Paris and Chantilly conferences

On 15 November 1916 the Allies gathered at two meetings at once. At the French Army’s headquarters in Chantilly, under the chairmanship of General Joseph Joffre, the commanders-in-chief or their representatives met, while in Paris the French Prime Minister Aristide Briand hosted politicians from Britain, Italy and Russia. Both conferences lasted two days. For the soldiers this was another Chantilly meeting, after those of December and March, at which the war plan for the following year was to be drawn up. The British wanted the politicians to have the first word this time. It ended the other way round.

A dispute over precedence

The idea of a meeting of politicians came from London. At the beginning of November the British War Committee concluded that the Somme offensive, if continued in 1917, would not bring a decision, and that the losses would be too high in relation to the results. The Secretary of State for War, David Lloyd George, argued that a decision must be sought on another front and that Russia and Romania, which was then fighting for survival, must be given much stronger support. He also proposed that Allied strategy be decided by a small conference of politicians and generals in Russia itself, since operations in the east and west could not be agreed without the Tsar and his advisers. When it turned out that the soldiers intended to meet at Chantilly before the politicians met in Paris, London proposed on 7 November that the generals’ meeting be postponed by a week. Lloyd George feared that the generals would commit themselves to their plans in advance, before the governments had had time to consider them. Joffre refused, and the two conferences took place on the same days.

Chantilly

According to the British official history, the mood at Chantilly was one of “sober optimism”. Good news was coming in from the Western Front: in October the French had retaken Fort Douaumont at Verdun, and on the Ancre the British Fifth Army was attacking and had taken Beaumont-Hamel two days earlier. Britain was represented by the commander of the army in France, General Douglas Haig, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson; Italy by the deputy chief of staff, General Carlo Porro; Russia by General Fyodor Palitsyn, head of the Russian military mission in France; Belgium by its chief of staff, General Félix Wielemans; and Romania and Serbia by officers of their missions at French headquarters, Colonel Rudeanu and General Rašić.

The basis for discussion was a memorandum from the French staff. It calculated that on the Western Front the Allies had 168 divisions against 129 German ones, and argued that the offensives of 1916 had produced important but not decisive results. The Allies should therefore persevere on the same course: continue the operations already begun through the winter, and in the spring of 1917 seek a decision in new, coordinated offensives on all fronts. Haig declared that if necessary he could attack on a larger scale from 1 February, but would prefer to wait until about 1 May, when the British Army would reach its full strength. At Joffre’s proposal it was agreed that the coalition’s armies would be ready for general offensives from the first half of February, and that if the enemy had not regained the initiative by then, they could wait for the most favourable moment.

The most disputes concerned the Balkans. The Italians, Russians and Serbs, and to a lesser extent the French, regarded the Salonika front as very important. The Russians and Romanians wanted Bulgaria to be attacked from the south while they themselves advanced on the Danube. Robertson was extremely sceptical about Salonika and opposed any further commitment of British troops there, citing the difficulties of shipping in the Mediterranean, which in his view the Allies did not understand.

The resolutions of 16 November

On 16 November the participants signed the resolutions. They approved the plan set out in the memorandum, intended to give the campaigns of 1917 “a decisive character”. General offensives, conducted with all available forces, were to begin on all fronts as early as possible and as nearly simultaneously as possible, on dates agreed by the commanders-in-chief. Attacks begun within no more than three weeks of one another were to count as simultaneous. The coalition was to knock Bulgaria out of the war as quickly as possible, attacking it from the north with Russo-Romanian forces and from the south with the Army of the Orient from Salonika. The latter was to be reinforced to 23 divisions: Britain was to have seven divisions in it, France six, and Italy was to be asked for three. On secondary fronts the enemy was to be held with the smallest possible forces. The participants also renewed the December undertaking to help one another if any of the Allies was attacked, and decided to make up the Serbian army with volunteers from among prisoners of war of Serbian nationality held in Italy and Russia.

Paris

The British delegation arrived in Paris on 14 November. The Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, accompanied by Lloyd George and the Secretary of the War Committee, Maurice Hankey, was to present Briand with a confidential memorandum from the British government on the morning of 15 November. Briand arrived almost an hour and a half late, having been held up by a parliamentary committee in which Georges Clemenceau was sharply criticising the conduct of the war. According to Lloyd George’s memoirs, Asquith read the memorandum hurriedly and without emphasis, and the distracted Briand merely asked for a copy.

The conference opened in the afternoon. France was represented by Briand, who was also Foreign Minister, and the Minister of Marine, Admiral Lacaze; Britain by Asquith and Lloyd George with the ambassador, Lord Francis Bertie; Russia by the ambassador Alexander Izvolsky; and Italy by the Treasury Minister Paolo Carcano, Senator Tommaso Tittoni and the ambassador, Marquis Salvago Raggi. Briand declared that it was the governments, not the staffs, that should direct the war, because every commander considers his own front the most important. The delegates agreed that in winter the main theatre of operations would be the east, and supported in principle the British plan for a conference in Russia. The Italians stipulated that they spoke only ad referendum and asked for financial help. The question of Greece came up again, as it had a month earlier at Boulogne, without resolution. Asquith was in favour of recognising the government of Eleftherios Venizelos, but the majority considered this premature. It was agreed only that the Allies would support the Venizelists and protect them against the King. The delegates also dealt with the response to the Act of 5 November. Asquith insisted that the protest against the creation of a Kingdom of Poland by the Central Powers should not be confined to the charge of violating international law, but should recall Russia’s promises to the Poles of 1914. The joint protest was published on 16 November.

When the politicians gathered for their second session on the afternoon of 16 November, the Chantilly resolutions were already ready, and Joffre, Robertson, Haig and Porro joined them at the table. Lloyd George asked where the figure of 23 divisions in Macedonia had come from and whether it had been agreed with the commanders on the spot. Joffre replied that no more troops could be supplied there without new roads and railways. Briand, with Asquith’s support, proposed that for the time being the generals’ resolutions be approved ad referendum and passed on to the conference that was to meet in Petrograd.

Significance

In practice the politicians’ conference merely recorded the soldiers’ decisions. The British official history admits that despite Briand’s words about the primacy of governments, Paris “did little more” than adopt the Chantilly conclusions, and Lloyd George failed to push through either a reinforcement of the Salonika front or the loan of heavy guns to Italy for the winter. Years later he wrote bitterly that the generals had “torpedoed” his efforts and that the disastrous offensives of 1917 had been “hatched at Chantilly”. The authors of the official history took the opposite view: they regarded the two days of discussion at Chantilly as useful work and supposed that, but for Russia’s gradual withdrawal from the war and Joffre’s removal from command, the war might have ended in 1917.

The Chantilly plan was quickly overtaken by events. By the end of 1916 most of Romania had been conquered, in December Lloyd George became Prime Minister, and Joffre lost his command to General Robert Nivelle, who reworked the plan into an offensive of his own. The Petrograd conference did not meet until February 1917, a few weeks before the February Revolution.