The Path of Peace by Anthony Seldon

Author:Anthony Seldon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

R. C. Sherriff in 1918.

One speech has always stood out to me, when Stanhope tries to reassure the frightened Hibbert that death cannot be so frightening, given all they know killed in the war so far: ‘It can’t be very lonely there with all those fellows,’ he says. Then he whispers as if to himself, ‘Sometimes, I think it is lonelier here.’7

Lonelier here. Words that frighten me. And comfort me.

I do not think that death is the end. But I do wish I could discern more about what follows it.

Sherriff set the play in British trenches near the town of Saint-Quentin during the three days leading up to the German Spring Offensive (or ‘Operation Michael’) launched on 21 March 1918. Fortified by hundreds of thousands of soldiers released from the Eastern Front, the Germans enjoyed a rare moment of numerical superiority on the Western Front, which they sought to exploit. Preceded by a ferocious bombardment, and using innovative ‘stormtrooper’ infantry tactics, they gave short shrift to the British Fifth Army, making rapid gains along the 100-kilometre front. Ground that the British had taken weeks to achieve at the Battles of the Somme and Passchendaele was retaken in days, with the Germans surging forward through Bapaume, Péronne, Roye and Noyan. I want to know how close the Germans came to success. Could they have actually won the war? I consult Nick Lloyd, author of the seminal The Western Front. ‘It is tempting to say that the Allies were never close to being defeated and the German offensive would run out of steam,’ he tells me. ‘But it did not feel that way in late March and early April 1918, with a real concern the Allied armies would break, run, and never stop.’ But as reinforcements arrived, resistance solidified, and the ‘dangerous moment’, as he described it, passed. The Germans failed to take the British strongholds of Arras to the north of the front and the still more important town of Amiens. Eventually, their Herculean effort petered out 20 kilometres short of it at Villers-Bretonneux in April. The German strategic gamble to win the war had failed, just like in 1914.8

By 1918 the front line had moved 30 kilometres east of where my hotel is today, so I take a taxi. Some 177,000 British soldiers became casualties in the offensive; 1918 indeed saw the highest British casualties of any year.9 Some of them lie in the Savy British Cemetery I visit outside Saint-Quentin, including Private W. E. Lowe of the Machine Gun Corps, killed on the opening day of the battle, 21 March 1918. I taught a W. E. Lowe. Kneeling by his grave to read the dedication, ‘Mourned Deeply by Mother & Brother’, I move two red roses gently aside that conceal his age: nineteen. Did his mother and brother travel to France to see his grave, I wonder: how did they manage without him? I reflect on this often. As a head, it fell to me to break the news of lost parents and children.

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