In September 1916, newly minted Supreme Army Commander Paul von Hindenburg and his deputy chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, toured the front lines at the Somme and Verdun. After that journey, a subdued Hindenburg worriedly noted that his soldiers “hardly ever saw anything but trenches and shell holes…for weeks and even months.” He confessed he “could now understand how everyone, officers and men alike, longed to get away from such an atmosphere.” In these dispiriting conditions, soldiers had “to renounce that mighty spiritual exaltation which accompanies a victorious advance…. How many of our brave men have never known this, the purest of a soldier’s joys.”
Accustomed to a war of consequences, if not always decision, on the Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915, Hindenburg may well have seconded Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener’s famous declaration that, with respect to combat on the Western Front, “This isn’t war.” Rather than free flowing and glorious, combat on the Western Front had become oppressive and joyless. In the aftermath of the Schlieffen Plan’s failure and the indecisive “race to the sea” in 1914, remorseless attritional warfare in France and Belgium served to weaken German vigor. Confined to underground bunkers or exposed to merciless storms of steel rained down on them by opponents who could afford to throw a greater weight of shells, Germany’s soldier-heroes wasted away.
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