Collapse of the Nivelle offensive

The British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based records under 20 April 1917 that the French offensive “was stopped”. That is a simplification. Five days after the start of the attack on the Chemin des Dames it was already clear that the great Nivelle offensive would not bring the promised breakthrough, and around 20 April the French command halted the full-scale attack. The fighting did not stop, however. The very next day a third army, the Tenth, went into line between the Fifth and Sixth Armies, and the offensive, turned into an operation with limited objectives, continued intermittently until 9 May. What really collapsed around 20 April was the plan to decide the war with a single blow, and faith in General Robert Nivelle.

Gains

On paper the balance of the first five days did not look bad. The most spectacular success was achieved by General Mangin’s Sixth Army on the western wing. Threatened from two sides, the Germans on 17–18 April suddenly abandoned the whole salient between Braye-en-Laonnois, Condé-sur-Aisne and Laffaux and fell back to the Hindenburg Line, which ran from Laffaux mill to the Chemin des Dames road. The British official history (Falls) stresses that although the retreat was voluntary it was dictated by fear, and that in their haste the Germans left behind many guns, some of them undamaged, and huge stocks of ammunition. When on 20 April the French came up against the new German position, they were about 6 kilometres further forward at that point than before the offensive.

According to Falls, by 20 April the French had taken a total of more than 20,000 prisoners and 147 guns: the Fifth Army 11,000 prisoners and 40 guns, the Sixth Army more than 5,500 prisoners and 80 guns, and the Fourth Army in Champagne more than 3,500 prisoners and 27 guns. The railway from Soissons to Reims was clear, the Germans had been driven out of the Aisne valley west of the Oise–Aisne canal, and north of the river the Fifth Army had taken the second German position south of Juvincourt. The German counter-attacks, dangerous on the first day, gradually weakened. On 19 April three German divisions struck the Fourth Army in Champagne and were repulsed. The German commanders, relieved that the French had not broken the front, proclaimed a great victory, but their front-line divisions had been bled white and had lost ground.

Disappointment

These gains, however, were overshadowed by what had not been achieved. Nivelle had promised a breakthrough in 24, at most 48 hours, and it had been accepted in advance that if there was no breakthrough the whole operation would count as a failure. On the Chemin des Dames ridge the French held only part of the German positions, and at the eastern end, near Craonne, and on the Ailette the Germans still had the upper hand. Losses were enormous. Nivelle’s corrected figures gave 96,000 killed, wounded and missing up to 25 April, and other authors, such as the American historian Robert Doughty, give about 134,000 men for those ten days, including 30,000 killed. The French medical service broke down: soldiers saw crowds of wounded behind the lines waiting for hours for help. Artillery shells, used in vast quantities and often wastefully, were starting to run short.

On 20 April, according to French accounts, the attack was temporarily halted along the whole front. Nivelle, however, had no intention of ending the battle. At first he wanted to continue the attempt at a breakthrough, and ordered General Duchêne’s Tenth Army into the battle between Berry-au-Bac and the Chemin des Dames north of Oulches. On 21 April the army group commander, General Alfred Micheler, proposed a change: instead of a breakthrough, take the western part of the ridge, hold the whole Chemin des Dames, and then seize Fort Brimont north of Reims, which dominated the plain. Nivelle agreed in principle. The offensive that was to have decided the war became, as Falls puts it, an operation with limited objectives: to take the Chemin des Dames ridge and push the Germans back from Reims. Nor was the battle for the Moronvilliers hills east of Reims over, in which General Anthoine’s Fourth Army had been taking one summit after another since 17 April. The fighting for them lasted until 20 May, when the French took Mont Cornillet.

Paris and London

More important than what was happening at the front was what was happening in Paris. According to the British official history, disappointment, dismay and anger in political circles demanded a scapegoat, and from that moment Nivelle was “bound hand and foot”. He could not order the study of any operation, let alone its execution, without questioning or a veto from the government, and he was constantly being summoned away from headquarters. The minister of war, Paul Painlevé, sceptical of the plan since March, now had arguments in hand.

Unease also gripped the British, who were fighting at Arras mainly in order to support the French. As early as 16 April the prime minister, David Lloyd George, told the War Cabinet about a conversation with the French minister of munitions, Albert Thomas. Thomas had warned him that the French government would not allow a protracted struggle of the Somme kind, and that if the offensive did not bring great gains in its first days it would be broken off. France could no longer afford heavy losses, and time, Thomas argued, was working in the Entente’s favour, because Russia might recover after the revolution and the United States might raise a great army. The British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, replied that German resistance had already weakened, that the Germans must not be given time to rebuild their strength, and that breaking off the attack would in the final reckoning cost more than continuing the fight. On 20 April in Paris, at a meeting attended by Lloyd George, who the day before had taken part in the conference at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, it was decided that operations would continue and that another conference would meet in about two weeks.

What came next

The compromise did not last. On 24 April at Amiens Nivelle assured Haig that neither he nor his government intended to break off the offensive. Two days later Painlevé, talking to Haig, spoke as though the French had been beaten and, according to Falls, all but encouraged him to suggest that Nivelle be replaced by General Philippe Pétain. Haig did not do so. At the end of April the government appointed Pétain chief of the general staff and its military adviser, and on 4 and 5 May the French made their last major attacks, in which they took Craonne and the Californie plateau. On 15 May Nivelle was dismissed and Pétain took his place. By then mutinies had broken out in the French army; over several weeks they spread to dozens of divisions and for a long time put France out of action for great offensives.