THE YEAR THE ARMIES BLED

As 1915 ended, the Allied cause looked worse than it was and the Central Powers' triumph looked better than it was. Serbia had been overrun and Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers in October; the Gallipoli evacuation was completed on 9 January 1916 (see chapter IV); and Russia had spent the summer in the Great Retreat, giving up Poland, Lithuania and much of Galicia. Yet Germany had not won, and could not simply win. Its armies stood deep in France, Belgium and Russia, but every one of its enemies was still in the field, the British blockade was throttling its trade, and its partners were fragile. The Entente's problem was the mirror image: how to turn a growing advantage in men and industrial output into victory before the war exhausted everyone.

The answer was worked out at Chantilly, the racecourse town north of Paris where General Joseph Joffre kept his headquarters, in a conference of Allied military representatives on 6–8 December 1915. The reasoning was simple. The Central Powers sat in the middle of Europe on a dense railway network, and in 1915 they had exploited it ruthlessly, shifting divisions from front to front: from France to Galicia for the Gorlice-Tarnów breakthrough, then to Serbia, then back. The Allies, arranged around the circumference, had attacked one at a time and been beaten one at a time. At Chantilly they resolved to strike in 1916 simultaneously, or nearly so, on the Russian, Italian and Western fronts, so that Germany could not rescue Austria-Hungary and Austria-Hungary could not rescue Germany. The main blow in the west was to be an Anglo-French offensive astride the River Somme, where the two armies' lines met, in the summer.

Preparing to carry out the plan, Britain was transformed. The old regular army had been shattered in 1914; its replacement was Lord Kitchener's volunteers, the "New Armies", hundreds of thousands of men who had enlisted since August 1914, often in "Pals" battalions raised from a single town, trade or workplace. By the start of 1916 the supply of volunteers was drying up. The Military Service Act, which received royal assent on 27 January and took effect on 2 March 1916, introduced conscription for single men aged 18 to 41, the first time in British history; it was extended to married men in May. The Ministry of Munitions, created in 1915 after the "shell scandal" with David Lloyd George at its head, was now producing guns and ammunition on a scale the pre-war army could not have imagined. On 19 December 1915 Sir Douglas Haig replaced Sir John French, whose reputation had not survived the battle of Loos, as commander of the British Expeditionary Force, which would number well over a million men by the summer.

The French side of the bargain was much larger. Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French armies since 1914, counted on about 40 French divisions for the Somme alongside some 25 British ones. Everyone expected the Germans to be struck at several points; nobody asked what the Germans might do first. The plan was therefore a framework rather than a blueprint, and it did not survive contact with the enemy. Falkenhayn moved first, at Verdun on 21 February, and by the time the Somme opened the French contribution had shrunk to a fraction of what Joffre had promised, so that the battle meant to be France's with British help became Britain's with French help. Russia's offensive, scheduled for the summer, was brought forward and then overshot every expectation. Italy, for its part, fought the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo in March, as promised, and then had its own front torn open in May. Chantilly set the rhythm of the year, but none of its events happened as written.

By December 1915 Erich von Falkenhayn had concluded that Germany could not win the war by breaking through anywhere. Russia was too vast to be knocked out; the Western Front was a continuous belt of trenches; Britain, whom he regarded as the arch-enemy, was out of reach behind the Royal Navy. What remained was to destroy the one ally on whom Britain's land power depended: the French army, which he called Britain's best sword. His plan, as he later described it, was to attack a place the French would feel obliged to defend at any price, hold the high ground around it, and let the French throw in their reserves piecemeal under German artillery until the "forces of France" were bled white (the German word is weißbluten). The place he chose was Verdun.

Verdun made sense for several reasons. It was an old fortress town on the Meuse, ringed by a belt of forts built after 1871, and it carried enormous symbolic weight in French history. It sat in a salient that bulged into the German lines, almost surrounded on three sides, so German guns could fire into it from several directions. And it was badly connected: the main railway lines had been cut by German positions at Saint-Mihiel in 1914 and others lay within German artillery range, leaving only a narrow-gauge railway and one road to the south. The French, for their part, had stripped the forts of much of their artillery in 1915, after the fall of the Belgian forts at Liège and Namur seemed to prove that fixed fortifications could not withstand modern howitzers. Verdun's defenses were thin.

Falkenhayn gave the job to the Fifth Army, nominally under Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser's eldest son, but effectively run by his chief of staff, General Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf. The operation was named Gericht, "Judgment". It was to be an assault on a front of only about eight miles (13 km) on the east bank of the Meuse, by three army corps, preceded by a bombardment from some 1,200 guns, among them the huge 420 mm (17-inch) Krupp howitzers and the Austrian Škoda 305 mm mortars. The artillery was to destroy the French positions, and the infantry were then to advance cautiously, occupy the ruins and wait for the French counter-attacks to be shattered. In the German phrase, the artillery conquers and the infantry occupy. Well over a thousand trainloads of ammunition were brought up in secret. The date was set for 12 February, but snow, rain and fog forced a postponement for nine days, and the delay gave the French time to rush some reserves forward after warnings from airmen and prisoners.

On 21 February, a bitterly cold Monday, the bombardment began at about 7:15 in the morning. For nine hours shells fell on a front scarcely the width of a large city, flattening trenches, burying men in dugouts and turning the Bois des Caures, a wood held by two battalions of chasseurs under Lieutenant-Colonel Émile Driant, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, into a field of splinters. At 4 p.m. German infantry advanced behind flamethrowers, in small groups with orders to probe first. They took a few ruined trenches and held back for the night. Driant's men fought on, and Driant himself was killed on 22 February as he led the survivors out. The delay gave the French another day. Even so, by 24 February the French second line was breaking, Joffre's staff was telling him the east bank might have to be abandoned, and the Crown Prince's men were within sight of Fort Douaumont.

Douaumont was the largest and highest of the forts, a concrete and rock warren on a ridge about 1,250 feet (385 m) above sea level. It was almost empty: its guns had been removed for use elsewhere, and a caretaker garrison of about 60 to 70 men, mostly reservist gunners, held it. On 25 February a patrol from the 24th Brandenburg Infantry Regiment, led by Sergeant Kunze and Lieutenant Radtke and then reinforced by Captain Haupt and Lieutenant von Brandis, found a gap, climbed through and walked in. The tiny garrison surrendered. Germany went mad with joy: church bells rang across the country, newspapers announced the capture of the strongest fortress in France. In France the shock was equally intense, but General de Castelnau, Joffre's chief of staff, who had hurried to Verdun, ordered that the east bank be held at all costs, and General Philippe Pétain was sent to take command. The real battle began.

Philippe Pétain, 59, a cool, dry, skeptical infantry general who had risen from colonel to army commander within a year, arrived at the command post at Souilly on the night of 25–26 February with pneumonia. His first decision was that the east bank would be held, and his second was that the French artillery, which had been scattered, would be concentrated, using guns on the west bank to fire into the flank of the German attackers. His third was logistical. The railways were cut, and the only reliable connection to the rest of France was a country road from Bar-le-Duc, 45 miles (about 75 km) away, backed by a small light railway. Pétain organized that road into a one-way system for lorries, with an army of road-menders who laid stone day and night. At the height of the battle, by the commonly cited estimate, a truck passed every 14 seconds. The writer Maurice Barrès named it La Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way. Without it Verdun could not have been supplied.

Pétain's fourth innovation was the system the French called the noria, after the water-wheel with buckets: divisions were rotated through Verdun quickly, after a week or two, rather than left in the line to break. A division that had been shot to pieces went back to rest and rebuild; a fresh one took its place. The system sustained morale but meant that the whole French army went through the furnace; of the 95 or so divisions in its order of battle, roughly 70 served at Verdun, which is why the battle belongs to the entire French nation and not merely to its Lorraine corner. On 10 April Pétain issued an order of the day that ended with the words "Courage! On les aura!" ("We'll get them!"). It became the battle's slogan. Pétain was promoted to command the army group in May, and his place at the head of the Second Army was taken by General Robert Nivelle.

Falkenhayn had expected to avoid exactly what now happened. His aim was to hold the heights and let the French bleed, but the French guns on the west bank were bleeding the Germans, so on 6 March Knobelsdorf extended the offensive across the Meuse to take the Mort-Homme ("Dead Man") and Hill 304. Falkenhayn went along, which meant that his battle of attrition turned into a battle for ground, and for ground one has to keep attacking. For nearly three months men fought and died on the two hills, which were shelled until their shapes changed. By the end of May the Germans held both. It had cost both sides tens of thousands of men, and the French artillery was still firing.

In June the Germans resumed on the east bank. Fort Vaux, a smaller work about two miles from Douaumont, was besieged from 1 June. Its commander, Major Sylvain-Eugène Raynal, and several hundred men defended its tunnels against grenades, flamethrowers and gas; they fought in the dark through the corridors, building sandbag barricades, and ran out of water. Raynal released his last carrier pigeon, Vaillant, which reached the command post with its dispatch, and surrendered on 7 June. The Germans praised the defense. On 22 June they fired a bombardment of well over 100,000 shells loaded with phosgene (the "Green Cross" shell) onto the French batteries behind the lines, silencing much of the French artillery with gas. The next day, 23 June, German infantry stormed Fleury and the Thiaumont work and reached a point only about three miles (5 km) from the citadel of Verdun. That day Nivelle issued an order of the day urging his men not to let the Germans through; Ils ne passeront pas, "they shall not pass", is the slogan attributed to it, though the exact wording is disputed. Fleury changed hands 16 times, and the village was reduced to a few stones.

The German high-water mark came on 11–12 July, when a handful of men reached the slope of Fort Souville and glimpsed the Meuse and the spires of Verdun, before being driven back. By then the Somme had begun, Brusilov's Russians were pouring into Galicia, and Falkenhayn was obliged to move divisions east and west. On 11 July he ordered a halt to the offensive, and Verdun became a defensive battle for the Germans. In the autumn the French struck back. Nivelle, with General Charles Mangin commanding the attack, prepared the counter-offensive with the new rolling barrage, overwhelming artillery, rehearsed infantry and a fleet of 400 mm howitzers firing shells weighing almost a ton. On 24 October the Moroccan Colonial Infantry Regiment, with other units, retook Fort Douaumont. On 2 November the Germans evacuated Fort Vaux. A second attack on 15 December recaptured Louvemont, Bezonvaux and Hardaumont, taking more than 11,000 prisoners and over 100 guns, and by 18 December the French had recovered most of the ground lost since February.

The cost to both nations was enormous and the strategic results ambiguous. France had held Verdun and kept its army in being, but its offensive spirit was drained and its commander-in-chief, Joffre, was soon removed (see chapter VI); the casualties among the youth of France shaped a generation. Germany had not broken France, but had lost its own best men, had failed to take its objective, and had given up the initiative on the Western Front, where the Somme now made demands on its reserves. Falkenhayn, who had refused to reinforce or to stop, was dismissed on 29 August. Verdun left a lasting mark on French memory, but it left an equally lasting lesson on all armies: attrition is a game that no one wins cheaply.

The Ottoman Empire, which the Allies had expected to crumble, fought four separate campaigns in 1916 and won the most humiliating victory of the year over Britain. In Mesopotamia (Iraq), Major-General Charles Townshend's 6th (Poona) Division had pushed up the Tigris in 1915, been checked at Ctesiphon in November and fallen back to Kut-al-Amara, a mud-walled town in a loop of the river about 100 miles (160 km) from Baghdad. Townshend decided to stand rather than retreat further, and on 7 December 1915 the Ottoman Sixth Army closed around his 13,000 men. Britain's attempts to relieve him failed, one after another, in flooded country: at Sheikh Sa'ad (6–9 January), the Wadi (13 January), Hanna (21 January), Dujaila (8 March) and Sannaiyat (April). The relief force lost more than 20,000 men and got no closer to the town.

Kut was starved. The garrison ate its horses and mules, and the daily ration fell to a few ounces. Aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps dropped food in the last weeks, in one of the first air resupply operations in history, and on 24 April the river steamer Julnar, loaded with supplies, tried to run the blockade and was sunk; two of her officers received the Victoria Cross. Attempts to buy the garrison's freedom failed when Khalil Pasha, the Ottoman commander, refused an offer of up to two million pounds. T. E. Lawrence and Aubrey Herbert went to negotiate and came away with nothing. On 29 April 1916 Townshend surrendered his force of about 13,000 men, most of them Indian. It is often described as the largest surrender of a British force since Yorktown in 1781.

The prisoners were marched hundreds of miles toward Anatolia in the spring heat, and thousands died of disease, starvation and ill-treatment. Something like a third of the captives, and a larger share of the British other ranks, never came home. Townshend, meanwhile, spent the rest of the war in comfort on an island near Constantinople. In London the disaster had political consequences: control of the Mesopotamian campaign passed from the India Office to the War Office, Lieutenant-General Frederick Stanley Maude was appointed to command in August, and a parliamentary commission of inquiry (reporting in 1917) blamed the muddle so harshly that Austen Chamberlain resigned as Secretary of State for India.

On the Caucasus front the Ottomans fared no better. General Nikolai Yudenich, a tough, careful commander, had taken advantage of the Ottoman Third Army's weakness after the transfer of troops to Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. On 10 January 1916, in snow and temperatures far below freezing, he attacked at Köprüköy in the Aras valley and then converged on the fortress city of Erzurum, whose ring of forts was thought impregnable. After a week of assaults on the Deve Boynu ridge, the Russians stormed the forts and on 16 February took Erzurum. They went on to seize Bitlis in March and, with the support of the Black Sea Fleet and an amphibious landing, Trebizond (Trabzon) on 18 April. Erzincan fell in July. By the end of the summer the Russians controlled a large part of eastern Anatolia, though an Ottoman counter-attack in August retook some ground. The region's Armenian population, meanwhile, had been deported and massacred the year before (see chapter IV).

The fourth front was in the Hejaz. Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, a descendant of the Prophet, was a vassal of the Sultan who feared that the Young Turks meant to replace him. Through the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915–16, Britain had indicated that it would recognize Arab independence in return for a revolt. The hanging of 21 Arab nationalists in Damascus and Beirut on 6 May 1916 by Djemal Pasha sharpened Arab grievances, and on 10 June Hussein proclaimed the revolt at Mecca, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal leading the tribesmen. The rebels captured Mecca and Jeddah within weeks, aided by the Royal Navy, but they could not take Medina, which was held by an Ottoman garrison with German help. In October a British intelligence officer, Captain T. E. Lawrence, reached the camp of Hussein's third son, Faisal, and suggested a different strategy: to avoid attacking Medina and instead threaten the Hejaz Railway, forcing the Ottomans to garrison its whole length.

Behind the Arab Revolt lay a contradiction. In May 1916, Britain and France, with Russian assent, concluded the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, negotiated by Sir Mark Sykes and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot. It divided the Ottoman Arab provinces into zones: France to receive the Syrian coast and Cilicia with influence in the interior; Britain to receive southern Mesopotamia including Baghdad and Basra, with influence over Transjordan and the area between; Palestine to be placed under international administration; Russia to receive the Armenian provinces. The Arabs were not told. The terms contradicted at least some of the promises made to Hussein, and when the Bolsheviks published the treaty in 1917 (see chapter VI), the damage to British credibility was lasting.

At noon on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, a few hundred men and women in assorted uniforms and civilian clothes seized buildings across the center of Dublin. Patrick Pearse, a schoolmaster and poet, stood outside the General Post Office in Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street) and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which was signed by seven men: Pearse, Thomas Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Éamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett and James Connolly. It was the opening of the most famous failure in Irish history. Britain, fighting for survival at Verdun and in preparation for the Somme, was caught off guard.

The Rising was the work of the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society, which had decided in 1915 that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity and had planned a rebellion to coincide with the arrival of German arms. They controlled the Irish Volunteers only in part, as the Volunteers' chief of staff, Eoin MacNeill, did not know of the plot. They were joined by James Connolly, the socialist trade unionist whose Irish Citizen Army had committed itself to a rising. Germany agreed to send about 20,000 captured Russian rifles and a large supply of ammunition. The arms ship, the Aud, was intercepted off the Kerry coast and scuttled by her captain; Sir Roger Casement, who had come ashore from a German submarine at Banna Strand, was arrested. MacNeill, learning of the plan and of the loss of the arms, canceled the Volunteers' Easter maneuvers by an announcement in a Sunday newspaper. The Military Council decided to go ahead the next day anyway, which meant that perhaps 1,200 rebels turned out instead of the thousands expected.

They held the GPO (the headquarters), the Four Courts, Jacob's biscuit factory, Boland's Mill and the South Dublin Union, and St Stephen's Green with the Royal College of Surgeons, but they failed to take Dublin Castle, the seat of British administration, which was lightly guarded at the start; they did not know it. The British response was slow at first, then overwhelming. Reinforcements poured in from the Curragh camp and from England. On the evening of 26 April, the Sherwood Foresters, raw territorials newly landed at Kingstown, were sent against Mount Street Bridge, held by 17 Volunteers under Lieutenant Michael Malone in Clanwilliam House and neighboring buildings. Charging in the open, they suffered a large share of all the British casualties of the week within a few hours. Artillery and the gunboat Helga shelled Liberty Hall and the center of the city; Sackville Street burned. On Friday 28 April the GPO was evacuated under fire. On Saturday 29 April Pearse surrendered unconditionally to Brigadier-General William Lowe.

Dubliners did not welcome the rebels. Many had sons and husbands at the front, and the soldiers' wives, who depended on separation allowances, were particularly bitter. The rebels were jeered as they were marched off. What changed Irish opinion was what happened next. General Sir John Maxwell, in command under martial law, ordered courts-martial held in secret, and between 3 and 12 May 14 leaders were shot by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol: first Pearse, MacDonagh and Clarke, then others in batches. Joseph Plunkett was married in his cell hours before his death. James Connolly, whose ankle had been shattered, was shot sitting in a chair on 12 May. The slow drip of executions, reported day by day, shocked even moderates, and Prime Minister Asquith traveled to Dublin in mid-May, and the executions stopped. By then it was too late.

In the end the Rising's importance lay less in its military effect, which was negligible, than in its symbolism. The rebels were soon seen as martyrs. Sinn Féin, a small separatist party that had nothing to do with the Rising but was blamed for it, became the vehicle for the new mood. The British government's attempt to extend conscription to Ireland in April 1918 completed the process, and in December 1918 Sinn Féin won 73 of 105 Irish seats (see chapter VIII). The poet W. B. Yeats, who had known several of the leaders, wrote that "all changed, changed utterly". It was the first of the nationalist challenges that, by 1923, were to redraw the map of Europe, and that map included the British Isles.

For two years the great fleets had been waiting for each other. The British Grand Fleet, based at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, controlled the exits from the North Sea and enforced the blockade of Germany. The German High Seas Fleet, built at enormous cost and rivalry before the war, stayed mostly in port, because the Kaiser feared losing it and because Admiral Tirpitz's "risk fleet" idea had always been about deterring Britain, not about fighting. In January 1916 Admiral Reinhard Scheer took command of the High Seas Fleet and adopted a more aggressive plan: to send out Vice-Admiral Franz von Hipper's battlecruisers as bait, lure part of the British fleet into a trap, and destroy it before the rest could arrive. U-boats were stationed off the British bases; Zeppelins were to scout. The sortie was set for the end of May.

The British knew. Room 40 at the Admiralty had broken the German naval codes and read the signals that the fleet was about to sail. Admiral Sir John Jellicoe took the Grand Fleet out from Scapa Flow and Cromarty on the evening of 30 May, while Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty led his battlecruisers from Rosyth, with four fast Queen Elizabeth class battleships in support. The U-boats found nothing, and the Zeppelins were grounded by cloud. In all some 250 ships took part: 151 British, with 28 dreadnought battleships and nine battlecruisers, and 99 German, with 16 dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers, supported by six older pre-dreadnoughts.

Contact came at 14:20 on 31 May, when light cruisers from both sides stopped to investigate a Danish steamer. Hipper turned south and Beatty followed. The battlecruiser action began at about 15:48 at a range of about 15,000 yards. The Germans shot better. Just after 16:00 Indefatigable blew up and sank, and at about 16:25 Queen Mary exploded, with huge loss of life. Beatty is reported to have remarked that there seemed to be something wrong with our bloody ships today. At 16:40 he sighted the High Seas Fleet coming up behind Hipper, turned about and ran north, drawing Scheer after him onto Jellicoe's guns.

Jellicoe's moment of decision came at about 18:00, when his battleships, steaming in six columns, had to be turned into a single line of battle without knowing exactly where the enemy was. He deployed to port at 18:15, and for about 20 minutes the Grand Fleet fired at the flashes of the German ships through smoke and mist, crossing Scheer's "T". At about 18:30 Invincible, flagship of Rear-Admiral Horace Hood, was cut in half by a salvo and sank in seconds; only six of her crew of more than a thousand survived. Scheer, finding himself in a trap, ordered a turn away under cover of smoke and torpedo-boat attacks, one of the most skillfully executed maneuvers of the war. Then, at about 18:55, inexplicably, he turned back toward the British line, and was once again crossed and hammered. To cover a second turn away he sent Hipper's battlecruisers on a "death ride" toward the British line, supported by massed torpedo-boat attacks. Jellicoe, fearing the torpedoes, turned his fleet away from the attack, and in the dusk lost contact.

During the night Scheer cut across the British rear toward Horns Reef and home. Destroyer flotillas fought confused actions in the dark; the armored cruiser Black Prince was destroyed with all hands; the German pre-dreadnought Pommern was torpedoed and blew up; the battlecruiser Lützow, crippled, was scuttled at about 01:45. Jellicoe did not know where the Germans were. The Admiralty had decoded signals showing Scheer's course, but the information was not relayed to him in time. By dawn on 1 June the High Seas Fleet was safe, and the British, who had hoped for a second Trafalgar, had missed it.

Who won? The German press and the Kaiser announced a great victory, because Germany had sunk more ships and killed more men. The British press, disappointed by an unexpected Admiralty communiqué that listed the losses plainly, spoke of a defeat. A sober view is that the Germans won the tactical exchange and the British won the strategic one. The Grand Fleet remained in command of the sea and was ready to sail again within hours, while a number of Scheer's ships were so damaged that they needed months of repair. The blockade continued. Scheer himself reported to the Kaiser that only a campaign against British commerce by submarine could bring victory. That conclusion led directly to the unrestricted submarine campaign of 1917 (see chapter VI). The controversy that raged among British admirals afterward, between the partisans of Jellicoe's caution and the admirers of Beatty's boldness, lasted for decades. Churchill's verdict was that Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon. Jellicoe became First Sea Lord in December, and Beatty took the Grand Fleet.

The Russian army that went into 1916 was a different animal from the one that had been driven out of Poland the year before. Production of rifles and shells had been transformed, new divisions had been raised, and the Great Retreat had at least shortened the Russian front. Its first major test of the year was a disaster. In March, at Joffre's urgent request to relieve Verdun, the Russians attacked near Lake Naroch, north of the Pripyat marshes, with a massive bombardment that was wasted on the wrong targets; the thaw turned the ground to bog, and the attack, which began on 18 March and was called off on 30 March, cost the Russians somewhere between 76,000 (their own count) and 110,000 men for almost no gain. Aleksei Brusilov, the commander of the Southwestern Front, took a lesson from it.

The plan for the summer was that the main Russian blow would be struck in the north by General Evert's Western Front, with Brusilov in a secondary, supporting role. Brusilov asked and was allowed to attack as well, in the south, and he determined to make the most of it. He believed that the standard way of breaking through, a few weeks of bombardment on a narrow front, which told the enemy where the attack was coming, was both wasteful and ineffective. Instead he ordered every army and many corps on his front, which stretched some 300 miles (480 km) from the Pripyat marshes to the Romanian frontier, to prepare their own attack, so that the Austrians would not know where the main blow would fall. His sappers dug approach trenches to within a hundred yards of the enemy's line or less, giving the infantry a short sprint. His artillery fired short, precise bombardments, from a few hours to a day or more depending on the sector, aimed at the enemy batteries and wire, after careful survey and aerial reconnaissance. The troops rehearsed on mock-ups of the enemy trenches. And there was surprise.

The offensive opened on 4 June. In the north, around Lutsk, General Aleksei Kaledin's Eighth Army smashed the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, taking Lutsk on 7 June. In the south, General Lechitsky's Ninth Army broke the Austro-Hungarian Seventh Army and took Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) on 17 June. The Austro-Hungarian line collapsed over a wide front, with many units surrendering without fighting. By 14 June Austro-Hungarian losses were put at some 205,000 men, about 150,000 of them prisoners, and the Austro-Hungarian army never fully recovered.

The shock rippled across Europe. Conrad von Hötzendorf had launched a major offensive against Italy in the Trentino a few weeks earlier, and now had to cancel it and send divisions east. Falkenhayn, who had refused to reinforce Conrad's offensive, sent German reinforcements east over the summer, some of them taken from the Western Front. German generals took over command of much of the Austro-Hungarian front in Galicia, and on 6 September, in a meeting at Pless, the Central Powers agreed to put their forces under German supreme command. The Austro-Hungarian army, whose losses are put at a million men or more in all (estimates vary widely, and many of them were prisoners), had become a junior partner. Russia paid too: its losses over the summer are estimated at anywhere between 500,000 and well over a million men, and the offensive ended on 20 September in the marshes of the Stokhod River near Kovel. The best of the officers who had survived since 1914 were gone. Russia had won a great victory and lost something in the winning.

The offensive also pulled Romania into the war (see the final section of this chapter), which was probably a mistake for everybody. And it affected Italy. On 15 May 1916 Conrad had launched his Strafexpedition ("punitive expedition") from the Trentino against the Italian armies on the Isonzo, with two armies and well over 1,000 guns, in revenge for what he regarded as Italy's betrayal in 1915. It broke through at the Asiago plateau and threatened to reach the plain of Venetia and cut off the Italians. General Luigi Cadorna rushed up reserves, formed a new Fifth Army and held the line in front of the plain. The Austro-Hungarian advance came to a stop in the last days of May, and in June Conrad was obliged by Brusilov's offensive to transfer troops east. The Italian government of Antonio Salandra fell on 10 June, and Paolo Boselli became prime minister. Italian losses were in the region of 140,000, many of them prisoners; the Austro-Hungarians lost perhaps 80,000.

Cadorna then took revenge. In the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, 6–17 August, his Third Army under the Duke of Aosta, with General Luigi Capello's VI Corps leading, took Monte Sabotino and the Podgora heights in a surprise attack and crossed the river. On 8 August the Italians entered Gorizia (Görz), the largest town on the front. It was Italy's first genuine success of the war and a great boost to morale; each side lost on the order of 40,000 to 50,000 men. Three more battles of the Isonzo followed before the end of the year, in September, October and early November, each gaining a few miles for tens of thousands of casualties. Italy declared war on Germany at the end of August. The Isonzo had settled into the same pattern of the other fronts.

The place was chosen for geometry, not for merit. The Somme was where the British and French armies met, and Joffre insisted on a joint offensive there; Haig, who would have preferred to fight in Flanders to clear the Belgian coast, agreed. The ground was a rolling chalk upland cut by the rivers Ancre and Somme, dotted with villages and woods, and the Germans had held it since the autumn of 1914 and had had nearly two years to fortify it. Their front line was backed by a second position about 2,000 to 3,000 yards behind it, with deep dugouts in the chalk, 20 or 30 feet down, safe from all but the heaviest shells, and a third line was under construction. Most of the high ground, at Thiepval and Pozières, was in German hands, and they looked down on the British.

The attacking force was General Sir Henry Rawlinson's Fourth Army, with 11 divisions in the first assault, joined by two from Third Army at Gommecourt on the northern flank, 13 divisions in all, on a front of about 15 miles (24 km). Rawlinson wanted a limited "bite and hold" operation; Haig wanted a deeper advance and hoped for a breakthrough, followed by cavalry; the plan was a compromise, and its objectives were too ambitious for the troops and the guns available. Many of the units were Kitchener's volunteers, Pals battalions drawn from the same factories, mines and streets, who had never seen a major battle. They were enthusiastic and brave, and in 1916 that was not enough.

The bombardment began on 24 June, planned for five days and extended to seven because of rain. Some 1,500 guns fired more than 1.5 million shells at the German lines, the heaviest barrage in British history. Its flaw was that the guns were too few and too light for the front: on the order of one heavy gun for every 60 yards, and many of the shells were shrapnel, which could cut wire but could not destroy dugouts. A great many shells were duds. The deep German shelters survived, and when the barrage lifted the machine-gunners came up out of them. In the north, around Serre and Beaumont-Hamel, the wire was uncut; in the south, where the Germans were fewer and the guns more numerous, it was not.

Zero hour was 7:30 a.m. on Saturday 1 July, on a hot, hazy morning of the kind that makes the English countryside lovely. Ten minutes before, at 7:20, a mine of about 18 tons beneath the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt at Beaumont-Hamel was detonated, to allow the British to seize the crater lip. It warned the Germans. At 7:28 the huge Lochnagar mine, some 27 tons (60,000 lb) of ammonal south of La Boisselle, went up and left a crater about 70 yards across (some 150 yards counting the lip). At 7:30 whistles blew and the infantry climbed out. At Montauban, the XIII Corps' Liverpool and Manchester Pals took the village by mid-morning. At Mametz the 7th Division took the village. At La Boisselle, the 34th Division's Tyneside Scottish and Tyneside Irish were cut down in the open before they reached the German wire, and the division lost more than 6,000 men, the heaviest loss of any division that day. At Serre, the 11th East Lancashire (the Accrington Pals) lost about 585 of 720 men, 235 of them killed, in 20 minutes. At Thiepval the 36th (Ulster) Division, attacking on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne by the old calendar, took the Schwaben Redoubt but was cut off, and lost more than 5,000 men in two days.

At Beaumont-Hamel the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, of the 29th Division, advanced at about 9:15 a.m. from the support trench, because the front-line trenches were already crowded. They had to cross well over 600 yards of open ground under fire from the German machine-guns that survived. Newfoundland was then a separate dominion, not part of Canada, and its contribution to the war was proportionately large. Some 780 to 800 men went forward (sources differ slightly), and the next morning, at roll call, only 68 answered. Roughly 700 had been killed, wounded or missing in about half an hour. In Newfoundland 1 July became Memorial Day, and it is still marked on that date.

The final tally was 57,470 British casualties, of whom 19,240 were killed, on one day. Roughly half the men who went over the top had been hit, and it remains the worst day in the history of the British Army. The Germans lost far fewer. The only real successes were in the south, where XIII Corps took its objectives, and, still more clearly, in the French sector. The French Sixth Army under General Fayolle, with General Balfourier's XX Corps on the north bank beside the British and the Colonial Corps on the south bank, attacked with a great weight of heavy artillery behind it and an infantry used to the rough craft of the front. Its men advanced about as far as the plan required, with comparatively light casualties, against a thinly held and surprised German line. The contrast between the French and British experience of that day was to feed arguments about British generalship for a century.

On the evening of 1 July the British Army had no choice but to go on. The French were fighting for Verdun and expected the offensive to continue; Haig's confidence in the possibility of a breakthrough survived the disaster, in part because fragmentary reports reached his headquarters at Beauquesne and the scale of the day's casualties became clear only over the following days. In the next two weeks the British took Fricourt and Mametz, and the 38th (Welsh) Division fought its way into Mametz Wood at a cost of nearly 4,000 men. The ground was gradually won, village by village, wood by wood, but each yard was gained at a heavy price.

On 14 July Rawlinson tried a different approach. In the Battle of Bazentin Ridge, troops formed up in the dark, a few hundred yards from the German line, and attacked at dawn after a short hurricane bombardment of only five minutes. The surprise was remarkable. The British took the German second position between Bazentin-le-Petit and Longueval in a few hours, and a gap opened. Late in the day the 7th Dragoon Guards and the Deccan Horse charged at High Wood, in the first cavalry action of the Somme. But infantry reinforcements were slow, the Germans brought up reserves, and the chance was lost. High Wood itself was to cost two more months.

July and August were a succession of such battles, all fought with hurried preparation and bloody results. The Australians of the Reserve Army under General Hubert Gough, new to the Western Front and eager, took Pozières on 23 July and then held it under a bombardment so heavy that survivors spoke of it as the worst experience of the war. Guillemont, which had defied several attacks, finally fell on 3 September, and Ginchy a few days later, to the 16th (Irish) Division. The Germans, under Falkenhayn's order not to yield ground, replied with repeated counter-attacks that cost them nearly as heavily as the British attacks cost the British.

The most famous episode came on 15 September, the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. Haig had demanded the new weapon, the tank, in time for the battle, against the advice of those who thought it should be saved until there were hundreds. Of the 49 Mark I tanks available, slow, hot and hard to drive, only about 30 reached their start lines, fewer than 20 crossed the German front line, and only a handful kept pace with the infantry. Their effect was moral as much as physical. German soldiers who had never seen such things fled or surrendered. The New Zealand Division, the Canadian Corps at Courcelette, and the Guards Division all took part in a successful attack that captured Flers, Courcelette and, at last, High Wood, advancing as much as 3,500 yards in places, the best day since 1 July. A pilot is said to have reported that a tank was walking up the High Street of Flers with the British army cheering behind. But there was no breakthrough: the tanks broke down, the infantry became exhausted, and the cavalry was not used. The prime minister's son, Lieutenant Raymond Asquith of the Grenadier Guards, was among the dead.

Through the rest of September and October the offensive went on with small advances in worsening weather: Morval and Thiepval Ridge (26 September), where the 18th Division finally took the village of Thiepval, a first-day objective, 87 days late. The rains came in October, and the battlefield turned into a quagmire. The last major operation was the Battle of the Ancre, from 13 November, in which General Gough's Fifth Army (as the Reserve Army was renamed) at last took Beaumont-Hamel, the objective of the Newfoundlanders, with the 51st (Highland) Division, and Beaucourt, where Bernard Freyberg of the Royal Naval Division won the Victoria Cross. On 18 November, in sleet and snow, the offensive was closed. The British had advanced about six miles at the deepest point and had not reached Bapaume, the town that had been a first-day objective, which the Germans evacuated in March 1917.

The figures are contested. British and Imperial casualties were about 420,000 and French about 200,000, while German losses are put anywhere between roughly 240,000 and 600,000, depending on who is counting; the total for the three armies was somewhere around a million men. Haig has been judged on those figures for a hundred years. The postwar myth of the "butcher and bungler", fed by Lloyd George's memoirs and by Alan Clark's book The Donkeys (1961), which popularized the phrase "lions led by donkeys" and quoted a German exchange that there is no evidence ever took place, portrays Haig as callous. The revisionists, such as John Terraine, Gary Sheffield and William Philpott, argue that the Somme wore down the German army, kept the Germans from reinforcing Verdun, and that the British army learned from it. A third view, associated with Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, accepts that the British learned but argues that the cost was higher than it needed to be and that other options existed. What is certain is that the British Army that fought on the Somme was a different army from the one that began it, and that it had paid for its education in advance.

Romania had waited two years. King Ferdinand, a Hohenzollern by birth, and his Prime Minister Ion Brătianu bargained with both sides, and the Allies' price was the one that mattered: Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat, provinces of Austria-Hungary with large Romanian populations. Brusilov's victories in the summer convinced Bucharest that the Habsburg empire was finished. On 17 August 1916 Romania signed a secret treaty with the Entente, and on the night of 27 August it declared war on Austria-Hungary. Its army, more than 650,000 men in 23 divisions on paper but poorly equipped, with few machine-guns and little heavy artillery, attacked at once across the Carpathians into Transylvania, where much of the population was Romanian.

The Central Powers' reaction was swift. On 29 August the Kaiser dismissed Falkenhayn, whose reputation could not survive Verdun and the Romanian surprise, and put Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg at the head of the General Staff, with General Erich Ludendorff as First Quartermaster-General. Falkenhayn was sent to command the German Ninth Army in Transylvania, where he proved that he was a competent general. In the south, Field Marshal August von Mackensen, with German, Bulgarian and Turkish troops, invaded the Dobruja and took the fortress of Turtucaia (Tutrakan) on 6 September. In September and October Falkenhayn expelled the Romanians from Transylvania in the battles of Hermannstadt (Sibiu), 26–29 September, and Kronstadt (Brașov) in early October, then forced the Carpathian passes. Mackensen took Constanța, the Black Sea port, on 22 October and crossed the Danube on 23 November. After a counter-attack on the Argeș River failed, Bucharest fell on 6 December. The Romanian government and court withdrew to Iași in Moldavia, and about two thirds of the country, with its wheat fields and the oil wells of Ploiești, was in enemy hands. The British MP and engineer John Norton-Griffiths, "Empire Jack", arrived in time to wreck oil installations and burn stocks, destroying, by his own count, hundreds of thousands of tons of oil.

The Romanian defeat cost the Entente a quarter of a million men, killed, wounded and prisoners, by estimates, and extended the Eastern Front by several hundred miles, which Russia had to garrison. For Germany it brought food and oil that it badly needed in the coming winter.

Their first acts were to end the offensive at Verdun, to order the construction of a new, stronger and deeper defensive position behind the Somme front, which the Allies would call the Hindenburg Line (the Germans called it the Siegfried Position), and to launch a program of industrial mobilization. The Hindenburg Program, launched in the autumn, called for doubling the output of munitions and trench mortars and tripling that of guns and machine-guns by the spring of 1917. This required labor. The Auxiliary Service Law (Hilfsdienstgesetz), passed in the first week of December 1916, made every German male from 17 to 60 not in the army liable to work for the war effort, tied workers to their jobs and set up workers' committees in large factories, a significant concession to the trade unions, and one that weakened the compulsion. The program fell well short of its targets, in steel and explosives especially. From October, tens of thousands of Belgians (estimates run from about 60,000 to 120,000) were deported to Germany for forced labor, a measure that provoked a worldwide outcry and was halted in early 1917.

The strain on German civilians was growing. The British blockade had already cut imports of food and fertilizer; in the autumn of 1916 the potato crop, the staple, failed in wet weather, to about half the previous year's harvest. The government replaced potatoes with the swede or rutabaga, a fodder crop. The winter of 1916–17 was therefore known as the Turnip Winter (Kohlrübenwinter), and urban Germans faced it on rations that were nowhere near enough to sustain heavy labor. A German public-health estimate of December 1918 put civilian deaths from hunger-related causes over the whole war at about three quarters of a million, though a later study gave a lower figure of about 424,000 (see chapter XII). In the spring of 1917 the hunger would drive strikes and political unrest (see chapter VI).

Other leaders were changing too. On 21 November 1916, in Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph died at the age of 86, after reigning for 68 years. He was succeeded by his great-nephew Karl, a young man of 29 with doubts about the war and an earnest wish for peace. In London, a political crisis that had been brewing for months broke in early December. David Lloyd George, the Secretary of State for War, who was exasperated by Asquith's slow methods, proposed a small War Committee to run the war; Asquith agreed and then withdrew; on 5 December Asquith resigned, and on 7 December Lloyd George became prime minister. He formed a War Cabinet of five (himself, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, Bonar Law and Arthur Henderson), a Cabinet Secretariat under Maurice Hankey, and new ministries for shipping, food and labor. The Liberal Party split. Lloyd George had said in September, in an interview with an American journalist, that the fight must go on "to a knockout".

In December the question of peace came up. On 12 December Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, speaking in the Reichstag, announced that Germany and its allies had proposed to the Entente that peace negotiations begin. The offer named no terms, came from a position of apparent strength after the conquest of Bucharest and was rejected by the Allies as a maneuver. On 18 December President Wilson, who had just been re-elected, asked all the belligerents to state their war aims. The Central Powers replied vaguely; on 10 January 1917 the Entente replied with a list of terms that included the evacuation of invaded territory, the restoration of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro, and the liberation of subject peoples from foreign rule. The two sets of terms could not be reconciled. A war that was costing millions of lives would go on for a third winter, and Germany, at the urging of its military leaders, turned toward the weapon that would break the deadlock and, unintentionally, bring America in: the U-boat.