The End in the West

Abstract

Let us now turn to examine the progress of events on the Western Front, after the ‘black day’, which had compelled the Germans to go so far in co-operation and conniving with the Bolsheviks. Ernst Jünger wrote that by 23 August ‘there was not a man who did not know that we were on a precipitous descent … Every man knew that victory could no longer be ours.’¹ To withstand the hammer-blows of the Allied armies and replace the losses they inflicted, it became necessary to transfer from the occupation zone in Russia and the Ukraine as many as possible even of those low-grade troops who had been left behind in March. (A Swedish consular official had described the German soldiers in the Ukraine in June as ‘practically all bespectacled Landsturm’.)² In September three divisions were transferred from the Ukraine to the Western Front.³ Though service in the Ukraine had not been without its dangers, these were (especially since May) not to be compared with the prospects facing a German soldier in France at this time, and there were now ‘cases every day of soldiers refusing to be sent to the Western Front’.⁴ In their desperate search for manpower, the German generals resorted to re-enrolment, after long leave, of their men returned from captivity in Russia. This, Ludendorff later recalled, resulted in ‘a decided deterioration in the army’s morale’. The ex-prisoners-of-war ‘introduced a spirit of general insubordination, showing itself particularly in definite refusal to return to the Front, thinking that, like the prisoners of war exchanged from England and France, they were under no obligation to fight any longer’.⁵