To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [80]
But the Germans rushed in reinforcements, and repeated, costly British attempts to advance farther came to a halt under snow flurries. Haig's subordinates, afraid of his well-known temper, never dared give him a crucial piece of information: on one key stretch of the German trench under attack, the British bombardment had failed to blast apart the barbed wire or knock out machine-gun emplacements. And so while British troops frantically tried to cut through the tangle of wire, a mere two German machine guns killed roughly 1,000 of them. "The Germans were shooting like mad while our lads were crouching down in the mud trying to breach it [the wire] with wire-cutters, and those that didn't have wire-cutters hacking at it with bayonets...," recalled a stretcher bearer in the Scottish Rifles. "All the officers went, killed or wounded. By the end of three days we had just one subaltern left." On the third day, French called off the attack. His troops had lost 12,847 dead and wounded.
In winning their blood-soaked mile of earth, the British experienced yet another way in which trench warfare put the attacker at a painful disadvantage. If you had the rare luck to capture some ground, your supplies and reinforcements then had to advance through ground strewn with craters, barbed wire, and dead bodies, the air filled with bursting shrapnel, without communication trenches for protection. It was hard enough for a man on foot to make his way unscathed, much less a cavalry division.
In addition, the matter of sending messages—about, for instance, what terrain you held and where your artillery should fire—was staggeringly difficult. Telephone wires were invariably cut by enemy shells; primitive radios and their heavy batteries were too bulky to hand-carry onto the battlefield; and signal flags proved impossible to see through the smoke. This left runners, who, as they scrambled across the shell-blasted wasteland, were ideal targets for German snipers. The farther you advanced, the more out-of-date the runner's message—if he even survived the journey. On the first day at Neuve Chapelle, it took nine hours for front-line officers to send a message back to their corps commander and get a reply. (German commanders would complain of the same problem.) Generals had no way of knowing whether their troops a mile away, invisible in the dust and smoke, had captured an enemy trench or all been wounded or killed.
Trying to put a good face on this battle, French reported "the defeat of the enemy and the capture of his position" to London. Adjusting his predictions, he now was convinced that the war would end by June. His faith—and Haig's—in the cavalry remained as strong as ever. A month after Neuve Chapelle, Haig scoffed at two officers who were cavalry skeptics: "If these two had their way, Cavalry would cease to exist as such. In their opinion, the war will continue and end in trenches."
On one front, however, French had won an unusual victory: his exalted position had—for the moment—curbed his sister's long-standing pacifism. Charlotte Despard continued her relief work in Battersea, where many women were suffering from the economic dislocations of the war and the absence of husbands at the front. She helped them fight off debt collectors, distributed milk to nursing mothers, and set up a shelter for women recovering from childbirth. At a cafeteria that provided healthy meals at cost, she often ladled out soup herself (although some diners complained of her ardent vegetarianism). With Sylvia Pankhurst and others, she founded the League for the Rights of Soldiers' and Sailors' Wives and Relations. Military authorities had worked themselves into a misogynist