To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [73]
As the seasons began to change, the specter of the coming winter threw a shroud over the commands of both sides. Winter would mean immobility, would increase the suffering of the men who had already suffered more losses than any army that ever crossed a battlefield. The British were the first to concede, and on November 19, the assaults along the Somme front were halted. For all their losses, the British had gained barely seven miles of ground. To the south, the battles still erupted around Verdun, but any major gains the Germans had made in the spring had been erased by French counterattacks in the fall. After nine months of fighting, neither side had the spirit or the resources to gain any advantage at all.
The stalemate of 1915 had allowed both sides to reequip and regroup, while the commanders struggled to create a strategy that would prevail. But the entire Western Front had been gripped by the slow torture of a stalemate. Now, with 1916 drawing to a close, the stalemate would come once again. But there was a difference. At the beginning of the year, every general and every monarch remained wrapped in the glorious delusions of history, ignoring the truth about the stalemate. The commanders had failed to understand what their infantry knew all to well: the new methods of killing, the terrifying technology of poison gas and the machine gun, were far more effective at devastating an army than any carefully thought-out plan on a map. If an army was to survive, it had to dig deep. Security and survival came from barbed wire, sandbags, and gas masks. In February 1916, the German High Command ordered their army forward toward Verdun, it was with the blind confidence that this war could be brought to an end by the one magnificent battle, the final thrust that would rout their enemy. But the days of the massed frontal assault had become completely, disastrously obsolete.
Along the Western Front, the great battles of 1916 had added another two million casualties to what had already become an incomprehensible number of dead and dying. The legacies of the past were forgotten, replaced by the stunning horror of the present. From Flanders to the Swiss border, the Western Front had become one massive graveyard, a generation of young men trampled into the muddy fields by the new realities of war.
In Germany, there were other changes as well. The attack at Verdun had been the strategy of the German commander Erich von Falkenhayn, who had replaced Field Marshal von Moltke after the failures of 1914. With the failure of the Verdun offensive, Falkenhayn had sealed his own fate. The kaiser was forced to look to the east, to the Russian front, the one campaign where Germany’s commanders had shown the intelligence and aggressiveness that produced success. In late August 1916, the two men responsible for securing Germany’s eastern borders were called to the kaiser’s palace. By the first of September, Falkenhayn was demoted, and in his place Kaiser Wilhelm named Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg to overall command. Von Hindenburg was Germany’s beloved old soldier, an aging veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, a kindly and bearlike grandfather who inspired both soldier and civilian. But the kaiser understood that the success in the East could not be laid solely on von Hindenburg’s shoulders. The kaiser had been convinced by his closest advisers, including his son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, that the tactics and operations against Russia had actually been carried out by von Hindenburg’s deputy, Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff’s official rank was first quartermaster general, but everyone in the High Command accepted that