1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [32]
Now that the plan for a coastal attack had been finally scotched Sir John French began to consider alternative plans of attack – for attack he must, if only to raise the morale of the troops ‘after their trying and enervating experiences of winter in the trenches’. On 8 February he put his view cogently in a memorandum to the War Council. Nowhere had the experience of the troops been more ‘trying and enervating’ than in the flat lands at the end of the British line where the flooded River Lys and its tributaries seeped across the marsh. It was here the Commander-in-Chief proposed to mount an offensive. He did not accept the view that it was impossible to break through the German line, and he said so forcibly. An attack at Neuve Chapelle held out several tantalising possibilities. Not least was the chance – and French and his staff believed it to be a certainty – of capturing the Aubers Ridge that ran along the eastern edge of the valley. It was not much of a ridge, a mere four miles long, with a maximum elevation of fourteen metres at most, but it was high enough to give the Germans who held it a considerable advantage. If the offensive were launched as soon as conditions improved and the foul weather began to abate, the troops could be on top of the ridge in two days at most, and out of the slough forever.
Sir John French was encouraged in this idea by General Joffre, who informed him that, as part of his own ambitious project to breach the German salient, he proposed to launch his 10th Army to force the German front and capture the high ground to the east between Arras a few miles to the south and la Bassée where the French sector joined the British. If the British could attack simultaneously on the French left, the possibilities were boundless. Since this was exactly what Sir John French had in mind, he was delighted. But Joffre made one condition. If his offensive was to succeed, if he were to be in a position to press home his advantage, he must have more men. He had two whole Army Corps north of the British line at Ypres and he was insistent that Sir John French should now replace them with British troops and extend his own line to the north.
The Commander-in-Chief was not averse to this idea – indeed he had first proposed it himself when he had mooted his Belgian coast offensive in order to place the British Army adjacent to the Belgians. The fact was that, with a conglomeration of units and nationalities still holding the line in positions where the early battles had left them, the allied line in the north was something of a hotch-potch creating unnecessary difficulties of liaison and command. The teeming roads behind it were a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of uniforms and nationalities, for there were always troops on the move. French Cuirassiers on horseback, their once-gleaming breastplates dulled and rusting in the all-pervading damp; turbanned Indian troops hunched against the cold; foot-slogging poilus, mud-spattered in their horizon blue; Tommies, muffled up in khaki, leather jerkins and a variety of woollen caps, mufflers and mittens that would have reduced a peacetime sergeant-major to apoplexy. And in the extreme north, Belgian troops on their way to the marshes where the allied line trickled into flooded land, and where the line itself was little more than a straggle of duckboard causeways and island outposts in the morass.*
For the British to sidestep and join up with the Belgians, for the piecemeal French corps, at present between them, to go south and join up with the main French Army would obviously make sense. But, since the proposal had been put forward, things had changed. General Joffre had already reduced the force that stood between the British and the coast by more than a hundred thousand men in order to create an armee de manoeuvre – a flying column that could be held in reserve