To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [156]
The small Belgian city of Ypres was by now the most ravaged in Western Europe. It lay at the center of a bulge of British-held territory that for several years had been shelled by the Germans from three sides. Its famous Cloth Hall was a jagged shell; its brick and stone buildings and cobblestone streets were in ruins. Tens of thousands of troops from all corners of the British Empire found shelter where they could, often in cellars. The entire salient was honeycombed with narrow-gauge trolley tracks on which carts of bullets, shells, food, and bandages made their way to the front. It was from this battered wasteland that Haig planned to launch his next big assault.
The War Cabinet was uneasy. The Russian army, which the new Provisional Government could barely manage to supply with food, was so depleted, British planners calculated, that Germany could afford to move up to 30 divisions to the west. When Haig predicted success for his offensive, Milner wrote, in an acid memo to his colleagues, "The argument seems to be that, since we can't overcome the unreinforced Germans, ergo we can reasonably hope to overcome them when [they are] strengthened by 30 divisions. Really lunatic." Lloyd George was equally dubious, but Haig was so well entrenched politically that the prime minister was never really able to assert control over the army high command. He would rail at the generals in his memoirs, published long after the war: "Their brains were cluttered with useless lumber, packed in every niche and corner."
In the end, no matter how lunatic Haig's strategy, the War Cabinet could offer no realistic alternative. In mid-June the field marshal laid out his plans in London. "He spread on a table or desk a large map," Lloyd George remembered, "and made a dramatic use of both his hands to demonstrate how he proposed to sweep up the enemy—first the right hand brushing along the surface irresistibly, and then came the left, his outer finger ultimately touching the German frontier with the nail across." Vanished was last year's talk about attrition as success; Haig was once again dreaming of a breakthrough. After smashing open the German line, the long-waiting cavalry would stream through the gap, and British troops would swing to the left to seize the medieval Belgian city of Bruges. When cabinet members visited the front, Haig's officers took them up a specially built observation tower that looked out over the land he expected to capture.
Given the number of men being moved into position, there would be no surprise. "Everybody in my hotel knows the date of the offensive down to the lift boy," observed the chief of the Imperial General Staff on a visit to Paris. As the launch date grew near, Haig seemed to interpret everything around him in military terms of obedience and duty. When Lady Haig told him that she was expecting their third child, he wrote back, without any trace of jest or irony, "How proud you must feel that you are doing your duty at this time by having a baby and thereby setting a good example to all other females!" Convinced that the forthcoming battle would cement his place in history, he suggested to his wife that she write his biography.
In England, where German bombing raids and the sense that a great battle was in the offing kept chauvinist fervor boiling, many people with German names found it politic to change them—including the royal family. Because Queen Victoria had married a German prince, the British monarchy was officially the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. On July 17, 1917, two weeks before Haig's new offensive, a proclamation from Buckingham Palace announced that henceforth the family would be known as the House of Windsor.
When he heard the news, Kaiser Wilhelm II is