted as a result of fighting and rampant disease.