AMERICA ARRIVES, RUSSIA FALLS

On 9 January 1917, in the castle at Pless (Pszczyna), the Silesian town where the Kaiser had his headquarters, a Crown Council listened to the Navy's case and decided to stake the war on the submarine. The man who made the case was Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, chief of the Admiralty Staff. His memorandum of December 1916, supported by detailed arithmetic, claimed that if German U-boats could sink 600,000 tons of shipping a month, Britain, which depended on the sea for food, raw materials and munitions, would be forced to sue for peace within five months, before the next harvest and before America, even if it entered the war, could make any difference. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had concluded that the army could not win in 1917 and that Germany's own food and manpower were running down, backed him. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who feared American intervention, thought the risk too great, but he was overruled. The Kaiser signed the order: from 1 February, U-boats would sink without warning any ship, enemy or neutral, in a declared zone around Britain, France and Italy.

It was a deliberate gamble, and everyone in the room knew it. Since the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, Germany had restrained its submarines under American pressure; after the attack on the passenger ferry Sussex in March 1916 it had given the "Sussex pledge" of 4 May to stop sinking merchant ships without warning, and President Wilson had made clear that a return to unrestricted warfare would mean a break. The naval staff's answer was that the break would not matter: the Americans had no army, and by the time they had raised one the war would be over. In one oft-repeated version, the Navy promised the Kaiser that not one American soldier would set foot on the Continent. Germany announced the new campaign on 31 January, with a token concession of one specially marked American passenger ship a week, and on 3 February Wilson broke off diplomatic relations. At the start the Germans had about a hundred ocean-going U-boats.

Wilson's anger had a second source. On 16 January, a week after Pless, the German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, had sent a coded telegram to the German minister in Mexico City, routed through the embassy in Washington. It told him that, if the United States entered the war, he was to propose an alliance to Mexico, with the promise of financial support and the return of the territory lost to the United States in 1848. The telegram was intercepted by British naval intelligence, whose codebreakers in Room 40 at the Admiralty, among them Nigel de Grey and the Reverend William Montgomery, read enough of it within days to understand its meaning. The director of Naval Intelligence, Captain William "Blinker" Hall, then had to show it to the Americans without revealing that Britain was reading German diplomatic traffic (some of it sent over the State Department's own cables). He arranged for a copy to be obtained from the telegraph office in Mexico City, and in late February the text was handed to the American ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, who cabled it to Washington. Wilson released it to the press on 1 March.

We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Zimmermann Telegram, 16 January 1917 (English translation as published)

Reaction in the United States was anger, then doubt: many thought it a forgery, until on 3 March Zimmermann himself admitted it with the words "I cannot deny it. It is true." Mexico, in the middle of its own revolution, had no ability to reconquer anything, and President Venustiano Carranza's government politely declined. The telegram's importance lay in what it did to American opinion, particularly in the Southwest, where the idea of a German-sponsored Mexican invasion had been a fear, and in confirming that Germany would use the war against American interests.

Meanwhile the U-boats did frightening work. In April alone, more than 850,000 tons of Allied and neutral shipping went down, and by some estimates one ship in four leaving British ports was not coming back. Britain had only a few weeks of wheat in reserve. When Rear-Admiral William Sims of the US Navy arrived in London in April, the First Sea Lord, Sir John Jellicoe, showed him the figures and told him that, unless the losses could be stopped, Britain would be unable to go on much beyond the autumn. The Admiralty's answer was to hunt submarines with patrols, mines, nets, Q-ships and depth charges, which did little. The proven remedy, the convoy, was resisted for months by naval officers who feared that crowding ships together would give the U-boats bigger targets, who thought they did not have enough escorts (a belief based on counting every small coastal vessel as an ocean crossing), and who doubted that merchant captains could keep station. Prime Minister Lloyd George, with the support of Maurice Hankey and junior officers such as Commander Reginald Henderson, pressed the Admiralty to test it. The first experimental convoy sailed from Gibraltar on 10 May and reached Britain between 20 and 22 May (sources differ on the exact day) without loss. By August convoys were running on most Atlantic routes, and by the end of the year monthly losses had fallen sharply from April's peak.

Holtzendorff's five months ran out in the summer, and Britain was still at war. The U-boats continued to sink large tonnages through 1917 and 1918, and the shipping shortage remained serious, but the strategy of starving Britain into submission had failed, and in the meantime it had brought into the war the one power that Germany could not beat. A German campaign meant to end the war before American help arrived instead brought the Americans in.

Woodrow Wilson had won re-election in November 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war", and he had meant it. A former Princeton professor and a stern Presbyterian, he saw himself as the arbiter who would one day broker a "peace without victory" among exhausted combatants, as he had told the Senate on 22 January 1917, just before the Germans closed that door. The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, the sinking of American ships in February and March and the Zimmermann Telegram together made neutrality impossible. On the evening of 2 April he addressed a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war. "The world must be made safe for democracy", he said, and he cast the war as a crusade against autocracy; he was careful to say that the United States had no quarrel with the German people. The Senate voted 82 to 6 on 4 April, and the House 373 to 50 in the early hours of 6 April, Good Friday. One of the dissenters in the House was Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress.

The United States was not ready. Its regular army and National Guard together numbered about 300,000 men; it had almost no modern artillery, few machine guns and hardly any aircraft or tanks. Wilson insisted that the country go to war as an "Associated Power", not as a formal ally, preserving the freedom to make its own decisions, and he did not join the secret treaties that bound the Allies. The Selective Service Act of 18 May 1917 introduced conscription, and on 5 June millions of men aged 21 to 30 registered for the draft. A Committee on Public Information under the journalist George Creel mobilized propaganda; the Espionage Act of June gave the government powers to punish dissent; Liberty Loan drives raised billions of dollars. The Treasury began lending large sums to Britain and France, whose own finances were nearly exhausted. The US Navy sent destroyers to Queenstown, in Ireland, from early May, to help escort convoys, and later battleships to join the Grand Fleet.

The man chosen to command the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) was Major-General John J. Pershing, a veteran of Cuba, the Philippines and the 1916 Punitive Expedition in Mexico, nicknamed "Black Jack" from his time with Black cavalry regiments. Named on 26 May, he sailed on 28 May with a small staff, reached Paris on 13 June, and was met with an enthusiasm that the French had not shown for years. The first troops of the 1st Division landed at Saint-Nazaire in late June, and paraded in Paris on 4 July. Pershing came with two firm ideas. The first was that the AEF should fight as an independent American army under American command, not be broken up and fed into British and French divisions, which was what the Allies wanted. The second was that the war would be won by well-trained infantry fighting in open country, in rifle and bayonet "open warfare", a view that disregarded much of the experience of three years. American divisions were also very large, about twice the size of European ones.

The buildup was slow, and that slowness shaped the year. The training camps, the ships, the supply lines and the staff had to be created, and the army relied on French and British industry for artillery, tanks and aircraft, much of it for the rest of the war. The first American soldiers killed in action, three men of the 16th Infantry in a German trench raid at Bathelémont on 3 November, died long after the Allies had needed them. By the end of 1917 fewer than 200,000 American troops had reached France. A million would not be there until the summer of 1918. In the meantime the Allies, for whom the moral effect was nearly as valuable as the arrival of units, had to hold on, and Germany had a window, which would close in 1918, in which to try to win before the Americans arrived in force.

America's declaration of war encouraged others. Cuba and Panama declared war on 7 April. Brazil, after German submarines sank several of its ships, broke relations in April and declared war on 26 October, later sending a naval division to the Atlantic. In Greece, a national schism between the pro-German King Constantine and the Allied-backed Eleftherios Venizelos, who had set up a rival government at Salonika in 1916, ended in June, when French pressure forced Constantine to leave the country; his second son Alexander took the throne, Venizelos returned to Athens, and Greece formally joined the Allies at the end of the month. Siam declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary on 22 July and sent a small expeditionary force of drivers and airmen to France in 1918. China, whose government had broken relations with Germany in March, declared war on 14 August, in a year of political chaos that included an attempted restoration of the last Qing emperor in July. China hoped for the return of the German concessions in Shandong, which Japan had seized in 1914, and for a seat at the peace conference. About 140,000 Chinese laborers worked behind the lines in France for Britain and France. Their government's hopes were to be disappointed in 1919 (see chapter VIII). By the end of 1917 the Allies had, formally, many more partners than the Central Powers, though most of them could do little more than lend their names.

By the winter of 1916–17 Russia's war effort was grinding itself to pieces. The army had suffered millions of casualties and the 1916 Brusilov Offensive had cost its best troops. The railways, overloaded with military traffic, could not bring food to the cities; prices rose faster than wages; and the queues for bread in Petrograd (the capital had been renamed from St Petersburg in 1914, which sounded too German) grew longer in the cold. The Tsar, Nicholas II, had taken personal command of the army in 1915 and spent most of his time at Stavka, the headquarters in Mogilev, leaving the capital to his wife Alexandra, who was widely distrusted for her German birth and her faith in the monk Rasputin. On 30 December 1916 a group of aristocrats, including Prince Felix Yusupov and the Tsar's cousin Grand Duke Dmitri, murdered Rasputin. It changed nothing. Liberals in the Duma, generals and even some grand dukes were by then asking whether the monarchy could survive.

The Russian calendar was 13 days behind the Gregorian, so the events historians call the February Revolution took place between 8 and 12 March 1917 by the calendar used in the rest of Europe, 23 to 27 February by the Russian one. On Thursday 8 March, International Women's Day, women textile workers in the Vyborg district marched out of their mills demanding bread. By the next day tens of thousands of workers had joined them, and on 10 March a general strike shut down the city. The Tsar, at Stavka, telegraphed his commander in Petrograd to end the disorders by force. On Sunday 11 March troops fired on a crowd in Znamenskaya Square, killing some 40 people. The next day the soldiers, peasants in uniform who did not want to shoot women and workers like their own families, mutinied: the Volynsky Guards Regiment killed its officer and marched out, and within hours tens of thousands of soldiers had joined the demonstrators, opening the prisons, seizing arsenals and joining the crowds at the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma.

Two bodies emerged there, in the same building, on 12 March. The Duma's members, mostly liberals and conservatives, formed a Provisional Committee, which became the Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov, with the liberal Pavel Milyukov as foreign minister and the Socialist Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky as minister of justice. At the same time, socialist intellectuals and delegates of workers and soldiers formed the Petrograd Soviet (the word means "council"), led by Nikolay Chkheidze and dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The Government had the legal authority; the Soviet had the loyalty of the soldiers and workers, and thus the power. Historians call this arrangement "Dual Power" (dvoevlastie). It meant that no one fully ruled Russia.

The Tsar's position collapsed in three days. His train, trying to return to Petrograd, was stopped by railway workers and diverted to Pskov, headquarters of the Northern Front. There the army commanders, including General Alekseyev, the chief of staff, and General Ruzsky, consulted by telegram with the other front commanders, including Brusilov, and told him that only abdication could save the army and the dynasty. On 15 March (2 March in Russian dating) Nicholas signed an abdication in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. Michael, advised that he could not guarantee his safety, declined the throne the next day unless it was offered by a Constituent Assembly. The Romanov dynasty, which had ruled since 1613, was over. Nicholas and his family were placed under arrest.

The Provisional Government introduced remarkable freedoms: it abolished censorship and the death penalty, freed political prisoners and gave women the vote. But it chose to continue the war. Milyukov and the liberals felt bound by Russia's alliances and hoped for a victory that would legitimize the new order and win territory, including Constantinople. The Soviet, by contrast, called for a general peace "without annexations or indemnities", and condemned the war as imperialist. The Allies, who welcomed the revolution at first as a victory of democracy and a guarantee of Russia's will to fight, were soon dismayed to find that Russian soldiers had no desire to attack.

Into this unstable situation came Lenin. The leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party had been in exile in Zurich for most of the war, and was cut off from Russia. The German government, which saw an advantage in anything that weakened Russia, agreed to let him cross Germany. On 9 April Lenin and about 30 other exiles, including his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek, left Zurich in a railway carriage that the Germans treated as extraterritorial, though in practice it was not literally "sealed". They traveled through Germany to the Baltic coast, took a ferry to Sweden, crossed Finland by train and reached the Finland Station in Petrograd on the night of 16 April (3 April by the Russian calendar). Lenin spoke to the crowd from an armored car. The next day he presented a document known as the April Theses: no support for the Provisional Government, which he called imperialist; the war to be ended not by a negotiated peace between governments but through revolution; all power to the soviets; the land to the peasants; the banks to be nationalized. Most Bolsheviks, who had been supporting the government conditionally, were shocked. Within a few weeks, Lenin had won over his party.

The first test came at the start of May, when Milyukov sent the Allies a note reaffirming Russia's war aims. Soldiers and workers poured into the streets in protest. Milyukov and the war minister Guchkov resigned, and on 18 May a coalition government was formed that included socialists, with Kerensky as minister of war. It would try to give the war new life with one more offensive. German money for the Bolsheviks has been alleged ever since; historians agree that Germany subsidized anti-war propaganda in Russia, but the sums and the extent to which they helped the party are still disputed.

The Germans moved first. During February and March 1917, in an operation code-named Alberich, Hindenburg and Ludendorff withdrew from the great salient they had held between Arras and Soissons to a new, much stronger position, the Hindenburg Line (the Germans called it the Siegfried Position), 20 to 30 miles to the rear. The retirement shortened the front by about 25 miles and freed more than a dozen divisions for the reserve. It was also carried out with brutality: villages were razed, wells poisoned, fruit trees cut down, roads mined and booby-traps left in the ruins. When British and French patrols moved forward in March they found a wasteland. More importantly, the withdrawal removed the very salient that General Robert Nivelle, the new French commander-in-chief, planned to pinch off, and left his scheme short of a target.

Nivelle, an artillery officer who had succeeded Joffre in December 1916 on the strength of his recapture of Douaumont, believed he had found the formula for victory: a huge, accurate bombardment, a creeping barrage with the infantry close behind it, and a rapid exploitation. He promised a rupture of the German front in 24 to 48 hours. At the Calais conference of 26–27 February, Lloyd George, who distrusted Haig and was captivated by Nivelle, placed the British army under Nivelle's orders for the offensive, a humiliating arrangement that Haig and Robertson eventually modified. But Nivelle's own generals doubted him, the plan had been so widely discussed that the Germans had it almost entire (a raid on 4 March captured French documents), and Paul Painlevé, who became war minister in March, thought the whole thing a gamble.

The British opened the campaign on 9 April, Easter Monday, with the Battle of Arras, meant to draw German reserves away from the French. At 5:30 a.m., in sleet and snow, the British Third Army under General Sir Edmund Allenby attacked east of Arras after a bombardment that fired some 2.7 million shells, in which the new "106" fuze, which burst on contact, finally cut the wire. Soldiers waited for zero hour in caves and tunnels beneath the town; the infantry advanced behind a creeping barrage; and counter-battery fire, planned with sound ranging and flash spotting, knocked out most of the German guns. On the first day the British advanced three and a half miles, the longest advance by a British army in a day since the trenches had formed. On the northern flank of the attack, the Canadian Corps, with all four of its divisions fighting together for the first time, stormed Vimy Ridge, a long, low escarpment that had dominated the plain of Artois for two years. Months of rehearsal, models of the German trenches, tunnels (subways) for the approach and a precise bombardment paid off: by 12 April, when the 4th Division took the last height, the "Pimple", the Canadians held the ridge, at a cost of about 10,600 casualties, of whom some 3,600 were killed.

After the first three days the British advance at Arras stalled, as it always did: the Germans brought up reserves, the cavalry did nothing, the weather turned bad, and the battle degenerated into a succession of costly attritional assaults. It ended on 16 May with about 158,000 British casualties, a higher daily rate than the Somme or Passchendaele. Allenby, whom Haig blamed, was moved in June to command in Palestine.

On 16 April, at 6 a.m., in cold rain, the French armies attacked along the Aisne, on the ridge known as the Chemin des Dames (the "Ladies' Road", an old carriage road along the crest). The German position was a natural fortress, a steep plateau of limestone honeycombed with caves and quarries, with defense in depth and machine-guns firing from hidden positions. The creeping barrage moved too fast for the infantry, who found the German machine-guns intact when they arrived; some 130 new Schneider tanks, making their first French appearance at Berry-au-Bac, suffered heavily from artillery fire. By the end of the first day the French had advanced hundreds of yards instead of miles. Nivelle persisted for three weeks. Casualties were about 134,000 by 25 April, and some 187,000 by the time the fighting died down in May, against a plan that had promised small losses. The French captured part of the ridge and some 28,000 prisoners, but it was not a breakthrough.

The reaction was a crisis in the French army, usually described as the mutinies of 1917, though the word is misleading. Beginning in early May and spreading through May and June, soldiers in many divisions refused to go back into the line to attack, held meetings, sometimes sang the Internationale and shouted "à bas la guerre". They did not desert in large numbers or turn their weapons on officers, and most stated that they would defend the trenches if attacked. They would not take part in more futile offensives. Their grievances were the useless slaughter, bad food, too little leave, and the contempt of staff officers. The song "La Chanson de Craonne" ("Goodbye to life, goodbye to love") expressed their mood. The Russian Revolution and pacifist agitation at home played a part. The Germans never learned how close France was to collapse.

On 15 May Nivelle was relieved, and Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, became commander-in-chief, with Foch as chief of the general staff. Pétain restored order with a mixture of discipline and sympathy. Some 3,400 men were tried by courts-martial, 554 were condemned to death and between about 26 and 49 were shot (historians' counts differ), a far smaller number than rumor later suggested. At the same time he visited many divisions, listened to complaints, improved food and rest camps, regularized leave and stopped the great offensives. The French army would henceforth fight limited battles with heavy artillery support and few casualties, as at La Malmaison in October, when it took the whole western end of the Chemin des Dames and more than 10,000 prisoners. It would wait for tanks and Americans. It was a recovery of a kind, but for most of 1917 France was in no state to attack, and the burden of the offensive fell on the British.

The first part of the British plan in Flanders was a masterpiece. General Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army had spent more than a year preparing to capture the Messines Ridge, which had given the Germans observation over the southern part of the Ypres salient since 1914. British, Canadian and Australian tunneling companies had planted 26 deep mines under the German front, some at depths of over 100 feet, filled them with about 447 tons of ammonal, and spent months in the dark, listening for German counter-miners. On 7 June 1917, after a week-long bombardment by more than 2,000 guns, in which some 3.5 million shells were fired, the mines were fired at 3:10 a.m. Nineteen exploded. The blast, according to reports, was heard in London; perhaps 10,000 Germans were killed or buried. Plumer's chief of staff, Major-General Charles Harington, is said to have told reporters the night before that they might not make history the next day, but would certainly change the geography (the remark is also credited to Plumer himself, and its exact wording is uncertain).

The infantry went forward behind a creeping barrage, with tanks and a heavy machine-gun barrage, and by afternoon had taken the ridge, including the village of Wytschaete. The attackers included the Australian and New Zealand divisions of II Anzac Corps and the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions side by side, a rare moment of Irish unity: the Nationalist MP Major Willie Redmond, brother of the Irish Party leader John Redmond, aged 56, was killed leading his men. Casualties on each side were of the order of 25,000. Messines was a model of a limited objective carried through by careful planning and overwhelming force. Unfortunately it was followed by a seven-week pause, in which the Germans reinforced the sector.

Haig's real aim was to break out of the Ypres salient. He hoped to reach the ridge near Passchendaele, move on to Roulers and the Belgian coast, link with an amphibious landing, and capture the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge, which housed U-boat flotillas. The Admiralty, stressing the submarine threat, supported the idea, and the French collapse after the Nivelle offensive made it urgent for the British to keep the Germans busy. Lloyd George and the War Cabinet doubted it but, under pressure from Haig and Robertson, finally authorized it. The main attack was entrusted not to Plumer but to General Hubert Gough's Fifth Army, and was preceded by a bombardment of about two weeks by some 3,000 guns firing about 4.25 million shells. The Third Battle of Ypres, as it is formally named, began at 3:50 a.m. on 31 July.

The first day took the Pilckem Ridge, but then the rain came. August 1917 was the wettest in decades, and the ground, low-lying clay laced with drainage ditches and streams that the bombardment had destroyed, became a quagmire. Shell craters filled with water; men and mules drowned; duckboards sank; tanks could not move. The Germans, under their chief of staff Colonel Fritz von Lossberg, the master of defense in depth, held their front zone lightly and kept strong counter-attack divisions behind it, with concrete pillboxes (Mebus) that withstood shelling. British infantry would capture the thinly held forward area, become exposed to counter-attack, and be driven back. Gough's attacks of August brought small gains for big losses.

In late August Haig turned to Plumer, who introduced "bite-and-hold": limited advances of about 1,000 to 1,500 yards, under an immensely heavy barrage, stopping at a line where the guns could cover the troops against counter-attack, then repeating the process after a pause of several days to bring up the artillery. It worked. The attacks at Menin Road Ridge (20 September), Polygon Wood (26 September) and Broodseinde (4 October), led by British and Australian troops, broke up German counter-attacks, killed large numbers of Germans, and moved the line forward in steps. The Germans, shaken, reorganized their defense again. But on 4 October the rain returned, and the artillery sank in the mud. Haig, encouraged by overoptimistic estimates by his intelligence chief, Brigadier-General John Charteris, pressed on. On 12 October, in the First Battle of Passchendaele, the New Zealand Division attacked in a downpour against wire that the artillery had not cut and lost some 2,700 men, more than 840 of them killed, the worst day in New Zealand's history.

In October Haig brought in the Canadian Corps under General Sir Arthur Currie, who insisted on two weeks to improve roads and move guns before he would attack. In four attacks between 26 October and 10 November, the Canadians fought their way to the ruins of Passchendaele village, which they took on 6 November, and the ridge. They lost some 15,654 men. The offensive ended on 10 November. Estimates of British Empire losses range from about 240,000 to well over 400,000, and German losses from about 217,000 to 400,000; both are contested. The British advanced about five miles, did not reach the coast and gained a ridge that was almost impossible to defend, since the Germans would retake it in April 1918 with ease. Supporters say that it wore down the German army, relieved the French and contributed to the German decision to risk everything in 1918. Critics say it was an expensive and unnecessary diversion that left the British army exhausted before the German spring offensives (see chapter VII). Lloyd George, who had never been convinced, tried to reduce Haig's reserves in the winter, with consequences that would be felt in March 1918.

The Provisional Government's war minister, Alexander Kerensky, was a gifted orator who believed he could revive the army by exhortation. In the spring and early summer he traveled from one front to another, in a car, by train and on horseback, calling on the soldiers to defend the revolution by attacking. The Allies, who needed Russia to take the pressure off the French after the failures on the Aisne, were pressing for action, and General Brusilov, appointed commander-in-chief in June, supported it. On 1 July (18 June by the Russian calendar) the Southwestern Front attacked in Galicia, on a front centered on Zborów and Tarnopol. After a heavy bombardment, the Eighth Army under General Lavr Kornilov broke through and took some 18,000 prisoners and a number of guns in the first days. Units of shock troops, and a "Women's Battalion of Death" organized by the peasant-born Maria Bochkareva, joined the offensive.

But the army could not keep it up. Most Russian units now had soldiers' committees, which debated each order, and many soldiers saw no reason to risk their lives for a war that the government had said it would end. In the second week of July they refused to advance. On 19 July (6 July by the old calendar) the Germans counter-attacked, with a few well-trained divisions, at Zborów. The Russian line collapsed in a panic. Troops threw away their rifles and left; the Germans and Austrians retook all of Galicia and Bukovina, including Tarnopol (25 July) and Czernowitz (3 August), and stopped at the Russian frontier because they chose to. The Russian army lost at least tens of thousands of men in the offensive, and many more deserted to return to their villages, where peasants were beginning to seize the land. As Lenin was to put it, the army was voting for peace with its feet.

The disaster at the front coincided with a crisis in the capital. From 16 to 20 July (3 to 7 July by the Russian calendar) the July Days saw armed soldiers of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment, Kronstadt sailors and workers demonstrate against the Provisional Government, demanding that the Soviet take power. The Bolsheviks, whose rank and file were involved, were divided: Lenin was in Finland, resting, and the party leadership at first tried to restrain the crowds, then joined them. The Soviet's leaders, who thought a seizure of power premature and dangerous, refused to take it; the crowd, half a million strong on 17 July, besieged the Tauride Palace and nearly lynched the Socialist Revolutionary minister of agriculture, Viktor Chernov. Loyal troops arrived, and the Government published documents purporting to show that Lenin was a German agent. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda was shut, Trotsky and Kamenev were arrested, and Lenin fled, shaved and disguised, to hide in Finland. On 21 July Kerensky, who had returned from the front, became prime minister.

Kerensky tried to make order, and found that his supporters preferred a stronger hand. On 31 July he named General Kornilov, a Siberian Cossack's son with a reputation for courage and a taste for politics, as supreme commander. Kornilov demanded the restoration of the death penalty at the front, the militarization of the railways and a limit on soviets and committees. At the Moscow State Conference in late August, conservatives and industrialists cheered him; the left hated him. Rumors of a coup flew. Between Kerensky and Kornilov, a muddled exchange of messages through an intermediary led each to believe that the other was working against him. Kornilov ordered the Third Cavalry Corps toward Petrograd, ostensibly to restore order; on 9 September (27 August by the Russian calendar) Kerensky dismissed him and declared him a traitor. Kornilov refused to submit.

The Kornilov Affair was a tragedy for Kerensky. To defend the capital, he had to ask the Soviet for help, and the Soviet armed the workers: thousands of rifles were distributed to the Red Guards, and Bolsheviks who had been in jail since July were released. Railwaymen blocked the tracks, telegraphers misdirected messages, and agitators persuaded Kornilov's troops to stop. The cavalry corps halted near Luga without a shot, its commander, General Krymov, shot himself on 13 September, and Kornilov was arrested on 14 September. That day Kerensky proclaimed a republic. But he had lost the officers, who suspected that he had betrayed Kornilov, and the soldiers and workers, who now feared that the officers were plotting. The Bolsheviks gained the most: they won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, and on 8 October Trotsky became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.

The Germans watched all this, and took one more step. On 1 September, General Oskar von Hutier's Eighth Army crossed the Dvina (Düna) near Riga, behind a short, intense bombardment directed by the artillery colonel Georg Bruchmüller, who had written the method into a doctrine: a hurricane of high-explosive and gas shells fired in careful phases against batteries, command posts and communications, not at the trenches, followed by infantry in small groups that infiltrated rather than assaulted, bypassing strongpoints. The Russian Twelfth Army broke and Riga fell on 3 September. The Allies would call the method "Hutier tactics", after the general, although the real innovator was Bruchmüller. A month later a German combined operation captured the Moon Sound islands in the Gulf of Riga. It was a rehearsal. The same approach would break the Italians at Caporetto in October, the British at Cambrai at the end of November, and the British Fifth Army in March 1918.

By the autumn of 1917 the Italian army had been fighting for 29 months. General Luigi Cadorna had launched eleven battles on the Isonzo, the last in August and September, when the Bainsizza plateau was taken at huge cost. The Italian army had grown, but the strain on the soldiers, who were subjected to harsh discipline and poor food and had hardly any leave, was great, and at home there was war-weariness, bread riots in Turin in August, and the Pope's call to end the "useless slaughter". The Austro-Hungarian army, too, was nearly at the end of its tether after the Isonzo battles. Emperor Karl asked Germany for help. Ludendorff, who wanted Austria to stay in the war and a quick victory over Italy that would allow him to bring troops back for use elsewhere, agreed. A new Fourteenth Army, under the German General Otto von Below, with Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen as chief of staff, an expert in mountain warfare, was formed of German and Austro-Hungarian divisions and brought secretly to the Upper Isonzo.

The place chosen was the sector between Tolmino (Tolmin) and Plezzo (Bovec), near the village of Caporetto (Kobarid, in modern Slovenia), a quiet stretch of the front, held by the Italian Second Army of General Luigi Capello. Cadorna, expecting an attack, had ordered a defensive posture in September, but the order was not carried out: Capello still wanted to attack, the defenses were arranged in the wrong depth, and the best units and heavy guns stood elsewhere. A key sector was held by the XXVII Corps of General Pietro Badoglio. The Italian artillery, which could have been devastating against the German assembly areas, did not fire effectively. Why is still argued: Badoglio's corps had received an order to open fire when the attack began and either did not receive it or did not act on it.

The attack began at 2 a.m. on 24 October, in rain and fog, with a short hurricane bombardment of high explosive and gas, of the sort the Germans had perfected at Riga. The gas, a mixture including phosgene, hit the Italian positions in the valley near Plezzo, where soldiers' masks were inadequate; many men died in their trenches. At about 8 a.m. the German and Austro-Hungarian infantry advanced in small groups through the fog, along the valley bottoms, bypassing the mountain-top strongpoints and thrusting deep into the Italian rear. By the afternoon they were at Caporetto itself, and the Italian line was cut. Among the German officers was a young captain, Erwin Rommel, of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, whose detachment on 26 October captured Monte Matajur with thousands of prisoners. He would receive the Pour le Mérite for this and later actions.

The retreat was a rout. Cadorna's headquarters at Udine fell on 28 October. The roads were choked with fleeing troops, guns, wagons and several hundred thousand civilian refugees, and discipline collapsed; units with their officers retreated in order, others dissolved. Cadorna blamed the troops, publishing a communiqué that spoke of cowardice, which outraged the army and the country. The Italian armies crossed the Tagliamento around 30 October, with the Germans on their heels, and fell back on the Piave, the last river before Venice, by about 10 November. Their losses were among the heaviest of any army in a similar period. But the German-Austrian advance was extended beyond its supplies, the guns could not keep up, and the Italians, falling back on their own territory, began to rally.

The shock produced political changes. Prime Minister Boselli resigned and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando formed a government of national defense. At the Allied conference at Rapallo on 5–7 November, Britain, France and Italy set up the Supreme War Council at Versailles to coordinate strategy. On 8 November Cadorna was dismissed and replaced by General Armando Diaz, a quiet and conciliatory man who improved the soldiers' food and leave and introduced propaganda and welfare services, and who made it a war of defense of the homeland. Five British and six French divisions arrived from the Western Front, under Plumer and Fayolle, as a precaution, though in the end the Italians held the Piave and Monte Grappa themselves in the battles of November and December. Teenage conscripts of the class of 1899, the ragazzi del '99, were called up early. The Germans withdrew their divisions in December.

The name Caporetto passed into the Italian language as a word for total disaster. But the defeat also had an effect that Cadorna's critics did not expect: the Italian people, faced with invasion, rallied. In the following year the Italian army would hold the line on the Piave and finally win a victory at Vittorio Veneto (see chapter VII). Ernest Hemingway, who served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in 1918, described the retreat from Caporetto in his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

While the infantry at Passchendaele were drowning in mud, a small group of staff officers of the Tank Corps had been proposing something different. Tanks had been used since Flers in 1916, and also at Arras and Ypres, but never on ground that suited them. Cambrai offered it: the rolling chalk downs south-west of the town, hard and dry, not churned up by years of shellfire. Brigadier-General Hugh Elles, commander of the Tank Corps, and his chief of staff, Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, proposed a large raid by tanks over this ground, with surprise as its principal weapon. General Sir Julian Byng, commanding the Third Army, expanded it into a full-scale offensive. On 20 November the plan was carried out.

It was a combined-arms operation. The British massed 476 tanks, 378 of them fighting tanks, the rest for supply and wire-pulling, spread among nine battalions, supported by the infantry of III and IV Corps and by the Royal Flying Corps, whose aircraft would attack trenches and artillery positions. Instead of the usual days of bombardment that warned the enemy, the artillery fired no preliminary shots; the guns were registered by survey and sound-ranging, and opened fire at about 6:20 a.m., when the tanks moved forward, with a hurricane of fire and smoke on the German batteries and strongpoints. Each tank carried a fascine, a huge bundle of brushwood, to throw into trenches, so that it could cross them. The infantry followed in small groups behind the tanks. The German defenders, in the Hindenburg Line and its support line, were not expecting an attack, and many were from poor-quality divisions.

The surprise was complete. In a few hours the British broke through the Hindenburg Line, one of the strongest positions on the front, on a front of six miles to a depth of up to five miles, taking several thousand prisoners and well over 100 guns at a cost of far fewer casualties than the Somme or Passchendaele had required. Elles led from the front in a tank named Hilda. The one serious check was at Flesquières, where the 51st (Highland) Division's tanks were held back by German gunners who knocked out a number of them, a failure that was later blamed on the division's commander. Church bells were rung in Britain in celebration, reportedly for the first time in the war. Yet 179 tanks were out of action by the end of the first day, most through breakdown or ditching rather than enemy fire.

But the offensive had no reserves to exploit its success. The tanks, which broke down in large numbers, were soon worn out; many were destroyed in the fighting; the infantry were tired; and Byng's plan had given little thought to what to do next. The fighting then degenerated into a struggle for Bourlon Wood and the ridge beyond, from 23 to 28 November, which the British took at heavy cost but could not hold securely, leaving a salient exposed on three sides. The Germans, under General Georg von der Marwitz's Second Army, had meanwhile brought up fresh divisions.

On 30 November, in the early morning mist, they counter-attacked, in the south and east of the British salient, using the methods they had perfected at Riga and Caporetto: a brief, intense bombardment of gas and high explosive, ground-attack aircraft strafing the British troops and storm detachments infiltrating through gaps. The British, who did not expect an attack, were taken by surprise at Gonnelieu and Villers-Guislain, and in some places overrun in an hour. The Germans recaptured most of the ground the British had taken in the south, as well as British guns and thousands of prisoners. The British withdrew from Bourlon in the first week of December, and the front settled. The British lost about 44,000 men and the Germans somewhere between 45,000 and 55,000, depending on the count.

Cambrai was in effect two battles, and it has been read in two ways. Tank enthusiasts like Fuller saw in the first day proof that mechanized warfare could break the stalemate, which it did, in conjunction with infantry, artillery and aircraft. Skeptics point out that the offensive overreached and that the German counter-attack revealed British weaknesses in defense. A court of inquiry at Haig's headquarters found fault with local commanders. The lesson drawn by the Germans, who had themselves attacked with infiltration and gas, was that these methods could succeed against the British, and Ludendorff drew from them the conclusion that a great offensive in the west in 1918 was possible. The British drew the lesson that tanks, aircraft, predicted artillery and surprise could be combined in a new way, a lesson they would apply at Amiens in August 1918 (see chapter VII).

As the military stalemate deepened, voices for peace were heard in every capital. In Germany the first was that of Matthias Erzberger, a leader of the Catholic Centre Party, who stood up in the Reichstag on 6 July and said that the submarine campaign was not producing what the navy had promised and that the war could not be won by arms. Ludendorff and Hindenburg, enraged, forced the Kaiser to dismiss Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg on 13 July, replacing him with Georg Michaelis, an obscure civil servant. But on 19 July the Reichstag, by 212 or 216 votes to 126 (sources give both counts), passed a Peace Resolution, drawn up by Erzberger with the Social Democrats and Progressives, calling for "a peace of understanding and the permanent reconciliation of the peoples" without forced annexations. Michaelis accepted it "as I understand it", which drained it of meaning, and the generals ignored it. In September the Fatherland Party, founded by Admiral Tirpitz and the Prussian official Wolfgang Kapp, was created to oppose such moves and to demand annexations. In the Navy, a protest in August led to the execution on 5 September of the sailors Max Reichpietsch and Albin Köbis.

On 1 August Pope Benedict XV published a peace note to the belligerents, calling the war "useless slaughter" and proposing a return to the pre-war situation, disarmament, arbitration and the restoration of Belgium. Neither side was prepared to accept it. Wilson answered on 27 August that the United States could not trust the existing German government, and Michaelis gave an evasive reply. Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary had sent secret letters in the spring through his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, to the French President, acknowledging France's claim to Alsace-Lorraine; the effort foundered on Italian demands, and the exchange would be exposed in a scandal in April 1918. The peace appeals of 1917 failed because neither coalition would accept a settlement that did not reflect its sacrifices. The one government that wanted peace at any price was in Petrograd, and it was about to change.

Kerensky's government never recovered from the Kornilov Affair. The soldiers wanted peace, the peasants wanted land, the workers wanted bread, and the Bolsheviks promised all three. Lenin, who had returned secretly from Finland in October, persuaded his Central Committee on 23 October (10 October by the Russian calendar) to vote 10 to 2 for an armed uprising; Zinoviev and Kamenev were opposed. The organization was in the hands of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, directed by Trotsky. On the night of 6 November, after Kerensky tried to close the Bolshevik newspapers, Red Guards, soldiers and sailors seized bridges, railway stations, the telegraph and the post office with almost no resistance. Kerensky left the city to find loyal troops. On the evening of 7 November (25 October by the old calendar) the cruiser Aurora fired a blank round on the Neva as a signal, and in the early hours of 8 November the Winter Palace, defended by cadets and a Women's Battalion, was taken, with few casualties. The ministers were arrested.

The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which had opened on the evening of 7 November, with a Bolshevik majority, approved the seizure of power after the Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries walked out. On 8 November it adopted Lenin's Decree on Peace, which proposed to all belligerents an immediate peace without annexations or indemnities and abolished secret diplomacy, and the Decree on Land, which abolished private ownership of land and left its distribution to peasant committees. A Council of People's Commissars with Lenin as chairman, Trotsky for foreign affairs and Stalin for nationalities became the government. The Bolsheviks later published the secret treaties from the Tsarist archives, including the Sykes-Picot agreement. Elections to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November (12 November by the old calendar) gave the Socialist Revolutionaries about 40 percent of the vote and the Bolsheviks about 24 percent; the Assembly would be dissolved by force in January 1918 (see chapter VII).

The Allies refused to follow Lenin's invitation to talk. The Russian commander-in-chief, General Dukhonin, refused to open negotiations and was dismissed on 21 November; he was lynched by soldiers at Stavka on 3 December. The Bolsheviks sent their own delegation to the German headquarters at Brest-Litovsk, led by Adolf Joffe. After a ten-day ceasefire from 5 December, they signed an armistice with the Central Powers on 15 December, which was to last 28 days from 17 December. Romania, cut off and isolated, signed its own armistice at Focșani on 9 December, and Finland declared its independence from Russia on 6 December. The peace conference at Brest-Litovsk opened on 22 December. For Germany, the armistice meant that it could shift its divisions to the west. For the Allies, the loss of Russia meant that the war would be fought out in the west in 1918, and that the Americans' arrival had become more urgent than ever.

After the humiliation of Kut, the British Army in Mesopotamia was reorganized under Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, who had a larger force, better river transport and railways, and a methodical approach. In December 1916 he advanced up the Tigris, retook Kut in February 1917, outflanked Ottoman positions on the Diyala, and on 11 March entered Baghdad, which the Ottomans had abandoned. On 19 March he issued a proclamation, drafted in London, in part by Sir Mark Sykes, that told the inhabitants that British armies had not come as conquerors or enemies but as liberators. Few of the Iraqis would have agreed in later years. Maude died of cholera in November 1917, the year of his greatest triumph.

In Palestine, the war began less well. The British Egyptian Expeditionary Force under General Sir Archibald Murray had crossed the Sinai desert in the winter, laying a railway and a water pipeline behind it, and had arrived in front of Gaza, the Ottoman fortress town on the coast, in March. In the First Battle of Gaza on 26–27 March, fog, delay and poor communication let a nearly won battle fall apart, and the troops withdrew, 4,000 casualties down, from a town they thought they had taken. In the Second Battle of Gaza on 17–19 April, a frontal attack with eight tanks and gas shells failed, with more than 6,000 casualties. Murray was replaced. Lloyd George, who wanted a victory in the Middle East to show the nation, told the new commander, General Sir Edmund Allenby, who arrived on 27 June, that he wanted Jerusalem captured by Christmas.

Allenby, a large, loud, energetic cavalryman called "the Bull", moved his headquarters from a Cairo hotel to the front, reorganized the force into three corps and brought it up to seven infantry and three mounted divisions, including the Australian and New Zealand mounted troops of the Desert Mounted Corps under General Harry Chauvel. Instead of attacking Gaza again, he decided to turn the Ottoman line at its other end, Beersheba, on the edge of the desert, whose wells were essential for his army. In the Third Battle of Gaza, he began on 27 October to bombard Gaza, drawing attention to the coast, while the main force moved secretly inland. On 31 October, the infantry attacked Beersheba in the morning and by late afternoon had not taken it. At about 4:30 p.m., with the sun going down and the wells at risk of demolition, the 4th Light Horse Brigade of the Australian Mounted Division, some 800 men on horseback and armed only with bayonets held like swords and rifles, charged across four miles of open ground into the guns, jumped the trenches and captured the town with its wells intact. The Australians lost 31 killed and 36 wounded. It is often called the last great cavalry charge.

After Beersheba the Ottoman line collapsed. Gaza fell on 7 November, the British broke the Ottoman front on a wide scale and pursued up the coast, taking Jaffa on 16 November, and then climbed into the Judean hills toward Jerusalem. The Germans' General Erich von Falkenhayn, now in command of the Ottoman Yildirim army group, counter-attacked in late November and early December without success. On 9 December the Ottomans evacuated the city and its mayor surrendered it to avoid destruction. On 11 December Allenby entered the Old City on foot through the Jaffa Gate, deliberately declining to ride or to make a triumphal entry, and issued a proclamation announcing that all holy places of the three religions would be protected. Jerusalem's fall was celebrated in Britain as a Christmas gift, and in the Christian world as the end of nearly 700 years of Muslim rule, in the first capture by a Christian army since the Crusades, though the British were embarrassed by the comparison.

Meanwhile the Arab Revolt, which had been stuck around Medina, had also moved. In July 1917 Captain T. E. Lawrence and a band of Arab irregulars under Auda abu Tayi crossed the Nefud desert on a journey of hundreds of miles, and attacked the port of Aqaba from the landward side, where the Ottoman guns could not reach, and took it on 6 July. Aqaba gave the Arab armies a base on the Red Sea, connected them to the British in Sinai, and placed them on Allenby's right flank. Faisal's army moved north, attacking the Hejaz Railway as Allenby advanced.

The most lasting political act of the year was the Balfour Declaration. On 2 November 1917, Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary, wrote to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, a letter approved by the War Cabinet on 31 October. It was the outcome of years of work by Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader and chemist, and of a variety of British motives: sympathy; the hope of gaining Jewish support in the United States and Russia; the wish to establish a British interest in Palestine, close to the Suez Canal, that would counter French claims under Sykes-Picot. Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the Cabinet, opposed it, fearing for the position of British Jews.

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917

The Declaration contradicted other British promises. Palestine's population of roughly 700,000 was overwhelmingly Arab, with a Jewish minority of perhaps 60,000; the McMahon-Hussein letters had been understood by the Arabs to include most of it in the area of Arab independence; and the Sykes-Picot agreement planned an international administration. When the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties on 23 November, the Ottoman commander Djemal Pasha used Sykes-Picot to try to persuade Faisal to change sides. The British gave Hussein reassurances that did not resolve the contradictions. The consequences, in the Mandate for Palestine, in the Arab-Jewish conflict and in the Middle East at large, are still with us (see chapters VIII and XIII).