To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [164]
On other fronts, the war was going even worse. In late October came disastrous news from northern Italy: German and Austrian troops had broken through at Caporetto, sweeping forward some 80 miles after a surprise attack in fog and rain. The demoralized Italians, choking in inadequate gas masks, lost more than half a million men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
Against all this, the capture of a muddy, ruined village or two in Flanders seemed little to brag about. "For the first time," the war correspondent and novelist Philip Gibbs later wrote, "the British Army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter." Men joked bitterly about where the front line would be in 1950. One officer calculated that if the British continued to gain ground at the pace so far, they would reach the Rhine in 180 years.
It was during the autumn of 1917 that the British army experienced the nearest thing to a mutiny on the Western Front: six days of intermittent rioting by several thousand troops at the big supply and training base in Étaples, France, in which a military policeman killed one soldier. Amid protest meetings the red flag briefly flew, and one rebel was later tried and executed. Rates of desertion and drunkenness rose, and the army increased the ratio of military police to other soldiers. "Reinforcements ... shambled up past the guns with dragging steps and the expressions of men who knew they were going to certain death," wrote one veteran about the mood around Ypres in October. "No words of greeting passed as they slouched along; in sullen silence they filed past one by one to the sacrifice." Haig, as usual, tolerated no dissent. When a brave colonel told him that further fruitless attacks would leave no resources for an offensive the next spring, Haig turned white with anger and said, "Col. Rawlins, leave the room."
As more rain fell in November, Haig's thoroughly undistinguished chief of staff, Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, made a rare trip forward. Approaching the battlefield at Passchendaele, he saw from his staff car for the first time the terrible expanse of mud, dotted with water-filled shell holes. Reportedly—although his defenders deny this—he said, "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?" and then burst into tears. Shortly afterward military doctors judged him to be suffering from nervous exhaustion. He was bundled off to a low-stress but dignified post as troop commander and lieutenant governor on the Isle of Guernsey.
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In Russia, over the night of November 6–7, 1917, the moment that the Allied governments had been dreading for months finally arrived. The Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, occupying telegraph stations and key official buildings and storming the Provisional Government's headquarters—the Winter Palace, on whose balcony the Tsar and Tsarina had received the ecstatic cheers of patriotic crowds on the outbreak of war some three years before. Now the city's streets were filled with workers marching under triumphant red banners and jubilant revolutionary soldiers whose long greatcoats were crisscrossed with bandoliers.
Within days, to underline its commitment to peace instead of diplomatic business as usual, the new regime made public the secret treaties Russia had signed with the other Allied countries that it found in government files. These revealed the territorial gains all were hoping for. There were, for instance, detailed plans for dismembering the Ottoman Empire and parceling it out—either