The British Armies in France
By John Hussey, OBE
The nature of the First World War was determined by the military and industrial strength of the German Empire. It dominated the centre of Europe, and it possessed the largest and most efficient army in the world and a growing modern navy, backed by a developed armaments industry. Its war plan envisaged a short war, and relied on massive and rapid attacks to overwhelm its western enemies within weeks, then turning against an isolated Russia. The great German march through Belgium and northern France in August-September 1914 narrowly failed because of the French “miracle of the Marne”, but it left swathes of French and Belgian territory under German occupation. French and British determination to liberate that territory meant first defeating the resolute German army, strongly entrenched. It meant that the war would certainly be costly, and almost certainly would be long.
In 1914 the French army numbered a hundred divisions. The British assisted by sending to France and Belgium their Expeditionary Force of six divisions, finely equipped but backed by a war industry predicated on a six-months’ campaign and scales derived from experience of the 1899-1902 South African War. Not only were the post-1914 British armies in France composed increasingly of duration-only citizen soldiers, but they relied on industrial production that took time in get into stride. As Sir Douglas Haig rightly said at the Guildhall on 12 June 1919 “We went into this war lacking preparation for it, not only militarily but industrially. Throughout the whole process of the war we were making desperate efforts to catch up”.
By the time Haig became Commander-in-Chief of the BEF in December 1915 his force had risen to 43 divisions grouped in three Armies. Consequently the BEF was gradually taking more of the front line southward and the original General Headquarters at St Omer was becoming less suitable. Thus GHQ was re-sited in Montreuil in 1916.
Montreuil and the British Army
It is worth noting the necessary but unspectacular role of GHQ. During Haig’s time in command his forces continued to expand further, to 59 divisions, in five Armies To handle this vast expansion was GHQ’s task , based in many of the public buildings of Montreuil. Haig fully recognised the importance of this work, remarking in December 1915 “the amount of work which has been done in maintaining our large armies is quite wonderful”. It was GHQ’s daily responsibility to train, clothe, handle medically, feed, and supply the military needs of up to 2 million men stationed in a foreign land. It necessarily required an administrative service of increasing complexity. Logistical aspects: dock management, rail- and road-laying and maintenance, control of munitions movements, these likewise grew in importance. Gas-mask repair was one such mundane but essential task, controlled by a Miss Beavor, an ex-suffragette – which reminds us of the role many women played in ancillary services at Montreuil. Other branches concentrated on Intelligence, and the planning for Operations. By 1918, an estimated 1,700 soldiers were working within the town walls. Between 3,000 and 3,500 more were working in or close to the town – bringing the total to 5000. For three years GHQ dominated the life of the town of Montreuil.
Haig himself worked at the Château de Beaurepaire, two miles outside Montreuil. He was visited daily by his senior staff, Adjutant General, QMG, Director of Operations, head of the Royal Flying Corps and so on, and he would visit Montreuil at least weekly for the Presbyterian church service there and would then go round the offices. During major operations he would move forward to an Advanced HQ, sometimes in his adapted railway-train, but always in communication with Montreuil.
The Task and the Achievement
The Army’s task as ordered by the British government was to liberate the occupied territories and defeat the German army. It was to cooperate with but not be subordinate to the French: unity of purpose but not unity of command. Yet by serving in an ally’s homeland these instructions inevitably created frictions at times. As the immense French losses of 1914, 1915, and again at Verdun in 1916 drained France, so the growth of the British forces in France both reassured the French government as to allied manpower and resolve, yet worried it as to possible British claims to allied leadership on the soil of la patrie.
(These tensions were not resolved until March 1918 when, following the collapse of our Russian ally and Germany’s ability to concentrate all its efforts in the west, events imposed an inter-allied French supreme commander (Foch) over both French and British armies in France, and subsequently over the other allies.)
Meanwhile in 1916 at the Somme and Verdun, and in 1917 on the Aisne and at Ypres and Cambrai there were battles to ‘wear down’ the tough and resilient German army under Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The opposing sides were still not unequal in numbers; dogged determination and courage still bore up the opposing forces. True, the French army had to be nursed back to health after its failed 1917 offensive; Russia had collapsed and was forced into a humiliating peace with Germany. But the German U-boat offensive against allied shipping had failed, if only narrowly, and that had brought the USA into the war on the allied side. On the western front both sides were tired, neither was yet broken. Decision would be on the western front.
As the late John Terraine always reminded us, in 1916 Haig’s armies engaged 83 different German divisions; at Third Ypres in 1917, 78; in the German offensives of March and April 1918 no less than 109 different German divisions. And at last, when the tide turned, in the final ‘Hundred Days’ to victory in 1918, when Haig’s 59 divisions engaged 99 separate German divisions, some of them twice, some of them more often, his armies took 188,700 German prisoners and 2840 guns; all the other allies between them took 196,700 prisoners and 3775 guns. Some German troops continued to fight hard, but many surrendered in droves. Ludendorff’s nerve broke and he resigned; Hindenburg did nothing; the German navy mutinied; and the Kaiser abdicated and a German delegation sued for peace.
As Terraine remarked, British armies had never fought on this scale before, nor have they since.
The Aftermath
Of course there was an aftermath. We have seen what Haig said at the Guildhall in June 1919 about ‘catching up’. He then continued: “Now Peace has caught us unawares, almost to as great an extent as war did in 1914”. He did what he could. His testimony to the Commons on 1st July, 1919, on the plight of ex-servicemen and widows so moved the House that it instantly voted a massive increase in pensions. That achieved, he opened his final and nine-year campaign for the ex-servicemen and their widows and dependants.
John Hussey OBE, MA, was the Douglas Haig Fellowship’s second annual Haig Fellow (1996-97), in succession to John Terraine. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society and won the Society for Army Historical Research’s Templar Medal in 2017. In 2019 he was awarded the Royal United Services Institute’s Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History for his two volume history of Waterloo, ‘Waterloo: The Campaign of 1815’.