London conference on the command

On 12 March 1917 an Anglo-French conference met in London, the second in two weeks devoted to the same dispute. At the end of February at Calais the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had agreed that for the duration of the spring offensive the British Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, would conform to the orders of the French Commander-in-Chief, General Robert Nivelle. The compromise quickly began to crumble, because the two generals understood it quite differently. The British chronology of the war records that the conference was to discuss the relations between the commanders of the two armies on the Western Front, and also the employment of prisoners of war in the zone of operations.

The dispute over Nivelle’s letter

The trouble began the very day after Calais. On 28 February Haig received a letter from Nivelle which the British official history (Falls) describes as written “in a peremptory tone”. The Frenchman demanded information not only about the instructions issued to the British armies but also about how the army commanders were carrying them out. He also demanded that the British mission at his headquarters be raised “without delay” to a standing matching its new duties, and proposed that it be headed by General Henry Wilson, who was just returning from the conference in Petrograd. Haig concluded that Nivelle was still aiming to set up a British chief of staff at his side, such as the rejected French scheme at Calais had envisaged. Falls considered the naming of a particular general in an official letter improper.

Haig protested to London. He warned that the demands of Nivelle and the French government would grow, and that an enlarged mission would begin to pass on the French commander’s orders and to report to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff over the head of the British commander. The War Cabinet, which according to Falls only now fully understood the situation, agreed that the way the Calais agreement was applied needed to be defined more precisely. The French had their own grievances: Nivelle complained through his government that Haig accepted his directives with the old reservations, had not sent a detailed plan, and was thinking more of defence than of attack. Haig was indeed worried. The Germans had just begun withdrawing from the Ancre, German reserves had appeared in Belgium, and he feared a blow in Flanders that would threaten the Channel ports through which the British army was supplied.

The talks and the agreement of 13 March

Haig and Nivelle came to London, and with them, as Lloyd George wrote years later, four French ministers. Among them were the Minister of War, General Hubert Lyautey, the Minister of Marine, Admiral Lucien Lacaze, and the Minister of Munitions, Albert Thomas. According to Lyautey’s biographers he was in London from 11 March until the morning of 14 March. Lloyd George, who at Calais had taken Nivelle’s side, this time defended Haig. According to the minutes he quoted in his memoirs, he reminded the French that Haig commanded more than one and a half million men, the largest army in British history, and enjoyed the full confidence of the War Cabinet. He called both of Nivelle’s letters “rather brusque”. Nivelle assured them that he had not meant to offend anyone, and the Prime Minister accepted the explanation that the letters had been written by one of his subordinates. Lyautey admitted that he too had noticed the curt tone of the French letters and had advised Nivelle to have every document for British headquarters prepared by an officer who chose his words carefully. Lacaze proposed that either commander who received a letter written in haste and in an offensive tone should, instead of sulking, quickly meet the other and clear the matter up.

On 13 March Haig and Nivelle signed an agreement on the application of the Calais convention. It consisted of two parts. The first defined the relations between the commanders: the French Commander-in-Chief was to communicate with the British army solely through Haig and to receive from him information on the operational orders issued and on their execution, while the British troops in France remained under the orders of their own commanders and of the British Commander-in-Chief. The second part concerned the British mission at French headquarters. The British government agreed to place Nivelle’s candidate at its head, but the mission was only to maintain liaison between the commanders, keep Nivelle informed of the situation of the British armies and the course of operations, and if necessary help him draft the instructions, which he in any case sent to Haig over his own signature. As Falls summed it up, this was something less than the British staff at French headquarters at which the Calais scheme had aimed.

Prisoners in the zone of operations

The second item on the agenda, prisoners of war, was connected with a mounting war of reprisals. Since 1916 the French had been using German prisoners for work in the front-line zone, including on the battlefield at Verdun, and the British were forming them into labour companies behind the front. The Germans responded with reprisals against newly captured British and French soldiers, whom they held in harsh conditions just behind their own front line. The sources available to us do not say what exactly was agreed on this matter in London. In the spring of 1917 France and Britain agreed to keep German prisoners at least 30 kilometres behind the front, and the Germans called off the reprisals.

Significance

The London agreement closed the dispute over the extent of Nivelle’s authority, but it did not remove the mistrust. Lloyd George later wrote that after “a long palaver” the trouble had been “once more settled”, and that the only lasting result of the disputes was a further delay of the offensive. According to the original plans the Allies were to be ready to attack in the first half of February, and in mid-March they were still arguing over preliminaries. Meanwhile the Germans were falling back to the Hindenburg Line, which undermined the foundations of Nivelle’s plan. That same day revolution broke out in Petrograd, dashing hopes of a Russian attack supporting the offensive in the west. The day after the agreement was signed, Lyautey resigned in Paris, and a few days later the government of Aristide Briand, which had chosen Nivelle as commander-in-chief, fell. Falls noted bitterly that the British government had placed its largest army under the orders of a general who soon lost the full confidence of his own government.