November 1916

To readers of the blog,

November 1916 portended, symbolically at least, a loss of the fighting spirit in the Allied armies. Lord Kitchener, one of the few who foresaw that the war would go on at the outset and who had done so much to raise Britain's troop levels during the war, perished off the Baltic Sea at the hands of German U-boat warfare. Also, in November 1916 the inter-Allied commanders met as Chantilly as they had the previous December to plan yet another offensive on the Western Front. They hadn't evidently learnt the lessons that the Battle of the Somme should have taught them; namely, that German defensive strategy, chiefly in the form of "defense in depth," which Von Lossberg had introduced in the aftermath of the early campaigns of the Somme, combined with technological inability to coordinate mass artileery barrage and infantry charges would render any offensive along the front futile and exacting in the tool it took on human life. The offensives to which November 1916 led, those of the British at Arras and Vimy Ridge, the French along the heights of the Aisne at the Chemin Des Dames, were failures in the end. The German artillery and reserves the offensives could not overcome; the geography and weather they could not bear. The failure of the French offesnive around the Chemin Des Dames, once the playground of Louis XV's daughter, led in no small part to the mutinies in the French army during 1917.