8. The balancing act: Britain’s transport experts, the global war effort and coalition warfare, 1916–18

Lawson Billinton had seen little of the world beyond southern England before 18 March 1917 when, as a temporarily commissioned lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers, he departed the country ‘for a destination unknown’.¹ By the time he set foot on British soil once again the following June, the LBSCR’s locomotive engineer had discussed the condition of Romania’s railways with King Ferdinand I; inspected the oil fields and refineries of Baku; drawn his revolver upon the stationmaster at Kharkov; diverted the journey of an American ship in the Sea of Japan; and circumnavigated the globe. Billinton’s wartime travels underline the First World War’s global dimensions, and illustrate how civilian expertise could be applied to the wider allied war effort. From late 1916 until the end of the war Britain’s transport experts were exposed to the peculiar demands of an international alliance.

This chapter investigates the manner in which Britain’s transport experts navigated the challenges of multifaceted coalition warfare following Sir Eric Geddes’s appointment as DGT and DGMR. Both on and beyond the western front Britain’s transport contribution to the allied war effort expanded as the relative strengths of its partners waxed and waned under the sustained pressure of the ongoing conflict. From working in relatively small-scale roles with limited, localized objectives during the first half of the war, the second half of the conflict saw Britain’s transport experts become immersed in the solution of international supply challenges that demonstrated the global interconnectivity of the various fronts and belligerents that contested the First World War.

The deployment of Britain’s transport experts, both to new theatres and to work alongside different allies, illustrates two things: that the transportation problems caused by modern, material-intensive warfare could not be tackled by nations working in isolation from one another; and that the complexities of alliance warfare stretched beyond the machinations of the political and military high commands. The continued difficulties of supplying a worldwide war effort, with a voracious appetite for finite resources and raw materials, necessitated the consideration of supply and transportation questions at a supranational level. The war’s demands required the application of British technical expertise to the solution of inter-allied transport problems, within the delicate balance of a fragile partnership. In the final two years of the war, Geddes, Billinton, and their contemporaries from across the British empire faced fresh obstacles to the execution of their duties. Their experiences of coalition warfare illuminate the challenges – cultural, political and strategic – that were an ever-present feature of the conduct of modern warfare alongside sovereign states with their own priorities and national interests.

Defining the global requirements of the British war effort

In his initial memorandum to Sir Guy Granet about the nascent directorate-general of military railways, Geddes acknowledged the distinctiveness of the directorate-general of transportation in France compared to the extant hierarchies in Britain’s other expeditionary forces. When the latter wrote to the former in October 1916 he was, as the ‘inspecting officer’ for transportation on the western front, in the process of preparing ‘a very definite statement of requirements in tons per week, working up to the maximum, together with the provision of locomotives, rolling stock, permanent way, personnel and so on, necessary to meet [the BEF’s] requirements. We have, however, no similar organization in the other theatres’.² Before Geddes could be satisfied that the transport facilities behind Britain’s multiple forces were sufficient to support the demands of the troops in their respective theatres, he appreciated the need for the War Office to obtain ‘a very clear and definite statement from each theatre of war as to what is wanted, together with the date upon which it is required’.³

Geddes was reluctant to base his assessment of the needs of Britain’s various expeditionary forces upon the judgments hitherto put forward by soldiers. As he explained to Granet, ‘the soldier, as opposed to the civilian, asks for less than he really ought to have and – in my private opinion – this is due to the way in which he has been made to cheespare, and the fear he has of the Treasury, on account of the lean years before the war’. Geddes believed that Britain’s soldiers had ‘consistently put forward demands far below the real needs of the situation’ throughout the war – an activity that had contributed greatly to the deficiencies he had witnessed behind the western front. Consequently, he felt unable to accept that ‘the very modest demands’ from Salonika, Egypt, Mesopotamia and East Africa were an accurate reflection of those theatres’ resource requirements. The solution Geddes proposed was to replicate the transportation mission of August– September 1916; he suggested that ‘we … carefully select the best man we can get and send him out, with a small secretarial staff, to consult with the Administrative directors and commander-in-chief, in Salonika and Egypt, and another man to do the same thing in Mesopotamia and East Africa’.⁴ Sir Francis Dent’s investigations in the former, discussed in chapter four, represented the first of a series of investigations undertaken by civilian experts to identify the transport implications of Britain’s global war effort.

Dent’s assignment demonstrates Geddes’s recognition both of the interdependence of Britain’s myriad commitments to the fighting and the need to apportion resources on the basis of an overarching, long-term strategy. Railway wagons despatched to France could not be made available to serve General Murray’s troops in Egypt, while every yard of light railway track sent to the western front was a yard of track that could not be laid behind General Milne’s forces at Salonika. Ahead of Dent’s departure for the Mediterranean, the Army Council outlined the constraints that prolonged, material-intensive warfare had placed upon the British empire’s ability to provide for its armies in the field. In letters sent to both Murray and Milne the council emphasized

For Murray in particular news of the ‘present situation’ came as no surprise. Arthur Webb, the Egyptian State Railways’ agent in England, had already reported his ‘great difficulty in obtaining ordinary stores for the maintenance of the Railway’ on 4 October – a challenge greatly exacerbated by the voluminous orders for railway materials placed by the BEF in the wake of Geddes’s mission to the western front.⁶

Whereas Sir Douglas Haig – as the field commander of the BEF – advocated strongly and consistently throughout his tenure for the concentration of British resources within his theatre of operations, his first DGT on the western front had to take account of his wider brief. As DGMR, Geddes was tasked both with the fulfilment of the British army’s global transportation needs and with coordinating the War Office’s policy to increase the exploitation of local resources within the extra-European campaigns to preserve British shipping capacity. The increasing success of German and Austrian U-boats in the Mediterranean during 1916 reached its peak in the last quarter of the year, as 248,018 tons of cargo were lost between October and December – the period in which Dent’s investigation took place.⁷ Following Dent’s advice that Britain – both for shipping and industrial capacity reasons – could not fulfil all of the EEF’s demands for the materials considered necessary to construct new strategic lines, Murray’s staff placed orders in India and the shipment of 822 miles of track from the sub-continent commenced on 1 January 1917.⁸ By July of that year, when Brigadier-General John Stewart undertook a second investigation of circumstances in Egypt, the main line behind the EEF had progressed some 138 miles towards Palestine from its base on the Suez Canal.⁹

Stewart’s visit to Egypt reflected the EEF’s amended role following Lloyd George’s appointment as prime minister, rather than any deficiencies with Dent’s work the previous year. In early 1917 Murray was ordered to abandon his policy of aggressive defence in the desert to the east of the canal, and to use the summer months to prepare for ‘large scale operations’ later in the year. The single-line from the canal at Qantara, originally constructed to supply the troops engaged in forward defensive positions, became the principal supply artery for the EEF’s proposed advance into Gaza and beyond.¹⁰ Murray claimed in early May that the existing infrastructure was ‘barely sufficient’ to sustain the existing force, and predicted that the ‘railway would be strained to its limit’ following the arrival of the 74th and 75th divisions.¹¹ He had pressed for authorization to double-track the line in April but stressed to London that the Egyptian State Railways could not supply further material. However, as over two million tons of British, allied and neutral shipping had been sunk between February and April 1917 – and a further 320,000 tons had been damaged by enemy action following Germany’s adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare – the effective allocation of the available shipping tonnage exercised British strategic planners even more thoroughly than had been the case earlier in the conflict.¹² Consequently, London had to be satisfied that the requested materials were fundamental to the success of military operations.¹³

According to L. S. Simpson, who accompanied Stewart on the mission, such was the importance attached to the investigation that Geddes originally intended to lead it himself.¹⁴ However, in May 1917, Lloyd George appointed the latter as controller of the Royal Navy in response to ‘the mismanagement of resources, particularly of supply’, which the prime minister perceived to be rife within the Admiralty.¹⁵ Therefore, leadership of the mission passed on to the man said, according to Haig, ‘to be about the ablest builder of railways in the world’.¹⁶ Stewart was tasked to examine whether the EEF’s intended operations were feasible given the existing capacity of the railway line, and to identify the improvements and equipment required should the force advance to Jaffa, Haifa, Beirut, Tripoli, Homs and Aleppo (the latter being almost 600 miles from Qantara).¹⁷

Stewart’s report combined encouragement for the immediate future of operations in Palestine with forecasts of the theatre’s resource requirements should the EEF press the Ottomans into a significant retreat. He acknowledged that sea transport offered a ‘useful supplement to the railway’, but warned against further dependence being placed upon such an ‘unsecure source of supply’.¹⁸ Consequently, he confirmed that – unlike in France, where the existence of roads, light railways and IWT provided the BEF with a range of transport options – the EEF had to rely almost exclusively upon the construction and operation of the railway line across the desert. Stewart concluded that the force’s seventy-seven locomotives and 1,300 wagons were ‘ample for present and sufficient for immediate prospective requirements’, and that the existing personnel in Egypt were capable of running sixteen trains per day over the line from Qantara to Jaffa once ongoing construction work was completed. Therefore, he considered it ‘unnecessary to double the track or to send out additional rolling stock’ provided the EEF was ‘not largely increased’ and halted at Jaffa. However, if the force advanced beyond the Jerusalem–Jaffa line, Stewart advised, the doubling of the line at least as far as Rafa would become necessary and he recommended that one hundred miles of track be made available to the Egyptian authorities to ‘meet unforeseen eventualities’.¹⁹

Alongside providing London with an unequivocal, independent statement of the theatre’s potential requirements, Stewart’s report illustrates that Britain’s transport experts did not always agree with each other’s methods and projections. Murray’s DRT in Egypt was the highly experienced Brigadier-General Sir George Macauley, who had become the Egyptian State Railways’ general manager after a career in the Royal Engineers that included active service in Kitchener’s Sudanese campaign. Stewart believed, regardless of Macauley’s knowledge of both civilian and military railway operations in the region, that the latter’s estimate of the rolling stock required to service the EEF’s advance into Palestine was excessive. Macauley had based his forecasts upon a prospective locomotive mileage per day of forty-three miles, which broadly equated to the extant figures recorded in France during April 1917.²⁰ Stewart asserted that a locomotive mileage of ‘not less than’ sixty-six miles per day ‘should be assumed and worked on in all estimates of rolling stock requirements for any extensive railway developments in Palestine’.²¹ It is unclear whether Stewart drew his figures from the mileage that the directorate-general of transportation considered to be an achievable target on the French railways. If so, his projection proved to be somewhat unambitious, and Macauley’s figure remarkably conservative for the Egyptian theatre. Whereas the highest figure for locomotive mileage recorded by the ROD in France was just over fifty-five miles per day, the average goods engine on the Egyptian front ‘ran at least 1,000 miles and sometimes 1,400 miles a week’ during March 1918.²²

General Edmund Allenby’s appointment as commander-in-chief of the EEF on 27 June 1917 changed the EEF’s outlook once again, and forced the War Office to confront the hitherto hypothetical additional resources listed in Stewart and Macauley’s estimates. Before the new commander arrived in Cairo, Lloyd George ‘promised to deliver all the men and resources Allenby might consider necessary’ to realize the prime minister’s ambition of ‘Jerusalem by Christmas’. If the soldier ‘cheespared’ and the enterprise failed, Lloyd George warned, responsibility for the failure would fall upon Allenby alone.²³ The latter took the prime minister’s advice seriously, and demanded another infantry division, five squadrons of aircraft, more artillery and additional engineer, signals and medical units to augment his forces for the assaults on Gaza and Beersheba.²⁴ The demands of Third Ypres meant that Allenby’s requests were not met in full, but the War Cabinet insisted that he should ‘strike the Turks as hard as possible’ by the autumn.²⁵ On 21 July he received the authorization to double the line from Qantara to Rafa that Murray had requested in May, and the arrival of two more railway construction companies – which doubled the number attached to the EEF – permitted construction to proceed at a rate of one mile per day as preparations for the advance intensified.²⁶

The railway behind the EEF was fundamental to the success of Allenby’s 1917 and 1918 campaigns. The artillery support for the assault on Gaza from 31 October comprised a concentration of guns the equivalent of that assembled by the BEF on 1 July 1916, and it fired the heaviest bombardment to take place outside Europe in the entire war.²⁷ As Rob Johnson has observed, Allenby resisted pressure from London to attack before his forces were at full strength and prepared.²⁸ His methodical approach ensured the EEF achieved both numerical and material superiority over the defending Ottomans, which precipitated the latter’s abandonment of Gaza on 6 November. By the middle of the month the force had advanced sixty miles, despite considerable logistical difficulties.²⁹ ‘Appalling weather conditions’ rendered the tracks and roads in the Judean hills almost impassable. However, thanks to the ‘untiring work’ of the EEF’s labourers, the necessary repairs to the existing rail and road networks around Jerusalem were completed in time for Allenby to press on and deliver Lloyd George’s ‘Christmas present to the nation’ on 9 December.³⁰ When the advance recommenced the following September the double-track to Rafa carried more than 2,000 tons of supplies per day, while at its peak the 5,500-strong ROD in Egypt and Palestine operated 169 locomotives, 2,573 wagons, fifty passenger coaches and ninety-eight hospital coaches. While mechanical transport and coastal shipping took on an increased role after the EEF advanced beyond Damascus in October 1918, the 627 miles of standard-gauge track laid under Macauley’s direction ‘were probably the most important single factor in achieving the superiority in numbers and material resources which made the [EEF’s] final campaign so decisive’.³¹

Closer to home, an even longer railway line consumed the attentions of Britain’s transport experts from early 1917. The establishment of a 1,460-mile-long overland route from the French Channel coast to the heel of Italy, conceived to improve communications between Britain and the eastern Mediterranean, exemplified the increased exposure of British expertise to transport operations in continental Europe after the battles of 1916. Before 1914 the normal route for passengers travelling between Britain and India had involved an overland journey from the Channel to Marseille or Brindisi, and railway services had been synchronized with the departure and arrival times of ships at the two ports. As Britain’s war effort expanded around the globe – bringing with it demands for the movement of military personnel, government officials, nurses and civilian specialists to theatres outside western Europe – the French and Italian authorities began to complain about being ‘crowded out of their own trains’ by British travellers.³² The British and French governments had agreed to the establishment of a new line of communications for the transport of troops from the western front to Salonika, via the Italian and Greek railways, at an inter-allied conference on 20 October 1916.³³ However, activity only really began on 7 January 1917, when delegates from Britain, France and Italy approved the development of an overland route with ‘the object[s] of diminishing the length of communications by sea, which are at present seriously threatened by submarine attack, and reducing the [allies’] dependence on sea transport’.³⁴ The Italian minister of transport agreed to discuss the project with representatives from France and Britain, and the following day Lord Milner instructed Geddes to identify a suitable expert for the mission. The latter selected Guy Calthrop, the LNWR’s general manager, who pursued the task with great energy in the weeks that followed.

Geddes’s civil–military mission of the previous summer provided the blueprint for Calthrop’s. Alongside the LNWR’s superintendent, Calthrop was accompanied by the Royal Navy’s Commodore Irwin and army officers from the QMG’s department and the directorates of equipment and ordnance stores, medical services and railway traffic.³⁵ The party left Charing Cross on 14 January, just a week after the allies had agreed to develop the line, and completed its work within three weeks. Calthrop’s final report was submitted on 7 February, exactly one month after the inter-allied conference in Rome had authorized the examination.³⁶ In it, he looked favourably upon the overland route but acknowledged significant obstacles to the scheme’s realization. The available facilities at Cherbourg, the only port to which the cross-Channel voyage was short and that was not already in use ‘to its full extent for the BEF in France’, were limited. The French navy occupied the port’s dockyard, the pier had been pressed into constant action to replace berthing accommodation used by the BEF at other French ports and the railway connections from the small commercial port that remained ‘needed much alteration’.³⁷ Given these deficiencies, Calthrop estimated the capacity of Cherbourg to be between 1,200 and 1,400 tons per day. However, as with Francis Dent’s projections of the Bassin Loubet’s capacity two years earlier, Calthrop’s figures proved over ambitious. As Henniker noted after the war, ‘in actual practice only about 600 tons per day was attained’ from the Bassin du Commerce at Cherbourg in 1917–18.³⁸

If Cherbourg provided the northern terminus of the overland route by default, several options for the Mediterranean terminus were considered before Taranto was selected. The commercial port at Taranto could only be reached through ‘a very congested station’, and Calthrop was ‘convinced that a very serious delay would take place’ if traffic for the allied forces at Salonika ran through Taranto to the commercial quay.³⁹ To avoid the city the Italian naval commander at Taranto recommended the development of a location to the east, on the south side of the Mar Piccolo. An entirely new port had to be constructed on the site and a multinational force under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Langbridge Morgan, chief engineer of the LBSCR before 1914, commenced work that summer. By January 1918 they had created what Colonel Rhys Williams described as ‘a remarkable achievement’:

The fact that sufficient materials to create the new port were redirected to Taranto underscores the importance attached to the development of the overland route during 1917, which the war policy committee hoped in June would eventually account for 36,000 of the 51,000 tons per month required by the British forces in Salonika and Egypt.⁴¹ The committee’s aspirations were never met. It took until early July for the labour and materials required to construct the terminus to be despatched to southern Italy and, although a passenger service commenced operations on 28 June, the first consignment of goods for Taranto did not leave Cherbourg until 8 August. A regular service of two trains per day from the Channel to the Mediterranean did not begin until the final week of October 1917.

At that point the war intervened to stymie the development of the Cherbourg–Taranto route. On 24 October, German and Austrian forces broke through in the upper Isonzo valley and sent the Italian army into a desperate retreat. Within a week Italian troops had fallen back as far as their rearmost defensive positions on the River Tagliamento, some forty-five miles away from the Isonzo, and the French and British governments had resolved to bolster their ally with reinforcements drawn from the western front. The goods service between Cherbourg and Taranto was suspended on 30 October, and the first British troops entrained for Mantua a week later.⁴² Supply trains for Salonika and Egypt did not recommence until January 1918 and, following another suspension in response to the German spring offensives in March and April, the Cherbourg–Taranto line recorded its highest traffic figures in June 1918.⁴³ However, even the 725 tons per day carried on the line in the summer of 1918 fell well short of Calthrop’s initial estimates.

The root causes for these relatively low returns lay with the allies rather than the central powers. While the construction of the facilities required to transfer goods from shore to ship demonstrated that the allies could work collaboratively to solve the supply challenges raised by the First World War, the provision of railway equipment to operate between Cherbourg and Taranto highlighted the technical constraints that existed between sovereign states lacking in standardized infrastructure. In his February 1917 report Calthrop produced various calculations for the route’s locomotive, rolling stock and engine crew requirements (see Table 8.1). The Italians confirmed their ability to provide the locomotives required for four marches on their own soil, but warned that the engines for any additional marches had to be provided by the British. The French were similarly accommodating, and committed to supply the passenger coaches and locomotives for four marches on French soil. However, as Sir Guy Granet noted, this agreement stood ‘only on condition that they are immediately replaced by British coaches and locomotives of equal capacity’. The French minister of war accepted that French rolling stock should be employed along the entire route, but demanded that the British shipped replacement wagons to run on the French main lines as soon as the Cherbourg–Taranto service commenced. Granet acknowledged that the demand for 6,000 wagons was ‘a large number’, but believed that ‘the British railways might manage it at a pinch’.⁴⁴

The outlook for motive power was far less positive. Before the war the British railways possessed approximately 23,000 locomotives. In peacetime roughly 600 of those locomotives were withdrawn from service and replaced with new stock each year. However, the outbreak of war had dislocated the locomotive building and overhauling processes in Britain, as materials and manpower were redirected into the fulfilment of the armed forces’ various requirements. The SECR built just two locomotives and reconstructed one engine during the war, while across the country as a whole just 803 new engines were put into traffic between August 1914 and April 1917. At the same time the British railway companies had despatched 420 locomotives overseas and received ‘urgent requests’ for another 150 engines. ‘Owing to a want of men and materials’, the REC advised the War Cabinet, Britain’s railways were ‘short of no less than 1,600 locomotives’ in May 1917. The REC complained that ‘when an undertaking was given to send … 380 locomotives to France it was distinctly understood that the Companies would be put in a position to replace them at once and details of all materials required for the purpose were sent to the Ministry of Munitions’. The ministry, the committee claimed, had failed to supply the items requested by the railway companies or ensure that engines under manufacture with private locomotive builders were requisitioned and placed at the railway companies’ disposal.⁴⁵

Table 8.1. The equipment and personnel required for operation of the overland route to Salonika, February 1917.

Britain’s transport experts were asked to do as much as required with as little as possible during the war, in conditions which exerted great strain on the domestic railway network. ‘The movement of traffic over the Railways at the moment’, the REC highlighted, ‘is greatly in excess of what it was in 1913 which was the busiest year the Companies had experienced prior to the War. This greatly increased traffic is being operated with less locomotives, less wagons and a greatly reduced Staff of efficient Railwaymen’. Unless steps were taken to allocate materials to the railways for new construction, the committee warned, ‘there is the possibility and even the probability of the position in this Country becoming from the traffic working point of view as bad as it had been in the North of France’.⁴⁶ Consequently, the REC rejected requests to supply the projected 370 locomotives required to fulfil Calthrop’s highest estimate for the Cherbourg–Taranto line, as it was ‘impossible for the Railways to find these engines and at the same time to deal with the traffic in this country’.⁴⁷

However, the existing stocks of the British railway companies represented the only immediately available source of locomotives for the new route to the eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, in the wake of the REC’s memorandum, a gathering of locomotive engineers, goods managers and railway company superintendents were tasked to revisit the decisions made in December 1916 and identify further restrictions to domestic traffic that could free up locomotives for service overseas. Holiday traffic was subjected to further controls, express services were withdrawn, lightly loaded goods trains run for government departments were curtailed, passenger services were cancelled and the committee restated its request for ‘all the material [the railway companies] may require for the repair of their locomotives, wagons and permanent way’. By early July agreement had been reached for the despatch of 175 locomotives to the European theatres by November, but by the end of the year only 155 engines had actually departed British shores – well short of the number required to operate five goods trains per day between Cherbourg and Taranto.⁴⁸ Yet although the overland route did not achieve the ambitious targets set for it by Calthrop in February 1917, it did ‘justify its existence’ by permitting the redirection of shipping tonnage to other duties and offering respite for soldiers deployed in inhospitable theatres. By the end of the war it had removed roughly 500,000 shipping tons and 350,000 troops from the submarine-infested waters of the Mediterranean, and provided British troops in the unhealthy Macedonian theatre with opportunities to undertake periods of home leave.⁴⁹

Britain’s transport experts and the limits of inter-allied cooperation

The difficulties the allies experienced in providing the resources necessary to operate the Cherbourg–Taranto route indicated the diminishing quality and quantity of materials available to the belligerents as the war ground on. Like those of France, Germany and the other belligerents engaged in the material-intensive combat of the First World War, British resources were limited and required careful management. Britain’s relative distance from the destructive effects of the fighting did not isolate it from the gradual processes of erosion, wear and eventual breakdown that afflicted the machinery of its partners and enemies over the course of the conflict. As David Stevenson has noted, ‘governments and public alike resigned themselves to fighting into 1919 or even 1920’ during the spring and summer of 1917 – unable to accurately predict an end date for the hostilities, both sides were forced to balance fulfilling the material requirements of the front line with the continued maintenance of an operable transportation network.⁵⁰

The nature of the support that had hitherto been supplied to the British by its hosts lay at the heart of a bitter dispute between the coalition’s senior partners shortly after Geddes’s arrival in France. In mid November 1916 a letter from Joffre to the French mission at GHQ stated that the number of wagons allotted to British traffic had risen from between five and six thousand in January 1915 to 19,350 at the conclusion of the Somme offensive.⁵¹ Consequently, the French demanded that the British provide 19,350 wagons as soon as possible to cover the BEF’s transport requirements and asked that the British be ready to supply a total of 54,000 wagons by the time the allies reached the German frontier.⁵² Following a meeting between British and French transport authorities a few days later, in which Geddes was adjudged to be ‘very liberal in the way he proposed to meet the French difficulties in their transport’, the British military attaché described the French approach in a letter to Lloyd George:

Geddes was not prepared to take the estimates of his coalition partners at face value,⁵⁴ and expressed doubts as to the motives behind Joffre’s request. He wrote to Lloyd George that the French demands were ‘excessive’, and expressed his conviction that ‘they neither expect to have them met in full, nor believe that it is possible to meet them in full’.⁵⁵ On 13 December Claveille and Geddes reached a preliminary agreement for the British to provide 29,000 wagons over the following year, and to be prepared to supply 42,000 wagons in the event of a general advance.⁵⁶

The winter weather in 1916–17 exacerbated the poor condition of the French railways. A severe frost set in during January 1917, which increased congestion and reduced the circulation of rolling stock around the network. On 24 January the situation became so acute that the French authorities placed an embargo on all military traffic for the French army other than supplies, ammunition and railway material. On the same day Geddes ‘extracted’ a ‘candid confession’ from Brigadier-General Camille Ragueneau, director of the French rearward services, that the French could see ‘no hope’ of being able to deal with more than the 150,000 tons per week received by the BEF at that time.⁵⁷ Geddes’s choice of language in this letter is indicative of the state of suspicion that existed between the two transport authorities. ‘Unless we can get 200,000 tons carried from the ports weekly’, Haig wrote in his diary on 28 January, ‘we cannot carry out our offensive as early as we wish’.⁵⁸ The new French commander-in-chief, General Robert Nivelle, refused to be persuaded by his counterpart’s position, and rather condescendingly advised the British Field Marshal that if it was

Four days later, Haig ‘discussed the state of the French railways and the effect on our preparations for the offensive’ with his deputy chief of staff, Major-General Richard Butler and Geddes. They concluded that an improvement in the traffic position was improbable even if a ‘drastic curtailment of civil traffic’ took place, which was unlikely, and agreed that the condition of the railway network ought to influence the decision to launch the BEF’s offensive operations.⁶⁰ After hearing Geddes’s views, the War Cabinet agreed with Haig’s recommendation that French and British ministers, senior commanders and transport experts should convene to discuss the ongoing ‘crisis of transportation’.⁶¹ Consequently, a conference was arranged to take place in Calais on 26 and 27 February 1917.

Of all the inter-allied meetings to take place during the First World War, the Calais conference has proved the most controversial. The political machinations that led to Haig’s subordination to Nivelle for the duration of the spring campaign – described by William Philpott as ‘probably the most unfortunate episode’ in the coalition’s history – have become synonymous with the events that took place in Calais, and have dominated the published accounts of those who were present.⁶² The conference’s agenda contained six items for discussion, all of which related to the operation and development of the transport network rather than the existing command structure on the western front.⁶³ However, Sir William Robertson, who had made Haig aware of his reservations about the presence of French and British government minsters at the conference, dedicated just one sentence of his autobiography to the transportation crisis.⁶⁴ Lloyd George’s War Memoirs did acknowledge the ‘long delays over questions of transport and coordination’ that had determined the need for a meeting of allied political and military leaders. However, his account of those discussions – which he claimed had ‘occupied much of our time’ – comprises little more than an attempt to portray Haig as an obstructive figure who created ‘difficulties’ that contributed to the failure of Nivelle’s offensive.⁶⁵ In his analysis of the prime minister’s account, Andrew Suttie comprehensively demolished Lloyd George’s version of events, arguing that the latter distorted the facts and omitted important material from his recollections of the conference.⁶⁶ Lloyd George’s exploitation of the conference to subordinate Haig to Nivelle was an ‘ambush’, which led to ‘very little progress’ being made with respect to ‘the railway question’ in Calais.⁶⁷

The internal power struggle between Britain’s political and military leaders that played out in the Hotel Terminus was mirrored by a vituperative inter-allied disagreement between France’s and Britain’s transport experts. The French, as with their coalition partner, had centralized their transport services in the latter part of 1916 under a civilian – Albert Claveille.⁶⁸ At Calais, Claveille and Geddes continued their discussions in an adversarial rather than conciliatory tone. The latter began by pressing the French for a date upon which the British could expect the railways to be able to handle 200,000 tons per week on the BEF’s behalf, the figure he considered necessary to service the force’s demands in preparation for an offensive. Ragueneau stated merely that he ‘hoped to reach’ a figure of 194,000 tons per week by the end of March, to which Lloyd George responded by explicitly linking the capacity of the transport network to the likely success of the BEF’s operations. If the tonnage demanded by the BEF could not be provided, the prime minister warned, ‘either Sir Douglas Haig must make his attack insufficiently provided, or else he must postpone it’. He was, he said, ‘very anxious’ that Claveille and Ragueneau understood the connection between the provision of sufficient transport and the BEF’s participation in Nivelle’s campaign.⁶⁹

The French representatives did not allow their guests to dictate proceedings. Claveille responded to British accusations that they had provided insufficient transport by directing the prime minister’s attention to the locomotives the British had promised to despatch to assuage the transportation crisis. Claveille argued that British deliveries of valuable locomotives and rolling stock had fallen ‘behindhand’ during the first two months of 1917. Furthermore, Ragueneau added that the BEF used an unnecessarily large amount of rolling stock to service its requirements; while the French army requisitioned 2,800 wagons per day to supply its forces on the western front, the British demanded 8,000 per day for half the number of men.⁷⁰ Geddes, as Robertson noted ruefully after the conference, did not choose to question the accuracy of Ragueneau’s figures or explain the reason why such a wide discrepancy between the two forces’ needs existed.⁷¹ When Lloyd George asked Geddes to respond to Ragueneau’s charge, the DGT instead launched into a further attack on what he considered to be the French failure to properly manage the railways. Before considering the BEF’s demands for rolling stock he

Following further disagreement between the French and British representatives – over the BEF’s requirements during the preparatory period before the offensive, during the phase of military operations and in the prospective advance following any success on the battlefield – Lloyd George moved to segregate the technical and strategic components of the conference. He observed that ‘the discussion might continue forever on these lines. The experts did not appear to agree on a single figure’. Therefore, the specialists were invited to ‘retire and discuss the question among themselves’.⁷³ The debate on transportation, for which the conference had been scheduled, lasted less than two hours and achieved nothing more than an ill-tempered airing of grievances.⁷⁴

Like Francis Dent and Gerald Holland before him, Geddes’s freedom of action in France and Flanders was constrained by the attitude and priorities of the coalition’s leading partner. The railway network behind the western front was a core component of the French army and state’s supply system as well as the BEF’s logistics chain. Therefore, the successful development, management and operation of this strategically vital artery required a constant process of negotiation, renegotiation, collaboration and compromise to ensure the sustenance of both nations’ war efforts. However, Geddes’s immediate response to events at Calais was to exclaim that the BEF was ‘practically being “rationed” in the matter of trains by the French’ and to question the utility of his remaining in France ‘if this state of affairs [was] to last’.⁷⁵

The man dubbed ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Sir Hindenburg Geddes’ by some observers, because of his perceived absolute command over British transportation in early 1917, struggled to adapt to the requirements of diplomacy and conciliation upon which coalition warfare depended.⁷⁶ Claveille’s observation that the British had failed to deliver the agreed quantity of locomotives and wagons was accurate. By the time of the Calais conference the British had fallen over 30 per cent behind on the monthly schedule of wagon deliveries, while only fifty of the 100 locomotives Geddes had ‘hoped’ to despatch in the programme’s first month had arrived in France.⁷⁷ Yet less than a week after the Calais conference, Geddes produced a letter for Haig that detailed ‘the history of the whole transaction with the French’. The document, in Haig’s words, showed ‘clearly’ how the French had ‘failed to keep their agreements’ – a response that suggests the British transport expert had either neglected or refused to countenance the possibility that Ragueneau and Claveille had raised legitimate concerns.⁷⁸

Geddes’s attitude towards the French remained truculent. At the next gathering of French and British leaders on 12 March – at which neither Claveille nor Ragueneau was present – the French minister of finance, Alexandre Ribot, acknowledged that the Chemins de Fer du Nord ‘was in a terrible condition’, warned that the civil population served by the railway had raised complaints over the shortage of rail traffic, and emphasized that the will to provide for the BEF’s requirements was not matched by the possibility to do so. In the spirit of cooperation, the French minister of war, General Hubert Lyautey, proposed ‘the establishment of a permanent Anglo-French bureau’ to provide ‘a continuous reciprocal examination’ of the railway question ‘both from the point of view of our requirements and the means of execution’.⁷⁹ Geddes ‘stated that … nothing would be gained by the establishment’ of such a bureau and reiterated his demand that the BEF be provided with 200 trains per day. For the French, Geddes’s intransigence proved exasperating. Albert Thomas explained in response that, even if the French were able to meet their ally’s request, ‘no doubt from time to time they would have to desist for days from supplying the full number of trains in order to meet particular emergencies’. The creation of a permanent Franco-British organization for the exploration of transportation issues – as opposed to discussion at ‘intermittent conferences’ – offered a forum through which the traffic demands of the military and civilian users of the Chemins de Fer du Nord could be regularly examined, prioritised, and delivered according to the network’s capacity and the needs of the military situation. However, Geddes demurred. ‘So long as the French had the management of the Chemins de Fer du Nord’, he stated, ‘it was impossible for [the British] to share it or be responsible in any way for it’.⁸⁰ The opportunity to create an inter-allied forum for the allocation of finite transport resources thereby lapsed until the arrival of American troops on French soil imposed further pressures on the heavily burdened railway network.⁸¹

The preservation of harmonious relations with an equal, and in many ways a senior, partner proved difficult for Geddes. His recognized gifts of intuition, rapid decision and force, which proved crucial in the development of the Ministry of Munitions and the creation of the directorate-general of transportation, could not be exercised so liberally when the needs of the French military and civil population had to be considered alongside the BEF’s requirements. The coalition environment effectively gloved the free hand Geddes employed behind British lines with Haig’s and Lloyd George’s support, and may have contributed to Geddes’s withdrawal from direct involvement on the western front in May 1917. Lloyd George’s decision to transfer Geddes to the Admiralty has been presented in previous accounts as the logical appointment of ‘an organiser to carry out for the Admiralty the functions which the Ministry of Munitions had long operated for the army’. Certainly, the navy benefited from Geddes’s introduction of managerial methods that were ‘alien’ to the senior service’s ‘badly co-ordinated existing administrative practices’.⁸² Yet the railwayman lacked specialist knowledge of the shipping industry, while the move further exposed his self-acknowledged weaknesses as a political operator. ‘I am a Political Chief among Naval Experts’, Geddes wrote to Lloyd George in December 1917: ‘I am essentially an executive man now employed in a non-executive job … I am very conscious of the honour of being First Lord [of the Admiralty], but I am not a shipbuilder, Naval strategist, Speaker, or politician. I am a Transportation man, and I feel I can do my best work where my previous experience justifies my position’.⁸³ However, as the scope of transportation by that point covered ‘the Allied world’ rather than the coordination of resources for Britain’s war effort alone, such a role required a collegiate approach. Lloyd George possibly suspected that Geddes, who less than a month earlier had told Lord Derby that the French were ‘quite hopeless at running their own railways’, was temperamentally unsuited to a task that demanded more conciliatory methods.⁸⁴

Geddes’s dismissive attitude towards his French counterparts was by no means unique among the senior figures in Britain’s war effort. Sir Sam Fay reflected in his autobiography that ‘the French railway organization throughout the war’ had been ‘anything but good’,⁸⁵ while William Philpott has outlined how the relationship between Haig and his allies was ‘beset by suspicion, antagonism and double-dealing’. Geddes displayed a similar jingoism to the commander-in-chief, with whom he had struck up an immediate and lasting friendship. Both perceived that their citizenship of the greatest empire on the planet possessed them with ‘an innate sense of superiority over the foreigner’, which contributed to the ‘indifferent management of the joint campaign’ on the western front.⁸⁶

Yet Britain’s transport experts were not merely exposed to the challenges of coalition warfare in France and Flanders during 1917. In the first half of the year, as Geddes became exasperated by the divergence of priorities between the British and French war efforts on the western front, a succession of civilians travelled east to undertake missions in conjunction with Britain’s allies in Russia and Romania. The efficient use of the transport infrastructure in eastern Europe was as critical to the sustenance of operations there as the French railway network was to the fighting on the western front. Yet Russia lacked both a dense system of railways and the option to thoroughly exploit alternative forms of transport. Three-quarters of Russian lines were single-track, its roads were primitive and its inland waterways were mostly impassable during the winter months as they froze over. Therefore, the effective operation of the comparatively sparse Russian railway network was fundamental both to the continuance of the eastern war effort and the maintenance of the domestic Russian economy.⁸⁷

The profound differences between the Russian transport infrastructure and those in western Europe influenced the choice of expert despatched to investigate conditions in the east. When asked to suggest a suitable man to accompany Lord Milner’s mission to Russia in early 1917, Sir Sam Fay put forward the name of a Canadian. George Bury had worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway throughout his career, and had attained the position of vice president of the line prior to the outbreak of war. ‘When making this recommendation’, Fay recalled in his autobiography:

Lloyd George acted upon Fay’s advice immediately. By 1 February, Bury had received the prime minister’s instructions, which were to ‘obtain all the information that you can and render every possible assistance, in regard to the working of the Russian railway system’.⁸⁹

Within three weeks, Bury had submitted a memorandum to the cabinet in London, which outlined the parlous state of communications in Russia. The first sentence of his report, dated 20 February, stated baldly that ‘Russia has not sufficient railway lines and those she has are not equipped adequately with waggons and locomotives’.⁹⁰ He estimated that the Russians had a backlog of locomotives and wagons awaiting and under repair that was 1,500 and 15,000 units respectively higher than it should have been given the circumstances – a consequence of inefficient working procedures, inadequate labour supplies and a lack of materials. These deficiencies were exacerbated by the retention of large numbers of wagons in the battle area for use as storehouses, living quarters and offices by the army (Bury gave a figure of ‘more than eight thousand units’ in his report). In addition, he asserted that ‘very unnecessary delays’ took place at the ports due to the continuance of lengthy customs practices and the inefficient deployment of labour tasked to discharge ships, and observed that the Russian railway officers lacked ‘the organizing genius to be found in some other countries’.⁹¹

Alongside his diagnosis of the problems that afflicted the Russian network, Bury’s memorandum contained a series of recommendations for their alleviation. His solutions to the transport problem included: the direction of ‘all the waggons and locomotives that can be delivered during this year’ into Russia; the introduction of operating practices designed to maximize the haulage capacity of individual trains and improve the circulation of rolling stock; the amendment of government regulations to permit higher levels of tyre wear; the establishment of a central authority to oversee the distribution of locomotives and rolling stock across Russia’s various districts; the provision both of additional passing loops and terminal facilities on existing lines; and the construction of a greatly improved line between the port at Murmansk and the interior. However, he stopped short of recommending that British and French officials be – like Geddes had been on the western front – parachuted into key positions in the Russian railway administration. Russia was a sovereign nation upon which its western allies could apply ‘a certain leverage’ but nothing more. As Bury acknowledged in his report, ‘to attempt to place British or French officers in charge of the more important positions on the Russian railways’ was a diplomatic impossibility. Instead, his recommendations centred upon ‘securing for [the Russians] all the waggons and locomotives it is possible to obtain even by paying premiums for prompt delivery … This is something the [British] Government should take in hand at once and vigorously’.⁹²

As in France prior to the Somme offensive, a lack of rolling stock to remove supplies from the ports had created congestion at the docks – a situation compounded by the quantity of wagons retained in the battle area for use as storehouses and living quarters.⁹³ Bury claimed that the accumulated stocks at Vladivostok in early 1917 had reached the port’s annual capacity, and projected that some nine months would be required to clear the existing material inland at the prevailing rate of movement. Therefore, to relieve congestion at the port, Bury recommended the increased use of the Japanese-controlled port of Dalniy (now the Chinese city of Dalian) on the South Manchurian Railway and advised that Vladivostok should be used solely for the import of railway materials into Russia.⁹⁴ Even after such changes Bury warned that the paucity of rolling stock and the vast distances between the far-eastern ports and the eastern front meant that Russia would – in the continued absence of a southern sea route through the Dardanelles – have to rely upon its northern ports ‘for at least a year’.⁹⁵

Conditions at the northern ports provided scant cause for cheery optimism. Archangel possessed fifty-two berths, each capable of discharging approximately 300 tons per day, with a further twenty berths scheduled to become operational over the summer of 1917. However, the port could only be used with any degree of certainty from June until November and the Archangel–Vologda railway line responsible for moving goods inland only carried three freight trains per day at that time.⁹⁶ While the Russian authorities promised Bury that they could move 127,000 tons via Murmansk – the only ice-free port available in northern Russia – before May 1917, the Canadian expert advised the cabinet in London that ‘the best we should figure on … is four-fifths of the Russian expectations’.⁹⁷ In a complaint familiar to investigators of the Channel ports the previous summer, Bury observed that the labour at Murmansk was ‘inefficient and inadequate’ and that additional storage was ‘urgently required … as there is almost certain to be congestion, and materials stacked in the snow on the shore are bound to deteriorate’.⁹⁸ Yet whereas on the western front Geddes had stressed the ‘moral and physical impossibility’ of scaling back on munitions imports for the BEF, Bury advocated that all shipments of munitions to Murmansk be suspended until congestion at the port had been cleared. ‘Otherwise’, he warned, ‘the place will become a second Vladivostock [sic] and munitions urgently needed elsewhere will be left to deteriorate in the snow’.⁹⁹

Bury’s experience of operations on a single-track railway that stretched over long distances through extreme territory informed his recommendations for the improvement of the Russian railway infrastructure. He recognized that the line from Murmansk to the interior represented the ‘main artery for traffic’ to Russia during the winter months if Vladivostok was closed to imports, and argued it was essential that:

The maximum capacity for each train on the extant Murman Railway between Kola and Petrograd (see Figure 8.1) was between 140 and 160 tons. However, Bury believed that the line was capable of handling trains of between 400 and 600 tons if it were ‘properly constructed’ and ‘the support of the [Russian] Government and especially the Minister of Ways and Communications’ for the scheme was enlisted.¹⁰¹ The latter, E. B. Kriger-Voinovskii, was lauded by Bury as ‘undoubtedly the best administrator’ to have held the position during the war, and he instructed that it ‘should be the duty of [the British] Government to make every effort to have his hands strengthened and … [ensure that] he be given the freest rein [sic] to bring about changes that he will have to make if his administration is to be effective’.¹⁰²

Figure 8.1. Principal railways in north-western Russia, 1917–18.

Source: Military Monograph Subsection M.I.2, Military Intelligence Division, General Staff, Russia, Route Zone A: Murman Railway and Kola Peninsula: Information and Route Notes, Murmansk to Petrograd (Washington, DC, 1918).. Map drawn by Cath D’Alton.

However, Kriger-Voinovskii’s experience in 1917 underscored one of the two major limitations of Bury’s mission. A fortnight after the latter’s report was submitted the February Revolution broke out, and the Romanov dynasty – which had gratefully provided its Canadian visitor with a daily bottle of champagne to assist him in the production of his report – was overthrown.¹⁰³ Bury’s desire that Kriger-Voinovskii’s hands be strengthened was eclipsed by the domestic concerns of the Provisional government in Petrograd. Kriger-Voinovskii was replaced at the Ministry of Ways and Communications by Nikolai Nekrasov, who commenced a ‘flurry of new railway appointments’ chosen for their political desirability rather than their professional qualifications during the spring and summer.¹⁰⁴ While some improvements to the Murman Railway were made during 1917 – and orders for locomotives, rolling stock and other railway equipment were added to those placed with foreign suppliers earlier in the war – Bury’s recommendations for the development of the Russian railways were not pursued in full by the new authorities.¹⁰⁵

Yet the outbreak of the revolution and subsequent turmoil within the Russian railway industry was not the sole reason why Bury’s report generated little activity behind the eastern front. The overall tone of his memorandum to the War Cabinet had been one of cautious positivity; Bury wrote with a belief that the Russian railways could be made effective through a combination of organizational changes, infrastructure improvements and material support. However, his diagnosis presented an overly optimistic image of Russia’s transport position after two-and-a-half years of war, and was built upon a far from comprehensive understanding of the situation across Russia. Many of the organizational changes Bury advocated had been in place throughout the war, or had been introduced as the situation demanded. Furthermore, his recommendations for the improvement of the line from Murmansk to the interior – while unquestionably desirable for the development of Russian railway capacity – were wholly impracticable given the prevailing conditions. The line was built in appalling conditions by a labour force that mostly comprised German prisoners of war, for whom the provision of building materials and food were incredibly difficult. As Anthony Heywood has demonstrated, in 1916 the Russian railways had carried over 20 per cent more freight than had been transported in 1913.¹⁰⁶ The demand for freight transport remained incessant over the challenging winter of 1916–17, and shortages of civilian supplies existed across the country as military traffic took precedence.

These difficulties were not sufficiently appreciated by British observers, who lacked thorough knowledge of the situation outside Petrograd. The military attaché, Alfred Knox, recorded on 7 February that ‘it had been suddenly discovered that many railways had only two to five days’ supply of coal’. Consequently, he added, the ‘railways were ordered to carry nothing but coal for a week. The week was extended till March 14th’.¹⁰⁷ By early March the condition of the network was adjudged by Sir Henry Wilson to be ‘deplorable … Coal cannot be carried from the pit-mouths to the railways and the manufactories; food cannot be distributed to the towns nor collected from the countryside; troops and materiél cannot be carried from one place to another’.¹⁰⁸ Yet over the same period, as Heywood has illustrated, the work performed on the Russian railways almost matched that achieved during the equivalent period of the previous year.¹⁰⁹

Bury’s memorandum betrayed similar ignorance of wider Russian problems. The Canadian railway expert failed to appreciate the complexity of the traffic problems that existed in Russia during the First World War, particularly in the vast area of the country east of the Urals. Consequently, he advocated solutions that would have been profoundly difficult to implement even had the Russian political situation been stable in 1917. Like his political and military contemporaries, Bury struggled to come to terms with what Catherine Merridale has termed Russia’s ‘extraordinary foreignness’.¹¹⁰ The result was a report, researched and submitted in a period of little more than a fortnight, which failed to adequately appreciate the challenges that Tsarist Russia had faced in the sustenance of industrial war since August 1914.

For Lawson Billinton, who only departed Britain for Romania via Russia on 18 March, the effects of the revolution greatly impeded his attempts to sustain the war effort in the east. Prior to Billinton’s arrival, Wilson had observed that:

After a three-day voyage and sixteen days in Petrograd, Billinton’s party made its way south to Iaşi – the Romanian government’s temporary home following the fall of Bucharest. He immediately noted the disorganized condition of the railways and, when his attempts to find breakfast on his first morning in Iaşi proved fruitless, how short of food the Romanians were. It took him very little time to diagnose the problems:

Rather than merely report and advise, as Bury had done in Russia, Billinton exchanged his uniform for overalls and transformed ‘from a military man into a jack-of-all-trades boilermaker, fitter, erector, etc., in order to carry out the work of reorganization’. He travelled across what remained of Romanian territory, visited all the available running sheds and repair depots, and gained a thorough knowledge of the ‘contour of the road and how the locomotives were operated’ by Romanian drivers. He remarked after the war that ‘by very careful application there was very great improvement effected, not only in the number of trains running but also in punctuality’ across the Romanian network.¹¹³

However, Billinton’s efforts had little impact on the Romanian war effort. Raymond de Candolle, the general manager of the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway who led the mission to Romania, reported pessimistically to Sir William Robertson in May 1917 that ‘the working of Roumanian locomotive traffic departments still leaves much to be desired and is engaging our special attention although owing to [the] innate reluctance of [the] Roumanians to push through comprehensive programmes it will not be easy to bring about rapid improvement’.¹¹⁴ By the summer of 1917, although the French still believed that a Russo-Romanian offensive on the eastern front was indispensable to the allied campaign, the British government had lost faith in Romania’s ability to successfully conduct an offensive against the central powers. Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary, suggested that the Romanians had been ‘incompetent to the verge of a crime’, while Lloyd George categorized allied obligations to Romania as of the lowest importance in Britain’s evolving strategic calculations.¹¹⁵ Unable to provide further support to the Romanians, Billinton embarked for the Caucasus in October 1917 to assist the Russian forces gathered at Rostov-on-Don under General Aleksei Kaledin. From there he embarked on the remarkable tour of the region that opened this chapter, and which ended the following summer with his return to Brighton.¹¹⁶

The wider military and political environments in which George Bury and Lawson Billinton operated worked against them in 1917. Events beyond their control overwhelmed their endeavours. Coordination of the Russian railway network largely disintegrated after the Russian state collapsed. The Provisional government’s removal of undesirable elements, and the Bolsheviks’ purge of ‘large numbers of experts and administrators’ from the railway industry, threw the work of governance into ‘near total dysfunction’ by the end of the year.¹¹⁷ The Romanian decision to accept the armistice of Focşani on 9 December 1917, and the Russian descent into civil war, decreased the eastern front’s prominence in British strategic plans and reduced its desire to divert precious human and material resources from the western front. However, as one set of allies in eastern Europe fell away, the constellation of nations assembled in France demanded reconsideration. The introduction of another sovereign army to the western front provided further challenges and opportunities for Britain’s transport experts in the final year of the war.

The Supreme War Council and the Inter-allied Transportation Council

The directorate-general of transportation, first under Sir Eric Geddes and then Philip Nash, became an integral, civilian-led component of Sir Douglas Haig’s military force. The organization created and fostered by successive DGTs provided the platform for talented transport administrators to apply their skills to the delivery of operational and infrastructural improvements in France. Their contributions raised the capacity and efficiency of the distribution network behind the BEF in the war’s most important theatre of operations in 1917. Furthermore, as larger numbers of British personnel, locomotives and other transport-related equipment arrived on the western front during the year, British units became increasingly concerned with the maintenance of the shared logistics systems behind the allied forces.¹¹⁸ In January 1917 the French handed over responsibility for the repair and maintenance of the British-built ambulance trains that had gradually entered service in France over the previous two years, while the chief mechanical engineer took over ‘from the State Railway some partly-finished shops at St Etienne, near Rouen’ that were subsequently completed and equipped for the repair of locomotives.¹¹⁹

The British presence outside the repair shops of France also expanded. ROD crews, having previously been largely restricted to the running of trains behind the Ypres salient, were given instruction in French signalling methods and gradually permitted to operate services on the French main lines. Between March and November 1917 the number of trains driven by the ROD over French tracks grew from ten per day to 341 – not all of which were dedicated to the BEF’s maintenance.¹²⁰ General François Anthoine’s French First Army, which arrived on the BEF’s northern flank in Flanders ahead of the third battle of Ypres, was served exclusively by the ROD throughout the offensive. Liaisons between Anthoine’s force and its British supply service were described as ‘smooth and efficient’ in the QMG’s post-war report, in stark contrast to the fractious relationship that existed between Geddes and those in charge of the French transportation services earlier that year.¹²¹

Lloyd George’s clumsy attempts to subordinate the BEF at Calais, Geddes’s reluctance to acknowledge French concerns over the efficient operation of the allies’ shared transport infrastructure and General Nivelle’s failure to realize his grandiose plans retarded rather than reversed the trend towards greater allied cooperation at a political and strategic level in the second half of the war. Events both on land and at sea drew the allies closer together in search of answers to the war’s evolving logistical and organizational complexities. At sea, the German decision to pursue unrestricted submarine warfare engendered a supranational consideration of shipping priorities, which resulted in the eventual formation of the Allied Maritime Council in November 1917 to ‘make the most economical use of tonnage under the control of all the Allies, to allot that tonnage … in such a way as to add most to the general war effort, and to adjust the programmes of requirements of the different Allies in such a way as to bring them within the scope of the possible carrying power of the tonnage available’.¹²² On land, the United States’ entry into the war as an associated power also ‘forced a degree of allied cooperation’ to meet the challenge of inserting another army into the crowded space behind the western front.¹²³

America’s decision to send an expeditionary force to Europe reinforced the value of efficient railway use as the war intensified. In recognition of the railways’ importance, an American military railway mission comprising civilian and military railway experts was despatched to Europe on 14 May. After arriving in Britain the party conferred with Geddes and Sir Guy Granet, who provided their new partners with an insight into the creation of the directorates-general of transportation and military railways. The Americans then crossed to France, where they observed the French army’s lines of communications in action and met with Nash at GHQ.¹²⁴ The mission confirmed to William John Wilgus, a retired civil engineer who served with the AEF’s transportation services for the duration of the war, the virtue of ‘building up a new arm of the Service, headed by men from civil life who had been trained in the art of transportation and, therefore, could most quickly glean the required knowledge and construct and operate a machine that would function with efficiency’.¹²⁵ General Pershing concurred with the idea of replicating the British approach; the American commander-in-chief’s personal sympathy towards the unification of transport within the American force under a civilian expert was confirmed following a visit to Nash’s headquarters at Monthuis in July. William Wallace Atterbury, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was appointed the AEF’s DGT in October 1917 and held the position for the duration of the conflict.¹²⁶

The addition of an American army with its own requirements for port space, rolling stock, roads and vehicles introduced another thread to the patchwork of transport issues that occupied allied leaders. Franco-American discussions on the operation of the AEF’s lines of communications; Franco-British conversations about the supply of rolling stock and personnel from the British empire to augment French resources; negotiations between French, British and Italian experts over the operation of overland communications to the eastern Mediterranean; and deliberations between British, French and Belgian representatives about the use of much-needed – but hitherto idle – Belgian locomotives were all ongoing when Pershing arrived in France. Furthermore, each topic was treated independently until July 1917, when a meeting of French, British, Italian, Belgian and American transport authorities took place and agreed to the organization of periodic conferences to discuss the common use of rolling stock, railway materials and technical labour. These conferences, at which Granet or a deputy from the War Office represented Britain’s interests, met on a dozen occasions before the end of the year and dealt with ‘numerous questions’ prior to the formation of the Supreme War Council (SWC) in November.¹²⁷

Created when the Italian disaster at Caporetto made it ‘evident that a very much closer cooperation was necessary for a successful prosecution of the war by the Allied nations’, the SWC provided the catalyst for British transport expertise to become engaged on work at a supranational level.¹²⁸ On 1 December the council recommended that a suitable expert be appointed to examine and report on the allies’ railway arrangements across the European theatre. Both the British and non-British representatives on the SWC identified Geddes as a suitable candidate for the task.¹²⁹ However, as noted above, Lloyd George refused to release his First Lord of the Admiralty for transportation duties. Consequently, Philip Nash was entrusted to conduct the investigation in January 1918.

The instructions issued to Nash, when compared to the parameters of Geddes’s transportation mission to GHQ in August 1916, emphasize the increased scope of Nash’s remit.¹³⁰ Alongside investigating the allies’ transport resources and the capacity of the railways across France and Italy, Nash was tasked with the development of a framework for a formal, inter-allied authority capable of studying the implications for transportation of the SWC’s strategic designs. The report he produced in February 1918 underlined the interconnectivity of allied operations and demonstrated that the compartmentalization of transport questions within regional or even national boundaries clearly limited the efficiency with which the extant infrastructure was exploited.

The existing provision of railway facilities for both civilian and military traffic was evaluated within Nash’s report. On the former, he concluded that any further reductions in France – the volume of which Geddes had condemned bitterly at Calais twelve months earlier – on ‘a scale likely to affect the position materially’, were ‘impossible’. By the end of 1917 passenger traffic on the French rail network was 65 per cent lower than it had been in 1913, and Nash was confident that the suppression of unnecessary goods traffic had been ‘thoroughly dealt with by the French government’.¹³¹ On the latter, Nash’s investigations revealed the parlous state of the allies’ mobility within the war’s principal theatre of operations, and confirmed the extra layer of complexity that American involvement in the fighting had created for the coalition’s transport administrators. Predominantly based upon the ports on France’s Atlantic coast (see Figure 8.2), the AEF was served by ‘a limited number of railways lines of communications of great length’. Provided the American forces remained deployed within the Champagne or Verdun regions, Nash wrote, the existing Franco-American arrangements for the improvement of lines and stations, the erection of storage depots and the provision of personnel and materials were likely to be sufficient. However, Nash warned:

The accumulation of American manpower in France was, Nash demonstrated, both an aid to and an added complication for the country’s allies. Whereas the Germans could shift troops from east to west without the need to consult its allies,¹³³ any prospective redeployment of the AEF in response to the anticipated German offensive on the western front in the spring required the identification of traffic priorities between the forces of three independent national railway organizations: the British directorate-general of transportation, the American directorate-general of transportation and the French ministry of public works (which exercised its control through the direction des transports militaires aux armées at GQG).¹³⁴ As the Franco-British discussions at Calais in February 1917 had illustrated, there was little guarantee that agreement on those priorities was likely to be arrived at between the coalition partners easily.

Yet if strategic movements within France were likely to demand the curtailment of industrial traffic, the dislocation of services to and from Paris and disruption to the supply trains that fed and maintained the armies at the front, transport between France and Italy presented ‘much more serious’ difficulties for the allies because of the relative paucity of connections between the two nations.¹³⁵ Only two railway routes were available, one via the coast and the other through the Mont Cenis tunnel. Both presented considerable obstacles to the swift movement of men and goods; on the former route a section between Ventimiglia and Savona was single-rather than double-track, while on the latter a portion of the line between Modena and Bussoleno had been electrified. Consequently, the maximum capacity of the two lines was around forty trains per day, each restricted to a maximum of 260 tons per train.¹³⁶

Figure 8.2. Principal ports and routes used by the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–18.

Source: W. J. Wilgus, Transporting the A.E.F. in Western Europe, 1917–1919 (New York, 1931). Map drawn by Cath D’Alton.

The limitations of the land connections between France and Italy were recognized by the SWC even before Nash’s report had been completed. On 21 January 1918 the council’s twelfth joint note stated that Italy was ‘safe’, but that ‘the power of rapid rail transport’ both within Italy and between Italy and France had to be increased in order to ‘secure strategic unity of action over the two theatres’.¹³⁷ In the wake of Caporetto, troops had been sent to Italy at a rate of forty-two trains per day, but the achievement of such figures had necessitated the suspension of all other traffic on the lines. Alongside the Cherbourg–Taranto service the Mont Cenis route carried a mail and passenger train, a train of supplies for the French forces in Macedonia and fourteen trainloads of coal for Italy each day. By February 1918, Nash reported, the nationwide reserves of coal within Italy – a nation that produced no coal of its own – had dropped to an average of twelve days’ supply.¹³⁸ Any curtailment of coal imports to facilitate the movement of troops risked the further erosion of stocks upon which the continuance of Italy’s war effort depended. Therefore, any decision to move troops from France to Italy in 1918 could only be made after careful consideration of the relative priorities of the military situation in France and Italy, the available stocks of raw materials within Italy and the reserves of supplies accessible to the allied forces engaged in Macedonia and further afield.

Nash recognized that such decisions could not be taken unilaterally. ‘Speaking broadly’, he stated, ‘each operating agency is, within its own province, carrying out the work allotted to it in an efficient manner. These investigations have, however, convinced me that by freer interchange of ideas and experiences drawn from the different agencies concerned, highly important results in the direction of expediting movement might be obtained’.¹³⁹ To encourage the circulation and consideration of transportation issues across the coalition, Nash recommended the formation of an Inter-allied Transportation Council (IATC), comprising representatives from the four principal allied nations and under the direction of the SWC rather than any national body. The IATC, Nash proposed, should advise the SWC of the transportation implications ‘of all plans of campaign’ under consideration on the western front; negotiate with the allied governments over the provision of extra railway facilities necessary to ‘give effect to any accepted plan of campaign’; prepare schemes for the movement of large bodies of troops when ordered to do so by the SWC, and liaise with the independent allied governments concerned with the prosecution of such movements; ‘study the enemy position regarding transportation facilities of every kind’ and update the SWC on the enemy’s logistical capabilities; prepare schemes for the development of railway lines with the explicit purpose of relieving seaborne communications; and oversee the ‘performance of the different agencies operating on the lines of communication … bringing to the notice of the Governments or armies concerned cases in which the fullest use does not appear to be made of available resources, and suggesting remedies’.¹⁴⁰

There was little need for discussion of Nash’s report in London. Even before the document had been submitted to the War Office the concept of an inter-allied committee working with the SWC at Versailles had been accepted by the allied prime ministers, while his proposed framework had received the backing of the French minister of public works, Albert Claveille, the Italian ministers of transport and war, Riccardo Bianchi and General Vittorio Alfieri respectively, and the American commander-in-chief, General Pershing. Consequently, Nash was duly appointed as the British representative on the IATC by Lloyd George in mid March 1918.¹⁴¹

Superficially, upon his appointment to the IATC, Nash attained a position of higher authority over transportation in the First World War than that acquired by Geddes when the latter became DGT in October 1916. The IATC provided Nash and his colleagues with an administrative framework and the necessary international contacts to construct a wider understanding of allied transportation than had hitherto been possible. Geddes’s organizational changes had provided GHQ and the British government with the tools to consider the transport requirements of Britain’s global war effort, but in 1917 suspicions, disputes and disagreements took place at the intersections of British and non-British (principally French) authority. The IATC provided the allies with the bureaucratic machinery necessary to work collaboratively rather than in competition with one another, and permitted the SWC to treat the European theatre from Flanders to the Adriatic as one continuous front. As Meighan McCrae has noted, the allies’ subscription to the IATC – and the appointments of senior transportation figures such as Nash and Claveille to sit upon it – illustrates the importance the coalition placed on improving communications between the French and Italian fronts in the winter of 1917–18.¹⁴²

However, the council’s lack of executive authority hampered its ability to make fundamental changes to the allies’ transportation facilities during the war’s final year. The IATC set to work immediately, and between March and November 1918 it considered topics ranging from the most effective distribution of personnel, tools and materials among the allied armies to how best to transport onions from Egypt to the western front.¹⁴³

The first task it was set provides an insight both into the organization’s strengths and limitations and the instability of the circumstances in which the IATC operated as the war entered a more dynamic phase. On 23 March the SWC directed the newly formed council to undertake an examination of railway movements, which bore striking similarities to the exercises issued by the War Office to the ERSC in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The SWC responded to a warning from the Italian commander-in-chief, General Diaz – which stated that ‘in the event of a powerful attack on [the Italian] front, he would demand the support of’ eight divisions – with a request that the IATC ‘undertake immediately a study of the betterment to be made in the transport facilities between France and Italy’ to facilitate such a movement. Nash and his colleagues were tasked to examine whether the number of troop trains handled daily over the lines between the two countries could be more than doubled, and to identify what volumes of vital commodities such as coal had to be stockpiled in Italy to permit the temporary suspension of supply trains ‘for some days during the critical period’ when the troops were moved.¹⁴⁴ The council’s report, submitted on 10 April, provided the allies’ strategic planners with a response that took account of the difficulties involved in the supply of coal to Italy that could not be alleviated by further use of shipping; the impracticality and lengthy nature of all possible infrastructure improvements to the existing routes between France and Italy; the ongoing shortages of rolling stock across the western front; and the sustained, unavoidable demands for traffic ‘of high military importance’ from the allied forces located at Salonika and beyond. The IATC provided the SWC with a possible solution to the transport challenge – dependent upon the suppression of certain supply traffic, advantageous weather conditions and the availability of shipping tonnage – that required the exploitation of seven separate lines of communications.¹⁴⁵

Nash was quick to emphasize that the scheme contained within the report was ‘merely a study … [that could not] be put into effect without considerable preparation’. The council’s recommendations involved the exploitation of routes that comprised railways only, those that combined rail and road transport and those that used a combination of rail and sea transport to execute the required troop movements. Yet the council’s responsibilities did not extend to the identification of suitable entrainment and detraining points, to the collection of suitable rolling stock and locomotives, to the provision of additional engine crews and other personnel required to facilitate the moves, or even to the ‘clearing of the roads of snow’. Such questions remained the exclusive responsibility of the national governments and military authorities concerned with transport matters – the council merely acted as ‘an extremely useful organ of information and coordination’, which illustrated the decisions that needed to be made before a swift, successful movement of troops could take place.¹⁴⁶ Consequently, the ultimate decision over whether or not to act upon the IATC’s recommendations in the British case had to be taken by the War Office rather than by Nash. Over a month after the SWC issued their joint note number twenty-two, which recorded the IATC’s recommendations as ‘certain precautionary measures’ deemed necessary to ensure the efficient transfer of manpower to Italy,¹⁴⁷ Nash broached the subject with London. In a somewhat pathetic letter he begged ‘that I may be permitted to know if the necessary arrangements’ – which included the strengthening of the British army’s supply organization in Italy, the identification and allotment of tonnage for the transport of troops from Marseille and the accumulation of sufficient stockpiles both of supplies for the soldiers to be moved to Italy and of coal for the Italian economy – had been made.¹⁴⁸ They had not.

In the spring and summer of 1918 British priorities lay elsewhere. Under the stresses engendered by the German advances in France the diversion of precious shipping tonnage, construction personnel and materials, alongside the arrangement of hypothetical programmes for the rapid movement of troops away from the western front, proved to be a low priority for those at GHQ and in London. The British government declined to approve joint note number twenty-two, much to the distress of the country’s allies, as ‘present conditions’ made it impossible to spare the supplies required to build up stocks in Italy.¹⁴⁹ As the surviving documents demonstrate, what followed was a prolonged and sustained multilingual correspondence between the allies in response to the flow of events in France and Italy. The IATC continued to produce reports and investigate the material requirements of infrastructure improvements across the two nations for the remainder of the war. The council facilitated discussions between the Italian government and the British Ministry of Shipping, which led to an agreement on the establishment of a strategic coal reserve in Italy and the provision of extra cargo tonnage to reduce pressure on the cross-border railways. The French also agreed to provide 10,000 wagons to the Italians, which were replenished by additional imports of rolling stock from Britain for use on the French lines.¹⁵⁰

Yet these successes were the result of agreements reached by the national governments of each allied partner rather than the outcomes of IATC-led discussions. The IATC’s memoranda and reports provided the foundations for inter-allied negotiations, in which the internal priorities and national interests of the individual members remained of foremost importance to the delegates, rather than the blueprint upon which truly collaborative actions were decided upon and implemented. Nash, the recognized transport expert with over twenty years’ experience in the railway industry, contributed little to the realization of projects that did not align with Britain’s strategic priorities as the war entered its final phase. As the tide turned on the western front and the allies launched what ultimately proved to be the war’s final offensive campaign, attitudes towards the provision of resources to Italy hardened among the British, French and Americans. While the Italians attempted to use the IATC’s reports to press for additional support from their allies, the rest of the coalition ‘increasingly expect[ed] the Italians to solve their own problems’.¹⁵¹ Nash, far from being considered an asset to the conduct of a war that could only be conducted in collaboration, was seen to be acting in a manner that did not complement British priorities. By mid October 1918, Lord Milner, the secretary of state for war since April, had resolved to despatch Nash to the eastern theatres to report on the railway situation. ‘His object’, recalled Sir Sam Fay, ‘was to get Nash away from Paris where, [Milner] said, he was a nuisance’.¹⁵² The armistice came into effect before Milner could implement any changes to the IATC’s composition.

Conclusion

The British government’s refusal to automatically comply with the IATC’s recommendations in 1918 exposes the limitations faced by an advisory body that wished to coordinate the war efforts of multiple sovereign nations. Sir Philip Nash and his colleagues from France, Italy, the United States and Belgium were provided with the bureaucratic machinery to identify and examine the transport implications of the evolving war effort, but their investigations were unable to break from the shackles of national insularity. Each of the coalition partners maintained their domestic priorities and interests in the second half of the war, which superseded the creation of a truly unified command structure even when the work of Britain’s transport experts demonstrated the interconnectivity and scale of the allies’ war efforts.

The move towards increasing cooperation between the allies came about in response to events rather than any innate desire for closer collaboration. The twin battles of Verdun and the Somme greatly accelerated the degradation of the French transport infrastructure in 1916, which recalibrated the relationship between host and ally on the western front. As discussed in the previous chapter, the abandonment of the pre-war agreement provided the catalyst for British locomotives, wagons and other transport equipment to be despatched to France in hitherto unanticipated numbers. At the same time, Britain’s transport experts were tasked with ensuring that the resource requirements of the nation’s domestic industry and other expeditionary forces were secure – a challenge complicated by the war’s voracious appetite for finite raw materials and the continued absence of a realistic appraisal for when victory would be achieved.

British transport experts became an increasingly important component of the allied war effort within this constantly changing environment. In France, Italy, Egypt, Russia, Romania, Macedonia and at home, British civilians were liberally despatched to support and advise Britain’s coalition partners and to report upon developments across the nation’s own multiple theatres of operations. As George Bury’s examination of the Russian network and Lawson Billinton’s attempts to rehabilitate Romania’s railways demonstrate, they were not always successful, but in many instances British investigators were warmly received. Guy Calthrop recorded that it afforded him ‘the greatest pleasure to state that the French and Italian Authorities, from Ministers downwards, were most helpful’ to the mission charged with examining the feasibility of the overland route to the Mediterranean.¹⁵³

However, mistrust continued to dog the allies’ attempts to expel the Germans from occupied territory in the war’s principal theatre of operations. British materials were not sent to France and Flanders unquestioningly, while French demands for material and operational support were not accompanied by a willingness to relinquish control over the supply lines upon which allied troops depended in the second half of the war. Sir Eric Geddes’s adversarial approach to coalition warfare exacerbated rather than smoothed tensions between the French and British armies over the winter of 1916–17. The bullish attitude that dominated the North-Eastern Railway proved less applicable to the inter-allied conference room. In an arena where a collegiate, diplomatic approach was required, Geddes’s refusal to seek out a compromise with his coalition partners stymied the evolution of an inter-allied forum for the discussion of transportation issues until early 1918. Geddes was kept away from a body that ultimately provided the allies with the technical advice required to consider the transportation requirements of movement on a global scale. The IATC’s deliberations and reports largely remained hypothetical exercises. Yet, on the western front, Geddes’s organizational and operational changes to the BEF’s transportation system were subjected to the ultimate practical test in the second half of the war.

______________

¹ K. Marx, Lawson Billinton: a Career Cut Short (Usk, 2007), p. 78.

² UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/51, memorandum to Granet, pp. 3–4.

³ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/51, memorandum to Granet, p. 5.

⁴ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/51, memorandum to Granet, p. 4.

⁵ TNA, MT 23/677/9, mission of Sir Francis Dent to Egypt and Salonika to investigate land transportation questions. Request to naval transport staffs to afford him all possible facilities, Cubitt to Milne, 24 Oct. 1916; Cubitt to Murray, 24 Oct. 1916.

⁶ TNA, WO 95/4379, branches and services. Deputy quarter-master general, diary entry, 4 Oct. 1916.

⁷ K. C. Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 64–5.

⁸ TNA, WO 95/4389, DRT war diary, diary entries, 9 and 14 Nov. 1916; WO 95/4379, deputy QMG war diary, diary entry, 29 Dec. 1916.

⁹ TNA, WO 106/720, Stewart (railway) commission: precis of report, July 1917, p. 2.

¹⁰ M. Carver, The National Army Museum Book of the Turkish Front, 1914–1918: the Campaigns at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and in Palestine (London, 2004), pp. 94, 96.

¹¹ History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), vi. 276–7.

¹² D. Stevenson, 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford, 2017), pp. 67–87; K. C. Ulrichsen, The First World War in the Middle East (London, 2014), pp. 44–5.

¹³ Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns, p. 56.

¹⁴ L. S. Simpson, ‘Railway operating in France’, Journal of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers, xii (1922), 697–728, at p. 711. Simpson and Stewart were accompanied on the mission by Colonel William McLellan, a Scottish electrical engineer and partner in the consultancy firm Merz and McLellan. Prior to the war the firm had worked alongside the North-Eastern Railway on the electrification of local lines in the Tyneside area.

¹⁵ K. Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989), p. 41.

¹⁶ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/110, diary entry, 17 Feb. 1917.

¹⁷ Simpson, ‘Railway operating in France’, p. 712.

¹⁸ TNA, WO 106/720, Stewart commission report, p. 5.

¹⁹ TNA, WO 106/720, Stewart commission report, p. 4.

²⁰ TNA, WO 106/720, Stewart commission report, p. 4; J. G. Beharrell, ‘The value of full and accurate statistics: as shown under emergency conditions in the transportation service in France’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 37–9, at p. 38.

²¹ TNA, WO 106/720, Stewart commission report, p. 4.

²² Beharrell, ‘The value of full and accurate statistics’, p. 38; ‘The Palestine campaign’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 119–28, at p. 127.

²³ L. James, Imperial Warrior: the Life and Times of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby 1861– 1936 (London, 1993), p. 111.

²⁴ Carver, The National Army Museum Book of the Turkish Front, pp. 207–8; James, Imperial Warrior, p. 118.

²⁵ R. Johnson, The Great War and the Middle East: a Strategic Study (Oxford, 2016), p. 193.

²⁶ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 277.

²⁷ Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns, p. 73.

²⁸ Johnson, The Great War and the Middle East, p. 199.

²⁹ Stevenson, 1917, p. 345.

³⁰ Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns, pp. 44, 73.

³¹ D. Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London, 2011), p. 235; Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 410.

³² A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937), p. 287.

³³ TNA, CAB 28/1, papers I.C. 0–12, Conclusions of the Anglo-French conference held at Boulogne, 20 Oct. 1916, p. 3.

³⁴ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Conclusions of a conference, 5–7 Jan. 1917, p. 1.

³⁵ TNA, CAB 24/7/11, proposed overland route to Salonica, Calthrop to Derby, 7 Feb. 1917, p. 1.

³⁶ TNA, CAB 24/7/11, proposed overland route to Salonica, Diary of the work of the War Office mission.

³⁷ TNA, CAB 24/7/11, proposed overland route to Salonica, Calthrop to Derby, 7 Feb. 1917, pp. 3–7; Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 289.

³⁸ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 289 n. 2.

³⁹ TNA, CAB 24/7/11, proposed overland route to Salonica, Calthrop to Derby, 7 Feb. 1917, pp. 7–8.

⁴⁰ ‘The Mediterranean line of communication’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 101–7, at p. 103.

⁴¹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/4/145, shipping allotted to overseas expeditions outside France. Interim report by General Smuts, 23 June 1917, p. 1.

⁴² Stevenson, 1917, pp. 227–31.

⁴³ Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 294–5.

⁴⁴ TNA, CAB 24/7/11, proposed overland route to Salonica, Calthrop to Derby, 7 Feb. 1917, pp. 9–10; memorandum by Sir Guy Granet, 22 Feb. 1917, p. 3.

⁴⁵ TNA, CAB 24/14/83, memorandum by the REC. Shortage of materials for repairs and renewal of permanent way, locomotives, carriages and wagons, 24 May 1917, pp. 3–4.

⁴⁶ TNA, CAB 24/14/83, memorandum by the REC, 24 May 1917, pp. 6–7.

⁴⁷ TNA, CAB 24/14/83, memorandum by the REC, 24 May 1917, pp. 4–5.

⁴⁸ E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., London, 1921), ii. 656–60.

⁴⁹ Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 296–7; ‘Mediterranean line of communication’, p. 107.

⁵⁰ D. Stevenson, 1914–1918: the History of the First World War (London, 2004), p. 298.

⁵¹ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/E/1/5/16, translated copy of a letter from Joffre to the French mission at GHQ, including handwritten notes from Geddes dated 19 Nov. 1916.

⁵² PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/E/1/5/17, locomotives and rolling stock for the British armies in France and Belgium, 24 Nov. 1916, p. 2.

⁵³ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/E/3/14/29, Le-Roy Lewis to Lloyd George, 22 Nov. 1916. Albert Claveille, an engineer and former director of the French State Railways, became under-secretary of state for transport in the French government on 14 Dec. 1916.

⁵⁴ The DGT’s figures stated that approximately 12,000 of the wagons used for the BEF’s supply needs in Nov. 1916 had been provided by the French. See PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/E/6/1/5(A), memorandum on the question of railway wagon supply for the British army in France, by W. Guy Granet, 7 Nov. 1916, p. 1.

⁵⁵ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/E/1/5/16, Translated copy of a letter from Joffre; LG/E/1/5/17 Locomotives and rolling stock, p. 6.

⁵⁶ Les armées françaises dans la grande guerre: la direction de l’arrière (Paris, 1937), pp. 601–2; Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 247.

⁵⁷ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/4/47, Geddes to Granet, 24 Jan. 1917.

⁵⁸ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/110, diary entry, 28 Jan. 1917.

⁵⁹ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/110, diary entry, 9 Feb. 1917.

⁶⁰ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/110, diary entry, 13 Feb. 1917.

⁶¹ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 7/7/5, Robertson to Haig, 13 Feb. 1917; NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/110, Robertson to Haig, 14 Feb. 1917; diary entry, 15 Feb. 1917; note on the present transportation situation, 16 Feb. 1917.

⁶² W. Philpott, ‘Haig and Britain’s European allies’, in Haig: a Reappraisal 80 Years On, ed. B. Bond and N. Cave (Barnsley, 2009), pp. 128–44, at p. 136.

⁶³ TNA, WO 158/41, transportation: agenda and notes for the Calais conference, 26 Feb. 1917.

⁶⁴ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 7/7/7, Robertson to Haig, 14 Feb. 1917; W. R. Robertson, From Private to Field-Marshal (London, 1921), p. 307.

⁶⁵ D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London, 1938), i. 891–3.

⁶⁶ A. Suttie, Rewriting the First World War: Lloyd George, Politics and Strategy, 1914–1918 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 116–19.

⁶⁷ Stevenson, 1917, p. 126; LHCMA, Robertson papers, 7/7/8, Robertson to Haig, 28 Feb. 1917; NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/110, Haig to George V, 28 Feb. 1917.

⁶⁸ The reasons behind this decision, which revolved around the need to maintain a balance between military traffic in the battle zone and civilian traffic across the rest of France, are summarized in Direction de l’arrière, pp. 513–14.

⁶⁹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/183, notes of an Anglo-French conference held at the Hotel Terminus, Calais, 26–27 Feb. 1917, pp. 2–5.

⁷⁰ E. Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), p. 141.

⁷¹ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 7/7/8, Robertson to Haig, 28 Feb. 1917.

⁷² UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/183, notes of an Anglo-French conference, pp. 5–6.

⁷³ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/183, notes of an Anglo-French conference, p. 8.

⁷⁴ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, notes of an Anglo-French conference held at the Hotel Terminus, Calais, 26–27 Feb. 1917, pp. 1, 4. The first session, at which transportation was the central focus, began at 3:30 p.m. on the 26th. The railway experts withdrew, and the conference adjourned ‘for a short time’, before the second session commenced at 5:30 p.m.

⁷⁵ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/111, diary entry, 3 March 1917; I. M. Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (London, 1998), pp. 159–60.

⁷⁶ P. K. Cline, ‘Eric Geddes and the “experiment” with businessmen in government, 1915– 22’, in Essays in Anti-Labour History, ed. K. D. Brown (London, 1974), pp. 74–104, at p. 75; K. Grieves, ‘Improvising the British war effort: Eric Geddes and Lloyd George, 1915–18’, War & Society, vii (1989), 40–55, at p. 47.

⁷⁷ TNA, CAB 24/7/11, proposed overland route to Salonica, memorandum by Granet, pp. 3–4. On 17 March 1917, by which time the schedule called for the British to have despatched 9,500 wagons to France, only 4,500 had arrived. See Direction de l’arrière, p. 602.

⁷⁸ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/111, diary entry, 3 March 1917.

⁷⁹ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, notes of an Anglo-French conference held at 10 Downing Street, 12 and 13 March 1917, pp. 3–4.

⁸⁰ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, notes of an Anglo-French conference, 12 and 13 March 1917, p. 5.

⁸¹ Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition, p. 241.

⁸² Grieves, ‘Improvising the British war effort’, pp. 47–9. On Geddes’s experiences at the Admiralty, see K. Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989), pp. 40–68.

⁸³ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/F/17/6/19, Geddes to Lloyd George, 20 Dec. 1917.

⁸⁴ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/F/14/4/78, Derby to Lloyd George, 24 Nov. 1917. Geddes’s assessment of Italy’s railway officials was similarly derisive.

⁸⁵ S. Fay, The War Office at War (London, 1937), p. 104.

⁸⁶ Philpott, ‘Haig and Britain’s European allies’, pp. 129–30.

⁸⁷ Stevenson, 1917, pp. 93–4.

⁸⁸ Fay, The War Office at War, p. 29.

⁸⁹ Lloyd George to Bury, 1 Feb. 1917, quoted in T. Murray Hunter, ‘Sir George Bury and the Russian Revolution’, The Canadian Historical Association: Report of the Annual Meeting, cdxli (1965), 58–70, at pp. 60–1.

⁹⁰ Memorandum regarding transportation, prepared for the British war cabinet, 20 Feb. 1917, p. 1. My thanks to Anthony Heywood for providing me with access to this document, and for his guidance on the complexities of Russia’s railways during the war more generally.

⁹¹ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, pp. 2, 4–5, 6–7.

⁹² Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, pp. 7–8.

⁹³ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, p. 4.

⁹⁴ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, pp. 1–2; TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Allied conference at Petrograd, January–February 1917, Report on mission to Russia, by Major David Davies, 10 March 1917, p. 5.

⁹⁵ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, p. 5.

⁹⁶ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Allied conference at Petrograd, Report by Davies, p. 5; P. Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: a Social and Economic History (Harlow, 2005), p. 25.

⁹⁷ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, pp. 5–6.

⁹⁸ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, pp. 6–7; TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Allied conference at Petrograd, Report by Davies, pp. 5–6.

⁹⁹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, p. 9. Bury’s remarks reported in TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Allied conference at Petrograd, Report by Davies, p. 6.

¹⁰⁰ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, p. 6.

¹⁰¹ Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, p. 8.

¹⁰² Memorandum regarding transportation, 20 Feb. 1917, pp. 8–9.

¹⁰³ Murray Hunter, ‘Sir George Bury and the Russian Revolution’, pp. 61–2.

¹⁰⁴ On the ‘chaos’ within the Russian railway administration during the February Revolution, see A. Heywood, Engineer of Revolutionary Russia: Iurii V. Lomonosov (1876– 1952) and the Railways (Farnham, 2011), pp. 151–8.

¹⁰⁵ Military Monograph Subsection M.I.2, Military Intelligence Division, General Staff, Russia, Route Zone A: Murman Railway and Kola Peninsula: Information and Route Notes, Murmansk to Petrograd (Washington, DC, 1918), p. 26; A. J. Heywood, ‘Russia’s foreign supply policy in World War I: imports of railway equipment’, Jour. European Econ. Hist., xxxii (2003), 77–108, at pp. 82–5; Heywood, Engineer of Revolutionary Russia, p. 157.

¹⁰⁶ A. Heywood, ‘Spark of revolution? Railway disorganisation, freight traffic and Tsarist Russia’s war effort, July 1914–March 1917’, Europe-Asia Studies, lxv (2013), 753–72, at p. 765.

¹⁰⁷ A. W. F. Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–1917 (2 vols., London, 1921), ii. 525–6. Knox’s observations are almost certainly an exaggeration, as Russian authorities had been aware of the worsening fuel situation since the previous autumn.

¹⁰⁸ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Allied conference at Petrograd, Report by Lieutenant-General Sir H. H. Wilson, 3 March 1917, p. 2.

¹⁰⁹ Heywood, ‘Spark of revolution?’

¹¹⁰ C. Merridale, Lenin on the Train (London, 2017), p. 33.

¹¹¹ TNA, CAB 28/2, papers I.C. 13–32, Allied conference at Petrograd, Report by Wilson, pp. 3–4.

¹¹² Marx, Lawson Billinton, pp. 80–1.

¹¹³ Marx, Lawson Billinton, p. 81.

¹¹⁴ TNA, CAB 24/14/38, Roumanian communication. Tel. from Sir G. Barclay, dated 18.5.17, conveying General de Candolles’s report, p. 3.

¹¹⁵ G. E. Torrey, ‘Romania in the First World War: the years of engagement, 1916–1918’, International History Review, xiv (1992), 462–79, at pp. 466–7.

¹¹⁶ Much of Billinton’s own account of this lively period is reproduced in Marx, Lawson Billinton, pp. 87–111.

¹¹⁷ E. Lohr and J. Sanborn, ‘1917: revolution as demobilization and state collapse’, Slavic Review, lxxvi (2017), 703–9, at p. 706.

¹¹⁸ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 2.

¹¹⁹ Simpson, ‘Railway operating in France’, pp. 709–10. The chief mechanical engineer, Colonel George Tertius Glover, was another of Geddes’s civilian appointments. Glover had entered the North-Eastern Railway as a draughtsman in 1894, and was the Great Northern Railway of Ireland’s locomotive engineer from 1912 onwards.

¹²⁰ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v. 622–3.

¹²¹ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 17.

¹²² J. A. Salter, Allied Shipping Control: an Experiment in International Administration (Oxford, 1921), pp. 144–55. On the work of the Allied Maritime Council, see M. McCrae, Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: the Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917–1918 (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 187–236; Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition, pp. 129–32.

¹²³ E. Greenhalgh, Foch in Command: the Forging of a First World War General (Cambridge, 2011), p. 393.

¹²⁴ W. J. Wilgus, Transporting the A.E.F. in Western Europe, 1917–1919 (New York, 1931), pp. 3–7.

¹²⁵ Wilgus, Transporting the A.E.F., p. 550.

¹²⁶ J. G. Harbord, The American Army in France, 1917–1919 (Boston, Mass., 1936), p. 116.

¹²⁷ TNA, CAB 25/110, inter-allied transportation council: organisation and functions, Nash to Storr, 4 May 1918; Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 197–8. Unfortunately, Henniker does not provide any examples of the discussions that took place at the conferences held during this period.

¹²⁸ TNA, CAB 25/127, historical record of the SWC of the allied and associated nations from its inception on 7 Nov. 1917 to 12 Nov. 1918, the day after the signature of the armistice with Germany, together with a note as to its role and work subsequent to that date, p. 2.

¹²⁹ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/F/17/6/19, Geddes to Lloyd George, 20 Dec. 1917.

¹³⁰ Nash’s instructions are replicated in Appendix II.

¹³¹ TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation on the western front, 20 Feb. 1918, p. 6.

¹³² TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation, p. 7.

¹³³ On the scale and significance of Germany’s movement of divisions to the western front during this period, see G. Fong, ‘The movement of German divisions to the western front, winter, 1917–1918’, War in History, vii (2000), 225–35.

¹³⁴ TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation, pp. 18–19.

¹³⁵ TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation, p. 8.

¹³⁶ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 298.

¹³⁷ TNA, CAB 25/120/2, nos. 1–150, joint note no. 12, 21 Jan. 1918, pp. 1–2.

¹³⁸ TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation, p. 17.

¹³⁹ TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation, p. 19.

¹⁴⁰ TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation, p. 20. Nash later advocated for a Belgian representative to join the council, to sit alongside representatives from France, Italy, Britain and the United States.

¹⁴¹ TNA, CAB 24/43/19, report on general transportation situation, p. 21; Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 199.

¹⁴² McCrae, Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War, pp. 104–5.

¹⁴³ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 200.

¹⁴⁴ TNA, CAB 25/110, IATC, explanation of motives, 23 March 1918, p. 1; Joint questionnaire number 1, 27 March 1918, pp. 1–2.

¹⁴⁵ TNA, CAB 25/53, transportation of troops between France and Italy, Nash to Storr, 10 Apr. 1918.

¹⁴⁶ TNA, CAB 25/53, transportation of troops, Nash to Storr, 11 Apr. 1918; Draft for collective note number 2, 15 Apr. 1918, p. 2. The French were also fully alive to the implications of the IATC’s absence of executive authority. See McCrae, Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War, p. 105.

¹⁴⁷ TNA, CAB 25/53, transportation of troops, joint note number 22, 19 Apr. 1918, pp. 1–2.

¹⁴⁸ TNA, CAB 25/53, transportation of troops, Nash to Storr, 29 May 1918.

¹⁴⁹ TNA, CAB 25/53, transportation of troops, telegram: War Office to Britcil, 6 June 1918.

¹⁵⁰ McCrae, Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War, p. 117.

¹⁵¹ McCrae, Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War, pp. 122–3.

¹⁵² Fay, The War Office at War, pp. 205–6.

¹⁵³ TNA, CAB 24/7/11, proposed overland route to Salonica, Calthrop to Derby, 7 Feb. 1917, p. 15.